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Critical Disability Studies in Archives

This LibGuide intends to help researchers develop a foundational understanding of disability studies, learn about field-specific archival research issues, and find additional resources to assist their research.

Disability History Highlights

Limitations

Disability history is vast and complex. Regrettably, this guide can not hope to map it in its entirety and is even more restricted to its author’s expertise. As such, these “Disability History Highlights” are primarily American disabled history after 1900 CE.

Pre 1900

  • Enslavers justified the institution of slavery throughout the world by arguing that Africans and Black Americans were disabled and unfit to live freely. An example is drapetomania, a psychological disorder discovered by Samuel Cartwright to explain enslaved people’s desire and attempts to run away from bondage.
    • Cartwright (1851). “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race”. De Bow’s Review. XI: 331–336
    • By arguing that enslaved people who desired freedom were crazy, Cartwright was attempting to delegitimize the abolitionist movement.
  • Before the standardization and widespread use of ASL, Deaf people created home signs and community-specific sign languages to interact with the world. Deaf people often lived in communities together, most notably Martha’s Vineyard.
  • Alexander Graham Bell, who had a Deaf mother and wife, popularised the oralism movement. This movement believed that Deaf people needed to learn to speak English and lipread and assimilate into nondisabled society to be successful.
  • The oralism movement forced Deaf children to be educated only with lipreading and without sign language, primarily by nondeaf teachers, which has had widespread adverse effects on Deaf people’s literacy into the present day and perpetuates isolation.

The Eugenics Movement

Institutionalization

  • Institutionalization of Mad and other disabled people is not new to the 1900s. However, the late 19th and 20th centuries are notable for attempting to treat and cure their disabled patients instead of just imprisoning them.
    • In the 1900s, doctors developed treatments like electroshock therapy, insulin shock therapy, lobotomy, and oral medications like Thorazine.
  • Though treatments harmed countless people, remember that medical professionals believed wholeheartedly that they were helping. Treating mental illness is not like breaking a bone. A doctor can not scan a patient’s brain and see that they are cured. Instead, all a doctor can do is define treatment as a change or end of symptoms.
  • Significant systemic problems get worse when institutions become overcrowded. When this happens, the staff becomes stressed, and the focus becomes not on a cure but instead on therapeutic discipline. Therapeutic discipline is performing treatment to punish patients for bad behavior, not to cure them. The action is the same, but the intent is different.  
    • To be clear, staff are entirely responsible for their behavior and should never abuse or harm the people in their care. But the reasons why abuse was and continues to be rampant in institutions has to do with systemic problems like overworking and underpaying staff, not just individual evil people.
  • In the 60s and 70s, the Independent Living Movement gained traction, especially after the documentary Willowbrook: the Last Great Disgrace aired the terrible living conditions and lack of care given to children and adults at Willowbrook State School in Staten Island.  
    • Important tenants of the Independent Living Movement include disabled people’s right to choose their personal care aides and treatments, living alone or with their families instead of inside institutions, and being active members of their communities.
  • Unfortunately, though noble in theory, in practice, many of the same abuses done in institutions still occur in group homes or among families, including forced treatment and sexual and physical abuse  
  • The closing of institutions pushed many disabled people without support systems into homelessness. With the increased criminalization of homelessness, many disabled people, especially people of color, end up in the prison system.

Mad Pride

  • Mad Pride and its academic offshoot, Mad Studies, reclaims the terms mad, madness, and insanity.
  • Mad Pride grew parallel to the independent living and disability rights movements, but they diverged because they disagreed with the premise of the social model of disability.
  • Mad activists argue that mad people are not just disabled by their environments, and that's okay.
    • Similar movements include the psychiatric survivors and anti-psychiatry movements.
  • Important tenants of Mad Pride include:
    • No forced institutionalization and no forced treatments
    • Insane people are still human and deserve a voice in their care
    • Mental illness doesn't need to be cured because being cured means completely changing a person's brain. Mad people need support and coping skills, not cure
    • Psychiatric drugs should never be the stopping point of care, and many Mad Pride activists believe people are over-medicated while acknowledging that psychiatric medication can be life-saving
  • What is madness?
    • Mad Pride argues that mental illness is not scientific. Instead, it is simply pathologizing behavior
    • A psychiatric study published in 1973, called "On Being Sane in Insane Places," tested this premise by having individuals pretend to experience hallucinations and then, once they were institutionalized, stop pretending. The result was that the individuals were actually deemed more insane once they stopped performing symptoms because then doctors believed the individuals were in denial and, therefore, needed more treatment and more time in the institution.

