Disability Biometrics Aff CNDI

2015

1AC

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The post-9/11 security environment witnessed a massive
expansion of biometric surveillance technologies, as a
historical technique of social control to enforce the
normalization of bodily identities.
Clarkson 14 [Nicholas L. Clarkson (PhD candidate in Gender Studies @ Indiana

University), Biometrics, Duke University Press, TSQ Volume 1, Numbers 12, May
2014, http://tsq.dukejournals.org/content/1/1-2/35.full]
September 11, 2001, offered a rationale for expanding and
legitimizing surveillance practices already in use or under development in the United
States. Biometricstechnologies that measure the body , often with the intent of
identifying individuals1featured significantly in that expansion. While full-body scanners at
airport security checkpoints have been the most prominent face of this expansion for
many US residents, other biometric technologies, such as fingerprint scans, iris and retinal
scans, facial and hand geometry analyzers, and gait signature analysis, among
others, also feature in security discussions and practices. Proponents of these technologies often
The events of

argue that objective computer analyses provide better security than human agents while avoiding the liability of

these machines are

infrastructurally encoded with assumptions about race, gender, and
ability and thereby continue to enforce bodily norms consistent with
profiling practices (Pugliese 2007, 2010). The analog antecedents of contemporary
digitized biometrics highlight the legacy of biometrics as techniques of subjugation .2
For example, British colonists used fingerprinting to distinguish Indian subjects , whom
British officers could not otherwise tell apart (Pugliese 2007: 120). Furthermore, practices of
measuring the body arose from the racist science of anthropometry, a branch of
physical anthropology that sought to determine intelligence , for example, through a
system of cranial measurements. These cranial measurements were used to support arguments that
racial profiling. However, cultural critics of biometrics have argued that

white men were more intelligent and civilized than women and the other races (Pugliese 2007; Amoore and Hall
2009; Magnet 2011). Though anthropometry is widely discredited, biometrics researchers continue to cite
anthropometric methods (Magnet 2011: 39). Sir Francis Galton's use of the term biometry additionally highlights the
connection between anthropometry and contemporary biometrics. In 1910, Galton used this term to describe the
process of collecting measurements in service of anthropometric hypotheses.3 Though practices of measuring the
body have a long history, the contemporary meaning of biometrics appeared in the early 1980s. The Oxford English
Dictionary's first noted use of the term appeared in American Banker in 1981, in which authors hoped that
biometrics would prove useful for unspecified banking operations.4 This is consistent with Kelly Gates's (2011)

biometric surveillance systems proliferated in tandem with neoliberal

reforms before their exponential expansion under the rubric of homeland security.
claim that

In the midst of the continuing proliferation of biometric technologies, transgender theory and trans bodies provide a
unique vantage point from which to critique such developments. In particular, when trans bodies confound body
scanners and individuals with dark skin tones reveal the racialized calibrations of facial geometry analysis, we are
reminded that gender and race remain central to contemporary identity projects in spite of claims to the contrary

biometric systems respond to the need to

bind identities to bodies while our identity information supposedly circulates
untethered through computer networks. Because our vocabularies of gender and race have such
by the biometrics industry.5 Gates argues that

limited ability to provide useful information about an individual, one might think that attempts to secure identities

manufacturers persistently
encode normative assumptions about gender and race into biometric systems even as

to bodies would be minimally invested in gender or race. Nevertheless,

they claim to produce objective technologies.

Beyond the utility of trans bodies for highlighting the

gendered and raced assumptions of biometrics, it is also crucial for the lives of transpeople that we continue to
investigate and theorize these developments. As Dean Spade emphasizes in Normal Life (2011), the most
vulnerable transpeople are the ones most exposed to mechanisms of surveillance. Biometrics are not only deployed
to protect expensive, privatized resources (such as banking assets); these techniques are frequently imposed upon

This includes mandated fingerprint

scanning for welfare recipients, retinal and fingerprint scanning for prisoners, and
fingerprint scanning for migrants to the United States through the Department of Homeland
the most vulnerable populations in the most coercive relationships.

Security's US-VISIT program (Magnet 2011; Department of Homeland Security 2013). For trans theory, then,
biometrics are a focal point for examining the biopolitical nexus of gendered, raced, and sexualized concerns.

Exploring the connections between our experiences of biometrics and

those of other, similarly targeted groups reveals the bodily norms
encoded into and enforced by these technologies.

This reflects a larger turn towards the body in surveillance

practice as assemblages of surveillant technology read the
body as pure information this abstraction from experience
renders the body open to interpretation and discrimination.
Haggerty & Ericson 2000 [Kevin D. Haggerty (Professor of Criminology &
Sociology @ University of Alberta), & Richard V. Ericson (Professor of Criminology
and Sociology @ University of Toronto), The surveillant assemblage, British Journal
of Sociology Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 4 (December 2000) pp. 605622,
http://bigo.zgeist.org/students/readings/IPS2011/8/Haggerty%20ericson
%202000.pdf]
A great deal of surveillance is directed toward the human body. The
observed body is of a distinctively hybrid composition. First it is broken down by
being abstracted from its territorial setting. It is then reassembled in different
settings through a series of data flows. The result is a decorporealized body, a data
double of pure virtuality. The monitored body is increasingly a cyborg; a fleshtechnology-information amalgam (Haraway 1991). Surveillance now involves an interface
of technology and corporeality and is comprised of those surfaces of contact or
interfaces between organic and non-organic orders, between life forms and webs of
information, or between organs/body parts and entry/projection systems (e.g., keyboards, screens) (Bogard
1996: 33). These hybrids can involve something as direct as tagging the human body
so that its movements through space can be recorded, to the more refined
reconstruction of a persons habits, preferences, and lifestyle from the trails of
information which have become the detritus of contemporary life. The surveillant assemblage is a
visualizing device that brings into the visual register a host of heretofore opaque
flows of auditory, scent, chemical, visual, ultraviolet and informational stimuli. Much of the visualization
pertains to the human body, and exists beyond our normal range of perception. Rousseau opens The Social
Contract with his famous proclamation that Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. To be more in

Humans
are born free, and are immediately electronically monitored. If such a slogan seems unduly
keeping with the human/machine realities of the twenty-first century, his sentiment would better read:

despairing, one might consider the new electronic ankle bracelet for infants, trademarked HUGS, which is being
marketed to hospitals as a fully supervised and tamper-resistant protection system that automatically activates
once secured around an infants ankle or wrist. Staff [are] immediately alerted at a computer console of the newly
activated tag, and can enter pertinent information such as names and medical conditions. Password authorization is

needed to move infants out of the designated protection area and if an infant is not readmitted within a
predetermined time limit an alarm will sound. An alarm also sounds if an infant with a Hugs tag is brought near an
open door at the perimeter of the protected area without a password being entered. The display console will then
show the identification of the infant and the exit door on a facility map. Alternatively, doors may also be fitted with
magnetic locks that are automatically activated. As well, Hugs can be configured to monitor the progress and
direction of the abduction within the hospital. Weighing just 1/3 of an ounce, each ergonomically designed infant
tag offers a number of other innovative features, including low-battery warning, the ability to easily interface with
other devices such as CCTV cameras and paging systems and time and date stamping. (Canadian Security 1998)
Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University is the self-proclaimed first cyborg, having implanted a silicon chip
transponder in his forearm (Bevan 1999). The surveillance potential of this technology has been rapidly embraced
to monitor pets. A microchip in a pets skin can be read with an electronic device which connects a unique
identifying number on the microchip to details of the pets history, ownership and medical record. Warwick has
proposed that implanted microchips could be used to scrutinize the movement of employees, and to monitor money
transfers, medical records and passport details. He also suggests that anyone who wanted access to a gun could do
so only if they had one of these implants . . . Then if they actually try and enter a school or building that doesnt
want them in there, the school computer would sound alarms and warn people inside or even prevent them having

the surveillant assemblage relies on

machines to make and record discrete observations. As such, it can be contrasted with
the early forms of disciplinary panopticism analysed by Foucault, which were largely
accomplished by practitioners of the emergent social sciences in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. On a machine/human continuum, surveillance at that time leaned
more toward human observation. Today, surveillance is more in keeping with the
technological future hinted at by Orwell, but augmented by technologies he could
not have even had nightmares about. The surveillant assemblage does not
approach the body in the first instance as a single entity to be molded,
punished, or controlled. First it must be known, and to do so it is broken
down into a series of discrete signifying flows. Surveillance commences with
the creation of a space of comparison and the introduction of breaks in the flows
that emanate from, or circulate within, the human body. For example, drug testing striates flows of
access. (Associated Press 1998) These examples indicate that

chemicals, photography captures flows of reflected lightwaves, and lie detectors align and compare assorted flows

The body is itself, then, an assemblage comprised of

myriad component parts and processes which are broken-down for
purposes of observation. Patton (1994: 158) suggests that the concept of assemblage may be

of respiration, pulse and electricity.

regarded as no more than an abstract conception of bodies of all kinds, one which does not discriminate between
animate and inanimate bodies, individual or collective bodies, biological or social bodies. It has become a
commonplace among cultural theorists to acknowledge the increasing fragmentation of the human body. Such an
appreciation is evidenced in Groszs (1995: 108) schematic suggestion that we need to think about the relationship
between cities and bodies as collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds between substances to form
linkages, machines, provisional and often temporary sub- or micro-groupings . . . their interrelations involve a
fundamentally disunified series of systems, a series of disparate flows, energies, events, or entities, bringing

the surveillant assemblage

standardizes the capture of flesh/information flows of the human body. It is not so
much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body
(although this may be an ultimate consequence), but with transforming the body into pure
information, such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable.
Such processes are put into operation from a host of scattered centres of calculation
together or drawing apart their more or less temporary alignments. Likewise,

(Latour 1987) where ruptures are co-ordinated and toward which the subsequent information is directed. Such

forensic laboratories, statistical institutions, police stations,

financial institutions, and corporate and military headquarters. In these sites the
information derived from flows of the surveillant assemblage are reassembled and
scrutinized in the hope of developing strategies of governance, commerce and
control. In the figure of a body assembled from the parts of different corpses, Mary Shellys Frankenstein spoke to
centres of calculation can include

early-modern anxieties about the potential consequences of unrestrained science and technology. Contemporary

Today,
however, we are witnessing the formation and coalescence of a new type of
body, a form of becoming which transcends human corporeality and
reduces flesh to pure information. Culled from the tentacles of the surveillant
assemblage, this new body is our data double , a double which involves the multiplication of the
individual, the constitution of an additional self (Poster 1990: 97). Data doubles circulate in a host of
different centres of calculation and serve as markers for access to resources,
services and power in ways which are often unknown to its referent. They are also increasingly
the objects toward which governmental and marketing practices are directed (Turow
1997). And while such doubles ostensibly refer back to particular individuals, they
transcend a purely representational idiom . Rather than being accurate or inaccurate portrayals of
real individuals, they are a form of pragmatics: differentiated according to how
useful they are in allowing institutions to make discriminations among
populations . Hence, while the surveillant assemblage is directed toward a particular
cyborg flesh/technology amalgamation, it is productive of a new type of individual,
one comprised of pure information.
fears about the implications of mass public surveillance continue to emphasize the dark side of science.

