Book review of: Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability

Speaking from a first person's narrative, as Barnes herself identifies as physically disabled, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (2016) is a timely and insightful social philosophical analysis of disability. Throughout her book, Barnes focuses her analysis on physical disability only (as opposed to intellectual disability). Using a feminist, social constructivist lens, Barnes' primary goal in her book is to argue that to be “physically disabled is not to have a defective or broken body, but to have a minority body”1 (p. 6, emphasis added). Throughout the six chapters of this book, Barnes draws both on her personal experiences with disability, as well as her knowledge as a feminist philosopher working in the fields of social philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics, to guide her analysis. Through exploring the relationship between disability and well-being, challenging the view that disability has a negative impact on well-being, and defending a “mere-difference view” of disability (see Chapter 2), Barnes argues that although having a physical disability may make you different, this difference is not in and of itself a negative or necessarily bad difference. Barnes' account of disability is opposed to the view that “disabled people played the natural lottery and they lost” (p. 169), that is, being disabled is bad for you, or that being disabled is something that intrinsically makes you worse off in the world, as many people often assume. Of course, for those who are familiar with disability studies, this idea of disability is not all that innovative as similar ideas have been around for quite some time2-4 (see Amundson, 1992; Garland-Thomson, 2002; Wendell, 1996). It is in Chapter 1 where Barnes begins to show the novelty of her position on disability. Barnes begins her first chapter, Constructing Disability (p. 9), by exploring “what it is for something to be a disability” (p. 10), because the things we tend to categorize as a disability are diverse. In this chapter, Barnes outlines four key criteria of success that any account of disability must achieve: (1) “delivers correct verdicts for paradigm cases;” (2) “doesn't prejudge normative issues;” (3) is “explanatory;” and (4) “is not circular” (p. 11-13). She moves on to show how several accounts of disability, namely, the naturalistic account of disability and the social model account of disability, fail to meet these criteria. Instead, Barnes suggests a more nuanced approach, which amounts to a “moderate social constructionism” account of disability (p. 38). Such an account, according to Barnes, views disability as socially constructed but emphasizes the significance of objective realities of disabled individuals and helps to reveal how those bodies are viewed within society, both by disabled and nondisabled individuals alike. In particular, Barnes' understanding of disability is that it is a social construct that people have “found useful when organizing themselves in a civil rights struggle” (p. 41). This is to say that the category disability resulted from, and is mediated by, group solidarity (ie, the solidarity of disability rights activists). This is a unique approach to disability and is a part of what sets Barnes apart from other scholars in this field. She maintains that what falls within the concept “disability” are those things that the “disability rights movement is promoting justice for” (p. 43). Barnes (2016) describes disability as “rule-based solidarity among people with certain kinds of bodies” (46). This view builds on the strengths of the naturalistic and purely social constructionist models Barnes examines throughout her argument. Barnes turns to an exploration of the connections between disability and well-being beginning in Chapter Two, Bad-Difference and Mere-Difference (p. 54). In this chapter, Barnes aims to present the distinction between whether disability is bad or neutral, with the aim of convincing the reader(s) that the “bad-difference view” of disability—the view that disability by itself makes you worse off, even if we did not currently live in an ablest society—“should not be treated as the obvious or default position” (p. 77). Instead, Barnes defends that a “mere-difference view” of disability—the view that being disabled does not make you worse off, but makes you different—is a more helpful and accurate perspective to hold. Importantly, through her discussion of what the mere-difference view is, Barnes distinguishes this view from the social model of disability, which “maintains that the bad effects of disability are due entirely to social prejudice” (p. 58). Although the social model is one particular version of the mere-difference view, it is not the only one, as Barnes notes that the mere-difference view is also consistent with the view that disability involves the loss of intrinsic goods (ie, hearing and walking); however, according to the mere-difference view, disability cannot be solely a loss or lack of intrinsic capabilities (p. 57). Importantly, Barnes herself maintains that disability is by itself neutral with regards to wellbeing, that is, nothing about disability is bad in itself, but rather, having a disability can be bad or good for someone depending on the circumstances of one's life. Chapter Three, The Value-Neutral Model (p. 78), introduces Barnes mere-difference account of disability, which she refers to as the “Value-Neutral Model.” Barnes' aim with the Value-Neutral Model is to show that disability is “neutral simpliciter” (p. 88), which is not to say that disability can never be bad for someone, as Barnes states that disability can be both a “local bad” or a “global bad” depending on what else it is combined with (p. 90). A local bad in this context refers to things that can be bad for you during a particular context or a particular