The rhetoric of disability : a Foucauldian discourse analysis.

Abstract

The institution of disability, as it is perceived in the United States and most of Western civilization, signifies a site of oppression that has been historically neglected if not actively rejected by the hegemonic population of nondisabled people. While disability studies has congregated as a concerted effort of academic inquiry, scholars have largely approached disability from cultural and sociological perspectives and have focused on physical rather than cognitive disabilities. The field of rhetoric, as the study of discourse and its relation to the production and reception of meaning, offers vital perspectives for better understanding the institution of disability and may serve as a framework for first illuminating and then disempowering the discursive structures that have heretofore suggested that people with disabilities are deviant and inferior. This exposition aims to trace how and in what contexts the concept of disability has been formed as a rhetorical object via Foucauldian discourse analysis. The findings of this research elucidate how the disabled person has come to be known as a subject of the domain of disability through discursive knowledge-power relations. Though a rhetorical analysis may not alleviate the physical, intellectual, or emotional obstacles that may occur from the phenomena of disability, this project represents one step toward reshaping the oppressive paradigm of cultural thought regarding disability and the unjust hierarchization of human ability and worth.