Screwing the Social Model of Disability

Introduction

The social model of disability represents the disability movements ‘big idea’ (Oliver 2013). No longer confined to medical perspectives and discourses that conceptualise ‘disability’ as the abnormal biological, material, and functional consequence or ‘personal tragedy’ befalling individuals (i.e., the individual or medical model of disability), social modellers instead conceptualise disability as a public form of social oppression or disadvantage that is imposed upon people with impairments (Thomas 2004). The social model of disability thus splintered ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’; while the medical model considers ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ broadly synonymously, social modellers conceptualise ‘impairment’ as an individual bodily attribute, and ‘disability’ as social oppression (Hughes & Paterson 1997). Three preconditions thus inform the social model; first, disability is not automatically an innate consequence for people with impairments; second, impairment should not result in disability; and third, impairment is nevertheless a precondition for disability (Tremain 2001). Since its inception, the social model has enjoyed currency in academic, activist, policy, and professional settings, and many have noted its transformative impact on the lives of many disabled people (Goodley 2017). The social model allowed people with impairments to relocate the source of their oppression from individual (bodily) concerns onto broader social (ableist and disablist) barriers and attitudes (Shakespeare 2006). Its importance cannot be overstated, and some have even suggested that the social model has saved disabled people’s lives (Crow 1996).

Despite its influence, the social model remains controversial in many quarters, and it has been debated and re/theorised ad nauseum (Levitt 2017). Shakespeare (2013a: 17) outlines the bold and seismic shift that social model thinking created, which helps explain both its discursive impact and controversial reception:

only the most powerful counter-claim could have effectively dislodged the deep-seated idea that disabled people are defined by their incapacity. So from one extreme – the cultural assumption that disability is equated with dependency, invalidity and tragedy – the disability movement swung to another – the political demand that disability be defined entirely in terms of social oppression, social relations and social barriers. From seeing disability as entirely caused by biological deficits, the radical analysis shifted to seeing disability as nothing whatsoever to do with individual bodies or brains.

It is perhaps unsurprising that such seismic shifts would lead to considerable debate, but Oliver (2009: 50)—one of the social model’s key advocates and commonly misidentified as one of its architects—suggests this form of ‘intellectual masturbation’ should cease. Oliver (2009: 41) argues that scholars and activists have ‘spent too much time talking about the social model and its usefulness and indeed its limitations and not devoted enough attention to actually implementing … it in practice’. For Oliver (2013: 1026), ‘the talking has to stop’.

I’ve always understood Oliver’s argument, rightly or wrongly, to be that scholars and activists should either use or ignore the social model, and not be drawn into discussion or critique for its own sake. I’ve admittedly followed this latter approach by simply ignoring it, because by following my post-Foucauldian and post-structuralist imperatives, the social model provides an inapposite analytic to my scholarship. Simultaneously, I’ve encouraged others to engage with the social model, either by encouraging new scholars to read it (the foundational ideas are obviously important), or when reviewing for journals (too many manuscripts fail to conceptualise disability, and to that end, the social model can be useful). This ambivalence—not using but nevertheless encouraging—has led to a love/hate relationship with the social model, which also aligns with other people’s experiences and perhaps helps explain its contested and influential space within disability activism (Barnes 2020).

In this article, I betray both Oliver’s plea and my own previous scholarship by discussing, critiquing, and screwing (discussed shortly) the social model of disability. Confining the discussion to the British (or strong) social model, my intention is to revisit and problematise the foundational splitting of disability with impairment that was itself informed by the sex/gender distinction (Tremain 2001). Critiques towards the impairment/disability distinction have waxed and waned over the years (Barnes 2020; Goodley 2001; Hughes & Paterson 1997). Perhaps surprisingly, however, very little research—except most emphatically Tremain’s (2001, 2002) arguments more than twenty years ago—has considered the ongoing debates regarding the sex/gender distinction, and how that in turn informs the impairment/disability distinction central to the social model. While considerable research troubles the impairment/disability distinction, and some seek to correct impairment’s elision through a sociology of impairment (Hughes & Paterson 1997; Sherry 2016), contemporary research broadly fails to interrogate the influence that the sex/gender distinction has had in informing the social model. This oversight is important because, as I argue, the sex/gender distinction is increasingly called into question by a range of (post-structuralist) feminists and gender theorists (Barnard 2020; Butler 1990; Stryker 2017; Webster 2002), and if it is a distinction that is increasingly untenable, this must then have consequences for the impairment/disability distinction as well. My methodology thus involves revisiting and problematising the sex/gender distinction that has been foundational to the impairment/disability distinction, and I argue that the edifice upon which the impairment/disability distinction—through sex/gender—is fundamentally unstable, and this has consequences for the social model of disability more generally.

