by Elizabeth F. Emens

About Elizabeth F. Emens

Elizabeth F. Emens is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University. Her articles about disability law and theory include “Integrating Accommodation” (2008); “Intimate Discrimination: The State’s Role in the Accidents of Sex and Love” (2009); and “Disabling Attitudes” (2012, reprinted in the Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed. 2013). She recently edited the volume Disability and Equality Law (2013) with Michael A. Stein.

Accommodation

book Keywords for Disability Studies

“Accommodation” bears a more positive and powerful meaning in disability discourse than its roots in race and religion contexts would predict. In the history of U.S. racial politics, “accommodation” is a dirty word. Accounts of the early civil rights era used accommodation to refer to a brand of gradualism and compromise associated with Booker T. Washington—a position famously critiqued as “conciliation” by W. E. B. DuBois (1994; Myrdal 1944). But while racial accommodation evokes blacks accommodating the white majority, in the disability context accommodation means changing society in response to disability. The term has thus shifted radically in both sense and reference.