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

establishment of Disability Studies as an academic discipline addressing issues concerning
not just the meaning of disability but the nature of society.
In Jane Campbell and Mike Oliver‟s words, the growth of this movement
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was not merely a numerical phenomenon, but also reflected the individual and
collective empowerment of disabled people through the organisations they were
creating. This can be seen ... in the challenge to dominant social perceptions of
disability as personal tragedy and the affirmation of positive images of disability
through the development of a politics of personal identity (Campbell and Oliver,
1996:20).
Carol Thomas has noted that this politics of identity is fundamentally bound up with having
an impaired body (where impairment is recognised as a fixed physical characteristic) as well
as being disabled (seen as socially constructed difference) (Thomas, 1999:113). These
differences are affirmed and celebrated rather than hidden or regarded as sources of
inadequacy. They become the focus for engagement with the world. Allan Sutherland sums
this up:
We break through the idea, presented to us by the medical profession and disability
charities in particular, that our situations are different and unrelated, and come
together not as the blind or the deaf or the epileptic, or the spastic or the arthritic, but
as disabled people (Sutherland, 2004:unpaged).
Disabled people come together as people with different impairments who recognise a
commonality of oppression. John Fiske has noted that:
The recognition of social difference produces the need to think differently: thinking
differently reproduces and confirms the sense of social difference. What is crucial
here is that the thinking is different: not divorced from social reality: thinking
differently involves the subordinate in making their sense of their subordination, not
in accepting the dominant sense of it or in making a sense with no relationship to
domination (Fiske, 1995:58).
While the focus of campaigning activity in the disabled people‟s movement has concentrated
largely on addressing physical and social barriers preventing access to opportunities and life
chances, this is not to say that impairment has been downplayed. The „thinking differently‟
within the movement has involved a rejection of the idea that impairment is inherently tragic
and a claim for the rights of people with impairments to be recognised as different but equal.