Stigma and the Social Construction of Disability Module 7
If “baby boomers” who have not learned electronic communication become a despised, as opposed to merely statistical, minority, and if, as a result, they become cut off from friends and acquaintances who rely on email and social media for long-distance communication, and who dismiss them as luddites and fogeys, they will learn something about the social construction of disability. They will learn even more if they cannot cross the “digital divide” or can do so only at considerable economic cost or cognitive strain, or if they are still regarded as luddites and fogeys even when they do. They will experience something of the stigma and discrimination that cut across impairments.
The second type of disability experience, then, is of attitudinal barriers to ordinary activity that are facts of life for people with disabilities. According to the social model, which highlights these barriers, the “disability experience” that links people with cystic fibrosis to people with epilepsy, learning disabilities, or cerebral palsy is one of having to deal daily with the largely negative responses of others. These negative responses involve several elements. The most discussed is overt stigmatization and discrimination: being treated as a social outcast, losing out on jobs, friends, or partners, because other people do not want to interact with a person with a disability, or enduring grossly inadequate accommodation because reasonable accommodation is thought too costly or troublesome.
But there are also less overt ways that society makes living with a disability difficult. Simply being different from the majority of the population, in a way that the majority makes salient, can make people with disabilities feel isolated or alienated. This experience is similar to those not only of other stigmatized minorities, such as African-Americans or LGBTs, but of people with atypical characteristics who may not form a distinct political or cultural minority but are nonetheless constantly reminded of their difference. For example, people whose spouses have died and older adults who are single for whatever reason may feel excluded from social events intended for couples, or face the presumption that they have a (usually opposite-sex) partner (“And what does your husband do?”).
It is in the social construction of disability that we move from the particularity of any one disability toward the common social experiences of people with disabilities. Stigma, discrimination, and imputations of difference and inferiority are all parts of the social experience of disability. Being greeted at a party or a conference not by “hello” but by “do you need any help?” and having virtually every aspect of one's interests, tastes, and personality attributed to one's disability are also parts of the disability experience. As one writer describes it, if he cooks it is because he doesn't want to be seen in public; if he eats in restaurants it is because he can't cook (Brickner, 1976). Disability becomes a “master status,” preventing people from playing any adult social role and eclipsing sex, race, age, occupation, or family (Goffman, 1963; Gliedman and Roth, 1980). Many nondisabled people assume that people with disabilities won't make good partners and cannot or should not become parents (Safilios-Rothschild, 1970; Shakespeare, 1996; Asch and Fine, 1988; Wates, 1997). People with disabilities are perceived to be globally helpless based on their need for assistance with some facets of daily life (Wright, 1983), fueling the conviction that they are unable to render the help needed for successful partnership or parenting. Most nondisabled people, after all, are not told that they are inspirations simply for giving the correct change at the drugstore. Perhaps there would not even be a “disability experience” in a world without the daily indignities, barriers, and prejudices that characterize life with disability almost anywhere.
Just as there is great variation in how members of racial and sexual minorities experience stigmatization, however, disabled people's experience also varies. In claiming that the experience of stigma unites disabled people, we must be careful to acknowledge those differences. For example, a major source of variation is whether the disability is visible or invisible (Davis, 2005; Banks and Kaschak, 2003). Whereas visibly disabled people must deal with being instantly classified as “different” and inferior, people with invisible disabilities are often placed in the stressful and exhausting position of having to convince others that they are “really” disabled and not asking for special treatment. The alternative is to keep quiet and forgo needed assistance, which carries other costs, such as the stress of keeping a secret or trying to decide if a particular disclosure is safe (Schneider and Conrad, 1985; Davis, 2005).
In addition, disabled people who are also members of other stigmatized groups may experience a distinct kind of stigmatization that is “more than the sum of its parts.” For example, disabled women are disproportionately affected by society's obsession with body image: they must confront not only sexism and prejudice against disabled people, but a particularly virulent combination of the two that stigmatizes women who do not fulfill a narrow ideal of feminine beauty (Crawford and Ostrove, 2003) or are thought incapable of performing the stereotypically female role of nurturer (Asch and Fine, 1988). In a similar way, both African-Americans and disabled people are frequently stereotyped as dependent or ineffectual. And so African-Americans who are also disabled face a particularly high burden in overcoming these stereotypes.
Moreover, some would argue that to the extent that people with disabilities have distinct and common experiences, they are due to embodiment as well as stigmatization. A disputed but much-discussed strand of feminist philosophy holds that the experience of being female differs in important ways from being male, regardless of cultural position, discrimination, or political and economic power. On this view, women differ in some important ways from men because of the biology of femaleness and of childbearing, and those differences should be seen as gateways into philosophical and moral understanding (Whitbeck, 1972). Discussions of “race” are similarly complex: is the experience of “race” entirely socially constructed, or is there a biological component after all? (See generally APA Newsletter on the Black Experience, 2000). Debates about the experience of disability can be enriched by understanding these debates about other minority groups, even if disability differs in significant respects. On the one hand, the biological reality of much significant impairment affects the experience of those with the impairments. On the other hand, different impairments shape experience in very different ways. Clearly, “the experience of disability” is complex, and usefully compared to the experience of other stigmatized minorities.
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