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

departure from an imagined ideal (Swain and Cameron, 1999:75). By representing disability
as misfortune and disabled people as unfortunate, the non-disabled can shore up their own
perceptions of themselves as desirable and attractive.
Quoting the historian Paul Longmore, Mary Johnson speaks of the implicit bargain that is
struck between society and people with impairments:
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We will extend to you provisional and partial toleration of your public presence – as
long as you display a continuous, cheerful striving towards „normalization‟
(Johnson, 2003:118).
Disabled people are required to internalise the values which tell them that they are inferior
and to smile bravely. The performance of this role gives legitimacy to structural relationships
of inequality. Drawing upon Judith Butler‟s arguments on gender, disability is not a property
or attribute of subjects or their bodies but a shifting effect of ideological practices. Disability
is not so much something people with impairments have as something they do. It is
something produced performatively, constructed through multiple acts of disabling practice,
and is a:
repeated stylisation of the body , a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory
frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural
sort of being (Butler, 1990:33).
In that the constructed identities of disabled people are understood and recognised by both
disabled and non-disabled people as inferior, the superiority of non-disabled embodiment is
established.
The second point above, involving the rejection of identification of self with group identity,
has been documented widely in the context of disability and is reflected in the following
statements by disabled people:
If I saw anyone who was disabled I didn‟t want to talk to them, and if I did talk to
them it was as if I was able-bodied talking to them, doing the old patronising bit
(Shakespeare et al., 1996:51)
Growing up, I wanted to dis-identify myself with the image or label of being a
cripple. As I grew older, I sought out attractive lovers as a way of establishing my
own normalcy. I avoided other disabled people. I refused to see myself as part of that
group (Tollifson, 1997:106).