Disability studies and the classical body

This chapter argues that an awareness of disability studies is essential in Classics and the Humanities more widely. Studying historic disabled people requires an engagement with this relevant if seemingly anachronistic field, as we would expect with other identities, such as gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Dialogue between past and present will help combat the ableism of our scholarly work, which is not only morally dubious, but also intellectually blinkered. This introduction sets out many of the key background issues, such as how to define disability and categorize impairments in both Western modernity and classical antiquity, and the construction of bodily aspirations and aesthetics, particularly around ‘the norm’ and ‘the ideal’. It introduces the standard medical and social models of disability studies, but argues that we need to move beyond them, for example, considering a ritual model involving divine intervention. Unusually for a work on a disadvantaged minority, it investigates modern (British) equality and human rights law as a transparent, practical framework for exploring the complexities and tensions that the disabled body holds to the light

History · History of Medicine Studies · Legal and cultural studies analysis · Psychology

• Disability and Healing in Greek and Roman Myth

  Open Access•Christian Laes•Disability and Healing in Greek…•2024

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