“What Will You Gain When You Lose?”: Disability Gain, Creativity, & Human Difference
By nbarkerNovember 28, 2014 - 20:34
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As society frames it, disability is a loss and a deficit—seemingly pathological in its very existence. This is also the personal experience of a large portion of the disability community. Acquired disability is perhaps the best example of this: many people, your author included, experience acquired disability as a profound sense of loss, and a source of despair.
What if, instead, we reframed disability of all kinds as a source of gain, as the Deaf community has? This is a large part of the mission of the Disability Studies field, seeking to reframe disability as not just a loss, a deficit, but instead an expression of human difference and variation, and thus a valuable part of the human experience.