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"The other day I was thinking of writing an essay on being a cripple. I was thinking hard in one of the stalls of the women's room in my office building, as I was shoving my shirt into my jeans and tugging up my zipper. Preoccupied, I flushed, picked up my book bag, took my cane down from the hook, and unlatched the door. So many movements unbalanced me, and as I pulled the door open, I fell over backward, landing fully clothed on the toilet seat with my legs splayed in front of me: the old beetle-on-its-back routine. Saturday afternoon, the building deserted, I was to free to laugh aloud as I wriggled back to my feet, my voice bouncing off the yellowish tiles from all directions. Had anyone been there with me, I'd have been still and faint and hot with chagrin.

"I decided that it was high time to write the essay. First, the matter of semantics. I am a cripple. I choose this word to name me. I choose from among several possibilities, the most common of which are handicapped and disabled. I made the choice a number of years ago, without thinking, unaware of my motives for doing so. Even now, I'm not sure what those motives are, but I recognise that they are complex and not entirely flattering. People -- crippled or not -- wince at the word cripple, as they do not at handicapped or disabled. Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a touch -sic- customer, one to whom the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger." (1986, p. 9).

While Phillips' very titles may imply an evaluation of the particular strategies, it is clear from her own caveats that while many may try to impose their terminology as 'the correct language', 'None feel really right' (Peters 1986a, p. 5).

The ultimate question, of course, is whether any of these renaming procedures, singly and alone, can deal with the connotational and generalisation issues discussed previously. I would argue that the context of usage may be every bit as important (as Phillips 1986 implies) as the specific terminology. Thus one of the reasons for all the negative associations to many terms is a result of such contexts. Here social scientists, researchers, and clinicians are particularly at fault in their medicalising of disability (Zola 1972; Illich 1977; Conrad and Schneider 1980). In conversation, but more importantly, in their writings and thus in the transmission of these writings by the popular press and media, people with varying diseases and disabilities are inevitably referred to as 'patients', a term which describes a role, a relationship, and a location (i.e. in an institution or a hospital) from which many connotations, as previously noted, flow. For the thirty-six million people now designated as having a physical, mental, or biological disability, only a tiny proportion are continually resident in and under medical supervision and thus truly 'a patient'. Similarly, the terms 'suffering from', 'afflicted with' are projections and evaluations of an outside world. No person with a disability is automatically 'suffering' or 'afflicted' except in certain time-bound situations where they do indeed 'hurt', are 'in pain, or 'feel victimised'.

I am not arguing, however, for the complete elimination of medical or physical terminology for as De Felice cautions, 'The disabled movement has purchased political visibility at the price of physical invisibility. The crippled and lame had bodies, but the handicapped, or so the social workers say, are just a little late at the starting gate. I don't like that; it's banal. When we speak in metaphorical terms, we deny physical reality. The farther we get from our bodies, the more removed we are from the body politic. . .' (De Felice 1986).

One meaning I derive from his caution is that we must seek a change in the connotations and pervasiveness of our names without denying the essential reality of our conditions. Thus biology may not determine our destiny; but as with women, our physical, mental, and biological differences are certainly part of that destiny (Fine and Asch 1985). A way of contextualising our relationship to our bodies and our disabilities may not be in changing terms but in changing grammars. Our continual use of nouns and adjectives can only perpetuate the equation of the individual equalling the disability. No matter what noun we use, it substitutes one categorical definition for another. An adjective, while a 'modifier' of a noun, still colours and thus connotes the essential quality of the noun it modifies. Such adjectives as 'misshapen', 'deformed', 'defective', 'invalid' -- far from connoting a specific quality of the individual -- tend to taint the whole person. The same is true with less charged terms. Thus 'a disabled car' is one which has totally broken down. Could 'a disabled person' be perceived as anything less? Prepositions, on the other hand, imply both 'a relationship to' and 'a separation from'. At this historical juncture the awkwardness in phrasing that often results may be all to the good, for it makes the user and the hearer stop and think about what is meant, as in the terms 'people of colour' and 'persons with a disability'.