Medical vs.Social Models of Disability

• Medical or deficit Model: Disability as “a problem for which a solution must b sought” Titchkosky, Tanya and Michalko, Rod (2009)
• Aimed toward conformity/assimilation.

Medical Models vs.Social Models of Disability
• medicine, rehabilitation, counseling, and special education:
• “committed first and foremost, to the prevention of disability” (Titchkosky, Tanya and Michalko, Rod, p3).
• And id prevention fails, find a cure.
• Disability communities are also important social and political identity groups.

Eli Clare
• impairment – lists the things they are unable to do.
• disability – lists the ways in which society is disabling.
• “Oliver defines disability as ‘the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes no or little account of people who have physical [and/or cognitive/developmental/mental] impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of society’” (Eli Clare citing Oliver).

Ableism
• “…instead of situating disability as bad and focusing on that stigma, positively values able- bodiedness. in fact, ableism makes able-bodiedness and able-mindedness compulsory” (Dolmage, p.11)

implicit ableism
• …

what is “Neurodiversity”?
• a term used to indicate and even celebrate the diversity of the brain
• comes out of both neuroscience and an identity politics espoused by ASD activists.
• Juxtaposes Neurotypicals (NTs) with those on the spectrum.

different forms of activism (Holmer Nadesan, 2013)
• some advocates are pushing for a “cure,” or research focused on developing genetic prenatal testing and potential prevention of ASD (giving parents the option to terminate pregnancies).
• other ASD activists find early prediction and prevention very troubling comparing it to a form of genocide that targets people with biological or neurological differences.
• ASD activists argue prediction and prevention:
– operates under a “deficit model,” which dos not celebrate the diversity of brain types or the
creativity that can come from that.
– assumes a “normative” mode of thinking, sensing, and interacting with the world as the point
of departure.
– this kind of research may divert attention and funding from:
—> programs and therapies that help support people with ASD.
—> studies on the efficacy of therapies for people with ADS (Occupational Therapy, Speech
Therapy, intensive Behavioral Therapy)
– suggests non-neurotypicl people are a social burden, and in some cases, programs are cut in
favor of other kinds of spending.

compare with testing for down syndrome
• “in the united states, an estimated 67 percent of fetuses with prenatally diagnosed down syndrome are aborted. in canada, the rate could be even higher, tough there aren’t any reliable studies on it. This has become a passed in North Dakota, Ohio, Indiana and Louisiana (and introduced in Utah) that make it illegal for a doctor to perform an abortion because of a positive prenatal test for Down syndrome.” (Chris Kaposky, 16 April 2018, “The Ethical Case for Having a Baby with Down Syndrome,” The New York Times).

Chris Kaposky, 16 April 2018, “The Ethical Case for Having a Baby with Down Syndrome,” The New York Time
“So why is there such reluctance to have children with Down syndrome? One explanation shows up repeatedly when parents recount the early days after receiving their child’s diagnosis. They feel a sense of loss because they no longer dream that their child will get married, go to college or start a family of their own one day – in other words, that they will not meet the conventional expectations for the perfect middle-class life. In fact, some people with Down syndrome do accomplish those things. Nonetheless, hope and dreams of perfection might be strong motive for parents to choose abortion.
After the initial phase of grief, however, parents of children with Down syndrome tend to leave behind concerns about perfection, and embrace a new outlook that values acceptance, empathy and unconditional love of their children. And researchers note that those parents feel pride in their children.
Perhaps the question to ask is: Why do we have children at all? Most parents would agree that it is not only so that they can replicate a conventional arc of a successful middle-class life: college, marriage, real estate, grandchildren. if those are the reasons to abort fetuses with Down syndrome, they seem disappointing – they are wither self-centered or empty in their narrow-minded conventionality. Aaron will probably not become a veterinarian, and that’s o.k. childhood dreams often harmlessly go unrealized. He could still get a different job working with animals, and that would make him happy.”

speaking about “the ethical case having a baby with down syndrome.”
• “but acceptance in our communities seems scarcely possible without acceptance into our families” (Kaposky, 2018).

