sitting here both in and witnessing discussions on the social model and it’s fascinating how much contention there is over including people with disabling chronic illnesses

I get it but also I don’t get it, just insofar as like, the primary contention seems to be over those who would resist versus those who need to assert (both not always successfully) that our bodies are inherent obstacles to action or ways of being

also—and it’s likely I’m overlooking a detail here about diagnostic specificity and stigma but idk—this is a place where eg U.K. legal definitions of disability end up being more capacious than what I’ve seen called “social model absolutism”

It seems perfectly conceptually coherent to me to have a disabling chronic illness where significant parts of that are about the world (understanding, flexibility, even basic shared stuff like being a mobility aid user & needing more “standard” access) but some of it is my body

Also I’m not wholly convinced that my chronic pain or chronic energy impairment or the ways they cycle through each other aren’t also at least partly socially constructed insofar as their magnitude and frequency and disruptiveness is socially produced or mediated

like if I had UBI and a reasonable expectation of pro disability accessible workplaces that acknowledged the value I can contribute despite having different chronologies around that, I suspect I’d have been able to do so so much more work on recovery or treatment or management

I guess what I’m learning from all this, which I suspect is connected to a phd thesis not about disability but about systemic ignorance as a form of injustice, is that I’m a lot less invested these days in trying to split the difference between the social and the non-social

Imagining just how much less exhaustion or pain there might be if i lived in a world where ME wasn’t systemically disbelieved & stigmatised or where the average diagnosis time for EDS wasn’t 17 years (!) and I’d had access to eg relevant medication & therapies much sooner

This isn’t to say we should stop having these discussions because they’re important and interesting

but it is to say that I suspect any attempt at hard lines between these two camps is going to be problematic insofar as it tends to occlude this

Also, from a chat this morning w @R_J_Chapman who has good reasons for rejecting the social model:

What if we need multiple models, like one that tracks what we think the ontology really is and another that tracks what the ontology is (perniciously, usually) perceived to be

This is a real outcome of the thesis kinda point but I wonder a lot if in constructing these models and trying to make them fit both for what we take as ideals and as actuals, we end up denying ourselves the tools to deal with what is actually causing us problems

So eg Robert sent me a link where the claim is that disability should be taken as difference and not as a minority rights kind of conceptualisation, because the latter displays a kind of species essentialism

okay but what if disability as an oppressive structure does that too

it might be that an ideal metaphysics of disability doesn’t reproduce essentialisms—seems not just fine but good! but it may be that to navigate the actual production of disability in terms of social imaginaries, shifting to our ideal won’t alone help us think thru our actual

This is a really big problem especially the more invested one is within what are basically liberal conceptualisations of both society and politics but also theorising about society and politics, imo

Chatting to my partner about this and he has a good question about the extent to which a lot of this debate turns on questions of phenomenology versus social ontology