F/W: The role of the ballot should be for the team that best helps center the debate on the question of ability

AT: Cap

F/W: The role of the ballot should be for the team that best helps center the debate on the question of ability

Aff comes first – interrogating notions of productive bodies forms a direct challenge to capitalism rather than a mere symptom.

In closing we gesture to our own contribution in addition to the productive discussions of alternative valuation systems with regard to people with disabilities. In "Disability as Multitude: Re-working Non-productive Labor Power" we employ Hardt and Negri's concept of "multitudes" in order to re-fashion contemporary understandings of people with disabilities and their overriding ouster from guiding concepts of productivity within late Capitalism. Rather than continue necessary lines of thought regarding contemporary social barriers to disability and meaningful employment, we undertake a discussion of disability as an alternative to existing models of consumption. In so doing we seek to recognize disability as a pragmatic category for engaging enactments of nationalism and normative expectations of citizenship. We call this imperative to conform to the demands of competitive labor markets and their attendant [End Page 123] normative expectations of participation Ablenationalism. Ablenationalism involves the implicit assumption that minimum levels of corporeal, intellectual, and sensory capacity, in conjunction with subjective aspects of aesthetic appearance, are required of citizens seeking to access the "full benefits" of citizenship. As such, most people with disabilities are excluded by falling short of this participatory bottom line and, as such, key guiding principles of democracy are left unrealized. When we approach disability with respect to a concept of alternative valuation rather than merely as a symptom of exclusion within Capitalism, opportunities erupt for realizing "other worlds" of possibilities. In traditional formulas of Marxism and liberal discourses of political economy, disability represents the existence of non-productive bodies that cannot be successfully adapted to market expectations of competitive labor. Such bodies prove needy of state and private sponsorship that mark them as superfluous to classifications of those on the outer most fringes of Capitalism such as "surplus labor." In Hardt and Negri's definition of "non-productive bodies" we find a potentially productive alternative to body-based exclusions in identifying disability and other nonconforming populations as actively resistant to the imperatives of consumptive living (Empire, 274). Rather than simply bemoaning a lack of inclusivity characteristic of neo-liberal social orders, "non-productive bodies" allows a more active reading based on refusals of normative modes of participation that operate with respect to compulsory able-bodiedness as their unspoken foundation.

Disability must be at the forefront of our critical analysis, it inherently includes a lens of historical materialism – means perm do the aff

Capitalism isn’t the root cause – disabled oppression exists in both pre- and post-capitalist societies.

Gleeson, 99 (Brendan Gleeson is the professor of Urban Policy Studies at Melbourne University, “Geographies of Disability”, 1999, https://books.google.com/books?id=6UsqBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=The+rest+of+this+book+is+devoted+to+this+unfinished,+indeed+hardly+established,+project+of+writing+%27body+histories%27.&source=bl&ots=6bp5MLe4sl&sig=-XADEI9o-d5PkyGHITqYYP32OHM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvgbvH0p_VAhUBVj4KHRTmD34Q6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=The%20rest%20of%20this%20book%20is%20devoted%20to%20this%20unfinished%2C%20indeed%20hardly%20established%2C%20project%20of%20writing%20'body%20histories'.&f=false )

The rest of this book is devoted to this unfinished, indeed hardly established, project of writing 'body histories'. In the previous chapter I made it clear that there is a pressing need for empirically grounded research on the social experiences of disabled people in nearly all historical societies. In selecting the empirical contexts for this study from the vast continent of human history - including, for example, 'primitive' and Classical societies - I have followed a fairly well-trodden path. As was shown earlier, the transition from feudalism to capitalism has attracted interest from a variety of materialist and other radical disability scholars. Their reasons are clear enough: a distinguishing, and politically salient, feature of materialism is its insistence that the fundamental relations of capitalist society are implicated in the social oppression of disabled people. This suggests that the elimination of disablement (and, for that matter, many other forms of oppression) requires a radical transformation, rather than reform, of capitalism. Thus, from the perspective of disabled people, historical-geographical research is needed for two main reasons: first, to identify those specific and enduring features of our present social formation, capitalism, which oppress disabled people; and second, to demonstrate the ways in which impairment was experienced in alternative societies, with a view to identifying social arrangements that are non-disabling. 'Alternative societies' includes both societies which preceded capitalism and those which have existed alongside it. Given that capitalism has not been the exclusive source of disablement in human history, it is politically important that materialists turn a critical gaze towards the historical experience of disabled people in 'socialist' societies. I think it best, however, to begin the historical-geographical project from our present context, connecting back to its prior forms, to the societies which gave birth to capitalism. A better understanding of the historical genesis of disability in capitalism both serves the contemporary political needs of the disability movement and also establishes the basis later for meaningful comparisons with other real and potential modes of production. In the present volume therefore I intend to follow the interest of materialist disability scholars in contemporary and historical capitalism, and its antecedent social form, feudalism. My explorations begin with feudalism and early capitalism in Part Il, and then shift in Part III of the book to contemporary themes.

