Lessons from Susan Sontag

This article adds to our genealogies of disability studies by critically examining the insights that Susan Sontag’s work affords to the field today. Focusing on two texts from her oeuvre—Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)—I focus on Sontag’s work on the use of metaphors regarding illness and consider the resonances of these arguments to disability studies. Sontag’s simple yet powerful premise is that illness is not a metaphor and that we should resist metaphorical language. I outline several insights her work affords to disability studies, namely the harm and danger that metaphors can do; her critiques towards psychology and the medical establishment; the need to recognise patients’ and/or disabled people’s agency; the interdisciplinarity of disability studies; and expanding the reach of disability studies’ subjects. The article remembers Sontag’s influence upon disability studies’ development and reflects upon the field’s evolution today.