A review of
“Disability Theory by Tobin Siebers”
By Ann Arbor
Disability Studies (DS) has been a growing field of inquiry for quite a while
within academia. From Laura Hershey’s work on women with disabilities to
James Charlton’s reading of disability as a rights issue to Robert McRuer’s focus
on queer and crip cultures as sites of disability to Michael Bérubé’s discussions
of disability and theories of justice, the field is as diverse as the bodies it seeks
to map. It is also one of those fields that stands as a stark reminder of the gulf
between the progressive theories of academia and the lived experience of
people the field studies. Media coverage of and legislation affecting those with
disabilities do not share the same concept of disability as those who study it.
The critical perspectives on race, class, gender, and sexuality that emerged in
the past thirty years have had at most a minimal impact on media and public
conceptualisation of those identities. Siebers’s Disability Theory (DT) is a game
changer within the field not in the usual sense that some reviews use that term
to indicate an interesting new perspective on a topic. Siebers actually changes
the game. “One of the basic claims of disability studies,” he says, “is that the
presence of disabled people in any discussion changes not only the culture of the
discussion but also the nature of the arguments in the discussion” (4). He looks
back at the history of DS and is not satisfied with the aversion to identity politics
in discussions of disability. Identity, though, is thought of as a defect only when
it relates to minorities and then is seen as a social pathology. DT is a “deliberate
act of identity politics” because it is “the most practical course of action by which
to address social injustices” (15). DS is, simply because of its subject, an activist
field. And Siebers acknowledges and embraces this work as such: “Identity
politics either springs from disability or disables people for viable political
action” (14).
The medical model of disability—that disability is a physical feature of the
body that impairs an individual and must be treated to get the body as close
to the normative body as is possible—is the prevailing concept that shapes the
medical community, media, and majority public opinion of disability. DS offers
two theoretical challenges to this. First, the structural model identifies disability
as socially produced through environmental barriers to normative mobility and
interactions. And the minority model makes the lack of equal rights the basis
of disability thus broadening the field’s ability to critique unequal access for
ethnic-minorities, women, economically disadvantaged, and LGBTQ people.
Siebers merges these last two perspectives to approach disability with a theory
of “complex embodiment.” This view takes into account the secondary health
effects and chronic pain of the aging body as well as bodies suffering from the
effects of HIV and AIDS. Complex embodiment opens up the field by offering
the intersectionality of identity as a way to analysesocial oppression that takes
