Sociální konstruktivismus v disability studies
Title in English | Social Constructionism in Disability Studies |
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Authors | |
Year of publication | 2025 |
Type | Requested lectures |
MU Faculty or unit | |
Citation | |
Description | After social constructivism was extensively applied first to the concept of race and then to the concept of gender, academics and activists in the field of disability theory also adopted its tools. Following the above-mentioned frameworks, they aim to "denaturalize" the category of disability and promote the view that disability is not an objective physiological or mental dysfunction, but a category produced by societal prejudice and discrimination. According to this view, what objectively exists—independent of human attitudes—are simply various bodies and forms of human difference, none of which are better or worse, normal or dysfunctional. However, social constructivism in disability theory encounters a fundamental problem: some disabilities cause pain, others significantly shorten life, and the most tragic of them lead to a swift death. These "hard facts" have led some theorists to revise social constructivism and adopt a hybrid approach, which holds that disability has a physiological or mental basis (a dysfunction), but that many prejudices and discriminatory attitudes accumulate around it—often worse than the dysfunction itself. Yet there are those who downplay the harmful consequences of some disabilities and claim that even pain and death are socially constructed. In this paper, I will focus on some of these authors and show that their views are a) literally absurd and b) completely undermine the original motivations of disability studies. |
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