Disability and Discourse Analysis

Jan Grue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317150428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Disabilities in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Disability studies has engaged with discourse analysis in key works both from the UK and the USA. While the perspectives and analyses of discourse analysis have proved well suited for exploring disability, however, its methods have not been sufficiently developed in a disability studies context. Conversely, discourse analysts have traditionally been concerned with social issues and fields in which asymmetric power relations, marginalization, and discrimination play a central role, e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, all of which share many analytical features with disability. But although efforts have been made to integrate disability into the discourse analysis and conversation analysis canon, the link between the two fields needs to be strengthened. This ground-breaking volume contributes to this link by thoroughly applying the analytical vocabulary of discourse analysis to issues that are central to the field of disability studies. It strengthens disability studies by supplying case studies of representations and constructions of disability and disabled people in discourse, theorizes the role played by language in the social construction of disability, and makes disability a more salient topic for discourse analysts.

Chapter 1
Why Discourse Analysis? Disability and Language

Some years ago, while studying at the University of California at Berkeley, I came across a sign on a bathroom stall. The sign requested that I please leave the stall unoccupied, as a courtesy to “the disabled”. From a certain perspective, this request could be construed as a little bit puzzling. Not only was it unclear how any disabled people would benefit from the stall leaving unoccupied – specifically, myself; as a wheelchair user, I would have preferred to use it, since it was the only wheelchair accessible stall in the bathroom.

A more reasonable reader, of course, would assume that the sign addressed a non-disabled audience. But not all disabled readers remain reasonable after many years of being talked about rather than being talked to. The building where I live, in Oslo, has a courtyard where parking is strictly prohibited – except in cases of “transportation of goods and the handicapped”. The discourse of disability has a long history of not involving disabled people as addressees or people with independent agency, but as clients, recipients, beneficiaries, and transportable goods – as objects and as predicates. As Henri-Jacques Stiker argued a generation ago, disability continues to signify difference and alterity:

Isn’t the first question […] this one: why is disability called ‘dis-ability’? […] When we name, we point up a difference. […] It is the wonderful clarity of the opening books of the Bible in which God distinguishes, separates, differentiates by naming, to the point where to create is to separate; we also see one being (Eve) come out of another (Adam) but affirmed as Difference even in the name that is cried out. (Stiker, 1999 [1982]: 5)

This book is about disability and language, and its interests are primarily in language in use, as it can be found in social, institutional, and political contexts. It is about the kind of socio-political stories told about disabled people, and about the kind of socio-political stories disabled people tell about themselves. A major premise of the book is that stories and representations also constitute arguments, whether implicitly or explicitly, and so come to express something not only about how the world is, but about how it should be. This requires nuance in analysis:

[A]n effective approach to the politics of disability narrative needs to be localized culturally and historically. There is no universal narrative that can do justice to the variegated historical patterning of its material meanings. (Snyder & Mitchell, 2000: 164)

Here, the shorthand for such representational, narrative/argumentative, contextualized language is “discourse”. We are dealing with texts, whether oral or written, in context. Texts are coherent symbolic representations of the world, and they are produced by social agents, for other social agents. From this perspective, the study of language is inevitably tied in with the study of society and social phenomena. The discourse perspective makes research questions out of how and to what extent epithets, insults, and slurs denote disabled people and impairments. Those questions must necessarily involve social context, for example, people’s social background, comparable trends in abusive language related to sexuality, gender, or ethnicity, and relevant legislation and political action on such questions.

From a discourse perspective it could be just as interesting, however, to examine the grammatical forms in which disabled people are cast in media reports, as compared to other groups. Are disabled people chiefly active or chiefly passive, and under what conditions – in which textual roles? Do they usually appear as victims, as heroes, as the subjects of interviews, as professionals, at the centre or the periphery of stories? A discourse-analytical approach to disability potentially encompasses the full range of language functions, and the full range of interaction between language, language users, and the world, that produce the words, concepts and frames of thought that are integral to disability and disabled experience.

Disability scholars have long been interested in language, partly because so much of the language associated with disability has, in many societies over a relatively brief period of time, changed so profoundly. In Norway, which is my home country and the source of many examples in this book, the current and preferred term for disabled people, funksjonshemmede, (literally “those hindered in function(s)”), dates back only about 50 years, and has only recently come to supplant handikappede, which in turn forced out vanfør (“mis-capable”, closer in meaning to “invalid”). Similar shifts, roughly speaking, away from terms focused entirely on bodies and towards terms that have an interactional component, are probably familiar to readers in many countries.

Aside from such glaring examples, however, there is a rich history of disability and discourse studies. In the fourth edition of The Disability Studies Reader, Lennard Davis argues that disability cannot be understood without first understanding its prerequisite discourse of normality and the normal. What is meant when someone says or writes “disabled” is not primarily determined by that term itself, but by its relationship to the standard or norm from which it marks deviation:

[Even] in texts that do not appear to be about disability, the issue of normalcy is fully deployed. [… The] very term that permeates our contemporary life – the normal – is a configuration that arises in a particular historical moment. (Davis, 2013b: 12)

Another example: on the back cover of their anthology, simply called Disability Discourse, Mairian Corker and Sally French posed the question of how a social theory of disability might fully incorporate “the multidimensional and multifunctional role of language”. In their introduction to that volume, they began to answer that question by drawing on what was then another emerging discipline of discourse analysis. Citing key figures in discourse analysis such as Norman Fairclough, Teun van Dijk, Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter, they argued that Disability Studies must reclaim discourse (Corker & French, 1999: 6), an act which entails close linguistic analysis as well as a social theory of language use. Words like “disability” derive their meaning-in-use from their hegemonic opposite numbers, like “normal”, but also from their traditional and conventional usage contexts. This suggests the need to bring non-traditional thematic areas within the analytical scope of Disability Studies, and to introduce disability as an analytically relevant concept into new areas.

The Corker & French anthology provides many instructive examples of how language (and other forms of representation, e.g. film) informs and influences the concept of disability. Their work forms, as I see it, part of a broader effort to continually and persistently de-naturalize disability as well as related words and concept. This book is a contribution to those efforts.

Analysing disability from a discourse perspective is a matter of continually redirecting one’s attention (and the reader’s) to context and usage, partly because usage-in-context has real political implications. In this regard, my view of what discourse is and why it is important differs from, for example, Shakespeare (2013: 2), who sees discourse studies and discourses analysis as focusing representations to such an extent that important political issues become obscured. But discourse analysis is, besides other things, a tool for explicating political issues and conflicts. An example: as I began to write this book, a controversy over rising building costs played out in the Norwegian media. Several major construction companies protested new regulations which mandate universal design in new private residence, arguing: a) that the prohibitive costs would have to be passed on to consumers; b) the regulations were being enforced because of the needs of a very small number of wheelchair users. While the technical and financial aspects of the debate are too complex to recount here, I will point out that the builders’ arguments were predicated on a narrow construal of “the disabled” as wheelchair users – one related, in key ways, to the bathroom stall sign in Berkeley. This argument, which at the time of writing appears to have persuaded the right-wing Norwegian government, should be met with a number of political tools, including activism, litigation, and lobbyism – all of which operate through discourse.

“The disabled” tend to occupy the communicative position of third parties, even as they become scapegoats. They are an unpredictable quantity – an x-factor. The group of people to which the label refers can be construed as quite large (if they are to be represented as a threat to the economic wellbeing of the nation) or as quite small (if they are making demands). This is a matter of context, and circumstances, which inform language use.

My approach in this book draws mainly on a particular form of discourse analysis – Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), but I will also refer to works that employ or advance what I think of as an ecumenical discourse-analytical perspective on disability. This includes works that explicitly approach the concept of discourse from other angles than my own, for example from the perspective of literary criticism, cultural studies and narrative analysis (Snyder & Mitchell, 2000), but also works that display similar methodology and analytical purpose to that of discourse analysis while not invoking the concept at all, e.g. Oliver (1990).

