Disability and the Challenge to Medicine
Lecturer: Mia Edwards
In the 1970s, disability activists in Britain and the United States began to push for a new way of thinking about disability. Instead of seeing a disabled person as an imperfect body to be cured by medical intervention (the medical model), they instead sought to locate disablement in the social obstacles that made it difficult for disabled people to lead fulfilling lives with equal access to opportunities. They advocated for a new vision of society capable of adapting to human variation (the social model). This lecture will consider the context of this shift – particularly the influence of the civil rights movement – and its impact on disabled communities and the medical profession. The lecture will briefly consider how disability intersects with other categories of identity, such as gender, race, and sexuality, both within the civil rights movement and scholarship. It will also explore the legacies of the social model and ask whether it is still relevant in an era of advanced medical technologies and identity politics.
Discussion/Essay Questions:
- Should disability be considered a medical or a social phenomenon? What are the historical implications of these definitions?
- Is the social model still useful today? How else might we conceptualise disability or adapt this model for the present era?
- How did the civil rights movement shape the development of a disabled identity, in the United States and elsewhere?
- What might advancements in medical technologies mean for understandings of disability?
Required Reading:
1. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, ‘Introduction: Disability History: From the Margins to the Mainstream’, in Longmore, Paul K., and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 1-29.
2. Douglas C. Baynton, ‘Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,’ in Paul Longmore, Lauri Umansky (eds.), The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33-57.
And choose ONE of the following:
3. Tom Shakespeare, The Social Model of Disability, in Lennard J. Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2013), 214-221. OR
4. Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry, 'Beyond (Models of) Disability', Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Vol. 41 (2016), pp. 210-228.
Further Reading:
Video: Judith Heumann, ‘TedxMidAtlantic: Our fight for disability rights and why we're not done yet’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABFpTRlJUuc
Colin Barnes, Geof Mercer, and Tom Shakespeare, Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction (Wiley, 1999)
Susan Burch and Lindsey Patterson, 'Not Just Any Body: Disability, Gender, and History', Journal of Women's History, Vol. 25, No. 4 (2013), pp. 122-137.
Mairian Corker, and Tom Shakespeare, Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002)
Roy Hanes, Ivan Brown, and Nancy E. Hansen, eds., The Routledge History of Disability, 1 edition (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017)
Paul K. Longmore, and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: NYU Press, 2001)
David T. Mitchell, and Sharon L. Snyder, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 1997)
Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2012)
Tom Shakespeare, Disability Rights and Wrongs (Routledge, 2006)
Bonnie G. Smith, 'Introduction', in Bonnie G. Smith, Beth Hutchison (eds.), Gendering Disability (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp. 1-6.
Sharon L. Snyder, and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
David M. Turner, and Kevin Stagg, Social Histories of Disability and Deformity: Bodies, Images and Experiences (Routledge, 2006)