Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

The disability rights movement began in the 1960s and drew on other rights movements, including the civil rights movement, women’s movement, and gay rights movement. People with disabilities in the US were not protected under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and faced problems with accessible transportation, housing, buildings, telecommunications, and other areas of life—excluding them from having the same experiences as people without disabilities. A specialist in disability studies, Lennard Davis describes how his parents, who were deaf, could not talk on the phone, request sign language interpreters during appointments, drive, or go to church or the movies because of a lack of closed captioning and sign language interpretation:

Disabled people were treated like children—dependent, helpless, and unlike children, pitiable. Most disabled people were not allowed the dignities of work, a love life, friends, children, advanced education, and a profession. And worse than all of this, being a person with a disability was tantamount to being an invisible person. No one cared about your plight; society ignored you. You essentially did not exist (Davis, Lennard. Enabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the Americans the Disabilities Act Gave the Largest US Minority Its Rights. Beacon Press, 2015).

Disability rights began with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, when World War II veterans with disabilities demanded rehabilitation services and vocational training from the government. Subsequent activism followed when parents advocated for children with disabilities, and disability rights advocates fought for legislation to prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities.

In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was instituted to protect the rights of people with disabilities. It prohibits discrimination against them in employment, public services, public transportation and accommodations, government services, and telecommunications. The ADA views a person with a disability as someone who has a physical or mental impairment that “substantially limits one or more major life activity,” including those who had an impairment in the past but no longer do and those seen by others as having a disability (“Guide to Disability Rights Laws.” ADA.gov). Rebekah Taussig briefly discusses the ADA in the context of her own life and work done by disability advocates. She notes the broad definition of disability in the ADA and how people are often unaware of the legislation’s existence.

Disability rights focus on addressing barriers to transportation, public places, health care, and employment, as well as discrimination and negative representation in media. Sociologist and bioethicist Tom Shakespeare notes that ableism lies with societal factors, especially one’s environment: “[B]arrier-free buildings and transport are important not just in themselves, but also because they enable people to access other public goods, such as education, health, and employment opportunities” (Shakespeare, Tom. Disability: The Basics. Routledge, 2018). The disability rights movement gradually moved from a medical model to a social model of disability, a concept originated by the UK’s Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation. In 1976, the group published a pamphlet that defined this social model: “[I]t is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society” (Shakespeare). This shifts the focus from “fixing” disabilities to societal issues, allowing people with disabilities to fight for rights rather than having to prove their personhood (Shakespeare). To reiterate, the social model focuses on the following:

the interaction between functional limitations or impairments and physical and social barriers to full participation create disabling environments. [It] distinguishes between disabilities and impairments. Disabilities are restrictions imposed by society. Impairments are the effects of any given condition. The solution...lies not in fixing the person, but in changing our society. Medical care, for example, should not focus on cures or treatments in order to rid our bodies of functional impairments. Instead, this care should focus on enhancing our daily function in society (“Medical and Social Models of Disability.” University of California, San Francisco Office of Developmental Primary Care).

Taussig emphasizes the social model throughout the book and her definition of ableism to focus on society’s idealized body. She also focuses on the range of physical impairments on the spectrum of disability.