time, whereas a global bad refers to something that is bad for you on the whole. What Barnes means by disability being a “neutral simpliciter” is that the presence of a disability “doesn't, by itself, make you better or worse off than people without such” a disability (p. 84). Even in our ableist society, suggests Barnes, many disabled people claim to value their experience of disability, and the “range of testimony we have from disabled people who value disability—across a wide variety of disabilities and encompassing what we might consider the most ‘severe’ and most painful disability—is enough to suggest that most disabilities are mere-difference” (p. 103). That is, while disability may be bad for you, it may also be good for you, or indifferent for you, but, crucially, disability is not in itself something that is bad. Next, Barnes considers two potential objections to her mere-difference approach to disability. First, in chapter 4, Taking Their Word for It (p. 119), Barnes focuses on the epistemological issues surrounding the positive testimony of disabled people. Much to Barnes' dismay, a common (mis)understanding is that disabled people's testimony of being disabled, and in particular of valuing their disability, is questionable and untrustworthy, because such testimonies are based on “adaptive preferences” (p. 123). Adaptive preferences, according to Barnes, include adaptations to the suboptimal in light of limited and restricted options. A large portion of this chapter is spent exploring the most common version of adaptive preferences “most suited to skepticism about disability-positive testimony,” which is the approach by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen known as the “Nussbaum-Sen model” (p. 129). However, Barnes relies on the work of Miranda Fricker (2007), specifically her concept of “testimonial injustice” (p. 135), as a way to argue that the dismissal of disabled people's testimony is unjust and unwarranted. Thus, as Barnes points out, “we ought to take disabled people as very good sources of evidence about what it's like to be disabled” (p. 142). This particular point in Barnes work, highlighting the importance of “testimonial injustice,” is a novel contribution to the disability studies literature, as Fricker's (2007) work was published only a few years prior to Barnes work. The second potential objection to Barnes approach to disability is discussed in Chapter 5, Causing Disability (p. 143). In this chapter, Barnes attends to two counterarguments to her mere-difference view of disability: (1) “if a mere-difference view of disability were correct it would be permissible to cause disability;” and (2) “if a mere-difference view were correct it would be impermissible to remove disability” (p. 143). The purpose of this chapter is to argue that neither of these counterarguments is accurate. Barnes begins by exploring reasons we could not cause disability according to the mere-difference view. She argues that, according to the mere-difference view, causing disability to a person leads to: (1) “unjustified interference in another person's life;” (2) “transition costs” for the person who experiences the disability; (p. 147-148) and (3) an unjustified disruption in the identity of a person without their consent. Last, Barnes ends her book with the final chapter, Disability Pride (p. 168). This chapter focuses on the importance of the disability pride movement, with Barnes arguing that “pride is a crucial part of undermining the idea that disability is somehow essentially or inherently tragic” (p. 169). Here, Barnes introduces another concept from Fricker's (2007) work: “hermeneutical injustice” (p. 169). She explains that disabled people experience hermeneutical injustice insofar as they are left to attempt to understand or interpret their experience of disability using the dominant groups' (ie, nondisabled people) social resources and tools, which happen to be predominately disability-negative. As Barnes notes, disabled people often face strong assumptions about disability—“disability is loss, disability is lack” (p. 179)—which happen to go against the notions and experiences disabled people themselves have towards (their) disability; this of course makes it difficult for disabled people to then articulate their positive understandings of disability. This is one of the primary functions of the disability pride movement—to show that the normative assumptions about disability are inaccurate. As Barnes suggests, one of the most crucial “contributions of pride movements is an epistemic one. That is, the benefits of pride movements are not merely emotional or affective—what or how we feel. Pride movements also affect what we can know” (p. 183). I agree with Barnes' description of the power of pride movements, in that the disability pride movement highlights the often-disregarded voices of the disabled and allows such voices to standout by challenging the problematic, taken-for-granted assumptions about being disabled. Barnes maintains rigour and clarity in her arguments, effectively illustrating the idea that being disabled is not inherently bad for you, that being disabled does not automatically position the disabled person as worse-off or “suboptimal” in society. Barnes convincingly defends the view of disability that is common in the disability rights movement, that is, to be disabled is not to have a defective body, but to have a minority body. Her argument that disability itself is neutral is a powerful one, and her work represents a significant contribution to the broader area of disability studies. This book is relevant to those interested in theories of disability. The book also provides a strong foundation for those with little experience with the extant literature, but who want a deeper understanding of what it means to be disabled as well as disability's connection to wellbeing.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.