In the case of the former, my primary rationale is that “discourse” is loosely defined even in CDA literature, which is commonly described as an “approach” with a “toolbox” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009) rather than a narrow school of research. CDA and the related discourse-historical approach have many antecedents, ancestors and close cousins, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. They employ, mutatis mutandi, concepts from literary studies, sociology, and, not least, rhetoric, for good reason: What is essentially an interpretive scholarly effort, with a strong hermeneutical component, should not forgo the use of proven interpretive tools for the sake of a toolkit that is exclusively its own. Drawing on works from closely related scholarly traditions is a source of strength, so long as the aims and constraints of those traditions are kept in mind.

In the case of the latter, i.e. works that do not use the concept of “discourse” at all, Michael Oliver’s analyses of the OPCS form sent out to disabled people serves the purposes I have already discussed. In the questions posed on that form, everyday problems are construed as stemming from impairments. In Oliver’s rephrasing of the questions, the problems are reconfigured as stemming from the organization of society. The rephrasing draws attention to context and conventions of usage, showing that the location of “the problem” is a matter of how one represents the world, and what direction of argument one employs. This is an example of precisely what discourse analysis should do: Look closely at texts, and tease out the implications of how people, and the world, are represented in those texts.

A Note on Language and Culture

Like many Norwegians, I primarily talk, write and – to some extent – think in Norwegian and English. These two languages both belong to the Indo-European language family, both share a heritage from their common Germanic ancestor, and are spoken, if we restrict ourselves to Norway and England, in societies with many shared features that impact the lives of disabled people and perceptions of disability. These features include a strong and relatively centralized state, a tradition of government-financed health care and welfare services, and a strong civil society of non-governmental organizations representing various segments of the population.

Even in the comparison between these two (fairly) closely related countries, however, significant differences emerge almost immediately. The organization and financing of various governmental and non-governmental operations notwithstanding, differences between the two areas of linguistic practice are evident on the level of classification and conceptualization. In English, the words “disability” and “impairment” are commonly used to refer to a social phenomenon and a biophysical phenomenon respectively. In Norwegian, that distinction used to be less clear, in that the commonly used word for both phenomena was funksjonshemning.

To an extent, this reflects the modelling of disability that will be discussed further in Chapter 2. The conceptual distinction between bodily impairment and socially imposed disability is absolutely central to the classical version of the British social model of disability, while the Norwegian “gap” model requires primarily a notion of disablement produced in the interaction between individuals and structures.

However, neither languages nor societies are static. Over the last decade and a half, Norway has adopted more of a rights-based, social model-influence approach to disability, and with it has come the Norwegian equivalent of the impairment/disability distinction: to funksjonshemning has been added funksjonsnedsettelse. The literal meaning of funksjonshemning is “function-hindrance”, while funksjonsnedsettelse means “function-lowering”. In practice, the two Norwegian terms are often confused. “Disability” and “impairment” are of course used inaccurately or interchangeably in English too, but the two compound words in Norwegian add to the problem with their shared first component.

The ongoing changes in Norwegian disability-related language are, from a discourse analytic point of view, indicative of two mechanisms: the way in which social reality both produces and is produced by language (Fairclough, 1992, 2001 [1989]; Fairclough, Cortese, & Ardizzone, 2007). The introduction (first and foremost in governmental/departmental documents) of a distinct term for “impairment” coincides with an orientation towards a rights-based international discourse on disability, but it also overlaps with the slow growth of a Norwegian identity-based disability movement, and the partial success of independent living organizations which are very much invested in promoting disability-related language that focuses on citizenship and anti-discrimination. The social changes are expressed through and formulated in language which promotes and constrains certain aspects of those changes.

Ultimately, the new Norwegian set of words cannot mean exactly the same as the English words. They carry with them their national context of use and their etymology. Moreover, if we accept what has been a fundamental premise of systematic language study ever since the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale nearly a century ago, namely that the meaning of a word is not contained within the word itself, but depends on its relationship with other words, then the entirety of the Norwegian and English language is potentially relevant for decoding their meaning.

