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

as to have no impact on the rest of society‟ (Willis, 1991:34). To many disabled people,
disability politics seems either an irrelevance or the activity of extremists who have not
adjusted themselves to the way the world is.
Redistribution or Recognition?
In opening a political-philosophical debate with Axel Honneth on strategies for the pursuit of
social justice, Nancy Fraser has stated that:
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Claims for social justice seem increasingly to divide into two types. First, and most
familiar, are redistributive claims, which seek a more just distribution of resources
and wealth... Today, however, we also encounter a second type of social justice
claim in the „politics of recognition‟. Here the goal... is a difference friendly world,
where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price of
equal respect (Fraser and Honneth, 2003:7).
In that its focus has been on addressing barriers to participation in ordinary life, disability
politics has had an agenda that can, in Fraser‟s terms, be described as redistributionist. As a
tool to be used in identifying and removing barriers the social model is a redistributionist
model. The activity of the disabled people‟s movement has also, however, been characterised
by a politics of recognition.
The recognition paradigm... targets injustices it understands as cultural, which it
presumes to be rooted in social patterns of representation, interpretation, and
communication (Fraser and Honneth, 2003:13).
Within the Disability Arts Movement, a distinctive disability culture rooted in the life
experiences and perceptions of disabled people, narratives have been developed which
challenge dominant portrayals of disability. Slogans such as Disability Pride and Piss on
Pity, emblazoned on t-shirts worn at cabarets, street demonstrations and in the course of
ordinary life, have made visible a strength and connection which makes little sense to an
onlooking world. As with other marginalised and disempowered social groups the identity
politics of the disabled people‟s movement has invested heavily in claims to recognition on
its own terms as a social group. However, as Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine have
observed, there is a danger inherent in such a stance:
...the affirmation of particularity can, and often does, have the perverse effect of
deriving the dignity of the subject from its determined or constrained nature... In so
far as such situations are produced through inequality, then this inequality becomes