But these surveillant assemblages break down when faced

with disability the non-normative body is categorized as an
inherent security risk subject to biopolitical control. The
ableist construction of biometric technologies functions as a
normalizing technique to manage and exclude disabled bodies.
Saltes 13 [Natasha Saltes (PhD Candidate in Department of Sociology @ Queens
University, MA in Critical Disability Studies), Abnormal Bodies on the Borders of
Inclusion: Biopolitics and the Paradox of Disability Surveillance, Surveillance &
Society 11(1/2): 55-73, 2013, http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillanceand-society/article/view/abnormal/]
Writing in the context of racism and sexual oppression, McWhorter (2009) hones in on the concept of abnormality

psychiatry became a
technology of abnormality (Foucault 2003, quoted in McWhorter 2009: 30), she writes: [I]t identified
persons who it supposed could not be assimilated into the life of the community,
and then it went to work to capture those individuals, discipline them, and thereby
defend society from the threat they posed. In the process, the public became sensitized
to newly recognized dangers:eccentrics, and nonconformists of all kinds. Such
peopleabnormal peoplewere not only problems for those whose intimate lives they shared but were
threats to the general public and rightfully subject to surveillance and constraints imposed
and provides a compelling appropriation of Foucault. In explaining how

through psychiatry and other means by or on behalf of society as a whole. (McWhorter 2009: 30-31) In the same

the biomedical
definition of disability in that it identified and categorized people with impairments as
unhealthy, defective and incapable, rendering them social burdens and therefore a
threat to the normalizing society. For people with impairments, the path to a normalizing society is one
way that psychiatry became a technology of abnormality (Foucault 2003a: 163), so too did

marked by a sequence of dividing practices (Foucault 1982: 777) that begins by classifying abnormal bodies
through the implementation of ableist policies and practices and the demarcation of spaces as those designated for
normal (able) and abnormal (impaired) bodies (Hansen and Philo 2009). Kitchin (1998) recognizes the ways in
which

disability is spatially produced through power relations that work to organize

people with impairments. He claims that the social relations that emerge through socio-spatial
processes serve to isolate and marginalize people with impairments (1998: 343). In the
context of the excessive demand clause, the political tactic of managing bodies through the
use of medical data to categorize desirable immigrants from undesirable
immigrants in accordance with perceived excessive demand on health and social
services illustrates the operation of biopolitics (Wiebe 2008, 2009). The use of this data to
determine who will be granted permanent residency also illustrates how socio-spatial processes work through

biopolitical agendas that

regulate health in order to optimize economic prosperity inevitably construct a
narrow conception of citizenship extended only to those deemed healthy and
productive. Wiebe adds that surveillance derives from a fear of the unknown, which
translates into the states ambition to conduct risk management practices (2008: 337).
power relations to exclude people with impairments. According to Wiebe (2008),

Writing on the theme of surveillance as biopower, Ceyhan (2012) echoes Wiebes sentiment, remarking that

surveillance operates as a technology of biopoliticalized security (2012: 39)

as a means of mitigating uncertainty. Indeed, it is the Canadian states assumptions
about impairment and its inclination toward managing economic risk and
uncertainty that the purpose of conducting disability surveillance at the border
becomes evident. Biopolitics at the Border: Social Sorting and Ableist Biometric Technologies The
pervasiveness of surveillance and its inherent discriminatory characteristic of
identifying and classifying certain individuals and groups as risky have given rise
to the notion of surveillance as social sorting. According to Lyon, surveillance as social sorting
centres on the social and economic categories and the computer codes by which personal data is organized with a

It is the process of predicting

and preventing risk by classifying subgroups of society deemed to pose a
threat (Lyon 2003). Lyon attributes social sorting and digital discrimination to the prevalent use of networked

view to influencing and managing people and populations (2003: 2).

technology (2003: 8) and the rising attention paid to the body itself as a source of surveillance data (2007: 55).

The concept of social sorting and the emphasis on the body as a source of data is
especially relevant in the context of disability surveillance in that the collection and
documentation of information about the body reduces people with impairments to
impaired bodies and further still to impaired data. The data double therefore can
become disabled in much the same way as the individual insofar as it is not
perceived, viewed, monitored and treated equally as non-impaired data doubles. The data
double itself may include biometric details or other forms and fragments of
information that allude to or signify the embodiment of impairment. The implication of this
is that the abnormality of the body is extended to the digital and what serves to mark,
label and stigmatize the body in the physical environment now has the ability to
mark, label and stigmatize the body digitally. Referring to electronic patient records (EPR) as an example
of the digitalization of the body, van der Ploeg considers the data they contain to be extended forms of unique

The increased
use of biometric identifiers in EPRs (as well as in other contexts such as immigration) are
superimposing traditional forms of identifiers such as name and birth date as they
are considered a more reliable representation of identity (van der Ploeg 2003). In challenging
the gendered neutrality of surveillance, Monahan argues that representations of data render a
disembodied and highly abstract depiction of the world by removing social context
(2009: 286). Monahan contends that surveillance systems artificially abstract bodies,
identities and interactions from social contexts in ways that both obscure and
aggravate gender and other social inequalities (2009: 286). He considers the embodied
consequences that arise from surveillance practices that operate on a level of
identifiers due to the personal information they contain, including biometric data (2003: 62).

abstraction (2009: 286). Building from Monahans argument on the socially de-contextualized collection of
data and applying it to disability surveillance provides a useful means with which to
contextualize the consequences of conducting disability surveillance within a
biomedical perspective. A useful starting point is to consider the ways in which certain surveillance
strategies such as biometric technologies separate the social from the body.
Biometric technologies operate by capturing physiological markers of bodies including
fingerprints, face or voice recognition, iris and handwriting authentication. The data produced by the
body is then used to verify identity (Maddern and Stewart 2010). However, biometric
systems do not only verify identity, but they also play a significant role in
assigning identities. This is worth considering in light of the governments
reliance on biometric data, which stems from the belief that biometric technology is
infallible (Maddern and Stewart 2010). The use of biometric technology at the Canadian border is being touted
by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (2012b) as a highly reliable way to reduce identity fraud. In a public notice
released online announcing the scheduled implementation of biometric technologies in 2013, Citizenship and
Immigration Canada (2012b) states that biometrics would strengthen the integrity of Canadas immigration
program by helping prevent known criminals, failed refugee claimants, and those previously deported from using a
different identity to obtain a visa and that biometrics will strengthen and modernize Canadas immigration
processes. In lauding the collection of biometric data as part of the immigration process, the Canadian government

the technology might have a discriminatory impact for certain

groups. Pugliese (2010) questions the infallibility of technologies that filter bodies through a racialized lens. He
looks in particular at the ways in which biometric technologies fail to accurately capture the
data and images of bodies that do not conform to the features of whiteness, which
biometric technologies were designed to accommodate. 7 Similarly, by virtue of their
ableist design, biometric technologies also filter bodies through a
normalized lens. Trials have shown that biometric systems are not designed to
conform to disabled people, but that disabled people are expected to be
able to conform to the systems design (Maddern and Stewart 2010). The ableist way
in which they collect physiological data inherently carries out the function of social
sorting by classifying and categorizing those who are not able to pass easily through
the system. The passage below illustrates this point: For someone in a wheelchair if you cant perfectly adapt
neglects to consider how

your position it could be difficult. For blind people it certainly can be difficult because they cant seeYou dont
actually have to focus, but you do have to keep a constant relationship with the camerathats why we couldnt get
acceptable enrolment (in a recent trial) for a quite a large selection of people with disabilities. (respondent and
biometric technology user quoted in Maddern and Stewart 2010: 247) This quote reveals the challenges that

The inability to navigate through

biometric systems not only impedes mobility, but reduces people with impairments
to deviant bodies that do not conform to preconceived standards of ontological
normality. According to Haggerty and Ericson, The observed body is of a
distinctively hybrid composition. First it is broken down by being abstracted from its
territorial setting. It is then reassembled in different settings through a series of
data flows. The result is a decorporealized body, a data double of pure virtuality. (2000: 611) For some
people with impairments, their bodies are in a sense already decorporealized before they
are even reassembled, due to the biometric systems inability to accept and process
their varied physiological traits. Similarly, Garfinkel suggests that biometric technologies
are problematic in that they do not identify people, they identify bodies
(2000: 65 emphasis in original). Here we can begin to see that the surveillance gaze is similar to that of
the medical gaze in that it calls abnormal bodies into question. In examining biometrics
biometric technologies present for some people with impairments.

through a governmentality perspective, Epstein observes that biometric databases operationalize two types of risky
bodies: guilty bodies understood as transgressors of the law and immigration violators understood as

biometric technologies seem to

operationalize a third type of risky body understood as nonnormative bodies. By failing to
process the data from bodies that do not conform to the systems ableist design,
biometric technologies also function as a technology of abnormality (Foucault 2003a: 163).
In reinforcing corporeal norms, biometric technologies operate as part of a
broader biopolitical project aimed at eliminating abnormality. Biometric
technologies, especially when used in combination with provisions that emphasize ontological
normality such as the excessive demand clause, do not account for the social construct of
disability. Consequently, it is not ableist and discriminatory social structures,
systems and attitudes that are deemed flawed, but the body. The flawed body is
then evaluated against normative corporeal standards used to determine
citizenship often resulting in an undignified, if not outright exclusionary, immigration process.
destructive bodies (Epstein 2007: 160). For people with impairments,

Ableism is foundational to all oppression categorization

based on normative biological standards justifies every form of
discrimination and violence.
Siebers 9 [Tobin Siebers (Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism @ University
of Michigan),
The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification, 10/28/9, Lecture,
http://disabilities.temple.edu/media/ds/lecture20091028siebersAesthetics_FULL.doc]
Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of
intergroup violence. That oppression involves groups, and not individuals, means that it concerns identities, and

that oppression always focuses on how the body appears , both on

Oppression is
justified most often by the attribution of natural inferioritywhat some call in-built or
biological inferiority. Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental
and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of
biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always
comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes
other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aestheticsnot only
because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of
this means, furthermore,

how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances.

how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation and
appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic

despite my statement that disability now serves as the

master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority
identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done
by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental
properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this
specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present moment to
the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of
our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some way as
disabled , and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed
identity. Racism disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the
examples from the historical record. First,

inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. Sexism

disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and
physical inferiority. Classism disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and
socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. Ableism disqualifies
on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing
them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the
disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of
incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. As
racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority
and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression the prejudice
against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the
belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will
continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about
the social construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of
race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time
the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority.

