Customer Reviews

A History of Disability (Corporealities: Discourses of Disability)

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If you're looking for dates and places, you can put this book back on the e-shelf. If you want to understand how Western society perceives disability and why, from the gut level, you may want this book. But be warned, this is not light reading. Stiker's book would probably be best used in a university philosophy or sociology classroom; maybe it should even be required reading in settings such as those, since disability issues in general are too often ignored by academia. An important thing to know before buying this book is that it is written originally in French, by a French author; it winds its way from the antiquity shared by all Western civilization directly into specific French history. Readers looking for the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act will not find it here. But all Western countries have shared philosophical concerns even though the history itself differs. Also important to know is that much of Stiker's discourse is founded on the very French phenomenon of understanding a people by its language, in this case, French. He does take somewhat long journeys into the meaning of certain French words. (I am a little less offended by the term "handicapped" as the French understand it, for example, and our term "rehabilitation" now takes on a whole different light.) If you can hold these diversions somewhere in your brain long enough for him to explain his point, what he says does eventually make sense. I did not always agree with his conclusions, but there was enough food for thought that I would say, altogether, the book is worth reading.

This was practically designed to be a companion to Michel Foucault's A History of Madness. Stiker focuses on physical disabilities but traces some of the same important fractures in the historical geanology of the conceptualization disability. Perhaps the most important contibution in here is his extension of this genealogy through what he calls "The Age of Rehabilitation." If you are studying the sociology or history of disability, this is a must have.