The excessive appearance of disability

Abstract

This paper engages the appearance of disability in contemporary Western culture. Rather than taking disability for granted as a biomedical condition, I interrogate how disability is made to appear in our culture, including its appearance as a biomedical condition. Fundamentally, disability appears to us as a trouble and, as such, cultural practices steeped in a medical paradigm are invoked as a way to rid ourselves of the trouble of disability. This trouble is transformed into the cultural requirement of making disability disappear into the normative order through conceiving of disability as a conditional feature of human life. This paper concludes by theorizing disability as excess, as too much and not enough. I demonstrate how such a conception of disability permits its normalization while disallowing any engagement with it as having anything to teach us about the social process of norming.

Keywords:

• disability
• trouble
• excess
• appearance