Materialism and the "Disabled Subject" in Disability History

A materialist analysis of disability emerged in the U.K. in the 1980s and 1990s, alongside developments in disability politics, culture and activism. In some ways, the growing disability rights movement and its emerging debates parallel experiences in feminist politics and writings. At the heart of both materialist feminism and materialist Disability Studies are the challenges of trying to understand the political, economic, and ideological aspects of oppression. Despite these aims, contradictory approaches to history and the disabled subject have plagued these projects. Himani Bannerji (1995) has identified ways that materialist feminists ended up creating an essential idea of woman, while creating a mechanical (abstracted and ahistorical) account of gender relations. In the case of the debate on materialism and disability, authors replicate these problems even as they critique them. Through a review of historical materialist approaches to disability, I will discuss the consequences of what Anne Borsay (2002) refers to as the nomothetic approach to history taken by several influential Disability Studies theorists. I will argue that these consequences include the writing of histories in which the category of disability either appears to be rigidly stuck to social conditions that existed in the past, or appears as a self-evident social identity. Distortions in our understanding of the history of the social relations of disability have contributed to an erasure of disability in the present global context—a context that includes, but is only partially explained by the structural barriers and institutional discrimination described by materialist Disability Studies theorists. Following Bannerji, I will argue that a historical materialist analysis of disability must take people's experience as a start-point. Historical study will allow us to trace the ways in which particular experience is mediated through social relations, and to connect immediate experiences of embodiment to concrete social contexts.