ABSTRACT
Critical projects such as feminist research, gender and queer theory, and cultural and critical race studies share an interest in questioning how certain people are regarded as on the edge of all that counts as human. Disability studies shares this interest as well; it explores how disabled people figure on the edge of the ordinary orders of daily life, including education, work, leisure, and love, and it studies how such exclusion is normalized. The case of normalized exclusion is poignant. In relation to disability, there are millions of people in Canada who find themselves with unequal access to education, under-employed, unemployed, or excluded from housing, leisure, politics, transportation, services, and other support systems (Government of Canada 2009). Yet, this state of affairs, shared by more than one billion disabled people around the world (World Health Organization 2011, 7), rarely takes shape as a non-individualized social issue because it often appears as though impairment itself leads naturally to limited inclusion. As a way to denaturalize processes of cultural exclusion, this article addresses representations of disability in order to explore how the edges of human inclusion are constituted and normalized.
