Beyond simply theorizing, this dialogue begins to unearth potent and in-depth examination of membership, meaning, and social valuation on the basis of embodied features that exclude bodies from membership of the category of human. Geneticized, branded and designed as not normal, undesirable, and in need of change, embodied disablement can provide an important but circumvented 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 enter the portal through which to query the legitimacy of the atypical body for membership, quasi-membership, or exclusion from the category of human. However a substantive and well-organized literature, which we suggest is a critical but an unmined element of embodiment scholarship to inform action has not yet been initiated. Chandler looked at containing those outside of the boundaries of humanness through institutionalization or other geographic isolation. Goffman’s classic work briefly addressed the relationship between stigma and humanness or lack thereof, and several scholars such as Gately and Hammer examined symbols of difference as deviance in their analyses. 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.

Given the nascent emergence of this important topic, this paper chronicles the theory, questions and experiences that have provoked questions and posited the need for more substantive theory development and verification.Įmerging from an opposition to medical deviance theories of the 20 th century, sociology and related disciplines have brought potent intellectual frameworks to an expanded, non-medicalized analysis of disabled bodies. Building on and synthesizing historical and current work in the sociology of the body, in disability studies, in cyborg and post-human studies, this paper begins to ask questions about 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. Geneticized, branded, and designed as not normal, undesirable, and in need of change, embodied disablement can provide an important but circumvented 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 query the legitimacy of the atypical body for membership, quasi-membership, or exclusion from the category of human.

Social microcosm