Feminist Perspectives on Disability (review)

Feminist Perspectives on Disability. 2000. By Barbara Fawcett. Lon-don: Pearson Education.

Barbara Fawcett's book, Feminist Perspectives on Disability, accomplishes the formidable task of drawing together two fields of literature that bear more parallels to each other than they do intersections. The work of a feminist disability theorist is a difficult one in that she stands with one foot in each field and bears the burden of showing how disability and gender studies can be mutually informative. In the United Kingdom, this kind of work is not as easily achieved as it might be in U. S. disability studies because of the mechanism by which both a political movement and an academic discipline emerged and flourished in the last twenty years. The brainchild of Michael Oliver, the "social model of disability" made possible a profound and radical shift in the conceptualization of disability. Under the social model, disability is no longer a function of an individual's material impairment and her supposed lack of a "normal" body, but is instead viewed as the result of socially imposed barriers such that disablement resides in ableist environments and not in the disabled body per se. The profundity of this insight lies in the shift of the burden of disability from the individual to society.

However, as Fawcett demonstrates in her thorough review of the literature, the practical and theoretical implications of the social model framework continues to both sustain and plague the field of disability studies as well as disability politics. The problem with the social model and related theoretical frameworks that emerge from the social model is one of limitations: "disabled people are both positioned in a limited number of ways and have a limited number of positionings available to them" (34). Similarly, a recurrent critique of the social model made by feminist disability theorists is that the social model overlooks the role of the body and experience in its concrete, material manifestations of impairment. Disabled people are thus positioned in ways that force a public/private split upon their bodies via a materialist framework of impairment (as a biological foundation) and disability (as a social construction)—a split that leads to a fragmented self-conception of one's disability. For example, the seeking of medical attention for certain aspects of their impairments ends up being a private, "medical" matter—one that is independent of and inconsistent with the notion of disability as a socially constructed, public matter.

For Fawcett, a more central concern is whether or not the social model and its derivative frameworks can address the issue of difference among disabled people as a group with respect to impairment, disability, race, class, age, sex, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Taking my cue from the opening epigraph, which reads: "Now we must recognize differences among [disabled people] who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others' difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles," ¹ it is clear that Fawcett will argue that the social model has thus far not successfully addressed issues of differences—and that, in the end, it may well prove unsuccessful altogether. However, it must be noted that she does not explicitly advocate a rejection of the social model. Instead, she argues that, in the very least, disability theorists need to reconsider the tendencies of the social model to speak for all disabled people. She states: "Largely as a result of either/or dichotomies, or an over-reliance on binary forms of analysis, disability rights movements and feminism(s) in the past have often been presented as homogenous and unified movements, with feminism appearing to speak for all women, and disability rights, based on the social model of disability, appearing to speak for all disabled people" (39).

In pointing to this overlap between disability studies and feminism, Faw—cett's voice joins the chorus of the rapidly growing body of disabled feminist authors (Liz Crow, Jenny Morris, Nasa Begum, Margaret Lloyd, Mairian Corker) who argue that the social model framework...