The Cultural Politics of the Paralympic Movement

Expansion of the Paralympic Games has to some extent mirrored expansion of the mainstream Olympics and the event now constitutes an internationally significant sporting festival. This book examines the development of the Paralympics and asks whether we are justified in describing the Games as a vehicle for the empowerment of the disabled community.

A highly successful paralympian athlete in his own right, David Howe uses ethnographic research methods to investigate the economic, social, cultural and political processes shaping the Paralympic movement on a local and global scale, and develops a new theory of the relationship between sport, the body and the culture of disability.

By critiquing contemporary attitudes to disability within sport and within society more generally, and by challenging the orthodox view of the Paralympics as a vehicle for empowerment, this book raises important questions and debates crucial to the study of sociology and sports studies.