What’s disability got to do with it? Changing constructions of Oscar Pistorius before and after the death of Reeva Steenkamp

Traditionally disability has been viewed in the popular imagination as either a highly positive or highly negative phenomenon. Disability and disabled people deserve to be seen in an integrated, holistic way and to have recognised as much diversity as characterises the human condition. The recent case of Oscar Pistorius fatally shooting Reeva Steenkamp has highlighted this tendency. Before this incident, Pistorius’ disability was viewed in a predominantly positive light. He had been described as a ‘supercrip’ who had, despite his physical impairments, ‘overcome’ his mobility limitations and was consequently attributed heroic status by some. However, after this fatal incident, the portrayal of Pistorius’ disability has, perhaps inevitably, shifted. This paper will offer possible psychosocial reasons for this tendency to view disability in a binary way.     

Personal Independence Payments,welfare reform and the shrinking disability category

The question of who counts and how we construct just who can ‘be disabled’ is central to our concerns in disability studies. As Stone makes clear, disability is exactly what a state deems it to be; the very malleable nature of the category has been exploited to widen or more commonly to narrow just who counts as disabled. This article will apply and adapt Stone’s thesis to current plans to revise the Personal Independence Payment extra costs benefit. Using official and disabled people’s narratives, the article will make clear the force with which new definitions of disability are being put forward. This process arguably risks doing state violence to a number of disabled people. These reforms have also used the language of independence in a way that fundamentally distorts the origins and potential of the term in an enabling society.     

Orientating disability studies to disablist austerity: applying Fraser’s insights

Many disabled people in Britain have experienced profound challenges brought about by a government policy programme characterised by ‘austerity’. Drawing on the work of Fraser and Polanyi, this article explores new ways in which disability studies can become theoretically orientated to the task of explaining and challenging what has become an issue of overbearing importance for many disabled people. It is argued that Fraser’s notion of bivalency encapsulates the combination of cultural and economic challenges which characterise ‘disablist austerity’. Fraser’s development of Polanyi’s work is used to argue that disability studies should be orientated to large-scale economic challenges as well as cultural and discursive concerns that are more often the object of study in the field.     

Genes Spell Danger: mental health service users/survivors, bioethics and control

The focus of this discussion is disability, culture and identities in relation to bioethics and mental health service users/survivors. Taking account of the inclusion of mental health service users/survivors within the administrative categories of disability, this article argues for debates about bioethics and disabled people to address and include the perspectives of psychiatric system survivors, and their concerns about psychiatry and bioethics. There is currently an increasing emphasis in both the media and government policy on the danger, threat and 'otherness' of mental health service users, and increasing provisions to restrict their civil and human rights. This development is international and has also tended to be racialised in its public presentation. While genetic approaches to physical and sensory impairment can be seen to be concerned with physical and bodily conformity, genetic approaches to madness and mental distress that are gaining increasing power and official legitimacy, are also closely associated with regulating diversity, divergence and dissent in thinking and perceptions. The aim of this article is raise and explore these issues, and highlight the common and different concerns for us as survivors and disabled people as a basis for encouraging alliances, shared understanding and common resistance.     

Activism and the academy: losing the ideological and material battles

Abstract

In this article written in the summer of 2018 Professor Michael Oliver sought to convey a sense of urgency about the need to reinvigorate the relationship between disability, the academy and activism. In his usual clear unswerving style that is both liberating and enabling in its directness he calls upon all engaged with the journal to remember that the foundations of disability studies emerged out of democratic organisations of disabled people and must remain committed to placing the experiences of disabled people at the centre of academic and activist enterprise. He places emphasis on the original purpose of the journal to build on the social model of disability in order to produce real social change expressing frustration about what he saw as an increasing ineffectualness within the academic community to confront what is really happening to disabled people. He is forthright when describing his hope that disability activists and academics will strengthen the future of disabled people, and the future of disability studies too, by working ever more closely together.     

The social model of disability: thirty years on

This year marks exactly 30 years since I published a book introducing the social model of disability onto an unsuspecting world and yet, despite the impact this model has had, all we now seem to do is talk about it. While all this chatter did not matter too much when the economy was booming, now it no longer booms it is proving disastrous for many disabled people whose benefits and services are being severely cut back or removed altogether. In the article I restate my view of what the social model was and what I see as its potential for improving the lives of disabled people. Finally I focus on the unfortunate criticisms of it and the disastrous implications these have had for disabled people.     

Physically disabled women and sexual identity: a PhotoVoice study

The issue of sexuality for young disabled women is not often talked about in society. Our study aimed to explore four young physically disabled women’s experiences and perspectives regarding sexuality and disability. We used PhotoVoice, a participatory action research method which uses photographs, to capture and convey our participants’ concerns. Through their photographs they showed that everyday interactions with others, particularly strangers or meeting people for the first time, were made difficult by how they were always seen as having a disability. Other parts of their identity were not recognised. The change the young women wanted was for people to see them as young women and not just as disabled.     

