ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a preliminary examination of the shared characteristics of American constructions of race, sex and gender, sexual orientation, and disability. It considers how each of these is constructed through social processes in which categories of people are named, aggregated and disaggregated, dichotomized and stigmatized, and denied the attributes valued in the culture. The chapter explores what disability look like when its context is the social construction of race, sex and gender, and sexual orientation categories. Affirmation of a new name as signal of a new identity has also been the case for the disability rights movement, most specifically in the movement's rejection of the term "handicapped" based on the assertion by some that the term originated in disabled people having to beg-"cap in hand"-for their subsistence. While disability categories are constructed as discontinuous, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 offers a broadly inclusive definition of disability.
