ABSTRACT
M. Schillmeier argues that: ‘Disability turns our attention to the different ways’ in which ‘the bifurcation of nature is practiced’. The twins–disability and non-disability–are separated at birth and go on to live lives vastly different in experience; the former in impropriety, the latter in dignity. Disability history is an infant project on the margins of historical inquiry compared to the ‘older’ sibling social divisions of class, race, gender and sexuality. The emergence of disability as a vibrant, dynamic and morally negative construct in the history of cultural narrative makes it the latest recruit to historical revisionism. D. Mitchell and S. Snyder are impressed by the extraordinary frequency in the literary canon with which disability is used as a ‘narrative prosthesis’. Disability and non-disability are constituted in the non-disabled imaginary in ways that idealise the latter and contort the former. Writing a history of disability from the perspective of the medical model has become impossible.
