ABSTRACT
The concept of the human subject suffered some damaging blows to its authority toward the end of the twentieth century. Following on from structuralism, post-structuralism in a de-centring move discredited the subject as a limiting and nefarious product of the Enlightenment. The Western subject was characterised as insular, closed off from the other and encased in a prison of insoluble but unstable binaries and hierarchies. Among postmodern efforts to theorise against the restrictions of the subject have been to dissolve it into desire, relationality or connectivity. Images of hybrids and cyborgs have also been championed as transgressive of a range of binaries, including subject–object and control–lack of control. For some critical disability studies scholars in the new millennium sympathetic to post-modern perspectives, these ideas and images fit with the fact that disability often requires prostheses or other technological aids, as well as personal assistants. Thus, a social and/or technological relationality or connectivity is increasingly being theorised in terms of disability (Gibson 2006; Shildrick 2009, 2012; Fritsch 2010; Goodley and Lawthom 2012). Moving beyond the modernist binaries also fits with those efforts to reimagine the restrictive dualisms that have structured the various socio-political models of, for example, individual versus social, social versus medical, impairment versus disability. Then, too, for some of these scholars, disability has become something of a key figure of human identity or embodiment, with all its inherent vulnerability and fragility (Davis 2003; Turner 2006; Shildrick 2009). In this chapter, I do not wish to discredit this conceptual narrative, what Shildrick (2009, 2012) characterises as a “post-conventional” approach to disability. In many ways, post perspectives offer significant insight into the constitution of disability in the twenty-first century. However, in the final analysis I want to provide a vision of disability that retains what I believe is a critical space for an agentic subjectivity, one that can work in productive tandem with a diversity of differently embodied disabled people together to transform the negative understanding of disability that permeates Western societies.
