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Radical Model

This approach to disability looks at disability entirely as a social construct and does not separate impairment from disability like the social model.

Radical disability activists acknowledge that we do not control the definition of disability – that it is defined by those with power to their benefit.

Women, queer people, trans people, racialized people, poor people and other marginalized people were all considered disabled at one point in history, largely under the umbrella of feeble-minded and/or degenerate.

Radical disability activists are very critical of certain groups’ attempts to get more privilege by defining themselves as other than disabled. Members of the Deaf and psychiatrized communities have attempted to distance themselves from other disabled people by saying essentially “there is nothing wrong with us. We are a linguistic minority or we think and experience the world differently but we are not disabled. There is nothing wrong with us.”

The radical disability model says there is nothing wrong with any of us.

We argue that disability is simply defined as those who are externally identified as disabled and those who self-identify as disabled.

To us, disability is not a point of individual or social tragedy but a natural and necessary part of human diversity. The tragedy of disability is not our minds and bodies but oppression, exclusion and marginalization.

We do not need to be cured. We do not need charity. We need respect, equality and access.

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In-text links in this post:

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Social Model

The Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) separated the idea of disability from the idea of impairment in 1976. They said:

Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society.

by this definition requiring a wheelchair is the impairment where the inability to enter certain buildings is the disability. This definition sent shock waves through the disability rights community.

This definition set impairment as the physical or mental “limitations” apart from the social barriers that are disabling.

Michael Oliver, a disabled British academic and author of Understanding Disability: from Theory to Practice a disabled British academic, expanded on this idea, saying:

It is not individual limitations, of whatever kind, which are the cause of the problem but society’s failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure the needs of disabled people are taken in to account in its social organization.

The separation of impairment and disability was a revolutionary idea at the time. It took the discussion away from disabled people’s own bodies and minds and made it about social conditions, access and oppression.

The social model has become the broadly accepted view of disability by most disabled activists and academics.

They have promoted it because it puts forward the position that there are fundamental problems with the way that society approaches disabled people. While this is very much the case, allowing this dichotomy reinforces the ableist notions that there are problems with or flaws in all disabled people’s bodies or minds rather than acknowledging that disability is an aspect of basic human diversity.

The social model establishes or reinforces what is normal and people with “impairments” as being outside of that.

At the time, the social model was a revolutionary idea. But now, it is limiting and outdated.

Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson have argued that, like the sex/gender dichotomy that was used by feminists to advance their goals in the past, the impairment/disability duality is both socially constructed and limiting to contemporary disability discourse. They state that:

The words we use and the discourses we deploy to represent impairment are socially and culturally determined. There is no pure or natural body, existing outside of discourse.

The idea that disability is socially constructed and impairment is a biologically reality, as promoted by the social model, only serves to reinforce ableist notions. Like disability, impairment is also a social construct. This is why the Radical Model is a far better way to view disability.

This doesn’t mean that there are no biological factors; rather, our social perceptions inform how we relate to those functions and place social value on states of being that may otherwise be neutral.

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In-text links in this post:

Michael Oliver

Understanding Disability: from Theory to Practice

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Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson

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What is Normal?

Normal is relatively new.

According to Lennard J. Davis, in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body:

A common assumption would be that some concept of the norm must have always existed. After all, people seem to have an inherent desire to compare themselves to others. But the idea of a norm is less a condition of human nature than it is a feature of a certain kind of society.

…this concept ‘normal,’ ‘average,’ ‘abnormal’ – all entered the European languages rather late in human history. The word ‘normal’ as ‘constituting, conforming go, not deviating from, the common type or standard, regular, usual’ only enters the English language around 1840. (Previously, the word had meant ‘perpendicular’…)

We are taught that normal is good, disability is not normal and, so, disability is bad.

However, normal functioning is simply a line drawn arbitrarily. Normal itself is frequently held out in authority when it is an abstract concept that fails to provide an adequate definition of the human existence. Are people who are born with one arm or who have low IQ test scores abnormal? It depends on the set of criteria that one uses. By some standards one could say that these groups of people are rare in the general population. However, by others, if you look at how many people have one arm or low IQ scores, you will find that there are a great many of them, which may make them normal. Indeed, one could say that they are probably not typical or average. However, speaking of someone’s probable lack of typicalness in respect to one aspect of the person’s mind, body or identity does not ring with the same authority as saying that someone is not normal.

Even if one could establish what normal is or isn’t in relation to disability/impairment, there are other problems with normal. For instance, autistic people are commonly described as having “peaks of ability.” There are some things that many autistic people are very good at and other things that they cannot do. Michelle Dawson, an autistic woman takes issue with this view, saying in a Quirks and Quarks interview:

it isn’t that we have these sort of peaks and valleys it is that we are fundamentally different. The processes that we apply to these various tasks are different, our brains will do things differently…if you have normal as a baseline it will produce this result of peaks and valleys that isn’t a collections of excesses and deficits attached to a normal person it is just that it’s the product of a fundamental difference in how our brains process information

As Dr. Laurent Mottron, a psychiatrist who works with Dawson, put it in the same interview, “you do not describe a dog as a negative of a cat and we still do neuroscience research of autism by describing autism as defects of typical mankind” . In other words, you cannot take what is normal behavior for a cat (or an autistic person) and say it is abnormal because it is not what dogs (or non-autistic people) generally do. The same can be said of many groups, while some groups of peoples’ minds and bodies act differently than some other groups of people that does make them inferior, simply different. You cannot use the same scale to measure people in these groups as you do to measure people who are not members of those groups.