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

to negative subject positioning, within the terms of my argument I would suggest it is naive.
Charles‟ description of time spent wondering what it would be like to be non-disabled and
wishing that he was not disabled is a description of a confusion of self with the subject
position occupied by the self. Ironically, though, and as we have seen elsewhere, as long as
he rejected disability identity Charles fulfilled the requirements of the disabled role.
Having since embraced a disabled identity, Charles is able to re-evaluate his earlier thinking.
He now recognises the negativity he felt towards himself as the outcome of the personal and
social education he had been subjected to. As he says, „the way that you‟re being treated...
that‟s what‟s at the heart of it‟ (l.1:261). Charles has transformed imposed relevances into
intrinsic relevances. He has named the relationship that oppresses him, and in doing so has
claimed power. The barriers he has experienced, as well as his formal training in self-
rejection, come from outside and have their roots elsewhere rather than within himself.
Had Charles been one among a hundred thousand people with impairments who experienced
discrimination, it might have been possible to argue that his troubles were personal, and were
to do with who he is as an individual. But because this can be demonstrated as a patterned
experience, described by many disabled people, he is able to understand his situation
otherwise. In taking on a disabled identity, in identifying as somebody who is disabled by
society, he is able to relate in a different way to the tensions he experiences in common with
other disabled people. He is able to recognise that these are to be resolved through collective
action.
C. Wright Mills has argued that people:
154
do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and
institutional contradiction... They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such
ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them (Wright
Mills, 1967:2).
I suggest this also is the situation of those who deny disability identity. Seen from the
perspective of the disabled individual, it is easy to imagine the troubles they experience as
being related to their own physicality; especially when professionals, carers, and media
discourse constantly reiterate this perspective. Institutional contradictions appear just too
large to address, and besides, this would require engagement with politics (with which
people are either disillusioned or uninterested).
Wright Mills describes the sociological imagination as enabling its possessor to understand: