Richard wrote:
>
>Loathing of the medical model amongst many politicised d.p. arises as a
>direct result of our experiences at the hands of the medical mafia.
>Accordingly, any theorising that seems to emphasise 'impairment effects'
>starts to sound depressingly familiar to times and places many of us have
>been before (and will be again if the QALY and DALY supporters get their
>way).
I think, Richard, that this depends on whether we are talking about a
social theory of impairment or a medical one. One of the problems is that
we have never had a social theory of impairment, though I have to support
some of the excellent work that is being being done, particularly by
Paterson and Hughes in this area. I think it's also possible to accept
diversity within the collective construct disability on the grounds of
impairment without jeopardising the disability movement's idea that
oppression is institutionalised in structures and processes, but it
requires that we talk to each other without boundaries. Oppression also
works at the local level and sometimes individuals have to exercise agency
in these very contingent 'moments' of oppression because the collective all
but disappears. I've seen disabled kids exercise local agency very
effectively, and it does achieve change - sometimes. We need to understand
this process better
>
>The social model continues to provide an unparalleled tool for d.p.'s
>'coming out' and a.b.'s reassessment of what disability means - unparalleled
>because after 20+ years of theorising since the UPIAS statement, I have yet
>to come across a 'model' that is anywhere near as useful as the social model
>at addressing oppressive assumptions, or the social 'theory' that so many of
>us have read about and, in some cases I am sure, dreamt of delivering to an
>expectant academy.
>Whilst I am sure it is not the intention with you or Nick Watson (or indeed
>the well-respected theorists that you mentioned in your last posting), I
>sometimes wonder whether the two-decade critique of the social model,
>without an obvious alternative having been advanced, is simply leaving the
>way open for bio-medical based disciplines to completely dismiss our efforts
>at redefining what disability 'means', rather than merely sneer?
How long did social theories of gender and race take to emerge? And before
social theories, what did women, black and ethnic minority have? Changing
mind-sets and world views takes time and I think there is tremendous
resistance in some quarters of the disability movement and disability
studies to any exploration appears to threaten the social model. I myself
have tried to articulate ideas about directions we could go in in expanding
our theoretical and practical understanding of disability. I have always
acknowledged the power of the social model, and say this regularly, but I
still get attacked for 'picking away at the social model'. My response to
these attacks is to go back, again, to one of the founding fathers of the
UK social model, Mike Oliver, who says that the social model is not a
social theory of disability, and to ask whether that means that the social
model must remain 'all that there is' and never become part of a social
theory? What about those areas of disabled people's lived experience,
including some forms of oppression, that the social model is not so
effective in dealing with? As to the implication that theories are only for
the expectant ears of the academy (and I use 'ears' in the Nietszchean
sense), who was it that said 'there's nothing so useful as a good theory?'
- that is a theory that is conceived of and engages with the public sphere,
not the academy.
As to other models - I think you are not looking far enough. There was a
time when deafness was not regarded as any different from other forms of
impairment.
As Jane Campbell and Mike Oliver note in their book 'Disability Politics',
the social construct 'disability' was rejected by Sign language users, who
then developed their own model - a linguistic minority model. Other
impairment specific groups are also going this way by harnassing the power
of identity, and I would hazard a guess that this approach is
characteristic of some North American perspectives to conceptualising
disability. The description of placing disability 'at the centre' in Simi
Linton's book "Claiming Disability" is very similar to one of the early
texts looking at Sign language users - Padden & Humphries' "Voices from a
Culture." I worry endlessly about this approach, but it doesn't mean that i
can't recognise that some people see it as an alternative. As Mark
Priestley has pointed out, citing Oliver, Finkelstein and Shakespeare that
there is more than one social model, so I think the critique is resulting
in diversification that opens doors to more disabled people to 'come out',
which can only be healthy.
>....
>I would, however, be interested in understanding the need to keep
>picking away at the social model? It is a human construct, therefore it is
>inevitably flawed - rather like my simplistic but genuinely expressed
>opinions herein. I am not criticising, but I do need to understand.
Wouldn't it be better if the activity concerned was perceived as 'building'
rather than 'picking away' and wouldn't this be facilitated if people
actually started to listen to some of the alternative views and to engage
with them in dialogue, instead of the endless sniping across the bows? If
this happened we might actually ALL understand a bit better.
Thanks for the post
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:
111 Balfour Road
Highbury
London N5 2HE
U.K.
Minicom/TTY +44 [0]171 359 8085
Fax +44 [0]870 0553967
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"To understand what I am doing, you need a third eye"
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