Disability Law and Theory

Catalog description

In this course, we will discuss the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the Air Carrier Access Act as well as the historical contexts in which they were passed and the current context in which they are enforced. Together, we'll think through theories of disability that underly these laws, work in opposition to them, or don't intersect at all. These are likely to include the medical model, the social model, how disability and modernity have co-developed, intersections between disability and other human identity taxonomies, how concepts of disability work with other ideologies of difference such as feminism, racialized identities, and value systems associated with paid work under capitalism. We'll talk about what we mean when we call disability visible or invisible, Descartes' mind-body dualism, cyborg theory, anti-work theory, disability and forced intimacy, disabled marriage equality, and who is allowed subjectivity within disability constructs. We'll ask the difficult questions: can we find the edge between disability and ability? What, exactly, is a body, and why? For whom is disability useful? We will learn through reading, but also through film and audio. Works may include those by by Judith Heumann, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Marta Russel, Alice Wong, Eli Claire Jasbir K. Puar, and others