Critical Disability Studies as Methodology

By Sami Schalk. 2017

115 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Response to Julie Avril Minich, “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now,” published in Lateral 5.1. Schalk calls for a shift in thinking that directly affects action and discusses creating classroom experiences that help students to critique intersecting social structures in their everyday encounters. Reading Julie Avril Minich’s “Enabling Whom?: Critical Disability Studies Now,” I nearly applauded when she argued that critical disability studies is a methodology rather than a subject-oriented area of study. She writes: “The methodology of disability studies as I would de ne it, then, involves scrutinizing not bodily or mental impairments but the social norms that de ne particular attributes as impairments, as well as the social conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular populations.” This argument is essential to the future vitality of the eld—one that has been gestured toward and even enacted by multiple scholars, but not to my knowledge articulated in this particular way. Following Minich, we can understand critical disability studies as a method, an approach, a theoretical framework and perspective—not (exclusively) a study of disabled people. One can study disabled people and not be doing critical disability studies and one can be doing critical disability studies and not be directly studying disabled people. In some sense Minich’s argument runs parallel to work in crip theory, a strain of disability studies theory that draws upon insights in queer theory. Robert McRuer proposes that crip theory “should be understood as having a similar contestatory relationship to disability studies and identity that queer theory has to LGBT studies and identity, [but] crip theory does not—perhaps paradoxically—seek to dematerialize disability identity.” More recently Alison Kafer has argued that crip theory allows for the inclusion of “those who lack a ‘proper’ (read: medically acceptable, doctor-provided, and insurer-approved) diagnosis for their symptoms” and “people identifying with disability and lacking not only a diagnosis but any ‘symptoms’ of impairment.” Scholarship in crip theory expands the possibilities of analysis in disability studies by moving away from more strictly medical, legal, and identity-based de nitions of disability as an object of analysis. Minich’s argument pushes this crip theory stance further by proposing a critical disability studies that is not dependent upon de ning an object of analysis (no matter how expansive the de nition), but rather focuses on the method of analysis instead. In my own work I use the term (dis)ability to designate the socially constructed system of norms which categorizes and values bodyminds based on concepts of ability and disability. Other scholars have used terms like dis/ability or ability/disability system to refer to similar ideas. I believe that one of the ways that critical disability studies can develop itself more clearly as a methodology is by using critical terms that work in parallel with terms in related identity / oppression / social justice elds. Race, gender, class, and 1

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Education, Literature and Literary Theory

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