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

2007:19). Once it has become possible to step back and recognise those structures as
structures, it becomes similarly possible to try and act upon these structures.
113
If we grant that symbolic systems are social products that contribute to making the
world, that they do not simply mirror social relations but help constitute them, then
one can, within limits, transform the world by transforming its representation
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2008:14).
This is what has been achieved through the social model of disability, a transformed
representation of the world which has made it possible to regard disability as an oppressive
relationship, or as a structure of domination, rather than as individual limitation. The
adoption of this model by the disabled people‟s movement as an organising principle has
enabled a start to be made in transforming the world in terms of opportunities for the
participation of people with impairments in ordinary life.
I suggest that the affirmative model can similarly be used as an analytical tool for
transformed representation of the world in terms of describing the function that disability as
role has to play in sustaining established social relations. To this end I propose the following
affirmative model definitions:
Impairment:
physical, sensory, emotional and cognitive difference, divergent from socially valued norms
of embodiment, to be expected and respected on its own terms in a diverse society
Disability:
a personal and social role which simultaneously invalidates the subject position of people
with impairments and validates the subject position of those identified as non-disabled
My revised definition of impairment builds upon my analysis of participants‟ recollections
and insights in that it includes a recognition and rejection of the social and cultural processes
by which impairment comes to be marked as personal tragedy. While I have represented
impairment as an individual characteristic of difference to be expected and respected on its
own terms, this definition does not relate to normality as an established medical fact but to
normality as something that is socially valued. Discussion of impairment can therefore,
within the terms of this definition, be framed within social and cultural rather than medical
terms.