Disability is not Inability

Introductory Eassy on Normality
By Colins Barnes

Contd. from page one.

The move away from the domination of the number of a few terrestrial broadcasters to the addition of a plethora of competing channels from satellite, digital and cable channels has meant that the main broadcasters have started to focus more on ratings and the ‘quick fix’ of consumerist television. Disability – as a political issue (like many other political issues) - does not seem to fit into such a schedule; except perhaps as a consumerist issue: liberal rights for the few consumer-like and normalised disabled people or the increasing business-like mentality of the large and powerful charities and their political lobby machines.

For example, whereas the commercial channel ITV used to have a politicised Disability programme such as Link it now has Esther, hosted by Esther Rantzen. Esther is a magazine style programme rooted in the charity consumerist/rights model of impairment and, unlike Link, is not made by disabled people (though it has the occasional disabled reporter). Esther has a number of items in each show and maybe one or two are occasionally ‘disability’ themed (actually impairment specific in reality) whereas Link was entirely about disability and, occasionally, about impairment..

The move away from disability specific programming – seen equally at the BBC and particularly at the ‘minority’ interests broadcaster Channel 4 – is, they have argued, about ‘mainstreaming disability’. This is the placement of disability within the mainstream of programme production and output at those two corporations. Another pure example of mainstreaming is the cancellation of the BBC Radio 4’s long running Does He Take Sugar programme. It has been ‘replaced’ by the mainstreaming of disability stories and issues within Radio’s lunchtime daily magazine show You and Yours. In fact, disability, the social process of exclusionary practices of society against disabled people, has not been ‘mainstreamed’: impairment has.

Disability has almost entirely been lost except as a political, or even polemical, issue linked to impairment charities or particular socio-political or medical issues. For example Channel 4 has made a big play of its disability and sexuality campaign to allow disabled people to access prostitutes, sex surrogates and be sexually active. (In reality this is merely ’normalisation’ under a political headline and not actually about disability.) The concentration by broadcasters on impairment issues, increasingly being fed by the main wealthy charities’ increasingly professional and effective (and large) Public Relations departments, is increasing as the charities opportunistically appropriate the language – not the essence - of disability social model politics and use it for their own, impairment orientated, agendas.

The seemingly paradoxical acceptance of, whilst at the same time there is a backlash against, disability political correctness can be seen as at the heart of the matter. The original intent and meaning of political correctness in relation to the social model of disability – an understanding of the genealogy of oppression through culture – is what has been negated and replace by an acceptance of what political correctness has become: the sanitisation of past unpleasantries or objections to extreme examples of abuse against impaired individuals.

By which I mean that whereas broadcasters and journalists would routinely use the term cripple or handicapped they now routinely use the term ‘disabled’ but actually have as little understanding of the politicisation of the issues as they did when they previously used the terms cripple or handicapped. The language has changed but not the politics behind it; for example, institutionalisation itself is not questioned only the excesses of abuse within an institution.

The media, particularly the printed press but also investigative television journalism, will highlight that a particular ‘bad’ ‘home’ is using illegal restraining practices whilst a model of ‘good practice’ ‘home’ is just down the road and that one should learn from the other! The media will make a clear distinction, for example, between good and bad institutionalisation whilst never actually realising (let alone understand) the politics of institutionalisation as an abuse against disabled people in itself.

Contd Page three.