Abstract Summary
As Katherine Ott has asserted, disability is “unique in the extent to which it is bonded with technology, tools, and machines as a medium of social interaction.” Objects used by, and made for, disabled people serve as tangible evidence of lived experiences of disability—the constraints of medicine, the limits and expansions of technology, and shifting aspects of identity, self-representation, and stigma. These objects also define and shape social and medical meanings of “disabled” and “abled” as much as the relationship between innovation and commercialization. Furthermore, as scholars of material culture have emphasized, object biographies—especially of neglected artefacts—can dictate patterns in larger historical trends. Focusing on hearing prosthetics, this paper examines how material culture and the history of medicine provide methodological approaches for understanding neglected and nuanced histories of disability.
