Screwing With Our Embodiment: A Response to Thorneycroft’s Re-Imagining of the Social Model

This paper presents a response to Thorneycroft’s (2024) proposed conceptual solution to the disability-impairment binary at the heart of the social model of disability, also published in this journal. Since the binary is based on the now discredited sex-gender distinction, it is ever more unsustainable, leading Thorneycroft (2024) to suggest ‘screwing’ the social model by collapsing disability with impairment, recognizing that there is, putatively, no body-mind experience which is not discursively produced. As disabled people ourselves, we differ with Thorneycroft (2024) both on theoretical and phenomenological grounds, arguing that this approach constricts the already limited space available in social model discourse (and disability studies broadly) for an engagement with embodiment. Using experiential narratives from our own lives, we argue in support of a combination of critical realism and phenomenological disability studies, to create a firm conceptual space for the embodied self.