Historical analysis fails and doesn’t account for the factors that shape disability

Gleeson, 99 (Brendan Gleeson is the professor of Urban Policy Studies at Melbourne University, “Geographies of Disability”, 1999, https://books.google.com/books?id=6UsqBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=The+rest+of+this+book+is+devoted+to+this+unfinished,+indeed+hardly+established,+project+of+writing+%27body+histories%27.&source=bl&ots=6bp5MLe4sl&sig=-XADEI9o-d5PkyGHITqYYP32OHM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvgbvH0p_VAhUBVj4KHRTmD34Q6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=The%20rest%20of%20this%20book%20is%20devoted%20to%20this%20unfinished%2C%20indeed%20hardly%20established%2C%20project%20of%20writing%20'body%20histories'.&f=false )

Any historical analysis must have both an empirical starting point and a framework for understanding temporal social change. Disabled people's lives have been shaped and differentiated by the historical structuring of social relations around a variety of social cleavages, such as class, gender, race, and sexuality. I chose a political-economic frame for my empirical analyses because the historical rise of capitalism generated a profound, and inescapable, source of material change in the increasing array of societies which have yielded in time to commodity relations. I therefore wish to elaborate how this vital transformative force has affected the social geographic circumstances of disabled people. By choosing a political-economic historical framework, I do not wish to dismiss or downplay the contribution of other socio-cultural structural influences on the historical experience of disability. My analyses will capture at various points the effects of these other socialising forces. None the less, I cannot, and do not, claim that the following historical geographies provide a complete picture or explanation of the changing experiences of disabled people in Western societies. It will be the task of subsequent historical geographies of disability to elucidate more fully the complex influences of various identity forms on the past lives of disabled people. I hope to contribute to this process by offering glimpses on the role that political- economic dynamics played in this historical process. The aim of this chapter is to provide a conceptual introduction to the second part of the book which deals with the historical experience of disability in feudalism and industrial capitalism. In this chapter, I will distil from the framework developed in the previous part of the book a set of historiographical principles which can guide the study of disability in past societies. To do so, I will first need to engage the present historiography of disability which I referred to briefly in Chapter 2. My analysis here will begin with a short, critical review of this historiography, followed by an outline of my alternative historical-geographical method of analysis. Conventional approaches to the history of disability As I explained in the previous two chapters, there has been relatively little attempt within social science to understand the historical experience of disability in any depth. The few serious historical studies of disability hardly constitute a comprehensive and critically engaged debate on the topic. Moreover, the limited historiography of disability studies seems to have littered the field with a number of assumed orthodoxies about the social context of impairment in previous societies (Gleeson, 1996b). I want to examine these assumptions critically in the following discussion with a view to providing an alternative historiography in the second part of this chapter.

Perm do both - Disability exists in imperfection – if the alternative must be perfect to solve, their world necessarily excludes disabled bodies

Martz, 01 (Erin Martz has a PhD in Rehabilitation Education and Research and is a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor. She has focused on research coping with and adapting to chronic health conditions and disabilities for the past 20 years. She is a 2017 Fulbright Research Fellow for the US Department of State, works as a research investigator for the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and runs her own business called Rehability. “Acceptance of Imperfection”, 2001, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/302/353 )

*edited

In addition to the subjectivity of perfection, for every individual who is deemed "the best" or "highest" on a certain external or internal quality, there will always be another individual who surpasses the individual on another quality. Hence, the "fiction of perfection" (Lazarsfeld, 1991) usually entails a unidimensional means of viewing of a person by an exclusive focus on one quality. Since every individual is multifaceted, then this fact of the multidimensional nature of individuals precludes the ability of an individual to surpass others on every possible human quality. The dichotomous thinking of perfection/imperfection is similar to the dichotomous thinking of disability/ability. For example, the phrase describing people without disabilities as "temporally-abled" implies that once an individual has a disability, then they lose all their abilities. This ignores that all humans have a range of abilities and qualities in which they may surpass many others. However, imperfections and disabilities will always exist simultaneously with qualities that may be viewed socially as approaching perfection along with abilities. As Arokiasamy (1993) stated, "Every single person has some ability while no person has infinite perfection" (p. 83). What needs to be emphasized, when discussing social norms especially in the context of disability, is that no human can become perfect. Some humans may have one or several favorable qualities that are well-developed, but because of the multidimensional nature of humans no individual can be denoted as perfect, flawless, or unequivocally without fault. All humans are imperfect. Many acknowledge that perfection is impossible in real life (Arokiasamy, 1993; Lazarsfeld, 1991; Pacht, 1984). Yet, the strong force of social norms distracts people from this fact. Like the inevitability of death, the fact of imperfection is suppressed and denied by many. Pacht (1984) described a client who believed she was perfect even pointing out that the word "imperfect" can be "visualized as I.M. PERFECT which of course reads, I am perfect" (p. 388). Application to Disability Studies The assertion that no human is perfect is relevant to the field of disability studies for many reasons. First, perceptions are held by many people that individuals with physical or mental disabilities are imperfect and thus are avoided due to fear of safety or contagion (Smart, 2001). Such discrimination and stigma is a blatant disregard and denial for the fact that no human is perfect. The anger, avoidance, blame, and stigma that is often heaped upon individuals with disabilities could be explained as a projection of an individual's own insecurity and non-acceptance of the fact that he or she [they] is also imperfect. The projection of the "fiction of perfection" (Lazarsfeld, 1991) unfortunately finds a target in people with disabilities. This may occur because disabilities may serve as a threat to one's conscious and unconscious body image (Livneh, 1982) which may include beliefs about the importance of (physical) perfection. Disability may also pose an unconscious reminder of death (Livneh, 1982) which could be viewed as the ultimate form of imperfection due to not having control over all aspects of one's life. Smart (2001) reports on the attitude that leads to "imperfect" people with disabilities being blocked or discouraged from marrying or having children due to the concern about passing the "imperfection" onto others. What is wrong with this concept? The error lies squarely in the irrational belief that there are humans who are perfect. Stone (1995) wrote about the pervasive social myth of bodily perfection. Yet, cognitive and emotional perfection should also be included in her analysis. Thus, the bottom line is that it is a myth that anyone can claim to be perfect. To emphasize once again, perceived perfection is a relative concept according to one's social and cultural viewpoint. Thus, true perfection is unobtainable by humans because there can never be an accepted standard of what constitutes total perfection. In addition, no one human can exhibit all the qualities that are deemed as a sign of perfection since one can easily find another quality of this individual that is surpassed by another individual. The same logic that is used to counter the perception that there are "perfect" humans can be used to address the thoughts when an individual declares that it is not "fair" that he or she [they] has a disability. Is absolute fairness possible, like absolute perfection? And if so, upon what qualities and by whose standards is fairness (or perfection) judged? Fairness, like perfection, is a perceived quality that depends upon the individual's worldview. "Fairness [like perfection] is not a universal/objective concept" (H. Livneh, personal communication, January 13, 2001). For example, if an individual picks a certain quality claiming that absolute fairness would be that everyone earns the same income (e.g., a communist society), then a problem arises when one individual works harder than the other. Is it "fair" that they are paid the same amount? Translating this into disability topics, is it "fair" that individuals differ widely on any one quality, whether it be physical, emotional, or cognitive abilities? Would perfect fairness be achieved if we all were the same on a specific quality, yet differed widely on other qualities? And who would choose which specific quality would be most desirable for all of us to be equivalent? In a similar way, who decides what qualities would make up a "perfect" person? Acceptance of Imperfection Individuals with congenital or sudden-onset disabilities may internalize the stigma that "disability means imperfection" (Smart, 2001). They may view disability as "a constant reminder of imperfection" (Bicknell, 1983). These highly laden, negative connotations of having a disability is one reason why some may argue that an individual should not "accept" the disabled aspect of his or her [their] mental or physical life. However, if the argument shifts from whether one should or should not accept a specific disability that exists in one's life to the argument that all no human is perfect, then the issue becomes: does an individual accept that they are imperfect, like everyone? The fact that society as a whole denies that each and every person has imperfections and that there can be no perfect person is a larger issue. The negative connotation placed upon physical or mental disabilities by society can be recognized as a form of projection of fears about facing one's own imperfection and finiteness. Thus, a baby with a disability should not be labeled "imperfect" by the parents (Bicknell, 1983) as if there was a human that was perfect.

