The recuperated materiality of disability and animal studies

Walsh, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5574-1074 (2015) The recuperated materiality of disability and animal studies. In: Lesnik-Oberstein, K. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4970-0556 (ed.) Rethinking disability theory and practice: challenging essentialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, pp. 20-36. ISBN 9781137456960

Abstract/Summary

This chapter considers a perhaps unexpected connection between disability and animal studies, given disability studies' understandable reluctance to be associated with animal liberation/rights struggles. It finds that both fields remain rooted in ideas of experience and feeling, or the notion of an essential embodied experience, even while they offer up critiques of the way essentialism operates more broadly to disenfranchise or disadvantage the groups they represent. The chapter goes on to analyse what the implications are of this notion of 'embodiment' and the materialism that accompanies it, it foregrounds the contradictions that ensue, and then discusses what this means for the way political action is (and can be) conceived of.