Unmaking the other? Discourses in intellectual disability in contemporary society
Creators: name: Quibell, Ruth
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: Unmaking the Other? is a qualitative sociological analysis of the discourses of intellectual disability present in contemporary Australian society. It attempts to reveal the ways that people with intellectual disabilities 'are' for Australians. This is important because people with intellectual disabilities have a long history of being seen as 'other' or 'not one of us'. For many years they were kept 'out of sight, and out of mind' on the margins of our communities, locked in institutions or hidden in sheltered workshops. Yet, during the last few decades there has been a concerted effort to bring people with intellectual disabilities back into society. Institutions and sheltered workshops closed, and policies of inclusion, normalisation and community living were vigorously pursued. People with intellectual disabilities are now equal citizens in the eyes of the law. But how readily have we accepted that people with intellectual disability are 'one of us'? Have community living reforms overturned deep cultural dispositions that cast people with intellectual disabilities as 'lesser', 'defective', and lacking personhood? This thesis investigates recent community living reforms, especially the assumption that inclusion and education would radically transform our conceptualisations of people with intellectual disabilities. To do this, it draws on contemporary social and political theory to explore how the meanings of disability are created and maintained, focusing on the Foucauldian concept of discourse. This Foucauldian theorisation of discourse, power and knowledge informs a methodology devised to provide a more detailed and sophisticated analysis of the meanings of intellectual disability than previous investigations. Texts from three key social arenas are analysed for the way in which our society constructs intellectual disability, and these analyses lead to a number of theoretical and practical conclusions. Specifically, the main contributions of this thesis are: the identification and analysis of fourteen distinct discourses of intellectual disability, the theoretical explication of their relations to one another, and theoretical discussion of what their presence reveals about intellectual disability in today's Australia. The findings of a variety of discursive constructions of intellectual disability suggest a complex picture in which discourses of inclusion and membership have emerged that are consistent with community living reforms, while at the same time there has been a continuation of discourses that view people with intellectual disabilities as defective humans. Drawing on theory and empirical evidence, possibilities are suggested for further political and educational interventions into the discursive construction of people with intellectual disabilities. The problems posed by our attempts at liberation through community living reforms are major; this thesis contributes to this task by revealing the complexity, contradictions, and resistances inherent in this task. What is more, it sees these findings not as causes for dismay, but as reasons for cautious hope.