Women's Studies 2162A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Medical Model, Feminist Theory, Medicalization

• School: Western University
• Department: Women's Studies
• Course: Women's Studies 2162A/B
• Professor: Julianna Beaudoin

Document Summary

Ability is a construct, it"s something that we build every day and there are different models of ability: medicalization has had a major influence on this as it has described what, physically, an. able body looks like (medical model: there are also social constructs of ability (social model, the government also defines what ability looks like through guidelines and acts/laws. There"s no one way to understand ability it"s always changing and it"s contextual. The impacts of ability and disability are variable: transportation, disabilities that cannot be visibly seen all the time, employment. Well all experience changes in ability, they aren"t limited to a select few others, no one is exceptional or exempt. Ability can be visible and/or invisible: constructions of ability include the physical body, the mind, emotions, etc. Garland-thomson: feminist theory investigating how culture saturates the particularities of bodies with meanings and probes the consequences of those meanings.