Bill Hughes

The Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body: Towards a sociology of impairment

What is the case for and how would one begin to construct a sociology of impairment? This paper argues that the realignment of the disability/impairment distinction is vital for the identity politics of the disability movement. The body is at the heart of contemporary political and theoretical debate, yet the social model of disability makes it an exile. The transformation of the body from a reactionary to an emancipatory concept implies a sociology of impairment. This paper explores the contribution that post-structuralism and phenomenology might make to this end.

The Constitution of Impairment: Modernity and the aesthetic of oppression

Impairment has been set aside in debates about disability dominated by the social model. This paper seeks to go beyond the Cartesianism which produces this neglect. It suggests that radical disability studies can prosper from a critique of modernity which entails a shift from its singular epistemological origins in the critique of capitalism. The argument challenges the contention that the oppression of disabled people is reducible to social restrictions which are the outcome of a set of structural determinations. It suggests that the oppression of disabled people is also umbilically linked to the visual constitution of impairment in the scopic regime of modernity. The vision of modernity is impaired by the assumption that to see is to know, that is, by its ocularcentrism. In deconstructing the visual culture of modernity, it is possible to demonstrate that the non-disabled gaze is a product of this specific way of seeing which actually constructs the world that it claims to discover. Using the work of Sa...

Love’s Labours Lost? Feminism, the Disabled People’s Movement and an Ethic of Care

The Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) and the Feminist Movement appeal to incompatible meanings of ‘care’. For the DPM the word ‘care’ is to be resisted. The emotional connotations implicit in the concept and experience of care inhibit the emancipatory project for independence and self-determination. Feminist theorists value the concept of care, and the emotional aspect of ‘caring about’ in ‘caring for’. Given that independence can be interpreted as an ideological distortion of ‘malestream’ public policy, feminists argue that it should be replaced by the concept of interdependence. Furthermore, feminists express concern that the DPM’s pragmatic solution to the problem of ‘care’ is a form of discursive alignment with ‘malestream’ public policy that constitutes both disabled people and women as ‘other’ subjects of modern welfare state economies. Drawing on the work of Irigaray, we propose that a post-feminist analysis of the constitution of the parties in the caring dyad can help to make the case for a mutually beneficial ethics of care. We support the feminist voice in disability studies, particularly its call for an embodied, experiential, emotional and political view of the caring relationship. We articulate a post-structuralist feminist critique of waste and want as the discursive terrain upon which both disabled people and women are constituted as marginalized subjects in caring relationships. Irigaray’s claim that women’s immersion in the pleasure of ‘the other’ marginalizes her from her embodied experience, dims her sense of self, and locates her and her caring practices in a liminal, abject space on the margins of phallocentric culture, ground this analysis. We claim that disabled people are similarly disembodied, and constituted as waste, and that their passionate fight for dispassionate goals might be working against their demands for a dignified and inclusive existence. Finally, we make a plea to disability activists and feminists to make common cause in the struggle for an ethics of care that is founded upon embodied interdependence.

(Inter)Dependence, Needs and Care The Potential for Disability and Feminist Theorists to Develop an Emancipatory Model

In this article we examine the tensions between feminist and disability studies perspectives on care.We argue that an emancipatory model of care is one that must address these tensions. In developing this model we consider the notions of (inter)dependence and need across the lifecourse. Drawing on the work of Fraser (1989), we propose that the notion of ‘needscape’ can be used to construct a ‘discourse bridge’ that will mediate between the disability studies and feminist perspectives on care. Notions of care and caring have been subject to criticism by feminist and disability theorists.There is a presumption by some that care is an activity to which women are naturally suited and this forms a starting point for the claim associated with the feminist view that care is a source of women’s exploitation. For disability activists notions of care are dis-empowering.The person in receipt of care is often assumed to be passive and dependent. This is exemplified in the limited access of disabled people to choices over the nature and form of the social support that they may need.

Being disabled: towards a critical social ontology for disability studies

In Disability Studies the question of ontology is establishing itself as a live issue. Whilst there are many arguments and tendencies emerging from this literature, this paper identifies and critically examines an approach to the ontological question in disability studies that is based on an appeal to frailty as a universal characteristic of humanity. The argument builds on the relatively familiar claim that everyone is only temporarily able‐bodied. This approach is exemplified in recent work by Bryan Turner and by Tom Shakespeare and Nick Watson. I argue that their universalistic approach is problematic. While it may constitute a theoretical means of ameliorating the existential negativity associated with being disabled it does so at the expense of disability identity. What is required is a critical social ontology that problematises non‐disablement and exposes the forms of invalidation that lie at the heart of disabling culture.

