Disability

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Disability is the experience of any condition that makes it harder for a person to do certain activities or to have equitable access within a given society. It can be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, or some combination of these. Some people are born with it. Others acquire it across a lifetime. A disability may be easily visible, or it may be invisible. None of this is new, yet the way societies understand it has shifted dramatically over time. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities frames disability as long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments that, in interaction with various barriers, may hinder full participation in society on an equal basis with others. That phrasing carries a quiet argument inside it. Is disability located in the body, or in the barriers? Who gets to define what counts as normal, and why have those definitions hardened into slurs at some points and into civil rights at others? The chapters ahead follow that argument across the bone wells of ancient Greece, the statistics tables of the nineteenth century, the language people fight over today, and the tropes that still shape how disability appears on screen.

• 2. Greece's Buried Evidence

  ›

  At the Windover Archeological Site, archaeologists recovered the skeleton of a male about 15 years old who had spina bifida. He was probably paralyzed below the waist, yet he had been cared for within a hunter-gatherer community. Bones like his complicate a long-held assumption that ancient societies could not spare resources for disabled members. Plutarch, writing in The Life of Lycurgus, described Spartan infanticide as routine. He claimed newborns were carried to the lesche, likely a public building, for examination by elders. An infant judged ill-bred and deformed was sent to the apothetai, the exposure places, a pit beneath Mount Taygetus. Plutarch lived roughly 700 years after the events he described, and even he admitted his account was open to dispute. Plato and Aristotle reinforced the harsher picture. In Republic, Plato wrote that deformed children should be hidden away in a secret and unknown place. In Politics, Aristotle proposed a law to prevent the raising of deformed infants. The Hippocratic Corpus, written by physicians during the late 5th and 4th centuries BCE, tells a different story. Those treatises describe treating infants with conditions such as weasel-arm, clubfoot, and cleft conditions, yet never once mention killing them. Greek literature acknowledged disabled figures openly. Hephaistos, the god and craftsman described as lame in both legs, appears 41 times in the Iliad and 19 times in the Odyssey. In Book 2 of the Iliad, Homer details Thersites' bandy legs, lame foot, hunched shoulders, and balding pate, calling him the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion. The Agora Bone Well held many skeletons, including infants whose median age at death was only eight days old. Scholars cannot say whether those infants were killed or died of natural causes, which were common in the first eight days of life.

• 3. Living Disabled In Antiquity

  ›

  By 370 BC, the Sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus had at least 11 permanent stone ramps giving mobility-impaired visitors access to nine different structures. This was the most important healing sanctuary in the wider area, and its builders planned for bodies that could not climb. Daily life left room for disabled people across rank and role. According to Lysias, a disabled man who walked with two canes plied a craft and ran a shop. In On Joints, Hippocrates describes people with arm disabilities engaged in handiwork as long as they could operate tools. Plato, in Laws, noted that slaves who acquired disabilities could be reassigned to other suitable roles. Disabled Athenians who could not support themselves received monetary assistance from the state, enough to cover basic needs. War made its own accommodations. In Memorabilia, Xenophon suggests men with bodily weakness were considered liabilities in battle. During the Battle of Thermopylae, the Spartan king Leonidas excused Eurytus and Aristodemus from fighting because both suffered severe eye sickness. Power did not exempt anyone from impairment. In the 6th century BCE, Croesus, the King of Lydia, had a son who was either deaf or mute, and spent considerable wealth trying to cure him, even consulting the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. He eventually rejected that son in favor of his able-bodied son, Atys. Agesilaus, a Spartan king of the 4th century BCE, was lame in one leg yet became a general. The Macedonian king Philip II lost one eye, fractured his collarbone, and shattered one hand and leg during his conquests.

• 4. Inventing The Norm

  ›

  In the 1830s, the Belgian statistician, sociologist, mathematician, and astronomer Adolphe Quetelet wrote of l'homme moyen, the average man. Quetelet proposed taking the sum of a population's attributes, such as height or weight, finding the average, and treating that figure as a norm toward which all should aspire. From that single idea grew the concepts of abnormal, non-normal, and normalcy. Before this, the Middle Ages attributed madness and other conditions to demons, and saw them as part of the natural order, a view sharpened during the fallout of the Black Death. In the sixteenth century, Ambroise Pare wrote of monsters, prodigies, and the maimed. The European Enlightenment then built institutions that observed and categorized human beings, among them asylums, clinics, and prisons. The statistical norm spread quickly through Britain, the United States, and Western Europe, and it was tied to the rise of eugenics. The freak show profited from exhibiting people who deviated from those norms. As eugenics grew in the latter nineteenth century, such deviations were treated as dangerous to whole populations. Scientists devised metrics of genetic fitness, then used them to deport, sterilize, or institutionalize those deemed unfit. People with disabilities were among the groups targeted by the Nazi regime in Germany, and approximately 250,000 disabled people were killed during the Holocaust. After the Second World War, with the example of Nazi eugenics before them, that pseudoscience faded from public discourse.

• 5. From Land To Wage

  ›

  Disability scholars point to the Industrial Revolution, and the economic shift from feudalism to capitalism, as turning points in how disability was understood. In the rural production economy of the Middle Ages, disabled people still played significant roles and made genuine contributions to daily economic life, even amid religious superstition. The wage system changed the terms. Once people were no longer tied to the land, they had to find work that paid a wage in order to survive. Industrialized production made bodies valuable for their ability to produce like machines. People who could not match the standard worker's body or work power were grouped together as a class of disabled people, and came to be regarded as a problem to be solved or erased. In the early 1970s, the disability rights movement became established as activists challenged both how society treated disabled people and the medical approach to disability. Physical barriers to access were identified, and the idea took hold that those barriers, not bodies, did the disabling. Mike Oliver coined the social model of disability in 1983. That phrase draws a line between the medical model, under which an impairment needs to be fixed, and the social model, under which the society that limits a person needs to be fixed.

• 6. Two Models, Many More

  ›

  The medical model views disability as a problem of the person, caused directly by disease, trauma, or other health conditions, and treatable through sustained individual care by professionals. Its goal is a cure, or an adjustment close enough to count as one. The social model reverses the lens. It treats disability as a socially created problem and a matter of full integration, where the responsibility for change rests collectively on society rather than on the individual body. Tom Shakespeare and other scholars have criticized this model and urged a new one that overcomes the medical versus social dichotomy. The social construction of disability sharpens the point. Around the early 1970s, sociologists, notably Eliot Friedson, began applying labeling theory and social deviance to disability. In that view, the medical industry creates the ill and disabled social role, and a person is labeled disabled when a feature keeps them from the social definition of health. Beyond these sit a crowd of other models. The political/relational model, posed by Alison Kafer, holds that disability lives in inaccessible buildings and discriminatory attitudes while still allowing that impairments can have disabling effects. The moral model treats people as morally responsible for their own disability, an attitude that echoes in the doctrine of karma. The market model, drawing on US Census data, counts 1.2 billion people worldwide who consider themselves to have a disability, and frames them as consumers, employees, and voters.

• 7. The Fight Over Words

  ›

  People-first language puts the person before the disability, producing phrasing such as a person with a disability. It is reflected in major legislation, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The American Psychological Association style guide recommends describing adaptive equipment functionally, preferring a woman who uses a wheelchair to a woman confined to a wheelchair. Identity-first language describes the person as disabled, and many argue it fits the social model better. In the UK, identity-first language is generally preferred, on the reasoning that an impairment such as a spinal cord injury is an individual property while disability is created by external societal factors. Autistic self-advocates and Deaf communities in the US often reject people-first language for the same reason. In 2021, the US Association on Higher Education and Disability announced it would use identity-first language, saying it claims disability directly. In the 2020s, the term neurodiversity has been embraced by many adults with neurological differences, built on the belief that no two brains or minds function in exactly the same way. Many sources trace the term to a 1991 chapter by the Australian sociologist Judy Singer, though in 2024 a group of autistic academics argued it had evolved collectively since the mid-1990s. The word handicap carries its own buried history. It derives from the medieval game hand-in-cap, where a neutral third person judged the difference in value between two traded possessions. That concept of evening up the odds passed into handicap racing in the mid-18th century, then in the early 20th century came to describe a disability as a heavier burden than normal. The UK government now advises civil servants to avoid the term.

• 8. Disability On Screen

  ›

  Inspiration porn presents a person as inspiring simply because they have a disability, turning them into an object that makes viewers with no acknowledged disability feel better by comparison. It is one of several tropes that disability theorist and rhetorician Jay Timothy Dolmage identifies as perpetuating societal myths. The supercrip trope centers a disabled person's achievement on their disability rather than on what they actually did, and is common in reporting on disabled athletes and in portrayals of autistic savants. Scholar Sami Schalk splits it into three forms: the regular supercrip praised for mundane tasks, the glorified supercrip praised for feats even a non-disabled person could not manage, and the superpowered supercrip whose disability becomes literal superpowers, like prosthetic limbs or cyborg technology. Examples named include Dr. Shaun Murphy from The Good Doctor and Marvel's Daredevil. The disability drop reveals a supposedly disabled character to have been faking. Jay Dolmage offers Kevin Spacey's character Verbal Kint in Usual Suspects, a reveal that often serves as the narrative climax and reflects able-bodied mistrust. The disabled victim trope assumes misery or helplessness, seen in The Hunchback of Notre Dame's Quasimodo, The Elephant Man's John Merrick, and A Christmas Carol's Tiny Tim. The eternally innocent trope casts characters as angelic or childish, as in Rain Man from 1988, Forrest Gump from 1994, and I Am Sam from 2001. Against all of these, disability aesthetics tries to depict disabled bodies in art and media accurately, the next move in an argument that began with a paralyzed teenager cared for at Windover.