ABSTRACT
Pride to disability studies, review the history of the movement, and work through its contemporary struggles with psychiatry. Throughout the discussion, I highlight the importance of Mad Pride’s efforts to go beyond ‘‘politics-as-usual.’’ Mad Pride, like other forms of ‘‘biocultural’’ activisms (such as Women’s Health Movement and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), is located at the interface of bioscience and politics. As such,MadPridecontinuously struggleswith epistemological issues along with more typical political issues. In short, the people in Mad Pride struggle over both truth and values. This commingling of politics, power, and
truth is familiar ground for disability studies. Similar to Mad Pride, disability studies unpacks and undermines stereotyped representations of disability in science and popular culture to understand and intervene in how ‘‘representation attaches meanings to bodies’’ (GarlandThomson, 1997, 5). Michael Oliver gives a good sense of these stereotyped disability representations by dividing them into key themes of ‘‘individualism,’’ ‘‘medicalization,’’ and ‘‘normality’’ (Oliver, 1990, 56, 58). Individualism refers to the perspective that disability is a ‘‘personal tragedy.’’ This frame undergirds a ‘‘hegemony of disability’’ which views disability as ‘‘pathological
and problem-oriented’’ (1996, 129). It leads to a ubiquitous medicalization that legitimizes the medical infrastructure for acquiring knowledge about the disabled individual. The logic of this medical infrastructure rests on notions of normality and the dichotomy between normal and pathological. The able-bodied and the disabled, the valued and the devalued, become coconstituted cultural divisions which structure medical and cultural preoccupations (Davis, 1995).One side of the binary defines the other and both operate together as ‘‘opposing twin figures that legitimate a system of social, economic, and political empowerment justified by physiological differences’’ (Garland-Thomson, 1997, 8). Together, these stereotyped disability
representations direct the health care industry toward a near exclusive focus on individual biomedical cures. Rather than adjust social environments tomeet differing bodily needs, medical interventions seek to cure the individual ‘‘abnormal’’ body. Disability activists resist these individualizing and medicalizing approaches by reframing disability as a social restriction and oppression rather than simply a medical problem. Emphasizing a social model rather than a medical model they call attention to the fact that much of the suffering of different bodies comes from social exclusion, isolation, and lack of opportunity, along with theoftenpernicious side effects of amedical industry bent on aggressive intervention to achieve ‘‘normal’’ bodies.1
