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

cover up the significance of impairment in everyday life and relationships. Glenda Hyatt, for
example, remarks that:
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People have expected me to take the nicely paved path laid out for the disabled.
They expected me not to try, not to accomplish, and not to succeed. That map was
tossed out long ago. I have followed my own path as a person, a woman, who
happens to have a physical disability (Hyatt, 2008:unpaged).
It will become clear later, in my discussion of disability as role, why I consider Hyatt‟s
disavowal of „the nicely paved path laid out for the disabled‟ just as predictable and socially
acceptable a response to the experience of impairment as the passive lifestyle she rejects.
This is a position which necessarily involves an attempt to live with a sense of one‟s own
difference as undesirable misfortune, but hopes to compensate well enough so that others
will tolerate or overlook impairment. I use the word necessarily because this position offers
no alternative with which dominant medical model assumptions can be challenged.
The second position I would characterise as one which identifies disability as structural
oppression and embraces disability identity. This involves what Max Frisch has termed „the
rejection of what others want you to be‟ (cited in Bauman, 2006:38). I would argue that
taking on disability identity offers the only real alternative to complying with conventional
expectations and gives a critical vantage point from which to regard reality. If identity is a
storyline we use to comprehend and negotiate our place in the world and to reflexively
determine our own experience of the world as it is given to us, rejection of disability identity
involves deprivation (whether self-willed or through unawareness of its existence or
purpose) of a valuable sense-making tool.
In my research I attempt to develop new insights into people with impairments‟ self-
perceptions and about ways they relate to the idea of disability. This is not, however, a
rhetorical exercise attempting to demonstrate that life is easier or better with the social
model. Whereas in the past attempts to include impairment in the analysis of identity have
been resisted as a threat to the unity of the disabled people‟s movement (Scott-Hill,
2004:92), I suggest a clarified affirmative model offers a fresh insight into identity issues
rooted within individual and collective experiences of living with impairment in a disabling
society. What I have attempted is to ground the affirmative model within the experiences of
the sixteen disabled people I have talked with. This involves shifting the affirmative model
from being a set of statements inferred from the output of the disability arts movement to
being a model that can be shown to hold good when measured against the experiences of
disabled people, whether in terms of positive or negative experience.