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Disability Studies and Phenomenology

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Encyclopedia of Phenomenology

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This essay introduces the field of disability studies to readers of phenomenology and highlights areas where both enterprises can benefit from theoretical engagement with each other. I begin by introducing the origins of disability studies and the field’s rejection of biomedical approaches to disability. I then review some sociopolitical interpretations of disability elaborated in response to the medical model. By reframing disability in social terms, these accounts interrogate the relationship between material embodiment and the social construction of normalcy. Phenomenology also dispenses with a view of disability as biological fact but studies disability, instead, from the perspective of being in the world. The phenomenological model of disability foregrounds the spatiotemporal, affective, sensory, and intercorporeal dimensions of disability. This enterprise yields important insights about how disabled embodiment modifies the structures of bodily intentionality, intersubjectivity,...

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I follow Shelley L. Tremain (2017) in employing the expression “British social model” to describe the efforts of the UPIAS and its inheritors. I similarly employ the expression “sociopolitical models of disability” to describe accounts of disability that study disability as a social phenomenon and reject its individualization and medicalization.

  2. 2.

    Michael Oliver has defended the social model of disability against its critics in a series of articles. See, for example, Oliver (2004 and 2013).

  3. 3.

    For a more extensive discussion of pain in disability studies, see, for example, Bailey (2019); Crow (1996); Mollow (2014); Morris (1991); Patsavas (2014); Sheppard (2020); and St. Pierre (2020).

  4. 4.

    Cerebral palsy (CP) is a group of congenital disorders affecting a person’s motor function that is caused by abnormal brain development or damage to the developing brain.

  5. 5.

    For other critiques of Leder’s account of dysappearance from the perspective of disability studies, see Parrey (2016) and Overboe (1999).

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  1. Penn State University, State College, PA, USA

    Corinne Lajoie

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  1. Corinne Lajoie
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  1. Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

    Nicolas de Warren

  2. Dept of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Ted Toadvine

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Lajoie, C. (2023). Disability Studies and Phenomenology. In: de Warren, N., Toadvine, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_330-1

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