Disability, Culture and

Identity
 Disability in society
 DISABILITY IS A SOCIAL ENIGMA.

 Throughout the history people have felt compelled both to

stare at the disabled people in their midst and then to turn
their heads in discomfort.

 Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered by many to be one

of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States,
but he had to hide his polio-induced paralysis and use of a
wheelchair lest the public think him too weak to lead the
free world
 People with physical disabilities and bodily deformities, as
well as tribal nonwhite “cannibals” and “savages,” were
displayed for public amusement and entertainment along
with sword swallowers, snake charmers, bearded women,
and the full-bodied tattooed.

 The rise of a medical approach to disability, what disability

studies calls the “medical model” , helped change this state
of affairs.

 People with disabilities were now deemed worthy of medical

diagnosis and treatment and viewed more benevolently.

 But benevolence may breed pity, and the pitied are still
stigmatized as less than full human beings.
 Disability Studies as discipline

 Disability studies—an interdisciplinary field of inquiry

that includes representation from the social sciences, the
humanities, and the medical, rehabilitation, and education
professions—is vital to an understanding of humankind.

 It is a way for people with disabilities to stare back at

those who have stared at them (Fries 1997), to turn
society’s gaze back on itself and point out the things that
nondisabled people don’t seem to notice because, as Davis
observes, they “see themselves as living in a mirage of
being normal”.
 Speaking About Disability
 To begin with, disability studies asks us to become more aware of the words and
phrases we may use, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, that
demean people with disabilities (such as “gimp,” “spastic,” or “retard”), including
metaphors that conflate physical impairment with mental impairment (such as
“lame” or “the blind leading the blind”) or indifference (such as “turning a blind
eye” or “turning a deaf ear”).

 Or take a word such as “invalid,” which is used both to refer to someone with a
physical disability and to something that is illegitimate.

 Nowadays, even the term “handicap” has fallen into disrepute in disability studies.
In contrast, disability studies often uses “people first” language, referring to
“people with disabilities” to emphasize the person rather than the disability.

 However, it is also common, particularly in Great Britain, to use the term “disabled
people” to highlight disability as an affirmative identity, not one to be ashamed of,
that identifies the common cause of a particular political constituency
 nondisabled people sometimes find these language issues
tiresome and confusing, especially when disabled people
appropriate such terms as “gimp” or “crip” in an affirmative
way, similar to the way in which gay, lesbian, and transgendered
people appropriate the term “queer” as an affirmative identity.

 Moreover, we now hear people using terms such as “differently

able,” “physically challenged,” “developmentally challenged,”
or “children with special needs.”

 Simi Linton, an art consultant and filmmaker, does not find

these euphemisms or “nice” terms useful, characterizing them
as “well-meaning attempts to inflate the value of people with
disabilities [that] convey the boosterism and do-gooder
mentality endemic to the paternalistic agencies that control
many disabled people’s lives”
 She notes as well that an entire profession called “special
education” has been built around the appropriation of a term,
“special,” which may have been “a deliberate attempt to
confer legitimacy on the educational practice and to prop up
a discarded group” but nonetheless obscures the reality that
society considers “neither the children nor the education”
truly desirable.

 the point to be made here is that disability studies is an

attempt to reassign meaning(s) to our use of the term
“disability” and the ways we speak about it, and in doing so
reveal “the complex web of social ideals, institutional
structures, and government policies” that impact the lives of
people with disabilities .
 Impairment Disability, Handicap

 The field of disability studies, however, is not governed by such

administrative-legal criteria; and in this field a discussion of definitional
issues typically begins with a distinction between impairment and disability,
whereby impairment refers to a biological or physiological condition that
entails the loss of physical, sensory, or cognitive function

 And disability refers to an inability to perform a personal or socially

necessary task because of that impairment or the societal reaction to it.

 Although it has been common in the past to also use the term handicap to
refer to the social disadvantage that accrues to an individual due to an
impairment or disability, handicap as a concept is rarely used in scholarly or
activist circles these days, largely because it has negative connotations when
used to refer to Introducing Disability Studies persons with disabilities as
inferior or deficient in some way
 the distinction between impairment and disability is what is most
germane. Thus, for instance, people who use a wheelchair for
mobility due to a physical impairment may only be socially
disabled if the buildings to which they require access are
architecturally inaccessible.

 Otherwise, there may be nothing about the impairment that would

prevent them from participating fully in the educational,
occupational, and other institutional activities of society. Or take
the case of visual impairment.

 Nowadays people who wear eyeglasses or contacts don’t even

think of themselves as having an impairment, because these
corrective devices have become commonplace. But if it were not
for these technological aids, which are now taken for granted,
their visual impairments might also be disabilities.
 Moreover, people with disabilities often experience prejudice
and discrimination comparable to what is experienced by
people of color and other minority groups, and they are
therefore socially marginalized and disadvantaged in similar
ways.

