This chapter shows how the dominate stories, both in religious and popular contexts, led to the now present correlation between stigma and disability, so that disability has automatically became stigmatized. Provides examples of ways disability has and continues to be stigmatized including examples such as eugenics, freak shows, and reality television. It also shows the link between eugenics and practices of exclusion which led to people with disabilities not just being driven from public spaces but isolated in institutions; in doing so establishes that people with disabilities were not always precluded from “public” education.
Keywords
- commercializing disability
- freak shows and reality television
- Judeo-Christian tradition and disability