* Violating humanness: Legitimating the disabled body - what embodied criteria of “humanness” are lost, never obtained or otherwise not present that assign bodies to the disability category? We engage this analysis through four categories of content. Building on and synthesizing historical and current work in the sociology of the body, disability studies, and cyborg studies, this paper examines the criteria for human embodiment that are violated by interpretations of disability and then met with a range of responses from body revision to denial of the viability of life. Branded and designed as not normal, undesirable, and in need of change, embodied disablement provides a foundation for analysis of the explicit and implicit nature of the legitimate human body, its symbolism, and responses that such bodies elicit from diverse local through global social and cultural entities.
In this paper, we undertake a substantive examination of the disabled body within sociological and cultural context. Yet, scholars have only begun to directly engage in interpreting embodied disablement and responses to it as microcosm, meaning, and metaphor for fundamental social, philosophical, and cultural questions about essential elements and boundaries of embodied humanness. Emerging from an opposition to medical deviance theories of the 20th century, sociology and related disciplines have brought potent intellectual frameworks to an expanded, non-medicalized analysis of disabled bodies.
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