Disease versus Disability: The Medical Humanities and Disability Studies

Abstract

One of the consistent problems i find in the work I do—which is focused on women and the cultural representations of illness—is classification. There was not really a category of “disability studies” when I started this work in the 1980s, and I would have resisted that label even if there had been. Since embracing the field of disability studies, I have wondered about my early resistance to it. At first, I attributed it to my own ableism (and I don't think I am necessarily wrong about this), but as I have continued to work on the issues, I am coming to see it more as a result of a disciplinary divide between the medical humanities and disability studies. My first job teaching literature was in a medical school, and I was early on immersed in the idea of the medical humanities, an idea I am beginning to think is antithetical to disability studies (though not to disability itself). My talk today discusses the source of that divide, the problems I see with it, and suggestions for what we can do about it. I want to examine the two interdisciplinary fields in terms of their disciplinarity, and in the interest of time, I'll use a shortcut to do this; I will compare two relatively recent MLA publications,Teaching Literature and Medicine(2000) andDisability Studies: Enabling the Humanities(2002).