Leadership in Social Movements*

Two types of leadership styles in social movements are constructed on the basis of closed or open access to the source of legitimacy. Several predictions about structural consequences of the open or closed access are then made. The types are applied to four cases: the Nazis, the Manson Family, the Millerites and Women's Liberation. The hypotheses are confirmed.     

THE DISABLED BODY,GENEALOGY AND UNDECIDABILITY

The received history of the disabled body is deeply problematized by a genealogy – inspired initially by Foucault – that disrupts the notion of a continuous development of ideas and images, and shifts the focus to competing, fractured and discontinuous discourses culturally embedded in particular historical periods. Following Foucault's explication of the emergence of modernist normativities and the operation of power/knowledge, disability scholarship has charted a break between early religiously-inspired models concerned with a god-given nature, a medical model that pathologizes the disabled body and, more recently, the social model of disability that effects a politicization of the problematic. Yet consistent with a Foucauldian analytic, even the latter resistant discourse gives rise to its own normativities and generates new resistances. Alongside the return of the disabled body to challenge the hegemony of socio-cultural determinations, I offer, then, a further complication. Where previous approaches speak to external discursive power – albeit embedded in the individual consciousness – as the motor of change, I seek to supplement and reconfigure the problematic by engaging with the operation of psychic elements. Within the historically contextualized transformations in the meaning of disability, there is, I argue, another current of interior and less accessible responses, which not only challenge the privileging of periodization in historical thought, but also disorder the alternative Foucauldian approach. Where his analysis is concerned with the multifarious mobilizations of the binary of self and other, a more specifically deconstructive approach seeks to uncover the other as an interior attribute of the embodied self. This essay plays over some historical moments and brings them together with postmodernist and psychoanalytic theory to show how binary differences are constantly undone by the irreducible différance of the disabled body.