What Can Disability Studies Learn from the Culture Wars?

M y concern in this essay is threefold. First, I will be arguing that disability is a significant register in the many and various disputes that have come to be known as the wars. The culture wars are not only about what culture will mean in the future but also about who deserves to be included in our culture, and the determining factor in these decisions often depends on being able to display a body and mind. Statements that label cultural attitudes, minority groups, lifestyles, and works of art as healthy or sick are not metaphors but aesthetic judgments about the physical and mental condition of citizens. My general purpose is to rethink the culture wars from the point of view of disability studies, a revision that entails a critique of the reliance of cultural and aesthetic ideals on the and able body as well as an appreciation of alternative forms of value and beauty based on disability. Second, I want to suggest that a represses the role of disability in cultural and aesthetic representation. This issue is by necessity related to my first concern. Fredric Jameson argues that the experience of human community functions as a political unconscious that represents the absolute horizon of all interpretation (1981, 17).1 The unconscious, he concludes, determines the symbolism by which the forms of aesthetic objects are given as representations of community, but what has not been considered is whether the may also regulate aesthetic forms, excluding those suggestive of broken communities and approving those evocative of ideal ones. My specific test case here is the controversial Sensation exhibition shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in