‘Disability Worlds’: Enacting Positive Imaginaries of 'Difference'

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Abstract

There is a growing presence of positive disability imaginaries being enacted through popular media, and across widely distributed networks of people with shared experiences of disability. This proliferation of more optimistic and complex representations which celebrate ‘deviancy’/‘diversity’ and practices of self-making, community-building, and ‘revolt’ (Tyler 2013) may signal an important cultural shift in how people feel about, and experience, possibilities for reproducing a disabled child. Yet little research has addressed how parents of children with disability produce, experience, and/or resist configurations seemingly designed to enact a more positive, visible, and rounded portrayal of disability.

Drawing upon theoretical contributions from sociology, disability studies, cultural studies, and STS, and initial findings of a UK study (interviews with parents of children with Down’s syndrome and a textual analysis of cultural materials), I explore the formulation of new imaginaries of ‘difference’ which depart from narratives of disability as tragic and pitiful, and promote notions of dignity and worth. Moreover, I consider how positive imaginaries of disability in cultural outlets (e.g. TV/film, newspapers, blogs/social networks) chime with, contradict, or complicate configurations of disability as an unvalued bodily state in reproductive biomedicine and UK welfare rhetoric and practices. I also unpack how parents navigate representations of current/imagined futures which, arguably, promote ‘normalisation’ practices and normative subject positions. In so doing, this paper - as well as showing how ‘disability worlds’ (Ginsburg and Rapp 2015) are made ‘inhabitable’ and/or ‘uninhabitable’ (Freidner 2015) at different moments - recognises the critical intersections and possible overlaps of STS and disability studies.

Author

• Gareth Thomas, Cardiff University