A Matter of Dignity
Changing the World of the Disabled
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From A Matter of Dignity:
I realized that I needed to learn about the legislative and legal aspects of disability as much as I did about our feelings regarding wholeness, beauty and ugliness, about the state called normalcy, about liberating technologies and therapies, about the role of the disabled in history and literature.
And what could better inform and enlighten me than contact with people who help create access, who elicit change via care, support, teaching, and study as their life’s work?
As it turned out, I have learned from them that, in spite of the American addiction to youthfulness, “normalcy,” virility, activity, and physical beauty, diversity in all its forms provides not only fascination but strength. Diversity tends toward higher forms, uniformity toward dullness and extinction. What could make more sense than to value all that is diverse, unexpected, and exuberantly impure?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Insight and nuance underlie much of this investigation into the situation of disabled Americans today. Potok (Ordinary Daylight), who has the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, shapes his informative and wittily written survey around a series of 13 interview/profiles of disability activists of various backgrounds and interests: e.g., lawyer Chai Feldblum, who pioneered AIDS and race-based civil rights legislation and now does disability law; Connie Tomaino, who works for Oliver Sacks and studies "neurological aspects of music"; Dave Loney, who makes prostheses. While careful not to present a completely cheery portrait of the world of the disabled, offering the history of eugenics in U.S. thought and law, and accounts of guide dogs who can "smell, shed, get ill, revert to deeply ingrained beastly behavior," Potok discusses such positive developments as the new academic Society for Disability Studies, the ever evolving politics of the Americans with Disability Act, and the invention of the "talking computer" program JAWS (Job Accessibility with Speech). Covering medical, legal and psychological issues in depth and with intellectual vigor, the most provocative of Potok's work is his examination "about our feelings regarding wholeness, beauty, and ugliness about the state called normalcy," making the book less about changing the world of the disabled than about in re-imagining the world in which we all live.