The results from the analysis lead me to conclude that scholars and activists need to screw the social model of disability. This does not mean that we trash the social model altogether, but, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (2017), instead ‘exert pressure’ on the social model by ‘twisting, tightening, or pressing’ upon it. My use of ‘screw’ comes from Oliver’s analogical uses of hammers, nails, screws, and screwdrivers in the second edition of Understanding Disability: From Theory to Practice (2009). I use ‘screw’ in the sense of tinkering, tightening, and pressuring—rather than abandoning or jettisoning—and I suggest this pursuit is applicable in the contexts of the social model. Rather than abandon the social model, I argue it is in fact the least-bad model available, and tinkering and revising it is more applicable.

The argument in this article unfolds in five parts. I start by reviewing the origins of the social model of disability. I note how it emerged in response to the individual (or medical) model, and that splitting impairment from disability was central to its agenda. I outline some of the social model’s reception and document some main critiques. Second, noting the ways that the sex/gender (and nature/culture) distinction informed the impairment/disability distinction, I revisit feminist scholarship to track the patterns and arguments circulating this body of knowledge. I identify how sex’s claim to biological certainty is increasingly questioned and consider Butler’s (1990) famous argument that sex was always already gender. The discussion troubles the notion that ‘sex’ is a natural ontological reality and proposes that accounts of gender are incomplete if they do not also include sex. This body of scholarship has compellingly articulated how ‘sex’ is not ‘raw’ but ‘cooked’ and the work that binaries do in subordinating and hierarchising one term over another. The sex/gender dualism creates and naturalises a distinction, and it is worth contemplating what that distinction is intended to serve (Butler 1990).

Against this backdrop, the third section turns these insights to impairment and disability within the social model and, drawing from the sex/gender debates and feminist disability studies, I argue that impairment and disability are both discursively constituted and, perhaps provocatively, echo the claim that impairment was always already disability. This claim raises serious questions of the social model because it is fundamentally founded upon an impairment/disability division. The findings raise serious questions, such as: (a) How can the ‘disability equals oppression’ framework make sense if impairment has been disability all along? or (b) How can we reduce or eliminate disability—the goal of the social model—if it cannot be separated from impairment? The fourth section considers how the social model can be screwed to better reflect disability politics and to maintain internal logic. The fifth and final section concludes with a summary of the article’s main argument, which includes noting that the social model requires reconceptualisation because of the fictive nature of the impairment/disability, sex/gender, and nature/culture binaries.

Origins of the Social Model

The social model of disability emerged in contradistinction to the individual/medical model of disability (Thomas 2004). Attitudes towards impairment and disability have ebbed and flowed throughout history, but under the individual/medical model—which is influenced by Western culture, medical dominance, and industrial capitalism—impairment/disability was conventionally understood as an individual (and private) medical problem or ‘personal tragedy’ affecting one’s bodily and/or functional attributes (Barnes 2020). The effects of incarceration, institutionalisation, medical dominance and intervention, poverty, exclusion, mass disabling events such as World War II, and many other factors led to the politicisation of disability by many disabled people in the latter half of the twentieth century (Barnes 2020). Disillusioned with the status quo, disability activists formed the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) in 1974, and Barnes (2020: 15) suggests it is ‘[u]ndoubtedly the most influential organisation in the history of social model thinking’.

Informed by their personal insights, UPIAS conceived disability as a form of social oppression like that experienced by other marginalised groups (e.g., women) (Shakespeare 2013a). In 1976, the group and The Disability Alliance published Fundamental Principles of Disability, which stated:

[i]n our view, it is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society. To understand this it is necessary to grasp the distinction between the physical impairment and the social situation, called ‘disability’, of people with such impairment. Thus we define impairment as lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ or mechanism of the body; and disability as the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from full participation in the mainstream of social activities. Physical disability is therefore a particular form of social oppression (14, italics added).

This account describes what would later become known as the social model of disability. The UPIAS definition creates a mutually exclusive distinction between impairment (natural/biological/private) and disability (cultural/social/public), defining the former as an innate and objective transhistorical and ontological fact, and the latter as an imposed social relational form of oppression. Splintering the impairment/disability distinction meant that disability became foregrounded in activism and scholarship because it was, according to social model thinking, the source of oppression (disability = oppression) (Goodley 2017). The social model thus split the causal relationship between impairment and disability; focusing on impairment was deemed an inefficacious social enterprise because it (allegedly) had nothing to do with oppression (Sherry 2016). The cause of disability was due to social barriers and not impairment, and as such, impairment was cast aside as the political project transformed into confronting daily social and behavioural structures (Shakespeare 2006).

