The Place of Disability
To think of disability inevitably conjures up thoughts of age, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, indigeneity and nationality. Such intersectional considerations are at the heart of what has been termed critical disability studies (Goodley 2011; S
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The Place of Disability Dan Goodley and Leslie Swartz
Introduction To think of disability inevitably conjures up thoughts of age, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, indigeneity and nationality. Such intersectional considerations are at the heart of what has been termed critical disability studies (Goodley 2011; Shakespeare 2013), where disability links together other identities as a moment of reflection that Lenny Davis (2002, 2006) coins as dismodernism. While critical disability studies might start with disability, they never end with it: remaining ever vigilant of ontological and theoretical complexity, as well as complexity in terms of political, cultural, social and material issues (Goodley 2011). Such complexity is extended further when one thinks about the place of disability: where and when disability appears. Disability emerges geopolitically (in terms of location), temporally (by way of differing historical moments) and epistemologically (considering, for example, disability’s varied disciplinary dwellings). We are interested in those varied terrains where we might map and locate disability but this journey, perhaps inevitably, involves much crossing of national and theoretical borders. In this chapter we will consider a number of ways in which we might place disability, including a global north perspective, a supranational discourse and a global South response.1 In our geo-theoretical journey we will consider the troubles associated with
1 We have deliberately chosen ‘global north’ and ‘global South’ to unsettle the dominance of the former position and augment perspectives emerging from latter contexts.
D. Goodley (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Swartz Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 S. Grech, K. Soldatic (eds.), Disability in the Global South, International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42488-0_5
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conceptualising disability. We conclude by thinking through the complexities borne out of this recognition of the local and global placing of disability.
A Global North Perspective on Disability A well-told story about disability studies is of the field’s emergence in a transdisciplinary space in North America and Western Europe as a dynamic community of practice that brought together theorists, practitioners, activists and artists who shared an antipathy towards the dominant conceptualisations of disability. Two cultural extremes come to mind when one thinks of dominant hegemonies around disability: disability as immorality; and disability as medical specimen (Snyder and Mitchell 2001: 380). Moral positions, especially from Judeo-Christian traditions, have viewed disability as a sin (a punishment from God forgiven through divine intervention). Medical perspectives have dominated the discursive landscape, framing disability as pathology (a physical, sensory or cognitive failing that tragically ‘han
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