Thus we advocate resistance to domestic surveillance via a

politicization of the body.
Only reintroducing the body into surveillance studies can
formulate effective strategies for resistance to this new
technological mode the affirmatives rhizomatic
characterization of bodily surveillance is key to accurate
diagnoses of modern power.
Ball 5 [Kirstie Ball (Professor of Organization @ The Open University Business
School, PhD in Organization Studies from Aston University), Organization,
Surveillance and the Body: Towards a Politics of Resistance, Organization, January
2005 vol. 12 no. 1 89-108, http://org.sagepub.com/content/12/1/89.short]
theorizing about surveillance practices has turned to the centrality of
the body , not least in those at the workplace. Although many acknowledge Foucaults nod towards the

Recent

rehabilitated body of the incarcerated subject in the panopticon and the political technologies of the body identified
in The History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1976), the theoretical inclination is towards Latourian and Deleuzian ideas.

disparate arrays of people, technologies and organizations

that become connected to make surveillance assemblages, in contrast to the static,
unidirectional panopticon metaphor. Indeed, Gandy (1998) asserts that it would be a
mistake to assume that surveillance in practice is as complete and
totalizing as the panoptic ideal type would have us believe. Similarly, Rule (1998: 68) observes
that the panopticon alone offers little help in understanding new forms of
electronic surveillance , particularly if the question is whether people are subject
to more or more severe forms of control. Moreover, Boyne (2000) observes that disciplinary
power, with its perfection through technology, and the resultant docile, accepting,
These approaches highlight the

self-disciplining population are the exception rather than the norm. It is, rather, how
individuals, organizations, state bodies and the media connect to these
technologies that influences whose data are collected, where they go and what
happens as a result. Ball (2002) begins to address this point. In a paper entitled Elements of Surveillance,
she describes four elements in a surveillance domain. Representation refers to the technological element,
acknowledging how surveillance technologies can re-present data that are collected at source or gathered from
another technological medium. Meaning refers to the potential of new surveillance technologies to enable different
interpretations of life to be made, as well as interpretations of surveillance itself. At least three common meanings
are attributed to surveillance practice: surveillance as knowledge; surveillance as information; and surveillance as
protection from threat. Manipulation refers to the inevitability of power relations under surveillance, not least

Power
relations are evident in the way in which watching institutions or groups are able to
regulate the flow of information and knowledge about the surveilled domain
between various parties; resistance strategies concern breaking or
disrupting those flows and creating spatio-temporal gaps between
watcher and watched. Finally, Ball refers to actors within a surveilled domain as
intermediaries where meaning is inscribed, where technologies re-present
information, where power/resistance operates, and where networks are bound
together. Each party, at each level of analysis, assumes a role in a surveillance
network and becomes inscribed as such through embodied compliance, the
exchange of money, the inscription of text and the use of artefacts (Michael, 1996). Ball
argues that intermediation is an important socio-technical process in the perpetuation
of surveillance practices. Using Deleuze and Guatarris (1987) concept of the assemblage,
Haggerty and Ericson (2000) also describe the convergence and spread of datagathering systems between different social domains and at multiple levels. Their
argument centres on the notion that the target of the generic surveillance assemblage is the
human body, which is broken into a series of data flows to the end of feeding the
information categories on which the surveillance process is based (Hier, 2003). Thus, it
is not the identity or subjectivity of individuals that is of interest, but
rather the data individuals can yield and the categories to which they can
contribute; these are then reapplied to the body as part of the
influencing and managing process to which Lyon refers. Accordingly Haggerty and Ericson
argue that surveillance has a rhizomatic character: it has many and diverse
instances connected to an underlying, invisible infrastructure, which
concerns interconnected technologies in multiple contexts. Haggerty and Ericson
(2000) pose a new challenge, which concerns how resistance is to be conceptualized.
Unlike organizational conceptions of resistance, which are built around some
arboreal, centralizing dominant force , Haggerty and Ericson suggest that more widespread
and decentred notions are to be employed. It is no longer sufficient to resist
surveillance practices by restricting or controlling one technology; one must also
consider the impulse to integrate, simulate and apply disparate information categories
across a range of contexts that intersect at those surfaces of contact or interfaces
between organic and non-organic borders, between life forms and webs of
information, or between organs/ body parts and entry/projection systems (Bogard, 1996: 33). They
because surveillance practices capture and create different versions of life as lived by surveilled subjects.

characterize the human body as flesh made information, drawing on arguments that emphasize hybridity and
cyborgism (Haraway, 1991), positioning it as a marginality, a state of in-between-ness of technologies and the
local (Leigh-Starr, 1991). This is a point to which I shall return. Although Haggerty and Ericson argue that

rhizomatic surveillance opens more opportunities for scrutiny of

surveillance practices , they privilege the breaking of the body into flows to feed the assemblage over
the reconstitution of the body with such flows (Hier, 2003), and thus the question of resistance is not sufficiently
Haggerty and Ericsons work is that they shatter the
notion underlying many of the claims made by proponents of biodata that the body
is a source of truth. This enables a critique of these practices as somehow definitive, absolute or final to
addressed in their analysis. The main advantage of

be established. However, Haggerty and Ericson do not venture far enough: the degree of tension and inbetweenness characterizing the hybrid or cyborgian subject (Haraway, 1991) is underemphasized. In a manner similar to

the body is more akin to Callons (1991) intermediarya hybrid

entity that points back to the network of which it is part and defines roles for other
actors within it (Michael, 1996). A politicization of the constitutive instability of
the body is needed to augment a practical and analytical understanding of
how resistance to surveillance practices might be conceptualized. In order to
Ball (2002), the identification of

address this argument, a brief review of developments concerning a sociology of the body will be reviewed, and its
contribution to an understanding of resistance to surveillance will be considered.

Specifically, building a politics of difference centered on

embodied experiences of disability is key to overcome the
abstracting limitations of the social model and destabilize
ableist discourse.
Loja et al 13 [Ema Loja (Researcher Fellow @ University of Leeds Center for
Disability Studies, PhD in Psychology from University of Porto), Maria Emlia Costa
(Professor of Psychology @ University of Porto), Bill Hughes (Professor of Sociology
@ Glasgow Caledonian University) & Isabel Menezes (Associate Professor in
Education @ University of Porto), Disability, embodiment and ableism: stories of
resistance, Disability & Society, Volume 28, Issue 2, 2013,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687599.2012.705057]
What counts as a legitimate body' (Shilling 1993, 145) is a question that has been at
the core of disability discourse. Disabled people have struggled with a corporeal
identity that is predominately defined by a medical model that reduces it to
abnormality (Zitzelsberger 2005), stressing the need for correction or normalization
(Edwards and Imrie 2003). The medical gaze plays a crucial role in invalidating bodies that
do not conform to the norm. Impaired bodies are regarded as abnormal, deviant, inferior and even subhuman (Campbell 2008). Furthermore, the prominence of bio-medical ideas in the public
discourse on disability monopolizes not only physical capital but also political,
symbolic and social capital, loosely corresponding to and operationalised on different social fields'
(Gottfried 1998, 459). Subjects are produced and placed within a hierarchy of
bodily traits that determines the distribution of privilege, status, and
power' (Garland Thomson 1997, 6). As Braidotti (1996, 136, cited in Meekosha 1998) states, some bodies
matter more than others: some are, quite frankly, disposable'. Disabled bodies
epitomize the latter. The social model of disability makes a clear distinction between impairment and
disability. It rejects medical categories focusing on the elimination of prejudice and discrimination and defends self-

The body is the site of

physical disability (Stoer, Magalhes, and Rodrigues 2005), but a number of academics have argued
that the social model of disability has excluded it from disability discourse
determination, social integration and the civil rights of disabled people.

the social model considers the

impaired body untouched, unchallenged: a taken-for-granted fixed corporeality'
(Meekosha 1998, 175) and within disability studies the term body tends to be used
without much sense of bodiliness as if the body were little more than flesh and
bones' (Paterson and Hughes 1999, 600). However, debate about the body and impairment is reemerging within the disability movement (for example, Shakespeare 1992; French 1993). The
movement has been recovering this lost corporeal space , and as Hughes and Paterson (2006,
101) emphasize: disability is experienced in, on and through the body, just as
impairment is experienced in terms of the personal and cultural narratives
that help to constitute its meaning'. To bring bodies back in' (Zola 1991, 1) or
to recognize how corporeal practices produce and give a body its place in
everyday life' (Turner 2001, 259) are questions fundamental to the disability
project . In order to validate the impaired body within disability studies, Campbell (2001, 44) has defined
(Morris 1991; Hughes 2000; Patterson and Hughes 2000). In fact,

ableism as: a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the
corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfecct, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human'.

Ableism imposes a corporeal standard, the falling away from which represents the
pathway to disability (Campbell 2009), which for disabled people produces two
consequences: the distancing of disabled people from each other and the emulation
by disabled people of ableist norms (Campbell 2008). The body politics of Critical Disability
Studies that ableism envisages offers valuable ways to theorize disability and challenge
disability oppression (for example, Corker 1999; Hughes 1999). Furthermore, the politics of
difference can be an important lens for destabilizing ableism because it
legitimates not sameness but human variation (Jones 2006). As Taylor (1994, 51) says,
the politics of difference is about recognizing the equal value of different ways of
being', and moving to a tradition concerned with rights to secure positive recognition, albeit symbolically, for
minority identities (Galeotti 2002). The social struggle of disabled people understood as a
struggle for recognition' (Honneth 1995a, 1995b) embodies the deconstruction of ableism
and the celebration of difference.

