ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the ways in which circulating constellations of negative emotion both inform the non-disabled imaginary and invalidate disabled bodies. For Jean-Paul Sartre, emotion springs from a transformation of the subject’s perspective on the world. In the phenomenological tradition emotions are the means by which consciousness apprehends objects and attaches value to them. In sociology, the turn to emotions has followed logically from the growth in body studies and the recognition of the intensely somatic nature of contemporary society. Following Thomas, disability studies began to explore the issue of ‘psycho-emotional disablism’. Although philanthropy has been around since Prometheus gave humanity the gift of fire, post-Enlightenment approaches to disability depend quite strongly on the mobilisation of the emotions of pity and compassion by non-disabled agents. Disgust is an emotion that derives from the mortal limits of our abject bodies and from the leaky fluids that escape the boundaries of our corporeal selves.
