Disability Lens Research Articles

Human rights through the lens of disability

Notions discriminatory to persons with disabilities commonly underpin political theories of rights. While persons without disabilities are considered “normal” and independent, persons with disabilities are commonly seen as “deviant” and dependent. Persons with intellectual disabilities are also seen as lacking the autonomy required to have human rights. Acknowledging the equal human rights of all human beings, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) refutes such notions. Drawing upon relational theory, this Article provides a theoretical basis to some of the novel features of the CRPD. In contrast to many dominant theories of rights, the author argues that 1) disability constitutes a natural part of human diversity, 2) human beings are interdependent, 3) rights are achieved through supportive relations, and 4) human rights are ideals that inform how we should treat each other. The Article shows that a human rights theory fully inclusive of persons with intellectual disabilities also strengthens the human rights of others.

Lifelong learners: redefining the relationship between schooling and childhood in an early American school for the deaf

ABSTRACTDrawing on the early history of the American School for the Deaf (ASD) as a case study, and the primary records left by school administrators and students alike, this paper demonstrates that the history of childhood and education, when examined through the lens of disability, requires a fresh and critical application of age as a category of analysis. This paper holds that, though age as a category of analysis frequently has been invoked in the history of childhood and education, the range of its invocation has been limited. The following essay explores the tenuous relationship between schooling and age in this nineteenth-century school for the deaf, where at one time students’ ages ranged from 9 to 51 years. This essay discusses how peer relations were negotiated and redefined within this unique scholastic context.

Body Politics and Disability

The article explores the relation between the body and subjectivity through the lens of physical disability. Embarking from the idea that corporeality plays a crucial role in the way subjects are conceptualized, it emphasizes the potential of the non-normative body to produce a more flexible type of subjectivity. By focusing on poems on disability that are included in the collection Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2011), the aim in the article is to combine various representations of the disabled body with theories of subjectivity that reject unity, hierarchy, and order. For this purpose, the article employs the transgressive thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who developed a more extrovert and fluid conception of the subject compared to previous psychoanalytic theories. Notions of the Body without Organs, becoming, and desiring-machines are used to investigate the complex subject positions that emerge from disabled bodies and their interaction with their environment, as well as...

Un alegato a favor de lo compartido: historia de la discapacidad, discursos de rehabilitación, y el individuo

Desde finales del siglo XX la historia de la discapacidad ha madurado. Investigadores de muy diversa formación se han convencido cada vez más del valor de mirar al pasado a través de la lente de la discapacidad. Numerosos trabajos se han centrado en el análisis de la naturaleza construida de la discapacidad y, en consecuencia, han intentado de manera deliberada deconstruir las distinciones actuales entre las personas sin discapacidades y las personas discapacitadas. Reevaluando positivamente la particular posición del individuo con discapacidades sobre la base de narrativas históricas, este artículo intenta mostrar las tendencias presentes de discriminación y opresión. Con este trabajo nos gustaría además recordar al lector otro tipo de aproximación que, en ocasiones, corre el peligro de quedar oculta, concretamente la tarea histórica que intenta desvelar lo que se comparte: lugares donde las distinciones entre las personas con o sin discapacidades son temporalmente olvidadas y / o borradas; momentos en los que las fronteras entre el yo y el otro son reconfiguradas. Para llevar esto a cabo, vamos a utilizar un discurso de gran influencia dentro de la historia de la discapacidad: el discurso de la rehabilitación. Retrocediendo hasta el comienzo del siglo XX, presentaremos el trabajo del científico francés Jules Mardochée Amar y de dos soldados belgas con discapacidad de la Primera Guerra Mundial. Las ideas de Amar sobre la rehabilitación influyeron en las prácticas de rehabilitación desarrolladas durante y después de la guerra. Los dos soldados belgas discapacitados fueron rehabilitados en un instituto para la rehabilitación profesional establecido por el gobierno Belga en el norte de Francia. Al yuxtaponer el discurso de Amar con las experiencias de los dos soldados belgas, demostraremos cómo, junto al discurso individual de rehabilitación, pueden encontrarse también momentos en los que el individuo es absorbido por una “commonality” -un conjunto de características comunes- real y tangible. Como consecuencia de esto, todo el mundo – ya sean ciudadanos físicamente capaces o soldados mutilados – pasa a formar parte de una comunidad de iguales.

‘My Daughter was Genetically Drafted with me’: US‐Vietnam War Veterans, Disabilities and Gender

This article examines war's lasting bodily legacies by focusing on the Vietnam veterans’ Agent Orange movement that arose in the mid‐1970s. This movement pushed for the recognition of the disabling effects of Agent Orange not only on veterans themselves but also on their children. By taking biological responsibility for miscarriages or children's birth defects, veteran‐fathers challenged gender norms that blamed women and required men to hide their grief about both war and children. They also reinforced pitiful representations of children with disabilities in seeking to win benefits for their children. This article studies the representations of and discourses about these children, including how race and gender informed media coverage of the Agent Orange movement. Although women fought on behalf of Vietnam veterans and their families, their roles nevertheless remained circumscribed within conventional gendered expectations and domestic arrangements. The article uses the methods of disabilities, gender, social and cultural history to analyse veterans’ movement records as well as newspapers, Congressional hearings, television news and documentary films. It underscores the centrality of disability as a category of historical analysis and the value of (re)considering the fields of war, gender and reproduction through the analytical lens of disability.

Amoris Laetitia Through the Lens of Disability

ABSTRACTIn April of 2016, Professor David Perry called the vision of Amoris Laetitia with regard to disability “a kind, charitable, paternalistic vision in which the function of the disabled is to demonstrate the goodness of those who care for them.” This severe condemnation of the pontifical text appeals for a more detailed analysis.

Troubling constructions of Canada as a ‘land of opportunity’ for immigrants: a critical disability lens

This article presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis study of the constructions of people with disabilities within the Canadian immigration system and how this shapes the immigration experiences of people with disabilities, especially those from countries in the Global South. Findings suggest that dominant discourses of opportunities not only construct Canada as a ‘land of dreams’ for immigrants and newcomers but are also used to hide, justify, normalize and facilitate the operation of ableist, racist and colonial discourses that immigrants and newcomers with disabilities experience during their immigration. Recommendations for settlement workers involved in facilitating the settlement and integration process for immigrants and newcomers with disabilities are also presented. The article concludes by emphasizing the actual and potential contributions of postcolonial and critical disability lenses for a social justice-oriented practice at the intersection of disability and immigration.

Imperfection in Paradise: Reading Genesis 2 through the Lens of Disability and a Theology of Limits

Genesis 2 has been interpreted from many angles, but rarely through the lens of disability studies. Such a reading, however, provides a necessary corrective to interpretations that import into the text idealistic notions of bodily perfection and thereby inadvertently disenfranchise those with disabilities. By attending to the range of bodily experiences and the fluidity of embodied existence, this article seeks to shed new light on Genesis 2 and on the wider task of theological anthropology. More specifically, reading Genesis 2 with and for those with disabilities lifts up three essential themes in the text that all express human limitation as a good aspect of God’s creation: embodiment, imperfection, and relationship.

Mark and Disability

This essay explores the Gospel of Mark through the lens of disability, with attention to understandings of disability in the ancient world, the language of affliction, questions of faith and sin, forms of healing, and the agency of the impaired person. The essay examines the “powers” in the Gospel of Mark as a form of empire and demonstrates how Jesus’s action in casting out demons and unclean spirits is a disruption of the status quo at a cosmic level.

