As disabled people have emerged from the shadows of institutions and back rooms, upping the ante on the demands for an inclusive society, a remarkable groundswell of activism and critical literature has followed. Claiming Disability charts these social changes and intellectual shifts in the first comprehensive examination of disability studies as a field of inquiry.

Disability studies provides a location to think critically about disability, a juncture that can serve both academic discourse and social change. The field takes for its subject matter not simply the variations that exist in human behavior, appearance, functioning, sensory acuity, and cognitive processing, but the meaning we make of those variations. It can serve to hold academics accountable for the veracity and the social consequences of their work, as activism has served to hold the community, the education system and the legislature accountable for disabled people's compromised social position.

With vivid imagery and numerous examples, Simi Linton explores the critical divisions society makes -- the normal versus the pathological, the competent citizen versus the ward of the state. Map and manifesto, Claiming Disability overturns medicalized versions of disability and establishes disabled people and allies as the rightful claimants to this territory.

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