60 CHAPTER TWO
social constructionist model of disability argues that while impairment has
physical aspects, what constitutes disability depends on the social organi-
zation of society and the particular capacities it values (Wendell 1989). The
built environment, in particular, enforces social preferences in ways that
generate debilities for those with variant bodies. Disability is also consti-
tuted by representations of particular attributes as unfit and is linked to
other oppressions related to race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship (Bayn-
ton 2013). Some disability scholars have also made sense of disability as a
collective identity; despite the wide range of experiences gathered under
the umbrella of disability, those deemed disabled, they argue, have over-
lapping experiences negotiating the world (for discussion see Price and
Schildrick 1998; Samuels 2003). Yet it may be in disability studies where the
materiality of difference is articulated most persuasively, often in reference
to lived bodily realities that veer far from the normative ideal. Bodies are
physically different, and in some cases impaired, and social construction-
ism does not fully capture this (Baril forthcoming; Iwakuma 2006; Shake-
speare 2013; Siebers 2001).
Increasing interest in the materiality of bodily variation reflects a turn
in disability studies from a focus on representation to that of fleshly cor-
poreality. For example, rather than seeing the body in the first instance as
a site of cultural inscription, Tobin Siebers has insisted that the body is,
“first and foremost, a biological agent teeming with vital and often chaotic
forces” (2001, 749). Siebers advocates a “new realist” approach, one that
takes bodily variation not only as real but also as consequential. This ap-
proach, like feminist neo- materialisms, adopts many of the critical insights
of social constructionism while recognizing the material, biological body
as agentic. Seibers argues for a theory of complex embodiment, where the
physical body’s significance is indebted to social meanings, but not wholly;
rather, it also has its own capacities to shape experience. One of Siebers’s
key examples is the body in pain; in contrast to psychoanalytic and post-
structural treatments of pain, Siebers insists that pain is not reducible to
symbolic meaning, nor can it be understood as a kind of resistance to so-
cial inscription. For Siebers, the body “is not inert matter subject to easy
manipulation by social representations. The body is alive, which means
that it is as capable of influencing and transforming social languages as
they are capable of influencing and transforming it” (751). But this does