Introduction

Abstract

Author Webpage Disability is a pervasive and permanent aspect of the human condition: most of us have been, are now, or (as we age) will be people with disabilities.1 Disability may at first appear inescapably, solidly real—a medically, scientifically, biologically verifiable defect in mind or body. But despite its undeniable material reality, disability is also shaped and given meaning by culture. Attitudes toward disability vary with time and place and so, therefore, does the lived reality of disability. Even the sorts of conditions that are considered disabilities change with time and place. This is particularly evident in the psychiatric or cognitive domain. Some disabilities that were once felt as entirely real exist no longer (e.g., hysteria, neurasthenia, fugue, or nostalgia—all once legitimate medical diagnoses), whereas others that never existed before as distinct entities now seem all too pervasively real (e.g., attention deficit disorder or autism).2 Even in the physical realm, disabilities come and go, partly under the influence of medical science and partly under the influence of culture (e.g., anorexia, erectile dysfunction, or obesity, now often discussed as a medical epidemic). In short, disability is both a material reality and a cultural creation with a long and interesting history.3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.