Rosemarie Thomson Extraordinary Bodies Analysis

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary bodies: Figuring physical disability in American culture and literature. Columbia University Press, 1997. Print.
In this article, Rosemarie Thomson criticizes on the way physically disabled people are treated in the context of culture. Her main claim is that the socially contextualized view of disability has attributed misrepresentations to people with extraordinary bodies. The first sub-claim is that the identification of “disability” is based on cultural rules instead of corporeal properties. She provides the evidence that in social relationships, people tend to maintain their identity imposing cultural inferiority on others since people are constituted by retaining normative characteristics. She acknowledges that the Americans with Disability Act defines disability as “impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities” (6). And she responds that the definition sets s guide which compares the physical properties of individuals with the cultural assumption of the norm. Thomson’s second sub-claim is that the people with extraordinary bodies is pre-determined with
In the movie I intend to concentrate on, the character Quasimodo also is regarded as having extraordinary body, and my research topic about the cruelty also is one aspect of the misrepresentation discussed by Thomson. Her first sub-claim about how the phrase “disability” is constructed by cultural context leads me to critically consider the meaning of normalcy as a comparative concept. Before reading the paper, I was going to propose a sub-claim in my research paper that the portrayal of Quasimodo impedes disabled people from being regarded as normal people. But Thomson’s idea about norm enlightens me that being normal is not the guide line for perception of disabled people, since the word “normal” itself is