Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness engages with fundamental questions about the legitimacy of the atypical body for membership, quasi-membership or exclusion from the category of human.

Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness examines the role of embodied disablement in providing an important but often circumvented analysis of the explicit and implicit nature of the legitimate human body, its symbolism, and responses that such bodies elicit from diverse local through global social and cultural entities. Beyond simply theorizing, this work begins to unearth a potent and in-depth examination of membership, meaning and social valuation on the basis of embodied features that include desirables in and exclude “offending” bodies from membership in the category of human. It invokes contemporary post-postmodernist marriages of varied disciplines as frameworks for returning creative substance into rethinking disability as part of the fabric of humanness.

List of Figures; Part 1 Foundations; 1. Legitimate and Offending Bodies; 2. Bedrock Constructs; 3. Looking Back; Part 2 Violations; 4. The Offensive Scope; 5. The Tool Kit; 6. The Language of Violation; 7. The Visual Violator; 8. Spaces and Places; Part 3 Responses; 9. Revising the Illegitimate; 10. Reinvention; 11. Denial; Part 4 Rethinking Humanness; 12. Negotiating Humanness; 13. Expansion and Commencement; Bibliography; Index.