Pride Against Prejudice

"Yes, that’s true. I was busy doing my PhD in around 1990 and that is when the first books on disability started coming out, from a social research perspective. I had already done a sociology degree so it was interesting to apply the theories that I had learned to disability and to see that they were relevant to me. With my PhD I was starting to construct a sociology of disability and then these books came along. Some of them I couldn’t relate to because they didn’t speak to my condition. But Jenny Morris’s book did. I was really interested in cultural prejudice and the attitudes and stigma dimension and she talks about that really well. She also takes the feminism approach – the personal is political and all that. And I thought that was absolutely vital because mainly people were concentrating on the public dimension of disability, like how to get a job and a house. But there was much less work on the private dimension of people’s lives, things like feeling good about yourself, having a relationship, having a family. And Jenny’s book really did that and I just read it and thought, Yes this is it, this is exactly what I am trying to say. And that is why I wrote to her. The other dimension that is very important is that disability scholars were down-playing impairment. They were trying to say that disability is to do with oppression – disabled people are an oppressed group rather than a group of people with something wrong with them. And, of course, that is politically extremely powerful but it doesn’t accord with how many disabled people live their lives and what is important to them from day to day. Jenny Morris said we need to identify those disabling balances out there but we also need to realise that our impairments and our health conditions are limiting and involve pain and suffering and it is difficult. And that is exactly what I think. My own view is that people are disabled by society and their bodies and we can’t throw out all of this personal dimension."