Who's Afraid of the Social Model of Disability?

Disability Studies’ major contribution, in the disciplines early days of the 1970s and 80s, was the Social Model of Disability. It is a framework to define disability not by the standard paradigm of medical or legal diagnoses (what is oppositionally defined as the medical model of disability), but by the material barriers that restrict disabled people’s capacity. My disability to make it up stairs doesn’t exist in my body, it exists in the societal condition of chronic ramplessness.

Mike Oliver (codifying the term but not strictly speaking inventing it) defined it in 1983 as “a switch away from focusing on the physical limitation of particular limitations of particular individuals to the way the physical and social environments impose limitations upon certain groups or categories of people.”

Within disability studies, at least within it’s most front-facing academic articulations, there is an increasing desire to move ‘beyond’ this paradigm.

Tom Shakespeare, one of the most institutionally celebrated disability scholars1, has been a critic of the paradigm since the 2000s. His critiques are realpolitikal, “Only a tiny proportion of people with impairments have ever signed up to the radical campaign, and many have actively disowned it”, and phenomenological, “Most activists concede that behind closed doors they talk about aches and pains and urinary tract infections, even whole they deny any relevance of the body while they are out campaigning.”

This is disability scholarship hollowed out by the rot of capitalist realism, a pitiful reduction of what is possible for us to think or for us to become. Radicalism should never yield to a constructed majoritarianism, and there is no such thing as “the body” outside of the social and the political. The boundaries of our body are open to prosthesis and possibility, as surely a wheelchair user like Shakespeare should know.

A more aesthetically progressive critique of the social model was published in 2020 in the academic journal Frontiers in Psychology byJuan Toro, Julian Kiverstein and Erik Rietveld. They define their framework, the ‘ecological-enactive model of disability’, in the language of the environmental humanities. But on trend academic concepts like Ecology and Embodiment can’t stop their model from sacrificing all of the political muscle of the Social Model for little tangible reward.

In a well meaning attempt to re-centre “the disabled person’s lived experience of the world”, it ends up privatising disability as a matter of avoiding “pathological embodiment”, defined by the researchers as the body’s inability to “maintain a state of dynamic stability with its environment”, not a matter of demanding radical social change. This seems to me to have little to do with ecological thinking, the vital effort to think beyond our privatised minds into a better future for human and beyond-human bodies and worlds, and much more to do with a peer-reviewed request for noisy leftists to stop making such a fuss.

These critiques should be familiar across many leftist discourses and the broader Critical Theory tradition. TV pundits have been trying to moderate Ta-Nehisi Coates with poorly cited poll numbers for more than a decade and trans liberationists are often pushed to concede to right-wing essentialisms of sex and gender.

In the 1970 feminist classic The Dialectics of Sex, Shulamith Firestone positions her politics against foundational human psychology, human history and biology. The prose is still electrifying, it reads like a woman standing before God himself and demanding he yield to her. And she describes the reactionary opposition of “the common man, woman and child” as a horrified retreat: “‘That? Why you can’t change that! You must be out of your mind!’" Her answer, and ours, must be an honest and straightforward yes.

This is the promise of the social model of disability, it exists to reveal how society confines disabled bodies in order to see how we might free them. On this we can not compromise.