This paper focuses on issues of disabled people's notions of self-identity and is grounded in their accounts around their own self and identity. It starts with a brief description of what Hall (1996) describes as the two main schools of thought on identity. It then moves on to explore and discuss the self, and the embodied nature of self, and then explores the place of identity in disability studies. Disabled people's accounts around self-identification are then presented. The analysis of the data suggests that many of the informants do not see themselves as disabled and do not identify as disabled people. The political consequences of this are briefly examined. The views of those who identified as disabled are also explored.

(1997). Defending the Social Model. Disability & Society: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 293-300.

Journal of Medical Internet Research - International Scientific Journal for Medical Research, Information and Communication on the Internet

Critical disability studies (CDS) has emerged as an approach to the study of disability over the last decade or so and has sought to present a challenge to the predominantly materialist line found in the more conventional disability studies approaches. In much the same way that the original development of the social model resulted in a necessary correction to the overly individualized accounts of disability that prevailed in much of the interpretive accounts which then dominated medical sociology, so too has CDS challenged the materialist line of disability studies. In this paper we review the ideas behind this development and analyse and critique some of its key ideas. The paper starts with a brief overview of the main theorists and approaches contained within CDS and then moves on to normative issues; namely, to the ethical and political applicability of CDS.

The Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) and the Feminist Movement appeal to incompatible meanings of ‘care’. For the DPM the word ‘care’ is to be resisted. The emotional connotations implicit in the concept and experience of care inhibit the emancipatory project for independence and self-determination. Feminist theorists value the concept of care, and the emotional aspect of ‘caring about’ in ‘caring for’. Given that independence can be interpreted as an ideological distortion of ‘malestream’ public policy, feminists argue that it should be replaced by the concept of interdependence. Furthermore, feminists express concern that the DPM’s pragmatic solution to the problem of ‘care’ is a form of discursive alignment with ‘malestream’ public policy that constitutes both disabled people and women as ‘other’ subjects of modern welfare state economies. Drawing on the work of Irigaray, we propose that a post-feminist analysis of the constitution of the parties in the caring dyad can help to make the case for a mutually beneficial ethics of care. We support the feminist voice in disability studies, particularly its call for an embodied, experiential, emotional and political view of the caring relationship. We articulate a post-structuralist feminist critique of waste and want as the discursive terrain upon which both disabled people and women are constituted as marginalized subjects in caring relationships. Irigaray’s claim that women’s immersion in the pleasure of ‘the other’ marginalizes her from her embodied experience, dims her sense of self, and locates her and her caring practices in a liminal, abject space on the margins of phallocentric culture, ground this analysis. We claim that disabled people are similarly disembodied, and constituted as waste, and that their passionate fight for dispassionate goals might be working against their demands for a dignified and inclusive existence. Finally, we make a plea to disability activists and feminists to make common cause in the struggle for an ethics of care that is founded upon embodied interdependence.