Long History of Stigma and Persecution
• Historically, ASD was misunderstood, and often lumped in with other diagnoses like schizophrenia.
• used to be laws in US about “unsightly” people with disabilities being seen in public.
• Many forms of neurodiversity were also persecuted historically. For example, children diagnosed with “infantile schizophrenia” and other disabilities were executed in Nazi Germany under a eugenics model that employed a rhetoric promoting a “healthy” able-bodied, white population.
• They were also subjected to horrific experimentation.

Eugenics
• a study which seeks to improve the human gene pool through the control of undesirable traits through selective breeding.
• greek for “good brith.”
• before its use in Nazi Germany, where did it gain a lot of traction?
• 1883- Francis Galton (British)
• wrote on heredity and greatness
• used statistical analysis to support his ideas about human intelligence

invisibility and disability
• “the doctor advise us to send him away to an institution and tell our friends that he had died” (Emily Kingsley, mother of Down Syndrome son describing her experience in the 1870s as cited in Ginsburg & Rapp, 2015, p.103).

institutionalization
• Virginia state epileptic colony (started in 1910)
• Ontario Hospital school in Smiths Falls which later known as the Rideau Regional Centre

children with disabilities
• “… institutional basements were lads for the social and biological experimentation of scholars from the Ivory Towers. For instance, institutions for “feeble minded” children like Wrentham or Fernando in Boston were tightly connected to Harvard and MIT. Wrentham was opened in 1906. in the 1950s, “residents” at this and the vernal school (founded 1854) were fed radioactive isotopes in a scientific experiment. Young boys at these schools signed up to be part of the “science club,” a name invented by the MIT faculty, and they were given Mickey Mouse watches and armbands, and taken on special outings, in return for taking art in a “nutritional study.” seventy-four boys were fed oatmeal injected with radio active iron or calcium (Welsome, 231, 235). Welcome suggests there was “nothing unique” about this study, as the school had become a “veritable laboratory” with a “captive population” for academics from Boston” (231,233) (Dolmage, 21).

Institutions and Intersectionality
• Housed not only people with disabilities, but immigrant children from large families, indigenous children, Eastern Europeans, children of a lower socioeconomic status.
• homophobia and antisemitism conflated with disability and advance.

Invisibility and disability
• Symbolic annihilation and Institutionalization (Ginsburg & Rapp, 2015).
• Relegated to spaces outside of normative society.
• Deinstitutionalization began in the 1970s (Ginsburg & Rapp, 2015).

Deinstitutionalization and Visibility
• Bas news: Has also meant cost and responsibility placed on parents as well as emotional strain (especially felt by those with less familial or financial support- eg. single mothers) – (Bumiller).
• Educators do not have enough resources, despite “inclusion”.
• We still have a long way to go to establish an equitable society!

Recent Popular Depictions
• Sheldon Cooper from “The Big Bang Theory”
• “tample granden”

most popular type of ASD stereotype
• italian braliant

Playing Disabled
• however, most ASD characters (and others with disabilities) are played by non-autistic and able-bodied actors who are “crip-facing”

As CBC journalist Terry Reith writes,
• “Disability lags far behind race and gender when it comes to casting inclusive characters for stage and screen. while it is practically unheard of today to see white actors made up to portray someone of black, Asian or indigenous heritage, it is still common to see able-bodied individuals playing people with prominent mental or physical challenges” (Reith 2018: para.5)

Popular Representations of Disability More Generally
• Supercrips and Tragedies (Eli Clare)

Disability and representation more generally
• who gets represented?
• were the superhuman — created for 2016 Rio Paralympics
• Will pike parody

Supercrips (inspiration porn)
• “rely on the perception that disability and achievement contradict each other and that any disabled person who overcomes this contradiction is heroic” (Clare, p.8)
• “overcoming disability”
• also internalized superstition

“Mediated Kinships” (Ginsburg & Rapp, 2015, p.105)
• Enabled through various forms of media and the internet -promoting kinship connections with people with disabilities beyond the family unit.
• Computer assistive technologies

not just a question of representation
• people with disabilities are underrepresented on the production end (eg. writers and directors), leading to stereotypes.

MGL
• how could MGL be considered an example of a Mediated Kinship?
• what is the relationship between the funding model, audience, and mediated kinship in MGL? problems and benefits?
• what did it note about issues of representation and how they bode within actual disability communities?
• How is disability fetishized, commodified, and sold as a ‘product’ to audiences as demonstrated in this episode?
• How is this a commentary on disability, production, and audiences?

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