Cripping Justice: Enabling Theory on Disability

Abstract

Disability activism and disability studies have, over the last half-century, evolved theories to understand disability and operationalise justice for disabled people. Historically, the starting point is the Medical Model, where disability is a bodily ‘defect’, and therefore the responsibility of the disabled person to address or overcome. Making progress in theorising and actuating rights and justice for disabled people, disabled activists and scholars proposed the Social Model of disability. The Social Model understands disability as environmental barriers preventing people with impairments from accessing spaces and participating in society: societal oppression imposed on impairments. While a significant improvement, the Social Model is not perfect. It neither theorises impairment nor addresses cognitive impairment. It was never intended to be a complete theory of disablement; it was crafted as a political tool to agitate for disability rights. To that extent, it has had moderate success. Nonetheless, the oppression of disabled people remains an ongoing systemic and structural problem. Countries continue to use the Medical Model to define disability in legislation, while the rights enumerated (such as accommodations and access) are informed by the Social Model. This disconnect between definitions and rights has had a negative impact on the implementation of disability rights. Judges, working under the false belief/assumption of disability rights being ‘benefits’, have been overly focused on policing the boundaries of disability, often dismissing cases on grounds that claimants do not qualify as ‘disabled’ under the relevant legislation. Many of the definitions of disability (in law and theory) fall short of providing an accurate account of the problem of disablement. While the Social Model is vital to the progress of disability rights, it falls short of providing a thorough account of disablement. A part of the problem is its definitional reliance on impairment. Understanding disability as oppression imposed on impairment leaves impairment to be defined by medical science, and fails to question the moral valuations of impairment as a normatively negative trait. Other models (the most relevant being the Interactionist Model) also fail to account for disability, retaining negative valuation on impairment. They fall short of providing an account of justice in respect of impairment and cognitive justice. I suggest that the Social Model is not wrong but does not go far enough in its understanding of disablement to provide a full articulation of justice for disabled people. To this end, I suggest the Devaluation Model of disability. The Devaluation Model understands disability as any bodily condition/functioning/capacity that is devalued/neglected by society for deviating from societal expectations/norms. Where the Social Model focuses on barriers to access, the Devaluation Model provides an articulation of why these barriers exist. It is a universalist model in its understanding of everybody being subject to societal valuation; society is the cause of enablement and disablement in equal measure. It also rejects the notion of structural separation of disablement from other forms of oppression. The Devaluation Model understands the problem of disablement to be structural neglect of the needs and capacities of disabled people. For impairment, this manifests as an ignorance of the self-declared desires and wants of disabled people on our bodily needs and a lack of facilitation/denial of agency for us to address our bodily needs. It addresses cognitive disablement by rejecting societal norms/expectations of a minimum threshold of cognitive capacity for participation and inclusion in society. The Devaluation Model also provides the framework for cripping justice, or reframing justice from the perspective of disablement. Justice has been a primary objective of many scholars in disability studies. Conversely, theories of justice often ignore disability, suggesting this to be a space of ‘natural’ inequality and therefore not an appropriate subject of justice. What remains largely unexplored is the potential for models of disability to understand and build frameworks of justice. The Devaluation Model offers an understanding of structural oppression, explaining the persistence of oppression and marginalisation despite the significant strides made towards equality and the efforts of lawmakers and activists to push for progressive change. The devaluation model suggests that the core of structural oppression is hierarchical devaluation of certain groups. The manners and forms in which oppression presents, manifests, or is perpetuated are the trappings/appearance built around the core problem of devaluation. It is important to address the forms that oppression takes, but without addressing the core problem of devaluation, oppression will persist. Devaluation operates at the individual, institutional, and societal levels. Addressing it requires concerted efforts on all three. At the individual level, we need to divest ourselves of our attachment to hierarchical identities. At the institutional level, we need to rework our systems to prioritise supporting and including people regardless of functioning. At the societal level, we must take cognizance of the many ways devaluation permeates our culture and actively work to undo and mitigate its effects in our everyday lives. Doing so can bring us closer to living in a just world, where justice is understood as inclusion and enablement.