Making and Unmaking Disability: The Three-Body Approach - Paperback

by Julie E. Maybee (Author)

If the future is accessible, as Alisa Grishman--one of 55 million Americans categorized as having a disability--writes in this book's cover image, then we must stop making or constructing people as disabled and impaired. In this brave new theoretical approach to human physicality, Julie E. Maybee traces societal constructions of disability and impairment through Western history along three dimensions of embodiment: the personal body, the interpersonal body, and the institutional body. Each dimension has played a part in defining people as disabled and impaired in terms of employment, healthcare, education, and social and political roles. Because impairment and disability have been constructed along all three of these bodies, unmaking disability and making the future accessible will require restructuring Western institutions, including capitalism, changing how social roles are assigned, and transforming our deepest beliefs about impairment and disability to reconstruct people as capable. Ultimately, Maybee suggests, unmaking disability will require remaking our world.

Author Biography

JULIE E. MAYBEE is professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy as well as the director of the interdisciplinary Disability Studies Minor at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY). She also teaches in the Disability Studies Master's Program for CUNY's School of Professional Studies. For many years, her research areas were nineteenth-century Continental philosophy, particularly the work of G. W. F. Hegel, Africana philosophy, and race and philosophy. After her daughter had a brain aneurysm and came to be what our society would call "disabled" in 2002, Maybee became interested in the analysis of disability as a social category.