The Social Model of Disability in India

Politics of Identity and Power

Ranjita Dawn

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367677053
• eBook ISBN: 9781000394221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

This book presents various paradigms and debates on the diverse issues concerning disability in India from a sociological perspective. It studies disability in the context of its relationship with concepts such as culture/religion, media, literature, and gender to address the inherent failures in challenging prevalent stereotypical and oppressive ideologies. It traces the theological history of disability and studies the present-day universalized social notions of disablement. The volume challenges the predominant perception of disability being only a medical or biological concern and provides deeper insight into the impact of representation through an analysis of the discourse and criteria for 'normalcy' in films from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyzes the formation of perspectives through a study of representation of disability in print media, especially children's literature, comics, and graphic novels. The author also discusses the policies and provisions available in India for students with disabilities, especially women who have to also contend with gender inequality and gender-based discrimination.

The book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of disability studies, educational psychology, special education, sociology, gender studies, politics of education, and media ecology. It will also be useful for educationalists, NGOs, special educators, disability specialists, media and communication professionals, and counsellors.

1

Sameness and Difference

Transcending the Gap

Categorizing Disability as an Identity: A Symmetrical Sameness or an Asymmetrical Difference

The issue of ‘exceptionality’ has always been considered as synonymous to being associated with ‘stigmatization’, ‘exclusion’ and ‘isolation’ of individuals considered exceptional or ‘different’ and subjecting them to marginalization in income, education, employment, relationships and other facets of life. Disability has also been perceived as a neglected category not only with regard to social policies but also in academic researches where class, race, gender, etc., were accepted as the criteria to delineate and bring the focus on to the ‘excluded’ sections of society. They have represented a segment of the population that is most backward, least served and grossly neglected, having been customarily denied their right to self-assertion, identity and development. It is quite dismal that although research evidence also prove that no two disabilities are similar in nature, people with any form of disability continue to be treated as a separate category of people with characteristics similar to each other but different from the rest.

Though it is difficult to generalize the patterns of historical representations of disability in literary, artistic and visual media due to differentiations among cultures in giving meaning and form to it, a survey of disability representations helps us to visualize the extent to which human differences posed substantial conflicts for all communities. While for some like Nietzsche, the disabled were ‘parasites’ worthy of ‘extermination’, for others they were objects of humour. In societies where economic survival was difficult, elimination of such people was considered justified since they were regarded as weak and dependent members and hence a liability to the society.

Fraser (1997) posits gender as one such bivalent collectivity which signifies those excluded communities that are marked out both by the politico-economic and the cultural structures of society. Hence such groups are disadvantaged both by ‘socioeconomic maldistribution and cultural misconception in forms where neither of these injustices is an indirect effect of the other, but where both are primary and co-original’. Elaborating on Fraser’s categorization, Hugemark and Roman (2002) mentioned that persons with disabilities are also another bivalent collectivity because ‘the disadvantages facing disabled persons are rooted in the economic structure as well as in cultural beliefs, norms and attitudes’. The consequence of this bivalence is that ‘collectivities of disabled persons need to simultaneously claim their specificity and deny it’ (ibid.: 12).

The individual approach to disability and its narrow and reductionist nature failed to consider the significance of psychological and sociological causes resulting in disabling conditions, thus causing individuals to feel receptive, passive and compliant which promotes human helplessness. Such representations ultimately portray subjugated bodies not only as inadequate or unrestrained but at the same time as redundant and expendable. Bodies marked and selected by such systems are targeted for elimination by varying historical and cross-cultural practices.

Moreover, the medical model’s insistence on connecting impairment and disability causes has made some disability studies scholars ignore the critical aspects of living with something that creates a barrier to life (i.e., impairment), that resides within the body and that has nothing or little to do with societal barriers (i.e., disability).

The arrival of a social model provided much relief as it fosters a more humane view of disability. Reeve (2004: 83–84) argues that an extended social model that includes the detailed experiences of individual disabled people’s experiences of disability makes room for the discussion of the ‘psycho-emotional dimensions of disability’. Reeve (2004: 87) supports the notion of internalized oppression as a perilous factor, resulting from the incorporation of the social values and prejudices held about disabled people. This form of oppression affects disabled people’s self-esteem and has the danger of shaping disabled people’s thoughts and actions. Reeve (2004: 89) states that she considers

internalised oppression to be one of the most important manifestations of psycho-emotional disablism because of its unconscious and insidious effects on the psycho-emotional well-being of disabled people and because it has a direct impact on restricting who someone can be.

The interactionist perspective reinstated the role of ‘significant others’, which Scott (1969) referred to as ‘those people who have the greatest influence on an individual’s evaluation of himself and who have the greatest impact on his acceptance and rejection of social norms’, and facilitates the manner in which people with disabilities give shape to their ‘self’ (Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934). Cooley (1902) maintained that an individual develops his conception of the self by way of imagining what others think of him, by way of a ‘looking glass’ process. Later expanding upon Cooley’s looking-glass self, Mead (1934) held that self-concept arises through social interaction to anticipate how others’ reaction can cause an individual to behave accordingly and to therefore perceive the world as the ‘others’. Hence Mead (1934) also emphasized the aspect of self being social and held that an individual comes to know about himself or herself by role-playing.

However, the nature of interaction could extend from one of acceptance and compassion to one of labelling and stigmatization. Referring to the concept of stigma, Goffman (1969) maintained that the physically impaired, those with mental disorder, homosexuals and members of racial and religious minorities are viewed by the society as ‘not quite human’ but as deviants from the ‘anticipated norms’ (Vernon, 1999). The stigma attributed brings along with it a certain negative connotation that prevents individuals with disabilities from being treated at par with their non-disabled counterparts.

In relation to this, it is imperative to review the connotation of the term ‘minority’ and for those regarding disability as difference and as a ‘minority group’. Too often ignorance of minority and identity-based work has resulted in the term ‘minority’ being used to reflect a small percentage of the population or a particular culture. Alcoff and Mohanty (2006) in Identity Politics Reconsidered have challenged this and provided a critical clarification by stating that:

Our working definition of ‘minority’ refers to power rather than numbers; it seeks to connect contemporary uses of this crucial term with older debates about the nature and goals of democracy, especially since in formal political democracies power is not shared equally and social groups (defined by gender, race, or sexuality, or disability, for instance) often have unequal access to it. As we are combining a discussion of broadly different movements and programs of inquiry, ‘minority’ is a convenient way to incorporate the diversity of differences and forms of oppression we are concerned to bring into dialogue. (p. 7)

The rise of Postmodernism challenged the existence of ultimate truth which could be discovered through reason and rationality. The Postmodernist perspective later applied to the study of disability resulted in the formulation of a radical sociology of impairment. Postmodernists like Foucault (1973), while studying the power exercised by ‘normal’ people over people with disabilities, reasserted this perspective. Modernity according to them had a pervasive capacity to produce strangers. The limits of tolerance and conformity provided the basis for constructing the aspects of strangeness, while modernity lends support to homogenize and annihilate the differences it invariably produces. The two major viewpoints existing in the generic construction of stranger in modernity regarding people with disabilities are the anthropophagic (assimilationist) strategy by way of the segregationist policies and the anthropoemic (exclusionary) strategy by way of community care. However, both the strategies were an outcome of powerful ‘ill to order’, according to which impairment is constituted in terms of invalidation.

The concept of stranger that resulted from categorization and normalization of the propensities of knowledge was argued by Foucault (1973). According to him, the ‘gaze’ manifests itself more in institutional forms of domination and regulation than in the oppressiveness of intercorporal relationships. Self-surveillance, by which people develop an awareness of how they are through the gaze of others and then modify their behaviour, affects both disabled and non-disabled people. Under such circumstances people with disabilities are subjected to oppression wherein they internalize the prejudices and assumptions held by their non-disabled counterparts. Foucault (1971, 1976) held that medicine and psychoanalysis in addition to the penal system provide examples of disciplinary and regulatory control leading to the criterion of new norms. It is diffusion of the medical discourse that has enabled the medical model view of disability to become widespread at all levels of the society, affecting the manner in which institutions from the government to industry treat disabled people (Chadwick, 1996). According to Foucault:

The dominant society (epitomized) the enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which all events are recorded, in which the slightest movements are supervised … in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among living beings, the sick, and the dead. (1977: 197)

In this relation, ‘normal’ people use the power of fixing, which Sartre (1958) referred to as ‘gaze’, on the disabled people for not conforming to what they consider ‘valid’ behaviour. Sartre (1958) was concerned with the dialectical play of power which manifests itself in the form of ‘gaze’ of others that subject one to objectification and internalization. ‘Gaze’ for him was a ‘constituent power’ i.e., the power to fix an identity or to ‘condemn’ an individual identity wherein the absolute freedom of the solipsistic self is displaced by spatialization and temporization. In other words, the experience of being looked at by others indicates denial of ‘transcendence’ and transformation into a ‘degraded consciousness’. This is also applicable in case of the disabled where the ‘steady and corrosive gaze’ of the non-disabled others institutionalized in medicine highlights the corporeality of ‘truth’ and ‘perfection’ of normality subjects and stigmatizes the impaired for lack of wholeness, coherence and unity. Sartre (1982) referred to this gaze in the ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ as the ‘praxis of oppression’, which is socially constructed and through which the disabled people experience an act of ‘invalidation’, being reduced to the status of an object itself and condemned to an ‘identity’.

In the context of India, Addlakha (2011) mentioned that

Historically in India as elsewhere in the world, there has been a deeprooted cultural antipathy to persons with disabilities. Throughout the ages the disabled have been looked down upon with disdain, almost as if they were sub-human. They have been portrayed as medical anomalies, helpless victims and a lifelong burden on family and society.

(p. 9)

In The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, Wendell (1996) examines how Western philosophical conceptions of the body as separate from and a hindrance to the mind inform contemporary anxieties about bodies ‘out of control’ in general and disabled bodies in particular. The prevailing Western view, as Wendell explains, associates normalcy with the exercise of proper discipline and control over the body. Wendell regards disability as socially constructed and elaborates on it as ‘In ways ranging from social conditions that straight-forwardly create illness, injuries and poor physical functioning to subtle cultural factors that determine standards of normality and exclude those who do not meet them from full participation in their societies’ (p. 36).

Morris (1997) in Pride and Prejudice mentioned that

One of the biggest problems for disabled people is that all these undermining messages, which we receive every day of our lives from the non-disabled world which surrounds us, become part of our way of thinking about ourselves and/or our thinking about other disabled people.

(p. 19)

She expressed her discontent by arguing that

non-disabled people feel that our differentness gives them the right to invade our privacy and make judgements about our lives. Our physical characteristics evoke such strong feelings that people often have to express them in some way. At the same time they feel able to impose their feelings on us because we are not considered to be autonomous human beings.

(23, 24)

Based on his own experiences and those of other people with disabilities, Finkelstein (1980) maintained that for centuries able-bodied people have made decisions for the disabled, ranging from deciding on an appropriate behaviour pattern for them by means of a rehabilitation programme to designing equipment for them with assumed expertise. This resulted in depriving people with disabilities of the right to question the objectivity of the able bodied for making decisions on their behalf. He referred to this as the Social Barriers model of disability, according to which disability results due to social and attitudinal barriers constructed by a world built for the able bodied. According to Finkelstein, the construction of boundaries among the able bodied and people with disabilities are also handicapped by discipline. Disability according to him failed to hold the focus as a subject or course of study other than remaining as an issue of discussion and a result of a human malfunction.

Emphasizing on the role played by the society in disabling blind people using the prior social model of disability literature, French (1993, 1999) argued that conflicting discourse resulted due to sighted people’s definition of ‘acceptable’ and ‘normal’ behaviour for the visually disabled people and using them to ‘contest that person’s identity’.

According to Finkelstein the term ‘disabled’ or ‘abnormal’ denoted ownership of particular impairment and signified health problem of the able bodied whereby the disabled were regarded as able-bodied victims of the inequities imprisoned in imperfect bodies. This ignorance about the nature of disability characterized the whole residential institutional approach. According to Finkelstein (1980) there have been three phases of development regarding the perception of people with disabilities. In phase one, the disabled people formed a part of a mainstream oppressed underclass. In phase two, the coming of industrialization, urbanization, regulation and externalization of working practices with the rise of capitalism prevented many people with disabilities from keeping pace with the new market economy. This resulted in them being redefined as passive and dependent and segregated from mainstream society to workhouses and asylums. In the third phase, introduction of new technology led to the belief that individual people would help people with impairments to reintegrate into the mainstream society and cause disability to disappear.

In most occasions, the pessimistic undertones attributed to disability tend to engender an expectation within the disabled people by the ‘able-bodied persons’, resulting in the tendency to pass (Titchkosky, 2003). Goffman (1963) referred to passing as a strategy of managing the stigma of ‘spoiled identities’ discredited by law, opinion or social conventions. Hence this came to be regarded as a logical response to a situation where others’ knowing about one’s difference subjected him/her to being excluded. Zola (1982, 1989) referred to this denial as the ‘structured silence of personal bodily experiences’. Hence in fear of non-acceptance many disabled people refuse to acknowledge their disabilities. Based on their study, Olney and Kim (2001) also reported that being aware of the negative meaning of disability within the larger culture; discriminatory treatment and fear of stigma participants with disabilities tend to hide their disability status from others at least in some interpersonal relationships and social settings as was evident from:

Instead of teaching a point of adjustment, participants framed their experience differently from m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Sameness and Difference: Transcending the Gap
• 2 Disability and Representation
• 3 Disability, Religion and Culture
• 4 From Dosti to Margarita with a Straw: Representation of Disability in Indian Cinema
• 5 Disability, Children Literature and Other Narratives
• 6 ‘Disability Communication’: Media Ecology and Disability
• 7 Identities Embedded in our Bodies: Gendered Constructions at Work
• 8 Accessibility to Education and Disability: Challenging the Ableist Structures
• 9 ‘Our Identity, Our Voice’: The Evolving Face of Disability
• References
• Index