ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most significant contribution to scholarship of the democratizing cultural transformations in Western societies that began in the 1960s has been the rise of intense questioning of the legitimacy of official and institutional cultural authorities. In literature, history and other disciplines, feminist, Third World and ethnic minority voices have increasingly initiated debate about how the traditional, largely élitist and exclusivist canons by which we have attempted to represent reality and to codify and legitimate knowledge have come into being. These groups quite accurately conceive of the opportunity to speak for themselves as a necessary precondition for their empowerment (e.g. Deloria, 1973; Asante & Vandi, 1980; Spender, 1981; Gates, 1984; DuBois et al., 1985; Ecker, 1986; American Indian Program, Cornell University, 1988). The same challenge has transformed studies about people with disabilities, who now have an increasingly authoritative voice in our efforts to conceptualize the experiences and meanings of physical and developmental impairment1. The rise and growth of this voice have occurred simultaneously with the emergence of
the current disability rights movement, which has put forward unprecedentedly broad demands for the empowerment of people with impairments (Bowe, 1978; DeJong, 1979; Williams & Shoultz, 1982; Zola, 1982; Scotch, 1984; Browne et al., 1985).
