Part 22: Disability Corner: Social Construction of Disability
Disability Corner: Social Construction of DisabilityLet me tell you a story a professional tutor once told me. When the US entered World War II, it suddenly found itself in need of an Air Force. It already had one, yeah, but it was just a branch of the Army, and the war effort demanded as many pilots in the air as possible as soon as possible. So, they ramped up production and training. And started killing their pilots outside of combat. Seriously, they died constantly; about a third of dead American airmen died in accidents, and this was an air force that flew planes so dangerous they called them flying coffins. The military spent the war trying to figure out stem the tide and never really pulled it off – except in one place. During a review of training equipment, somebody noticed somebody else had fucked up standardized flight gear at the planning stage. As a matter of policy, all pilots were issued the same flight suit. The same-sized flight suit. Tall, short, thin, the closest you could get to fat on military rations, didn’t matter, same flight suit. If it was too big on you, it would get in the way, slow down your reaction time, and you would crash. If it was too small on you, it would restrict your movement, slow down your reaction time, and you would crash. They were in such a hurry to get people in the air that they forgot most people aren’t, in fact, the archetypical paragon of American manliness they’d modeled the flight suit on. They built a model around an assumption without realizing it was just an assumption, and it killed people they needed dying somewhere else yesterday.
The solution was simple: remove some unnecessary bulk, alter the flight suit to include adjustable straps to make up the difference, and that was it. And like that, pilot death rates dropped. Well, actually they kept climbing because that wasn’t their only problem and they were still ramping up recruitment, but the pilot death ratio fell significantly. All it took was an eye for letting people fit the situation to their own needs. But without that eye, without that reach towards accommodating all of their pilots, they would kept bleeding pilots for who knows how long.
I have no idea if that anecdote is true. I haven’t been able to find any trace of it on Google, though that may be due to the American military suppressing something that makes it look that. But the logic that led to first flight suit, the idea that an assumed average will fit everyone, is very much a thing. One example? Temperature control. In the US at least, most people assume the natural temperature to set your house or workplace a is 73°F. Most Americans absorb the idea that that’s the ideal indoor temperature pretty early. I did. And sure, it is – for biological males. For biological females, though, that’s a little cold, just enough to be uncomfortable. But when they started implementing climate control in the 50s and 60s, their tests involved mostly men, and so that discrepancy never came up. Car crashes killing more women than men because crash dummies are modeled on male bodies, facial recognition systems ignoring black people because they trained them on white faces, the examples are endless; assumed averages frequently backfire, but that doesn’t stop people from using them.
Naturally, this ends up hitting disabled people, too. Airports are famous for mistreating your luggage, that isn’t news. But did you know they wreck thousands of wheelchairs every year? Airlines are legally obligated to replace any wheelchairs they damage, but it can take weeks for you to get your wheelchair back, and that’s assuming they don’t ignore or reject your complaint and nothing else gets in the way. And that’s just the beginning of a wheelchair user’s woes; most old buildings can’t accommodate wheelchairs (especially if they have stairs), a lot of curbs can’t be mounted, certain pathways are downright unusable, the list goes on and I’m sure people in this thread can roll out endless examples. And beyond wheelchairs? Blind people can’t see the lights change on crosswalks. ADHD people are funneled into environments full of distractions and get punished for being distracted. Educational opportunities extended to abled folks as a matter of course are reframed as additional burdens when applied to disabled kids and get targeted for budget cuts. Getting life-saving medicine gets caught up in layers of bureaucracy without any way to expedite the process. All of this, all these issues and dangers, fall under a concept known as the social construction of disability: the way our society works shunts aside and hinders disabled people at a very basic level. Living with a disability can be hard; living with a disability when society punishes you for having it is much worse.
At least, I think this is what the social construction of disability is. I have to admit, researching this topic is kind of a nightmare – not in the “despairing for the soul of humanity” sense, but in the “why do you have to write like this
” sense. The Wikipedia article’s downright inscrutable, and reading this sort of thing is my job: "Social construction of disability, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia posted:
The social construction of disability comes from a paradigm of ideas that suggest that society's beliefs about a particular community, group or population are grounded in the power structures inherent in a society at any given time. These are often steeped in historical representations of the issue and social expectations surrounding concepts such as disability, thereby enabling a social construct around what society deems disabled and healthy.
