History of Disability

Catalog description

This course will explore the meaning of disability in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course provides a cultural overview of disability and seeks to explore the social construction of disability, with special attention given to the cultural, intellectual, personal, and social histories of disability. Disability in history has been many (frequently contradictory) things: acquired at birth and acquired by war; a reason to promote eugenic policies or a reason to promote civil rights legislation; a medical diagnosis or a personal identity; visible in the body (as in the case of amputations) or invisible (as in the case of deafness); a source of family shame or a source of personal pride. How has the meaning and nature of disability changed over time? How can we understand the cultural meaning of the body in history? The course seeks to explore and explain these shifting meanings of disability within the context of Western history. Specific topics to be considered include freak shows, disabled veterans, prosthetic technologies, disability as culture, the history of eugenics, and political activism.