Materialism isn’t the solution to capitalism, it’s a cause – society is fundamentally dependent on disability, not capitalism, and resistance has to come from outside the materialist frame.

Coleridge, 93 (Peter Coleridge was the Chief Technical Adviser for the Comprehensive disabled Afghans’ Programme with a Masters from Oxford, he is currently an Independent consultant on development specializing in disability “Disability, Liberation, and Development”, Jan 1, 1993, https://books.google.com/books?id=RcEaJ4WT-u4C&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=Development+is+not+simply+about+finding+a+solution+to+the+problem+of+poverty+on+the+grand+scale.&source=bl&ots=vYbIyYV2c4&sig=9IlnceytUvgI4FUZUKcfzFnp1jY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwib9-yf1J_VAhWIjz4KHSgiBKwQ6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=Development%20is%20not%20simply%20about%20finding%20a%20solution%20to%20the%20problem%20of%20poverty%20on%20the%20grand%20scale.&f=false )

Development is not simply about finding a solution to the problem of poverty on the grand scale. Poverty is a symptom of a greater malaise, an intrinsically flawed materialism which fails to value the earth and its resources and all the people who live on it. Poverty cannot be ‘solved’ using materialistic attitudes and mechanisms. Disability provides a key to unlock the secret of where the deeper values lie; it challenges all of us over our fundamental attitudes to what determines the value of life. A society which ignores its disabled people or shuts them away in institutions… is deprived of its necessary corrective. It mistakenly believes that only the disabled are independent persons. It fails to see that society itself is invisibly dependent on the disabled for a critique of its humane norms and values. In view of both out domestic social problems and the problems of the world community (for example starvation, apartheid and the gap between rich and poor), it is becoming ever clearer that the solution to these problems depends less and less on power and money and increasingly on the challenge of a radical thinking, that is learning.

Materialist explanations of disability fail – can’t inform successful activism and ignore intersectionality.

Tregaskis, 2 (Claire Tregaskis is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Social work at University of Plymouth “Social Model Theory: The story so far”, Disability & Society, 17:4, 457-470, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687590220140377 )

