Installment 2 rework

Ultimately, everyone wants to find a place where they belong in society, people with disabilities
included. Unfortunately, the majority of history concerning people with disabilities has been one
of exclusion and isolation. Most were either kept at home or sent to institutions because they
were seen as a burden not only on the family but on society as a whole. My disability history
begins in the 1980s.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a series of movements called the Disability
Rights Movement that focused on ending discrimination towards people with disabilities and
providing equal opportunities as well as access to schools and work places. Prior to this decade,
the majority of people with disabilities were excluded in society. The process of
institutionalization was still the mainstream means of caring for children with disabilities. This
meant sending the child to just thatan institution, which was usually a thinly disguised
hospital or sanitarium for crazy people. Since disability was thought of as a burden, the phrase
out of sight, out of mind became the mantra when it concerned persons with disabilities. These
places were often abusive to the people in their care.
Parents who didnt want to send their children to these places had to fight to get what
their children with special needs deserved. They were often the only family in a school with a
child with disabilities and had to search elsewhere for families in similar situations to create their
own community of support. The point being, neither schools, nor the workplace, were obligated
to provide accommodations for persons with disabilities. These people were not considered
people and could be turned away without a second glance. Throughout the 1960s and well
into the 1980s and 1990s, people with disabilities began demanding their rights to an equal
education, as well as proper accommodations in the workplace. In this era it became more

common for persons with disabilities to have a voice in society as well as being acknowledged as
people. These movements were finalized in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which were passed as laws in 1990. I was
three years old at the time. What these movements and acts have done, is enabled all persons
with disabilities to be socially successful.
Social success, to me, is defined as being able to express oneself and communicate, make
and maintain relationships, set boundaries within those relationships, be sensitive to the needs of
others, and be able to respectfully disagree with others, and also to handle stressful situations. As
for the world itself, some people would say that social success is being abled, this obviously does
not fit with persons who have disabilities, and yet everyone deserves to have a place within
society regardless of their ability. First of all, what does it mean to be abled? This definition
stems from history as someone who is normal. In this case an abled person has full
command of their five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch), as well as functions and
develops both mentally and physically at the same rate as his or her peers. Abled children hit the
developmental milestones when they are supposed to and go through the phases of life as theyre
supposed to. This definition, does not describe me, nor does it describe many others.
How, then, do persons with disabilities define social success? The Deaf Community
decided to create their own group of like people in order to succeed in a majority Hearing world.
Their world is full of people who all know sign language in one form or another and who all to
some extent grew up with or around Deafness. The community is close, many of its members
having attended schools for the Deaf as children. Social success to the Deaf, then, is having a
sense of community. Likewise, hearing people share a sense of community through music, radio,
film, and social media.

But what if you are hard of hearing? You are not completely d/Deaf, nor are you
completely hearing. In which group would you fit? The answer in neither, at least, not
completely; having a hearing loss makes you invisible (to an extent). You do not use sign
language, but you dont catch all of the conversation either. I am hard of hearing. Some of the
things I share with the hearing world are listening to music and the radio, and some of the things
I share with the Deaf world are ASL and closed captioning on films and television. People are
often surprised to learn that I have a hearing loss, largely because I dont sound like a Deaf
person when I speak, this is because I started losing my hearing around the age of four, after I
had acquired language. I did not get my first pair of hearing aids until first grade. There will
always be situations where I cannot hear best; they are usually situations and events that attract a
lot of people, like music concerts, restaurants, sporting events, and amusement parks. While
hearing aids do amplify sounds, they do not make specific sounds clearer. It is harder for me as a
person with a hearing loss to tune out background noise, like chatter from a food court or
cafeteria. While newer models of hearing aids have the technology to do this today, they did not
ten years ago (to me at least).
How does someone with a hearing loss get by in a crowded, loud, keep-up-with-the-pace world?
It is in no way easy. For example, there are a number of ways that I will need to advocate for
myself in order to be successful as a person with a hearing loss. The first is no bluffing; bluffing
in this case means acting like I do understand what someone has said when I really didnt, this
often happens with jokes in not hearing the punch line correctly. I will have to advocate for
myself by asking others to rephrase what theyve said, which will take patience; this act is
frustrating more often than not, but is necessary. The most important advocating I can do for
myself is not using my disability as a crutch.

My overarching theme didnt involve Disability Studies until I decided to incorporate my

cognitive disability, which changed the Identity aspect from a HH one to a Disabled one. In this
case, I went from specific to broad(er). The current conversation in Disability Studies is
attempting to move away from legal, psychological, medical, and scientific definition of
disability to an intersectional, cultural, social, and historical one. Disability Studies is a field of
study that focuses on how disability is defined in a society as well as represented.
History, for the most part, has othered people with disabilities through the societal view
as a burden. Unfortunately, this stereotype still exists today, largely through the influences of
Medicine, Psychology, and Science. The medical field takes the stance of a disability as
something that needs to be fixed. Doctors are taught to treat illnesses and disorders as
something that needs to be gotten rid of in order for the human body to function normally. In
this case, disabilities are considered in the same way, as something that needs to be reversed, if at
all possible, so the body can function as it is supposed to. This mode of thinking feeds into
ableist thinking and disability stereotypes by saying that a person who has a disability has
something wrong with them, and that something, be it deafness, blindness, or the use of a
wheelchair, is what makes them abnormal and, therefore, tragic. Psychology similarly takes
the fix it approach to disability but in the case of mental illnesses. Someone who has
Schizophrenia must take multiple medications to make the hallucinations go away so they can
function normally. A person with ADHD must take medication regularly so he or she can focus
and pay attention normally. The point is not how to learn to work with what is different, but
how to control it in order to give the appearance of normal functioning.

The legal world (to my current knowledge) defines disability vaguely, especially in the
ADA and IDEA. Court cases are done on an individual basis because each disability is different,
and each persons accommodations require different things.
The point of changing the definition of disability to cultural, social, and historical is to
place the person first and the disability second. A person with disabilities should be able to
define themselves first through their culture (how/where they grew up, family, beliefs, etc), their
history--personal, familial, racial, and otherwiseand social by the people in their lives and how
society at large affects them, and how their disability affects those identities.
In my experiences reading articles concerning this topic, the concern today is changing
how people with disabilities are represented be that in school, in literature, or other forms of
media. Another concern is getting people with disabilities to name and claim their various
experienced in an attempt to break stereotypes. Yet another concern is the labeling itself.
Terminology for disabled persons is still largely from the medical field which takes a negative
point of view, including the term disabled. The use of extremely negative terms for people
with disabilities has been termed ableist because it promotes the stereotypical attitude of
people with disabilities as burdens and tragic cases. Some terms that have been suggested to
replace the negative ones are differently abled, and Marie, who uses a wheelchair.