Mothers and Models of Disability

Author: Landsman, Gail

Source: Journal of Medical Humanities, Volume 26, Numbers 2-3, September 2005 , pp. 121-139(19)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Based on a qualitative anthropological study of American mothers of infants and young children newly diagnosed with disability, this essay examines how mothers understand their children and define disability in relation to publicly available discourses of disability and identity. In seeking to improve their children’s opportunities in mainstream society, mothers appear to comply with the medical model. But over time and in the process of providing meaning to their experience, mothers retool models, drawing both on the social and minority group models’ rejection of a problem-based definition of disability as inherently caused by impairment and on their own intimate engagement with impairment as an embodied experience.

Keywords: mothers; disabled children; social model of disability; medical model of disability; minority model of disability; disability rights movement; impairment; United States

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-005-2914-2

Affiliations: 1: Anthropology Department, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, New York, 12222, Email: Landsman@albany.edu

Publication date: 2005-09-01