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

of the National Disability Arts Forum, outlined to me the distinctions between the medical
and social models of disability. In many ways this was like a religious conversion
experience. As has been described in personal accounts by many disabled people (e.g.
Morris, 1993), it was as if a light went on. The idea that disability did not describe me as an
impaired individual but signified an oppressive relationship enabled me to make a new sense
of my own experience. For the past eighteen years I have worked within the disabled
people‟s movement as a disabled person, as somebody who is comfortable to identify as
disabled.
This is not, however, a „happily ever after‟ story. Taking on a disability identity is not a
once-and-for-all event. As Ken Plummer points out:
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Everywhere we go, we are charged with telling stories and making meaning – giving
sense to ourselves and the world around us. And the meanings we evoke and the
worlds we craft mesh and flow, but remain emergent: never fixed, always
indeterminate, ceaselessly contested (Plummer, 1997:20).
Identifying as disabled is not a decision that suddenly somehow means everything is all
right, but involves a new understanding of the relationship between the self and the physical
and social contexts in which the self is located. It makes possible different stories, which
identify as the site for struggle the environment in which the self lives rather than the
physicality of the self, but it does not imply there is no longer a need for struggle. When, for
example, in 1994, an official from the Sports and Arts Foundation pressed £1 into my hand
and earnestly told me to buy some chocolate, I was able to understand and explain the
oppressive assumptions underlying his behavior. Politely but firmly declining his offer, I was
able to walk away (laughing at him), recognizing the problem in this situation as his rather
than mine.
Disability identity and victimhood
A position recently proposed by Tom Shakespeare, and regarded as controversial within
Disability Studies (Beresford, 2008), suggests that disability identity can be associated with
victimhood, explaining any problems that individuals may encounter, or failure they
experience, as resulting „from oppression, not from any fault of their own‟ (Shakespeare,
2006:80). Using the social model, Shakespeare argues:
is a powerful way of denying both the relevance and the negativity of impairment.
Activists can maintain that their problems are not due to their deficits of body or