Disability as a cultural category. This approach, drawing upon the notion of cultural representation, has precedents in the work of Sontag, and is also related to Foucault's concept of discursive formations. Elsewhere I have looked at this in terms of prejudice, focusing on stereotypes, language and the creation of meaning. Using the notion of otherness, I suggested that the processes of denial and projection are involved in the cultural construction of disability.
By offering a range of ways of understanding disability as a social construction, I do not thereby intend to abandon the social model's stress on material, environmental and policy factors. But rather than reducing the category `disability to a straightforward social relation, I think an analysis of discursive practices offers a richer and more complex picture of disability. It is in this sense, rather than the narrow phenomenological sense, that I would say disability is socially constructed, and would highlight the benefits of a Foucaultian analysis, regarding disability as a process of subjection.
Tom Shakespeare
If everyone is impaired, then we should look at the ways in which a specific group in society, namely non-disabled people, ignore their experience of impairment…Perhaps the maintenance of a non-disabled identity…is a more useful problem with which to be concerned; rather than interrogating the other, let us de-construct the normality-which-is-to-be-assumed.
Tom Shakespeare
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