The COVID-19 era exposes what was already a crisis in the medical profession: structural racism, ageism, sexism, classism, and ableism resulting in healthcare disparities for Persons with Disabilities (PWD). Early research highlights these disparities, but we do not yet know the full impact of this pandemic on PWD. Over the last 20 years, many medical schools have attempted to develop disability competency trainings, but discrimination and inequities remain, resulting in a pervasive distrust of medicine by the disability community at large. In this commentary, we suggest that disability competency is insufficient because the healthcare disparities experienced by PWD are not simply a matter of individual biases, but structural and systemic factors requiring a culture shift in the healthcare professions. Recognizing that disability is a form of diversity that is experienced alongside other systemic disadvantages like social class, race, age, sex, gender identity, and geographic location, we explore the transformative potential of disability conscious medical education, training, and practice that draws on insights from intersectional disability justice activism. Disability conscious medicine is a novel approach, which improves upon competency programs by utilizing disability studies and the principles of disability justice to guide us in the critique of norms, traditions, and institutions to more fully promote the respect, beneficence, and justice that patients deserve.
This chapter explores the invocations of disability in early responses to Joyce’s novels, from newspaper reviews to essays by well-known modernist contemporaries. It demonstrates the lasting impact of nineteenth-century theories of degeneration—the idea that modern art was contributing to the disabling, weakening, and moral deterioration of the human race—on the reception of modernist literature in the interwar period. Joyce’s critics in England, Ireland, and the United States used imagery of degeneracy and disease to describe what they saw as the immorality, incomprehensibility, and lowness of his writing. They saw his work, and his status as an icon of innovation, as indicative of a spreading moral, mental, and artistic decline. Joyce, responding creatively to these reviewers, transformed hostile criticisms of his work into sites of literary exchange through which he negotiated the significance of disability to modern art. By crafting a radical disability aesthetic in “Shem the Penman”—book I.7 of Finnegans Wake (1939)—Joyce challenged the metric of beauty by which art had traditionally been assessed. Shem, a proud degenerate, is a revisionary portrait of the artist that asserts the generativity of the deformed, disabled, degenerate body. If Shem the Penman’s many defects and dysfunctions mirror the breakdown of language in Finnegans Wake itself, the text is rich with significance because of, and not despite, these deviations from the norm.
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