Disability images and the art of theorizing normality

Abstract

This paper addresses the power of images of disability as a way to examine how such images can be read as reproducing normality. By image of disability, I mean any appearance of disability made through the social act of interpretation. In this paper, I conduct an interpretive sociological analysis of common and even mundane everyday images of disability, including the universal icon for access. I aim to demonstrate the necessary ‘art’ of theorizing the connection between images of disability and the reproduction of normality. I call this pursuit an art since through theorizing how and why disability appears as it does in everyday life we can create a livelier, provocative, and perhaps deliberately different image of disability. This paper, then, makes normality something to wonder about by theorizing familiar disability images that are already part of Western collective existence.

Keywords:

• disability studies
• interpretation
• images
• power
• normalcy