Disabilities and extraordinary abilities in science fiction

Abstract

In his partly autobiographical analysis of the social construction of disability, the blind sociologist Rod Michalko deals with disability’s late arrival within the concept of social identity: Disability has existed as long as human life has existed but only recently has figured in human identity. It has generally been conceived of as something that happens to a person and thus as not a natural part of the human condition [...] it was understood as an ‘attachment’, as something extra that, for whatever reason, happened to a person. (Michalko 2002: 5) Likewise, Lennard Davis writes that disability ‘has been seen as eccentric, therapeutically oriented, out-of-the-mainstream, and certainly not representative of the human condition [...] But, how strange this assumption. What is more representative of the human condition than the body and its vicissitudes?’ (Davis 1997a: 2). The attitudes towards disability described by Michalko and Davis evince the uneasy relationship that most humans have with disability.