NotNormativelyHuman 271
concerned with the processes and scripts by which culture saturates
corporeal and cognitive non-normativity with meanings and positions.
While discussions in the field often remain vague on what exactly may
be meant by "someways," they have been more pronounced about how
the umbrella term "disability" can be usefully differentiated. Thus, they
have proposed a distinction between handicap or impairment (physical)
and disability (social and cultural) (Berger 6, 7, 28) Because the term
"disability" resonates with now almost thirty years of academic work in
variousscholarlyfields,itwillhereberetainedasprincipledesignator.
As embodied life experience, disability can of course take on many
different forms and thus resists the systematization that the term itself
suggests.MindfulofAdorno'smonitumaboutthe"untruthofconcepts,"
of the "gap between words and the thing they conjure" (Negative
Dialectics52), disability will in the present argument be read not as a
condition but rather as a site, a site where the individual and the
collective, the biological and the socio-cultural, interact and intersect,
whereSollenandSein, whereregulatoryassumptionsaboutthecontours
and capabilities ofHomo sapienscollide with the contingencies of the
human embodiment. And, as many examples from the U.S.-American
past and present will illustrate, this collision is often emotionally
charged for both, the disabled themselves (the current PC term for
people with disabilities would be PWDs) and those with whom they
interact. Disability is and has always been a site of affective intensities,
ofanxietiesoverthehumanbody,whicheitherPWDsoroutsiderswish
wouldnotexist.
Situated at the crossroads of the normal and the not-normal,
disability invokes larger ethical and moral concerns central to the ways
in which people with different abilities can live together (L. J. Davis,
"ConstructingNormalcy"3).Inthissense,disabilityisalwaysalreadya
politicalcategory.^100 Themoralandethicalconcernswhichitbringsinto
(^100) For a recent re-evaluation of the political implications of embodied non-
normativity cf. the essays collected in Mitchell, David T., and Sharon Snyder,
eds. The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and
Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2015. Print.; esp.
sections one, "From Liberal to Neoliberal Futures of Disability: Rights-Based
Inclusionism,Ablenationalism,andtheAble-Disabled"(35-62),andseven,"The
CapacitiesofIncapacityinAntinormativeNovelsofEmbodiment"(180-203).