Damaged goods: oral narratives of the experience of disability in American culture.

In a field project on oral narratives, I documented personal experience stories from 33 persons with visible, physical disabilities. These stories reveal informants' perceptions of how popular American notions about disability frame social interactions between disabled and nondisabled individuals, how such interactions affect the self-images of disabled persons, and how the predictability of such interactions constitutes a disabled experience that may be uniform across American culture.