169), that is, being disabled is bad for you, or that being disabled is something that intrinsically makes you worse off in the world, as many people often assume. Barnes' account of disability is opposed to the view that “disabled people played the natural lottery and they lost” (p. Through exploring the relationship between disability and well-being, challenging the view that disability has a negative impact on well-being, and defending a “mere-difference view” of disability (see Chapter 2), Barnes argues that although having a physical disability may make you different, this difference is not in and of itself a negative or necessarily bad difference.

Throughout the six chapters of this book, Barnes draws both on her personal experiences with disability, as well as her knowledge as a feminist philosopher working in the fields of social philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics, to guide her analysis. Using a feminist, social constructivist lens, Barnes' primary goal in her book is to argue that to be “physically disabled is not to have a defective or broken body, but to have a minority body” 1 (p. Throughout her book, Barnes focuses her analysis on physical disability only (as opposed to intellectual disability). Speaking from a first person's narrative, as Barnes herself identifies as physically disabled, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (2016) is a timely and insightful social philosophical analysis of disability.

Elizabeth barnes the minority body