Disability Theory

This article discusses the acquisition of a physical impairment/disability through voluntary body modification, or transability. From the perspectives of critical genealogy and feminist intersectional analysis, the article considers the ability and cis*/trans* axes in order to question the boundaries between trans and transabled experience and examines two assumptions impeding the conceptualization of their placement on the same continuum: 1) trans studies assume an able-bodied trans identity and able-bodied trans subject of analysis; and 2) disability studies assume a cis* disabled identity. The perception of transsexuality and transability as mutually exclusive phenomena results from a non-intersectional analysis of transsexuality as an issue of sex/gender, but not ability, and of transability as an issue of ability, but not sex/gender. Difficulty recognizing continuities between these phenomena thus stems from an ableist interpretation of sex/gender and a cis(gender)normative* interpretation of ability. This article aims to: 1) enrich intersectional analysis in trans and disability studies and transability scholarship; 2) complicate disability studies, in which disabilities are often presumed “involuntary”, and encourage the decentering of a cis* subject; 3) encourage trans studies to decenter an able-bodied subject; and 4) advocate for increased dialogue and the creation of alliances between trans and disability studies and movements.

Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hypa.12113/abstract

The Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard von Bingen’s twelfth-century music-drama, is one of the first known examples of a large-scale composition by a named composer in the Western canon. Not only does the Ordo’s expansive duration set it apart from its precursors, but also its complex imagery and non-biblical narrative have raised various questions concerning its context and genre. As a poetic meditation on the fall of a soul, the Ordo deploys an array of personified virtues and musical forces over the course of its eighty-seven chants. In this ambitious analysis of the entire work, Michael C. Gardiner for the first time examines how classical Neoplatonic hierarchies are established in the music-drama and considers how they are mediated and subverted through a series of concentric absorptions (absorptions related to medieval Platonism and its various theological developments) which lie at the core of the work’s musical design and text. This is achieved primarily through Gardiner’s musical network model, which implicates mode into a networked system of nodes, and draws upon parallels with the medieval interpretation of Platonic ontology and Hildegard’s correlative realization through sound, song, and voice.

The article examines three feature-length films produced in South Korea—director Hwang Dong-hyeok’s Silenced (2011), Song Il-gon’s Always (2011), and An Sang-hun’s Blind (2011)—that highlight a problem in contemporary disability rights cinema. While privileging individuals and groups that challenge normative understandings of character-based drama or documentary filmmaking, these motion pictures reflect an infantilizing tendency in popular culture more generally. The representations align with the standard medical approach to the topic, which sees disability as a sickness, a childlike helplessness (regardless of the person’s age) that results from an inability, a marked deficit in one’s physical or mental performance. However, it is argued that Silenced, a film that provoked legislative changes strengthening the protection of minors in South Korea, at least gestures toward the social model of disability.

ABSTRACT
This research, situated at the junction of feminist, trans and disability studies, examines the limits of intersectional feminist analyses and the difficulties faced in their consideration of gender identity and ability through an analysis of two types of body modification: transsexuality and transability (voluntary disability acquisition). In response to the question “what are the limits of intersectional analyses and how can they be addressed?”, three objectives are proposed: 1) participate in the critical examination of specific limits of intersectional feminist analyses in order to diversify their axes through the consideration of gender identity and ability; 2) question the conceptual assumptions and cisgenderist and (cis)ableist privileges informing negative discourses around these body modifications and highlight points of convergence among feminist, transactivist and anti-ableist movements in order to encourage dialogue and solidarities among them; 3) provide feminist, trans and disability studies with an enriched model of intersectionality capable of addressing new claims for justice from oppressed groups, such as those of transsexual and transabled individuals. The negative discourses of certain feminists and other scientists regarding these body modifications are mapped and critiqued through a methodology combining archeological, genealogical and critical discourse analysis. The reflections presented here, inspired by poststructuralist and queer approaches, explore neither the “origins” of transsexuality and transability nor their motivations; this is a study of the negative discourses about these phenomena and the normative systems from which they originate. The result is an important contribution to theoretical, normative and political fields of knowledge: the examination of two “extreme” cases of body modification reveals the bodily normativities of dominant regimes, specifically cisgenderism and (cis)ableism, that remain as unrecognized in our societies as in our social movements. 


