This collection explores the place of law in political, social, and biomedical developments relating to disability and other categories of ‘abnormality’. It shows how law produces cultural meanings, and expressions of disability, and how law is constituted by cultures of disability. It was published as a special issue of the Continuum journal.

Introduction – Normality and disability: intersections among norms, law, and culture 1. Fit or fitting in: deciding against normal when reproducing the future 2. Eccentricity: the case for undermining legal categories of disability and normalcy 3. Eugenics and the normal body: the role of visual images and intelligence testing in framing the treatment of people with disabilities in the early twentieth century 4. The construction of access: the eugenic precedent of the Americans with Disabilities Act 5. Disability and torture: exception, epistemology and ‘black sites’ 6. Mental capacity and states of exception: revisiting disability law with Giorgio Agamben 7. Not just language: an analysis of discursive constructions of disability in sentencing remarks 8. Policing normalcy: sexual violence against women offenders with disability 9. ‘The government is the cause of the disease and we are stuck with the symptoms’: deinstitutionalisation, mental health advocacy and police shootings in 1990s Victoria 10. Disruptive, dangerous and disturbing: the ‘challenge’ of behaviour in the construction of normalcy and vulnerability 11. Making the abject: problem-solving courts, addiction, mental illness and impairment 12. Cripwashing: the abortion debates at the crossroads of gender and disability in the Spanish media 13. ‘Figurehead’ hate crime cases: developing a framework for understanding and exposing the ‘problem’ with ‘disability’