Disability studies and phenomenology: the carnal politics of everyday life

This paper is an attempt to develop a sociology of impairment and to theori se embodiment in the lebenswelt. Disability studies has failed to address a dequately the fundamental issue of bodily agency. The impaired body is repr esented as a passive recipient of social forces. Such a conception of the b ody is losing ground within social theory. This paper attempts to overcome disability studies' disembodied view of disability by utilising a phenomeno logical concept of embodiment. Phenomenology offers the opportunity to tran scend the traditional Cartesian dualisms which posit the body as a passive precultural object. However, such a view, when extended to impairment is em pty of political content since phenomenological analyses have relied upon m edicalised and individualised understandings of disability. In order to cou nter the disablism evident in phenomenology on the one side and disability studies' disembodied view of disability on the other, we argue for a radica l phenomenological approach to the (impaired) body. To demonstrate the vita lity of such an approach, we also attempt to deploy Leders' (1990) concept of dys-appearance as a means of analysing the carnal politics of everyday l ife.