The Social Construction of Disability

Image: Slipping Through My Fingers by Kasia Runté

C. Wright Mills challenged sociologists to develop a sociological imaginationto explore the social context that shapes individual experiences.¹ Disability is often experienced as an individual challenge. Navigating my education and my career pathway as a student with disabilities has often left me feeling isolated and alone, as if I am the only one walking this path. How I experience my encounters with the education system, and even how I view disability myself, is shaped by social forces that delineate the boundaries of the path I walk and enable (or disable) me on my journey.

I started my post-secondary education with enthusiasm and purpose. My dream was to be a palliative care nurse. I was accepted into an LPN program and was entering my second semester with a high GPA and a very successful first practicum experience. This dream came crashing down when the program director called me into a meeting to explain to me why I could not be a nurse and strongly encouraged me to withdraw. I have a disability that results in significant joint instability. I experience chronic pain and have dislocated fingers through activities such as typing or handwriting. I wear metal splints on my fingers that stabilize these joints. In labs and in my practicum, I managed to keep sterile conditions by wearing, and frequently changing, surgical gloves. From the first day in the nursing program, however, I had instructors look at my hands and challenge me: “Are you sure you can be a nurse?” These challenges progressively became more directive: “You can’t be a nurse with a disability.” Despite having strong advocates fighting for me, and having human rights legislation on my side, I ultimately withdrew from the program. My soul could no longer take being told that I was not enough. My dreams, literally and figuratively, slipped through my fingers.

Disability has historically been seen through a medical model.² Disabled persons are defined by their diagnosis and their challenges explored on an individual basis as something to be “managed.” Disability, however, can also be understood as a social construct.³ Different bodies and minds are labelled as flawed and socially agreed norms are created that support these often arbitrary labels. Assumptions are often made about what someone with a disability can and cannot do, and what boundaries should be placed on accommodations, but these assumptions may bear little relationship to the actual challenges experienced by the individual. Further, the assumption is made that there is only one way to perform a task or organize the workplace. Rigid education and workplace design reinforce these assumptions. According to my program director, I would not have the stamina to meet the increasingly intense demands of the profession that have come about due to government cutbacks and understaffing: “It wouldn’t be fair to others.” In their view, success in the discipline is defined by bodies served, reducing the role of nursing to a quantitative measure divorced from the principles of caregiving.⁴ The socially defined rules of how to “be a nurse” and what it means to be “disabled” in a role where those with disabilities are patients and those without disabilities are the professionals, did not allow for someone like me to belong. Although I countered that there were a hundred different roles in the nursing profession—including researcher, homecare specialist, clinical desk jobs—that I could do without causing harm to myself or being a burden to others, the Director was unrelenting. I felt I had no option but to withdraw.

As I struggled throughout the current semester to redefine my career goals, I have explored my experience in nursing school through different sociological lenses and find each offers insights that help me plan the next steps in my career journey. Applying the materialist theory of Marx, for example, I can see that the program director defined “ability” based on what would be most efficient in a factory-like healthcare environment. Thus, applying the glasses used by Evan in the glasses scene of They Live,⁵ a nursing text would be more correctly titled: “Get them back to work” and such a task requires workers who operate with robot-like efficiency. Nurses are part of the means of production, pumping out able-bodied workers, and I would be perceived as a defective “robot.”

Crip theory,⁶ in contrast, shifts the focus from disabled persons as defective robots trying to perform roles within a capitalist framework to focusing on the ways that we, people with disabilities, perceive and experience the world. “To crip” is to challenge ableist norms and reimagine the world in a way that values and includes people with disabilities^.7 To crip healthcare, for example, would mean imagining a profession where having experienced pain and limited mobility is championed as a path to meaningful and empathetic engagement with patients as we mutually struggle, and triumph. To crip time would be to challenge the program director’s focus on my ability to juggle care for an unwieldly number of patients in a political climate obsessed with efficiency and cost reduction, and instead view time as unconstrained by these limiting norms.

My disability forces me to slow down and be deliberate and conscious of my movements. I want to be a palliative nurse providing care to those for whom “time is running out.” Every minute is precious to a dying person, and by slowing down and providing care without looking at a timesheet, I could better honour those minutes the patient has left. Crip theory embraces Mill’s challenge of applying a lens of sociological imagination by disrupting capitalist norms of ability and disability and in so doing, allow myself to see the potential path forward—a path walked in crip time.

Endnotes

1.C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, (Oxford University Press, 1959), 1-5.

2. Athena Elafros, “What is theory: Why does it matter?” Lecture, Sociology 1000, University of Lethbridge, January 28, 2024, PowerPoint slides 18-20.

3. PHILO-notes. “What is Social Constructionism?”YouTube Video September 11, 2020. Accessed April 18, 2024.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cckbw8dTsfY

4. Carlos Nicolas Gómez Marchant, Alexandra Aguilar, Emma Gargroetzi, and Campbell Reed, “The Measure of All Things: From US School Closures to Quantifying Body Size, What Harm Is Done by Reducing Social Issues to Numbers?” The Sociological Review, October 10, 2023. https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.ltod8142

5. “The Sunglasses Scene” They Live,[NBCUniversal1988]YouTubevideoAccessedApril182024https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w

6. Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”, Disability Studies Quarterly 37 no. 3, 2017.

7.Samuels, “Crip Time”.

Bibliography

Elafros, Athena “What Is Theory: Why Does It Matter?” Lecture, Sociology 1000, University of Lethbridge, January 28,2024.

Marchant, Carlos Nicolas Gómez, Alexandra Aguilar, Emma Gargroetzi, and Campbell Reed. “The Measure of All Things:From US School Closures to Quantifying Body Size, What Harm Is Done By Reducing Social Issues To Numbers?” The Sociological Review, October 10, 2023. https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.ltod8142

Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press, 1959.

PHILO-notes. “What is Social Constructionism?” YouTube video, September 11, 2020. Accessed April 18, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cckbw8dTsfY

Samuels, Ellen. “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no.3 2017,https//doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824.

“The Sunglasses Scene” They Live. Directed by John Carpenter [NBC Universal, 1988]YouTube video. Accessed April 18, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w