The social model of disability was immediately impactful and was picked up in a range of activist, organisational, self-help, legislative, policy, governmental, and scholarly contexts (Goodley 2017). Disability became social oppression, and this simple and effective analytical rubric permitted scholars and activists to identify and challenge a range of disabling barries, such as the inaccessibility of buildings and infrastructures, economic barriers including discriminatory employment practices, or cultural barriers such as the devaluation of disabled people through negative representations in art and media (Oliver 2009). The growth of interest led to the World Health Organization’s attempt to locate a universally agreeable definition of disability in 1980, and, in the following year, the UN declared 1981 the International Year of Disabled Persons (Barnes 2020). The increased politicisation of disability rights consolidated definitions of disability and concretised modes of thought anchored around the social model (Meekosha 2004). Disability politics coalesced around the social model and other perspectives were elided, or as Barnes (2020: 14) argues, ‘without the social model of disability, disability studies will be rendered meaningless’. The social model became foundational to disability politics, activism, and scholarship because it was seductively simple and instrumental; it provided a collective consciousness and framework with which to challenge the existing order (Shakespeare 2006).

This is not to say that the social model goes without criticism. Several critiques have been levelled since its formulation, and while it is not the main point of this article, I will outline several before arriving at perhaps its biggest issue concerning impairment’s omission. First, several scholars have suggested that the social model fails to provide a developed social theoretical framework of disability (Hughes & Paterson 1997; Shakespeare 2013b; Thomas 2004). Accordingly, the social model is based on an (allegedly unevidenced) assumption that disability equals oppression, yet it is a model that fails to theoretically account for oppression or disability (Corker & French 1999; Shakespeare 2013a). In response, Oliver (2009), Oliver and Barnes (2012), and others suggest the social model is not a social theory but a practical tool or model that helps build pathways to social transformation.

Second, several scholars have suggested that the political project of the social model—the removal of all barriers—is impossible (Shakespeare 2013a). People with different impairments may require different needs just as people with similar impairments may require different needs (Shakespeare 2013a). This becomes more complicated when non-physical impairments are considered, and it has been noted that the ‘first wave’ social modellers were mostly white heterosexual men with physical impairments, where the removal of barriers in these contexts is more readily identifiable. Some have questioned the extent to which some forms of impairment, such as intellectual disability, fit within social model thinking (Goodley 2017; Shakespeare 2013a).¹ Third, the social model has been criticised for failing to consider intersectional attributes such as gender, sexuality, and race (Morris 1991); and fourth, it has been suggested that a disproportionate focus on physical barriers elides the cultural conditions that facilitate disabled oppression (Shakespeare 2013b).

Finally, and perhaps the biggest, multi-faceted critique, is the issue of impairment. Impairment has historically occupied a backgrounded (absent present) place within the social model, and many scholars have taken issue with its elision—experientially and theoretically (Goodley 2001; Morris 1991; Crow 1996). Experientially, Crow (1992: 7) writes, ‘most of us simply cannot pretend with any conviction that our impairments are irrelevant because they influence every aspect of our lives’. Oliver (2009: 48) rejects this criticism and suggests it is based on a ‘conceptual misunderstanding’ because the ‘social model is not about the personal experience of impairment but the collective experience of disablement’.

The contention that the social model concerns disability rather than impairment is a dubious claim for many, and some suggest the argument fails to hold water at an experiential and theoretical level (Corker & French 1999; Shakespeare 2013a; Tremain 2001, 2002). Theoretically, it has been claimed that the disability/impairment distinction reinforces the (fictive) nature/culture binary, and, as with all binaries, privileges and valorises the former term (disability) while silencing and stigmatising the latter (impairment) (Corker & French 1999; Tremain 2001, 2002; Shakespeare 2004). Barnes (2020: 24) counters this claim, suggesting: ‘to claim that the impairment/disability distinction is false is to suggest that the division between the biological and the social is false’. Much of this tension rests on opposing ideological-theoretical positions between realist/relativist onto-epistemologies. How do we break this impasse?

It has long been noted the influence that the sex/gender distinction has had on formulating the impairment/disability distinction central to the social model, and yet since the 2000s, several scholars have suggested the sex/gender distinction is increasingly untenable (Shakespeare 2004; Tremain 2001, 2002). Except for a few patchwork comments, these considerations have not been fully interrogated, except for Tremain’s (2001, 2002) landmark papers more than two decades ago. It is important that such issues be reinvestigated in this contemporary moment to track both its history and the changes that have occurred. These changing attitudes chart the rapidity with which sex’s (and nature’s) claim to biological certainty is increasingly discredited, and these changing attitudes should be reconsidered given their influence over the impairment/disability divide.

Sex and Gender, Sex versus Gender

Tremain (2001) notes that in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1933, ‘gender’ is not defined in relation to, or distinct from, ‘sex’. Instead, ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ are substitutable. Since this time, though, many sexologists and feminists have promoted the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, such that in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1962), ‘sex’ refers to biological attributes while ‘gender’ refers to social and cultural influences (Tremain 2001). Influenced by the rise in focus on intersexuality, and later transsexuality, the ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ distinction provided a way in which someone with two ‘sexes’ could be assigned a gender identity (intersexuality), and to name and legitimise the experience of a person who wanted to identify with another ‘sex’ they were ostensibly assigned (transsexuality) (Tremain 2001). Against this backdrop, the sex/gender distinction emerged as a taken-for-granted and axiomatic social fact to convey the belief that one’s ‘gender’ is detachable from their so-called (and assigned) ‘sex’ (Lerner 1986).