KEYWORDS
Intersectionality; feminist theories; trans theories; queer theories; disability theories; social movements; body modifications; bodies; transsexuality; transability; voluntary amputation; BIID; disability; mutilation; pathologization; normality/abnormality; stigmatization; discourse; critical discourse analysis; norms; oppression; autonomy; bioethics.


RÉSUMÉ
Cette recherche se situe à la jonction des études féministes, trans et sur la production du handicap. Elle s’intéresse aux limites des analyses féministes intersectionnelles et leurs difficultés à considérer certains axes identitaires, telles l’identité de genre et les capacités, à travers l’analyse de deux cas de figure de modifications corporelles, soit la transsexualité et la transcapacité (transformation visant à acquérir un handicap). Cette thèse s’articule autour de la question suivante : quels sont les angles morts des analyses intersectionnelles et comment pouvons-nous y remédier? Pour répondre à cette question, cette thèse propose trois objectifs : 1) Participer aux questionnements critiques entourant certaines limites des analyses féministes intersectionnelles pour en diversifier les axes à partir de l’identité de genre et des capacités; 2) Remettre en question les présupposés conceptuels et les privilèges cisgenristes et (cis)capacitistes qui sous-tendent les discours négatifs entourant ces modifications corporelles et mettre en valeur les points de convergence entre les mouvements féministes, transactivistes et anticapacitistes pour instaurer des dialogues et des solidarités entre eux; 3) Fournir un modèle enrichi de l’intersectionnalité pouvant être déployé en études féministes, trans et sur la production du (trans)handicap, apte à répondre aux nouvelles revendications de justice de groupes opprimés, comme celles des personnes transsexuelles et transcapacitaires. À l’aide d’une méthodologie alliant l’analyse critique de discours, l’analyse archéologique et généalogique, les discours négatifs de certaines féministes et d’autres scientifiques sur ces transformations corporelles sont cartographiés et critiqués. Les réflexions présentées ici, s’inscrivant dans une approche poststructuraliste et queer, ne proposent pas une recherche des « origines » et des motivations de la transsexualité et de la transcapacité, mais plutôt une étude des discours négatifs vis-à-vis ces phénomènes et des systèmes normatifs qui sous-tendent ces discours. C’est sous cet angle que cette recherche constitue un apport important aux champs des savoirs, tant sur le plan théorique, normatif que politique : en se penchant sur deux cas de figure « extrêmes », elle met en lumière les normativités corporelles des régimes dominants, notamment cisgenriste et (cis)capacitiste, occultées tant dans nos sociétés que dans nos mouvements sociaux.


MOTS CLÉS
Intersectionnalité; théories féministes; théories trans; théories queers; théories sur le handicap; mouvements sociaux; modifications corporelles; corps; transsexualité; transcapacité; amputations volontaires; BIID; handicap; mutilations; pathologisation; normalité/anormalité; stigmatisation; discours; analyses critiques de discours; normes; oppressions; autonomie; bioéthique.

In this paper, my aim is to elaborate disability movement praxis so that transnational struggles for justice over the production of impairment emerging from the Global South can be represented within the transnational frame of disability politics. The paper seeks to explore the potential of deepening socio-political understandings of impairment as a means to radically democratize disability movement politics at the transnational scale to encompass pluralist, yet subaltern, collective claims for justice. I am guided by the question: if impairment is the place that makes visible invisible debts, can the global disability rights movement begin a process of re-identification to open the boundaries of disability justice claims and develop a strategic orientation which recognizes those collective justice claims for geopolitically produced impairments?

Mahatma Gandhi's principle of ahimsa concerns not a mere absence of violence, but an active pursuit of peace by way of satya or truth. This chapter proposes the disciplines concerned with structural violence, such as disability studies, may benefit from these approaches; especially their readiness to transcend contingent stances concerning violence. Gandhi discovers a priceless spiritual medium in khadi that could indeed facilitate this. Sitting on a spinning-wheel or charka, Gandhi reasons that he, and the masses too, will be able to spin together coarse inner realities as though they were constituent bits of yarn in a khadi fabric. Gandhi's crusade against violence has in its centre an individual selfhood where structural frameworks such as heterosexuality animate, and perhaps gain legitimacy. Gandhi's experiments with nonviolence, especially the ones that concern a selfhood's place in a hostile structure, draw on an ethic of caring.

The problem of mental retardation / intellectual disability is constantly evolving. The main element pointing to the essence of functioning of people with intellectual disabilities is a person's position in the society (Błeszyński, 2013, pp. 11-25; J. L. Aber …, 1997, p. 463). “The number of children with select developmental disabilities (autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other developmental delays) has increased, requiring more health and education services. Additional study of the influence of risk-factor shifts, changes in acceptance, and benefits of early services is needed” (C. A.Boyle, …, 2011, p. 1034). As indicated by D. D. Smitrz, the twenty-first century brought a paradigm shift from the traditionally negative conception (as a lack or limitation), to a more positive conception, in the spirit of R. Luckasson. The new approach highlighted the importance of the search for the capacity of each person and the environment in which this person lives, lear...

Disability Studies in Literature is an upcoming branch of knowledge which is yet to find its space in the Indian Sub-continent. Gender studies forms an integral part of the same and this paper inspired by the canons of feminism and disability studies, explores the cross roads of the same and how it has contributed to the construction of the historiography of disability in the country. The introductory part deals with the convergence of feminism and disability studies. The core of the paper deals with the representation of issues in literature pertaining to women with disabilities in the country.  Drawing on life-writing and fiction, the researcher points out that the country is yet to get introduced to the gender rights and identity politics. The paper is an attempt to create awareness on the plight of the people with disability in the country that has gone unnoticed and unvoiced for decades

Interiority is not just the science of interior design that meets of needs of function and aesthetics alone. Both of these are indeed the main task in interior design. Each building is design and built to fulfill certain functions. Hotels, apartments, and houses for example, serves as a means of accommodation. Restaurant serves as a commercial building that meets the needs of food. A public building should be accessible and used by a variety of different needs. These building must be accessible to those who can see or not (blinds), walkers and wheelchair users, and those who are able to listen or not (deaf/hard of hearing). This paper is a theoretical study and application of universal design that is accessible to public buildings that function as a university. The case studies taken in this research are University of Mercu Buana in west Jakarta and University of Daegu in South Korea. The study was conducted by study of universal design of two universities by considering two parameters, namely universal design and usability, by conducting literature study and user interviews. From results of study its found that university in Daegu have make of universal design and usability factors an important part of design, while University of Mercu Buana in West Jakarta hasn't fully made these two factors as part of the design, with many facilities not being able to accessed and used universally well

Understanding deafness not as a disability but as a benefit and vital aspect of humanity’s diversity

Through their in-depth articulation of Deaf Gain, the contributors to this pathbreaking volume approach being deaf as a distinct way of being, one that opens perceptions, perspectives, and insights less common to the majority of hearing persons. By framing deaf lives in terms of intellectual, creative, and cultural benefits, Deaf Gain recognizes physical and cognitive difference as vital to human diversity.


https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/deaf-gain

This article argues that Canada fails to meet its obligation under article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to provide students with autism with access to inclusive education. Moving beyond Canadian legislation, under which every province and territory recognises the right of all students to an inclusive education, it analyses Canada’s education system and the implementation of the goal of inclusive education. It points out the effect of five interrelated factors on the inclusiveness of the Canadian education system and its accessibility for students with autism: reductions in funding for education; the inadequacy of individual support measures and parent participation; the lack of education and training for teachers; the use of language indicative of the medical model of disability by governments; and "voluntary segregation" – the voluntary removal of children from the public education system by their parents. It concludes that Canada likely does not meet its obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Making Disability Modern: Design Histories brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary and national perspectives to examine how designed objects and spaces contributes to the meanings of ability and disability from the late 18th century to the present day, and in homes, offices, and schools to realms of national and international politics. The contributors reveal the social role of objects - particularly those designed for use by people with disabilities, such as walking sticks, wheelchairs, and prosthetic limbs - and consider the active role that makers, users and designers take to reshape the material environment into a usable world. But it also aims to make clear that definitions of disability-and ability-are often shaped by design.

Negli ultimi decenni, l’evolversi delle normative ha favorito l’inclusione sociale delle persone disabili, in particolare negli ambiti della scuola e del lavoro. Tuttavia queste persone si trovano ancora oggi in una condizione piuttosto critica: raggiungono livelli di istruzione inferiori rispetto alla popolazione normodotata e affrontano maggiori difficoltà nell’ottenere posizioni lavorative che, sovente, richiedono un basso profilo professionale e non prevedono sbocchi di carriera.
Quali sono le ragioni di tale disparità?
Questo volume, che nasce da una ricerca empirica, intende approfondire queste tematiche da un punto di vista sociologico.

“Cosa vogliono i disabili? Una vita, come la vogliono gli altri”

Indice:
Per una introduzione al tema della disabilità
La struttura del volume e la presentazione della ricerca
1. Disability is part of the human condition
2. Per una scuola verso il lavoro
3. Un lavoro per fortuna
4. Un lavoro per dovere
Qualche riflessione conclusiva
Nota metodologica
Bibliografia

Nota sull'Autore
Albertina Pretto
È ricercatrice in Sociologia presso l’Università di Trento dove insegna “Metodi Qualitativi” e il suo principale interesse di studio riguarda l’analisi e lo sviluppo di questi ultimi. Le sue ricerche si concentrano prevalentemente su il senso di appartenenza socio-territoriale, i valori e alcuni ambiti della sociologia della salute. Ha recentemente pubblicato: “Narratives, Values and Voters: a case study in Italy” (2016) in French Journal for Media Research; “The socio-territorial belonging in a cross-border area: a sociological approach” (2016) in Space & Polity; “A type of interview with photos: the bipolar photo elicitation” (2015) in L’Année Sociologique.

Liberalism glorifies free speech as the primary means to achieve progress. Free  speech is presumed to involve a clear association across awareness, individual  voice, collective speaking, and increased representation. Michel Foucault  located a genealogy of related practices of speaking truth in the Stoic tradition  of parrhesia. However, as he established, liberalism limits speech, as centrism  and civility flatten all forms of speech as equivalent whereby all sides come to  matter. As demonstrated today, the alt-right and radical left are seen as equally  illiberal and asking for too much. Speech, specifically under liberalism, loses  its import. The article asks what happens when we free the concept of speech  from free speech and the liberal tradition. To explore this, the article turns to  disability, particularly deafness, to grapple with other formulations of speech. It  examines Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s classic film A City of Sadness  (1989) and focuses on its representations of deafness and its disability aesthetics.  Hou’s aesthetics and use of media objects establish a political critique that does  not rely on truth, repair, or recognition. This film develops a Marxist theory  of speech and reconsiders speech through other modes of governance like  autocracy. Ultimately, the article explores how different governance structures  rework not only speech but also notions of political change.

In this article, the authors discuss friendship as a method of qualitative inquiry. After defining friendship and positing it as a kind of fieldwork, the methodological foundations of friendship as method are established (Tillmann-Healy, 2003). The purpose of this narrative woven autoethnographic study is to examine the role of friendship in describing disabling physical and attitudinal access barriers in a university setting. Friendship represents a critical analytic lens through which disabled/nondisabled individuals alike may examine their positions, understandings, regimes of practices, and particular knowledges. Friends —Mark and Dan — discuss their experiences of disablement and reflections on dis/ability. The authors draw from their experiences of friendship and disability in higher education and their allied identities to discuss and examine questions of access, disclosure, and inclusion.

The Daoist Zhuangzi argues against a Confucian conception of “normality” that, like Aristotelianism, is teleological: A higher power, Heaven, decrees what “human nature” is, and human nature determines all the normative facts, such as how many limbs a human should have, standards of physical beauty, tastes in food and music, and morality. This view implies that to be “different” is to be defective. However, Zhuangzi pushed back against the idea that “normal” is good and difference is bad, including when it comes to what we would call "disabilities" today.

Lennard Davis, in his work on visualizing the disabled body, argues that at root the body is inherently and always already fragmented. The unified "whole body" is, therefore, hallucinatory in nature-an imaginary figure through which the body's multiplicity is repressed. There is much in this view that is consonant with posthumanism, which so often seeks to destabilize the "whole" and singular one in favor of the multiple, the fragmentary, and the hybrid. Yet despite these considerations of the body as fragmentary, little attention has been paid to the value of considering the body not only as fragmentary, but also as potential fragment. What might we learn by rejecting anthropocentric assumptions about the body-mind's inherent completeness, and exploring the radically plural ontologies offered by visions of shared, joint, or group body-minds? This paper turns to science fiction as a source of such visions, considering depictions of symbiotic and hive minds through the non-traditional models of ontology and agency. While science fiction has traditionally represented plural being as a troubling and fearful injury to wholeness, this paper aims to highlight the symbiotic Tok'ra 1 of television series Stargate SG-1 as a model of excess being that not only challenges the naturalization of the "complete" body, but also asks us to interrogate presumed boundaries between self and other.

This essay aims to show why it is important to ask questions about the way Christians raise the question of disability. The central, animating concern has to do with metaphysically thin and philosophically problematic understandings of disability and the way that concept is inflected within contemporary Catholic moral discourse in the areas of biomedical ethics and social theorizing. The essay has three parts. First, through the lens of Gaudium et spes, the author discusses the source of our contemporary questions about disability and related themes. Second, the author surveys overlapping ways of framing the concept disability, as formulated within biomedical ethics, American jurisprudence, the social critique from disability studies, and the sociopolitical subversion of the biomedical outlook from critical disability theorists. Third, given those contemporary frames and in conversation with Fides et ratio, the author sketches some preliminary considerations relevant to a faithfully Christian and distinctively Catholic account of disability. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 20.2 (Summer 2020): 277–310.

Ciò che dà significato alle soluzioni istituzionali in favore delle persone con disabilità – integrazione, diritti, pari opportunità – sono i princìpi di fondo che le ispirano e la visione della persona e dell’umanità cui essi rinviano. L’itinerario di riflessione proposto in queste pagine unisce all’analisi teorica l’ascolto di testimonianze significative e si accosta ai disabili anzitutto in quanto persone, più che come ‘categoria’ svantaggiata, affetta da particolari deficit. Il fine è richiamare l’attenzione su ciò che l’handicap ci dice a proposito della condizione umana universale, segnata comunque da una dignità inestimabile e da una ineluttabile vulnerabilità.

The dominant discourse surrounding the teaching of writing focuses on texts and thoughts, words and ideas, as though these entities existed apart from the bodies of teachers, writers, audiences, communities. As a discipline, broadly speaking, we in composition and rhetoric have not acknowledged that we have a body, bodies; we cannot admit that our prevailing metaphors and tropes should be read across the body, or that our work has material, corporeal bases, effects and affects. Yet some recent attention to embodiment and to body politics in composition theory and research, and indeed the creation of a collection like this, suggests that we are beginning to recognize the corporeal entailments, foundations, and connections in the teaching of writing (see Fleckenstein, Hawhee, Couture, Lewiecki-Wilson and Wilson, McRuer). In this essay, I will build on this momentum as I argue that, in fact, ignoring the body has serious consequences. As we compose media, we must also—always—compose embodiment. I will also argue that we must be careful about which bodies we conceptualize. In this essay, I will critically investigate the ways that embodied pedagogy can be developed without invoking normative models of embodiment. And I will make some modest suggestions about ways that we can develop technologies and pedagogies for writing that not only affirm the body, but that affirm all bodies.

Metanarratives of Disability
Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order

Edited By David Bolt

The first book in the new Autocritical Disability Studies Series is now available to order: https://www.routledge.com/Metanarratives-of-Disability-Culture-Assumed-Authority-and-the-Normative/Bolt/p/book/9780367523190

With chapter contributions from Owen Barden and Erin Pritchard, and artwork by Claire Penketh, this book explores multiple metanarratives of disability to introduce and investigate the critical concept of assumed authority and the normative social order from which it derives.

The book comprises fifteen chapters developed across three parts and, informed by disability studies, is authored by those with research interests in the condition on which they focus as well as direct or intimate experiential knowledge.

The deliberative systems approach is a recent innovation within the tradition of deliberative democratic theory. It signals an important shift in focus from the political legitimacy produced within isolated and formal sites of deliberation (e.g., Parliament or deliberative mini-publics), to the legitimacy produced by a number of diverse interconnected sites. In this respect, the deliberative systems (DS)  approach is better equipped to identify and address defects arising from the systemic influences of power and coercion. In this article, I examine one of the least explored and least understood defects: the exclusion of non-speaking political actors generated by the uniform privileging of speech in all sites within a system. Using the examples of prefigurative protest, Indigenous refusal to deliberate, and the non-deliberative agency of disabled citizens, I argue that the DS approach allows theorists to better understand forms of domination related to the imposition of speech on those who are either unwilling or unable to speak.

The ideology of motherhood precludes disabled people in various ways: sometimes outlawing it completely, in the case of enforced or coerced sterilisation; sometimes condemning it through the sanctioned removal of children and/or adoption; and at other times complicating it severely through lack of access to accessible goods and services that all mothers require to function in their day-today lives-such as pushchairs/prams, baby-changing equipment and baby-wearing apparatus.

Source: Baril, A. (2020). “La Condizione Trans Come Debilità: Ripensare le intersezioni tra le incarnazioni disabili e quelle trans” (“Transness as Debility: Rethinking intersections between trans and disabled embodiments”), KABUL Magazine (Torino), 5, 3: 1-23. URL: https://www.kabulmagazine.com/la-condizione-trans-come-debilita/

Original publication: Baril, A. (2015). “Transness as Debility: Rethinking intersections between trans and disabled embodiments,” Feminist Review, 111: 59-74.

h i g h l i g h t s Studies on instructors' difficulties in teaching students with disabilities are limited. This qualitative study employs interviews to explore science instructors' barriers. The study reports first-order (external) and second-order (internal) barriers. Complex interactions between first-order and second-order barriers are discussed. The need for effective professional development models is highlighted.

Abstract:
The original question this thesis started with arose in the context of our professional activities within organizations dealing with the integration of disabled people in the world of work. How could policies specifically addressed to this public be enforced when the very definition of what characterized disabled people had not yet been formulated? The question is paradoxical, since this absence of a precise and homogeneous definition did not prevent the professionals of these organizations from working.
After focusing our analyses on the limits of the current classifications of disabilities, on the impossibility to define disability with the exactness of scientific classifications or by only resorting to medicine, we thought of conceiving disability as a singular relationship between social norms and individual experience. In so doing, Foucault’s first works and mostly unpublished writings by Canguilhem were a great help. These authors allowed us to prepare our formulation of the concept of disability which is based on Yves Schwartz’s central idea of “corps-soi” (body and self together). A disability is then considered as a singular experience of the “body and self” in the face of antagonistic social norms. This view of what disability is lead us then to present our main thesis: disability, considered as a concept, can be used as a prism to renew the analysis of human practices and of theoretical discourse. We then submitted our thesis to three different test procedures, so as to check if, with disability as a starting point, we could renew our understanding of activities and theoretical corpuses, well-known though they may be. We felt the process tended to validate our reflection and eventually made suggestions as to how public policies for the disabled could benefit from our thesis.
Keywords: Experience, norms, disability, activity, classification.

