Identity

Identity is the idea of the self understood within and against the social context, a means by which the individual is categorized and located as part of, or set apart from, recognized social, political, and cultural groups. As “the means by which the person comes to join a particular social body” (Siebers 2008b, 15), identity is a symbolic performance, an activity that names and aligns the self, by which the individual is composed as socially significant. It cannot exist, therefore, except in social relief—against a backdrop by which the self is made visible to both self and other. Disability identity has a complex and dynamic history. At its core is the disability rights movement, which for the first time asserted disability as a minority identity and as a platform for collective political action. In the entry on “Minority” in this volume, Jeffrey Brune indicates that Louis Anthony Dexter and Erving Goffman laid the groundwork for understanding disability in political terms in the early 1960s. Activists like Ed Roberts, Paul Longmore, Justin Dart, Judith Heumann, and others, however, were instrumental in developing and acting on this foundation. Fighting institutionalized political, social, and economic discrimination, such activists not only impacted public policy but also shifted and helped to shape a disability community, galvanizing a diverse and diffuse population of disabled people and helping to forge what many have come to understand as disability identity. This politicized identity is grounded in the idea that disability is a socially constructed category, an identity that is shaped by cultural and historical forces rather than being determined primarily by the body.