Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-225) and index. ; Introduction -- Tender organs, narcissism, and identity politics -- Body theory : from social construction to the new realism of the body -- Disability studies and the future of identity politics -- Disability as masquerade -- Disability experience on trial -- A sexual culture for disabled people -- Sex, shame, and disability identity : with reference to Mark O'Brien -- Disability and the right to have rights -- Conclusion. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; U. Michigan Faculty Author
Persons with disabilities still experience challenges in obtaining employment even though obligations associated with their employment are in place in legislative frameworks that strive to support transformation within the labour market. This paper explores employers' perspectives on the employment of persons with disabilities in South Africa identified in a case study. The influence of social capital on disability inclusive employment was explored from the perspective of two employers who employed trainees who completed an auxiliary training programme for persons with disabilities, which provides opportunities to facilitate pathways to economic inclusion and/or employment. Findings reveal that despite the call for increased labour inclusivity, the development of social capital is not clearly apparent when persons with disabilities are considered for employment. Organisational attitudes and beliefs seem to stem from the obligatory standpoint of the organisations. The paper highlights the need for employers to look beyond impairments so that employment goals are shared and re-enforced by understanding and possibly re-evaluating their views on their organisation's obligations, norms, values and mission, and goals. Insights can guide employers to think more holistically about ways to facilitate the economic inclusion of persons with disabilities.
Disability Mainstreaming zielt (analog zu Gender Mainstreaming) darauf, Anliegen und Bedürfnisse der Personengruppe 'Menschen mit Behinderung' nicht allein in den für diese Gruppe offensichtlich wichtigen Bereichen anzusprechen, sondern sie in allen gesellschaftspolitischen Handlungsebenen mitzudenken und dementsprechende Forderungen umzusetzen. Dabei wird 'Behinderung' vorrangig als soziale Konstruktion interpretiert, die mit der Erfahrung von Diskriminierung und Exklusion einhergeht.
Learning disability is so prevalent a concept that it has become difficult to imagine a world without it, especially given the centrality of schooling in contemporary society. However, the history of learning disability (LD) clearly shows that it need not have developed as it has. In fact, school systems in many countries know no such category. In America, the development of LD is inseparable from the dramatic expansion of compulsory schooling and intelligence testing since the beginning of the twentieth century. Begun as part of the military's attempts to measure recruits' intelligence during World War I, psychometric testing has since become routine in education, training, and employment. Hotly debated, these statistical and psychological approaches to measuring IQ redefined who was considered "normal" and "abnormal" – based on the normal distribution of intelligence along the Bell or Gauss curve. While "NORMALCY" is a common word, its derivation from mathematical methods of differentiating people by their characteristics (performance on tests, for example) is less well known. Early on, the EUGENICS movement abused IQ tests as arguments for the genetic "inferiority" or "superiority" of particular ability groups, classes or races. Despite repeated criticism of these tests' validity and reliability, they were used to justify policies that limited births and immigration, segregated people in asylums, and led to forcible sterilizations. Revised for widespread use in schools, psychometric tests promoted the development of school "tracking" systems that separate students into ability groups according to their scores.
Exploring major requisites to establish an Iranian disability studies, the aim of this study is to determine how a local literature of disability can be formed in Iran, as well as how the Iranian and global disability studies might interchange disability knowledge. In an analysis of the responses to a qualitative questionnaire, three themes emerged: rudimentary resources, disability literature, and political prerequisites. Accordingly, human and financial resources, a bank of Farsi and English literature on disability, as well as developing academic relations between Iranian and international disability scholars (as an outcome of improving the Iran-USA political affairs) are essential to form a local disability studies in Iran and to engage it in the global discussions of disability studies.Keywords: disability, global disability studies, Iran
Persons with disabilities still experience challenges in obtaining employment even though obligations associated with their employment are in place in legislative frameworks that strive to support transformation within the labour market. This paper explores employers' perspectives on the employment of persons with disabilities in South Africa identified in a case study. The influence of social capital on disability inclusive employment was explored from the perspective of two employers who employed trainees who completed an auxiliary training programme for persons with disabilities, which provides opportunities to facilitate pathways to economic inclusion and/or employment. Findings reveal that despite the call for increased labour inclusivity, the development of social capital is not clearly apparent when persons with disabilities are considered for employment. Organisational attitudes and beliefs seem to stem from the obligatory standpoint of the organisations. The paper highlights the need for employers to look beyond impairments so that employment goals are shared and re-enforced by understanding and possibly re-evaluating their views on their organisation's obligations, norms, values and mission, and goals. Insights can guide employers to think more holistically about ways to facilitate the economic inclusion of persons with disabilities.
