Societal Reaction And The Physically Disabled: Bringing The Impariment Back In*

According to the societal reaction perspective, the reactions of the nondisabled are the key to understanding the physically disabled. Consequently, stigmatization has been emphasized in explaining the often awkward and inhibited encounters between the disabled and the nondisabled. Stigmatization, though, cannot fully explain interaction between the disabled and the nondisabled. Through a qualitative analysis of encounters between the deaf and the hearing, 1 demonstrate that disabilities are also disruptive when they cause the assumptions and routine practices which usually successfully maintain interaction to become problematic. Coping strategies are attempts to compensate for those assumptions and practices which have failed. The reactions of the nondisabled are important in understanding the physically disabled, but in more complex ways than the societal reaction perspective has so far suggested.