Please do not take this too seriously, it’s a whimsical footnote… but it got serious despite my best efforts, sorry!
The children’s TV programme Playschool was a huge treat when I was a young. We lived in France, so the opportunity to watch it only came around a few weeks every year. At my grandmother’s I would sit in front of her TV and watch in awed silence. The square, round and arched windows were the highlight of the programme. I loved the short films, and guessing which window would be picked was the best bit of all. As a metaphor, not an analogy, the framing of the windows offers a perspective on storytelling in the following.
My thesis dealt with the blending of theory, among other things… That’s the notion that theories in some subjects are borrowed or blended, to be more or less domesticated by other disciplines. Some disciplines it seems adopt theories more readily than others. Some blunt theory by eroding their more challenging ideas, but keeping the ideas that best fit their own existing ones. So it is with this in mind that I came to reflect on Playschool in this a feminist critique of the social model. I drew on the writings Oliver (1990) and hooks (1989), I hope to honour their storytelling in this piece. Importantly where I fail, it’s my bad!!!
The square window
Imagine the square window as a frame through which society views matters relating to disability. Looking at the paper trail, disability has been the topic of accounts held in journals told largely by clinical professionals and/or academic writers. Their storytelling often speaks to an individualised and medicalised view of the problems disabled people have. No doubt framed by more widely by ideas of war, industrialisation and eugenics. They have have been tales told by the ‘expert’, in a scientific language, assumed class dominance, referring to the rectitude of economic development, the ghost of the industrial revolution, a barely vailed belief in progress and growth as a good for society. As this trail suggests, many research projects sought to answer questions that addressed personal issues to help individuals fit into society. Alongside this effort, communities saw the rise of poorhouses, workhouses and asylums, erected to warehouse those deemed deserving of charity - while not encouraging those viewed as undeserving. Pay attention to the framing, which helped silence the experience of disabled people in favour of explaining the price of their lives as a cost to society. Rarely even overtly framed as consumers, certainly not as citizens, disabled people were painted as passive recipients. Their voices thus erased from society by a growing industry, yet turned into commodities in a disability industry turning over thousands every year. An exploitation hidden from the frame, by a narrative of charitable benevolence silencing individuals, families and communities. A huge human cost. For me the medical model, is a shorthand, a way of framing clinical ideas have been domesticated by humanities, with a language that sounds authoritative but has few words for what matters to disabled individuals. In my experience evident in the words of those who feel entitled to tell me how I should adapt my story, people who seem oblivious to the frame, and therefore have no understanding of what they are asking me to dismiss.
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The round window
The round window, I think of as framing the voices of disabled people. Importantly standing against the medical model. More so against how medical thought has been adopted by disciplines, than whether it is okay in its own place, in a framing that can impose its binary – dividing opinion in far more complex debates. Its shorthand raising the question of the disabled population’s human rights in terms of “what’s wrong with society”. For me, and the many disabled people I’ve spoken to, it reminds us to look beyond each individual, to the organisational, institutional and societal structures that perpetuate the disadvantage imposed on the disabled population. It allows us to ask how change could enable greater participation and citizenship. Looking through the round window, the storytelling starts with the evidence held in disabled people’s storytelling – their experience. These tales often speak of testimonial courage, emotional labour, and the personal cost of boundary negotiation. Accounts that I read as upholding the values of coproduction, as they affirm a wide range of shared interests, from a diverse group, often engaged together as a community of learning, activism and/or quiet resistance. The round window frames a storytelling that acknowledges a fight against segregation, institutionalisation and marginalisation. Fights for rights with roots in the Independent Living movement, rooted in the interests of the D/deaf and Disabled people’s movement. A demand from a group within the civil rights movement for society to act with greater legitimacy to enable participation, addressing the barriers to community life and inequality globally. More saliently asking questions that failed to be addressed by those gazing through the square window, through the round window is a world vision more congruent with human rights, equality and justice.
As a shorthand, my reading of recent disability literature, encourages us not to pick between windows, but to seek to see beyond each one. This, an interpretation of history, was prompted by a textual analysis that suggested that the past framed square, is now facing push back. However, this pushback is not round either, I can’t unpick it fully here, but counter arguments are often framed through existing windows… responding in an academic, clinical, scientific style that in itself presents the wrong framing. Put another way, what may make you better, rarely makes you happy and is unlikely to help prevent illness. Well-being requires a different understanding than cure.
