Book News and What to Read this WeekArticles on messy stories and disability, marriage, money, and civil discourse. Plus news about books new and old. Amy Julia Becker
In the illness narrative, disabilities are seen as problems in need of solving, abnormalities that will surely bring great suffering to those affected and their families. In the identity narrative, anomalous conditions such as Down syndrome, autism or deafness are regarded not as flaws but as valuable manifestations of human diversity. The so-called abnormal conditions are disabling primarily because of societal prejudice, ignorance and exclusion, not because of inherent qualities of the conditions themselves.
I find both narratives incomplete, oversimplified and even dangerous when one is embraced to the exclusion of the other.