Self-identity and the arts education of disabled young people

Overall, little is known about the ways in which disabled children and young people produce artwork or how they experience arts education. Neither is it known to what extent they are encouraged to produce work that engages with the expressive development of a sense of self that incorporates experiences of impairment and disability. This article is based on my recent PhD research which has investigated the ways in which a group of disabled young students are being enabled, via their arts education, to engage in a process of self-realisation whereby negative and oppressive perceptions of disability have been identified and addressed via their artwork. Whilst current post-social model discourses that emphasise the multiplicity or plurality of identity are acknowledged, my research has demonstrated that disabled young people can be empowered through the expression of the lived experience of impairment and disability and thereby encouraged towards a positive, inclusive and potentially multi-identity perspective.     

Oscar Pistorius and the melancholy of intersectionality

The alleged shooting by Paralympian and Olympian athlete Oscar Pistorius of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp has led to strong reactions worldwide. Scholars in the field of disability studies have expressed shock and disappointment in response both to the death itself and to its implications for the representation of disability. In South Africa in the wake of the death of Ms Steenkamp, much has been made both by critics of Pistorius and by his defenders about his status as a white South African man, but little has been said about disability issues. This silence in South Africa about disability as a possible identity factor in this case draws attention to the extent to which disability questions remain profoundly raced and gendered, and influenced by the colonial and apartheid past. The tragic alleged shooting by Oscar Pistorius draws attention back to how important intersectionality is to understanding disability in South Africa and other unequal societies.     

Paralympics 2012 legacy: accessible housing and disability equality or inequality?

The golden summer of sport is now over, but what is the legacy of London 2012 for disabled people? Nadia Ahmed, a disabled student, discusses the difficulties she has faced in finding accessible accommodation in London. She argues that while the Games are over, the United Kingdom still has lots of hurdles to leap when it comes to disability. The article focuses on her own personal experience of not being able to get wheelchair-accessible accommodation in Tower Hamlets, a London borough that is a close neighbour of Stratford where the Olympic and Paralympic games were held. The article raises questions about disability equality following the Paralympics.     

Screening Networks: shared agendas in feminist and disability movement challenges to antenatal screening and abortion

This paper identifies common ground in feminist and disability movement concerns with the social and ethical implications of antenatal screening and abortion. By examining the frameworks used by particular authors within each area, I argue that they both can and do have a shared agenda, which is focused on the social values that are embedded in antenatal screening and promote abortion as the obvious choice to the diagnosis of a congenital condition. It is important to develop some kind of shared agenda in order to construct theoretical and methodological approaches, which pay equal attention to pregnant women (disabled and non-disabled) and disabled people. To aid the development of such an agenda I draw on Actor Network Theory (ANT), which focuses on analysing the role of sociotechnical networks in securing particular social values and moral worlds. The issue for both disability studies and feminism is what kind of screening networks produce moral worlds that promote abortion, shape women's choices and express discrimination against disabled people?     

The Researched Opinions on Research: disabled people and disability research

Thirty-five disabled people with a range of physical, sensory and mental impairments were interviewed about (1) their experiences of research; (2) their general opinions concerning research; (3) whether they thought research had served/was serving disabled people well; (4) how research on disability should be conducted; (5) who should conduct research on disability; and, finally, (6) what they would like to be researched. In this paper, the results of aspects two to five are reported. It was found that the opinions of disabled people mirror quite strongly the recent arguments forwarded by disabled academics concerning the need for emancipatory and empowering research strategies. In particular, the respondents articulated a need for inclusive, action-based research strategies, where disabled people are involved as consultants and partners not just as research subjects, There were few arguments, however, for an exclusive approach, where disability research would be conducted solely by researchers who were themselves disabled.     

Disabling masculinity: the isolation of a captive audience

In this article, I propose that disabled people tend to engage with and interpret images of people with impairments in a variety of ways that have some degree of correspondence to their structural contexts and their differential access to discursive resources. Contending that gender concerns play a crucial role in the interpretative performances of both disabled and non-disabled participants, it is argued that soap operas are an alienating experience for men in general. I propose that the placement of impairment and disability narratives within the soap opera's structure, as a specific genre, is a particularly demeaning experience for disabled men. Finally, I raise some questions about agency and resistance in such viewing practices, making specific reference to the experiences of disabled men.     

Developing a model of disability that focuses on the actions of disabled people

Disabled people, writers on disability and disability activists stress the importance of disabled people being included in all aspects of society. I argue that a major omission from this inclusiveness is that no current model of disability focuses on the impact of the actions of disabled people on disability. Disabled people are not passive bystanders, powerless to reduce the restrictions of disability. On the contrary, we are central to actively limiting its constraints. I develop a model of disability, called ‘active’, which focuses on the effects on disability of the individual and collective actions of disabled people. I describe published findings which indicate that engaging in self-help, using support groups and deploying assistive technology can all reduce the limitations of disability. Recent increases in the number of disability support groups and developments in assistive technology have substantially augmented the potential for disabled people to combat the effects of disability.     

Disability and the promises of technology: Technology, subjectivity and embodiment within an order of the normal

The topic of this article is the promises of technology for disabled people. The starting point is that disabled is not something one is but something one becomes, and, further, that disability is enacted and ordered in situated and quite specific ways. The question, then, is how people become, and are made, disabled - and, in particular, what role technologies and other material arrangements play in enabling and or disabling interactions. Drawing on a study of the uses of new technologies in the lives of disabled people in Norway, and recent work in disability studies as well as social studies of science and technology, this article explores precisely what positions and capacities are enabled; how these are made possible in practice; the specific configuration of subjectivity, embodiment and disability that emerges; and the limits to this mode of ordering disability and its technologies. The argument is that in this context the mobilization of new technologies works to build an order of the normal and turn disabled people into competent normal subjects. However, this strategy based on compensation achieves its goals only at a very high price: by continuing to reproduce boundaries between abled and disabled, and normal and deviant, which constitute some people as disabled in the first place. There are thus limits to normalization. And so, notwithstanding their generative and transformative power, technologies working within an order of the normal are implicated in the (re)production of the asymmetries that they and it seek to undo.     

Project Re•Vision: disability at the edges of representation

The representational history of disabled people can largely be characterized as one of being put on display or hidden away. Self-representations have been a powerful part of the disability rights and culture movement, but recently scholars have analysed the ways in which these run the risk of creating a ‘single story’ that centres the experiences of white, western, physically disabled men. Here we introduce and theorize with Project Re?Vision, our arts-based research project that resists this singularity by creating and centring, without normalizing, representations that have previously been relegated to the margins. We draw from body becoming and new materialist theory to explore the dynamic ways in which positionality illuminates bodies of difference and open into a discussion about what is at stake when these stories are let loose into the world.     

Claiming loss in disability

Pervasive representations of disability carry associations with the idea of loss. These have been strongly rejected by the social model movement as stereotyping, which may perpetuate views of disabled people as ‘incomplete’, ‘vulnerable’ or needing rehabilitation. Discourses of ‘loss’, ‘acceptance’ and ‘denial’ remain a lens through which disabled persons are misknown. It is posited that ascribed notions of ‘loss’ serve to maintain feelings of control and mastery within the observer, quieting the destablising psychic threat which disability poses. Further, disabled people positioned as having to ‘deny’ imputed loss may be at risk of suffering self‐alienation relating to a mode of being which is (necessarily, understandably) preoccupied with ‘not being’ the personification of stereotype, at the expense of exploring aspects of identity and self; such an orientation embodies unstable foundations for an entitled, articulate disability movement. Conceptual ideas are based on the author’s experience as a disabled group psychotherapist working with severely physically impaired adults.     

When they call me cripple: a group of South African adolescents with cerebral palsy attending a special needs school talk about being disabled

Central to the experience of disability are social and political forces and discourses which position people in particular ways. Little is known about the experiences of individuals with disabilities living in low-income and middle-income countries. We investigate the lived experience of a group of South African adolescents with cerebral palsy. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 adolescents with cerebral palsy. Data were analysed using interpretive phenomenological analysis. The participants position themselves between the medical and social models of disability, in a liminal space between ‘normal’ and ‘disabled’, but do not identify with either group. They describe a ‘hierarchy of disability’ and position themselves in-between more serious sensory impairments and less serious emotional and learning disabilities. Being disabled is associated with being taken care of, infantilised and being powerless. Consequently they aspire to achieve independence and autonomy, and face danger, which are seen as signifiers that they are not disabled.     

‘We do not have chiefs who are disabled’: disability,development and culture in a continuing complex emergency

In 2011 The World Health Organization declared disability an international development priority. Yet disability and disabled people are barely visible in the Millennium Development Goals. Exploring disabled people’s involvement in development processes in Binga District, Zimbabwe, this article: illuminates the impact of cultural beliefs about disability that systematically exclude disabled people from development initiatives; assesses the strengths and limitations of the capability approach for theorising disability; and considers the role of (u)buntu, a philosophy based on human relatedness and interdependence, in promoting justice for disabled people in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Children’s conceptions of the word ‘disabled’: a phenomenographic study

The aim of this study was to investigate the qualitative differences in children’s conceptions of the word ‘disabled’. Two hundred and thirty children, aged 7–12 years of age, were instructed to make a drawing of what came into their minds when they heard the word ‘disabled’. A brief written commentary on their drawing was also requested. The drawings and comments showed that the children had a positive attitude towards the word ‘disabled’. They drew and commented that a disability had medical causes, a technical device was a prerequisite for disabled people, a disability had social consequences and that a disabled person needed support. The children also explained that there were obstacles which impaired disabled people’s performance of activities. Access to some environments and being an active part of society was limited for some disabled people.