you are asking the wrong questions of the social model

(so you are getting the wrong answers)

As my evening coffee was brewing last night, I took a little time to think over one of my favorite recent reads: this article, Therapy Was Never Secular, by hannah baer in Jewish Currents. In the article, baer –– a student/practitioner of psychoanalysis –– makes a multifold argument in favor of acknowledging the role of the spiritual in therapeutic practice. More specifically, she points out the antisemitic demonization of psychoanalysis, inasmuch as psychoanalysis was and continues to be rooted in Jewish theological and cultural traditions. She expresses rightful concern over an isolationist, hypermodern, and scientized view of disability that has become increasingly mainstream with the rise of therapy apps and technologized “wellness” initiatives. Noting that the Jewish roots of psychoanalysis are necessarily rooted in the communal and collective, baer outlines the necessity of a spiritually, collectively-informed healing practice (and as such, I add, praxis) that reflects what it really means to be alive. To live is to be multiple, to be messy, and to be interconnected across spacetime. Under this intersubjective paradigm, the idea that I can CBT my Madmind into submission is pretty laughable. Or deeply frightening, if an authority mandates it.

If you'll forgive the very quick gloss of a truly fabulous article, I want to link this piece up to an article of discourse that, rather embarrassingly, surfaces every few social media cycles, much to the irritation of many who practice/think with disability studies (here is an illuminating twitter thread that partially inspired this post). I am referring to the reductionist binary of "Medical Model" versus "Social Model" of disability. Between disabled people claiming that they are "pro-Medical Model" simply because they believe correctly that pain and distress are material realities, to those claiming that there ought to be (or even could be) a centrist middle-ground between these two (of many!) models, we've backed ourself into an unfortunate game of telephone that we can't quite seem to hang up. All of this, despite the fact that debates over models of disability predate my own existence in the world, and that we are all very, very tired.

First, the "what." This 2005 article in Disability Studies Quarterly –– a fully open-access and screen-reader accessible journal that remains at the forefront of critical disability scholarship –– gives a good summary of the histories and politics of the two respective models, but there is a veritable garden of literature –– good and bad –– available to read on this. Below, I'm going to sum up each in my own terms, but I encourage you to do your own research to gain others’ perspectives on each.

The Medical Model is the one traditionally utilized by hegemonic medical authorities. It posits disability as an individual, isolated defect to be erased/corrected within individual bodyminds. At its most extreme, this approach to disability allows for the complete elision of social factors (marginality, location, lived experience) in understanding the etiology of disability –– that is, disability’s causes and contextual influences.

On the other hand, the Social Model frames disability explicitly through the lens of social, material conditions (marginality, location, lived experience, etc.). It allows us to think through disability as a product of the built world, a socially contingent axis of oppression rather than a static, inherent truth. Disabled subcultures such as the Deaf and autistic communities have argued that d/Deafness and autism, respectively, are no longer "disabling" in medical terms when accommodated by a transformed society –– one in which hearing or neurotypical ways of running are not prioritized. The Social Model is one of many meaningful ways to explore these conversations. It is also an opportunity to see disability differently, and to approach bodymind difference in a hostile world in ways that are not destructive (curative-eugenic) but (re)constructive.

Then, of course, there's the social media interpretation, which, in my observation, has included a general rehashing of the very sound objections raised against the social model in academic discourse decades ago, except truncated and shared by those without a grasp of what they're criticizing. There are a lot of reasons why this is happening, namely, the partial-truths (I deliberately avoid using the dreaded “nuance” here) circulated on social media without the liberation of –– or appropriate attention to –– scholarly resources from the halls and journals of academia. This creates a two-tiered system of conversation wherein those without institutional access are deprived of information. (I will attempt to write my rage at the epistemically violent paywalling of "scholarly" knowledge another day.) Another part of it is the way DS and other disciplines are often taught within institutions –- queer/gender studies friends might find it analogous to that tired, simplistic story of the "invention" of homosexuality in the 19th century clinic. We teach simple histories to those just starting out, which, while easier in the short-term, requires problematization and un/re-teaching years later. Except, most 101 students aren't going to become specialists, and thus won’t get the opportunity to unlearn... you get the idea. (Okay, I'm going to corral this thought for now.)

To return to the title of this post, the way of looking at the Social Model that has generated so much rancor is one which argues that the claim that disability is socially constructed is a claim that the material realities associated with disabling experiences, conditions, and bodymind statuses aren't real, or could be, in an imagined utopia, "cured." I increasingly view this as an attempt to apply the individualist and doctrinal logics of the Medical Model to a model that objects to individualism and doctrine altogether. If, following baer, there is no "recovery" alone, absent trails of spacetimes otherwise, absent communities whose norms and architectures continuously reinvent us, we must understand that a social model of disability is not one with which we can make claims about societies that do not exist, but simply observe the material realities of those that do.

I have no idea of what a "post-revolutionary" future might look like, other than that I am skeptical that "post-revolution" is a meaningful term at all. What I do know is that the conditions under which we currently live are not necessary, and that this mutability means that my own conditions –– my own abilities, my own needs –– are mutable too. I once believed I would never be loved, because adults around me claimed that the real world was not mine. I am loved. I have a community. I have friends who will carry my bags when I am in pain, provide me safe, quiet spaces to be free of noise, who will move meetings and meet-ups and change plans if and as my bodymind changes shapes. I am living in the real world because many worlds are possible. Including a world in which I am disabled, and I am not defective, not past hope, not past sociality, but held by those who know I'm worth it.

A medicalized approach to disability –– or, in Baer's case, specifically to Madness –– circumscribes the possibility of care, of genuine, collective holding. This view narrows the constraints of the acceptable and demands communities follow suit: something in direct contradiction to Jewish-psychoanalytic impulses to question, dig, revise. Further, the notion that there exists a definite, ontological state of disease which must somehow be eliminated, flies in the face of what we, as living things, are and do: again, we move together. There is no definite, walled-off "diseased individual," though we may experience pain and distress acutely in our bodyminds. There are a web of experiences that need to be addressed contextually, as a whole, and treated not with the logics of cure, but with much more challenging questions: how does this experience affect the world we all share?

I am asking questions, and I am asking, begging discourse on "The Social Model" to ask questions rather than claim answers, and to acknowledge the inevitable limitations of individual discourse about timeless and collective issues. I am further begging us to remember that the Social Model is not a magical problem-solving, cure-giving device. It's deliberately not trying to do what the Medical Model is doing, because its founding ethos is that the Medical Model is, well, wrong. The Social Model isn't a prescription. It's not a law. It's a model, a conceptual framework. Indeed, perhaps its most salient difference from the Medical Model is that it acknowledges its own model-status: adherents use it not as framework but as Truth, codified by associations and legally mandated in offices and hospitals. "True believers" are functionally no different from any other religious zealot; each site of contradiction is not a space for questioning and discussion, but a deviant pattern of thought that must be squashed, siloed, or converted. Indeed, what if we began thinking of medical practitioners as bumbling, harassing, malicious evangelicals, and our crip, Mad selves as beleaguered randoms who don't feel like getting the door?

I do a lot of complaining in this post, which is also very crip, Mad, and Jewish of me. Yet I also want to stress that the contours of our social media arguments have significant echoes in the halls of clinical power, and "individual" requests for cure, micro-level reifications of biomedical approaches at the expense of socially-rooted ones, have a deleterious impact on others in our communities. Given that we are not isolated individuals, no one person's demand for cure, for elimination, for compliance-training, for abusive "therapy" and incarceration, exists alone. As baer concludes, what we need is a profound culture shift, a framework shift. This cannot happen via squabbles about models that begin in false assumptions. It can only be done through the dirty, beautiful work of conversations, of care, of digging

digging

dig dig

dig and maybe

together we be

come the treasure.