The Difference That Disability Makes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566399343 ISBN 13: 9781566399340

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2002

Rod Michalko asks why disabled people are still feared, still regarded as useless or unfit to live, and not yet welcome in society. Drawing on his own understanding of blindness and narratives by other disabled people, he challenges us to come to grips with social meanings attached to disability.

From the Publisher:

Excluding disabled people is a political act; so is choosing disability

From the Inside Flap:

"Rod Michalko's superb book, The Difference That Disability Makes, is a nuanced and compelling contribution to the growing field of disability studies in the humanities. By using personal narrative and the lived experience of disabled people to mount critical analysis, Michalko uncovers the social construction of disability and challenges the received cultural assumptions and stereotypes that limit disabled people. But Michalko's unique and revealing contribution to disability studies is his incisive interrogation of the concept of suffering—perhaps the most pervasive characteristic attributed to people with disabilities. Michalko demonstrates brilliantly that we people with disabilities do not suffer our impairments so much as 'we suffer our society.'"
—Rosemarie Garland Thompson, author of Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture

"This is a savvy and provocative analysis of the cultural structures undergirding the reception of disability in contemporary North America (particularly of blindness). Michalko creates a compelling analysis of disability as a cultural construct and as a meaningful phenomenological category of identity and experience. There is a wonderful weave of theoretical and personal insight that makes The Difference That Disability Makes a joy to read and an important contribution to the academic field of disability studies. Such a combination is rarely found."
—David Mitchell, Director, Ph.D. in Disability Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

"Michalko advances contemporary scholarship not just by his reflections on the underlying grammar of our everyday talk on 'suffering' and on 'persons with disability' but by the self-exemplifying nature of his own text. The Difference That Disability Makes will make as important a contribution to theoretical developments on the 'self' as it will to our understanding of disability."
—C.N. Doran, Department of Social Science, University of New Brunswick