Disability and Impairment in Early China

This book is the first collection of scholarly works fully dedicated to exploring disability and impairment in early Chinese history. Early Chinese understandings of disability are effectively revealed through investigations of a wide range of aspects, such as terminological, legal, political, and etiological. The volume explores how early Chinese disability was socially negotiated as a means for creating enabled and at times empowered identities. It shows how oppression and empowerment, when viewed through the prism of such negotiations of identity, were not mutually exclusive. Through such examinations, the volume demonstrates how an approach sensitive to both the separability and the interconnectedness of disability and impairment enables a more nuanced understanding of Chinese disability history specifically, and Chinese notions of embodiment more generally. Bringing together international academics to examine a plethora of topics relating to disability and bodily impairment in early Chinese history, with an eye on their socio-political implications, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese History, History of Medicine, and Disability Studies.