Michael,
I think you raise some very interesting questions. Your point with
respect to the "coincidence" between the occurence of disability and the
"right" bodies is one good reason to think the claim that the social
model has 'broken the causal link' between impairment and disability is
misguided. Causal relations are not unidirectional as that claim
suggests. That is to say, the social model may demonstrate that
disability is not a *necessary consequence* of impairment (as it were)
and that impairment is not a *sufficent condition* for disability;
however, in the terms of the social model, impairment is in fact a
*necessary condition* for disability. To put it bluntly, only people
who "have" or are presumed to "have" impairments get to qualify as
"disabled." For me, this suggests that disability theorists must
interrogate the ways that impairment is naturalized and materialized.
In my own work, I am using Butler's critique of the ways that "sex" is
naturalized and materialized in order to do this.
Best regards, Shelley
Michael Peckitt wrote:
>
> To all
>
> The title 'Feminist Geography' may sound strange but I view it and many
> feminist theories as important for disability studies. When I first looked
> at the basics of disability studies i.e the social model,
> disability/impairment dichotomony and came to the view that the dichotomony
> was incoherent and that the main question for me was what was impairment's
> uneasy relation to the disability (if any). It seems too much of a
> coincidence for me that those who were disabled also have the 'right' body
> i.e an impaired one, if disability has nothing to do with the body as some
> social modellist's suggest then this is a hell of a concidence? To start to
> solve that puzzle as my starting point I turned to another group of people
> who say they have been discrimanted against and their view on the body e.g
> de Beauvior, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, people who been concerned with
> the body for the last 50 years (dated from the publication of the Second
> Sex). I never quite undertstood why some people ignored these ideas as
> being 'goofy' or 'too feminist'.
>
> Michael
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