A social anatomy of disability

Based on a synthesis of multiple kinds of data, ranging from sociological texts and medical statistics to feature films and personal interviews, this study takes the form of a set of interconnected essays that explore the social meaning of disability in American society. In Chapter 1, using the 1946 award-winning film, The Best Years of Our Lives, as the centerpiece of evidence, we show that the cultural interpretation of disability is related to a number of factors. Some of these are the stage in the life cycle in which disability occurs, the faculties that it affects, the degree of its visibility, its origin or cause, and the extent to which persons with disability are viewed as morally culpable. Despite the growing awareness of disability in American society, the discipline of sociology has largely ignored the social construct of disability. Evidence that this is so and the reasons underlying the absence of a sociology of disability are addressed in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 analyzes the social structures and socio-cultural processes, beginning in the 1940s, that caused disability to erupt in the public domain in the 1980s. This essay also illustrates that the way in which the facts of disability are constructed has contributed to the evolution of disability from a social to a public problem. The conceptual framework in which the facts of disability are grounded, the social nature of these facts, the metamorphosis of scientific estimates of disability into indisputable facts , and the avenues through which these facts find their way into the public consciousness are discussed. In the few instances in which disability is taken as a focus for sociologists, the tendency has been to emphasize physical disability. In an effort to present disability as a unified rather than a disaggregated concept, Chapter 4 looks deeply into the meaning and experience of the disability of mental illness by focusing on the life history of an Italian-American family. The final, overview chapter contains reflections on the meaning of disability in contemporary American culture