Rupturing Concepts of Disability and Inclusion

INTRODUCTION
It is no longer enough to assert, under the rules of modernity’s monotheism,
the inclusion of the marginal: they are, at best, included only if they obey
monotheistic practices as representatives of autonomy, identify, self-referentiality.
Rather, the policies of inclusion and exclusion, the rules of formation
and expulsion, the figurations of public and private as forms of the dominant
ordering must be uncovered. 22
To conceptualise inclusion in relation to people with intellectual disability, these
disclosures become imperative.
The processes of exclusion of people with intellectual disability activated in the
public arena stand in stark contrast to the natural and implicit inclusion present and
easily observed in the privacy of accepting relationships (including families)
involving a person with a disability. The contrasting scenario is embraced usually
in what appears to be a relational, domestic context. By applying feminist
scholarship, particularly feminist theology and feminist ethics, the orthodoxy of the
patriarchal matrices is challenged. Just as women claim a position from which to
challenge and transform the socio-symbolic order from the domestic sphere, so can
people with intellectual disability claim a similar conceptual conjunction. It is
through the “pursuit” of what has been described as ‘Other’, seen as “both taboo
and a precondition”, that the patriarchal monotheistic ordering which legitimates
and defines processes of inclusion and exclusion is exposed and scrutinised. 23 New
visions about how we, as a society, respond to embodied difference become
apparent. In this research, ‘A Transformatory Ethic of Inclusion’, a particular ethical
framework of inclusion, is offered as an instrument of rupture of the Selvedges of
Definition to facilitate the challenge of realising these new visions as different
practices.
1.2 AN EXPLORATION
‘Exclusion’ as a term has, in contemporary times, been used to express certain
social phenomena. In the 1990s, there are two outstanding examples. First, ‘social
exclusion’ has become a major consideration in the formation of economic policy
within the European Community Programme; 24 and second, in a local context but
with global importance, processes of exclusion formed the basis of a national
inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from
their families. At this point, it is useful to explore this latter example for the
insights that emerge for this research.
In April, 1997, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
released ‘Bringing them Home, Report of the national inquiry into the separation of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families’. 25 The Report
records narratives of grief and loss, tenacity and survival, courage and suffering, as
the ‘laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Indigenous
children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence’ since
colonisation are described, and ultimately condemned, for their contribution to the
continuing devastation of the lives of Indigenous Australians. 26
The Report describes social practices where people with different skin colours
have been systematically, and most often forcibly, removed from their kin, their
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