Focusing on the construction and negation of disability allowances, this Article identifies and traces the roots of a fundamental tension that underlies disability politics with regard to disability allowances: are cash benefits an archaic and outdated form of assistance to disabled people, or are they still a relevant mode of response to their systematic marginalization and exclusion? Based on a field study of the Israeli disability community, the Article shows that while disability rights advocates tend to reject disability allowances as fundamentally wrong and to support the transformation of society's social structures, welfare activists tend to view disability allowances as a response to a pressing necessity, an expression of social responsibility, and a means to provide economic security for disabled people. The Article employs a disability legal studies framework to analyze the study's findings, attending primarily to questions of power and difference, and offering a framework that considers both perspectives as two authentic voices that express genuine concerns. At the same time, the analysis maintains that both approaches lack a more complex understanding of the relationships between disability and poverty, within which the meanings of disability allowances are negotiated. It concludes with a call to re-conceptualize disability allowance, as a form of compensation that redresses disabled peopleindividually and collectivelyfor society's past and present continuing practices of exclusion and discrimination. The struggles of disabled people over rights and allowances become a fascinating site from which to draw the critical lessons that disability activism has to offer to social theory.
Social Security Disability Insurance and Veterans Disability Compensation- administered by the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs respectively- are two of the largest federal disability programs, but strongly differ along several dimensions, including the populations served, how each program defines a "disability," as well as varying eligibility requirements. This report provides a description and comparative analysis of the Social Security Disability Administration and the Veterans Disability Compensation programs.
Social Security Disability Insurance and Veterans Disability Compensation- administered by the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs respectively- are two of the largest federal disability programs, but strongly differ along several dimensions, including the populations served, how each program defines a "disability," as well as varying eligibility requirements. This report provides a description and comparative analysis of the Social Security Disability Administration and the Veterans Disability Compensation program claims.
This paper explores injustices experienced by disabled people in the postsocialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on Nancy Fraser's theory of social justice, the analysis proposes a 'matrix' that reveals the negative impact of two factors – state socialist legacy and postsocialist neoliberalization – on disabled people's parity of participation in three dimensions of justice – economic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political representation. The legacy of state socialism has underpinned: segregated service provision; medical-productivist understanding of disability for assessment purposes; denial of disability on everyday level; and weak disability organizing. Neoliberal restructuring has resulted in: retrenchment of disability support through decentralization, austerity, and workfare; stigmatization of 'dependency' through the discourse of 'welfare dependency'; responsibilization of disabled people; and depoliticization of disability organizations by restricting their activities to service provision and incorporating them in structures of tokenistic participation. The analysis is informed by reports and academic studies of disability in the postsocialist region.
