Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

This paper considers sociological understandings of what constitutes disability. Current meanings of disability in both disability studies and medical sociology are examined and compared, using selected articles from leading authors in each discipline as case studies. These disciplines are often represented as offering starkly contrasting approaches to disability, with their differences amounting to a disciplinary 'divide'. It is argued that, on closer inspection, common ground can be found between some writers in disability studies and medical sociology. It is suggested that this situation has arisen because, in disability studies, the social relational understanding of disability developed by Vic Finkelstein and Paul Hunt in the 1970s has been lost over time, overshadowed by the rise to prominence of its offspring: the social model of disability. The paper concludes with some reflections on the need to revive a social relational understanding of disability.

How is disability understood? An examination of sociological approaches

This article engages with debates relating to social policy and disabled people’s exclusion from the British labour market. Drawing on recent developments from within the disabled people’s movement, in particular, the concept of independent living and the social model of disability, and the associated disability studies literature, a critical evaluation of orthodox sociological theories of work, unemployment, and under-employment in relation to disabled people’s exclusion from the workplace is provided. It is argued that hitherto, analyses of work and disability have failed to address in sufficient depth or breadth the various social and environmental barriers that confront disabled people. It is suggested therefore that a reconfiguration of the meaning of work for disabled people - drawing on and commensurate with disabled people’s perspectives as expressed by the philosophy of independent living - and a social model analysis of their oppression is needed and long overdue.

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Disability, work, and welfare challenging the social exclusion of disabled people

This article self-reflexively turns the focus on disability studies to consider why critical disability studies (CDS) is emerging as the preferred nomenclature and whether this constitutes a radica...

What's so ‘critical’ about critical disability studies?

What's So "Critical" about Critical Disability Studies?

The papers explore the background to British academic and political debates over the social model, and argue that the time has come to move beyond this position. Three central criticisms of the British social model are presented, focusing on: the issue of impairment; the impairment/disability dualism; and the issue of identity. It is suggested that an embodied ontology offers the best starting point for disability studies, and some signposts on the way to a more adequate social theory of disability are provided.

Torn Shakespeare

Papers

The social model of disability: An outdated ideology?