Constant interrogation of ableism is critical the specter of the

disabled body permeates our cultural imaginary and
foundationally informs our epistemology.
Snyder & Mitchell 1 [Sharon L. Snyder (assistant professor in the Department
of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago), &
David T. Mitchell (associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Ph.D. in
Disability Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago), Re-engaging the
Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment, Public Culture 13(3):
367389, 2001, http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/13/3/367.full.pdf]
Consequently, disability studies has formulated the problem of the medicalized body in a manner similar to that
undertaken earlier in body studies, taking up medical institutions (and the ancillary administering of diagnosis,

The pathologization of human

differences is theorized as an imposition on the bodya regulatory effort to
standardize inherent dynamism. But while body studies provided a foundation for a
more general model of critique around the categories of illness, health, pathology,
sequestration, and case study) as the primary locus of its critique.

and even bioethics, disability studies moves beneath these terms to encounter
disability directly in the experiences of human populations which were merely
referenced euphemistically by those more general terms. Disability studies narrows the focus
of its investigation to the social implications for bodies deemed excessively aberrant. In doing so, scholars have
expanded the domain of cultural understandings about disability beyond the walls of its scientific management.

For disability studies, the disabled body is neither a matter of individual malfunction
as cast by medicinenor an effect of the abstraction of the body within the health
professions. Instead, disability translates into a common denominator of
cultural fascination (if not downright obsession)one that infiltrates
thinking across discursive registers as a shared reference point in
deciding matters of human value and communal belonging. In this emergent
field, the able body is no longer characterized as merely a false quantitative ideal,
as it had been in body studies, but rather as an aesthetic product of cultural forces
that oppress those categorized as disabled. This subtle shift in emphasis allows
humanities scholars in disability studies to extend the discussion of bodily deviance
from the context of rehabilitative institutions to that of wider ranging cultural
locations. For instance, Lennard J. Davis (1995) analyzes the role of institutions for the Deaf in the historical
development of disability activism and community in eighteenth-century Europe. Martin Pernick (1996) analyzes the
influential role of public health films in the promotion of eugenics in Chicago prior to World War II. Through readings
of nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literary texts and cultural spectacles such as the freak show, Rosemarie

disabled peoples bodies have been represented

as unassimilable within a normalizing biological ideology that marks the
disabled body as the inferior contrast to an able-bodied, white, masculine citizenry.
Garland Thomson (1997) argues that

Paul K. Longmore (1997) assesses television genres, such as disease-of-the-week movies and telethons, to dissect
mainstream representations of disability as tragedies in need of eradication or overcoming. In our own Narrative
Prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2000), we theorize the pervasive utility of disability to literature in Europe and the
United States by discussing the longstanding artistic recourse to disability as a staple feature of characterization.

corporeal metaphors to
emblematize societal weaknesses in literary and philosophical figurations of
disability. Ultimately, these analyses of the pervasive dependency upon textual and
visual representations of disability in various cultural media have forced a
reformulation of a theory of marginality itself within disability studies. This is one
site at which disability studies diverges from the approach established by other civil
rightsbased programs. While many minority movements have argued that their social devaluation occurs
as a result of their marginal presence in representational media, disability studies has formulated an
analysis of social depreciation targeting the perpetual recourse to images of
disability in narrative and visual mediums. As a result, disability studies follows a figuration of
Disability studies scholars have also analyzed the opportunistic use of

marginality as the expression of an overheated symbolic organism that conveys potent meanings as a result of its
palimpsest-like discursive history (cf. Stewart 1993). Theaters of Repression The work of disability studies scholars

bodily and cognitive differences were integral to

various registers of meaning-making within culture. While the earliest research in the

consolidated the argument that

field kept returning to a denunciation of three prominent literary figuresShakespeares Richard III, Melvilles
Captain Ahab, and Dickenss Tiny Timthe growing body of historical research called for wider ranging

disability studies outgrew its

denunciations of stereotypes; instead, theorists began to argue that disability
represented a deep-seated, yet uninterrogated, cultural conflict. If the able
body proved a utopian fiction of abstract bodily norms, disabled bodies occupied
the phantasmic recesses of the cultural imaginary. The different body was
methodologies. As with later developments in race and gender studies,

more than a site for public scapegoating cognitive and physical aberrancies
acted as reminders of Others in our midst who challenged beliefs in a
homogeneous bodily order. Out of these efforts to elucidate the constructed
nature of disabled bodies in history, disability studies set out to diagnose the
investments of an ableist society in disabilitys various incarnations. Cultural efforts
to medicalize or domesticate disability effectively repressed the power of aberrancy
to unmoor notions of the body as a matter of norms, averages, and deviations.
Locating disabled bodies as rare examples of extraordinary deviance essentially
cordoned off disability from the differences that characterize typical biological
diversity. For disability studies, the impersonal was the political. Such a sequestration
evidenced the mainstream desire to reduce the different bodys (or minds) ability to destabilize normative models
of health.

2AC Case Extensions

Ext Solvency
The affirmatives embodied intervention into disability studies
is key to reverse violent cultural normalization and biological
categorizations of value.
Snyder & Mitchell 1 [Sharon L. Snyder (assistant professor in the Department
of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago), &
David T. Mitchell (associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Ph.D. in
Disability Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago), Re-engaging the
Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment, Public Culture 13(3):
367389, 2001, http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/13/3/367.full.pdf]
We begin with Byrons The Deformed Transformed as an allegory for the efforts of U.S. disability studies first to

rejection of the apparently

visceral life of disability for the evidently social ideal of a classical and able
body encapsulates the double bind that confronts those who inhabit disabled
bodies: one must either endure the cultural slander heaped upon bodily difference
or seek to evade the object of derision. Such erasures of disabled people have
historically been achieved through such cultural solutions as institutionalization,
isolation, genocide, cure, concealment, segregation, exile, quarantine, and
prosthetic masking, among others. As a theatrical effort to destigmatize the disabled body, Byrons play
disengage from, and then to re-engage with, disabled bodies. In the drama,

much like research in disability studies over the past twenty yearsaims to debunk the fictions of desirability that

In critiquing the presumed desirability invested in able bodies,

disability studies has sought to destigmatize disabled bodies only by default. In the
invest the able body.

mid-1990s, U.S. disability studies returned to encounter the sloughed-off disabled body after the perfectible, able

disability studies
has strategically neglected the question of the experience of disabled embodiment
in order to disassociate disability from its mooring in medical cultures and
institutions. Although recently disability criticism has been calling for a return to a
phenomenology of the disabled body,3 this return has been slow in coming. Like
feminized, raced, and queered bodies, the disabled body became situated in
definitive contrast to the articulation of what amounted to a hegemonic aesthetic
premised on biology. Within this cultural belief system, the normal body provided
the baseline for determinations of desirability and human value. The section that follows,
body had been rethought as a matter of epistemology, as opposed to biology. We argue that

Abstracting the Body, begins with a discussion of the advent of the normative body in medicine through an
analysis of the theories of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem and the documentary films of Frederick
Wiseman. Leading documentarians of institutions, these three have produced work critical of sterile ideals of the
body based on statistical averages and on an investment in the diagnosis of biological differences as deviance.

the able body emerges as a

narrow measure for the creation of discriminatory, human-made environments that
elide the existence of biological and cognitive variations. Next, in The Cultural Arena of
Disability, we examine the ways in which disability studies has expanded the analysis of the
pathologization of disabled bodies beyond the walls of the medical institution and
into an engagement with intrinsically social questions of human value and
belonging. One result of this expansion has been to direct scholarly attention to the use of disability as a
Such critiques have provided the fundamental premise of disability studies:

metaphor for social conflict in various artistic traditions. In the segment Theaters of Repression, we argue that as
medical science strains to rein in the disabled bodys deviance, movies unleash nightmarish images of disability as
a threat to social stability. In posing such an opposition, we analyze portrayals of disability in Tod Brownings 1932
horror classic, Freaks, and Werner Herzogs misguided political satire, Even Dwarfs Started Small (1971). Finally, in

Body Poetics, we conclude with a discussion of the re-engagement with disabled embodiment in the poetics of
disability performance artists.

Ext Root Cause

Ableism forms the justification for all oppression racism,
sexism, and environmental destruction are inevitable absent
challenges to biological normalization.
Wolbring 8 (Gregor Wolbring, assistant professor, Dept of Community Health
Sciences, Program in Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, University of
Calgary. The Politics of Ableism. Development (2008) 51, 252258. )
Ableism is a set of beliefs, processes and practices that produce - based on abilities
one exhibits or values - a particular understanding of oneself, ones body and ones
relationship with others of humanity, other species and the environment, and
includes how one is judged by others (Wolbring, 2006a,2007a, b, c, d). Ableism reflects the
sentiment of certain social groups and social structures that value and promote
certain abilities, for example, productivity and competitiveness, over others, such as
empathy, compassion and kindness. This preference for certain abilities over others leads to a
labelling of real or perceived deviations from or lack of essential abilities as a diminished state of being, leading or

Ableism is an umbrella ism

for other isms such as racism, sexism, casteism, ageism, speciesism, antienvironmentalism, gross domestic product (GDP)-ism and consumerism. One can identify many
contributing to justifying various other isms (Wolbring, 2006a, 2007a, b, c, d).

different forms of ableism such as biological structure-based ableism (B), cognition-based ableism (C), social
structure-based ableism (S) and ableism inherent to a given economic system (E). ABECS could be used as the
ableism equivalent to the NBICS S&T convergence (Wolbring, 2007e ).