Ideas surrounding disability stem from societal attitudes, often connected to who is deserving or undeserving, and deemed productive to society at any given time. For example, in the medieval period, a person's moral behavior established disability. Disability was a divine punishment or side effect of a moral failing; being physically or biologically different was not enough to be considered disabled. Only during the European Enlightenment did society change its definition of disability to be more related to biology. However, what most Western Europeans considered to be healthy determined the new biological definition of health.[1]
Is it just me? I think it's not just me. This is the introduction. The rest is just as well-written and organized
. The blog posts I find touch on the subject before spinning off into some aspect, while the papers I find seem a lot more focused on collating examples than putting down a definition. Which, I suppose, is appropriate; the interplay of society and how it defines disability is hideously complex, so why should researching it be any easier?All I can say is that a society that can’t make those adjustments will have a nasty habit of brutalizing people to fall outside a projected norm out of convenience, and that if you choose to keep brutalizing them, you’re going to lose out on everything you could’ve gone back. That, and I’ve finally put a bullet in this godddamn topic that’s been haunting me for weeks
E: the next few posts cover this really well \/ \/ \/ \/
DoubleE: We have an
post from LXP that explains the concept far better:LXP posted:
Hi, I'm LXP. I'm middle-aged, asian, male(ish), and was largely from an affluent family. I was diagnosed with high-level autism at a young age, and my major problem is the inability to distinguish other peoples' emotions. Due to the affluence, my family was able to do things like "move me to different schools every grade level until 3rd so my classmates don't realize my weirdness", and "go to schools where there are enough workforce to take a few people out of class and do things like speech therapy and emotion control." So I can largely pass as "normal." As you might be able to tell, this is kinda a sticking point. This is also intersectionality in play.
I'm here to talk about Social Constructs, mainly because I've taken a lot of feminist theory courses, which have to discuss this. There's no way to construct new norms without understanding the identity of old ones, as well as the way the system works.
Re: Social construction of disability.
This type of power discussions are largely related to Foucault. It also comes up a lot in feminist theory courses, since social construction of gender is a thing. They're fun to take, by the way. My previous GWST teacher described it to the class as: "Legally taking a trip. It's like wow, just how much it turns things inside out."
Anyways, the basic ideas are that they were constructed to help control populations, part of Biopower. Biopower is power over living, as opposed to the power to give a thumbs down and kill someone that way (power over death). Since they're largely artificial, they play by different rules than real structures, namely, they're much more fluid.
I'll start off by dissecting this block:
Social construction of disability, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia posted:
The social construction of disability comes from a paradigm of ideas that suggest that society's beliefs about a particular community, group or population are grounded in the power structures inherent in a society at any given time. These are often steeped in historical representations of the issue and social expectations surrounding concepts such as disability, thereby enabling a social construct around what society deems disabled and healthy.
Ideas surrounding disability stem from societal attitudes, often connected to who is deserving or undeserving, and deemed productive to society at any given time. For example, in the medieval period, a person's moral behavior established disability. Disability was a divine punishment or side effect of a moral failing; being physically or biologically different was not enough to be considered disabled. Only during the European Enlightenment did society change its definition of disability to be more related to biology. However, what most Western Europeans considered to be healthy determined the new biological definition of health.[1]
Sentence 1:
What disability means changes over time.
The some other known examples of this phenomena would would be as the creation of a trans culture within the structure of gender, and also the fight for black rights, stretching from the civil war to today. What causes that meaning shift are largely dependent on other actors. Civil War came about due to economic and ideological shifts, as well as a half of a nation shooting the other half, and the on-going resistance of slaves. Our shift in work structures is mainly due to the pandemic making in-person meeting impossible, even though alternatives have existed before then.
From this, we can say that social structures change in at least two ways, the gradual shifts like on-going resistance and research, the major shake-ups, like a pandemic. The best way to put it is:
Prokhor Zakharov posted:
There are two kinds of scientific progress: the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries. Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn, nonetheless, for the latter.
