Stacy Alaimo & Susan Hekman. Material Feminisms . Indiana University Press. Kindle Edition.
Siebers (2008) discusses disability discrimination and the difficulty in overcoming these prejudices because our society is “discrimination by design”. Siebers quotes Jean-François Lyotard’s (1988) definition of différend “as a situation in which victims are denied the means to demonstrate that they have been wronged. The wronged are doubly victimized because they have both suffered injustice and been deprived of the means to argue their case” (294). The larger theoretical trend in rhetoric is on disability rhetoric studies. Jay Timothy Dolmage, author of Disabilty Rhetoric (2014) focuses on the role of the body in rhetoric and argues “that the body has never been fully or fairly understood for its role in shaping and multiplying these available means” (3). Through his work, he seeks to expand understanding of disability and the rhetorical body. Both of these works calls attention to fact that not only are those with disabilities discriminated against, but this discrimination is built into our environment. While Siebers focuses on the physical environment (such as the stairs in the court house that cause Lane to have to crawl up the steps), Dolmage speaks of the rhetorical environment (such as the dehumanization of words associated with disability, including their onomatopoetic dimension; examples include stuttering and crippled).