Disability Goes Cultural: The Cultural Model of Disability as an Analytical Tool

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Disability Goes Cultural
The Cultural Model of Disability as an Analytical Tool
Anne Waldschmidt
Even today, with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities (UN CRPD) adopted in December 2006 and disability-related
discourses, structures, and practices gradually changing throughout the world
according to the new human rights approach, there are many people who still
take disability as a simple natural fact. Not only myself, but probably other
critical disability studies scholars also feel that Lennard J. Davis expresses a
common experience:
“When it comes to disability, ‘normal’ people are quite willing to volunteer solutions,
present anecdotes, recall from a vast array of films instances they take for fact. No
one would dare to make such a leap into Heideggerian philosophy for example or the
art of the Renaissance. But disability seems so obvious – a missing limb, blindness,
deafness. What could be simpler to understand? One simply has to imagine the loss of
the limb, the absent sense, and one is half-way there.” (xvi)
However, it is not only ‘normal people’ who tend to underestimate the
complexity of disability. Academia itself often chooses to apply somewhat
undierentiated approaches to this phenomenon. When it comes to disability,
rehabilitation sciences, medicine, psychology, education, and social policy
research dominate the field. To avoid misunderstandings: Social protection
and rehabilitative assistance are important; persons with disabilities do rely
on societies committed to the principles of solidarity and equality instead of
leaving them to a destiny of negligence and ignorance. Still, this is only one
side of the coin. Traditional approaches ignore that impairment is a common
experience in human life and that we all are dierently able-bodied. At the
same time, it is important to acknowledge that while most people are likely
to be impaired at some point during their lifetime being disabled is, as Tom
Shakespeare puts it, “a specific social identity of a minority” (295). Why
then are certain dierences subsumed under the label ‘disabled’ and others

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considered as ‘normal’ manifestations of diversity? Why do modern societies
see the need to categorize people as ‘normals’ and ‘deviants’? Why and how is
disability negatively valued? In which ways is ‘otherness’ – and disability is a
form of alterity – (re-)produced in history, society and culture?
To answer these questions, we ought to take notice of discourses other than
just those of traditional rehabilitation sciences. We need encounters between
disability studies and those disciplines that at first sight seem to have nothing to
do with disability, such as philosophy and anthropology, history and sociology,
ethnology and archaeology, literary studies and linguistics, media studies and
religious studies, etc. At the same time, we have to bear in mind that doubts
are also raised about such an interdisciplinary approach: What can disability
studies gain by incorporating culture as an analytical tool more fully into its
work? Is it truly important that disability studies meet cultural studies?
With sociology as my academic background, this discussion is familiar
to me. In its founding phase at the beginning of the 20th century, sociology
was originally considered one of the humanities. However, in the 1950s and
1960s as a side eect of the then dominant empirical approach that was
interested primarily in quantifiable data, the issue of culture was pushed into
the background in mainstream sociology. It needed the cultural change of the
1970s and the birth of cultural studies to make possible a renewed attention to
culture as an analytical category essential for a comprehensive understanding
of society. In short, I am arguing for an interdisciplinary approach which I
believe useful and relevant for shedding new light on our contemporary
societies, cultures and histories. This approach assumes that impairments and
disabilities are structuring culture(s) and at the same time are structured and
lived through culture. And it is not only myself who is of this opinion. For
example Rosemarie Garland-Thomson was already calling for “New Disability
Studies” in 2001 (see Joshua and Schillmeier 4). However, many works are still
being published that apply traditional ways of thinking and more established
approaches, such as the social model of disability, still remain at the centre of
most scholars’ attention.
app r E c I atIng a n d cr I t I quIng t h E SocIal Mo d E l
of dI Sa b Il It y
Since its introduction in the late 1970s, the social model of disability has
changed international disability discourses. This model, as academics and
activists with a disability studies background well know, emphasizes that
disability is a social construction. Basically, it implies three assumptions. First,
disability is a form of social inequality and disabled persons are a minority

