Denaturalizing Cognitive Disability : Considering Dehumanization and Difference

Abstract

Cognitively disabled people are pervasively marginalized, in theoretical work and social-political life. Although more than fifty years of social activism and critical theoretical work has politicized and radically reframed the experience of disability, those effects seem to extend only tenuously to cognitively disabled people. Historical practices of dehumanization, and eugenicist constructions of cognitive inferiority and human value, continue to influence attitudes toward those who are cognitively, intellectually and communicatively atypical. Perceptions of these atypicalities are sufficiently insensitive to individual variation that the assumption of radical difference is global and total, and cognitively disabled people continue to be set apart as specially and naturally different and inferior. In this paper, I sketch a conceptual architecture of dehumanization and its relation to the qualitative and quantitative understandings of cognitive disability, with reference to historical instances. In doing so, I aim to denaturalize cognitive disability so that it can be more fully theorized from a critical disability perspective.