Disability as Socio-Political and Biomedical Construct: A Passionate and Pensive Reappraisal of a Global Phenomenon

Abstract

This paper uses personal tragedy theory and social model to interrogate two contextual narratives depicting how disability manifests and is made to manifest in labeled bodies. In the analysis, disability discourses provide a lens through which to understand how disability is done in everyday life, and in different socio-cultural contexts. It reveals how bodies are made to disappear and dys/appear when confronted with social normative constructs of the dominant class. Domba’s transplanted kidney, as well as the bodies of the segregated students enlisted to Room two zero two of an Ontario school remains both sites of oppressive subjectivity, spaces of contradictions and negotiations at which we learn how bodies relate with the world, and following this relationships the bodies are changed, providing means for these bodies to speak back to the world. Coming to terms with this theorizing helps us to visualize Domba’s body and those of the students living with learning disabilities as sites of political and socio-cultural struggle aimed at establishing supremacy and dominance, and as a corporeal reality in which bodies and commodified body parts simultaneously represent symbols of subjective hegemony of the dominant social class, and a platform for interrogation, negotiation and assimilation between the two social structures.