Furthermore, on the street the social model has currency. Outside the university, and its growing consumerist culture, the square frame has changed the lives of many. I’d wager the simplicity and accessibility of the social model has altered the way many disabled people see ourselves. For me it was oral history, not books initially, that provided a way into the ‘us’ of D/deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations storytelling. It wasn’t grand theory, but a way of making sense of being disabled by society and not having to change. And while we can critique the models in many ways, they serve to helps us interrogate many other perspectives we’ve come to accept – sometimes without question - our societal conversations. However, I think it helps when both frames are considered for their alternative views. As they help us consider many layers of culture, the institutional discrimination and globe-local injustice, the domestication of a voice that silences the disabled population in conversation about rights.
The arched window
Hooks of feminism: “Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult. It is also broad enough to include an understanding of systemic institutionalized sexism.” (1989)
So the arched window!?! I hear you cry. Can we acknowledge and enable a different view? I’m not suggesting I have an answer, but an have an urge to encourage a blending of disciplines in a more equitable way. Without borrowing or blunting, but honouring the sprit of the more jagged edges? As Hargraves encourages with regard to sustainability, leadership is a diet not a menu. We cannot pick and choose which tales we accept, or those we reject, according to how they best fit the windows we are most comfortable with. Ideology is at work, we need to begin by questioning the shape of our own frames.
If dated, the round frame has power outside the university, in its enduring contribution to the lives of many disabled individuals and the allies at their side. It enabled a view that was ground-breaking against the institutionalisation of the day. As such, it is far more understandable as a response to the structural harm of its time. To deny its contribution speaks more to criticism, than the possibility of further critical interpretation. As bell hooks said: “To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism”. The social model gave me a way to understand ableism, in turn this led me to understand disablement, much later disabled people as storytellers and the frame of their storytelling.
The way I read it, having analysed a small library, extending the story, including the challenging ideas, while striving to give breadth and nuances seem far more respectful when acknowledging past voices – as equal partners in time. Any view on it’s own will most probably fail to illuminate the tightropes of privilege, oppression and societal inequality. As bell hooks encourages us to consider, keeping knowledge within academic walls encourages an acceptance of the ivory towers and its window framing, without the disruption of others. Elitism, I my experience certainly, is a privilege that doesn’t do much to counter an internalised oppression driven by the ableism around me, one also toxic to many. It’s a response to silencing I seek to assuage by more conscientious reflection. By holding an arched window up at our societal conversations maybe we can foreground the round more effectively? Why? Because changing the conversation without including the people most affected by shared decisions will only serve to keep ‘inclusion’ as conditional. If the frames are ignored it’s impossible to work as allies as our leadership activity will be devoid of accountability, due a gap in legitimacy, where disabled people’s voices need to guide our strategic thinking. To quote bell hooks "Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression"; then similarly addressing ableism is a movement to end harm inflicted on disabled people and the disablism and disablist silencing that goes on around us in an ableism repeated with resulting silencing of the disabled population – if not individuals.
Go watch playschool with that in mind, I dare you!!
Bibliography
Barnes. (1991). Discrimination: disabled people and the media. . Contact, 45-48.
Hargeaves, A. (2005). Sustainable Leadership. San fransiso: Jossey Bass.
Helgesen, S. (2005). The Web of Inclusion. Washington: Beard Books.
Hochschild, A. (2012). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Holtgraves, T. (2002). Language as Social Action, Social Psychology and Language use. New Jersey: Erlbaum Associates.
hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston MA: South End Press.
Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate . London: Penguin.
Morris, J. (2001). Impairment and Disability: Constructing an Ethics of Care That Promotes Human Rights. Hypathia, 16(4), 1-16.
Oliver, M. (1990). The Politics of Disablement: A Sociological Approach (Critical Texts in Social Work and the Welfare State). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Oliver, M. (2016). Rewriting history: the case of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. Disability & Society, 31(7), 966-968.
Oswick, C., Fleming, P., & Hanlon, G. (2011). From borrowing to blending: rethinking the processes of organizational theory building . Academy of Management Review, 318–337.
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