Social model accounts were developed by disabled people in response to the prevailing individual/medical model that saw disabled people as ‘the problem’, and placed responsibility on people with impairments to adapt to fit in as far as possible with mainstream society (Barnes, 1992; Spence, 1992; Thomas, 1982, p. 18). The first accounts to emerge had a strong emphasis on the economic exclusion of disabled people. Thus UPIAS defined disability as ‘the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of social activities’ (1976, pp. 3–4). In countering the previously pervasive and victim-blaming individual model, this definition was ground-breaking, although it should also be noted that the exclusion of people with learning difficulties from the agenda was not questioned at this early stage of theory development. Following on from UPIAS, Finkelstein developed a materialist analysis of disabled people’s exclusion, based on the Marxist seven stages of progression (1980). He argued that there have been three phases of development in terms of how disabled people are perceived. In Phase One, disabled people formed part of a mainstream oppressed underclass (Finkelstein, 1980, p. 8). In Phase Two, the rise of capitalism led to industrialisation and urbanisation, and the regulation and externalisation of working practices. Many disabled people could not compete in this new market economy, and so were redefined as passive and dependent, and were then segregated from mainstream society in workhouses and asylums (Finkelstein, 1980, p. 10). Finally, he predicted that in a future Phase Three, the introduction of new technology and shift in focus away from the individual and onto the ways in which society disables people will enable people with impairments to start reintegrating into the mainstream, and disability will disappear (Finkelstein, 1980, pp. 11–12). This account has been critiqued on a number of fronts. First, the accuracy of the historical timescale used, and the rationale attributed to members of the Establishment for both inclusion and segregation, have been questioned (for example, Meyerson & Scruggs, 1980; Oliver, 1986, pp. 13–14; 1990, p. 27). So, too, has his assumption that technology would, in the future, be available for use by disabled people as an enabling tool, an optimism that has not —with the benefit of hindsight— been justified, due to the exclusionary ways in which technology has subsequently developed (Johnson & Moxon, 1998; Roulstone, 1998). His account has also been criticised for not making explicit any link between how making practical changes like improving physical access will lead to more positive attitudes towards disabled people (Meyerson & Scruggs, 1980). However, despite these criticisms it has been widely acknowledged as a seminal analysis, particularly in terms of its emphasis on disability as a social construction, and in seeing the big issue as lying within the relationship between the individual and society. In other words, it was no longer enough simply to look at the workings of one-on-one individual relationships— instead these had to be seen within a wider social context in which people with impairments are oppressed. Oliver (1990, 1996) drew on the earlier work by UPIAS and Finkelstein in defining disability as a social creation, from which it follows that the experience of disability depends on the sort of society we live in (1990, p. 11; 1996, p. 22). His accounts analyse the ways in which British capitalist society disables people with impairments (1990, p. 11), emphasising the ways in which structural barriers create exclusion. In developing his argument, he follows Stone in arguing that all societies function on the distributive principle, allocating goods and services on the basis that everyone is able to work. If you can’t work, you’re defined as being ‘in need’. As a result ‘disability’ has become a structural boundary category between work-based and needs-based distribution systems, which has in turn often been used as an oppressive and stigmatising tool against disabled people (Oliver, 1990, pp. 40–41). Thus, during early capitalism people with impairments were classified as being amongst the ‘deserving poor’ and were thus eligible for state aid. More recently, however, the fluidity of the disability category has been demonstrated as the boundaries of who is defined as ‘disabled’ in terms of determining eligibility for state aid have been changed in both Britain and the USA, according to the perceived need to control or relax welfare spending (Yelin, 1986, 1993). Oliver also explains how capitalism has structurally defined disabled people as ‘dependent’, with their lives and choices being defined by non-disabled professionals. In practice this has allowed the reality of those professionals’ dependence on disabled people for their livelihoods to become obscured (1990, pp. 90–91). Barton further emphasises the practical effects of this in describing how disablist assumptions and discourses based on individual deficit models of disability have silenced the voices of people with impairments and excluded them from full citizenship (Barton, 1993, pp. 235–236). The above materialist analyses were developed from a modernist perspective and have been critiqued primarily for their emphasis on capitalist economics as the main cause of disability. Other theorists, including some materialists, have questioned the bases of such claims, arguing, for example, that any society, whether capitalist or not, can only survive through maintaining some sort of inclusion/ exclusion mechanisms, and that any society in which full citizenship is judged on the basis of people being able to contribute their labour to the means of production will exclude at least some disabled people (Abberley, 1987, 1996). Others (Morris, 1991; Stuart, 1993; Vernon, 1996, 1999) have argued that materialist accounts often ignore issues of multiple or simultaneous oppression on the grounds of gender, age, race and sexuality, as well as playing down the significance of the real disabling effects of some impairments (Abberley, 1987; Crow, 1996; Hughes, 2000; Morris, 1991). It is also said that removing structural barriers alone has not led to equality for women or members of minority ethnic groups, so it is perhaps naive to assume that it will be any different for disabled people (Corker, 1999, p. 636). Many of these criticisms have recently been addressed by Thomas (1999). She argues for the development of an expanded materialist feminist social model account which recognises the gendered nature of disability (Thomas, 1999, p. 124), and which also challenges previous assumptions of the need for disability theory to maintain a distinction between ‘public issues’ and ‘private troubles’. This would provide a more holistic account, addressing the full extent of disabling practice (Thomas, 1999, p. 48) and its harmful psycho-emotional effects on disabled people (p. 46). Even more holistic materialist accounts like this one, however, still assume an end goal in which all discourses come together in synthesis, whilst at the same time continuing to utilise social processes that create a binary opposition between ‘self’ and ‘other’ (Hughes, 2000, p. 557). This highlights a potential contradiction between materialist social model theory and activist practice, in that such theories argue for an ideological consensus based on the assumption of a primary and essentialist ‘disabled identity’ shared by all people with impairments, even though this assumption is at odds with the reality of the lives of disabled people who experience simultaneous oppression on a range of fronts (Stuart, 1993; Vernon, 1996, 1999). Furthermore, such assumptions of a fundamental and unbridge-able difference between the disabled self and the non-disabled other also seem to militate against the possibility of forming alliances for change with any non-disabled others, even those who belong to other oppressed groups.

