Content area
Full text
Sharon L Snyder and David T Mitchell, Cultural locations of disability, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. xiv, 245, illus., £12.00, $19.00 (paperback 0-226-76732-9).
This is an ambitious and provocative book written by disability studies specialists, rather than historians. The authors argue that current approaches to disability are haunted by "phantoms of the past" (p. xii), and that it is timely to reflect upon the cultural heritage of past practice, particularly eugenics, which, they claim, "lurked like a social phantasm just below the surface, determining the standards, manner and parameters of our cultural, political and intellectual debate about embodied differences" (p. x).
The authors examine a range of "cultural locations of disability" that have been set out on behalf of disabled people in western Europe and the United States-nineteenth-century charity systems, institutions for the feeble minded, the disability research industry, sheltered workshops, film representations of disability and current academic work in disability studies. Their theoretical...