Disability Goes Cultural 21
group that is discriminated against and excluded from mainstream society.
Second, impairment and disability need to be distinguished and do not have a
causal relation; it is not impairments per se which disable, but societal practices
of ‘disablement’ which result in disability. Third, it is a society’s responsibility
to remove the obstacles that persons with disabilities are facing.
When this model of disability was introduced by disability rights
organisations and developed further by activists and academics in parallel
processes in both the United Kingdom and the United States, it oered a
fundamental critique of capitalist society and a new way of thinking. However,
in the course of the last 40 years this approach has somewhat become the
victim of its own success. It has proven an ‘all-rounder,’ a useful tool for
both academic discourse, disability rights activism and, last but not least, for
laypersons and their identity politics. Moreover, the incorporation of its basic
ideas into transnational policies, such as the UN CRPD and the two disability
classifications of the World Health Organisation of 1980 and 2001, has resulted
in pragmatist policies and the opinion that disability as a social problem can
be ‘solved’ through accessibility and participation, mainstreaming and human
rights policies. Especially in recent years, many interpretations have tended
to ignore the revolutionary impetus of the social model and have watered it
down to reformist aspirations of social inclusion and participation. Against this
background, the social model seems ‘a little dusty’ today and it may be time to
rethink or amend the concept.
In the following, I refrain from discussing merits and weaknesses of the
social model at length. Instead, I will focus on the aspect of culture, which is
itself a multifaceted phenomenon in need of specification. Before providing a
definition, it is worth mentioning that the social model has frequently been
criticised, as Katie Ellis contends, for “neglecting cultural imagery, certain
personal experiences and the impacts of impairment” (3). Michael Oliver, one
of the British originators of the social model, has reacted to this critique by
pointing out that the model emerged directly out of the personal experiences
of disabled activists and does indeed allow for the study of impairment eects.
Regarding the argument that cultural representation has been neglected,
however, he confirms the view of his critics as he does not consider “cultural
values” to be crucial, at least as long as so many persons with disabilities are
1 | As the British version of the social model of disability is implicitly based on the
minority group theory, I cannot see a big difference compared with the US-American
minority model and will for this reason not follow Goodley (Disability 11-18) in this
point. There are other disability models, often established in competition to the social
model, but they are also disputable. Be it the minority model or the relational model,
the social policy model or the civil right s model and the human rights model, they all are
more or less variants of a social science (sic!) perspective on disability.

Anne Waldschmidt
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still suering from poverty and material deprivation (49). This assessment,
although understandable in terms of practical politics, is astonishing from a
sociological point of view: It clearly underestimates the role and the relevance of
cultural practices in and for society and their influence on our understanding
of disability. My feeling is that this lack of regard may be traced back to some
shortcomings of the cultural studies approach. But before I elaborate this point,
let me trace the contours of a cultural model of disability.
dr a f tI n g a cu lt ur a l Mo dEl of dI S ab Il It y
Until today, eorts to develop a cultural model of disability have been rare.
However, in parallel with the development of the social model and its critical
discussion and partly independent of them, the past decades have witnessed an
increase in cultural studies oriented works with regard to disability and we can
already identify cultural disability studies as an innovative and prolific research
field carried out in the humanities. Yet, it is striking that in contrast to the social
model of disability, which is characterised by strong coherence and therefore
often accused of dogmatism, the field of cultural disability studies still looks
more like a patchwork quilt. It has not yet found its unique contours, despite an
ongoing discussion on the implications of culture for disability constructions.
As early as 1994, Tom Shakespeare called for a greater attention to cultural
representations of disabled people. Inspired by feminist debates he discussed
dierent theoretical approaches and suggested “that disabled people are
‘objectified’ by cultural representations” (287), under which he subsumed
theatre, literature, paintings, films, and the media. In the following years,
prominent scholars in the Anglo-Saxon world such as Lennard J. Davis,
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Robert McRuer, David T. Mitchell and Sharon
L. Snyder, Margrit Shildrick, Tobin Siebers, Shelley Tremain, and others (for an
overview, see Goodley, Disability 14-15) published a wide variety of cultural and
literary analyses showing the value and productivity of treating “disability as a
cultural trope” (Garland-Thomson 2). In 2006, Snyder and Mitchell explicitly
introduced a “cultural model of disability” but they defined it narrowly as an
approach that was primarily associated with US-American disability studies. In
terms of content, they remained rather vague:
“We believe the cultural model provides a fuller concept than the social model, in which
‘disability’ signifies only discriminatory encounters. The formulation of a cultural model
allows us to theorize a political act of renaming that designates disability as a site of
resistance and a source of cultural agency previously suppressed […].” (10)