People with Disabilities and the Charter: Disability Rights at the Supreme Court of Canada Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms

The inclusion of people with disabilities as a designated group for rights protection in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was viewed as a triumph of disability advocacy in Canada. And yet, a number of commentators look back with disappointment over the 30 years since the Charter was passed. This paper employs an empirical approach to examine an important subset of cases invoking the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to promote disability rights. Specifically, it examines 14 cases heard by the Supreme Court of Canada to uncover the types of disability issues that have been addressed, and the approach of Supreme Court justices to these issues. In order to qualify for inclusion, cases had to have an appellant with a disability, and to directly address a disability discrimination issue. The current study shows a very limited impact of the Charter, despite expectations of a discernible shift in the position of people with disabilities within Canadian society. There is still no consistently applied “disability lens” in the policy environment, and there are relatively few tangible indicators of the kinds of considerations offered to other enumerated groups, such as Ministry or oversight committees dedicated to their issues.

Challenging notions of being normal in the CS classroom

This paper describes a diversity intensive computer science course that challenges the notion of what it means to be normal by looking through the lens of disability. We discuss the why and the how...

Radicalising ‘disability’ in conflict and post-conflict situations

In this article, a radical social model of disability lens is taken to illustrate what counts as ‘disability’ within a neoliberal mindset. The South African and disabled activist Vic Finkelstein describes both an ‘outside-in approach’ that looks at the material conditions of how ‘disability’ is constructed and an ‘idealist’ ‘inside-out’ approach, or how people describe experiences of inequality and disablement. The ‘outside-in’ approach is where the focus of a social model of disability should be in terms of trying to understand how global capitalism or neoliberalism is (dis)ablest and creating impairment. The ‘inside-out’ approach is ‘idealist’ and where the other ‘components’ of the model such as ‘rights’ are located. This article begins with an overview of the relationship between disability and conflict. The article then moves to an inside-out framework to examine how disability is still viewed and created through a medical humanitarianism. Using an outside-in framework, I illustrate how states become disabled through neoliberalism. Lastly, I discuss how ensuring greater participation and rethinking neoliberalism in terms of sustainability may provide us with a way forward in a humanitarian setting and rethinking of disability.

Mothering the "Useless": Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery

Abstract For decades, scholars have studied virtually every aspect of day-to-day enslaved life in antebellum America, giving particular attention to the nuances and intricacies of slave family and community life. Yet few have considered the social relations of disabilities in these most intimate and closely guarded spaces or questioned, in particular, the challenges that women faced navigating the complex experience of enslaved motherhood when their children lived with disabilities. Since the United States’s economically driven regime of chattel slavery reduced human beings to property valued according to their ability to labor, slaveholders categorized those with disabilities as "useless" and sometimes even "chargeable" (negatively valued because the cost of their care was a financial liability). This pragmatic, calculated reasoning left disabled, enslaved children particularly vulnerable because slaveholders devalued them as property and potential future laborers, privileging mothers’ labor over their disabled children’s presumably irrelevant needs. But these beliefs also sometimes worked to enslaved mothers’ advantage since disabled children were less likely to be bought or sold away. Even then, however, women still confronted a myriad of challenges in meeting their children’s daily needs and facing other unusual, often emotionally charged situations. For instance, owners sometimes sent their children elsewhere for surgeries to "correct" their disabilities, while others simply refused to invest in their medical needs. Disability also intersected with enslaved motherhood when women experienced disabilities, which sometimes helped them avoid separation from their children, though often as a result of extremely disturbing circumstances. Finally, because mothers were forced to rely on others for childcare while they worked, bondspeople with disabilities oftentimes took on this important task and social role. The presence of disabilities among enslaved people, then, shaped many aspects of mothers’ and children’s relationships to one another in ways that were both positive and negative. Grappling with the complex realities of enslaved motherhood through the lens of disability reveals that women rejected slaveholders’ definitions of their children; they adapted, resisted, and persevered to ensure that they mothered their "useless" children to the best of their ability, despite living under an institution that inherently devalued them.

