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

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political struggle with them, they were either for the same things as I was or they
were against it… so it was like a discourse going on there, a discourse around
disability but not particularly talking about… your own self… it was trying to look
at pan-disabled issues… erm… at the time and looking at… erm… confluences
rather than conflicts… and building, erm… people were coming together in
coalitions, councils of disabled people about that time, so it was bringing together…
erm… a lot of different groups who didn‟t necessarily get on easily, people who‟d
campaigned on their own, sort of isolated spheres until then… who were coming to
take on other people‟s issues and understand that they‟ re all part of the same
thing… it wasn‟t just an individual thing about… well, I need a ramp to get into that
building… erm… it was about other people‟s access rights as well… and the whole
way in which legislation and everything wasn‟t there… to ensure these rights…
(l.1:397ff.)
Ben describes being part of what was sensed as a movement involving overt political
struggle. This involved forging a new sense of disability identity among groups of people
with different impairments who had previously not seen any connection with each other and
had viewed their interests as disparate. This politics seemed new and challenging because,
while many disabled people had previously actively avoided association, the coming
together and collective engagement between different groups working within the social
model seemed to suggest the possibility of bringing about real and decisive social change.
Mary speaks of activism in the disabled people‟s movement in the 1990s as involving a
sense of being part of something larger than herself:
when we went to block Telethon… when we went to protest outside Children in
Need… when we had DAN actions at Leeds Station and stuff like that… handcuffed
ourselves to buses and trains and stuff like that… we certainly… the people I was
with… believed ourselves part of a movement… certainly when we had the big
demonstration in Edinburgh… when we blocked off the Canongate… we certainly
thought we were doing the same sort of things people had done fairly recently in
Nottingham or in London… we felt that we were part of this much larger group…
(l.1:568ff.)
It is this sense Mary describes being part of a larger collective which enabled her
development of a strong disabled identity. While Ben and Mary are both in their early fifties,