 It remains sadly true that people whose bodies are different

from “a society’s conception of a ‘normal’ or acceptable body,”
even when it causes “little or no functional or physical
difficulty for the person who has them, constitute major social
disabilities”

 In earlier times, it was even illegal to appear in public if one’s

physical appearance offended others’ sensibilities, as in the
case of the so-called ugly laws, ordinances that were prevalent
in various cities across the United States.
 nondisabled people are often uncomfortable, even
fearful, around people with disabilities, as if the
disabling condition might be contagious.

 Robert Murphy thinks that all too many nondisabled

people view people with disabilities as a “fearsome
possibility” (1987:117).

 They displace their fears that the “impairment could

happen to them” onto the other person. In this way,
“the disabled person becomes the Other—a living
symbol of failure, frailty, and [for men]
emasculation; a counterpoint to normality; a figure
whose very humanity is questioned”.
 The question of disability within the labeling theory school
of deviance, which posited that “deviance is not a quality of
the act a person commits, but rather a consequence” of others’
reactions (Becker 1963:9).

 A general theory of stigma, attributing common devalued

statuses to deviants of all types: people with disabilities, gays
and lesbians, ex-convicts, mental patients, drug addicts, and
alcoholics.

 Nancy Miller and Catherine Sammons (1999) observe that it

is natural for people to notice others who look different.
Indeed, they argue, the human brain is hardwired to scan the
environment and notice differences from the routine or
“expected average”
 Disability
“Disability”as a social phenomenon, an experience that cannot be
reduced to the nature of the physiological impairment. Rather, it is a
product of societal attitudes and the social organization of society.

This view is sometimes referred to as a constructionist, or social

constructionist, approach to disability, which understands disability as
constructed by or residing in the social environment, in contrast to an
essentialist view, which understands disability as a condition that resides
or is inherent in an individual’s particular impairment (Baker 2011;
Omansky 2011; Wendell 1996).

To complicate matters further, disability scholars note that impairment

itself is a product of social definition, as in the case of medical diagnosis
and classification systems that are themselves subject to dispute and
change over time (Brown 1995).
 Autism as example
 Autism, for example, which is now understood as consisting of
a spectrum of conditions that includes people who are
considered very “low functioning” and very “high functioning.”

 Autism was discovered separately but nearly simultaneously by

Leo Kanner, a US child psychiatrist, and Hans Asperger, an
Austrian pediatrician, in 1943 and 1944, respectively.

 Both Kanner and Asperger chose the term “autism” from the
Greek word autos (self) to refer to the children’s “powerful
desire for aloneness” and “anxiously excessive desire for the
maintenance of sameness” (Kanner 1943:242, 249).
 People with autism have difficulty with face-to-face
interaction, lacking the ability to empathize with
others and appearing emotionally detached.

 They become attached to routines and can become

anxious when these routines are disrupted. They
often become focused on specialized, complex
topics, which can be associated with a number of
strengths, as people with autism can be
exceptionally skilled at systematizing information,
mathematics, computer programming, music, and art
(Cowley 2003; Grandin 2006; Kalb 2005; O’Neil
2008).
 Until 1980, the term “autism” did not appear as a distinct
condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM),
the official diagnostic guidelines of the American
Psychiatric Association.

 Previously the only mention of it had been as a symptom of

childhood schizophrenia, and Asperger’s syndrome was not
included until 1994 (Straus 2010).

 Another definitional issue that complicates our subject

matter is the distinction between physical, sensory, and
cognitive impairments. In some instances, one may find the
term “physical impairment” being used to refer to both
mobility impairments and sensory impairments such as
vision and hearing loss, and in other instances only for
mobility and not sensory impairments.
 As for “cognitive impairment,” this term is generally
used to refer to a wide range of conditions such as
autism, traumatic brain injury, and mental illness.

 Within this broad category, a distinction is also

made between intellectual disabilities, the term that
is now used to refer to mental retardation and that
involves limitations “rooted in sub-average
intellectual and adaptive functioning occurring early
in life,” and learning disabilities, a term that refers
to limitations involving “the brain’s ability to
receive, process, analyze, or store information”
(Carey 2009:190; see Box 4.3).10
 Communication is culture
& Culture is communication
Culture is, basically, a set of shared values that a group of people
holds. Such values affect how you think and act and, more
importantly, the kind of criteria by which you judge others.

Cultural meanings render some behaviors

as normal and right and others strange or wrong.

Every culture has rules that its members take for granted. Few of us are
aware of our own biases because cultural imprinting is begun at a very
early age.

