by Abby Wilkerson

About Abby Wilkerson

Abby Wilkerson is the author of Diagnosis: Difference: The Moral Authority of Medicine (1995) and The Thin Contract: Social Justice and the Political Rhetoric of Obesity (forthcoming). She coedited a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, “Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies” (2003) with Robert McRuer. She has also published a number of articles in journals and anthologies and teaches in the University Writing Program at George Washington University.

Embodiment

book Keywords for Disability Studies

One of the earliest goals of disability studies was to expose the various methods by which some bodies are marked as different and deviant while others are marked as normal. Disability studies scholarship focused on medicalization, rehabilitation, segregation, institutionalization, sterilization, and genocide demonstrated how such practices were instrumental to ideas of normalization and deviance. More recently, however, disability scholarship and disability culture more broadly have turned away from forces of institutionalization or medicalization to explore the relationship between disability and the concept of “embodiment.” Embodiment is a way of thinking about bodily experience that is not engaged solely with recovering the historical mistreatment of disabled people. Rather, it includes pleasures, pain, suffering, sensorial and sensual engagements with the world, vulnerabilities, capabilities, and constraints as they arise within specific times and places.