Thread by @alexhaagaard

We’re doing social model discourse tonight so here’s some stuff to know:

a) the social model, as originally formulated, explicitly defined disability as the oppression that is experienced by those whose bodies/minds are *perceived* as deviant...

...which, intentionally or not, leaves out a lot of disabled people. While there have been attempts to rehabilitate the model to address the experiences of those with chronic pain, as far as I have been able to find, there has been no attempt to comprehensively resolve...

...the problem that medically invisible disability poses to the model’s assumptions, or to contend with the impact that those assumptions have had on the advocacy and policy shaped by the social model.

https://twitter.com/alexhaagaard/status/1288477931518427140

b) the social model was created by a bunch of white cis folks, mostly dudes, with “accredited,” medically visible, physical disabilities. As such, it reflects their particular experiences of ableist oppression.

c) as recently as 2019 one of those dudes wrote in the Routledge Handbook for Disability Studies that “to claim that the impairment/disability distinction is false is to suggest that the division between the biological and the social is false” which is frankly some TERFy bullshit

d) Mike Oliver, who is credited with formalizing the social model, has explicitly said the model was never intended to be a rigorous theoretical explanation of what disability is or how it operates; it was intended to be a blunt political tool.

e) he also said this:

All of which raises this question for me:

https://twitter.com/zaranosaur/status/1353719343008387074

I am inclined toward the latter but at the bare minimum any attempts to rehabilitate the social model need to explicitly grapple with whom it has historically excluded, and how and why, andhwat harms have come from those exclusions. /fin

*should have said chronic pain and chronic illness