What Adrienne Knew: Living Bioethics

AbstractAdrienne Asch pioneered a way of doing bioethics that few are brave enough to attempt. In addition to summoning logic, arguing values, and applying reasoning to cases, Adrienne lived bioethics. Without compromising the strength of her analysis, she grounded that analysis explicitly in her own lived experience of disability. Hers was the view from somewhere—a deep invitation to others to rethink everything from embryo selection to end‐of‐life decisions through the lens of lived disability.

Disability in the Christian Tradition: Overview and Historiographic Reflection

This article summarizes and overviews Brian Brock and John Swinton's Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (2012), and reflects on its contribution from a historiographic perspective. In particular, this discussion explores how the lens of disability invites new approaches to the history of the Christian tradition that opens up fresh perspectives on narrating Christian history, recounting the history of Christian thought, and reconsidering the theological legacies of major thinkers.

“It’s a Hidden Issue”: Exploring the experiences of women with HIV-associated neurocognitive challenges using a disability framework

Purpose: To use the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) to explore the experiences of women living with self-identified HIV-associated neurocognitive challenges. Method: This interpretive, qualitative study involved key informant interviews with 16 women with self-identified HIV-associated neurocognitive challenges. Data were collected through 60–90 min, in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was performed using an inductive approach. Theoretical analysis then used the ICF to reconceptualize the data using a disability lens. Results: Participants perceived impairments (e.g. memory loss, difficulty multi-tasking) and participation restrictions (e.g. parenting, work roles) resulting from their neurocognitive challenges as having a larger impact on their daily lives than activity limitations (e.g. difficulty with chores). Participants held contrasting views about parenting: women with children drew strength from parenting whereas women without children worried that parenting could compromise their health. Participation in work and volunteering roles was viewed as integral to managing neurocognitive challenges and health overall. Conclusions: Conceptualizing neurocognitive challenges through a disability lens focuses attention on how impairments interact with other realities in these women’s lives. This exploratory study reveals the need for future research exploring perceptions among people living with HIV-associated neurocognitive challenges with attention to aging and among other vulnerable groups.Implications for RehabilitationFor people who can access treatment, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is experienced as a chronic illness.HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder is one of the comorbidities with a high-prevalence rate that can impact quality of life and everyday functioning.This study reveals that impairments experienced by women with HIV-associated neurocognitive challenges are linked with a range of participation restrictions.These restrictions need addressing through rehabilitation.

Looking through the learning disability lens: inclusive education and the learning disability embodiment

Inclusion as an educational approach for students with disabilities is a widely debated topic. The concept of inclusion is often referred to as a philosophy that all pupils – regardless of ability and other differences – should be included within age-appropriate community schools [Stainback, S.B. and Stainback, W. eds., 1996. Inclusion: a guide for educators. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing, Artiles, A.J. and Kozleski, E.B., 2007. Beyond convictions: interrogating culture, history, and power in inclusive education. Language Arts, 84 (4), 357–365]. This educational approach has been scrutinized for its capacity to meet the needs of students with and without disabilities Lindsay, G., 2003. Inclusive education: a critical perspective. British journal of special education, 30 (1), 3–12; Kauffman, J.M. and Hallahan, D.P., 2005. Special education: what it is and why we need it. Toronto, Canada: Pearson; McPhail, J.C. and Freeman, J.C., 2005. Beyond prejudice: thinking towards genuine inclusion. Learning disability research and practice, 20 (4), 254–267]. However, as Bodgan and Taylor [1990. Looking at the bright side: a positive approach to qualitative policy and evaluation research. Qualitative sociology, 13 (2), 183–192.] point out, the ‘does it work’ framework for analyzing inclusion programs for persons with disabilities is not beneficial to practitioners and researchers who believe that ‘integration into society is a moral question rather than an empirical one’ (p. 187). Instead of questioning whether inclusion ‘works’ or is ‘effective’ for students with learning disabilities (SLD), this study uses a critical geography perspective to examine from the SLDs' perspective how educational spaces are as socially and discursively constructed as places of inclusion and exclusion. This paper also examines interest in how these constructions of places are situated in relation to provincial and regional inclusive education policies.

Saints, Sages, and Victims: Endorsement of and Resistance to Cultural Stereotypes in Memoirs by Parents of Children with Disabilities

Memoirs written by parents of children with disabilities are a significant recent genre. Most are problematic: through their use of grief, their emphasis on a medicalized model, and their framing of the child's disabilities, these memoirs represent the child not as a person but as a problem with which the parents have had to grapple. Many memoirs, however, simultaneously work to humanize and value the children and reframe our cultural view of "typical" personhood through the lens of disability. This complex, popular genre reveals the powerful hold that formulaic narratives have, but also offers glimpses of ways in which formulaic narratives can and should be resisted and overturned. The books I examine demonstrate that the family can be a site that both bolsters oppressive cultural models of disability and profoundly challenges them.Keywordsmemoir, children with disabilities, parents, grief, dehumanization, pleasure, resistance

Embracing Limits, Queering Embodiment: Creating/Creative Possibilities for Disability Theology

Embracing Limits, Queering Embodiment:Creating/Creative Possibilities for Disability Theology Deborah Beth Creamer (bio) I am grateful for Sharon Betcher's reflections, particularly the ways in which she honors Nancy Eiesland's legacy while simultaneously encouraging us to imagine new directions for feminist disability theology. Not only does she provide a rich center point for this roundtable discussion but she also invites [End Page 123] conversation that I hope will go far beyond this set of essays. My reflections here focus on Betcher's distinction between flesh and body, which I find full of possibility in at least three significant and interrelated ways: as a foundational challenge to the idea of "normal," as a point of contact with other academic discourses (particularly queer theories), and as a site of potential for engagement around pain. I come to this essay with a particular commitment, partly based in a concern with and disappointment about the compartmentalization of "disability" within religious and theological discourses. While disability (both as a topic and as an identity) is more present in the academy and in theological education than it was at the time Eiesland published her groundbreaking 1994 book, its place is still tenuous and partial. Too often I hear disability as an "and" statement—as, for example, when we talk about race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability. When religious studies or seminary courses engage disability at all, it is often in a separate unit or discussion (often at the end of the semester), an addendum or afterthought. Those of us who work in the area of disability theology are often considered to be dealing with "special" interests (reminiscent of "special" education), and are typically (and uncritically) assumed to have a particular connection to these issues—not because we have/are flesh, as Betcher might claim, but because we must have a "personal" (read: nonacademic) experience with disability/impairment. These sorts of claims and positionings are frustrating, not only insofar as they negate complexity and ignore the fleshly realities that Betcher so helpfully names but also because they position disability as a theme and experience best left to closets, corners, and other closed spaces. Betcher offers us some openings, some possibilities for conversational intersection. Her appeal to flesh, rather than to body, is one such space. Two important claims are embedded in her argument against body. The first is that the use of body invites, as she writes, "the hallucinatory delusion of wholeness" (108). In other words, body has been taken to be another (disembodied) ideal that no one can attain. The second, related but yet somewhat different, is that we too often take body to be a generic term, leading to what Betcher describes as "naturalization or normalization." In this way, the term body had been taken as shorthand for "normal body," requiring a signifier for other kinds of bodies ("disabled body" being one example among many). I would argue that these two errors are interrelated, as we all have neither ideal nor normal bodies, and yet that they must be unpacked or challenged from slightly different perspectives. A corollary here might be found in other areas of feminist discourse where both the ideal woman and the generic woman have had to be deconstructed—the first to show that women were, in fact, human, living, people; the second to highlight ways in which the assumption of a generic type acts to "white"-wash or erase critical differences between and among these human, living, people. I find the lens of disability to be a promising way to challenge both the ideal [End Page 124] body and the normal body. Clearly, this is significant for people who already wear the label of disability, as we are often identified as those whose bodies are least normal—and, from this position on the margins, we can first make apparent and then challenge the assumptions of the center. Yet it is also important to recognize that this is not just a project for or of people "with disabilities." Here I find Sallie McFague's proposal of attention epistemology to be helpful: "the kind of knowing that focuses on embodied differences."1 Betcher makes a similar claim when she invites us...

An Ever-Expanding Inclusiveness: <i>Bending over Backwards</i>

An Ever-Expanding InclusivenessBending over Backwards Tom O'Connor (bio) Bending Over Backwards By Lennard Davis; New York University Press, 2002 In his recent collection of essays, Bending over Backwards, Lennard Davis states the following: my solution to the problem of identity is not the inclusion of disability on the roster of favored identities. Rather, the point is that identity studies itself is limited by the necessarily taxonomic peculiarity of its endeavor. The list of identities will only grow larger, tied to an ever-expanding idea of inclusiveness. After all, when all identities are finally included, there will be no identity. When studies focus on alterity, and when alterity must be included, then, in the full plenum of inclusion, alterity ceases to be Other. (30) The above quote outlines the book's purpose in potentially controversial terms. Bending over Backwards is not just a re-evaluation of the disability theories Davis first presented in Enforcing Normalcy (Verso 1995); it is a more extensive look at how notions of disability challenge other political assumptions and privileges. In this sense, disability theories inherently possess a multimodal, cultural critique: not only can literary theory and identity-politics be retheorized through the lens of disability but also the assumptions that often operate unchecked in the legal system, scientific study, and ethics. Davis clearly demonstrates how disability is unique in cultural ideology because it productively deconstructs the most fundamental "binary" in Western culture—that is, the opposition between "the normal" and "the abnormal." For this fact alone, Davis's book is a significant contribution to cultural studies at large. Davis takes his title Bending over Backwards from a rather blatant [End Page 161] bias operating in the legal system today: courts have continually sided with employers who must make "exceptions" for disabled workers, coding such "exceptions"—in legal language—as wholly negative and un-American. For example, the courts in the case Vande Zande vs. State of Wisconsin Department of Administration describe an employer as one who must "bend over backwards to accommodate a disabled worker" (126). Such problematic social "judgments" are what Davis's book attacks head-on from multiple perspectives, especially in the chapters "The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism" and "Crips Strike Back." Consequently, Davis claims that we need a new umbrella term for both literary as well as cultural studies, one that can overcome the problematic, humanistic/ableist strain that is one of postmodernism's key flaws; his new term is dismodernism, which establishes a nonidealized ethics that can affirm all that makes life nonideal, namely, our limitations and our mortality: politics have been directed toward making all identities equal under a model of the rights of the dominant, often white, male, "normal," subject. In a dismodernist mode, the ideal is not a hypostatization of the normal (that is, dominant) subject, but aims to create a new category based on the partial, incomplete subject whose realization is not in autonomy and independence but dependency and interdependence. This is a very different notion from subjectivity organized around wounded identities; rather, all humans are seen as wounded. (30) Hence, dependence and interdependence should no longer be viewed as pejorative terms, since the hypostatized desire for "perfection"/ "the ideal" is nothing but an alienating illusion. Davis further comments: "we are all disabled by injustice and oppression of various kinds. We are all nonstandard . . . " (31–32). Disability is a reality that everyone must face, since anyone can become physically disabled at any moment—especially later in life. Davis's theorization of dismodernism is a potential link for all identities, regardless of class, race, gender, or any other identity marker. However, it must be noted that "dismodern" disability theories do not attempt to demean the identity-politics based on those particular identity markers; instead, they offer a more inclusive logic that doesn't only privilege certain wounded identities: all "attempts to remake the identity inevitably end up relying on the categories first used to create the oppression" (19). Davis acknowledges that there will [End Page 162] always be some minority group that isn't considered a favored category, such as "Bosnian mothers, Albanian Serbs, or Ethiopian Jews," and so forth (89...