In 1990, Judith Butler observed feminism’s consolidation of the sex/gender division and proposed a need to trouble both the consolidation and the division (Barnard 2020). Butler (1990: 128, 146, italics in original) writes ‘[c]ategories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics’, later suggesting, ‘within the sex/gender distinction, sex poses as “the real” and the “factic,” the material or corporeal ground upon which gender operates as an act of cultural inscription’. Since its publication, feminism has celebrated Butler’s work and incorporated queer thought into feminist scholarship; yet, many feminists continue to uphold the sex/gender distinction and the category of an allegedly natural ‘sex’ that Butler troubled (Barnard 2020). For these feminists, the sex/gender distinction exists as a progressive and anti-essentialist framework that recognises the social construction of gender, providing one avenue through which women’s oppression and patriarchal politics can be fought (Barnard 2020).

The sex/gender distinction occupies a hegemonic place in many academic, activist, and social circles (McCann & Monaghan 2020). It may be that, like the social model, its compelling appeal lies in its seductive simplicity. The sex/gender distinction allows one to say: ‘I may have been born with a particular sex, but my gender presentation does not match, or need to match, that biological determination’ (Barnard 2020). The sex/gender distinction likewise reifies the equally seductive (yet fictive) nature/culture binary (Tremain 2001). That sex is natural and gender is cultural is spoken matter-of-factly in a whole range of contexts, within and beyond activist and scholarly spaces (Barnard 2020).

Notwithstanding, since the creation of the sex/gender distinction there has been resistance and revision to its formulation (Walsh 2004). There are signs that the sex/gender distinction is losing its stranglehold on feminist thought, and it is this observation that I want to seize upon in the disruption of the impairment/disability distinction that uses the sex/gender distinction as its supporting frame. I am interested in troubling the sex-impairment-nature versus gender-disability-culture divide, and particularly when one half of the binary (gender-disability-culture) is valorised while the other half (sex-impairment-nature) is occluded. Even in transgender theory, where the sex/gender distinction has been heavily mobilised in the last twenty years advocating for the cultural production of gender and gender affirmation, there are signs the sex/gender distinction is not as stable as assumed or alleged (Barnard 2020; Jones 2006). Note the slippage between Stryker’s description of the sex/gender distinction between two editions of Transgender History:

[S]ex is not the same as gender, although many people use the terms interchangeably in everyday speech. Sex is generally considered biological, and gender is generally considered cultural (although that understanding is changing too) (2008: 7–8).

[O]ne complication in drawing a hard and fast distinction between sex and gender, however analytically and conceptually different these terms are, has to do with our cultural beliefs. Although its true that sex typically is used to determine gender categorization, it’s also true that what counts as sex is a cultural belief (2017: 15, italics in original).

Stryker’s first definition contains equivocation—two instances of ‘generally considered’ and the parenthetical qualification ‘although that understanding is changing too’—and later, Stryker acknowledges that ‘contemporary theorists posit sex as a cultural category as well’ (2008: 11). Less than a decade later, Stryker’s (2017) edits exemplify the changing understandings and attitudes. The recognition that sex is a cultural category moves out of parenthesis, and while the first definition ties changing attitudes to ‘contemporary theorists’, the second definition grounds it plainly as ‘a cultural belief’ (Barnard 2020). Stryker’s evolving definition is representative of a broader trend in which sex is increasingly losing its claim to biological certainty (Barnard 2020).

Butler’s (1990) troubling of the sex/gender distinction is oft-cited but worth repeating. Butler’s (1990) central claim is that sex is not a timeless, objective, pre-discursive, or natural entity, and because gender is constructed and performative and not inevitably (or ‘naturally’) connected to sex (as sex/gender proponents would argue), the distinction between sex and gender is untenable. Gender is understood as independent of sex (by virtue of the sex/gender distinction), which raises the possibility that sex is just as constructed as gender (Butler 1990). It may be that sex was always already gender, or rather, that the sex/gender distinction is not a distinction at all. Butler (1990: 6) proposes:

[I]f gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two.²

Butler problematises the ways that sex is naturalised as pre-discursive and troubles the ‘heterosexual matrix’ that is underpinned by compulsory heterosexuality, the gender binary, and the sex/gender/desire framework. Sex is conventionally understood to underpin gender, and gender is in turn understood to inform desire/sexuality, such that, for example, a person assigned female (sex), will grow up as a feminine woman (gender), and desire a man (a desire towards the opposite sex/gender). Butler (1990) argues that the heterosexual matrix institutes, maintains, naturalises, and normalises binary heterosexual logic. For Butler (1990), analysing gender is an incomplete analytical project unless it also incorporates analyses of sex. At the same time, if sex is (now) understood as a constructed category, and is indistinct from gender, then existing accounts of gender are likewise insufficient (Butler 1990). This argument has influenced a range of feminist scholarship and redrawn the ways in which the sex/gender distinction is understood (Chambers 2007; Jagose 1996; Webster 2002).

