I've reflected a lot in the past days on a passage in Sara Hendren's book What A Body Can Do:
Amanda would say she is disabled—not differently abled, not specially challenged, or any other similar variation.* Like many people in the disability community, she would use that term by choice, preferring it even to person with dwarfism. For her, disabled is not a derisive word. Amanda would say very plainly that she lives with the disabling conditions of the world. She must bring her body to the built environment, with workarounds, in dozens of ways every day, and the qualities of that interaction, body meeting world, are what render her disabled.
As Hendren observes later, her friend Amanda is offering a different mental model from the one that most of us are used to when considering disabled people:
Disability studies identifies two mental models that serve as useful contrasts for understanding these relationships between the body and the world. In a purely medical model, the body is the location of impairment, which suggests that the person with the impaired body bears the responsibility for it—for telling a story of coping, or surviving, or overcoming, or any number of other possibilities, all of which require the individual person to contend with a personal condition. A social model of disability, by contrast, invites you to widen the scenario from the body itself to include the stuff around it: the tools and furniture and classrooms and sidewalks that make it possible or impossible for the body, however configured, to do its tasks, and the larger structures of institutions and economies that make human flourishing possible. In a social model, it's the interaction between the conditions of the body and the shapes of the world that makes disability into a lived experience, and therefore a matter not only for individuals but also for societies.
It's a humbling thought: that most societies have offloaded disability into the zone of personal responsibility.
I now see the word "disabled" differently: I recognize that it's not just another adjective—it's a past participle. It's a verb. The word itself—dis + able—suggests the "to take away ability."
This taking-away-ability is what the typical world—designed for "typical," non-disabled people—is in fact doing.
The designed world, as Amanda would put it—our built environments—disable people.
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