Disability Goes Cultural 23
In introducing the phrase “cultural locations of disability,” referring to “sites
of violence, restriction, confinement, and absence of liberty for people with
disabilities” (x), Snyder and Mitchell oered a tool for interdisciplinary work on
disability within and beyond cultural studies. Additionally, some scholars have
argued for the usefulness of a cultural model of disability to study intersections
between migration, ethnicity, ‘race,’ and disability. In 2005, Patrick J.
Devlieger, who teaches cultural anthropology in Leuven (Belgium), pleaded for
a dialectical cultural model focussing on communication and cultural diversity,
following Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Karl Marx. Recent works in
postcolonial studies ask the question “how disability is figured in the global,
postcolonial history of the modern” and aim “to highlight specific located
examples of disability in cultural contexts” (Barker and Murray 65). Meanwhile,
the cultural model of disability has also been acknowledged in religious studies
as a ‘key term.’ In this context, Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper define it as
an approach which analyses “how a culture’s representations and discussions
of disability (and nondisability or able-bodiedness) help to articulate a range of
values, ideals, or expectations that are important to that culture’s organization
and identity” (35).
We can state that there is an ongoing reflection on the strengths of a cultural
approach to disability. The Liverpool-based Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability
Studies, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2016, is a witness to this lively
debate. At the same time however, the respective ‘model’ still seems to have
rather blurred features. Further, the debate tends to reproduce the dominance
of English-speaking disability studies (see for example Goodley Disability) and
overlooks contributions from other countries, such as the longstanding works
of French philosopher Henri-Jacques Stiker. With regard to Germany, both
the interdisciplinary book series “Disability Studies” published since 2007 by
transcript and the Edinburgh German Yearbook’s fourth volume on disability in
German literature, film, and theatre from 2010 attest to a great wealth of works
drawing on a cultural studies approach. The editors of the yearbook, Eleoma
Joshua and Michael Schillmeier, define the cultural model as “the analysis of
the representations of disabled people in the cultural spaces of art, media, and
literature” (5) and even speak of a “cultural turn” in disability studies (4).
It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss these dierent proposals
extensively. Instead I will, in what follows, explain my own approach. Based
on contributions published in 2005 and 2012, the latter together with Werner
Schneider, I develop a cultural model of disability for the purpose of providing
a joint framework for the already numerous contributions which analyse
disability with the help of methodologies and approaches originating from
cultural studies. My intention is not to suggest that a cultural model should
replace the social model of disability. Rather, critical disability studies should

Anne Waldschmidt
24
acknowledge that disability is both socially and culturally constructed (on this
point, see also Ellis 2).
thE cu lt ur a l Mo d E l of d I S ab Il I t y aS an a n al y tI ca l too l
What is the core of a cultural model of disability? My starting point is that such
a model needs to reflect first of all its own understanding of culture. As both
a social practice and an analytical category, culture not only implies cultural
activities in the narrow sense, be it so-called high culture or popular culture.
Instead, for innovative research it is much more productive to apply a broad
conception of culture that denotes the totality of ‘things’ created and employed
by a particular people or a society, be they material or immaterial: objects and
instruments, institutions and organisations, ideas and knowledge, symbols
and values, meanings and interpretations, narratives and histories, traditions,
rituals and customs, social behaviour, attitudes and identities (see Moebius
7-9; Schneider and Waldschmidt 146).
In my opinion, if we were to use such a general understanding of culture, a
cultural model of disability would not be dismissed as focalising only symbols
and meanings, but could broaden our analytical perspective to investigate
the relations between symbolic (knowledge) systems, categorization and
institutionalisation processes, material artefacts, practices and ‘ways of doing
things,’ and their consequences for persons with and without disabilities, their
social positions, relations and ways of subjectivation. Such a cultural disability
model thus diers from other approaches in important aspects: It considers
disability neither as only an individual fate, as in the individualistic-reductionist
model of disability, nor as merely an eect of discrimination and exclusion, as
in the social model. Rather, this model questions the other side of the coin,
the commonly unchallenged ‘normality,’ and investigates how practices of (de-)
normalization result in the social category we have come to call ‘disability.’ As a
consequence of this shift in focus, four programmatic ideas arise.
First, a cultural model of disability should regard neither disability nor
impairment as clear-cut categories of pathological classification that auto-
matically, in the form of a causal link, result in social discrimination. Rather,
this model considers impairment, disability and normality as eects generated
by academic knowledge, mass media, and everyday discourses. These terms are
‘empty signi fiers’ or blurred concepts referring to a m ixture of di erent physical,
psychological and cognitive features that have nothing in common other than
negative or, as in the case of ability and normality, positive attributions from
society. In any culture at any given moment these classifications are dependent
on power structures and the historical situation; they are contingent upon and
determined by hegemonic discourses. In short, the cultural model considers