The sex/gender distinction operates interdependently on other binary oppositions, and, most particularly in the contexts of this article, the impairment/disability distinction. Several disability studies scholars have noted how the sex/gender distinction informed the impairment/disability distinction that is the hallmark of the social model (Corker & French 1999; Shakespeare 2013b; Tremain 2001, 2002). Tremain (2001: 631) notes that ‘analogical arguments that disability researchers and theorists make from “sex” not only reinstitute and contribute to the naturalization and materialization of binary sex’, but additionally, ‘these arguments facilitate and contribute to the naturalization and materialization of impairment’. The influence between sex/gender and impairment/disability is thus not a peripheral or unrelated concern. It is important to consider how the impairment/disability distinction might be redrawn, especially as attitudes are changing towards the sex/gender distinction. It may be that these changing attitudes mobilise greater scrutiny towards the impairment/disability divide and reinvigorate previous arguments that have not continued in a sustained way.

Impairment and Disability, Impairment versus Disability

Impairment occupies an awkward place within social model thinking (and disability studies more generally). Recall earlier comments that impairment was cast aside because social modellers sought to slice the causal link between impairment and disability. Disability became the primary focus of inquiry because it was (allegedly the source of) social oppression. As for impairment, it was ‘safer not mentioned at all’ (Crow 1996: 209). Nevertheless, many scholars—particularly feminist disability studies scholars—sought to account for impairment, and it is no accident they were informed by the sex/gender debates and the feminist slogan that the ‘personal is political’. Critics believed it was dangerous to engage with impairment because it was so closely connected to deficit and tragedy, but it is just as dangerous to leave impairment unchallenged, taken-for-granted, and biologically neutral and fixed (Goodley 2017). But what if impairment was never absent from the social model? What if impairment held an absent present location within the social model? In fact, what if impairment was always already disability?

Social model proponents severed the connection between impairment and disability such that disability is neither considered the causal result of impairment nor as fixed as impairment (Hughes & Paterson 1997). Oliver (1996: 35) asserts that ‘disablement is nothing to do with the body’ and that impairment is ‘nothing less than a description of the physical body’. Within this formula, disability becomes a ‘form of disadvantage that is imposed on top of one’s impairment’ (Tremain 2001: 630). However, it is my contention, informed by feminist scholars troubling the sex/gender distinction and disability studies scholars troubling the impairment/disability distinction, that the impairment/disability distinction is no distinction at all. Consider, for a moment, that it is only impaired people who can qualify as disabled within social model thinking. Oppressed non-impaired groups, such as women or queers, for example, fail to qualify. If only impaired people qualify as disabled, the division between impairment and disability is no division at all. It makes little sense to define disability as the cultural interpretation of impairment if impairment is itself a disabled category. The category of impairment cannot be thought as prior to disability precisely because disability is required to think of impairment at all. Disability is not the product of culture, and impairment is not the product of nature, because disability is the means through which ‘natural impairment’ is produced and established as natural, as prior to culture, and as a transhistorical and politically neutral surface upon which culture acts (Tremain 2001).

The impaired body comes to be known through the materialisation of language, and that materialisation requires the (re)iterative process of (re)signification for the impaired body to be perceived as fact, as reality. The impaired body congeals into the semblance of an ontological reality through language/discourse. The impaired body is therefore performative (Watermeyer & Botha 2023). Tremain (2001: 632, italics in original) explains:

[A]s effects of an historically specific political discourse (namely, bio-power), impairments are materialized as universal attributes (properties) of subjects through the iteration and reiteration of rather culturally specific regulatory norms and ideals about (for example) human function and structure, competency, intelligence, and ability. As universalized attributes of subjects, furthermore, impairments are naturalized as an interior identity or essence on which culture acts in order to camouflage the historically contingent power relations that materialized them as natural.

In other words, impairment and disability are both discursively constructed and ‘impairment has been disability all along’ (Tremain 2001: 632). The ‘division’ between ‘biological/natural impairment’ and ‘social/cultural disability’ ignores the fact that the (impaired/dis/abled) body is materialised through social (re)signification. This is why it is so difficult to talk about ‘disability’ without also always talking about ‘impairment’ (Corker & French 1999). The distinction between impairment and disability is false, just as the sex/gender and nature/culture distinction is false (Tremain 2001).

