“Yes, disability often involves some losses and hardships, but it involves many other things as well. They’re the result of lack of accessibility, accommodation, and social support for disabled people.” She says: “A lot of the difficulties about being disabled, in many cases, aren’t inevitable. It is something that makes you different from the majority, but that difference isn't by itself a bad thing,' she writes in a perspective-altering new book, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability.īarnes herself has a disability – Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a collection of tissue disorders – which gives her a special insight on the issue. 'Being disabled is a way of being a minority with respect to one's body, just as being gay is a way of being a minority with respect to sexuality. More than that, we tend to see disability as a 'bad' difference to the norm, whereas it could instead be seen as a 'mere' difference, says philosopher and author Elizabeth Barnes. But this needn’t be the case, and our first impressions can sometimes blind us to the unique qualities, talents and insights of people with disabilities. The very word tends to conjure up a lack of something, a disadvantage or a hardship. Disability is generally thought of in the negative.

Elizabeth barnes the minority body