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

modernity has involved many attempts to eliminate these facts from human society, they
persist in remaining. Markell offers a way of establishing a requirement that impairment be
acknowledged as a fundamental and ordinary characteristic of human experience.
The Affirmative Model of Disability
Criticism of the social model of disability is not new and has been a focus for writers in
Disability Studies almost since Michael Oliver first used the term as a description of the
UPIAS principles in 1983 (Barnes, 2004). For example, disabled feminists have stated that
the social model over-emphasises socio-structural barriers and ignores personal and
experiential aspects of disability. Jenny Morris (1991:10) has suggested that „there is a
tendency within the social model to deny the experiences of our own bodies‟; Liz Crow has
argued for a renewed social model which would allow „a more complete recognition and
understanding of individual‟s experiences of their body‟ (1996:210). Carol Thomas
(1999:47) has developed a social-relational definition of disability to account for the
„socially engendered undermining of the psycho-emotional well-being of disabled people‟.
Tom Shakespeare, drawing upon feminist theory, contends that the social model has
provided disabled activists with a framework through which they „could deny that
impairment was relevant to their problem‟ (2006:33).
The response to these criticisms made by social modellists has been that „the social model is
nothing more or less than a tool with which to focus on those forces, structural and social...
that shape our understanding and responses to people with designated impairments‟ (Barnes,
2007). The social model is not an all-encapsulating theory of disability (Oliver, 1996) but a
framework through which disability can be recognised as social process. Without
impairment there is no social model of disability. While disability is not the only collective
social response that could be made to impairment (the major thrust of the disabled people‟s
movement has been to demonstrate this), without impairment as a departure from and
challenge to valued norms of physical embodiment in bourgeois society, disability as a
specific form of social oppression would not exist. The fact that much of the movement‟s
campaigning activity has focussed on structural and environmental barriers reflects (perhaps
controversial) positioning decisions rather than a weakness of the social model.
One intervention within the structural/individual, barriers/experience debate was made by
John Swain and Sally French in a Disability and Society article in 2000 entitled Towards an
Affirmation Model of Disability. Here they proposed an affirmative model:
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