Résumé
L’interrogation première de cette thèse est issue de questionnements liés à notre activité professionnelle au sein de dispositifs dédiés à l’insertion professionnelle et au maintien en emploi des personnes handicapées. Comment mener des politiques spécifiquement destinées à ce public alors même que la définition de ce qui caractérisait les personnes handicapées n’était pas encore formalisée ? Comment concevoir une généalogie des classifications sociales dans le champ du handicap qui ne soit pas une histoire du handicap, quelle en serait la portée pour la philosophie juridique et pour l’épistémologie des classification du vivant ?
Après avoir fait porter nos analyses sur les limites des classifications actuelles du handicap, sur l’impossibilité de définir le handicap avec la rigueur des classifications scientifiques ou de le définir par le seul recours à la médecine, nous avons envisagé de concevoir le handicap comme une relation singulière entre normes sociales et expérience individuelle. En cela le recours aux premières œuvres de Foucault et à des écrits, pour une bonne part inédits, de Canguilhem nous était d’un grand secours. Ces auteurs nous permettaient de préparer notre formalisation du concept de handicap, en situant notre proposition centrale dans un rapport complexe entre les normes sociales et la normativité individuelle. Pour cela nous nous sommes appuyés sur les concepts d’expérience et de « corps-soi » empruntée à Yves Schwartz. Le handicap est alors considéré comme une expérience singulière du corps-soi à l’épreuve de normes sociales antagoniques. Notre thèse principale était alors la suivante : loin de n’être qu’une norme de l’anormalité, le concept de handicap peut servir de prisme pour renouveler l’analyse de pratiques humaines et de formes discursives théoriques. Nous l'avons alors soumis à trois procédures de test dans des domaines d’activité et des corpus théoriques. Notre thèse ainsi renforcée nous avons pour finir tenté de proposer un réinvestissement de nos analyses dans les politiques publiques destinées aux personnes handicapées.

Those who tune in to Televisa during the first weeks of December or who circulate in the subways or on city streets in Mexico are unlikely to avoid encountering images promoting the Teletón campaign. Through the display of images of disabled children and visual narratives of their bodies and lives, Teletón, a project of Televisa, raises money for the creation of rehabilitation centers for children throughout the country. A casual encounter with Teletón, inevitable for many Mexicans, is first of all an encounter with such images and stories of childhood disability, of bodies marked as in need of intervention. It is also the opportunity for a financial transaction that is both instantaneous and ongoing; viewers begin to pay for the image as soon as they view it, whether they resist or cede to the request for a donation. For a form of payment takes place when one views advertisements by Teletón's corporate sponsors, or simply by the viewer's participation in a visual transaction. The disabled child offers visual pleasure and the audience pays attention ; or the child aspires to rehabilitation while the audience aspires to moral elevation, thus creating an exchange between physical difference and the moral imperative to correct it. One might ask whether consideration of Teletón's role in Mexico must therefore hinge on the question of finance. Some donate while others refuse, and many question the moral and legal status of Teletón's profitable relationship to Televisa. Or perhaps the central issue could be defined through attention to the act of looking, and to the availability of specific children as visual objects. It might be simple enough to conclude that the two options are inseparable in this context and in general in the structure of spectacle, always rooted in some form of literal or imaginary payment. In other words, sooner or later one pays to look, spending to see a little bit more. Or one must look for a way to pay, to balance the transaction of what has already been seen and thus keep looking.