This dissertation argues that the psychic force that Freud named "the death drive" would more precisely be termed "the disability drive." Freud's concept of the death drive emerged from his efforts to account for feelings, desires, and actions that seemed not to accord with rational self-interest or the desire for pleasure. Positing that human subjectivity was intrinsically divided against itself, Freud suggested that the ego's instincts for pleasure and survival were undermined by a competing component of mental life, which he called the death drive. But the death drive does not primarily refer to biological death, and the term has consequently provoked confusion. By distancing Freud's theory from physical death and highlighting its imbrication with disability, I revise this important psychoanalytic concept and reveal its utility to disability studies. While Freud envisaged a human subject that is drawn, despite itself, toward something like death, I propose that this "something" can productively be understood as disability. In addition, I contend that our culture's repression of the disability drive, and its resultant projection of the drive onto stigmatized minorities, is a root cause of multiple forms of oppression."The Disability Drive" opens with a question: "What makes disability so sexy?" This is a counterintuitive query; after all, the dominant culture usually depicts disability as decidedly unsexy. But by performing a critical disability studies analysis of Freud's writings about sexuality and the death drive, I theorize sex as an intrinsically disabling experience and suggest that fantasies of disability may have an unrecognized sexual appeal. These possibilities lead me to introduce a new interpretive framework, "the sexual model of disability," which I posit as an alternative to disability studies' prevailing analytic paradigm, the social model of disability. While the social model defines disability as a system of oppression that isolates and excludes disabled people, the sexual model of disability goes deeper than this, locating the impetus for these exclusions in our culture's repression of the disability drive. Because disability may provoke an erotic excitement that the ego cannot bear to acknowledge, ableist culture is often torn between an urge to witness disability (e.g., by staring at disabled people) and an impulse to hide disability from view (e.g., by confining disabled people to institutions). The sexual model of disability has the potential to make interventions not only in disability studies but also in a range of other disciplines. In Chapter 1, I bring my account of the disability drive to bear on signal texts in queer theory. In doing so, I proffer an answer to a question that has long troubled disability scholars: given the many similarities between ableism and homophobia, why have queer theorists often been reluctant to engage with disability studies? Observing that founding texts in queer theory repudiate "feminist identity politics" and liken this discourse to madness and to figurative states of blindness and paralysis, I argue that these texts project the disability drive onto feminism, thus allowing queer theory to portray its own erotics as mobile, playful, and physically and mentally able. In Chapter 2, I show that the sexual model of disability can subvert a foundational concept in psychoanalysis: the disease category "hysteria." Analyzing Freud's case history Dora, which was published in 1905, in conjunction with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was published in 1920, I argue that Freud's notion of hysteria adumbrates his later theorization of the drive. The diagnostic category of hysteria, I contend, constitutes a projection of the disability drive onto people with what I call "undocumented disabilities," that is, nonapparent impairments for which mainstream western medicine cannot identify biological causes. One effect of this projection is that people with undocumented disabilities are figured as epistemologically disabled; that is, we are seen as distinctively lacking in the capacity to know ourselves.The social position of people with undocumented disabilities differs from that of the paradigmatic subject of disability studies: while people with undocumented impairments are often denied recognition of the disabling suffering that shapes our lives, people with disabilities that are visible and/or documented are frequently subjected to unwanted displays of pity. For this reason, "no pity" has long been a rallying cry of the disability rights movement. But is it possible to proscribe pity? In Chapter 3, I argue that instead of seeking to banish the affect of pity, disability scholars might do better to attend to the complex ways in which this affect can be incited and expressed. Toward this end, I propose a distinction between what I call "primary pity" and "secondary pity." The term "secondary pity" accords with the everyday understanding of pity, in which a person who feels pity is assumed to occupy a position of superiority in relation to a person who is pitied. Primary pity refers to a very different affective process, which is profoundly destabilizing to the ego of the person who feels pity. Derived in part from Freud's notion of "primary narcissism," my concept of primary pity occupies a liminal position between the erasure of the ego that primary narcissism entails and the buttressing of the ego involved in secondary narcissism. Because primary pity involves a complex process of identification, in which the subject and the object of pity risk becoming fantasmatically indistinguishable, this emotion threatens the ego's belief in its self-sufficiency and autonomy. I argue that primary pity's threat to the ego can be understood as a manifestation of the disability drive, and I suggest that the "no pity" position taken up by disability activists and scholars may be invested in a fantasy of overcoming the disability drive.This dissertation argues that rather than seeking to overcome the disability drive, cultural critics and activists should work