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

While class relationships are inextricably bound up with disability relationships, it is possible
here to gain illumination by simply substituting the word class in Charlesworth‟s statement
with the word disability. Disability habitus, viewed here as an absorption of dominant ways
of thinking about disability, involves an acceptance (which can be either passive or reluctant)
of the view that this is just the way things are. Using an analogy of participation in a social
field as game playing, Bourdieu notes:
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Because native membership in a field implies a feel for the game in the sense of a
capacity for practical anticipation of the „upcoming‟ future contained in the present,
everything that takes place in it seems sensible, full of sense and objectively directed
in a judicious direction (Bourdieu, 1990:66).
While aspects of experience may be sensed by the disabled individual as unfair and unjust,
possession of the disabled habitus confirms that at least they make sense. Impairment is
identified as the cause of misfortune. This raises the question of whether people with
congenital impairments or impairments gained at an early age better are thereby „better‟
equipped for survival as disabled people than those who acquire impairments in adulthood.
Certainly Bourdieu suggests that
the earlier a player enters the game and the less he is aware of the associated
learning... the greater is his ignorance of all that is tacitly granted through his
investment in the field and his interest in its very existence and perpetuation and in
everything that is played for in it, and his unawareness of the unthought
presuppositions that the game produces and endlessly reproduces, thereby
reproducing the conditions of its own perpetuation (Bourdieu, 1990:67).
This can be seen, for example, in the support given by many disabled people to large
charities for disabled people which place an emphasis on cure and rehabilitation as opposed
to organisations run by disabled people which have a rights agenda. It can be seen in the
identification of many disabled people with the interests of „carers‟. While a critical
disability perspective identifies care as a problematic concept, part of the network of
structural relationships which maintain disability oppression (Swain and French, 1998), this
is usually perceived as a benign concept and role when regarded in everyday terms.
Among the reasons why the majority of disabled people do not engage with disability
politics is the reason that this flies in the face of common sense as experienced at the
everyday level. Susan Willis has pointed out that one of the problems with the separatist
approach to social injustice is its tendency to be seen as „so different from dominant culture