Rupturing Concepts of Disability and Inclusion

PROLOGUE
burdens, or, in fact, as potential death. My gaze on such otherness became centred,
not around the notion of the distressed and suffering stranger, but of the potential
sibling; and therefore, of imagined relationships.
I recall my mother’s willingness to ‘mind’ people with disability for parents to
go out. I remember the respect shown to the Spastic Centre building located a few
streets away, and the way the work inside was held in the highest regard. This was
work never visited but always reified. And I recollect the disallowing of certain
language; for example, to call someone a ‘spastic’, a ‘retard’, an ‘idiot’, or a
‘simpleton’ received similar rebukes to that reserved for blasphemy. I have since
often wondered why these actions, though subtle, were so dominant. Obviously,
the stillbirth had had a large impact. But this had not been the totality of my
parents’ experiences. I am sure, though, that the influence of different experiences
initiated particular moral responses.
My father, a war veteran, was a labourer, employed as a council worker, then a
gardener. My mother, though employed for a short time, mainly shared her skills in
a volunteer context. So their different experiences were ones lived by the
embracing of hardship always in tension with determination to seek betterment,
‘rightness’ and success, often at personal cost. This has been their gift to their
children; and to any community in which they have lived. But these actions,
performed on the margins, are invisible to popular media portrayal or public award.
These actions are primarily acknowledged in the private lives of those in accepting
relationships. Therefore, I have gained an embodied inheritance – my body has
been inscribed with compassion, sensitivity, respect and empathy; captioning a text
about difference formed in my imagination from the seeds of my parents’
experience. So it was somewhat inevitable that some of these texts were to become
expressed in another medium, namely a vocational choice.
After completing secondary school in the mid-1970s, I chose to undertake
training to become a registered general nurse at a large metropolitan hospital some
700 km from home. This was, in my eyes, an inferior choice. I had always yearned
to study medicine, but this proved to be an unachievable goal. Undertaking nurse
training, though seemingly gender-appropriate and romantically endorsed as a
‘helping’ profession, proved to be an achievable nightmare! During the three and a
half years of being at that hospital (3 years of training plus 1/2 year employed as
a registered nurse), I could never feel comfortable with the militaristic style of the
profession. Compliance to ‘authority’ through the surrendering of any sense of self
was not only commanded, but any form of non-compliance brought reprimand and
humiliation. Status was hierarchically determined from senior medical staff down,
and this was played out in every arena. This included the staff dining room where
one could only sit within the bounds of pre-determined areas, according to status.
The ethos of the hospital was configured on the premises of power, expert knowledge
and authority, all of which covertly depended on a dialectical relationship with
vulnerability, naivety and submission. The latter descriptors represented, then, the
experience of subservient groups such as nurses and patients; groups which overtly
depended on the dominating forces.
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