Sep 16, 2014_AFFECT_Reading Response

      As normative concepts of beauty inundate our daily lives, Corker (2001) claims the necessity to reconceptualize the notion of identity in relation to sensory embodiment. The binary perspectives that privilege the presence and visible aligns with the conventional Western philosophy which favors the sense of vision and hearing over the sense of taste, touch, and smell. Sight and hearing may be labeled the “cognitive” or “intellectual” senses, while taste, touch, and smell constitute the “bodily” senses. Whereas the higher senses mostly function at a certain distance from the object, the lower senses require physical contact that is directly involved with pleasure or pain. Also, it has been suggested that the physicality and subjectivity of this sense, along with the other bodily senses, sets bounds to one’s absorption of information.

      It is this institutional practice that creates the knowledge of disability and restricts its meaning in relation to “socially constructed value judgements.” The "regulating power of 'universalizing'"controls the discourse of biological and socio-cultural differences that determines and circumscribes its meaning. If this discourse continues to be based on "rational consensus" and overgeneralization, the progress of communication will not evolve from but only revolve around the concept of both physical and sensory disability.