Ableism and preference of

certain abilities has been rampant throughout history. Ableism shaped and
continues to shape areas such as human security (Wolbring, 2006c), social cohesion
(Wolbring, 2007f), social policies, relationships among social groups, individuals and
countries, humans and non-humans, and humans and their environment (Wolbring,
2007a, b, c). Ableism is one of the most societally entrenched and accepted isms. Historically, ableism has
been used by various social groups to justify their elevated level of rights and status
in relation to other groups (i.e. women were viewed as biologically fragile and
emotional, and thus incapable of bearing the responsibility of voting, owning
property and retaining custody of their own children (ableism leading to sexism; Silvers et
al.,1998;Wolbring, 2003). Different forms of ableism Ableism against disabled people
(Wolbring, 2007a, b, c) reflects a preference for speciestypical normative abilities leading
to the discrimination against them as less able and/or as impaireddisabled people
(Wolbring, 2004, 2005). This type of ableism is supported by the medical, deficiency,
impairment categorization of disabled people (medical model ) (Wolbring, 2004, 2005). It
rejects the variation of being, biodiversity notion and categorization of disabled
people (social model). It leads to the focus on fixing the person or preventing more
of such people being born and ignores the acceptance and accommodation of such
people in their variation of being (Wolbring, 2005). Ableism has also long been used to justify
hierarchies of rights and discrimination between other social groups, and to exclude people not classified as

Sexism is partly driven by a form of ableism that favours certain

abilities, and the labelling of women as not having those certain necessary abilities
is used to justify sexism and the dominance of males over females. Similarly, racism
and ethnicism are partly driven by forms of ableism, which have two components.
One favours one race or ethnic group and discriminates against another . The book The
disabled people.

Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994) judged human beings on their cognitive abilities (their IQ). It promoted

claiming that certain ethnic groups are less cognitively able than others. The
ableist judgement related to cognitive abilities continues justifying racist arguments .
racism by

Casteism, like racism, is based on the notion that socially defined groups of people have inherent, natural qualities
or essences that assign them to social positions, make them fit for specific duties and occupations
(Omvedt,2001).The natural inherent qualities are abilities that make them fit for specific duties and occupations.

AT: Social Model Good

The social model is insufficient overly abstracted from
experience.
Terzi 4 (Lorella Terzi, School of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies,
Institute of Education, University of London. Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 21,
No. 2, 2004)
My questioning of the definition of impairment and disability provided by the social model certainly does not aim at
simply reintroducing a linear causal link between impairment and disability and in all cases. If we accept that
society discriminates against impaired people, then we can also understand the claim of the disablement structure
of society. What I hold, ultimately, is that there certainly is a causal relation between oppression and disability,

in maintaining that
disability is squarely socially caused, the social model theorists are over-socialising
their position. Their model, then, as we have seen, needs clarifications and extensions [56].
More specifically, the social model overlooks the impairment effects , in terms of their restriction
of activities or the possible inabilities to perform different functions. In so doing, it downplays the
importance of the relational nature of impairment, disability, and society. Moreover, in
asserting the total separation between impairment and disability, it opens up the
chance of a proliferation of terms other than disabilities, to denote inability or
being unable to do things, which, if politically correct, appears less justified theoretically. One example to
when society plays a strong role in excluding and marginalizing impaired people. But

illustrate this position is related to some forms of congenital blindness, which, for instance, prevent people from
performing certain actions, such as driving a car. This form of impairment, which can be considered a clear inability
and a disability if referred to driving (at present society is structured to have sighted drivers only), is certainly not a
cause of inability or disability in many other possible activities, like enjoying music or cooking or acting as a state

disabled scholars have voiced the need to

reconsider impairment, and why medical sociologists have pointed to the relational aspect of some
impairment with illness and disability. These considerations highlight the need for a different
framework, providing a more coherent basis for the under- standing of impairment,
disability, society and their reciprocal implications. I suggest that a philosophical perspective
minister. It is now clearer, therefore, why some

based on Amartya Sens capability approach could take these issues in fruitful directions. The discussion of the
latter, however, is well beyond the aim of this article. A final critical point, on the relation between impairment,

In maintaining that disability is

socially caused, the social model of disability attributes the responsibility of
disablement completely to society. In his development of a social understanding of impairment,
disability and society, concerns moral and social responsibility.

Abberley argues that impairment is socially caused; therefore asserting that society is responsible also for the
impairment it produces. However, in light of the previous critical points and although the issue of responsibility is
very complex, a few considerations emerge. First, if society causes discrimination, either politically or economically,
and, therefore, restriction of activity or participation, then society is responsible for the disablement in an
unacceptable way. The same applies when society causes impairment, as a con- sequence of war, for instance. But

there are circumstances when impairment and its effects do not stem from social
causes and many of the examples above have illustrated this claim. There are, consequently, different
considerations related to responsibility with respect to impairment. How could a congenital impairment
unrelated to any endemic condition be considered societys responsibility? Moreover,
even if one fully endorsed the social model position, it would be quite problematical
how society could be held responsible in the case of disablement connected to the
activity of driving by a person visually impaired owing to congenital blindness. Finally,
there are impairments that are a consequence of a persons agency, in other words of her particular actions or
activities, some of which can well be highly risky activities, voluntarily undertaken. When impairment arises from a
hang-gliding accident, to mention an extreme case, considerations of societys responsibility are difficult to sustain.
In that case, in fact, when the sport has been voluntarily chosen with full awareness of its potential risks, when all
that could have been done to prevent the accident has been done and when rescue has been provided, where

the social model of disability shows the

element of over-socialisation and improper generalisation seen in the causal link
established between society and disability, thus reconfirming the internal limitations
should societys responsibility be placed? Here again,

highlighted so far.

Their institutional change arguments are wrong the social

model doesnt create legal reform.
Samaha 7 [Adam M. Samaha, attended Harvard Law School, has taught at
Chicago University of Law, and has a BA in History and Government, WHAT GOOD
IS THE SOCIAL MODEL OF DISABILITY, July 2007,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=983818]
Despite the apparent connection between the social model and social change,
there just is no necessary relationship there . That is the central claim of this Article.
Although the social model is one way to define disability and a field of inquiry , it is
not a disability policy. Deciding how to respond to disability in law and
culture depends on a normative framework that cannot be supplied by the
model. This framework might be libertarian, utilitarian, egalitarian, some
combination thereof, or something else. The social model itself, however,
has essentially nothing to say about which framework to use. One can accept the
models insight regarding causes of disadvantage without committing to a particular response, even if one believes
that disability is simply or importantly the result of peoples attitudes.9 While legal scholars may concede that the
social model does not account for all disadvantage associated with impairments ,

none seem to
acknowledge the logical distance between the models causation
description and public policy .10 The implications are several. First, disability law
scholars should stop moving so quickly from assertions about social
construction to arguments for social reconstruction. Even if their comparative
advantage in scholarship does not include moral theory , their analytical skills often become
unhinged without a defensible normative goal. There is no way to set priorities, make
unavoidable tradeoffs, or confront cost issues without a normative orientation; even legal formalists must admit
this.

Second, because of the gap between causation and policy, the stakes are lower for
recognizing social forces in human disadvantage. Accepting a degree of social construction is not
the end of a policy discussion and so it should be neither shocking nor frightening. It might be intellectually

Third, the argument applies to all social construction observations, including

those related to gender, race, sexual orientation, class, deviance, and law itself. For
all of them, causation is separable from policy prescription. In fact the argument
applies to all causation observations. None determine just outcomes. This is not to
liberating.

dismiss efforts to untangle causal forces in human affairs. The social model of disability, for its part, has been a
source of revelation and inspiration for action. It can dispel uncritical assumptions that disadvantage is natural and

we ought to know precisely what the model can and

cannot accomplish.11 Then more can be done. We might achieve a sophisticated picture of the
models interaction with general normative frameworks, without relying on
membership in the disability rights movement to do the work of argument. There is another oversight
in the scholarship but this weakness underestimates the social models implications. When the
necessary, which is no small feat. But

model is doing work within a normative framework, its insight can suggest a class of decision makers different from
the class other perspectives suggest. This insight might require expertise in addition to or other than medical
knowledge. In a way, disability rights advocates who constructed the social model were pointing toward this

the connection between the model and institutional

design, however mediated, has not been recognized in the law literature.
conclusion all along. Yet

2AC Framework

Resolved
Resolved means to analyze in part.
Merriam-Webster No Date [http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/resolved]
resolved resolving Full Definition of RESOLVE transitive verb 1 obsolete : dissolve, melt 2 a : break up,
separate <the prism resolved the light into a play of color>; also : to change by disintegration b : to reduce
by analysis <resolve the problem into simple elements> c : to distinguish between
or make independently visible adjacent parts of d : to separate (a racemic compound or
mixture) into the two components

Aff Prerequisite
Political engagement before the affirmatives cultural shift is
impossible arenas of power and democratic debate are set up
to exclude disability extending the limits of acceptable
debate is key.
Berube 3 (Michael, Citizenship and Disability: Disability is a matter of civil rights,
even if the Supreme Court doesn't seem to agree.,
http://www.alternet.org/story/15809/citizenship_and_disability)
Imagine a building in which political philosophers are debating , in the wake
of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the value and the purpose of participatory parity
over against forms of authoritarianism or theocracy. Now imagine that this building has no
access ramps , no Braille or large-print publications , no A merican S ign L anguage
interpreters , no elevators, no special-needs paraprofessionals, no in-class aides.
Contradictory as such a state of affairs may sound, it's a reasonably accurate picture of
what contemporary debate over the meaning of democracy actually looks
like . How can we remedy this? Only when we have fostered equal participation
in debates over the ends and means of democracy can we have a truly participatory
debate over what "participatory parity" itself means . That debate will be interminable in
principle, since our understandings of democracy and parity are infinitely revisable, but lest we think of
deliberative democracy as a forensic society dedicated to empyreal reaches of
abstraction, we should remember that debates over the meaning of
participatory parity set the terms for more specific debates about the
varieties of human embodiment . These include debates about prenatal
screening, genetic discrimination, stem-cell research, euthanasia , and, with regard
to physical access, ramps, curb cuts, kneeling buses, and buildings employing what
is now known as universal design. Leftists and liberals, particularly those associated with university
humanities departments, are commonly charged with being moral relativists, unable or unwilling to say (even after

So let me be especially clear on this

final point. I think there's a very good reason to extend the franchise, to
widen the conversation, to democratize our debates, and to make
disability central to our theories of egalitarian social justice
September 11) why one society might be "better" than another.

