The thesis discusses the question of how the Frankfurt
School’s Critical Theory,
Foucault’s notions of power, and Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism can enhance the
British social model of disability in the context of postmodern critique.
Originally, disabled activists developed the concept of the social model of disability in
the 1970s and 1980s to highlight the disabling conditions of the current social
organisation of society that would exclude disabled people from participation and isolate
them. Although the social model was a decisive impulse for the disabil ity movement, it
has faced several criticisms by postmodern scholars and disabled activists. The main
points of criticism were the accusation of overall simplifying explanatory approaches,
the promotion of a unifying identity that would ignore the existing diversity and
differences among disabled people, and the biologisation of lived experiences
expressed through the body and the fostering of solely medical interpretations of
impairment through the distinction between impairment and disability. Furthermore ,
disabled feminists criticised gaps in the social model suggesting that it centred the
perspectives and experiences of white and mainly physically disabled men and
obfuscated gender specific discrimination.
In the light of this critique, the thesis argues for a reconciliation of these different
perspectives for an analysis of disability and gender through the integration of Critical
Theory and an epistemologically specific and nonidentitarian cyborg feminism.
The Frankfurt School’s critical social theory
shares the Marxist underpinnings of the
social model of disability as it was formulated initially but is specifically interested in how
the entanglement of the domination of nature, instrumental reason, and economisation
has led to a new totality. Disabil ity as a social category reveals societal contradictions
through its nonconformity to capitalist performance requirements. It, therefore,
constitutes a nonidentity that questions the universal ideal of always being healthy and
productive in a society that is focused on efficiency. In addition, Foucault’s dissection of
power relations and social practices offers relevant insights into medical settings and
the pathologisation of disability, for example through the concept of the ‘medical gaze’,
which has alre ady been highly significant for research in disability studies. Like Foucault
and Critical Theory, Donna Haraway shared a rejection of binary and identitarian
thinking, but her approach was explicitly based on socialist feminism and a critique of
situated knowledges. Instead, she argues for a partial and feminist epistemology that acknowledges particular perspectives and embodiments of the subject and allows
analysing individual experiences as well as multifaceted mechanisms of inequality and
oppression. Fo r example, placing disabled women as a starting point in knowledge
production would allow centring their particular experiences and acknowledging their
bodily differences that were widely ignored by the social model as well as by non
disabled feminists.
The presented approaches have in common that they reject rigid identity categories and
question the dominance of standardised norms. The embodiment of disability is diverse,
but also contradictory and ambiguous, while the different social and gender specific
localisations are always intersectional. Thus, the broad set of impulses as outlined
above would give the complexity of disability and gender a differentiated space for
analysis.