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

always somebody worse off‟ naturalises, justifies and explains away unequal structural
relations. While impairment is identified as misfortune the alienating constraints of
normality seem bearable.
I am trying to convey here tensions experienced by people with impairments in identifying
positively as people with impairments, in that even when an impaired individual interprets
her own experience as valid, it is unlikely this view will be shared by those around her. A
view which regards impairment positively will be regarded by most as incomprehensible.
Swain and French have argued that while many non-disabled people can readily accept the
social model, even if only at a basic conceptual level (for example, they can accept that a
wheelchair user unable to get into a building because of steps is disabled by environmental
barriers) they are:
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much more threatened and challenged by the notion that a wheelchair-user could be
pleased and proud to be the person he or she is (Swain and French, 2000:570).
The idea of the desirable self is associated so deeply in contemporary culture with images of
physical perfection – images aspired to but never achieved – that the idea that physical
impairment can be considered other than as defect is perceived as unsettling. Where the self
is equated with the surface which can be instantly evaluated, the idea that impairment can be
considered desirable is considered preposterous. The condition of alienation is described in
the parable told by the disabled philosopher Soren Kierkegaard about the peasant who
bought new shoes:
It is related of a peasant who came to the Capital, and had made so much money that
he could buy himself a pair of shoes and stockings and still had enough left over to
get drunk on – it is related that as he was trying in his drunken state to find his way
home he lay down in the middle of the highway and fell asleep. Then along came a
wagon, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would run over his legs. Then
the drunken peasant awoke, looked at his legs, and since by reason of the shoes and
stockings he didn‟t recognize them, he said to the driver, “Drive on, they are not my
legs” (Kierkegaard, 1978:19).
Taken-for-granted ways of being within commodity capitalism tend to miss the importance
of what really matters. Fitting in requires preoccupation with what we look like, what we
wear, what we buy, what we consume, as markers of the self. Farmer expresses this
differently but means much the same when he states that: