A Quick Note on the Failure of the Social Model of Disability
Impairment is definitionally important to understanding disability
It seems that I might have myself a new short-form series called A Quick Note!
This paragraph from Tom Shakespeare’s "Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited" got my head nodding up and down so hard I was pretty sure it was going to fall off! So I started a Twitter thread, and then it got a little too long for a Twitter thread, and so here we are!
"At the heart of the social model approach to disability is a kind of denial. Social model theory enables disabled people to deny the relevance of their impaired bodies or brains, and seek equality with non-disabled people on the basis of similarity. What divides disabled from non-disabled people, in this formulation, is the imposition of social oppression and social exclusion. Moreover, the identity politics that is fuelled by this ideology paradoxically depends on strengthening the coherence and separateness of the disability group. Disabled people are contrasted with non-disabled people. Non-disabled people and the non-disabled world are increasingly seen as oppressive and hostile. Those who claim to help disabled people– professionals, charities, governments– are rejected. A strong political identity, which should be a means to an end, has become an end in itself. Rather than looking outward, the disability movement has often turned inwards. Rather than building bridges with other groups or seeking the integration of its members within society, the vanguard of the disability movement has often been separatist, promoting a notion of ‘us’, the disabled people, against ‘them’, the non-disabled oppressors. For disability activists, this has been powerful and motivating, but as the basis for disability politics, it has been counter-productive" pp. 106
While I wouldn't consider the social model to be an ideology, per se, from my perspective as a disabled person with real-life impairments that actively keep me from participating in society, it seems to deny one of the most important definitional aspects of disability: People who are disabled are disabled, in part, in virtue of some kind of quantifiable impairment vis-Ã -vis species-normal biological function. While there may be social factors that limit participation in community, one cannot, it seems to me, identify as disabled merely because one experiences some kind of social, physical, or psychological barrier or oppression. In other words, a Black woman with species-typical biological function may be oppressed because she is Black and/or because she is a woman, but not because she is disabled.
In the world of natural or ordinary language, when someone claims an identity as a person with a disability, we do not generally understand them to be saying something about how the world treats them, but instead we understand them to be describing something about themselves and people like them in relationship to the world around them. More specifically, we understand them to be communicating something about how their biological function doesn’t match up with what is usually considered to be normal biological function. The relationship with the world around a person with a disability is primarily outwards, and secondarily inwards, and always includes some reference to biological function. That is, a person is disabled just in case their species-typical biological function does not match up with the world around them. Note that this formulation does not deny that there are social impacts on people with disabilities, it just says that those social impacts are not causally related to one’s claim to being disabled, but are instead generated post-hoc. A person experiences social oppression on account of their disabilities, not the other way around.
I should note that I am relatively new to reading about disability, both from a philosophical perspective and from a sociaopolitical perspective. None of my comments should be taken to be the last word on the subject - there are people who have been reading, writing, and thinking about disability since long before I was even born. One of the things I appreciate about Shakespeare’s book is that he is a person with a disability who is doing work that puts him at odds with the academic establishment. It isn’t easy to consistently publish work that others disagree with, and I really appreciate Shakespeare’s voice as I do my own reading and writing.
If you want to see more original, short-form content like this, please let me know by commenting here or by sending me a note at peter (at) peterthurley.ca