We have never been able-bodied: Thoughts on dis/ability and subjectivity from science and technology studies

This chapter aims to discuss the binary thinking that echoes the Cartesian split, which creates divisions between the body and mind, society and the individual, technology and biology, disability and impairment, thereby proliferating an infected, ambivalent and hybrid approach to the human subject. The study of dis/ability and research in the field of technoscience have followed relatively parallel paths in the history of ideas. The social model of disability has played an important role as a scientific and political instrument for identifying and confronting structural and legal barriers that impede the full participation and citizenship of people with disabilities, linking social theory to activism. The chapter summarises conceptualisations of dis/ability through the analytical lenses of science and technology studies, which remove the focus from the individual and turn it to relations and inextricable combinations of subjects and objects. Aside from the market, the other pillar of modernity, the sovereign state, uses biopolitical mechanisms to regulate life in organised societies.