Normality and Disability

Gerard Goggin is Professor of Media and Communications and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has published widely on the social and cultural dynamics of disability, including Disability in Australia (2005) and Digital Disability (2003) (both with Christopher Newell), Disability and the Media (2015, with Katie Ellis), Routledge Companion to Disability and Media (2018, with Katie Ellis and Beth Haller) and Listening to Disability: Voices of Democracy (2018, with Cate Thill and Rosemary Kayess). Linda Steele is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research explores the intersections of disability, law and injustice. She has published in journals across law, criminology and gender & cultural studies. Jessica Robyn Cadwallader is an independent scholar with an abiding interest in corporeal differences and its significance in contemporary culture, especially medical and legal cultures. Her doctoral thesis focused on experiences of suffering and how these are bound up with medical ‘solutions’ of normalization, while her postdoctoral project explored therapeutic forgetting, a response to trauma. Her work has been published in numerous international journals, including Social Semiotics, Australian Feminist Studies, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and Somatechnics.

Introduction – Normality and disability: intersections among norms, law, and culture 1. Fit or fitting in: deciding against normal when reproducing the future 2. Eccentricity: the case for undermining legal categories of disability and normalcy 3. Eugenics and the normal body: the role of visual images and intelligence testing in framing the treatment of people with disabilities in the early twentieth century 4. The construction of access: the eugenic precedent of the Americans with Disabilities Act 5. Disability and torture: exception, epistemology and ‘black sites’ 6. Mental capacity and states of exception: revisiting disability law with Giorgio Agamben 7. Not just language: an analysis of discursive constructions of disability in sentencing remarks 8. Policing normalcy: sexual violence against women offenders with disability 9. ‘The government is the cause of the disease and we are stuck with the symptoms’: deinstitutionalisation, mental health advocacy and police shootings in 1990s Victoria 10. Disruptive, dangerous and disturbing: the ‘challenge’ of behaviour in the construction of normalcy and vulnerability 11. Making the abject: problem-solving courts, addiction, mental illness and impairment 12. Cripwashing: the abortion debates at the crossroads of gender and disability in the Spanish media 13. ‘Figurehead’ hate crime cases: developing a framework for understanding and exposing the ‘problem’ with ‘disability’