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

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the vast and deep injustices that some groups suffer as a consequence of often
unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary
interactions (Young, 1990:41).
The systemic oppression of some social groups by others occurs not as a result of conscious
decisions to dominate and control but rather as a result of the self-interested attempts by the
powerful to preserve themselves from exposure to threats to their own self-image, autonomy,
prowess, longevity, welfare. Thus, non-disabled people are caught up in wider social
processes related to capitalist interests which require that they should prize highly self-
identification as distinct, autonomous individuals.
In Markell‟s view social subordination involves:
closing off some people‟s practical possibilities for the sake of other people‟s sense
of mastery or invulnerability; and it is the exploitative character of this relationship,
rather than some lack of correspondence between how people are regarded and how
they really are, that makes it unjust (Markell, 2003:23).
Markell‟s point here echoes Tom Shakespeare‟s description of disabled people as „dustbins
for disavowal‟, onto whom are projected the anxieties of non-disabled people, perpetually
anxious to deny their own mortality and physicality:
It is not just that disabled people are different, expensive, inconvenient, or odd; it is
that they represent a threat... to the self-conception of western human beings – who,
since the Enlightenment, have viewed themselves as perfectible, as all-knowing, as
god-like: able, over and above all other beings, to conquer the limitations of their
nature through the victories of their culture (Shakespeare, 1997:235).
There is a functional purpose to the marginalisation and cultural oppression of people with
impairments within the modern capitalist enterprise. The constant generation of needs,
consumption and profit involves a requirement of individuals to possess a specific type of
self-conception which conceives of itself as self-sufficient and self-determining. Impairment
poses a challenge to this view of the self and is therefore represented as abnormality and
inferiority.
The structural arrangements which shape the experience of the powerful by isolating the less
powerful do not, however, provide the sovereignty desired. This desire, Markell argues, is
impossible to fulfil, because it has itself roots within a misrecognition of the basic conditions
of human activity. Nevertheless: