Walking small with ‘Paul’, a man with ‘severe learning difficulties’: on (not) passing in purportedly public places

Abstract

This article primarily accounts for walks taken in purportedly public places with ‘Paul’, a middle-aged man who is currently diagnosed as having ‘severe learning difficulties’. These walks offer windows into the ways in which dis/ableist discourses and the powerful abstractions they produce descend to the level of practice, seeping into seemingly innocuous spaces, and the interactions and subjectivities therein. Through these encounters, persons become complicit in the production, maintenance and reinforcement of non-disabled (or abled)/disabled identities. This article nevertheless attempts to destabilize and defetishize the ontological categories that these encounters realize, and to recognize the vitality and presence set aside or concealed behind these concepts.

Keywords:

• Severe learning difficulties
• passing
• non-disabled (or abled)/disabled binary
• abstractions/reductions
• fetishize/defetishize (autism)

Acknowledgements

Thank you to anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, and suggestions, made in relation to the originally submitted manuscript of this article. These have greatly helped revision of this article for publication.

Notes

1. Stuart Hall has lucidly explained how representation works by marking differences which are constructed through language by way of binary oppositions, one of which is ‘dominant’: a power dimension in discourse that might be captured by writing white/black, men/women, British/alien, and so on, with the former pole of the binary made bold and the latter italicized ([1997] 2013, 225). As Hall explains with reference to the work of Mary Douglas, stable cultures ‘require things to stay in their appointed place’ and that what ‘unsettles culture is “matter out of place” … a sign of pollution, of symbolic boundaries being transgressed’ ([1997] 2013, 226). Such pollution is swept up or thrown out, thereby restoring order, all of which ‘leads us, symbolically, to close ranks, shore up culture and to stigmatize and expel anything … defined as impure, abnormal’ ([1997] 2013, 237). To the categories to which Hall refers, it is necessary to add non-disabled (or abled)/disabled.