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15 Issues L. & Med. 141 (1999-2000)
Narrating Genetic Disabilities: Social Constructs, Medical Treatment, and Public Policy

handle is hein.journals/ilmed15 and id is 155 raw text is: Narrating Genetic Disabilities: Social Constructs, Medical Treatment, and Public Policy Susan M. Squier, Ph.D.* ABSTRACT: The article compares three memoirs of genetically based disability: Lisa Roney's sweet, invisible body, Georgina Kleege's Sight Unseen, and Alice Wexler's Mapping Fate. The essay explores the tension between the narrow and the broad construction of disability, as demonstrated by the 1999 Supreme Court rulings on the ADA and as experienced by these three memoirists. It concludes that the approach of narrative bioethics, as exemplified by such a study of disability and illness narratives, can offer the medical and public policy community a valuable alternative perspective on genetic disability not as an incapacity, but as a set of social relations and practices. The theoretical bind is that deconstructing oppressive categories can neutralize the effects of real differences. -Rosemary Garland Thompson' *Julia Greg Brill Professor of Women's Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania; B.A., Princeton University, 1972; Ph.D., Stanford University, 1977. This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented at the Genetic Knowledge and Disability Conference sponsored by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, 345 East Superior Street, Chicago, Illinois 60611, (312) 908-4744, on April 22-23, 1999. Conference proceedings will be published by the Institute. 1ROSEMARIE GARLAND THOMPSON, EXTRAORDINARY BODIES: FIGURING PHYSICAL DISABILITY IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND LITERATURE 5 (1997).

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