ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines the emergence of the disabled body in the twentieth century. Drawing mainly on British examples, it surveys the institutions and agencies that compelled or necessitated the deployment of the category, and the forces that sustained and transformed it. The chapter discusses the role of medicine in framing the concept of disability and in socializing others into it. During the first half of the twentieth century, the disabled body was constructed primarily in terms of the industrial body, or the productive body, or the ergonomic body. Disability activists came to regard medicine as central to the process of the social exclusion of the disabled through the legitimacy it gave to physical difference. Medicine’s pathologization of disability, by occluding the social construction of the category of disability and by individualizing disablement, was perceived to operate against disabled persons’ own self-assessment of their situation, as well as against collective action for the rights of the disabled.