The Difference That Disability Makes

by Rod Michalko

Rod Michalko launches into this book asking why disabled people are still feared, still regarded as useless or unfit to live, not yet welcome in society? Michalko challenges us to come to grips with the social meanings attached to disability and the body that is not normal.Michalko's analysis draws from his own understanding of blindness and narratives by other disabled people. Connecting lived experience with social theory, he shows the consistent exclusion of disabled people from the common understandings of humanity and what constitutes the good life. He offers new insight into what suffering a disability means to individuals as well as to the polity as a whole. He shows how disability can teach society about itself, about its determination of what is normal and who belongs. Guiding us to a new understanding of how disability, difference, and suffering are related, this book enables us to choose disability as a social identity and a collective political issue. The difference that disability makes can be valuable and worthwhile, but only if we choose to make it so.

Genres: Disability, Sociology, Disability Studies, Nonfiction

207 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2002

Reviews

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raised really interesting ideas. Would love to discuss this book with anyone interested.

[Celeste Loia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.4 ⭐

Michalko brought up some really interesting points about how society treats, classifies, and deals with disabled people (and also provides commentary on the disabled people v. people with disabilities linguistic framing). One of the most interesting bits for me concerns an underlying assumption in our society that if you know you were to have a child with disabilities, that you would forgo having children, and the implications of what that says about how we view differently abled lives.

I didn't give it a higher score because Michalko is a professor, which shows in the more academic writing style. The more academic writing made it harder for me to get through at times as a book I'm just reading for pleasure. It was originally published in 2002, and I'd be very interested to read more recent works by Michalko.

I had many, many quotes prepared to attach to my review, but alas my pocket factory reset my phone the day before I finished and all such quotes were erased to the void with my notes app.