State Focus Bad

Centering our politics around the state causes a placebo effect
of real change and prevents effective resistance refuse the
top-down illusory gift of progressive egalitarian politics in
favor of our pluralist thought.
Arrigo & Williams 2000 [Bruce and Christopher, California School of
Professional Psychology, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, August 2000]
The impediments to establishing democratic justice in contemporary American
society have caused a national paralysis; one that has recklessly spawned an
aporetic 1 existence for minorities. 2 The entrenched ideological complexities
afflicting under- and nonrepresented groups (e.g., poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, crime) at
the hands of political, legal, cultural, and economic power elites have produced
counterfeit, perhaps even fraudulent, efforts at reform: Discrimination and
inequality in opportunity prevail (e.g., Lynch & Patterson, 1996). The misguided and futile
initiatives of the state, in pursuit of transcending this public affairs crisis, have
fostered a reification, that is, a reinforcement of divisiveness. This time, however,
minority groups compete with one another for recognition, affirmation, and identity
in the national collective psyche (Rosenfeld, 1993). What ensues by way of state effort,
though, is a contemporaneous sense of equality for all and a near imperceptible
endorsement of inequality; a silent conviction that the majority 3 still retains power .
4 The gift of equality, procured through state legislative enactments as an emblem of
democratic justice, embodies true (legitimated) power that remains nervously
secure in the hands of the majority. 5 The ostensible empowerment of minority
groups is a facade; it is the ruse of the majority gift. What exists, in fact, is a
simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1981, 1983) of equality (and by extension, democratic justice): a pseudosign image (a hypertext or simulation) of real sociopolitical progress. For the future
relationship between equality and the social to more fully embrace minority
sensibilities, calculated legal reform efforts in the name of equality must be
displaced and the rule and authority of the status quo must be decentered. Imaginable,
calculable equality is self-limiting and self-referential. Ultimately, it is always (at least) one step
removed from true equality and, therefore, true justice. 6 The ruse of the majority
gift currently operates under the assumption of a presumed empowerment, which it
confers on minority populations. Yet, the presented power is itself circumscribed by the stifling horizons
of majority rule with their effects. Thus, the gift can only be construed as falsely eudemonic:
An avaricious, although insatiable, pursuit of narcissistic legitimacy supporting
majority directives. The commission (bestowal) of power to minority groups or citizens through prevailing
state reformatory efforts underscores a polemic with implications for public affairs and civic life. We contend
that the avenir (i.e., the to come) of equality as an (in)calculable, (un)recognizable
destination in search of democratic justice is needed. However, we argue that this displacement
of equality is unattainable if prevailing juridico-ethico-political conditions (and societal consciousness pertaining to

the gift of the

majority is problematic, producing, as it must, a narcissistic hegemony, that is, a
sustained empowering of the privileged, a constant relegitimation of the powerful. 7
them) remain fixed, stagnant, and immutable. In this article, we will demonstrate how

Relying on Derridas postmodern critique of Eurocentric logic and thought, we will show how complicated and
fragmented the question of establishing democratic justice is in Western cultures, especially in American society.
We will argue that

what is needed is a relocation of the debate about justice and

difference from the circumscribed boundaries of legal redistributive discourse on

equality to the more encompassing context of alterity, undecidability, cultural
plurality, and affirmative postmodern thought. 8

Fiat Bad
Fiat is a terrible model for political education focusing on the
lived experiences of individuals is key to effective
policymaking and preserve legitimate alternatives.
Claude 88 [Inis Claude (Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs @ University
of Virginia), States and the Global System, 1988, pgs. 18-20]
This view of the state as an institutional monolith is fostered by the notion of sovereignty, which calls up the image

Sovereignty emphasizes the singularity of

the state , its monopoly of authority, its unity of command and its capacity to speak with
one voice. Thus, France wills, Iran demands, China intends, New Zealand promises and the Soviet
Union insists. One all too easily conjures up the picture of a single-minded and
purposeful state that decides exactly what it wants to achieve, adopts coherent
policies intelligently adapted to its objectives, knows what it is doing, does what it intends and always has
its act together. This view of the state is reinforced by political scientists emphasis
upon the concept of policy and upon the thesis that governments derive policy from
calculations of national interest. We thus take it for granted that states act
internationally in accordance with rationally conceived and consciously
constructed schemes of action, and we implicitly refuse to consider the
possibility that alternatives to policy -directed behaviour may have importance
alternatives such as random, reactive, instinctual, habitual and conformist behaviour. Our rationalistic
assumption that states do what they have planned to do tends to inhibit the discovery that
states sometimes do what they feel compelled to do, or what they have the
opportunity to do, or what they have usually done, or what other states are doing,
or whatever the line of least resistance would seem to suggest. Academic
preoccupation with the making of policy is accompanied by academic neglect of the
execution of policy. We seem to assume that once the state has calculated its interest and contrived
a policy to further that interest, the carrying out of policy is the virtually automatic result of the
routine functioning of the bureaucratic mechanism of the state. I am inclined to call
this the Genesis theory of public administration, taking as my text the passage: And God
said, Let there be light: and there was light . I suspect that, in the realm of government, policy
execution rarely follows so promptly and inexorably from policy
statement. Alternatively, one may dub it the Pooh-Bah/Ko-Ko theory, honouring those denizens of William S.
of the monarch, presiding over his kingdom.

Gilberts Japan who took the position that when the Mikado ordered that something e done it was as good as done

In the real world , that which a state decides

to do is not as good as done; it may, in fact, never be done. And what states do,
they may never have decided to do. Governments are not automatic machines, grinding out decisions
and converting decisions into actions. They are agglomerations of human beings , like the
rest of us inclined to be fallible, lazy, forgetful, indecisive, resistant to discipline and authority, and
likely to fail to get the word or to heed it. As in other large organizations, left and right governmental
and might as well be declared to have been done.

hands are frequently ignorant of each others activities, official spokesmen contradict each other, ministries work at
cross purposes, and the creaking machinery of government often gives the impression that no one is really in
charge. I hope that no one will attribute my jaundiced view of government merely to the fact that I am an
Americanone, that is, whose personal experience is limited to a governmental system that is notoriously complex,
disjointed, erratic, cumbersome and unpredictable. The United States does not, I suspect, have the least effective
government or the most bumbling and incompetent bureaucracy in all the world.

Here and there, now and

governments do, of course perform prodigious feats of organization and administration:

More often, states
have to make do with governments that are not notably clear about their purposes
or coordinated and disciplined in their operations. This means that, in international relations,
then,

an extraordinary war effort, a flight to the moon, a successful hostage-rescue operation.

states are sometimes less dangerous, and sometimes less reliable, than one might think. Neither their threats nor

Above all, it means that we students of

international politics must be cautious in attributing purposefulness and
responsibility to governments. To say that the United States was informed
about an event is not to establish that the president acted in the light of that
knowledge; he may never have heard about it. To say that a Soviet pilot shot down an airliner is
their promises are to be taken with absolute seriousness.

not to prove that the Kremlin has adopted the policy of destroying all intruders into Soviet airspace; one wants to
know how and by whom the decision to fire was made. To observe that the representative of Zimbabwe voted in
favour of a particular resolution in the United Nations General Assembly is not necessarily to discover the nature of
Zimbabwes policy on the affected matter; Zimbabwe may have no policy on that matter, and it may be that no one
in the national capital has ever heard of the issue. We can hardly dispense with the convenient notion that Pakistan
claims, Cuba promises, and Italy insists, and we cannot well abandon the formal position that governments speak

it is essential that we bear constantly in mind the

reality that governments are never fully in charge and never achieve the unity,
purposefulness and discipline that theory attributes to themand that they
sometimes claim.
for and act on behalf of their states, but

Rehabilitation DA
Framework is a violent rehabilitative attempt to bring the
disabled body back within normative standards of civility
reject their medical pathologizing of the affirmative.
Hughes 12 (Bill Hughes, Professor of Sociology and the Dean of the School of
Law and Social Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland. Civilising
Modernity and the Ontological Invalidation of Disabled People in Disability and
Social Theory New Developments and Directions)
There is another way to deal with disability, a technical (usually) medical solution designed to assuage the excess of
corporeality, the surplus of life (Kolnai, 2004) that upsets the civilised observer. This is the anthropophagic

the possibility of rescuing disability from the abyss of unacceptable

difference, through correction, rehabilitation, through finding ways to conceal or heal the
ontological deficit (Hughes, 2007). The quest to correct the disabled body is about
making disability and non-disability identical, about transforming the pathological into
the normal. In ableist culture, the bodily forms of disabled people are marked, not just by constitutional
strategy,

pathology but also by aesthetic unruliness. Disability represents deficit in competence and beauty. Eugenics, for
example, promised to make humanity not just strong and smart but beautiful as well (Pernick, 1997: 91). The
ontological disparagement of disability in the modern period is a double-edged sword. It thrusts and slashes in the

Medical and aesthetic prejudice work in combination to

produce the view that disabled peoples inabilities and deficiencies are products
of the natural distribution of competence and beauty rather than the social
organisation of opportunity. Insofar as one cannot exchange what one has not got or
(easily) transform a deficit into a credit, the disabled body is blocked in its
possibilities to acquire cultural, economic or symbolic capital (see Blackmore and Hodgkins
in this volume). Correction/rehabilitation involves the attempted erasure of deficits of
credibility that are simultaneously mechanical and undesirable. To be what not to
be is to be a stakeholder at the margins of the human community with few
opportunities to escape misrecognition and exile. Correction offers a tangible
promise of redemption, through to steal a phrase from Bourdieu (1984: 251) ontological
promotion. Making able (rehabilitation) offers an alternative to long-term or permanent incarceration in quasimedical institutions. Henri-Jacques Stiker (2000: 128) argues that rehabilitation marks the
appearance of a culture that attempts to complete the act of identification, of
making identical and that, this act will cause the disabled to disappear and with
them all that is lacking, in order to drown them, dissolve them in the greater and
single social whole. The dynamic of the disgust response down to the removal of the
aversive object is , in a concrete way, reproduced in the practice of rehabilitation.
quotidian spaces of the civilising world.

Modern professional therapeutic practice is designed to normalise in the name of sameness. Aside from the positive

it represents an assault on bodily difference and

embodies an assumption that the norm (of wholeness) is redemptive . Winance (2007:
value that it can and does have for many,

627) notes that in France from the 1950s onwards, the term handicap relates to divergence from a norm of
social performance and refers to a disabled person who, through medical means, is to be re-adapted.

Rehabilitation is an
offer of ontological promotion, an invitation to join the community of
civilised persons. Assumptions about civilised bodily performances are clearly evident in the field of

Rehabilitation also signifies betterment indicating a moral element to correction.

therapy and rehabilitation. Aides that facilitate the up-right stance and comportment of people with mobility
impairments are regarded as tools for enhancing physical capital. The difference between homo erectus and his
slouched, primate predecessors might have a quite a lot to do with our disdain for those who do not walk tall as
well as with the pervasive (nondisabled) view that a wheelchair is a place of confinement rather than a vehicle of

liberation. The medical term prosthesis is derived from the Greek word meaning addition, suggesting nature in
deficit. In a literal sense, note Mitchell and Snyder (2000: 6 ),

a prosthesis seeks to accomplish an

illusion, perhaps a deceit. It covers-up. It attempts to represent what an individual
is at the level of biology and ontology so that she can be embraced by a
community that will not tolerate her as she is. Therapies improve and correct, some cure. The goal
of speech and language therapy, for example, is to transform deficit communicators by providing them with the
tools to develop civilised speech patterns. Recipients of the therapy are taught like the heroine of George
Bernard Shaws Pygmalion to embody the protocols of competent communication and be able, therefore, to

The person with the speech impairment is

presented as a portent of social mess. To offend against protocol attracts aversion.
Yet, these protocols are themselves carnally informed and arise from the ways in
which non-disabled bodies leave their imprint the imprint of normalcy on the
forms of communication that come to be defined as acceptable. Impairment, in
these normalised social spaces, is always an ontological lack. Rehabilitation from the
Latin habilitare, to make able is a corrective, a pedagogical solution to our
aversion for the disruption caused by an ontological splinter in the
otherwise perfect fleshy fabric of a slick social encounter . Speech impairment is
participate effectively in civil social encounters.

treated as a creeping unruliness that threatens civility. From a non-disabled perspective, the corrupting presence

Disabled people can attempt to erase their

difference by passing as normal (Goffman, 1969) a form of ontological bluff that is
profoundly precarious. In equating social competence with the concealment of
corporeal difference, disabled people trade pride in who they are for the rewards of
assimilation. Elias understands this all too well. Passing, from his perspective, can be explained by fear of
of ontological deficit is a source of moral apprehension.

degradation and is underpinned by the alignment of ones super-ego with the social demands for self-constraint
(Elias, 2000: 414). Given the pervasiveness of ableism and the tyranny of normalcy, one can understand why this

The right side of civility is an attractive place to be.

One of the ways to sustain credibility as a disabled person seems to be by
convincing others that one is not what one is. Yet the cost of this civilising, ontological strategy can
be high. Its attraction hinges on the extent to which its protagonist internalises as
shame the disgust response that, she assumes, she will invoke if her impairment is
not corrected by concealment. However, if the concealed impairment is exposed and the protective
can be regarded as an attractive bargain.

mantle of passing collapses, the individual is caught in a deceit that may have profoundly negative consequences
for her social relationships.

Normalization DA
Normalizing the affirmatives resistant politics in an attempt to
create an imagined perfect debate community only results in
the maintenance of ableism forced norm emulation should be
rejected and replaced with our inversion of politics as usual.
Campbell 8 Fiona Kumari Campbell, researcher in philosophy, sociology,
jurisprudence and theology and Deputy head of school at Griffon Law School,
Refusing Able(ness): A Preliminary Conversation about Ableism, M/C Journal,
07/2008 http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/46
literature within disability and cultural studies has concentrate d on the
practices and production of disablism, specifically by examining those attitudes
and barriers that contribute to the subordination of people with
disabilities in liberal society. Disablism is a set of assumptions (conscious or
unconscious) and practices that promote the differential or unequal treatment of
people because of actual or presumed disabilities. On this basis the strategic
positions adopted to facilitate emancipatory social change whilst diverse ,
essentially relate to reforming those negative attitudes, assimilating people with
disabilities into normative civil society and providing compensatory
initiatives and safety nets in cases of enduring vulnerability . In other words, the
site of reformation has been at the intermediate level of function, structure
and institution in civil society and shifting values in the cultural arena . Such an emphasis
produces scholarship that contains serious distortions, gaps and omissions
regarding the production of disability and re-inscribes an able-bodied
voice/lens towards disability. Disability, often quite unconsciously, continues to be examined and
taught from the perspective of the Other (Marks; Solis). The challenge then is to reverse, to
invert this traditional approach, to shift our gaze and concentrate on what the
study of disability tells us about the production, operation and
maintenance of ableism. The earlier work of Tom Shakespeare concludes, perhaps the maintenance
Typically

of a non-disabled identity is a more useful problem with which to be concerned; rather than
interrogating the other, let us de-construct the normality-which-is-to-be-assumed (28). Hughes captures

An Abled
imaginary relies upon the existence of an hitherto unacknowledged imagined
shared community of able-bodied/minded people (c.f. Butler & Parr) held together by a
common ableist homosocial world view that asserts the preferability and
compulsoriness of the norms of ableism. Overboe and Campbell point to the compulsion to
emulate the norm through the internalisation of ableism . Ableistnormativity results
this project forcefully by calling for a study of the pathologies of non-disablement (683).

in compulsive passing, wherein there is a failure to ask about difference, to imagine human be-ingness differently.
Compulsory ableness and its conviction to and seduction of sameness as the basis to equality, claims results in a
resistance to consider ontologically peripheral lives as distinct ways of being human least they produce a
heightened devaluation. Ontological reframing poses different preoccupations: what does the study of the politics of
deafness tell us about what it means to be hearing? Indeed how is the very conceptualisation of hearing framed
in the light of discourses of deafness?

By decentring Abledness, it is possible to to

look at the world from the inside out ) (Linton 13) and unveil the non-disabled/ableist stance.

In a different context Haraway (152) exclaims [this] cannot be said quite out loud, or it loses its crucial position
as a pre-condition of vision and becomes the object of scrutiny. So what is meant by the concept of ableism? A
survey of the literature suggests that the term is often referred to in a fleeting way with limited definitional or

When there is commentary,

ableism is described as denoting an attitude that devalues or differentiates
disability through the valuation of able-bodiedness equated to normalcy. For some,
the term ableism is used interchangeably with the term disablism. I argue however that
conceptual specificity (Clear; Iwasaki & Mactavish: Watts & Erevelles).

these two words render quite radically different understandings of the status of disability to the norm. Furthermore,
as a conceptual tool, ableism transcends the procedures, structures, for governing civil society and locates itself
clearly in the arena of genealogies of knowledge. There is little consensus as to what practices and behaviours

We can nevertheless say that a chief feature of an ableist

viewpoint is a belief that impairment or disability (irrespective of type) is
inherently negative and should the opportunity present itself, be
ameliorated, cured or indeed eliminated. Ableism refers to In a similar vein, Veronica

constitute ableism.

Chouinard defines ableism as ideas, practices, institutions and social relations that presume ablebodiedness, and
by so doing, construct persons with disabilities as marginalised and largely invisible others (380). In contrast,
Amundson & Taira attribute a doctrinal posture to ableism in their suggestion that Ableism is a doctrine that falsely
treats impairments as inherently and naturally horrible and blames the impairments themselves for the problems
experienced by the people who have them (54). Whilst there is little argument with this presupposition, what is
absent from the definition is any mention of ableisms function in inaugurating the norm. Campbell and Chouinards
approach is less about the coherency and intentionalities of ableism; rather their emphasis is on a conception of
ableism as a hub network functioning around shifting interest convergences. Linton defines ableism as includ[ing]
the idea that a persons abilities or characteristics are determined by disability or that people with disabilities as a
group are inferior to non-disabled people (9). There are problems with simply endorsing a schema that posits a
particular worldview that either favours or disfavours dis/able-bodied people as if each category is discrete, selfevident and fixed. As I will argue later, Ableism sets up a binary dynamic which is not simply comparative but rather
co-relationally constitutive. Campbells formulation of ableism not only problematises the signifier disability but
points to the fact that the essential core of ableism is the formation of a naturalised understanding of being fully
human and this as Chouinard notes, is articulated on a basis of an enforced presumption that erases difference.

Negative

No Solvency
Interrogating disability as a social construction does nothing
no broad social change.
Donoghue 3 (Christopher, Fordham University, Challenging the authority of the
medical definition of disability: an analysis of the resistance to the social
constructionist paradigm, Disability & Society 18.2)
In an effort to debunk the entrenched authority of the medical model, a social
constructionist paradigm has been adopted by many disability theorists and activists. They have
suggested that society normally creates a negative social identity for people with disabilities (Gergen, 1985; Fine &

Through the construction of this identity, which is

typically characterised by deviant or abnormal behaviour, the non-disabled majority
is granted a legitimate means to exclude and isolate people with disabilities . As
Asch, 1988; Scotch, 1988; Brzuzy, 1997).

removed members of society, their contributions are often discredited and their successes are treated as
aberrations. Likewise, the expectations of people with disabilities are chronically low, and there is an ever-present
suggestion that their lives are not necessarily worth living. This identity has been argued to derive from the medical
model, which defines a disability as a deficiency that restricts ones ability to perform normal life activities. By
adopting the social constructionist viewpoint, theorists and activists have contended that society has created
disability by choosing not to remove structural constraints that would enable more people to participate and gain

The social constructionist approach was an effective ideological

rejoinder to the established medical model. Yet the question of how to convince the
non-disabled majority that society has disabled certain individuals has not been
adequately resolved. The activists attempted to adopt the social constructionist theory as a basis for a
minority group model of disability. They would use this model to support a plea for action to
people with disabilities as a mechanism to overcome the oppression being inflicted
upon them by the non-disabled majority. While it is clear that such a transformation of the definition
of disability among academics and disability activists has clearly taken hold, the disability movement
appears to have achieved only limited success in changing the views of the nondisabled majority. By accepting the reward of civil rights protection without insisting that the medical model
access to social resources.

be publicly dismantled, the hopes of the disability activists to change the views of the broader public may have

the belief among social

constructionist theorists that society will change its perception of disability if it is
merely demonstrated that the prior notion has been made unjustly. From a
structural point of view, it would seem to take much more to convince a dominant
group in society that it needs to redistribute power and access to its treasured
resources. The more desirable arrangement to the non-disabled majority is one that
maintains the superiority of people with normal abilities . As a result, the disabled
are typically described as dysfunctional and are often perceived to be incapable of
understanding the world in the same way that normal people do. Although social
constructionists argue that such judgements regarding how people should be able to think or act are
subjective notions that stem from dominant social ideologies, they may be said to underestimate the
extent to which those ideologies are created and legitimated by the non-disabled
majority because they best serve their interests.
been sacrificed. The willingness to make this concession may have stemmed from