Being impaired does not constitute some natural fact, but rather cultural performance(s); ‘naturalness’ is constituted and (re)produced through a grid of performative acts that produce the body within the category of ‘impairment’. The genealogy of the impaired body is concealed, forgotten, and repressed under the ruse of ‘natural fact’. Designating impairment is a political act and therefore impairment proves to always already be ‘cooked’ rather than ‘raw’. It is worth dwelling upon the purposes in which these dualisms—impairment/disability, sex/gender, nature/culture, raw/cooked—are intended to serve. Creating a distinction establishes a hierarchy wherein one half (e.g., disability, gender, culture) imposes itself on the other (e.g., impairment, sex, nature), thus rendering it a subordinated status that only exists relative to its master signifier (Butler 1990). Exposing the foundational categories of impairment and disability as effects of power/knowledge/discourse, and the fictive distinction therein, does not entail searching for the origins of impairment or disability; instead, this is achieved by investigating the ‘political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, [and] discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin’ (Butler 1990: ix, italics in original).

To claim that the materiality of impairment is constructed is admittedly provocative. Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter (1995: 26) observe that realist/relativist debates often devolve into realists who thump on furniture, mention death or killing, or point to the existence of rocks to ‘prove’ a ‘reality that cannot be denied’ (italics in original). Invoking the rock analogy specifically, Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter (1995: 30) wryly respond that:

rocks are cultural too, in that they are thus categorized, included in the definition of the natural world, classified into sedimentary and igneous, divided into grains of sand, pieces of gravel, pebbles, stones, rocks, boulders, mountains, domesticated in parks and ornamental gardens, protected in wildernesses, cut, bought, used and displayed as “precious stones”, and include as a subcategory “girls’ best friends”; not to mention coolant for vodka!

The point is not to deny the materiality of a rock (or anything else), but to suggest that the meaning of its materiality is constructed through various temporal and spatial technologies, discourses, and practices. I am not denying the materiality of impairment. Butler (1993: xi) likewise acknowledges: ‘bodies live and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these “facts”, one might skeptically proclaim, cannot be dismissed as mere construction’. For Butler (1993: xi), though, the irrefutability of these experiences ‘in no way implies what it might mean to affirm them and through what discursive means’. The irrefutability of these ‘facts’ are caught up in regulatory discursive schemas that demarcate the un/intelligibility and political mattering of bodies. Impairment has a history and historicity, and recognising its construction moves it beyond aberrancy, shifts the emphasis from the individual body to the social discourses and practices through which impairment is constituted, and asks the question: through what discursive means can the impaired body be permitted to enjoy its masquerading performance as a brute ontological fact?

If impairment—conventionally understood as ‘nothing less than a description of the physical body’ (Oliver 1996: 35)—is the product of social forces, and if disability—conventionally understood as social oppression and ‘nothing to do with the body’ (Oliver 1996: 35)—is likewise the product of social forces, what does the social model mean? How can the ‘disability equals oppression’ framework make sense when impairment has been disability all along? How can we reduce or eliminate disability—the social model’s goal—if it cannot be separated from impairment? What is at stake in designating as an origin and cause a subject position that is otherwise an effect? Where to from here?

Four broad remedies have been introduced that seek to identify, directly or indirectly, a way out from the conundrum I have outlined. First, seeking to sidestep the pro/anti-social model debates, and analyses that question whether impairment is a cause or symptom of disability, Thomas (2004) proposes a focus on ‘impairment effects’ that recognise the social relational dimensions of disability. Thomas (2004: 29) explains:

[O]nce the term ‘disability’ is ring-fenced to mean forms of oppressive social reaction visited upon people with impairments, there is no need to deny that impairments and illness cause some restrictions of activity, or that in many situations both disability and impairment effects interact to place limits on activity.

For Thomas (2004), focusing on ‘impairment effects’ recognises ‘individual limitations’ that arise from one’s impairment, rather than from social oppression (disability). Thomas’ (2004) approach bridges some of the divide between impairment and disability, but it fails—through no fault of its own—to engage with the social discursiveness of impairment and the collapsibility between impairment/disability that lay at the heart of this article. Second, more radical approaches have sought to abandon the social model and create different models that better attend to impairment/disability. Many models have been provided and the list can appear endless—the cultural model, the minority model, the affirmation model, the human rights model, the normalisation model, the welfare model, the universal model, the dialectical model, and so on—and these have been tweaked and twisted in different ways. It can be difficult to identify where one model begins and another ends, and rest assured, I am not about to propose yet another new model.