Disability Rights Movement

  • Widespread, long-term protests throughout the nation led by people like Judy Huemann and Dennis Billups in collaboration with other movements like the Black Panther Party led to the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973     
  • Then, after federal and state governments refused to clarify the rules and enforce Section 504, more protests began, most famously the 504 Sit-In in San Fransisco, which successfully pressured the federal government into action.         
  • https://disabilityhistory.org/2021/12/19/the-504-protests-and-the-black-panther-party/    
  • Section 504 did not go far enough, and soon, disability rights activists began to lobby for a more comprehensive law.
  • The most famous protest during this period was the Capitol Hill Crawl in March 1990
  • The Americans with Disability Act was ratified in July 1990

Disability Justice Movement

The ten principles of Disability Justice below were written by Sins Invalid, a performing arts group composed of disabled BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) women and femmes (trans people who present femininely but don’t identify as women) who were drawing on their experiences of being marginalized by the wider disabled community to create guidelines for a more inclusive and far-reaching disability activism movement. This movement is now called Disability Justice and is the most popular activism and academic movement within disability studies.

Understanding Disability Studies

Disability, as it is understood in disability studies, is a social category, not a medicalized one. An example is that a hearing person in a room of Deaf people who use ASL becomes disabled in that environment because the hearing person can not communicate. A Deaf ASL user, in contrast, is not disabled in that environment. But the Deaf person is still deaf, and the hearing person can hear. The difference between disability and impairment is that a disability changes depending on the environment. An impairment is constant.

When disability is considered a social category, suddenly, society has the power to help by increasing access and equity. Disability as a medical category considers disability an individual, private problem that a patient and their doctor must solve. Medicalization believes, in general, that solving the problem means finding a cure. The medical system must cure disability because having a disability is a terrible thing that only impacts people’s lives in harmful ways. As a social category, disability is a source of human diversity and new viewpoints that are important and bring new positive and negative experiences, like any other category. As such, disability studies scholars are critical of the belief that a cure is inherently good for everyone but do not oppose medical treatment to reduce suffering or seeking cure on an individual basis.

Intersectionality is the study of overlapping social identities and experiences of oppression. Put more simply, intersectionality recognizes that we can not split ourselves into pieces and are not affected by only one issue. For example, in the US, white women won the right to vote in 1920. All Black women in the US did not win the right to vote until 1965. Just because a black woman is a woman and also black doesn’t mean she no longer experienced racism when women won more equality with men in 1920.

10 Principles of Disability Justice

  1. INTERSECTIONALITY “We do not live single issue lives” –Audre Lorde. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world “invalid.”
  2. LEADERSHIP OF THOSE MOST IMPACTED “We are led by those who most know these systems.” –Aurora Levins Morales
  3. ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITIC In an economy that sees land and humans as components of profit, we are anti-capitalist by the nature of having non-conforming body/minds.
  4. COMMITMENT TO CROSS-MOVEMENT ORGANIZING Shifting how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, disability justice lends itself to politics of alliance.
  5. RECOGNIZING WHOLENESS People have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience.
  6. SUSTAINABILITY  We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation.
  7. COMMITMENT TO CROSS-DISABILITY SOLIDARITY We honor the insights and participation of all of our community members, knowing that isolation undermines collective liberation.
  8. INTERDEPENDENCE We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.
  9. COLLECTIVE ACCESS As brown, black and queer-bodied disabled people we bring flexibility and creative nuance that go beyond able-bodied/minded normativity, to be in community with each other.
  10. COLLECTIVE LIBERATION No body or mind can be left behind – only moving together can we accomplish the revolution we require

Further information about the ten principles can be found here: https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice