ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights medicalized discourses of the disabled body which provided the scientific foundation for Het Dorp as design aimed at rehabilitating the individual and society. Under the rhetoric of inclusion, Het Dorp expelled this cloistered disabled figure into the Village enclave, achieving a double purification: constituting the virtuous Dutch citizen through participation in the collective nationalist project, and cleansing the body politic of its invaliden – invalid bodies. The cultural conception of the body as a machine that can be 'repaired' by technological means owes much to the twentieth-century mechanization of processes and animate beings. Central to the concept of Open Het Dorp's new disabled citizen was the use of science and technology to restore autonomy to the incapacitated body. Het Dorp thus made the disabled body knowable to science, through the sole determinant of disability as a human type. Technology helped to inscribe the idealized body onto the material body of the disabled residents.