Third, several scholars have advocated for a sociology of impairment that better accommodates an understanding of the social life and construction of impairment. Hughes and Paterson (1997: 328), for example, argue that the social model imposes an untenable separation between body/culture and impairment/disability, and by conceding ‘impairment’ to the domain of medicine, impairment and the body is confined to a reactionary and oppressive discursive space rather than a site of history, culture, production, possibility, intentionality, and agency. For Hughes and Paterson (1997), a sociology of impairment centres the life, history, and experience of the impaired body—a body that is socio-culturally created and mediated. Fourth, Tremain (2001: 635) follows a Foucauldian path and suggests that identity-based political agendas are inefficacious and the ‘disabled people’s movement should develop strategies for advancing claims that make no appeal to the very identity upon which that subjection relies’. Tremain (2001: 635) argues that identity politics and identity-based political agendas inevitably collapse around claims that its politics is exclusionary and internally hierarchical, and activists and scholars should instead ‘formulate demands in terms of “what we want,” not “who we are”’. Speaking against oppressive forms of power, and promoting a politics of action around ethics, care, and vulnerability, dispenses with intractable identity questions and refocuses to the task of politics (Cohen 1997).

These four strategies engage with the impairment/disability problem in varying ways, some of which tweak or dispense with the social model to varying degrees. My concern is how the social model can be screwed to make better sense now that we know that the impairment/disability distinction is not as stable as we might have otherwise thought. If impairment is discursively constituted, and if impairment was always already disability, what does, or should, the social model (and its terms) mean? Borrowing from some parts of each of the four strategies above, and drawing upon my analysis thus far, the following section provides some overlapping and provisional ways forward.

The Social Model of Disability: Turning the Screws

My analysis complicates several terms associated with the social model—namely, ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’—and I would like to suggest some terminological and definitional changes that better accommodate a screwed social model. While the social model emphasised disability and de-emphasised impairment, I suggest it may be strategically efficacious to use ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ synonymously as identity categories, while simultaneously recognising such categories as externally, oppressively, and ideologically imposed (after all, the creation of impaired or disabled identity—and many other minoritised identities—often works to create systems of oppression). Similarly, the focus on ‘disability’ and ‘disabled’, as defined under the social model as a particular form of oppression, should be replaced by a focus on ‘ableism’ and ‘disablism’. The social model conceptualises disability as a form of social oppression, but if impairment was always already disability, and if impairment and disability become identity categories (as I argue, and as evidenced elsewhere in contemporary scholarship), other terms need to be utilised, and studies in ableism and disablism is an already developed (and developing) area of study focusing on the oppression against disabled people. ‘Disability’ has increasingly become an identity category, such that ‘fighting disability’ (language aligning with the social model) does not make much sense for those that consider disability as an identity. I am thus proposing that ‘disability’, as used in the social model, be split in two different directions: by anchoring it alongside impairment as an identity category externally imposed upon people, and by moving the politics of the social model and its emphasis on ‘disability’ (which means ‘social oppression’) instead towards a focus on ableism and disablism. Finally, given the difficulty associated with identity politics, it may be prudent that disability studies move beyond identity politics, and instead focuses on ‘what to do’ instead of ‘who we are’. I am thus proposing that we alter the terms of the social model, mobilise around ableism and disablism, and focus on the task of politics.

I suggest there is no political-theoretical need for social modellers to split impairment from disability. Impairment and disability are not abiding substances but ableist culture establishes the coherence of these categories to create and perpetuate compulsory abledness. Society establishes ‘impairment’ as an innate secret ‘truth of the self’, whereupon we (allegedly) only ‘know’ impairment through disability (and vice versa). Illustrating the cultural construction of impairment and disability is intended to highlight the ways they are both politicised and propped up to support ableist regimes. To counter such phantasmatics, the distinction between impairment and disability should be dissolved, and both terms should refer to identity categories. The original intention of the social model was to suggest that disability could be reduced or eliminated because it was socially created (Barnes 2020). This does not make (onto)logical sense because impairment and disability are both discursively constituted and impairment was always already disability (Tremain 2001). ‘Disability’ is increasingly used as an identity category, not as a form of oppression. Impairment is not natural but cultural, and thus, impairment and disability do not sit in distinction to each other but are substitutable and complementary.

The contention that impairment and disability are broadly synonymous does not pollute or contaminate the aims of the social model—that is, the removal of barriers—but strengthens it. This is the case because impairment has been historically elided from scrutiny, but this isn’t possible when impairment and disability are conceptualised as inseparable. Conceiving impairment and disability as synonymous does not concede impairment to the domain of medicine (or biology)—as critiques of the social model contend—but rather helps subject it further sustained scrutiny. Impairment should thus feature more heavily within the social model and this should involve a sociology, history, and genealogy of impairment. This political project, following in the likes of Rapley (2004), Hickey-Moody (2009), and others, would seek to expose the fantasy with which impairment is tied to biology. Definitions of impairment have ebbed and flowed through history, and the task is to investigate the conditions with which impairment is created and naturalised for particular purposes such that more complex accounts, effects, and histories can be considered. Tying impairment with disability aids with this enterprise.

