Disability in the Perspective of New Materialism

New materialism focuses on the material or the matter which was neglected in western discourse until the early 21st century. It is said that the material turn rejects dichotomy which divides material/mind, culture/nature and human/inhuman and advocates monism which embraces all the things in the course of mattering. This paper aims to investigate the material, materiality and mattering. This paper places emphasis on the corporeal materiality including individual self-generating and self-organizing courses. The organismal self-generation builds plenty of variations from the interior vitality of itself. In addition, organisms intra-act the self and also interact with the environment, which supports entanglements in Barad’s agential realism. Also, Darwin emphasizes the individual difference and diversity, which is the foundation of an entities’ evolution. Genetic variations stem from entities’ diversity and differentiation, which emerges from the fortuitous and accidental adaptation stage of the environments. Thus genetic mutation or biological deviancy is regarded as not anomaly but diversity of the species. Particularly, disability related to the bodily classification is subordinated to the normalcy/abnormalcy dichotomy in pathology. In the end, bodily variations lead to the possibility of evolution and disabled bodies function as a vector of human variability in the perspective of new materialism.