ABSTRACT
The definition of who is protected by the legislation – the definition of disability – is more complex than in relation to gender and race.
Gooding, C, Disabling Laws, Enabling Acts, 1994, London: Pluto, p 15:
To understand the full operation of discrimination on disabled people’s lives we need to extend our understanding of that process to include the socio-economic and political forces which shape not only our attitudes towards disability but also the very meaning of that term. In a very real sense society disables individuals by constructing a disabled identity into which individuals are fitted ... [For example] the labels ‘blind’ or ‘deaf’ are relative ones, based on the percentage of ‘full’ vision’ which a person possesses ...
