'What Matters to Me is not What You're Talking About' - Maintaining the Social Model of Disability in 'Public and Private' Negotiations

Moving from a medical to a social model of individual disability is a political process of change with implications for understanding of and relationship to borders between individual, social life and political participation. This process has echoes in the conceptual experience of change through movement for women's liberation and gay liberation. Conceptualisation of a public/private divide has been identified in both these movements, and can also be used productively to further the use of a social model of disability. In this way, public change in status and participation can be linked to private defeat of barriers to public and political participation. This article identifies some uses of conceptualising public and private as a way of locating service provision within a social model of disability.