And while some of culture’s knowledge, rules, beliefs,

values, phobias and anxieties are taught explicitly, most is
absorbed subconsciously.
 Culture as a term is widely used in academic as well as in daily speech and 
discourse, referring to different concepts and understandings. While the term
originally stems from ancient Greek and Roman cultures (Latin: cultura) it
has various dimensions today built from the different needs and uses of each
field, be it anthropology, sociology or communication studies.

 Cultures are not fixed, monolithic entities, but are fluid, always changing
and responding to pressures and influences, such as the changing
experiences of its members, or interaction with other cultures.  However, to
its members, the artifacts and even the existence of cultural behaviors and 
schemas may seem invisible or unremarkable.  

 A culture may even have within it certain subcultures which exist within the
main cultural framework of a society, but share within specific peculiarities
or modalities that also set it apart from the mainstream.  

  These subcultures may continue to exist for many years or only a short
period of time.  They may die out or may become incorporated into the
mainstream as part of this ongoing evolution of culture.
 While there are specific differences to each culture, generally
speaking, cultures share a number of traits, such as a shared language
or linguistic marker, definition of proper and improper behavior, a
notion of kinship and social relationship (i.e.: mother, friend, etc),
ornamentation and art, and a notion of leadership or decision making
process.

 Culture and society, though similar, are different things.  Cultures are
defined by these learned behaviors and schemas.  Societies at their
simplest can be defined as groups of interacting individuals.
 However, it is through this interaction that individuals develop and
communicate the markers of culture, and so in human societies, it is
very difficult to separate out ‘culture’ and ‘society.’

 And thus we come back to the role of communication within culture.

 The idea of culture as something that is shared means that it is vital
to understand culture and communication in relation to one another.  
 The relationship between culture and communication, in all its
forms, is tightly interwoven and interlinked. We can see that
communication enables the spread and reiteration of culture.  Both
communications and the media propagate the values and schemas of
a culture through the repeated interaction and exchange enabled by
the communications process.

 Notice the emphasis on repeated there: it is not in single instances of

communication that culture is made, but rather in the repeated
exchange of information and the reinforcement of the ideals and
values it embodies, all conveyed within a particular moment.  One
way we can think about this complex interplay is by looking at
notion of the circuit of culture.

 Paul du Gay’s (1997) The circuit of culture is a way of exploring a

product of a culture as a complex object that is affected by and has
an impact on a number of different aspects of that culture.
Circuit of Culture
 Representation – how is the meaning conveyed to the
audience, user, or co-communicator?  What signs, modes and
discourses help convey the meaning – not only the ‘factual’
or informational meaning, but also the social meaning.  For
example, what does the colour pink represent in your cultural
context?

 Identity – refers to how meaning is internalized by the

receiver or audience.  Our identity is shaped by our culture,
which creates a range of viable and non-viable identity
options that are presented, refined and renegotiated through
our communication and exchange of cultural objects.  By
consuming and displaying certain communicative texts and
strategies, we are both claiming certain identity positions,
and simultaneously rejecting others.
 Production —   here refers to the production of meaning.
 Meaning can be produced and reproduced in a number of ways.
 An individual may produce meaning about themselves in the way
they dress or wear their hat.  Apple produces meaning about itself
in the way they design and build the iPhone.  A terrorist
organization may produce meaning about itself by making videos
they put on Youtube.  This act of meaning production may be
unproblematic within mainstream culture, and help maintain the
hegemony, the dominance of a particular set of schema or values.
 
 Alternatively, this production may challenge dominant beliefs or
values in some.  A pop culture example of this might have been
early Lady Gaga, whose mode of dress was confrontational
because it deviated from existing cultural schema about
appropriate dress for someone of her class, race, gender and
occupation.
 Consumption – The flip side of production is consumption.  
Consumption of texts, whether they be an outfit, a
conversation, or a pop-song, reflects cultural values and
expectations – conforming to values and expectations leads to
unproblematic consumption – it’s what is expected, it fits our
internalized schema.  Texts that do not fit this schema are
confronting, challenging, even shocking.  To continue to use
Lady Gaga as an example, when she released a 
nine-minute long music video centered around a narrative of
female violence, it was shocking both in terms of its format
(which wasn’t standard MTV fare) and its narrative structure.
 Regulation – finally, regulation refers to the forces which
constrain the production, distribution, and consumption of
texts.  These forces may be explicit, such as the television
broadcasters code of conduct, or they may be implicit, such as
the blogger litmus test of ‘would you say this in front of your
mother?’
 Circuit points together makes culture

 Finally, linking together these areas are these arrows – the

arrows are very important, because none of these variables
can really be considered in isolation.  So it is important,
when considering communication within a cultural context,
to remember that there are multiple factors influencing the
production of text and meaning.  These factors may support
the text, reinforce a cultural position, or alternatively, they
may challenge or confront a cultural schema.

 Du Gay’s model is regularly applied to analyzing the

interplay between communication and culture within one
cultural situation.