Salvador García Jiménez's Novel Angelicomio

(1981)

During recent years, the movement that seeks to obtain political rights for disabled people has echoed the advances of other civil and legal battles. In general terms, it has been important to call attention to disability as a form of marginalized subjectivity situated within specific socio-political contexts. Many have underscored a historical legacy through which the population of disabled people has suffered due to harmful institutionalized perceptions. It has thus been important for research on disability to critique the ‘medical model’ of the disabled person, and thus to affirm that he or she is not merely a problem to be solved, but instead that he or she enjoys the same rights as the rest of society. Appropriately, critics in the field have emphasized a ‘social model’ of disability over the so-called ‘medical model’ (e.g. Brosco). The ‘social model’—which Ferreira defines as a ‘comprensión sociológica del fenómeno de la discapacidad’ [sociological understanding of the phenomenon of disability]—does away with the medical focus on the disabled body itself in favor of an emphasis on environmental limitations and the importance of changing contemporary social attitudes and institutions.