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

which identity becomes regarded as a fixed characteristic. In Markell‟s terms identity is
continuously produced through people‟s words and actions in everyday life, in other people‟s
reactions to these, and in their multiple varieties of social interactions:
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Because we do not act in isolation but interact with others, who we become through
action is not up to us; instead, it is the outcome of many intersecting and
unpredictable sequences of action and response (Markell, 2003:13).
Whereas our sense of who we are is in actuality an ongoing process, emerging in the course
of the ongoing and uncertain interactions in which we engage in everyday life, by treating
identity as static the politics of recognition does not allow room for acknowledgement of our
intersubjective vulnerability (Markell, 2003:14).
The issue here has to do with forms of self-consciousness that have dominated western
thought in modernity. As Elias (2000) and Foucault (1998) have shown elsewhere,
consciousness of the autonomous self, separated and alienated from all others by its own
embodiment, is enmeshed with processes aimed at establishing ever-increasing subjection,
discipline and control (of nature, of self, of body). The weakness of the ideal of recognition,
Markell suggests, is its entanglement within and validation of a particular historical
construction of the self. Its problem is to do
with the way in which it expresses the aspiration to a sort of sovereign
invulnerability to the open-endedness and contingency of the future we share with
others (Markell, 2003:15).
The politics of recognition is inadequate as a diagnosis and response to „the underlying
relations of subordination that give rise to systematic, identity-based social and political
inequality‟ (Markell, 2003:17) because its aim is caught up in the contradictions of
autonomous individualism. While disabled people seek a resolution of injustice by gaining
equality with non-disabled people (perceived as relatively autonomous agents) by gaining
similar degrees of autonomy, injustice will not be addressed but merely reproduced in a
slightly different form. It is the very idea of the autonomous individual which must be called
into question if the oppressive social relationship of disability is to be removed. The answer
lies not in the non-disabled changing their attitudes towards disabled people, but in
addressing their own understanding of themselves.
Iris Young suggests that structural oppression refers to: