Rupturing Concepts of Disability and Inclusion

CHAPTER 1
anomalies of accepted norms which include somatic anomaly, spiritual anomaly,
scientific anomaly and social anomaly. The authority and orthodoxy of this gaze
contributing to the ‘disability dynamic’ is challenged for authenticity. 33
Peter Clough and Len Barton reflect the power of such a gaze when they discuss
who people with disability are:
8
They are the recipients of powerful professional categories. These envelope
their identities. They are the ‘lunatics’, the ‘idiots’, the ‘mentally handicapped’,
the ‘subnormal’ the ‘spastics’, the ‘cripples’ and ‘level-one child’. The point is:
We know who They are. They are conspicuous, because their world is set about
with a particularly forceful categorical thinking. (Authors’ emphases) 34
Australian writers, Jan Branson and Don Miller also elaborate:
The ‘disabled’, a marginalized group whose failures to satisfy the culturallyspecific,
historically-specific standards of physical or behavioural ‘normality’,
display ‘handicaps’, inabilities to deal ‘effectively’ as individuals, with life in
Western capitalist society, their ‘handicaps’ demanding, in the eyes of those
for whom they are an ‘other’, a policy, an objective, clearly-formulated,
bureaucratically-realizable, logical, coherent approach to dealing with/coping
with, their ‘handicaps’. 35
Exclusion, as a negative practice or a negative process of action, in the context of
intellectual disability, takes many forms and wears many disguises. Responses to
the common ethical questions of ‘What ought I/we to do?’ or ‘What should I/we
do?’ have evoked normative processes of exclusion throughout history such as
exemption, extermination, expulsion and incarceration. In contemporary Australian
society, there is little recognition of the similarity of these actions to those enacted
upon Indigenous Australians. This research seeks to explore the ethical significance
of inclusion, though, from wider, more critical perspectives, which will account for
‘ethics’ being expressed in a somewhat negative context for people with intellectual
disability. Implicit immorality in a disability context, remains to a large extent,
concealed. Therefore, expressions of shame and disgust appear to be rarely
articulated in relation to the historical and contemporary dislocated experiences of
people with intellectual disability.
One reason for such omissions may be a failure to understand the particularity
of such a context. Although it is seemingly critical to note the similarities of the
situations, it is also imperative to note significant differences. It could be that an
Ethic of Normalcy and an Ethic of Anomaly have been enacted differently in
certain contexts and that the Selvedges of Definition have different powers of
discernment. These differences can be illuminated by narratives about the lives of
people with intellectual disability, as has been articulated in the account of Angela,
Trudy, Simon, Desmond, Wally and Roslyn.
It appears that Indigenous children were removed from their families and
communities to facilitate ‘social life’ by assimilating them to the values and
lifestyles of white European society, and therefore facilitating ‘cultural death’.
Indigenous children, with genealogical characteristics, were actively removed from