Because Susan wrote:
>> As a new suscriber, I'm intending to make contact with parties
>> interested in the passages of 'disability discourses' from the UK and
>> USA. Is anyone interested ??
Lennard wrote:
Wed, 14 Oct 1998 09:03:29 -0400
> Subject: Re: FW: Polio documentary
> From: Lennard Davis <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Reply-to: [log in to unmask]
> The voices of people with polio were
> certainly allowed, but mostly their speak was "victim" speak. The adults
> recounted their experiences as youthful patients, but there was no sense of
> disability as a positive experience.
Susan and Donna, is this the kind of thing that you mean? In the UK,
the 'social model' interpretation of disability would seem to
preclude the possibility of disability per se being a positive experience,
as disability, according to the social model *is* social oppression.
Any positive experience of disability would come from the transformative praxis of
disability oppression. Instead, UKers may use
*impairment* instead, which could be positively experienced. In the
US, the term disability seems to include both the UK ideas of 'impairment'
and 'disability', this seems to be the case from many of the US articles and books
I have read.
Does everybody on the list share the same views? I still find the
disability/impairment thing very confusing, especially when the terms
are used interchangeably within the same piece of writing! The
disability/impairment categories seem to be another reconfiguration of
that ol' society/individual dichotomy. Why must we think in terms of
these dualisms anyway?! Is there any way in which
'disability' or 'impairment' (you know what I mean!) can critique
such dualisms? Or is 'disability studies' doomed to traipse behind
on the road that the rest of the social sciences has gone down
before? Is this problem due to the lack of experiences and voices of
'disabled' people outside of Western/Northern countries and
academic ideas of 'society/individual' and 'disability/impairment' (which
has informed 'disability studies'), which should not to be understood in Western
terms, but in and on *their* own terms, and thereby informing 'disability
discourses'?
Just a few thoughts
Matthew Barnett
"I believe in surgery"
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