Disability is entrenched in cultural formation – makes it a pre-req

Snyder & Mitchell 1 [Sharon L. Snyder is a researcher in the fields of disability studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. David T. Mitchell is the executive director in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has a PhD in Disability Studies at the University of Chicago. Together they have written and/or edited four books, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), The Encyclopedia of Disability (vol. 5): A History of Disability in Primary Sources (2005), and Cultural Locations of Disability (2006). Their most recent book, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism and Peripheral Embodiment (forthcoming) analyzes crip/queer subcultures as social spaces of differentiation for the construction of non-normative identities. They also founded the disability production film house Brace Yourselves Productions, which has created four internationally award-winning films: Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1995), A World Without Bodies (2002), Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer (2005), and Disability Takes on the Arts (2006 “Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment”, Public Culture 13(3): 367–389, 9/14/2001, http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/13/3/367.full.pdf )

Consequently, disability studies has formulated the problem of the medicalized body in a manner similar to that undertaken earlier in body studies, taking up medical institutions (and the ancillary administering of diagnosis, sequestration, and case study) as the primary locus of its critique. The pathologization of human differences is theorized as an imposition on the body—a regulatory effort to standardize inherent dynamism. But while body studies provided a foundation for a more general model of critique around the categories of illness, health, pathology, and even bioethics, disability studies moves beneath these terms to encounter disability directly in the experiences of human populations which were merely referenced euphemistically by those more general terms. Disability studies narrows the focus of its investigation to the social implications for bodies deemed excessively aberrant. In doing so, scholars have expanded the domain of cultural understandings about disability beyond the walls of its scientific management. For disability studies, the disabled body is neither a matter of individual malfunction—as cast by medicine—nor an effect of the abstraction of the body within the health professions. Instead, disability translates into a common denominator of cultural fascination (if not downright obsession)—one that infiltrates thinking across discursive registers as a shared reference point in deciding matters of human value and communal belonging. In this emergent field, the able body is no longer characterized as merely a false quantitative ideal, as it had been in body studies, but rather as an aesthetic product of cultural forces that oppress those categorized as disabled. This subtle shift in emphasis allows humanities scholars in disability studies to extend the discussion of bodily deviance from the context of rehabilitative institutions to that of wider ranging cultural locations. For instance, Lennard J. Davis (1995) analyzes the role of institutions for the Deaf in the historical development of disability activism and community in eighteenth-century Europe. Martin Pernick (1996) analyzes the influential role of public health films in the promotion of eugenics in Chicago prior to World War II. Through readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literary texts and cultural spectacles such as the freak show, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) argues that disabled people’s bodies have been represented as unassimilable within a normalizing biological ideology that marks the disabled body as the inferior contrast to an able-bodied, white, masculine citizenry. Paul K. Longmore (1997) assesses television genres, such as disease-of-the-week movies and telethons, to dissect mainstream representations of disability as tragedies in need of eradication or overcoming. In our own Narrative Prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2000), we theorize the pervasive utility of disability to literature in Europe and the United States by discussing the longstanding artistic recourse to disability as a staple feature of characterization. Disability studies scholars have also analyzed the opportunistic use of corporeal metaphors to emblematize societal weaknesses in literary and philosophical figurations of disability. Ultimately, these analyses of the pervasive dependency upon textual and visual representations of disability in various cultural media have forced a reformulation of a theory of marginality itself within disability studies. This is one site at which disability studies diverges from the approach established by other civil rights–based programs. While many minority movements have argued that their social devaluation occurs as a result of their marginal presence in representational media, disability studies has formulated an analysis of social depreciation targeting the perpetual recourse to images of disability in narrative and visual mediums. As a result, disability studies follows a figuration of marginality as the expression of an “overheated symbolic organism” that conveys potent meanings as a result of its palimpsest-like discursive history (cf. Stewart 1993). Theaters of Repression The work of disability studies scholars consolidated the argument that bodily and cognitive differences were integral to various registers of meaning-making within culture. While the earliest research in the field kept returning to a denunciation of three prominent literary figures—Shakespeare’s Richard III, Melville’s Captain Ahab, and Dickens’s Tiny Tim—the growing body of historical research called for wider ranging methodologies. As with later developments in race and gender studies, disability studies outgrew its denunciations of stereotypes; instead, theorists began to argue that disability represented a deep-seated, yet uninterrogated, cultural conflict. If the able body proved a utopian fiction of abstract bodily norms, disabled bodies occupied the phantasmic recesses of the cultural imaginary. The different body was more than a site for public scapegoating—cognitive and physical aberrancies acted as reminders of Others in our midst who challenged beliefs in a homogeneous bodily order. Out of these efforts to elucidate the constructed nature of disabled bodies in history, disability studies set out to diagnose the investments of an ableist society in disability’s various incarnations. Cultural efforts to medicalize or domesticate disability effectively repressed the power of aberrancy to unmoor notions of the body as a matter of norms, averages, and deviations. Locating disabled bodies as rare examples of extraordinary deviance essentially cordoned off disability from the differences that characterize typical biological diversity. For disability studies, the impersonal was the political. Such a sequestration evidenced the mainstream desire to reduce the different body’s (or mind’s) ability to destabilize normative models of health.

Extra

The social model of disability inherently contains a historical materialist analysis

Shakespeare and Watson, 97 (Tom Shakespeare is a senior lecturer at Norwich Medical School. He has a PhD at Cambridge University. Nick Watson is a professor of Disability Studies at University of Glasgow, “Defending the Social Model”, Disability & Society, 1997, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599727380 )

