Search results

Disability as a consequential social characteristic has not drawn sociologists’ contemporary attention in the way that race, class, gender, and sexuality have. In order to understand why, it is instructive to analyze how disability has been framed since the inception of the American Sociological Society, now known as the American Sociological Association.

Our findings are based on an intensive, systematic, and comprehensive content analysis of 10 years of the Proceedings from the American Sociology Society’s Annual Meetings, 1906–1915.

Three key themes emerged from the content analysis of the proceedings of the first 10 years of the papers delivered at the Annual Meetings (1906–1915). First, people with disabilities were largely invisible in those papers. Second, influenced strongly by a social reform agenda which stressed progress and the powerful eugenics movement of the time, those early presenters who addressed people with disabilities in their papers vilified them. Third, their denigration was met largely with silence in the printed commentary which followed in the proceedings.

In order to understand the present limited attention to disability, researchers need to know the historical context.

Although there have been a number of thoughtful books, edited volumes and review essays exploring the history of the discipline of sociology, none of them have attended to the history of disability within the field. This paper contributes to that historical understanding.

The purpose of this paper is to unpack the tenuous relationship between medical sociology and disability studies, particularly as it relates to the work of Irving Zola.

Many attribute the division between these disciplines to their starkly different and oft competing approaches to disability; however, I argue that a closer examination reveals a number of commonalities between the two.

I use Irving K. Zola’s extensive body of scholarship to demonstrate the connections between these divergent approaches to disability, and imagine what his legacy has to offer to the advancement of a diverse sociology of disability.

Neither focus is more correct than the other, as considering these bodies of work together presents a number of opportunities to advance a more comprehensive sociological theory – not just of disability – but of ableism and its intersections with other forms of oppression as well.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.

In this chapter, the author critically examines the relationship between sociology and the identities/experiences of disability and ‘mental illness’ (referred to throughout as distress). The author argues that despite sociology having an ethos of social justice and frequently producing critical accounts of inequalities – such as anti-racism and gender equality – it nonetheless uncritically reiterates the marginalisation of disability and distress. As such, sociology not only reflects the increasing ‘medicalisation of everyday life’ and shores up the essentialist discourses of genetics and neuroscience, but also consigns research and knowledge production about disability and distress to the medical sciences. The author challenges these sociological conventions and highlights the ways in which both disability and distress are socially structured, embodied experiences. The author argues that a sociological account of distress and disability are important not only in and of themselves, but also because they highlight the ways and means to challenge essentialism, inequality and the ever-narrowing definition of what is considered a normal or acceptable part of human experience. Furthermore, vibrant streams of user-led research, activism and practice-interventions – resulting in widespread social, legal and identity transformations – have emerged from the experiences of disability and distress. These user-led perspectives highlight the importance and potential of knowledge produced from the margins, not only for those experiencing disability and/or distress but also for the ways in which we perceive, theorise and research the social world more broadly.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature review of investigations into the specific disability of deafness in the field of sociology and other closely related fields.

After a pilot search using databases appropriate to social science research, we developed key search terms and, using an inductive approach, we identified major themes in the literature.

Our review shows that deafness has been investigated for a long time in sociology and other related fields, that there is a wide range of themes in scholarly work on the experiences of deaf communities and deaf people, and that conceptualizations of deafness and d/Deaf communities have changed over time. We organize this paper around six major themes we identified, and a few highlighted pieces of scholarship illustrate these themes along the way. We particularly focus on scholarship from the late 1960s through the early 1990s as emblematic of seismic shifts in studying deafness, although we do highlight little known nineteenth century work as well.

This paper captures the legacy of this past scholarship and reveals that deafness is a rich site of inquiry that can contribute to the field of sociology. It is also a valuable resource for any future sociological research into deafness, deaf people, and deaf communities. We conclude with a discussion of our findings, commentary on the extent to which previous scholarship on the sociology of deafness has or has not figured into current scholarship and suggestions for future research.

A forward thrust drives the theoretical narrative of disability-in-society, as told by scholars of recent decades. Consider these titles (with emphases added): From Stigma to Identity Politics: Political Activism among the Physically Disabled and Former Mental Patients by Anspach (1979); From Good Will to Civil Rights by Scotch (1984); Moving Disability Beyond Stigma a collection edited by Asch and Fine (1988); The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation by Fleischer and Zames (2001). Each title is like a revved-up engine. Together, they convey a message of forward movement in the status of people with disabilities. The road they all travel starts from a negative starting point and ends at a clear and a more desirable, if not yet perfect, destination. The starting point is the subordinated and powerless status of persons with disabilities – a status based on stigma wrapped in pity. The destination: empowerment. These analyses focus on the United States; their authors, while not all sociologists, are close enough for our purpose. The road they all cover starts (chronologically speaking) around the 1940s, and extends – in the case of the earliest – up to the late 1970s; two others cover up to the mid- and late 1980s; and the last one, to the current century.

This paper attempts to put Goffman’s writings about disability in Stigma into the context of his own writings as well as into the context of current concepts of disability.

This is a critical review of historical literature in Sociology.

The paper suggests how Goffman’s writings can underpin a concept of disability as a fluid and active state rather than a passive and stigmatized state.

By putting Goffman’s writings into an historical context within the development of the field of sociology, the paper shows that some of the ways in which disability advocates and scholars tend to denigrate his writings are really a misinterpretation.

Sharon N. Barnartt is professor and department chair in the Department of Sociology at Gallaudet University. She has coauthored two books: Deaf President Now: The 1988 Revolution at Gallaudet University (1995) and Disability Protests: Contentious Politics 1970–1999 (2000). She coedited Disability Studies Quarterly, Special Issue on Deafness, volume 18, issue 2, 1998, and the Journal of Disability Policy Studies: Special Issue on Women and Disability, volume 8, 1997. She has also presented papers and published widely in the areas of gender differences in socioeconomic status, disability policy issues, social movements in the deaf and disability communities, and disability in developing countries. She has been a board member and president of the Society for Disability Studies, member and chair of the American Sociological Association's Committee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities, and chair of the American Sociological Association's Disability and Society Section-in-Formation. She is a founder and coeditor of the Research in Social Science and Disability volume series.