It is important to recognise impairment as an identity category, but one that is also externally imposed. Impairment cannot be defined as ‘nothing less than a description of the body’ (Oliver 1996: 35), nor can it refer to (1), ‘lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ or mechanism of the body’ (UPIAS 1976: 14), (2), broadened criteria that includes sensory, intellectual, or other ‘impairments’, or (3), an external ontological reality that is simply discovered and identified as ‘truth’. Within the contexts of the social model, impairment is presumed to be a natural biological fact, and while this presumption is socially widespread, I posit this is likewise wrong. Instead, I conceptualise impairment (and now, disability) as an oppressive and externally imposed category. The foundational construction of impairment (and now, disability) is an oppressive category because it is premised in ideas surrounding bodily morphology, functionality, intelligence, capacity, productivity, and ability that depart from normative and desirable ableist attributes (Campbell 2009; Erevelles 2016). The impaired (and now, disabled) body is identified as such to mobilise surveillance, measurement, intervention, and sometimes elimination, and thus ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ are ideologically loaded categories populated with expectations about human attributes.

Instead of conceiving ‘disability’ as social oppression, social modellers should relinquish (or reconceptualise) ‘disability’ as a descriptor or identity category alongside impairment, and focus the social oppression battle through the lens’ of ableism and disablism. As mentioned above, ‘disability’ has morphed over the years into an identity category, not as social oppression (thus contravening the social model). Ableism and disablism should become the focus because they describe oppressive beliefs and practices, and studies in ableism and disablism is coalescing as a burgeoning area of study. Additionally, turning to ableism and disablism remedies one of Shakespeare’s (2013a) arguments that social modellers need to prove what they otherwise ordinarily assume. Shakespeare (2013a: 218) argues that it is ‘logically impossible for a qualitative researcher to find disabled people who are not oppressed’ because social modellers assume without exception that disability equals oppression. Turning to ableism and disablism, however, establishes the site with which such investigations can materialise (particularly given the morphing of ‘disability’s’ meaning mentioned above). It is my contention that ‘disability’ better captures an identity category, and that the investigation and fight against oppression towards impaired/disabled people can be better waged through studies in ableism and disablism.

Finally, and following a very long list of critiques towards identity politics, it is my contention that disability politics should consider moving beyond preoccupations with identity—‘who we are’—and instead move towards different demands, imaginations, and arrangements—or, ‘what to do’ (Tremain 2001). A political movement organised around identity, and attendant questions such as ‘who is disabled?’ or ‘what is disability?’, are red herrings that create inclusionary/exclusionary criteria and hierarchies within that political movement (Tremain 2001). Note, too, that much of the ‘intellectual masturbation’ (Oliver 2009: 50) surrounding the social model has focused on identity questions and not on the arrangements that are needed to establish and sustain grievable and viable lives. Notwithstanding the analysis in this article, it may be more efficacious to get on with the task of politics and this necessarily involves identifying and articulating the values and goals central to that political endeavour (Butler 1990). We do not need to ‘ground ourselves in…a single notion of the subject before we are able to act’ (Butler 2004: 48), and ‘impairment/disability’ should not be the grounding category for disability studies because they are regulatory fictions (Tremain 2001). Following the work of influential scholars in this area, disability politics aligned with the social model might best be pursued by rejecting the toxic and oppressive status quo and instead imagining sites with which to design anti-ableist, accessible, interdependent, nonviolent, and equality-driven spaces (Butler 1990, 1993; Goodley 2014b; Young 1990). This point is not peripheral but central because it ensures the basic principles of the social model—a less oppressive society—can be followed.

Conclusion

Comparing the social model to a hammer, Oliver (2009) argued that scholars/activists need to use it to improve disabled people’s lives. Fond of a good tool analogy, he reasoned that we’d still be living in caves if carpenters spent too much time discussing whether a hammer was a good fit for housebuilding (Oliver 2009). ‘We do have a hammer in the disabled people’s movement’, he said, adding that if used correctly, it can mobilise ‘justice and freedom for disabled people’ (Oliver 2009: 57). Shakespeare (2013b: 45), recalling Oliver’s invocation of the protest song ‘If I had a hammer’ years earlier at a conference, said he responded thus: ‘give a man a hammer, and all he sees is nails’. In short, if all we have is a social model hammer, then every problem looks like a nail to be smashed. The social model is flawed in many respects, but given its strong social, political, and academic currency, it may be better to replace the hammer with a screwdriver and screw some of its terms and meanings. Rather than throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, it might be worth using it as a ‘least crappy’ platform with which to re-articulate a broader politics. Disability studies scholars drew upon the sex/gender and nature/culture distinctions in their formulations of the impairment/disability distinction, but, as attitudes change regarding the former, it is time that attitudes likewise change with the latter. Several foundational contentions within the social model no longer make sense, and, to that end, the social model is (or needs to be) screwed. Refiguring impairment in more capacious ways, interrogating impairment/disability, and moving beyond identity politics may be central to this endeavour.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.