Dear all, a few points:
1) The social model is a good way of understanding impairment in context.
However the social model does implicitly contain references to normality. It
is a tool for social inclusion based upon 'normal values and expectations'.
It does not challenge difference - that is why some people find it limiting
and other do not.
2) By virtue of the politics and medical advances of this century, the
people at the forefront of the disability movement and current ideas about
what consititutes as 'disabling' it only presents a small section of people
who experience impairment. It does not fully address the increasing number
of people who have a long term illnes, nor those people whose lives and
experiences span both illness and disability either in the present or over a
life-time.
3)The social model does not draw upon new knowledges that have illustrated
how people can have limited mobility even if they have hidden bodily
differences.
4) The social model was created in a different historical period where the
poltics of identity where much simpler and cultural 'norms' different.
5) Protagnoists of the social model often worry that disability will be seen
as being 'sick' again if it is changed to accept pain, etc. However, times
have changed and being 'ill' now does not mean you are in bed at home. For
some it means mixing with people like everyone else, everyday. The
association between illness, disability and movement is still crude. For
others, how they are treated when they are ill can affect their ability to
access a social life later on. Inherent in this statement (also made by gay
groups etc to escape their experience at the hands of the medical
profession) are several assumptions (mostly negative) about people who do
have a long term illness. Such thinking is offensive and needs to be rethought.
6)If the social model is not challenged then 'joe public' will be
continually faced with images of disability that revolve around the use of
wheelchairs. Hence naive debates in the media (BBC news the other night and
parliament) about who will and will not be hit by the welfare reform here in
the UK. Who are the most severely affected in todays world ? Research has
shown that 'severity' of physical impairment is not related to distress.
7) If the model is not adapted to the present, it will leave out in the cold
many people who understand their experience of impairment as political but
can not claim the legitimacy and the benefits that having a political
disabled idenitity can give. Hence, when i was doing my degree i read a lot
about the social model and peoples experiences of being disabled, but as a
person with a chronic illness i felt unable to feel comfortable with
associating with the people I read about. At least I had the privalege and
environment to access these journals and books and gain support from reading
and imagining this wider 'community' of people who had experienced exclusion
based on impairment. You have to recognise yourself as 'disabled' before you
can draw on the social model. That depends on many factors including the
defintion of disability and how a disabling environment is understood.
A few thoughts.
Glenn.
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