Wounded/monstrous/abject: a critique of the disabled body in the sociological imaginary

Contemporary sociology has made sense of bodily difference by mobilising a number of tropes. ‘Wounded’ (or vulnerable), ‘monstrous’ and ‘abject’ stand out by virtue of their ubiquity though they do not exhaust the repertoire. These categories highlight the conceptual tensions between the sociology of the body and Disability Studies. In this paper, I will examine the value of these tropes to Disability Studies and suggest that while they can help to clarify the processes that bring about the misrecognition of disabled people, understanding the nature and scope of the lives of disabled people in modernity requires a more embodied language rather than one that has been generated from a sociological imaginary that is strongly influenced by a non‐disabled subject position in which repulsion for the other – which one must become – is never fully resolved. Disability has had little impact on sociological theories of the body and when sociology ventures into disability it has tended to conflate it with an ontology of human frailty or gloss it with tropes that may be instructive about the generic or gendered modernist structure of exclusion but it tells us little about the specific forms of invalidation experienced by disabled people.

Disability, embodiment and ableism: stories of resistance

Non-disabled responses to visible impairment embody either social invisibility or over-attentiveness. The subjective and inter-subjective experiences of impaired bodies and intersubjective encounters within society are important aspects of disablement and the construction of a disabled identity. Impairment is read by and influences the social structure of ableism. This paper attempts to understand how ableist discourses about impaired bodies have impacted on and been resisted by disabled people and how embodiment is related to identity. In pursuit of these aims, a qualitative study was conducted with seven people who have visible physical impairments. The results indicate that disabled embodiment is produced and experienced within an ableist context that mobilizes the charitable gaze and the medical model to signify impaired bodies at the expense of the recognition of disabled identity. In order to deconstruct ableism and to recognize and respect the value of the disabled identity, a politics of recognition is required.

Disability activisms: social model stalwarts and biological citizens

The Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) in the UK rejects the view that disability is an illness. For the DPM it is the social processes of discrimination and oppression that create the material circumstances out of which solidarity and politicisation arise. The DPM has also been shy about impairment, arguing that it is generally irrelevant to the issue of disability and that a clear distinction between impairment and disability is necessary if disability is to be understood as a basis for identity politics. The biological citizens that support embodied health movements use impairment, genetic status, biomedical diagnosis and classification as calling cards that signal their claims to identity. Whilst the DPM has challenged medical hegemony and scientific ideas, many ‘biosocial’ groups embrace the specialised medical and scientific knowledge associated with their ‘condition’, particularly where it might be used to enhance their claims to citizenship. This paper argues that disability activism in the UK is bifurcating. It addresses the difference in perspective and action between the ‘social model stalwarts’ of the DPM and biological citizens that organise politically around particular diagnostic labels.

Nothing to be had ‘off the peg’: consumption, identity and the immobilization of young disabled people

Contemporary sociology makes the case that the concepts of society and social structure are past their sell‐by dates. Our world is marked by impermanence and social life is characterised by mobilities. Even self‐identity has become liquid. Social actors use consumption artefacts and services to re‐design themselves in ways that are commensurate with their deepest desires. However, we argue that disabled people are unlikely to recognise themselves in these debates. Young disabled people, in their quest for identity and consumer citizenship, meet with ubiquitous barriers and closed markets. In their experience choice and mobility are rhetorical. They encounter immobilization and exclusion from the kinds of consumer lifestyles that their non‐disabled peers take for granted. Furthermore, we argue, that at the heart of consumer culture is an aesthetic of youthfulness that is profoundly alien to ‘the anomaly’. The signifiers of ‘youth’ and disability are in profound tension. Cultures of consumption are constituted in ways that mark young disabled people off as outsiders who need not apply for entry.

Introducing Disability and Social Theory

Theorising disability lies at the heart of many recent social scientific engagements with the body, subjectivity, culture and society. Disability studies have developed across, through and with disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. The extent to which disability illuminates and puts into practice social theory and, moreover, the potential of social theory to add to our understandings of disability are key themes of this book. This text aims to further examine social theory and disability as resources for thought, action and activism.