I mention this in order to stress the difficulty of talking, writing, and thinking about “disability” in the abstract. Disability is a concept and a category, but it is also a word, and words have a tendency to take on more weight than they can support. “A disabled person” has no clearer referent than “A French person”, but both phrases will tend to summon up, in the minds of readers, a referent of some sort. Is your “disabled person” the same as my “disabled person”? We won’t know that until we’ve checked; if we can’t check, the best we can do is provide an educated guess. It is not accidental that the World Health Organization calls some groups of disabled people “classic”, meaning wheelchair users, hearing impaired people, and visually impaired people (WHO, 2011). Neither is it accidental that the next sentence in its World Report on Disability stresses the need not to restrict our mental images of disabled people only to the “classic” types.

Definitions of disability vary across the world. This book cannot, and will not attempt to, summarize or systematically examine them all. My examples of language use will be drawn primarily from Scandinavia, the UK, and the US, since these represent the societies, with corresponding languages, with which I am most familiar. Additional examples will be examples drawn from the rapidly growing part of Disability Studies that investigates other societies and languages. Throughout the book, however, I will try to keep in mind – and I will as the reader to try to keep in mind – that disability is not any one thing, neither in the world nor in texts. The multiple functions of language, and the ensuing multiplicity of meaning, demand this of us.

Origins of Discourse Analysis

I have already mentioned the problematic definitions of “discourse” and “discourse analysis”; now it is time to attempt a clear definition of both, as well as a brief sketch of their scholarly origins. Since this book is about one type – or rather, certain types – of discourse, the sketch is intended as background, and as a tool for contextualizing the approaches and attitudes to language that define the enterprise of discourse analysis.

First, I’ll note that discourse analysis is a scholarly field, which emerged a few decades ago, through

[…] the launch of [Teun] van Dijk’s journal Discourse and Society (1990) as well as through [the publication of] several books, like Language and Power by Norman Fairclough (1989), Language, Power and Ideology by Ruth Wodak (1989) or Teun van Dijk’s first book on racism, Prejudice in Discourse (1990). (Wodak, 2001a: 4)

CDA is a field in the sense that it is defined by certain institutions, practices, power relations, and agents. It isn’t legally restricted in the way that, say, the medical field is – if you want to practice discourse analysis or say you are a discourse analyst, nobody can prevent you from doing so. However, there are certain symbolic goods that are much more restricted, including university degrees and publication in peer-reviewed journals. Access to these goods, which are necessary in order to be a discourse analyst in good standing – a discourse analyst accepted as such by other discourse analysts – is only available once you have mastered certain conventions of the field and its practices, particularly an analytical vocabulary and accompanying methods of research. The analytical vocabulary and analytical practices, along with many other things, separate the field of discourse analysis from neighbouring fields, as well as providing a sense of commonality among those who do identify themselves as discourse analysts.

The same point, of course, applies to disability research. There are university courses, programmes, and journals in Disability Studies, and there are ways of writing and thinking about disability that are common to some people but not others. Disability is not by any means an exclusive topic of Disability Studies – it is also a topic of medicine and law, in addition to many other fields – and so it is important to keep in mind that fields are not the same as their topic, but represent certain kinds of interest in topics.

The field of discourse analysis is defined partly by an interest in power and power relations as they are produced and reproduced by language. There are many reasons for this. Discourse analysis has, at the very least, origins in social theory, the history of ideas, and linguistic research. I will discuss some of the ways in which these origins influence current practices of discourse analysis, and some of the re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Why Discourse Analysis? Disability and Language
• 2 Models, Theories, and Perspectives: A Discourse Approach to Disability and Disability Studies
• 3 Medical Discourses of Disability
• 4 Political and Economic Discourses and the Limits of Language
• 5 Counting as Disabled: Discourses of Identity
• 6 Media Discourse and Popular Representation
• A Final Note
• Bibliography
• Index