At the same time it offered a critique of what Singer perceived to be a certain tendency towards social-constructionist fundamentalism within the disability movement, which, she argued, limited the potential of the new paradigm. Its chapters encompassed a brief history of autism, self-exploration of Singer’s life in the middle of three generations of women “somewhere on the autistic spectrum” and her research as a participant-observer on InLv, an online community of people on the spectrum. The work attempted a panoramic view of this new terrain from within a post-modern, social constructionist, feminist, disability rights perspective. And in the process, prefigured a new paradigm within the disability rights movement of the time. The word itself was just one of many ideas in this work, her 1998 Honours thesis, a pioneering sociological work that mapped out the emergence of a new category of disability that, till then, had no name. Judy Singer is generally credited with the coinage of the word that became the banner for the last great social movement to emerge from the 20th century.
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