Browsing by Subject "ability"

My master's thesis is a study of citizenship and its ideals in disability policy from the perspective of critical ability studies. The main focus of ability studies is to analyze ableism and how it produces ideals of perfect humanness. Therefore, from the perspective of ableism these ideals produce disability and impairments as something intolerable as well as inherently and ontologically negative. My study focused on the disability policy paradigm as it is after the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities from the year 2006. The disability policy paradigm emphasizes both the rights of people with disabilities to full citizenship and their participation in society. The study data included 20 documents from European, national and municipal disability policies, released from 2006 onwards. In this study I explored how ableism defines the construction of full citizenship and how ableism affects individual's possibilities to participate as citizen according to the current disability policy. As my research method, I applied interpretative reading style based on the New Rhetoric. In the current disability policy paradigm the ideal of full citizenship is based on individualistic and neoliberalistic views, which emphasize self-mastery and independence. This ideal is impossible for people with disabilities because self-mastery and independence are defined as autonomy from other people and social services. Moreover, falling short from the ideal is located in ontologically negative space. Subsequently the bodies with impairments are always seen as imperfect and defective as well as economically burdening. Emphasizing the physical imperfectness of individuals defines their possibilities to participate in society because this participation is emulating the ideal. Also, the individuals with disabilities are forced to repeat their imperfectness in order to obtain social services, which enable participation. Ontological discrimination of people with disabilities is evident in the disability policy, even though it contradicts the aims of the policy.