Disability

These slides borrowed, with only modest modification, from Elizabeth Patitsas at McGill University. https://patitsas.github.io/

Who is disabled?

• What are some way that disabilities are categorized?

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• How many people are disabled?

Language

• Both acceptable: people with disabilities, disabled people
• Both are used by people in the disability community!
• Pro-tip: don’t tell somebody from a marginalized community what to call themselves
• #SayTheWord
• Euphemisms are inappropriate and often offensive
• “Differently abled” is silly and cringe-worthy
• “Special” is offensive

Disability Rights

Intersectionality

• Women are more likely to be disabled
• E.g. due to systemic sexism in medical care
• E.g. due to systemic sexism in medical research
• E.g. due to ergonomics & safety built for men
• Black and Indigenous people more likely to be disabled
• E.g. due to environmental racism
• E.g. due to systemic racism in medical care
• E.g. due to inter-generational effects of cultural genocide

Intersectionality Cont’d

• Queer people more likely to be disabled
• Yes, HIV/AIDS is a disability
• E.g. due to systemic homophobia/biphobia/transphobia/etc in medicine
• E.g. due to complications of gender-affirming surgery
• Feedback loop with poverty
• Life with a disability is more expensive
• Poverty more likely to lead to disability
• In 2011, ⅓ of PWD were employed. Median annual earnings for working PWD was $19,735, compared with $30,285 for others.

Disability Rights

• Involuntary sterilization
• Legalized in the US in 1907 to prevent “…the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists;” other states added “feebleminded,” blind and deaf. Still legal.
• Minimum wage law exemptions
• Including for “blindness, mental illness, developmental disabilities, cerebral palsy, alcoholism and drug addiction” if it “actually impairs the worker's earning or productive capacity”
• Despite legal protections, disabled parents have their children taken away more often

Violence Towards PWD

• More likely to be victims of crime
• Murders often portrayed as “mercy killing”
• More likely to experience domestic abuse
• More likely to experience sexual assault
• More likely to be killed in police interactions

And there are almost certainly intersectionalities here

Nothing About Us Without Us

• Big Issue: Paternalistic organizations run by nondisabled people
• E.g. Autism Speaks

What is disability?

What is disability?

• This is a contested concept, and so multiple definitions/models exist
• Five common examples (others exist):
1. Moral Model
2. Medical Model
3. Social Model
4. Spectrum Model
5. Social Construction Model�

Moral Model

• People are morally responsible for their bodies
• Disability seen as the result of
• Sin
• Bad Actions
• Karma
• Practicing witchcraft
• Historically common view of disability

Medical Model

• Person with disability has a medical “problem”
• Is limited by “problem”
• Need to “fix” the person
• (All of the “”s above are taken seriously)
• Also known as deficit model
• You may have read about “deficit models” in other contexts, e.g. race and gender
• We’ve already read a bit about how problematic this is

Social Model

• Social model (Finkelstein, 1980):
• Disability is not a problem with the disabled individual, it’s a result of the systemic barriers and exclusion from society
• E.g. “wheelchair-bound” vs wheelchair as chariot of freedom!
• Common model amongst activists
• E.g. the Sheila Young TED Talk (smiles->stairs->ramp?)
• Disability/impairment split
• Disability is social, impairment is medical/physical
• Analogous to gender/sex

Spectrum Model

• For a given type of impairment, everybody exists on a spectrum from abled to disabled
• E.g. sighted to blind
• E.g. Autism spectrum
• Pro: allows a place for people who are “in the middle”
• Con: “we’re all a bit disabled” minimizes PWD experiences
• Con: sometimes makes it too easy for non-disabled people to take over the conversation

Social Construction Model

• Social scientists agree: disability is socially constructed!
• Humans define the definitions/boundaries of disability
• E.g. how much vision loss does it take for you to be “blind”?
• E.g. is schizophrenia a disease, or do you have the gift to hear voices?
• E.g. is homosexuality a disease?
• E.g. Drapetomania constructed to justify white supremacy
• This model is most common in disability studies
• Note: this is not the same as the “social model” above.

Old paradigm New paradigm

• Deficit model: fix the disabled
• People are limited by their disabilities
• People with disabilities need to be cured

• System model: fix the system
• Society limits people with disabilities
• People with disabilities need accomodations to live full and independent lives
• Remove barriers for people with disabilities
• Create access through accommodations, universal design

Disability Pride

Neurodiversity

• Coined by autism community
• Grown to include ADHD, Schizophrenia, Learning Disabilities, etc [left-handedness!]
• Refers to how people who think differently have new perspectives
• Famous example: Temple Grandin (though of course opinions about her contributions are mixed)

Deaf Culture

• Sign languages & sign-language based culture
• Distinction: “Deaf” refers to culture, “deaf” to disability
• Many Deaf people see themselves as part of a separate ethnicity, rather than disabled
• We’ll see some more good examples of Deaf pride in the next few days

Disability community

• Disability community a common theme in #DisabilityPride
• Social media highly used by disability community
• We’ll be engaging with some of this to develop course projects. Some hashtags to start with:
• #AbledsAreWeird
• #ShitAbledPeopleSay
• #ThingsDisabledPeopleKnow
• #InaccessibilityMeans
• #DisabilityTooWhite

Group work!

Activity: for each disability

1. How does society marginalize people with this disability?
2. Why would somebody with this disability feel proud to have it?
3. Why wouldn’t somebody with this condition identify as disabled?
4. Why would somebody with this condition identify as disabled?
5. How is this disability socially constructed?
6. How this intersects with other marginalized groups��Worked examples as a class: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome�Then in worksheet: you’ll have 5 disabilities to answer these questions for