A Few Thoughts on Disability's Definition

I have come to appreciate more how “disability is relative to a person's physical, social, and cultural environment” and “many (conditions) do in fact cause disability given the demands and lack of support in the environments of the people affected” (Wendell, 1996, p. 36). Conversations I've had and readings that I've done recently emphasize that “stereotypes of disabled people as dependent, morally depraved, superhumanly heroic, asexual, and/or pitiful are still the most common cultural portrayals of people with disabilities” (Wendell, 1996, p. 43). A recent article I wrote about Helen Keller was helpful for me in my learning because I had the chance to explore how she defies these stereotypes.

My exploration of Helen Keller’s life also led me to examine more closely what Wendell (1996) describes as modern societies’ split of human concerns between private and public worlds. I am still exploring my own experience as a woman with a disability and how this split between public and private worlds, and the fact that I, as a woman with a disability, “fit two ‘private’ categories” has influenced and continues to influence my life experiences (p. 52). I proudly come “into the public world with…a devalued body” and, in so doing, resist the splitting of these two worlds and the relegation of women and persons with disabilities to a world of death, pain, weakness, illness, recovery and the negative (p. 40). I also consider that “when a troubled-persons industry recasts social problems as private troubles it can treat, it is removing them from the social arena that invites political debate” – when the “adversity is not depicted as a lack of opportunity, discrimination, institutionalization, and ostracism…(but rather,) it is the personal burden of their own body or means of functioning,” political debate is no longer raised and society is no longer accountable for the barriers it sets up (Petersilia, 1996, p. 446; Linton, 1998, p. 25).


References:
Petersilia, Joan (1996). The deaf agenda: Enriching the Deaf-world. In H. Lane (Ed.), Journeying into the Deaf-world (pp. 408-450). Dawnsign Press.

Wendell, Susan. (1996). The Social Construction of Disability. London: Routledge.

Linton, Simi. (1998). Claiming Disability. New York: New York University Press.