(Visual) Disability – from exclusive perspectives to inclusive differences

Abstract

By introducing the concept ‘inclusive differences’ of disability this paper suggests that disability is the outcome of historically specific, embodied human and non‐human configurations fabricated within the conduct of everyday life. Inclusive differences question the attempt given by exclusive perspectives that try to divide analytically, conceptually or politically ‘disability’ a priori into an individual (natural) bodily impairment or a purely socio‐cultural attributed disability. Applying the concept of inclusive differences, neither the domain of ‘nature’ nor ‘society’ can function as a disability’s self‐explanatory force. Rather, inclusive differences highlight the connection between human and non‐human relations that make up the different enabling and/or disabling scenarios of societal realities. Drawing on the practices of blind people in a visual culture this paper discusses related specificities of inclusive differences.

Keywords:

• exclusive perspectives
• inclusive differences
• blindness
• nature versus society
• white cane

Notes

1. For rethinking, for example, the impairment/disability divide see, for example, Benedelow and Williams (1995), Hughes and Paterson (1997), Shakespeare (2006), Thomas (1999) and Williams (1998).

2. cf. Oliver’s contribution in Sheldon et al. (2007).

3. On the relations of framing/overflowing see Callon (1998).

4. Other non‐humans play a similar role. The blind sociologist Rod Michalko (1999, 91 &, 126) wrote about his relation with his guide dog Smokie:

In terms of our social identity – blind person and guide dog – we cannot be separated. My self is now our self. Smokie’s self too is our self. … The world through which Smokie and I move is neither fully sighted, fully human, nor fully natural. We move ‘between’ these ontologies in the ‘no longer and not yet’. (Emphasis in original)