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To Deny or Not to Deny Disability
by Vic Finkelstein
Disabled people have always struggled against the way they have been prevented from taking part in the normal activities of their 代写ESSAY communities. More recently, however, these struggles have taken a step forward. Disabled people have begun to organise for their emancipation and joined the growing numbers of groups struggling against social discrimination. We are taking a deeper look at ourselves, at the way we are treated and at what is meant by disability. We have noticed that it has nearly always been others who have researched, written, analysed, examined our history, and proposed their knowing solutions for us. More and more disabled people have had experience of "disability experts" and increasingly we have come to recognise the humiliation this relationship may take for granted. Can it be that having others research on the lives of disabled people (rather than us expressing our own experience) has something to do with the very nature of disability? What, then, is disability?
To many of us, the single factor that unites us together in our struggles is that it is our society that discriminates against us. Our society disables people with different physical impairments. The cause, then, of disability is the social relationships which take no or little account of people who have physical impairments. If this definition is correct, then it should be possible to prove that other social groups can become disabled, in an imaginary society which took no account of their physical status. In such an imaginary society it would be possible for physically impaired people to be the able-bodied!
Let us see whether we can turn the world upside-down and show that disability is a socially caused problem. An upside-down world where the "able" become the "disabled" and the "disabled" become the "able-bodied" and where we show, too, that far from adjusting and accepting disability perhaps, just perhaps, it is healthier to deny and struggle to eliminate disability?
Let us suppose that those who believe in segregation could really have their way. We will imagine a thousand or more disabled people, all wheelchair-users, collected together and settled in their own village where they had full management and democratic rights. We will suppose able-bodied people do not often visit the village and that the wheelchair-users control all aspects of their lives. They make the goods that they sell in their shops with special aids, they work the machines that clean the street, run their own educational colleges, banks, post offices, and transport system of the village, and so on. In fact, for the villager, being in a wheelchair is like everyone else in their world of people that she or he meets in daily life. They see wheelchair-users on television and hear them on radio. Able-bodied people, however, are only rarely seen and little understood.
In the course of the life of the village the wheelchair-users plan their lives according to their needs. They design their own buildings to suit their physical situation. One thing the wheelchair-user architects quickly discover in this village is that because everyone is always in wheelchairs there is no need to have ceilings at 9 feet 6 inches high or door heights at 7 feet 2 inches. Soon it becomes standard practice to build doors to a height of 5 feet and ceiling or rooms to a height of 7 feet 4 inches. Naturally the building codes set out in t本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。