ABSTRACT
The phenomenological openness and malleability of the lived body, along with its relationality to its lived environment, have significant ramifications for ideas of normalcy, ability, and disability. Drawing on critiques and insights from feminist theory and other critical approaches, this chapter shows how these phenomenological ideas can elucidate the lived body as a political entity and sketches a political phenomenology of disability. It first considers concepts developed in the classic phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty—e.g., subjectivity, embodiment, habit body, lifeworld, agency, ability—that are relevant to a philosophy of disability. It then moves to critiques of classic phenomenology: the presumption of a ‘normal’ body, the narrow understanding of ability, the use of disability experiences only insofar as these illustrate ‘the normal.’ Finally, we turn to critical and crip phenomenology that, in dialogue with social theory and queer theory, move toward new political-phenomenological understandings of disability.