Case

Social Model Good

Social model of disability is good key to progressive
institutional change.
Morris 2000 [Jenny Morris, Reclaiming the Social Model of Disability, Greater
London Action on Disability, February 2000, http://disabilitystudies.leeds.ac.uk/files/library/GLAD-Social-Model-of-Disability-ConferenceReport.pdf]
The social model of disability gives us the words to describe our experiences of
inequality. It separates our disability (disabling barriers) from impairment (not being able to
walk, or see or hear, or having difficulty learning). There are two main types of disabling barriers. Attitudes
(prejudice) and unequal access the way in which society denies us access to the things we need to have a good
quality life and to do the things that non-disabled people take for granted. So my impairment is the fact that I cant
walk; disability is the fact that architects think that steps are a wonderful design feature. Not being able to see is an

We use the word

disability to mean oppression, to mean disabling barriers. The social model doesnt deny the
importance of impairment. It actually enables us to focus on our needs relating to
impairment, because it means we can separate these out from the disabling
barriers we experience. The social model also doesnt deny our difference. We are
impairment; disability is the failure to provide printed material on audio tape, in braille etc.

different from non-disabled people for two reasons: we have needs arising from our impairments, and we
experience disabling barriers of prejudice and unequal access. This is why the governments recent advertising

We are asked to believe that it is progressive for

non-disabled people to say to us, I dont see what makes your body or mind
different from me, I just see you as a person. This is not only an attempt to deny the feelings that
campaign (See the Person) is so dangerous.

people have about difference, it is also to deny that we are different they deny the prejudice we experience, and

The social model

helps us to understand what needs to happen in order that we can access our
human and civil rights. But to have our human and civil rights, we also need entitlements to
the additional things we require to have equal access: we need entitlements to
physical access, to communication assistance, to personal assistance, to accessible
information; we need legislation to protect us from prejudice. We need human
rights, civil rights and entitlements. These three statements illustrate the differences between these
deny the things we need to happen in order that we can have our human and civil rights.

and the relationship between them: Disabled people have the right to be parents a human right Disabled parents
have the right to sit with their children in the cinema a civil right Disabled parents have the right to assistance

Because the social

model separates out disabling barriers and impairments, it enables us to focus on
exactly what it is which denies us our human and civil rights and what action needs
to be taken in order to get us these rights. Sometimes the action is about removing disabling
with looking after their children in their own homes if they need it an entitlement

barriers, but sometimes its about providing the help we need because of our impairment. Sometimes its about
being treated the same as everyone else, sometimes its about being treated differently so that we can then
achieve the same things as everyone else. In the past our difference has only been recognised in a negative way,

The social model helps

our difference to be acknowledged in a positive or neutral way and makes it more
likely that we will get our human and civil rights.
which has resulted in disabled people being segregated and excluded from society.

Political Action Good

Orienting around concrete political action is key to activate the
potential of embodied politics and directly challenge
oppression the affs identity-based resistance trades off.
OP 14 (Orchestrated Pulse magazine, 3/6, My Skinfolk Aint All Kinfolk: The Lefts
Problem with Identity Politics, http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2014/03/problemidentity-politics/)
Imperial America, murderous America, the America that abused and robbed countries like Bolivia that America
was me. I too was a settler; my Black feet were stained red with blood as I stood on stolen indigenous land. I too
benefitted from colonialism, capitalism, and the other facets of White supremacy. I could no longer simply point the

My marginalized identity didnt absolve me. I began to think systemically. I

had to actually develop a multidimensional worldview and take political stances
that drew o n more than my lived experiences. When I returned to the United States and
finger at White people.

became involved in leftist politics, I soon realized that the political scene was, unfortunately, still stuck on personal

In this age of (misinterpreted) intersectionality, our

politics tend to rely on the body. When we deal with race, White people embody
White supremacy and privilege, while non-Whites are the corporal manifestation of
resistance. We obsess over White privilege and how we can get more people of color
involved in our spaces and projects, but does White supremacy really disappear when
there are no White people in the room? Some people look at these flaws and call for an end to
identity. WHAT IS IDENTITY POLITICS?

identity politics, but I think thats a mistake. At its most basic level, identity politics merely means political activity

In a certain sense, all politics are identity

politics. However, its one thing to intentionally form a group around articulated
interests; its another matter entirely when group membership is socially imposed. Personal
that caters to the interests of a particular social group.

identities are socially defined through a combination of systemic rewards/marginalization plus actual and/or

We cant build politics from that foundation because these socially

imposed identities dont necessarily tell us anything about someones political interests.
Successful identity politics requires shared interests, not shared personal
identities. Im not here to tell you that personal identity doesnt matter; we rightfully point out that systemic
power shapes peoples lives. Simply put, my message is that personal identity is not the only
thing that matters. We spend so much energy labeling people
privileged/marginalized, oppressor/oppressedthat we often neglect to
build spaces that antagonize the systems that cause our collective
trauma. All You Blacks Want All the Same Things We assume that if a person is systemically marginalized, then
potential violence.

they must have a vested interest in dismantling that system. Yet, thats not always the case. Take Orville Lloyd
Douglas, who last summer wrote an article in the Guardian in which he admitted that he hates being Black. I can
honestly say I hate being a black male I just dont fit into a neat category of the stereotypical views people have
of black men. I hate rap music, I hate most sports, and I like listening to rock music I have nothing in common
with the archetypes about the black male I resent being compared to young black males (or young people of any
race) who are lazy, not disciplined, or delinquent. Orville Lloyd Douglas, Why I Hate Being a Black Man As we can

membership in a marginalized group is no guarantee that a

person can understand and effectively combat systemic oppression. Yet, we seem
to treat all marginalized voices as equal, as if they are all insightful, as if there is no diversity of
thought, as ifin the case of race All you Blacks want all the same things. Shared identity does not
equal shared interests. John Ridley, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of 12 Years a Slave, is a good
see from Douglas cry for help,

example. Hes written screenplays based on Jimi Hendrix, the L.A. riots, and other poignant moments and icons
within Black history. He wants to see more Black people in Hollywood and he has a long history of successfully
incorporating Black and Brown characters into comic book stories and franchises. However, in 2006, Ridley made

waves with an essay in which he castigated Black people who did not live up to his standards; saying, Its time for
ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck. So I say this: Its time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck.
Just as whites may be concerned with the good of all citizens but dont travel their days worrying specifically about
the well-being of hillbillies from Appalachia, we need to send niggers on their way. We need to start extolling the
most virtuous of ourselves. It is time to celebrate the New Black Americansthose who have sealed the Deal, who
arent beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time to praise
blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement. The Manifesto
of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger While Ridley and I share cultural affinity, and we both want to see
Black people doing well, shared cultural affinity and common identity are not enough which recent history makes
abundantly clear. Barack Obama continues to deport record numbers of Brown immigrants here at home, while
mercilessly bombing Brown folks abroad. Don Lemon, speaking in support of Bill OReilly, said that racism would be
lessened if Black people pulled up their pants and stopped littering. Last fall, 40% of Black U.S. Americans
supported airstrikes against Syria. My skinfolk aint all kinfolk, and the Left needs to catch up. NO MORE ALLIES John
Ridley, Barack Obama, myself, and Don Lemon are all Black males. We also have conflicting political positions and

Instead of
learning to recognize how the overarching systems maintain their power and then
attacking those tools, we spend our energy finding an other to embody the
systemic marginalization and legitimize our spaces and ideals. In some interracial
interests, but how can we decide which paths are valid if we only pay attention to personal identity?

spaces I feel like nothing more than an interchangeable token whose only purpose is to legitimize the politics of my

We use these others as

authorities on various issues, and we use concepts like privilege to ensure that
people stay in their lanes. People of color are the authorities on race, while LGBTQ
people are the authorities on gender and sexuality, and so forth and so on. Yet,
experience is not the same as expertise, and privilege doesnt
automatically make you clueless. As Ive discussed, these groups are not oriented around a
singular set of political ideals and practices. Furthermore, as we see in Andrea Smiths work, there are often
competing interests within these groups. We mistake essentialism for
intersectionality as we look for the ideal subjects to embody the various forms of
oppression; true intersectionality is a description of systemic power, not a call for diversity. If we dont
develop any substantive analysis of systemic power, then its impossible to
know what our interests are, and aligning with one another according to shared
interests is out of the question. In this climate all that remains is the ally, which requires no real
White peers. If not me, then some other Black person would fill the slot.

knowledge or political effort, only the willingness to appear supportive of an other. We cant build power that way.
After having gathered to oppose organized White supremacy at the University of North Carolina, a group of

organizers in Durham, North Carolina found that the Lefts emphasis on personal
identity and allyship was a major reason why their efforts collapsed. They
proposed that we adopt the practice of forming alliances rather than
identifying allies. (h/t NinjaBikeSlut) Much of the discourse around being an ally seems to presume a
relationship of one-sided support, with one person or group following anothers leadership. While there are certainly

In an alliance,
the two parties support each other while maintaining their own self-determination and autonomy, and
are bound together not by the relationship of leader and follower but by a shared goal.
times where this makes sense, it is misleading to use the term ally to describe this relationship.

In other words, one cannot actually be the ally of a group or individual with whom one has no political affinity and

one cannot be an ally to an entire demographic group , like people of color,

who do not share a singular cohesive political or personal desire. The Divorce of Thought From
this means that

Deed While its vital for me to learn the politics and history of marginalized experiences that differ from my own,
listen to their voices, and respect their spaces and contributions its also important for me to understand the

Since we know that

oppression is systemic and multidimensional, then Im going to have to step
outside of personal experience and begin to develop political ideals and
practices that actually antagonize those systems. I have to understand and
articulate my interests, which will allow me to operate from a position of strength
ways in which these same systems have shaped my own identity/history as well.

and form political alliances that advance those interests interests which speak
to issues beyond just my own immediate experience . Ultimately, I want to attack
power, not people. In order to get there, the Left needs more identity politics, not less.