Second, the social model of disability is in a process of development, exploration and analysis. While Pinder presents a picture of stony-faced ideologues misrepresenting disabled people’s lives, in fact we have thousands of disabled people, including academics, discussing the issues and arguing about the best way to theorise disability. As well as the papers by Crow and French which Pinder references, there is published work by Morris (1991) and Shakespeare (1992), and unpublished work and unrecorded debate by many others. As with any other area of political debate, or sociological theory, there is a constant process of criticism, self-criticism and development (Oliver, 1996b). The social model originally under- played the importance of impairment in disabled people’s lives, in order to develop a strong argument about social structures and social processes. No theory emerges into the world fully formed, and getting the balance between the experience of impairment, and the experience of disability is a continuing endeavour. Pinder’s analysis elsewhere in her paper will actually contribute to this process, and should be welcomed. As well as these omissions, there is a misrepresentation of the body of work which Pinder refers to as `disability theory’ and which is commonly described as `disability studies’. Pinder suggests a neglect of what she calls society’s `sins of commission’, and describes discrimination in terms of negative attitudes. In her conclusions she refers to cultural proscription, marginalisation of outsiders and other social processes which she argues are not dealt with within the social model approach. She is entirely right to identify aspects of cultural representation and social attitudes, which are extremely disabling for people with impairment. However, far from offering an original analysis, or locating a lacuna within disability studies, she is in fact making an old argument. For example, Paul Hunt discussed such processes in 1966. Jenny Morris described the effects of prejudice in 1991. David Hevey developed a substantial theoretical account in The Creatures Time Forgot (1992). Colin Barnes summarised the key issues in 1992. Shakespeare (1994) subsequently published an article which explored cultural representation and theorised prejudice, using the concepts such as anomaly and liminality to which Pinder refers in the current paper. Many other contemporary sociologists within disability studies are exploring the body, impairment, and cultural processes (Barnes, 1995; Shakespeare & Watson, 1995; Oliver, 1996b). Equally, her suggestion that we need to explore closely the relationship between impairment, environment, and social interaction in the employment context has already been acted on by Alan Roulstone (1993) and forms the subject of his forthcoming monograph. In order to grind her particular axe, Pinder has constructed a picture of the disability studies perspective which few would recognise, and reinforced it by reference to a mere two research informants. Her critique is out-of-date, skewed by her biography, and highly subjective. Pinder’s paper, despite numerous merits and points of interest, represents a cul-de-sac. Moving On We have tried to demonstrate how the social model has had a limited impact, both in the mainstream media, and academic discourses other than disability studies. This failure relates to the ways in which other literature either ignore disability, or misconstrue disabled people’s lives. While this may be expected within biomedical and clinical approaches, its prevalence within social sciences should give cause for concern. What lessons can be learnt from exploring the range of reactions (and nonreactions) to the social model of disability? It could be argued that the continuing ignorance and hostility outside the movement highlights the danger of internal dissension. It has been suggested that questioning, for example the role of impairment, provides a `hostage to fortune’ and that alternative views should be suppressed, in order for the movement to speak with one, social model, voice (Finkelstein, 1996). Often, the disability movement prioritises marching to the beat of a single drum, favouring a united line to competing voices. Our conclusion is different. We have consistently argued that pluralism is a positive value, within both the disability movement and disability studies. Debates are necessary, and recognising difference within the disability community is overdue. Neither does openness threaten the central political goals of the movement. Post- modernist writers have argued against `meta-historical narratives’ and the modernist pursuit of a universalising and monolithic rationality (Fraser & Nicholson, 1990), and the contemporary experiences of disabled people highlight the value of such critiques. From this perspective, those who develop and refine the social model ensure its renewal and continuing relevance. Particularly, the dominant version of the social model has favoured a materialist, if not marxist, worldview. We argue it is possible (and indeed desirable), to retain the social model within a more nuanced worldview drawing on feminist and post-modernist accounts.

No historical root cause of ableism – oppression is intersubjective, not linear.

Campbell, 13 (Fiona Kumari Campbell works at the School of Education & Social Work, University of Dundee. She was Program Convenor, Human Services in the School of Health & Wellbeing at the University of Southern Queensland. She writes on disability and specificially—ableism, Sri Lankan disability, jurisprudence, technology, and South Asian disability, Problematizing Vulnerability: Engaging Studies in Ableism and Disability Jurisprudence, http://lha.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@law/@lirc/documents/doc/uow166211.pdf )

Disability produced in relations There are many ways to think about and designate disability and bodily difference. We are perhaps familiar with the biomedical approach (a first wave approach to disablement) and more recently the concept of the social model of disability (the second wave of disability paradigm) which links the designation ‘disability’ to capitalist economy and social organisatifon. Hence both the first and second wave of studies towards disability operates along the lines of a linear unidirectional causal paradigm where there is a proximity linkage between exact causes and extant effects. The rehabilitation model, architectural design, the economy or the adoption of prognosis diagnostics is indicative of a paradigm that proposes that “similar causes yield similar effects, and that different effects derive from difference causes” (Macy, 1991, 9). An exemplar of this manifestation is the rise of actuarialism and nosologies of disease.2 Much of the research around the world especially in Western countries, has taken as its focus disability as a problem and has studied the disabled person in individualized modes, promoted assimilation instead of uncovering the processes of abledness that sustain the existence of disability as an operational difference (Campbell, 2011; Goodley, 2012). In the past decade or so these approaches have been revised and developed into what can be described as a relational-cultural model which sees disability in terms of an evolution; an interaction between the impairment and the environment, the person and others. Known as the third wave of disability studies, this relational-cultural model is drawn from a French view of disability which understands the formation of the notion of disability as a relational, intersubjective encounter: Disability as a confrontation between the ability of a person and situations she encounters in life ‘macro-situations’, such as work or schooling, or ‘micro- situations’ such as cutting meat or using the keyboard of a computer. The disabling situations are not only structural and material, they are also (especially) cultural [my emphasis &translation] (Hamonet, 2006, p. 1). The perspective moves beyond abilities and limitations and embraces subjectivity acknowledging the person’s perception of difference in his /her body. Taking on board the conceptual notion of disability as a relational concept means that the production of disability must not be a by-product of our faulty interaction with differences in mentalities and bodies. This third configuration of disablement is reflected in the framework of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 3 The Preamble states: disability 4 is an evolving concept and that disability results from the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. ( Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 6 December 2006, at [e], my emphasis).

