Making and Unmaking Disability: The Three-Body Approach

by Julie E Maybee

If the future is accessible, as Alisa Grishman—one of 55 million Americans categorized as having a disability—writes in this book’s cover image, then we must stop making or constructing people as disabled and impaired.

In this brave new theoretical approach to human physicality, Julie E. Maybee traces societal constructions of disability and impairment through Western history along three dimensions of the personal body, the interpersonal body, and the institutional body. Each dimension has played a part in defining people as disabled and impaired in terms of employment, healthcare, education, and social and political roles.

Because impairment and disability have been constructed along all three of these bodies, unmaking disability and making the future accessible will require restructuring Western institutions, including capitalism, changing how social roles are assigned, and transforming our deepest beliefs about impairment and disability to reconstruct people as capable. Ultimately, Maybee suggests, unmaking disability will require remaking our world.

264 pages, Hardcover

Published September 17, 2019

Reviews

[Kathryn Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am currently reading this book for a philosophy course on disability. I am near finishing it (early), because I find it such an interesting read. I love the way the author uses history to explain how we got to where we are today, how quickly and entirely our society absorbed the idea of disability right along with capitalism by way of the industrial revolution. I found the stories and facts to be relevant to current events surrounding more than just disability, specifically immigration and racial inequality. The picture it paints about the way eugenics and capitalism play off of each other is as horrifying as it is obvious, but I never stopped to consider it in this light before picking up this book. Maybee turns the whole notion of "that's just the way things have always been" on its head. The idea of our entire system being set up as a form of affirmative action for the non-disabled is a concept I have thought about every day since reading it in this book. I appreciate how well written Maybee's book is, it doesn't quite feel like a textbook, while still being packed with carefully referenced information. I already have one relative and one friend who want to borrow the book when I finish.