Race

Race and disability, two significant categories of difference that shape the social, have often been conceptualized as analogous to each other. Disability has often been described as being “like race” and race as being “like disability” in attempts to shift the experience of disability from the debilitating conceptual space of individual pathology to a broader social recognition of disabled people as members of a political minority. Thus, for example, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1997) describes disability as a “form of ethnicity” (6), while Lennard Davis (1995) maps similarities between the disabled body and “the body marked as differently pigmented” (80). Foregrounding this analogous relationship between race and disability has helped propel the disability rights movement and disability studies scholarship forward into an alternative space of empowering possibility.