I think David is being provocative and perhaps has read rather selectively.
He knows perfectly well that this is an innacurate interpretation of UK
theory. In the UK disability has a similar though perhaps narrower meaning
to the USA disability paradigm 'oppresison and/or discrimination, though I
think there is slightly more resistance to including people who 'may'
become disabled because this distracts from dealing with the oppression of
those people who already are. I think we would also resist David's use of
'abnormal' which is unfortunate. though I accept that some in the USA think
its important and then again there are some in the USA (e.g. Simi Linton)
who seem to think in terms of 'different centres' rather than 'abnormality'
i.e. disability is a dimension/form of difference.
Further, in the UK I think it would be fair to say that there are two main
strands to theorising disability - materialist (which focuses of structural
barriers and, in my view anyway, is biased towards visible physical
impairments)(Oliver, Finkelstein) and approaches which conceptualise
disability in terms of prejudice and its relationship to identity
(Shakespeare) and those which try to conceptualise which differences matter
(myself). All of these approaches are valuable in different ways and all of
them acknowledge that disability is a form of social oppression. I think we
in the UK go beyond simply ideological approaches with more emphasis on the
political and the pragmatic (as befits our 'cultural' difference to the USA
- we do not have full civil rights in law). What is clear, however, is that
disabled people who collectively organise around the disability movement do
show a 'positive' face (though again, an emphasis on this worries me
because the 'negative' is often a socially constructed phenomenon anyway -
i.e. we are told we 'ought' to experience tragedy and some disabled people
internalise this
We are currently working on where impairment stands in relation (or not) to
disability. Impairment, in UK theory is simply a physical/mental/sensory
characteristic of the person, and does not always have a value judgement
associated with it. It is certainly true that impairment has resided in the
medical model but that was before people started to apply sociological and
phenomenological analyses (Shakespeare and Watson; Hughes and Patterson).
Some disability theorists have written quite clearly that impairment is not
always 'negative' (e.g.Colin Barnes). Others have said that we need to pay
attention to aspects of impairment which are 'difficult' such as pain (e.g.
Jenny Morris). Yet others have attempted to deconstruct impairment and to
theorise its relationship to disability (e.g. myself). In all, our
theorising and its practical application is designed to work at
ontological, epistemological and experiential levels.
I think David's comments link quite nicely to those of Anita Silvers a few
weeks ago - and yes, I still agree with Anita.
Mairian
>
In the US disability is the ideological term referring to abnormal,
>oppression, and/or discrimination depending on one's variation of the
>disability paradigm. In the US disability can be (but is not necessarily)
>a positive experience while impairment is tied to the medical model.
>In the US we emphasize that EVERYONE will someday be disabled if not
>already.
> In the UK, as I hear and read, impairment is the parallel term to our
>term disability. And disability, as I hear and read people in the UK, can
>never be a positive experience and only happens to some of the population.
> I have thought of using impairment in my writing, but being a Yank -
>though published in two disability related journals in the UK - I have
>resisted.
>
>David Pfeiffer
*********
"To understand what I am doing, you need a third eye"
*********
Mairian Corker
Senior Research Fellow
University of Central Lancashire
c/o 111 Balfour Road
Highbury
London N5 2HE
U.K.
Minicom/TTY +44 [0]171 359 8085
Fax +44 [0]870 0553967
Typetalk (voice) +44 [0]800 515152 (and ask for minicom/TTY number)
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|