Whose Experience and Judgments on Disability? Module 9

Whose Experience and Judgments on Disability? Module 9

3.4 Whose Experience and Judgments?

The final danger in emphasizing the experience of stigmatization is that it will exclude the voices of many people classified as having disabilities but who do not see themselves as disabled or stigmatized. People with disabilities include millions who do not tend to speak in social model terms and who may not typically speak to their social, as opposed to their medical situation (although they do file discrimination complaints under the ADA when they think it appropriate). People who have back problems, cancer histories, Parkinson's disease, Type II diabetes, stroke, emphysema, forms of dementia, mood disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse, or HIV do not typically count themselves as part of the “disability community.” The case for including such people is based in part on the shared experience of socially-mediated exclusion. For example, a person who has difficulty breathing because of emphysema and cannot visit friends because she cannot walk to a distant bus stop is disadvantaged by social organization in an analogous way to the person with paraplegia who can't meet friends in inaccessible restaurants.

Such inclusiveness, however, requires an acceptance of diverse attitudes and opinions. Even if the majority of people we would classify as having disabilities perceived societal mistreatment and institutional barriers to be more oppressive than their diagnoses, not all of them would share that view or agree on the best response. African-Americans have different views about affirmative action, and many women do not believe that the option of legal abortion is essential for women's full participation in society. Disability theorists can find it frustrating that most non-disabled people in bioethics dispute their claims about their experience, but those theorists must respond to whatever challenge to the social model is posed by people with disabilities who see their condition, and not society, as the major impediment to their living rewarding lives. Many people with both congenital and acquired disabilities have said that they don't want cures but do want societal change, but that hardly warrants the charge that Christopher Reeve wasn't speaking from his experience of disability when he argued that what he wanted was “cure” and not social change (Johnson, 2003; Shakespeare, 2006).