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

significance of impairment, this has sometimes been subjectively experienced as causing
anxiety. As Brian says:
156
...at that time, in the mid-90s, there was very much an over-arching sense in which
individuals‟ personal difficulties in living with impairment issues was very much…
if you talked about your experience in terms… of… erm…in terms of suffering… in
terms of something that wasn‟t imposed from without…then you were pretty
much… erm… you could expect to get kind of quite a short shrift from within the
disability movement… and I think, you know, the questions are very, very
complex…(l.1:334ff.)
Brian‟s words express a claim made by disabled people who would criticise the social model
(Oliver, 2004). A need is felt to be able to talk openly about impairment and impairment
effects as these are experienced by individuals in everyday life without giving credence to
the medical model.
The affirmative model I proposed in the previous chapter names impairment as a
characteristic of difference, divergent from culturally valued norms of embodiment, to be
expected and respected on its own terms in a diverse society. It creates a space in which
impairment can be owned as something that can be experienced positively, negatively, or
both at different times, and which can sometimes involve the darkness that pain brings, yet is
at the same time to be valued. This is a position which problematises the utilitarian
distinction between pleasure (or good, or convenience, or advantage, benefit, happiness, and
so forth) and pain (or evil, or inconvenience, or disadvantage, or loss, or unhappiness, and so
forth) (Bentham, 1987:89). Within such a schema, underlying contemporary assumptions
about disability, pain can only be regarded as something deserving pity, disapproval and
avoidance.
Rod Michalko suggests that impairment is indicative of the fragility of the human body and
subversive in its power to indicate the fragility of the body politic:
The disruption of contemporary hegemonic ideas of reason over passion and mind
over body is perhaps disability‟s greatest possibility. Disability disrupts society‟s
carefully structured and multilayered façade behind which it hides the human body
together with its fragility and vicissitudes (Michalko, 2002:166).
The affirmative model establishes the rights of people with impairments to feel okay about
themselves and to take pride in who they are even when they are having crap days, and to be
able to have crap days as well as great days or ordinary days without having to pretend