Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (Cultural Front) (Cultural Front Series) (Hardcover)

Simi Linton

"I've come to believe that the study of disability has its place in the curriculum-and that place is everywhere. . . . As Simi Linton shows us, it should be central to what we do in the humanities. And perhaps, just perhaps, if disability is understood as central to the humanities, it will eventually be understood as central to humanity-in theory and in practice, in sickness and in health, in cultural studies as in public policy. Few claims on our attention, I think, could be more pressing."

-From the Foreword by Michael Bérubé

Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity by Simi Linton, the first comprehensive examination of Disability Studies as a field of inquiry, has just been published by NYU Press. In the past twenty years, Disability Studies has arisen to focus an organized critique of the conceptualizations of disability that have dominated academic inquiry. Disability Studies explains disability as a socially constructed category, rather than simply a product of birth or accident. The field offers a means to think critically about disability, a means that can serve both scholarship and social change. Claiming Disability examines the intellectual as well as the political roots of disabled people's compromised social position and challenges the academic community to reckon with its own role in perpetuating a divided society.

Claiming Disability looks at the problematic history of society's response to disabled people, and captures the exciting changes taking place in the lives of disabled people. Simi Linton comments on the social and political change that is evident in reading the daily newspaper or observing newly integrated primary and secondary classrooms, and also describes the exciting change in thinking about disability, embodied in the field of disability studies. The book points optimistically toward the actions of the disability rights movement and the social change it has! brought about, and points to the innovative scholarship in disability studies, both endeavors reshaping disabled people's lives, and more broadly shaping a new, more inclusive society.

The title, Claiming Disability, captures the active voice of disabled people in asserting their role in shaping both knowledge and identity. A persistent call heard from the disability community is: "Nothing about us, without us." This idea pervades Claiming Disability, which is critical of oppressive practices and proactive in its approach to disabled people's self-determination.

Simi Linton, Ph.D. is a longtime disability rights scholar, and the author of Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York University Press, 1998), an examination of disability studies as a field of inquiry. Dr. Linton is a consultant on disability and the arts, and the Co-director of the Disability Studies Project, a curriculum development project at Hunter College. She was on the faculty of the City University of New York from 1986 to 1998, and in 1995 she received a Switzer Distinguished Fellowship from the United States Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.

Claiming Disability and Linton's other scholarship in the field of disability studies is interdisciplinary, grounded in a liberal arts, particularly a humanities, approach to this new understanding of disability. Her consulting practice to arts organizations, museums, theater companies, and film and television producers is an outgrowth of that approach, but focused on shaping the public presentation of disability, and the presentation of works by disabled people in the arts. She is currently at work on a book, called Disability Stories, which uses autobiographical material as the starting point for essays on the disability experience. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.