Nomadology and Subjectivity: Deleuze, Guattari and Critical Disability Studies

Abstract

Over the last two decades, impairment has become a tricky issue and remains under-theorised in disability studies (see Hughes and Paterson, 1997; Corker, 2001; Tremain, 2002). In the UK the social model of disability has dominated disability theory. In this frame of reference, a distinction is made between ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’. In the social model of disability, impairment is conceptualised as the lack or defect of a limb, organ or mechanism of the body, and analyses focus on the ways in which ‘disability’ is created through the historical, social, economic, political, cultural and relational exclusion of people with ‘impairments’ (UPIAS, 1976; Oliver, 1990, 1996). For many disability theorists and activists, impairment refers to an individualised phenomenon and implies negativities, including pathology, pathos, social death, inertia, lack, limitation, loss, deficit and/or tragedy (Goodley and Roets, 2008). Even quite recently it is argued that, after all, impairment is a tragic, biological reality (Shakespeare, 2006). Our question consequently becomes: can we return impaired bodies to their material roots, which means adopting a unified vision of bodies and minds as presocial, biological essences and unchanging phenomena without discrediting the social and political project of disability studies?