This documentary film is available online here. It is a filmic record of how the Third Reich murdered 200,000 mentally and physically disabled people by deliberate starvation, lethal medication and toxic gas, while subjecting another 350,000 to compulsory sterilisation between 1933 and 1939. The Nazis falsely labelled the disabilities as hereditary, a genetic threat, thereby condoning their Rassenpolitik of cleansing the German race of undesirable traits. They claimed that disabled people had been permitted to survive in defiance of the laws of natural selection, that they were unproductive and meaningless as well as being an economic drain. Continue reading “Selling Murder: The Secret Propaganda Films of the Third Reich”
Category: Disability Research
From Eugenics to Patents: Genetics, Law, and Human Rights
In an article that discusses eugenics, its modern form of genetics and the consequent legal and human rights issues raised, science historian Daniel Kevles points out that after the turn of the century, eugenics was pretty much practised everywhere, and although it is often dismissed as a crank movement, it must be remembered that “…science is in any day what scientists do and defend” (Kevles 2011, p 326). The possibility to improve people genetically is still a goal, and one that is rapidly becoming a reality owing to advances in the field of genetics. Continue reading “From Eugenics to Patents: Genetics, Law, and Human Rights”
Winogrand and disabled people
The next book Hevey looked at was Winogrand’s Figments from the Real World, which he says contains six images of people with disabilities – not as central subjects, but as secondary destabilising factor Continue reading “Winogrand and disabled people”
Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation
This article is featured in the Disability Studies Reader 2nd edition, Routledge 2006 pp 399-401. Although the article deals mainly with autobiographical texts, it throws up some interesting and thought-provoking issues surrounding the disabled debate. To begin with, the Thomas Couser makes a quite profound statement about how disability is generally overlooked as a minority status, although it is in fact a more fundamental distinction than race, gender or ethnicity. Continue reading “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation”
The Social Construction of Disability, by Debra Shogan
“People do not ‘have’ diseases, which are really descriptive mechanisms created by contemporary medicine. People have stories, and the stories are narratives of their lives, their relationships, and the way they experience an illness.” Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives
This is another article that echoes some of the same ideas that Davis put forward, in particular of how Galton took Quetelet’s idea of the normal man and adapted it so that average came to represent mediocrity, and the upper quartile of the distribution curve represented progress and perfection, thus eliminating abnormality. In fact, the appropriation of the law of error to explain stability in social statistics has never been called into question: Continue reading “The Social Construction of Disability, by Debra Shogan”
Martha’s Vineyard
I was intrigued by the phenomenon of Martha’s Vineyard and decided to explore it in more depth. In Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, an article that was published a few years before the release of her seminal book of the same name, Nora Groce wrote about the history of deafness and sign language among the island’s population and provides some firsthand testimony from the elder members of the community who could still recall sign language being an integral part of community life (it has now fallen into disuse). Continue reading “Martha’s Vineyard”
The Thrice Shy: Cultural Accommodation to Blindness and Other Disasters in a Mexican Community, by John Langston Gwaltney
John Langston Gwaltney provides another account of how a condition that in other societies would have been disabling was accepted and accommodated for within a particular community. Continue reading “The Thrice Shy: Cultural Accommodation to Blindness and Other Disasters in a Mexican Community, by John Langston Gwaltney”
Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body
In this essay, Tobin Siebers looks at the social construction of the body, and what repercussions this has on the representation of the disabled body. Continue reading “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body”
Researching the disabled identity: contextualising the identity transformations which accompany the onset of impairment
Following on from the statistic that Siebers revealed in his essay, that only 15% of disabled persons are born with their disability, I located this article by Rose Galvin, which looks at some of the transformations that take place in people who develop their disabilities later in life. Continue reading “Researching the disabled identity: contextualising the identity transformations which accompany the onset of impairment”
The End of Normal
The first chapter of Davis’ book is available online here. Davis asserts that in the neoliberal world of “cultural-identity eschaton“, the notion of normality has been replaced by that of diversity. Continue reading “The End of Normal”
Carl Whetham photography 