The Names of Physical Deformity: A Meditation on the Term Disability and Its Recent Uses

Abstract

Disability is an umbrella term used to refer to a variety of conditions that result in forms of disenfranchisement or social exclusion on the basis of some assumption understood when labeled as defective or pathological. People we would now label as disabled have lived well prior to modernity, and the use of this category distorts the experience of people who had their own ways of addressing physical deformity without the language of disability being applied to that experience. This essay explores the use of the term “disability” when applied to people who lived in the sixteenth century and the ways it can distort their lived experience. This essay draws on some of the jesters portrayed by Velazquez, as well as the notion of monster.