TITLE:
Disability as Socio-Political and Biomedical Construct: A Passionate and Pensive Reappraisal of a Global Phenomenon
AUTHORS:
Michael Onyedika Nwalutu
KEYWORDS:
Transplant, Disability, Organ, Construct, Learning, Policies, Transmigrated, Bodies, Deviant
JOURNAL NAME:
Sociology Mind,
Vol.9 No.4,
September
30,
2019
ABSTRACT: This paper uses personal tragedy theory and social
model to interrogate two contextual narratives depicting how disability
manifests and is made to manifest in labeled bodies. In the analysis,
disability discourses provide a lens through which to understand how disability
is done in everyday life, and in different
socio-cultural contexts. It reveals how bodies are made to disappear and dys/appear when confronted with social
normative constructs of the dominant class. Domba’s
transplanted kidney, as well as the bodies of the segregated students enlisted
to Room two zero two of an Ontario school
remains both sites of oppressive subjectivity, spaces of contradictions and negotiations
at which we learn how bodies relate with the world, and following this
relationships the bodies are changed, providing means for these bodies to speak
back to the world. Coming to terms with this theorizing helps us to visualize
Domba’s body and those of the students living with learning disabilities as
sites of political and socio-cultural struggle aimed at establishing supremacy
and dominance, and as a corporeal reality in which bodies and commodified body
parts simultaneously represent symbols of subjective hegemony of the dominant
social class, and a platform for interrogation, negotiation and assimilation
between the two social structures.