Disability, Valentine’s Narrative, and the Law
摘要
Some bodies are unknown. They understood as being the body upon which law comes from, and in the Western liberal tradition that normative body is white, cisgendercisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, and male, among other significant identities. To be a person with disabilitiesdisabilities is then to be forcibly made known and disclosed. Some bodies and some disabilities can make a person who may be ordinarily materially anonymous, hyper-visible for a moment, and that visibility will recede until the person is again made anonymous. Nonetheless, at various times episodic disabilities such as epilepsy have been rendered highly visible. A critical disability studies framework of legal embodimentlegal embodiment focuses on how sociopolitical and physical topographies are accessed or not accessed by people with disabilities at varying times and in varying spaces. Such a framework prioritizes these variations, for multiple reasons. One being that as technologies increase, people with disabilities may be able to involve themselves in aspects of life which were previously inaccessible. The second is that individuals whose bodies are liminally visible may experience restrictions to these topographies in a unique fashion which is contingent on the episodic nature of their disability. This analytical framework promotes a disability forward framework for engagement with the law and contends that hyper-visibility ought to be used by people with disabilities to foreground their experiences.