ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how rehabilitation risks reproducing the normative body and, in so doing, perpetuates the “othering” of people labeled as disabled. Rehabilitation focuses on assisting people to achieve or approximate normal: normal function, normal behaviors, normal movement patterns, normal activities, and normal roles. Normal in all of these instances focuses on techniques and technologies to encourage uniformity in body structures, how bodies move, and typical social roles. While these practices can have positive effects, the impulse toward normalization also contributes to sustaining negative attitudes toward disabled people and disavows the richness of human diversity. Rehabilitation recognizes the influences of “environmental factors” on individual abilities, but the larger sociopolitical themes that mediate disablement remain largely unacknowledged. In what follows I unpack the tension between disability and normality in contemporary social discourse and how it is reflected in rehabilitation practice and scholarship. I suggest that, through an “ethic of openness,” rehabilitation can be mobilized to help people adjust to and create new ways of doing and being in the world that do not have to be constructed in relation to preconceived bodily norms or modes of function.
