Alison Kafer: “Introduction: Imagined Futures”, in: Feminist, Queer, Crip, Bloomington, Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 1-24.
Upon seeing Alison Kafer uses a wheelchair and has been physically scarred by a fire, people imagine a bleak future of isolation and sadness for her. However other disabled people imagine a future for her where ableism, not disability, is the obstacle she must overcome. "What these two representations of the future share, however, is a strong link to the present." p.2
"If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future." p.2
"the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident" p.3
"Rather than assume that a “good” future naturally and obviously depends upon the eradication of disability, we must recognize this perspective as colored by histories of ableism and disability oppression." p.3
Defining Disability: A Political/Relational Model
"There is no accounting for how a disabled person's response to impairment shifts over time or by context, or how the nature of one's impairment changes, or, especially, how one's experience of disability is affected by one's culture and environment." p.4
Encouraging students on campus to wear a blindfold in order to experience blindness or have a go in a wheelchair, "the meaning of blindness... is completely encapsulated in the experience of wearing a blindfold; there is simply nothing else to discuss." p.5 The next issue is then that "disability is depoliticized, presented more as nature than culture." p.5
"The medical model of disability frames atypical bodies and minds as deviant, pathological, and defective, best understood and addressed in medical terms. In this framework, the proper approach to disability is to 'treat' the condition and the person with the condition rather than 'treating' the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people's lives." p.5
A political/relational model of disability shifts the blame from the individual, to the buildings that are inaccessible, the attitudes that are discriminatory and the "idealogical systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies" p.6
"The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation." p.6
"medical representations, diagnoses, and treatments of bodily variation are imbued with ideological biases about what constitutes normalcy and deviance." p.6
Politicising the medical model questions the efficiency and effectiveness of it. p.6
"People with impairments are disabled by their environments; or, to put it differently, impairments aren't disabling, social and architectural barriers are." p.7
"As feminist theorists have long noted, there is no mention of "the" body that is not a further articulation of a very particular body." p.7
"drawing a hard line between impairment and disability, and having this distinction serve as the foundation for theorizing disability, makes it difficult to explore the ways in which notions of disability and able-bodiedness affect everyone, not just people with impairments." p.8
"How has disability been depoliticized, removed from the realm of the political?" p.10
Identifying Disability: Bodies, Identities, Politics
The categories of disability, impairment and disabled should be contested when seeing disability as political. p.10
http://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/191/350
Upon seeing Alison Kafer uses a wheelchair and has been physically scarred by a fire, people imagine a bleak future of isolation and sadness for her. However other disabled people imagine a future for her where ableism, not disability, is the obstacle she must overcome. "What these two representations of the future share, however, is a strong link to the present." p.2
"If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future." p.2
"the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident" p.3
"Rather than assume that a “good” future naturally and obviously depends upon the eradication of disability, we must recognize this perspective as colored by histories of ableism and disability oppression." p.3
Defining Disability: A Political/Relational Model
"There is no accounting for how a disabled person's response to impairment shifts over time or by context, or how the nature of one's impairment changes, or, especially, how one's experience of disability is affected by one's culture and environment." p.4
Encouraging students on campus to wear a blindfold in order to experience blindness or have a go in a wheelchair, "the meaning of blindness... is completely encapsulated in the experience of wearing a blindfold; there is simply nothing else to discuss." p.5 The next issue is then that "disability is depoliticized, presented more as nature than culture." p.5
"The medical model of disability frames atypical bodies and minds as deviant, pathological, and defective, best understood and addressed in medical terms. In this framework, the proper approach to disability is to 'treat' the condition and the person with the condition rather than 'treating' the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people's lives." p.5
A political/relational model of disability shifts the blame from the individual, to the buildings that are inaccessible, the attitudes that are discriminatory and the "idealogical systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies" p.6
"The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation." p.6
"medical representations, diagnoses, and treatments of bodily variation are imbued with ideological biases about what constitutes normalcy and deviance." p.6
Politicising the medical model questions the efficiency and effectiveness of it. p.6
"People with impairments are disabled by their environments; or, to put it differently, impairments aren't disabling, social and architectural barriers are." p.7
"As feminist theorists have long noted, there is no mention of "the" body that is not a further articulation of a very particular body." p.7
"drawing a hard line between impairment and disability, and having this distinction serve as the foundation for theorizing disability, makes it difficult to explore the ways in which notions of disability and able-bodiedness affect everyone, not just people with impairments." p.8
"How has disability been depoliticized, removed from the realm of the political?" p.10
Identifying Disability: Bodies, Identities, Politics
The categories of disability, impairment and disabled should be contested when seeing disability as political. p.10
http://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/191/350
Comments
Post a Comment