Towards a politics of embodied disability

Abstract

The political treatment of disability has received a new impulse during the second half of twentieth Century. Within this impulse, the so named “social model of disability” supports that disability is a social construct, derived from the oppression that a capitalist society exercises over a minority with impairments. Thus, the social model of disability establishes a complete dichotomy between impairment and disability which relegates our corporal condition to the shadow of the discussion. Soon, within the disability studies field grew critical voices alerting that the social model leads to a disembodied disability. In a different context of the disability studies, Alasdair Macintyre makes a suggestive proposal carrying to its last consequences this line of inquiry to arrive to a truly embodied vision of disability.