Page 145 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | D sab l t es and the Med a

norMs and norMality
The word normal as “constituting, conforming to, not deviating or different from, the com-
mon type or standard, regular, usual” only enters the English language around 1840. (Pre-
viously, the word had meant “perpendicular”; the carpenter’s square, called a “norm,”
provided the root meaning.) Likewise, the word “norm,” in the modern sense, has only been
in use since around 1855, and “normality” and “normalcy” appeared in 1849 and 1857, re-
spectively. If the lexicographical information is relevant, it is possible to date the coming into
consciousness in English of an idea of “the norm” over the period 1840–1860.

On the “Normal” from Lennard Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the In-
vention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” in Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed. New York:
Routledge Press, 2006.

have brought more graphic visual representation of physical injury and disease
right into one’s living room and onto one’s computer screen. The media can be
said to have, on the one hand, contributed to familiarizing disability and making
it seem less strange. On the other hand, the very showing of images of “others”
can have the effect of turning persons with disabilities, whose visual appearance
is somehow different, into a “freak” on display.
The medical model of disability and the social model are two frameworks in
which disability can be understood. The term disability is itself a medical term
that suggests injury and that denotes and is connected to notions of cure. There-
fore, the term is often conceived of as a condition that can be fixed. In this model,
to be disabled is to be sick or physically ill; to be broken and in need of recovery
from the disability. Another model of disability is the social model, according
to which disability is socially and culturally constructed. The social construct
model takes into account societal and cultural meanings of impairment, health,
and disease; of how material conditions and the environment contribute to the
experience of being disabled; of what it means to have a physical, mental, or
cognitive condition that makes participation in so-called normal acts of society,
of human beings, difficult and even not possible.
Both models have limits. There are real physical and health aspects for per-
sons with disabilities, but societal perceptions of what it means to be disabled
also play into how persons with disability are viewed and treated, how decisions
about research are made, how services are devised and delivered, and how po-
litical policy is created and implemented.

rEPrEsEnTaTion, aDvoCaCy, anD sELF-aDvoCaCy

Persons with disabilities have often been seen as not only physically weak
but also cognitively and mentally impaired, as if cognitive and physical impair-
ment occur together. Advocates for disabled persons were first “able-bodied” or
nondisabled persons because it was thought that disabled persons lacked the
capacity to advocate and speak up for themselves. Charity organizations and