Disability Goes Cultural 25
disability not as a given entity or fact, but describes it as a discourse or as a
process, experience, situation, or event.
Second, from this premise arises the notion that disability does not denote
an individual’s feature, but an always embodied category of dierentiation.
Disability is taken as ‘true’ because it is not a natural fact but a naturalized
dierence. It is ascribed to the evidence of physical or embodied expression
(even in the case of not directly observable alterities), and it is interpreted
within a dichotomous framework of bodily dierences: healthy, complete,
and normal versus diseased, deficient, and deviating. It exists only when and
insofar as certain (bodily and embodied) dierences can be distinguished and
thought of as ‘relevant for health’ within a given cultural and historical order
of knowledge.
Third, both disability and ability relate to prevailing symbolic orders and
institutional practices of producing normality and deviance, the self and the
other, familiarity and alterity. By assuming a constructivist and discursive
character of disability, the historical contingency and cultural relativity
of inclusion and exclusion, stigmatization and recognition can come into
consideration, as well as socio-cultural patterns of experience and identity,
meaning-making and practice, power and resistance. Furthermore, from this
perspective disability is connected to specific social imperatives addressing all
relevant parties, on the one hand the experts for support and the rehabilitation
business, and on the other hand the laypersons, whether able-bodied or
disabled, with their desire or their defiance to adapt and comply to socio-
cultural normative expectations. Thus, a cultural model of disability shows
that the individual and collective subjectivities of ‘disabled’ and ‘nondisabled’
persons are interdependent.
Fourth, when one employs such a ‘de-centring’ approach, surprising
new insights become possible, insights into our late modern societies, their
trajectories and processes of change. Instead of continuing to only ‘stare’ at
persons with disabilities, asking what kind of problems they are confronted
with and how society should support them, the focus can widen to a look at
society and culture in general, aiming to understand the dominant ways of
problematizing issues of health, normality, and functioning; how knowledge of
the body is produced, transformed and mediated; which and how normalities
and deviations are constructed; how exclusionary and including practices in
everyday life are designed by dierent institutions; how identities and new
forms of subjectivity are created and shaped.
In sum, the cultural model of disability implies a fundamental change of
epistemological perspective since it does not deal with the margin but rather
with the ‘centre’ of society and culture. As a consequence, it changes disability
studies into ‘dis/ability studies’ (for this approach see also Goodley Dis/ability).
The introduction of the slash indicates that one should no longer problematize

Anne Waldschmidt
26
just the category of disability, but rather the interplay between ‘normality’ and
‘disability.’ In short, the transversal and intersectional should become the actual
object of research. Dis/ability understood as a contingent, always ‘embodied’
type of dierence relating to the realms of health, functioning, achievement
and beauty (and their negative poles), oers essential knowledge about the
legacies, trajectories, turning points, and transformations of contemporary
society and culture.
con c l u SIon
This essay has discussed the relevance of culture as an analytical category
for the study of disability. It has attempted to show that a cultural model of
disability has emerged over the last two decades, cross-cutting dierent
academic disciplines and transnational with regard to languages and contexts.
Of course, bringing disability and culture together does not progress smoothly;
it involves “contact zones,” i.e., “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and
grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of
power […]” (Pratt 34). This volume oers these conflictual yet productive spaces
through which new ways of seeing and thinking can emerge. Let me finish my
contribution citing Davis again: “[W]hile most ‘normals’ [and academics] think
they understand the issue of disability” and can “speak with knowledge on the
subject,” we need to commence from the assumption that “in fact [we] do not”
(Davis xvi). The belief that one is lacking knowledge seems a good point of
departure for new journeys into the worlds of dis/ability.
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