As for the second part, power structures are all intertwined. Much like how our lives are affected by our intersectionality, these structure all co-exist and affect each other, much like how "Capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it". Alongside that, we are a part of these power structures, and live our lives affecting and being affected by them. Capitalism requires a divide between it's merchant class and labor class, as well as a price inequality between the cost of labor and sale price. Obviously, this isn't fair, so racism comes in and states "It's okay to underpay [these people], because [their labor is worth less (somehow)]." This idea is part of the consumer, laborer, and merchant class, and we all feel this tug in some way. We are a part of these social structure by virtue of having been brought into a reality with these social structures. The only way out is to be in a world where they just don't exist (more later, see alterity).
Sentence 2:
What affects the creation of this social structure is not only the history of the issue, but also other power structures in play. When formed, this structure affects all others around it, much like how the identity of disability affects the identity of healthy.
An apt metaphor is the Desire Line. When you're walking through a campus or park or somewhere in "tamed nature", you'll see like, a dirt path, where grass doesn't grow. You'll probably use this path, because it's really convenient as opposed to the "real path" that's ten steps away. Maybe that path gets worked on and becomes "a path with stones". In the same vein, we can see social structures forming. Like in the various examples of the air force, crash accidents, facial recognition, there's someone who takes the first steps, and gets retread because it is convenient and existent, and in the process of being tread, becomes more real until all other paths become "nature." Additionally, this path affects the world around the path, like, it might require a railing to be taken down because everyone kept hopping that railing to use the desire path.
Sentence 3+:
This is an example describing the transience of social structure, using disability. It used to be seen as something related to morality, like a punishment from god or karma, but shifted to a more biological viewpoint during the Renaissance. Even though disability may be described through biology, the fact that it's meaning changed makes it a social structure. This shift in the meaning of disability also affected the meaning of health and healthy, and this shift still affects us to this day.
There's also a few other points I want to make:
Social constructs must have some way of reinforcing themselves. Much like how a state must command force to control it's borders, so too, must a social construct defend itself. The most obvious examples would be media, and children. A child is incredibly good at enforcing social norms, yo.
Social constructs exist, and there's no escape. This goes into power, but the basic idea is that a social structure is also defined by what it is not (called alterity). Much like how the color blue is not the color red, disability is constructed by the people who don't pass, can pass, and don't have disabilities. By defining trans identity, we're developing a sub-culture and a structure away from gender binary, we're also enforcing the overall idea of what gender is. Gender used to be a binary, now it's a spectrum.
Again, you can't get away from these structures, even if you say, I'm not a part of it, you just reinforcing what it isn't. That's not like, a bad thing, but it is sobering.
Something extraneous I'd like to add is the principle of behavioral existence: If something exists to control behavior, then the undesired behavior does exist, and power exists to reduce it. The best example is no littering signs, clearly there is a problem with littering, because otherwise, why bother putting up a sign? In the same way, the same deliberateness exists in everything. I guess it's like "everything happens for a reason."
From these points, along with what Nidoking and Notahippie state, we can recreate the following points about social constructions:
1: Social constructs are artificial. They may seem real, but are largely created.
2: Because of this, their identities are incredibly fluid.
3: We usually only notice big shifts, but small shifts also occur.
4: Social constructs not only include rules about living, they also contain consequences for the transgressions of it.
5: Social constructs are also defined by alterity.
6: Social constructs are maintained, not just by force, but also by almost imperceptible actions. The child mocking their peer maintains gender norms just as much as my desire to use masculine pronouns as a default for third-persons like the child I just created in the previous example. Obviously, the inverse is true, resisting that imperceptible desire creates and maintains openings for alternative constructs.
7: Social constructs are created, not just by the individual, but also by observers. Gender isn't just what you show, but also how other people make of what you show. I may dress feminine, but if people think "That person's not succeeding at being female", then I've been deemed male (and by extension, part of gender binary. I had to catch this example for it's adherence to the gender binary as well.)
8: Additionally, we are shaped by and shape social structures.
There's definitely more that I'm forgetting because social norms have a desire to be seen as "natural" and "unquestioning." I know this response evolved over the course of its own creation.
So like... what do we do? How do we deal with the Social Norm? We can't burn it all down and make a new norm, nor can we just separate.
I think what's being proposed by this game and Notahippie is a good play; we gradually form paths and tread them, until they too, become so well-trod as to be seem as a part of living. Corner curbs are everywhere, and they didn't use to be.
... It's good to meet you all