Claiming Disability: Knowledge and identity

Claiming Disability: knowledge and identity

SIMI LINTON, 1998

New York, New York University Press

203 pp., 32.50 (hb), 13.75 (pb)

ISBN 0-8147-5133-4 (hb); 0-8147-5134-2 (pb)

This ambitious book sets out to not only challenge the dominant medicalised view of disability, but also to further establish disability studies' place within the academy. Simi Linton argues that while in the past 20 years, the disability rights movement has pushed the "dominant cultural narrative" by exposing many of "the flaws in the civic response to disability" (p. 1), the academic narrative has lagged far behind. She sees this largely as the result of disability's having been positioned within the academy as the sole domain of the applied fields, such as `special education', `psychology' and `medicine'. She asserts that disability studies, offers academia, as well as society a means of liberation from their constricting view of disability.

The book constructs its argument very carefully. It begins by showing how language has been used to marginalise disability and disabled people within society and academia alike. It explains that in society's construction of the `normal' and `abnormal' that the two terms are viewed as unchangeable absolutes, with the examination of the marginalised position of `abnormality' being used to locate and define the unquestioned central position of normality. Linton attempts to turn this process on its head with her own linguistic choices' placing `disabled' in the central position and marginalising `non-disabled'

The book's breakdown of the linguistic constructions of disability as well as their effects, is very thorough, drawing on a wide...