Phenomenological investigation of bodies is key to a coherent theory of politics – either the alt excludes embodiment or there’s no link because the aff’s method is material.

Coole & Frost, 10 (Dr. Diane Coole is a Professor of Political and Social Theory in the School of Politics and Sociology at the University of London. Dr. Samantha Frost is a professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois. “New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics”, 2010, https://books.google.com/books?id=UFhBBKKTkMoC&pg=PA19&lpg=PA19&dq=For+new+materialists,+no+adequate+political+theory+can+ignore+the+importance+of+bodies+in+situating+empirical+actors+within+a+material+environment+of+nature,+other+bodies,+and+the+socioeconomic+structures+that+dictate+where+and+how+they+find+sustenance,+satisfy+their+desires,+or+obtain+the+resources+necessary+for+participating+in+political+life&source=bl&ots=D0WQ8VMwQC&sig=N_z2IQ8pnsn_kxjynbFn5KMG4Zo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiglrjQ05_VAhXKdz4KHUY0DFkQ6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=For%20new%20materialists%2C%20no%20adequate%20political%20theory%20can%20ignore%20the%20importance%20of%20bodies%20in%20situating%20empirical%20actors%20within%20a%20material%20environment%20of%20nature%2C%20other%20bodies%2C%20and%20the%20socioeconomic%20structures%20that%20dictate%20where%20and%20how%20they%20find%20sustenance%2C%20satisfy%20their%20desires%2C%20or%20obtain%20the%20resources%20necessary%20for%20participating%20in%20political%20life&f=false )

For new materialists, no adequate political theory can ignore the importance of bodies in situating empirical actors within a material environment of nature, other bodies, and the socioeconomic structures that dictate where and how they find sustenance, satisfy their desires, or obtain the resources necessary for participating in political life. This is in fact something that feminists and class theorists have often insisted upon, and we would add in this context only our concern that such material dimensions have recently been marginalized by fashionable constructivist approaches and identity politics. Of course, the latter have had a good deal to say about the body and its imbrication in relationships of power, but we are not convinced that they pay sufficient attention to the material efficacy of bodies or have the theoretical resources to do so. From this perspective we draw attention to a new materialist predilection for a more phenomenological approach to embodiment. In addition to focusing on the way power constitutes and is reproduced by bodies, phenomenological studies emphasize the active, self-transformative, practical aspects of corporeality as it participates in relationships of power. They find bodies exhibiting agentic capacities in the way they structure or stylize their perceptual milieu, where they discover, organize, and respond to patterns that are corporeally significant. Such theories thus introduce elements of creative contingency, meaning, difference, efficacy, and a limited freedom for improvisation or resistance into nature before cognition begins. In other words, they complement ontologies of immanently productive matter by describing how living matter structures natural and social worlds before (and while) they are encountered by rational actors. Again, they give materiality its due. This emphasis on corporeality further dislocates agency as the property of a discrete, self-knowing subject in as much as the corpus is now recognized as exhibiting capacities that have significant effects on social and political situations. Thus bodies communicate with other bodies through their gestures and conduct to arouse visceral responses and prompt forms of judgment that do not necessarily pass through conscious awareness. They are significant players in games of power whenever face-to-face encounters are involved, such as in deliberative models of democracy. Paying attention to corporeality as a practical and efficacious series of emergent capacities thus reveals both the materiality of agency and agentic properties inherent in nature itself.29 Both have important implications for the way we understand political processes. In this emphasis on corporeality, we also glimpse one of the most distinctive characteristics of the new materialist ontologies: their avowed posthumanism. They displace what Giorgio Agamben calls "the anthropological machine of humanism."3o While new materialists' conceptualization of materialization is not anthropocentric, it does not even privilege human bodies. There is increasing agreement here that all bodies, including those of animals (and perhaps certain machines, too), evince certain capacities for agency. As a consequence, the human species, and the qualities of self-reflection, self-awareness, and rationality traditionally used to distinguish it from the rest of nature, may now seem little more than contingent and provisional forms or processes within a broader evolutionary or cosmic productivity. If human perfection or redemption is no longer understood as the destiny of history, neither is it the goal of evolution. While it does not follow that cognitive capacities for symbolism or reflexivity are no longer valued, the new materialism does prompt away of reconsidering them as diffuse, chance products of a self-generative nature from which they never entirely emerge.

The alt’s objective analysis over-historicizes disability and excludes discussions of situated experience in the present

Dewsbury et. al. 4 (Guy Dewsbury, Karen Clarke, Mark Rouncefeild & Ian Sommerville (Department of Computing Lancaster University Lancaster) and Dave Randall (Department of Sociology Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester UK)), “The anti-social model of disability”, Disability & Society, Vol. 19, No. 2, March 2004, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.140.9006&rep=rep1&type=pdf )

