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The exam it is impossible to pass
Published in Beverley Clough, Jonathan Herring, Disability, Care and Family Law, 2021
Before that, however, it is useful to begin with a brief outline of the controversy we sidestepped earlier, namely the nature of disability. The extremes of this debate are occupied by those who believe in a medical construction of disability on the one hand, and those who suggest that disability is socially constructed on the other. Both models implicitly suggest a lesser expectation of the disabled. The medical model does so because a disability is viewed as an approximate equivalent to an ailment that requires care and an understanding that the sufferer might not manage as well as a healthy person would. The social construction model makes this lesser expectation more explicit but instead lays the blame at the door of societal attitudes to disability.
Introduction
Published in Gerry R. Cox, Neil Thompson, Death and Dying, 2020
It is for this reason that sociology relies heavily on the concept of “social construction.” Thompson (2018a) explains it in the following terms: Social construction has two main meanings that are separate, but related. First, it refers to how certain things are created by society – they are, to use Durkheim’s phrase, social facts. Social institutions are an example of this. For instance, the law is socially constructed, in the sense that, if there were no society, there would be no law (and no need for law)…. Social construction can also be used in a separate but related sense to refer to the process whereby certain social facts are defined by society (or, more specifically, through social processes …). For example, there is a common tendency to see childhood as a distinct phase in human development and therefore to see children as distinct from adults. However, on closer inspection, we can see that childhood is socially constructed – that is, the idea that children are distinct from adults is something that has been defined societally.(p. 40) This key idea of social construction is one that we will come back to at various points in the chapters that follow, as it is a central feature of what sociology has to offer in terms of taking forward our understanding of death and dying.
Psychological Recovery of Women with Cervical Cancer: The Role of Cultural Beliefs
Published in Walter J. Lonner, Dale L. Dinnel, Deborah K. Forgays, Susanna A. Hayes, Merging Past, Present, and Future in Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2020
This causal search is not confined solely to specific medical explanations of the health problem. Patients also try to comprehend their illness experience within the larger social and cultural context (Radley, 1994). Each culture has its own belief system and the meaning of the illness is based on the socio-religious belief system prevalent in a particular culture. The way in which people react to a major life crisis, such as cancer, would depend on the theories and beliefs which people of a particular culture hold about the world and their illness. The connotation of disease is unique to the particular cultural context. Wortman (1983) posited that patients’ beliefs about the world play an important role in shaping their reactions to sudden onset of illness or disability and hence the subsequent recovery process. Thus, a patient’s explanation for illness etiology is often a social construction derived from the cultural models of illness. In the Indian setting, the research evidence suggests that tragic life events are more often attributed to metaphysical beliefs, that is belief in Karma, God’s will and fate (Dalai, 1989; Mishra, 1997). Such metaphysical beliefs help people to accept their present suffering and keeps their hope alive for better future (Radhakrishnan, 1926).
Experiences of Personal and Vicarious Victimization for Black Adults with Serious Mental Illnesses: Implications for Treating Socially-engineered Trauma
Published in Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2022
Melissa Edmondson Smith, Rohini Pahwa, Geoffrey Harrison, Wendy E. Shaia, Tanya L. Sharpe
Intersectionality theory posits that multiple identities related to discrimination, power, and privilege influence a person’s social, economic and political positions (Anderson & Collins, 2016; Crenshaw, 1990). Two such identities, that of race and disability in various forms have historically intersected and negatively impacted people of color and, in particular, Black populations socially and economically (Charlton, 2000; Erevelles & Minear, 2010). More specifically, mental illness, as a form of disability, and race intertwine on a systemic and structural level. Dominant narratives in U.S. history demonstrate that the social construction of mental illness is inextricably linked to perceptions of violent and hostile tendencies in Black populations (Kanani, 2011; Metzl, 2010;). For example, Only during the civil-rights era did emerging scientific understandings of schizophrenia become enmeshed in a set of historical currents that marked particular bodies, and particular psyches, as crazy in particular ways. The tensions of that era then changed the associations that many Americans made about persons with schizophrenia. Ultimately, recent American racial history altered more than the meaning of mental illness: it changed the meaning of mental health as well. (Metzl, 2010)
Racial discrimination and disability among Asian and Latinx populations in the United States
Published in Disability and Rehabilitation, 2022
Kyle Waldman, Andrew Stickley, Beverly Araujo Dawson, Hans Oh
While not formally addressed in this study, it is important to acknowledge the overrepresentation of people of color among those labeled as disabled. Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit) [21–23] is important in this regard, as it explores the mechanisms by which race and ability are socially constructed and interdependent, explicating the processes through which people of color are simultaneously raced and disabled [22]. The implementation of DisCrit in applied work on health highlights how the social construction of disability is inherently racial. Specifically, the white dominant class sets the standard to which all other bodies and minds are compared, and often one’s disability status is a function of being able to successfully navigate a white-dominated society. Historically, perceived physical and mental differences across racial groups were explained using pseudo-science, creating “objective” evidence of white superiority. Such “evidence” reified and propagated racist notions of disability through clinical assessment practices, laws, policies, and programs that continue to advantage able-bodied white people [24–26]. Moreover, while racial discrimination can lead to disability through physiological pathways, it is also true that racist institutions, structures, and systems shape definitions of disability – a status that can further elicit racial discrimination.
Radical “Boyhood” Futures for the Twenty-First Century, or, Pinocchio (Finally) Gets His Phallus
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2019
Like Salamon (2010), I am sympathetic to the political aims of such projects, which lend credibility and authenticity to the experience of gender that some trans* folks have with and through their bodies (p. 41). However, such a place of “plenitude” outside meaning, language, the symbolic, and so on ultimately can only be one of abjection, psychoanalytically speaking (p. 41). Social construction is not equal to queer theory or “performativity,” though it is thoroughly related to both, not fictional or less important than our theorizing about sexed and gendered bodies. Rather, social construction is defined as how our bodies are “always shaped by the social world in which we are inescapably situated” (p. 76). It isn’t possible or desirable to extract the body from social relations or cultural images either. However, importantly, neither can we say that the social world is the only determining factor of gender and sexual identity. Following the work of intersex theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) and many others, I argue instead for the view that the material body and psychic processes both play a role in the formation of gender, and yet they intertwine and form a complex weave that is impossible to clearly separate. I address here the ways that images, cultural production, and community support help trans* subjects to conceive of boyhood possibilities that integrate the body and the psyche, and go beyond “phallic narcissism-qua-masculinity,” which is so often the sole determining factor of one’s manhood or boyhood.