by Janet Lyon

About Janet Lyon

Janet Lyon is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies and the Director of the Disability Studies minor at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (1999). She is currently working on books titled The Imperfect Hostess: Sociability and the Modern and Idiot Child on a Fire Escape: Disability and Modernism. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Modernism/modernity, English Literary History, Differences, and the Yale Journal of Criticism, and her chapters have appeared in many edited books. She is the coeditor of the Journal of Modern Literature.

Modernity

book Keywords for Disability Studies

Beginning in the sixteenth century, the same forces that gave shape to what we now term “modernity” also produced the concept of “disability.” These included burgeoning bureaucratic systems for the management of expanding global trade, the presence of increasingly concentrated, heterogeneous populations, the emergence of nation-states in the global north-west, a shift from religious and extrinsic forms of authority to the open-ended pursuit of knowledge through autonomous reason, and the continuous parsing of populations. The asylums and general hospitals that opened in the seventeenth century in order to sequester impoverished invalids and defectives generally mixed together disabled populations rather randomly and always through the common denominator of poverty. But by the beginning of the long eighteenth century, disability had emerged within modernity as a differential menu of problems to be solved, or at least controlled, via bourgeois systems of charity and in conjunction with the imperatives of a rapidly diversifying field of scientific study.