Introduction, Background, and History

Part 1: Models of Disability

It might not be possible to explain the idea or give examples of models of disability if it were not for some important events of the 1960s. Both the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism—the first wave was earlier in the 20th century, and women's suffrage was among its achievements—set a precedent for disabled people to demand equal rights in the face of widespread prejudice. Advocates of racial and ethnic minorities and of women had developed a critique of prejudice based on the notion that members of these marginalized groups are not marginalized because of anything inherent to members of the groups, but rather because of misguided beliefs about them and the practices and policies those beliefs [Page 2]engender. Those attitudes, assumptions, and the actions they motivate are the product of historical trends, social conventions, and false ideas about minority groups and their members. While there is a wealth of current work taking place on disability issues in a global context, this volume focuses mostly on an American context.

From that American context, in 1966, sociologists James L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality, which argues that all social patterns are based on concepts people develop over a long history of group interactions and the roles members of a society imagine for themselves and for others. Berger and Luckmann's explanation of the relative nature of both knowledge and social conventions provided a foundation for civil rights advocates. Although ideas about the social construction of reality and knowledge had been around for millennia, in the 1960s and beyond, minority groups and many others embraced what has come to be called social constructionism. Social constructionism is an important backdrop for thinking about models of disability. If knowledge about society and its members is flexible, then we can emphasize different parts of the disability experience in ways that lead to very different conclusions about what disability means and how we ought to interact with disability in our world.

For example, if we think of disability as a primarily medical phenomenon, we are thinking through a medical model of disability. Under this paradigm disability is a property of human bodies, a deficit or lack in the human body that belongs to the individual whose body it is. The medical model views disability as a departure from the normative functioning of healthy human bodies. Medical professionals are best equipped to address disability, and they do so as they would illnesses and diseases. In the event that the medical professional cannot provide a cure, the disability is considered “chronic” or, in instances where an individual was born with her disability, “congenital.” In the humanities, the medical model often relates to areas of inquiry such as medical ethics, medical humanities, or some studies of illness in narrative. New York University's School of Medicine, for example, has a medical humanities division dedicated to the way artworks and humanities scholarship contribute to the practice of medicine. Similarly, Columbia University has a program in Narrative Medicine, the aim of which is to incorporate narratives of illness, disease, and disability into medical practice. Thinking through the medical model in the arts might also lead to an interest in art or music therapy. Oliver [Page 3]Sacks's “medical anthropology” books, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), are good examples of popular literature rooted in the medical model: Sacks writes from the perspective of a neurologist even as he “humanizes” the individuals profiled in his books. In all of these cases, artworks and humanities scholarship on disability serve medicine as the central paradigm under which to think about disability. While the medical model is the dominant paradigm for thinking about disability today, it finds its most substantial counterpart in the social model.

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