A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

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do you do this... this is... you can do this but you make very obvious errors... and
what I could never admit then was the fact that it was just because I just wanted to
look as „normal‟ as possible... I didn‟t want to be seen as this blind woman that had
to grab onto the walls and follow them along... (l.3.286)
For a person with an impairment to perform a life function or task in her own way, to get
from one place to another in his own way, to communicate with a friend in their own way, to
access information, to make herself understood, none of these makes a person disabled.
Disability is only perceived when such things are measured against socially valued ways of
achieving the same ends. Disability appears when, in order to gain approval, doing things in
ways that work is discouraged by others or eschewed by self in favour of attempting to do
these things in ways that suit other people.
Much of this is already socially known. This way of thinking is acknowledged and formally
sanctioned in the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) (DDA) and DDA
Amendment Act (2005) for employers to make „reasonable adjustments‟ in work practice to
avoid placing disabled employees at a substantial disadvantage in comparison with non-
disabled employees:
The most important thing to remember is that treating everyone the same does not
mean that you are treating everyone fairly. The DDA requires people to be treated
differently according to their needs by making reasonable adjustments for them
(Employers‟ Forum on Disability, 2009: unpaged).
Carol Thomas argues that as well as the social barriers recognised by social modellists as
externally imposed restrictions of activity:
there are also social barriers which erect „restrictions‟ within ourselves, and thus
place limits on our psycho-emotional well-being: for example, feeling „hurt‟ by the
reactions and behaviours of those around us, being made to feel worthless, of lesser
value, unattractive, hopeless, stressed or insecure (Thomas, 1999:47).
In order to address the omission of personhood or agency that she identifies as lost in the
materialist social model, Thomas offers a reworked social relational definition of disability:
Disability is a form of social oppression involving the social imposition of
restrictions of activity on people with impairments and the socially engineered
undermining of their psycho-emotional well-being (Thomas, 1999:60).