Disability Definitions

Definitions of disability are mediated by individual and collective human perception and interpretation, and vary historically and culturally. Disability definitions, then, are socially constructed rather than inherent in nature. Definitions of disability are found widely in discourses including personal, sociopolitical, medical-therapeutic, legal, educational, and academic. Predominantly, disability has been defined in contrast to what is considered to be “normal,” “healthy,” and “fit.” Most commonly, disability is understood as deficiency, defect, deviance, or injury, and the person with the disability as lacking substantial ability for full participation in society. Typically, disability is seen as an individual's problem requiring a solution and necessitating eradication, control, repair, or therapy.

Because of variation in definition and identification, it is difficult to determine how many women, worldwide, are considered or consider themselves to be disabled. However, it is possible that the incidence of disability for women exceeds the incidence for men. Because gender is a social determinant of health, and because women are at a disadvantage in terms of access to recourses worldwide, women experience higher rates of illness and disease. Furthermore, globally, maternal conditions are leading causes of disability for women.

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Despite progress made in the 20th century, disability was and is still defined in contrast to what is considered “normal.”

While categorized variously, disabilities can be understood as developmental, learning, physical, including motor, chronic illness and disease, sensory, psychiatric, and mental health. Disabilities are defined as visible or invisible, and short term or permanent. In most discourses, disability is distinguished from impairment, impairment being loss or abnormality in structure or function, and disability being the restriction or limitation to perform within what is considered a normal range. How disability is defined and by whom has significant personal, social, and political consequences for disabled persons. Dominant definitions of disability have served to exclude and “other” persons who are characterized as deviating from socially constructed norms.

Although definitions of disability vary by time, place, and discourse, one might be required to, or choose to self identify as “disabled” so as to become eligible for various types of supports and equitable accommodations that are understood to “level the playing field” in social, political, legal, medical, and educational arenas. However, as Marcia Rioux has noted, for disabled persons, human rights are more likely to be treated as charitable privileges than legal entitlements. Unfortunately, regardless of what definition of disability one uses, human rights violations are daily occurrences for disabled persons.

Prior to the Enlightenment and the rise of science, disability was viewed as mythical, as a message from an otherworldly reality. In ancient Greece, a visible disability was seen as a message from the gods, and infants born with visible disabilities were often returned to the gods, as offerings, by being left in the elements to die. Ancient Hebrews understood disability as a sign of imperfection that was not compatible with the sacred. Christianity has long been ambivalent about disabled persons, understanding disabled persons as being in need of charity and the disability as a punishment for sin. By the 1800s, in the developed world, people labeled as having intellectual deficiencies or social differences were considered “lunatics,” “idiots,” “morons,” and “imbeciles,” and were housed on poor farms and asylums with others considered to be social deviants requiring exclusion from “normal” society. It was not uncommon, for example, to institutionalize women labeled as “mad” because they did not follow expected social roles or their husband's rules.

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