Cultural and Diversity Models

Cultural and diversity models of disability embrace the lived experience of difference or disability as valuable in itself, as something that should be celebrated and not erased (Devlieger, 2005, p. 8). These ways of understanding disability show that for many people, disability and difference are meaningful and valuable.

Deaf Culture

While some people who have hearing loss might identify with disability, people who identify themselves as Deaf often do not identify themselves as disabled, but rather as members of Deaf cultural and linguistic communities (Bartlett, 2018). Joanne Cripps of the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf (2022) explains:

Deaf Culture is the heart of the Deaf community everywhere in the world. Language and culture are inseparable. They are intertwined and passed down through generations of Deaf people. […] The Deaf community [comprises] culturally Deaf people in the core of the community who use a sign language (e.g. American Sign Language or Langue des Signes Quebecois) and appreciate their heritage, history, literature, and culture (Cripps, 2022).

Neurodiversity

Similarly, a neurodiversity perspective emphasizes the fact that people have a wide range of differences in thinking, perceiving, feeling, and relating to the world, and one way of being is not better or worse than any other (Douglas & Klar, 2019). People who are autistic or have ADD/ADHD, or who have learning, cognitive, neurological, perceptual or emotional differences may describe themselves as neurodivergent, in contrast with neurotypical people whose ways of being are taken for granted as normative in the societies they dominate (Walker, 2022).

Digital Story: Untitled by Raya Shields

The Mad Movement and Mad Studies

The Mad movement and the related academic field of Mad Studies challenge the understanding of mental health and mental illness as predominantly biomedical. Mad advocates and scholars point out that emotional distress is often rooted in trauma and oppression. Reclaiming the term “Mad” to describe experiences of emotional, perceptual and cognitive difference, they advocate for the acceptance of these differences in ways of being (Shimrat, 2013). 

Digital Story: Knitting by Elisabeth Harrison

In Knitting, Elisabeth Harrison describes how the medicalization of her distress about the difficult situation she experienced as a teenager compounded the problems she faced. She calls for changes to mental health care to better account for the contexts of people’s lives.

Indigenous Perspectives on “Disability” and Difference

Despite claims to its universality, the concept of disability is based on an analysis of the social and political organization of Western societies, and therefore does not account for Indigenous perspectives on difference (Puszka et al., 2022, pp. 1, 9). In addition, the concept of “disability” has been mobilized against indigenous people through historical and contemporary manifestations of the eugenics movement, to further the genocidal aims of settler colonial governments (Puszka et al., 2022, pp. 2, 7; Rice et al., 2021). Bodies in Translation leaders Carla Rice and Eliza Chandler write with Lenape and Potawatomi scholar Susan Dion to explain the continuing impacts of this:

In the testimonies of disabled and of Indigenous peoples, we can identify how similarities and overlaps in the state’s egregious treatment of both groups has served the geopolitics of settler-colonial nation building. These overlaps include settler imposition of political and economic regimes that have produced high degrees of debility and disability among Indigenous peoples.

The imposition of ableist settler knowledge systems have sought to render Indigenous and disabled populations as defective and inferior; settler transinstitutional responses to Indigenous and disabled bodies, centering mainly on policies of containment and elimination have had violent and deadly effects for Indigenous and non-normative lives.

Yet these resonances are complicated by a formidable rub: notions of “defectiveness” that have been imposed on Indigenous people through colonial knowledge regimes have meant that the ascription of disability, madness, fatness, or other forms of non-normativity doubly or multiply threatens Indigenous peoples’ access to the category of the human. This makes the claiming of disability or non-normativity itself a privilege (Rice et al., 2021).

Indigenous perspectives on “disability” and difference challenge colonialism and Eurocentrism. Anishinaabe disability scholar Heather Norris (2014) explains that within many Indigenous ways of knowing, difference and diversity are accepted and embraced as part of the “profound interdependency of all life” (p. 54). Anishinaabe artist and scholar Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning further points out that prior to the imposition of colonizer knowledge, the Anishinaabe worldview did not include the “deficiency-based” notion of disability (Rice et al., 2021).

The Social Model of Disability

The social model of disability was developed in the 1970s and 1980s within disability communities in the United Kingdom in response to the exclusion of disabled people from participation in society. At the time, many disabled people were segregated from the community and forced to live in residential institutions. 

Because disabled people were systematically excluded from the community, access was not planned for in infrastructure or policy (Oliver, 1983; Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, 1975).

The social model makes a distinction between impairment and disability:

From a social model perspective, the way to address disability is to facilitate access by removing barriers.

The Radical Model of Disability

Embodiment and Disability

Embodied Experience and Disability

Disability and Debility

Although disability is a fundamental part of life and a source of pride, as crip theorist Alison Kafer (2016) points out, it is necessary to recognize that it is sometimes the result of structural injustice. Theorist Jasbir Puar uses the term “debility” to describe injury caused by “precarity and vulnerability to police brutality, reckless maiming and killing, deprivation and destruction of resources” (2017, p. xxii). People with less power are more vulnerable to debilitating forces including colonialism, war, state and institutional violence, and unsafe work conditions, while people with greater privilege may be less impacted.

Puar’s consideration of debility highlights its impacts upon colonized people, but other scholars have argued that the concept is more broadly applicable. As Margrit Shildrick writes, debility is a lens through which to understand the condition of all “worn-out bodies in late capitalist society” (2015, p. 157).

Disability Justice

The framework of disability justice was developed by members of the Disability Justice Collective, which was founded in 2005 by Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Park Milbern, Leroy Moore, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018, p. 15). As disability activist and theorist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explains, disability justice was created as:

[A] movement-building framework that would center the lives, needs, and organizing strategies of disabled queer and trans and/or Black and brown people marginalized from mainstream disability rights organizing’s white-dominated, single-issue focus (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018, p. 15).

The disability justice framework’s centring of intersectionality marks it as a critical intervention into the theories and practices that have often failed to account for the differences among disabled people, and that have not always recognized the interconnection of disabled people’s struggles against ableism and for access with the justice-seeking work of people facing intersecting dimensions of structural oppression, including racism, colonialism, sexism, queermisia, transmisia, and poverty.

In this way, disability justice is a direct challenge to the historic and ongoing dominance of racism, white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism (Shelton, 2020).

Disability Justice and Activism

In Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer, the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid challenges the idea that the framework should have a concise definition. Instead, as queer disabled people of colour activists, they describe disability justice as having developed from their activist work toward being recognized as “an essential part of humanity.” Reflecting their intersectional perspective, they highlight the inseparability of the multiple dimensions of their activism: As they “challenge settler colonialism, gender normativity and violence that targets trans people” they simultaneously “challenge able-bodied normativity” (Sins Invalid, 2019, pp. 5–6). 

As Mia Mingus (2011) points out, unlike rights-based approaches emphasizing closeness to normalcy and validating existing social and political hierarchies, disability justice “embraces difference, confronts privilege and challenges what is considered ‘normal’ on every front.” Mingus explains that to seek disability justice is not to seek to “join the ranks of the privileged,” but to “dismantle those ranks and the systems that maintain them” (para. 5).

The Appropriation and Misuse of Disability Justice

As Patty Berne points out, the term “disability justice” is often appropriated and misused:

In recent years, on websites, on flyers and in informal conversations, we’ve witnessed people add the word “justice” onto everything disability related—from disability services to advocacy to disability studies. This is done without a significant shift in process or goals, as if adding the word “justice” brings work into alignment with disability justice. It doesn’t (Sins Invalid, 2020).

White, crip, feminist educator Samuel Shelton echoes this point, noting that academic disability studies has tended to reify white supremacy and settler colonialism, both theoretically and through pedagogical practices. He argues that a genuine engagement with disability justice as theory and practice is the means through which to upend the interlocking oppressions of racism, white supremacy, colonialism and ableism (2020, p. 196).