Our discussion of the ‘social model’ recognises that many different philosophical positions, which we have glossed as being a choice between realism and constructionism, underpin the anti-individualist position that it typically defends. That is, medical or psychopathological models, as we have seen, strongly suggest an expert-client relationship in which the expert seeks to cure or at least alleviate the symptoms experienced by, the client. The social model, in whatever form, has the great merit of 15 The Anti-Social Model of Disability producing an interactionist account of disability wherein disability is seen as a construction and thus necessarily a responsibility is shared by all parties to it. The challenge to ‘objective’ reality we have traced has largely been a matter of exposing the moral and political assumptions contained in client/expert views of the relationship between disabled people and wider society. That is, revealing a ‘taken for granted’ position as being only one of many possible ways of conceptualising this relationship. Above, we suggested that the constructionist mode typically involves four moves which lead inexorably to a political posture. There is nothing much wrong with this, except insofar as it implies, as social constructionist models sometimes (but not always) do, that if things could be otherwise, it means that there is no ‘reality’ in the first place. Equally, and despite the naturalistic fallacy contained in the move from 3. to 4. above, we have no great objection to the political postures adopted as a result of the anti-individualist position. Our objections lie in the privileging of sociological expertise to replace medical, psychological or whatever expertise. That is, as medical expertise is challenged we are asked to place our trust in a theoretical expertise held by sociologists instead, because it supposedly provides a more plausible account of what life is like for disabled people. Our argument has been that in important respects it fails to do that, because it provides a radically incomplete version of ‘experience’ and an ironic, explanatory account to boot. The problem with constructionist versions of experience is that they can slip into essentialist positions, whereby members of one social grouping are held to be incapable of experiencing the experiences of another social grouping and this in turn means a failure of understanding. We have been at pains to point out that it need not. Experience and understanding are quite different concepts. The ethnomethodological perspective we recommend argues that its analytic choices provide a means to understand the ordinary and mundane experiences of any social group, especially a social group that inhabits the same broad culture. These analytic choices dispose of the problem of ‘experience’ by de- essentialising it or de-reifying it. Experiences are local, situated phenomena, we have experiences of this or that. In building experience into our understanding of the needs of disabled people, the overriding requirement, in our view, is to understand phenomena as they are apprehended in precisely this or that, here and now, situation.

Not so good

Only the permutation solves – combining analysis of multiple non-economic background conditions is the only analytic sufficient to explain the historical constitution of capitalism. Power is co-constitutive and interwoven with, not linearly derived from, capitalism, and resistance should incorporate multiple angles of oppression.

Fraser 14 (Nancy Fraser is the professor of Political and Social Science and professor of Philosophy, and has a PhD in philosophy, “BEHIND MARX’S HIDDEN ABODE: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism”, New Left Review 86, March-April 2014, http://newleftreview.org/II/86/nancy-fraser-behind-marx-s-hidden-abode )

It follows from this that a proper account of capitalism’s foreground–background relations must hold together three distinct ideas. First, capitalism’s ‘non-economic’ realms serve as enabling background conditions for its economy; the latter depends for its very existence on values and inputs from the former. Second, however, capitalism’s ‘non-economic’ realms have a weight and character of their own, which can under certain circumstances provide resources for anti-capitalist struggle. Nevertheless, and this is the third point, these realms are part and parcel of capitalist society, historically co-constituted in tandem with its economy, and marked by their symbiosis with it. There is also a fourth idea, which returns us to the problem of crisis with which I began. Capitalism’s foreground–background relations harbour built-in sources of social instability. As we saw, capitalist production is not self-sustaining, but free rides on social reproduction, nature and political power; yet its orientation to endless accumulation threatens to destabilize these very conditions of its possibility. In the case of its ecological conditions, what is at risk are the natural processes that sustain life and provide the material inputs for social provisioning. In the case of its social-reproduction conditions, what is imperilled are the sociocultural processes that supply the solidary relations, affective dispositions and value horizons that underpin social cooperation, while also furnishing the appropriately socialized and skilled human beings who constitute ‘labour’. In the case of its political conditions, what is compromised are the public powers, both national and transnational, that guarantee property rights, enforce contracts, adjudicate disputes, quell anti-capitalist rebellions and maintain the money supply. Here, in Marx’s language, are three ‘contradictions of capitalism’, the ecological, the social and the political, which correspond to three ‘crisis tendencies’. Unlike the crisis tendencies stressed by Marx, however, these do not stem from contradictions internal to the capitalist economy. They are grounded, rather, in contradictions between the economic system and its background conditions of possibility—between economy and society, economy and nature, economy and polity. [14] Their effect, as noted before, is to incite a broad range of social struggles in capitalist society: not only class struggles at the point of production, but also boundary struggles over ecology, social reproduction and political power. Responses to the crisis tendencies inherent in capitalist society, those struggles are endemic to our expanded view of capitalism as an institutionalized social order. What sort of critique of capitalism follows from the conception sketched here? The view of capitalism as institutionalized social order calls for a multi-stranded form of critical reflection, much like that developed by Marx in Capital. As I read him, Marx interweaves a systems critique of capitalism’s inherent tendency to (economic) crisis, a normative critique of its built-in dynamics of (class) domination, and a political critique of the potential for emancipatory social transformation inherent in its characteristic form of (class) struggle. The view I have outlined entails an analogous interweaving of critical strands, but the weave here is more complex, as each strand is internally multiple. The systemic-crisis critique includes not only the economic contradictions discussed by Marx, but also the three inter-realm contradictions discussed here, which destabilize the necessary background conditions for capital accumulation by jeopardizing social reproduction, ecology and political power. Likewise, the domination critique encompasses not only the relations of class domination analysed by Marx, but also those of gender domination, political domination and the domination of nature. Finally, the political critique encompasses multiple sets of actors—classes, genders, status groups, nations, demoi, possibly even species—and vectors of struggle: not only class struggles, but also boundary struggles, over the separations of society, polity and nature from economy. What counts as an anti-capitalist struggle is thus much broader than Marxists have traditionally supposed. As soon as we look behind the front-story to the back-story, then all the indispensable background conditions for the exploitation of labour become foci of conflict in capitalist society. Not just struggles between labour and capital at the point of production, but also boundary struggles over gender domination, ecology, imperialism and democracy. But, equally important: the latter now appear in another light—as struggles in, around and, in some cases, against capitalism itself. Should they come to understand themselves in these terms, these struggles could conceivably cooperate or unite.

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