A historical materialist perspective weaves throughout the interestingly diverse collection of essays gathered in Disabling Barriers: Social Movements, Disability, History and the Law. This edited work seeks to bring awareness to often-overlooked disability histories, with an emphasis on structural barriers in the economic sphere, as well as potential pathways for legal reform. The editors Malhotra, a legal scholar, and Isitt, a historian, have produced a volume that interweaves their respective fields with a geographical focus on Canada. Divided into three parts, the collection covers a variety of topics within historical and legal studies on disability. In part one, ‘Historical Debates on Work and Disability’, the three works discuss the tendency of working-class and union politics to exclude some groups based on gender and race, employment and disability awareness campaigns after World War II, and the historical devaluing of women’s labor within rehabilitation regimes. The second part, ‘Debates in Disability Studies’, provides accounts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR’s) covering of his disability, the connection between inner ears, deafness, and seasickness, and racist and ableist intersections in early twentieth-century immigration policy. Finally, the third part, ‘Legal Debates’, concludes with a discussion of chronic illness in the workplace, income inequality among disabled people, and worker’s compensation as a means of decommodifying workers. While the collection seeks to spur new research in history and law, it also challenges negative stereotypes of disability and identifies potential legal paths for positive social change.
In Part 1, Mark Leier examines the connections between work, disability, and death in working-class culture in early twentieth-century British Columbia. Leier argues that although organizing often occurred in response to the threat of disability and death, creating solidarity was a complicated process, one that was sometimes fractured along gender and race categories. In Chapter 2, historian Dustin Galer details the fight after World War II to integrate wounded soldiers in the workplace. Disability hiring campaigns which started in order to support the troops eventually expanded to support the broader disability community. Galen suggests that although these campaigns, which highlighted prejudice as the most important barrier to disabled people’s inclusion in the workforce, were ineffective at shifting attitudes, they remain popular today. Geoffrey Reaume in Chapter Three contextualizes the devaluing of disabled women’s labor, especially in institutional settings. Reaume uses a gender lens to analyze a broad range of different disability histories, including research on spinal cord injuries, veterans’ labor, old-age homes, and miners with lung disease. According to Reaume, the gendered nature of mad people’s institutionalized labor has been analyzed more than other types of disabled people’s labor history.
In the first chapter of Part 2, Anne Fingers provides an account of FDR’s management of the public perception of his disability. FDR employed an ‘overcoming’ narrative to counter his fear of being seen as an ‘invalid’; his team also sought to shift the narrative of polio away from poverty and uncleanliness. Fingers provides this narrative of identity management to complicate the reclaiming of FDR as ‘one of us’. Finally, Fingers notes the intersection of racism and ableism in the labor done by the black male servants charged with carrying FDR, and thus helping to maintain FDR’s controlled image of disability. Mark Walters, in the following intriguing chapter, seeks to create dialogue between sound and disability studies. Walter presents a history of the scientific discovery of the relationship between the inner ear, hearing, seasickness, and balance. Along with a theoretical discussion of the five senses, balance and embodiment, and disability aesthetics, Walters relates an anecdote, in which the social isolation of deaf-mute people led a scientist to begin investigating the connection between hearing and balance. The final chapter in Part 2 analyzes the intersection of racism and ableism in early twentieth-century immigration policy. These immigration policies were influenced by ideas about Canada’s natural environment and the strength necessary to labor in it, as well as racism and eugenics. ‘Climatic suitability’, or the idea that only certain races were suited to the Canadian environment, was one of many eugenicist rationales underlying exclusionary immigration policies. The authors conclude by connecting past immigration policies to current debates, in which ‘code words of dependency and risk’ provide a connection to the explicit eugenicist rationales of the past.
Part 3 shifts the temporal focus to examine current forms of workplace discrimination. In ‘Battling the Warrior-Litigator’, Odelia Bay critiques the ideal of the unencumbered worker, which demands long hours and a ‘workaholic’ perspective. Bay analogizes the cases of chronically ill workers to the situation of caregivers, such as parents, and highlights the assumptions which connect the two groups: both are seen as less committed, less able, and less competent in the workplace. In the next chapter, Megan Rusciano examines income inequality through an analysis of Garrie v. Janus Joan Inc. This case alleged disability discrimination on the basis of a pay differential between disabled and non-disabled workers. Garrie, like her disabled colleagues, received a ‘training honorarium’ of $1.00 per hour in contrast to non-disabled employees earning the minimum wage or higher. Rusciano concludes that, of the legal pathways currently available, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, where Garrie’s case was heard, is the most promising legal route to reducing income inequality for disabled people. The final chapter looks at workers’ compensation and work-related injuries. Returning to an explicit historical materialist critique of capitalism, Eric Tucker demonstrates how workers’ compensation schemes reveal complicated tensions in the commodification of workers. Tucker provides both an overview of the development of workers’ compensation schemes and a detailed discussion of the complex relations between the commodification of labor under capitalism and workers’ compensation laws in Ontario.
This diverse array of articles is united by a strong adherence to the social model of disability. The works are also committed to connecting broad patterns of disability inequality to specific contexts, policies, and actors. Finally, and importantly, Disabling Barriers shares an intersectional perspective, with the majority of chapters considering the implications of race, class, and gender-based oppression.
Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, OR, Eugene, USA
[email protected]