Paul Duckett wrote:
>I too have reservations about 'people first' terminology. But I am also
>reminded that 'People First' is the name taken by the self advocacy
>organisation for people with learning difficulties. They clearly prefer to
>put people first ahead of any label that might follow.
>
There are also members of the organisation 'People First' who prefer the
term 'disabled people with the learning difficulties label'. See the
chapter by Simone Aspis in Disability Discourse (ed. Corker & French, 1999,
Buckingham: Open University Press). I wonder if what we're really getting
at is whether our sense of 'personhood' (in the ontological sense) is
disabled by (the experience of AND the social structures of) disability. I
think it can be which is why I stick to the term 'disabled people.' It also
designates that there is a a social understanding of disability and so has
political meaning.
I can't give dates, but in the UK, I am certain that the term 'disabled
people' pre-dated 'people with disabilities' and post-dated the medicalised
language of 'impairment', which was a term coined by non-disabled
professionals in different fields. The initial use of PWD was also claimed
by these professionals because it was 'nicer' language that distracted BOTH
from the 'nasty' word 'impairment AND from the 'nasty' word 'oppression'.
However, I think that if we look at how language is actually used by a
range of users, 'people with' language and terms like 'the disabled' are
what might be called hybrid discourses which by their nature are ambiguous
from the semantic point of view. So, 'people with disabilities' can NOW
mean putting the person first AND it can mean distancing oneself from the
social model AND it can mean internalised oppression. The key is then in
how language use is contextualised, who is using the term, why etc. etc.,
and also whether changing language means changinged attitudes which lead to
social change. I think it can if the language achieves the status of
ritual, and we mean what we say. Professional changes in language about
disabled people (which are usually cosmetic) only assume importance because
they have hegemonic status, but can we trust them or believe them? This is
one compelling reason for using consistent terminology.
If you can get hold of a copy of Disability Studies Quarterly, Summer issue
1999, I've tried to explain this, and I've also just given a paper to the
British Association of Applied Linguistics on this topic which is focused
on how disabled children perform the different meanings of disability as
self-referent and as 'other' - referent, in very contextualised ways.
Best wishes
Mairian
Mairian Corker
Senior Research Fellow in Deaf and Disability Studies
Department of Education Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
Address for correspondence:
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U.K.
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