to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the drive determines us. It is important to recognize and acknowledge one's determination by the disability drive because denying or repressing the ways in which this psychic force governs us will inevitably lead to the drive's being abjected onto groups of stigmatized others. In Chapter 4, I argue that in contemporary US American culture fat people constitute one such group. This chapter focuses on the drive to eat, a compulsion that I define as inseparable from the disability drive. Dependence, (on food), loss of mastery (over the intensities of the pleasures of eating), and failures of control (over what, and how much, one eats) combine to make hunger a fundamentally disabling drive. But instead of acknowledging that we are all disabled by the drive to eat, our culture abjects this drive onto fat people, whom it depicts as being driven, in ways that thin people are assumed not to be, by an out-of-control compulsion to eat. US American culture's projection of the disability drive onto fat people is intensified by racially inflected assumptions about "primitive" versus "civilized" forms of embodiment and by heteronormative constructions of "perversion." Resisting fatphobia therefore necessitates an intersectional analysis of the disability drive, an approach that takes measure of the ways in which repressing the drive reinforces multiple forms of prejudice.The central aim of this thesis is to show that the disability drive is a force that we must understand if we are to effectively challenge the many intersecting and overlapping modalities of oppression that define present-day cultural and social relations. "The Disability Drive" offers an invitation, to scholars and activists in a variety of cultural locations, to consider the ways in which our own beliefs and practices may be implicated in a hegemonic cultural endeavor whose goal is to overcome the disability drive. Because denying the drive results in the reentrenchment of oppressive social structures, I maintain that it is imperative to develop political strategies that resist the impulse to overcome the disability drive.
Disabled people, amidst political and social gains, continue to experience discrimination in multiple areas. Understanding how such discrimination, named here as ableism, operates is important and may require studying perspectives of people who do not claim a disability identity. Ableism may be expressed in a number of ways, and examining how a particular group, in this case siblings of disabled people, understand and value disability may contribute to overall understandings about how ableism works. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore relationships between siblings of disabled people's broad societal understandings of disability and their attitudes towards it. In order to tease out this relationship further we have also examined factors that impact how people define disability. Using both social psychological and sociological approaches, we have contextualized individual attitudes as providing additional new information about social meanings of disability, and set this study's results against the larger backdrops of debates over meanings of disability within Disability Studies. In our research, participants revealed complex understandings of disability, but most often defined disability as preventing or slowing action, as an atypical function, a lack of independence, and as a socially constructed obstacle. Participants' unconscious (implicit) disability attitudes significantly related to their understandings of disability as lacking independence, impairment, and/or in relation to the norm, and their conscious (explicit) disability attitudes. Moreover, longer employment in a disability-related industry was correlated with defining disability as a general difference, rather than as slowing or limiting of tasks.
This article explores the significance of disability for social justice, using Nancy Fraser's theory of justice as a guideline. The article argues that the disability perspective is essential for understanding and promoting social justice, although it is often disregarded by critical thinkers and social activists. The article looks at three prominent strategies for achieving social justice under conditions of capitalism: economically, by decommodifying labour; culturally, by deconstructing self-sufficiency; and politically, by transnationalising democracy. The disability perspective reveals that decommodification of labour requires enhancement of disability support, deconstruction of self-sufficiency requires valorisation of disability-illuminated interdependence, and transnationalisation of democracy requires scrutiny of the transnational production of impairments. The article discusses each of these strategies in theoretical and practical terms by drawing on disability studies and Fraser's analyses.
This paper explores injustices experienced by disabled people in the postsocialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on Nancy Fraser's theory of social justice, the analysis proposes a 'matrix' that reveals the negative impact of two factors – state socialist legacy and postsocialist neoliberalization – on disabled people's parity of participation in three dimensions of justice – economic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political representation. The legacy of state socialism has underpinned: segregated service provision; medical-productivist understanding of disability for assessment purposes; denial of disability on everyday level; and weak disability organizing. Neoliberal restructuring has resulted in: retrenchment of disability support through decentralization, austerity, and workfare; stigmatization of 'dependency' through the discourse of 'welfare dependency'; responsibilization of disabled people; and depoliticization of disability organizations by restricting their activities to service provision and incorporating them in structures of tokenistic participation. The analysis is informed by reports and academic studies of disability in the postsocialist region.
