Doing Disability: Disability Formations in the Search for Work*

Abstract

Disability theorists have spent much time discussing how disability is defined. The theoretical roots for these debates reside in the medical, structural, and minority models of disability. The medical model views disability as equivalent to a functional impairment; the minority model sees a lack of equal rights as a primary impediment to social equality between able and disabled populations; and the structural model looks to environmental factors as the cause of disability. While debates over how to define disability are informative, there is currently an insufficient amount of empirical research looking at how people come to identify themselves as having a disability. Rather than focus on how disability is (or should be) defined, herein we look at how disability identities are constructed as people search for work. We show that people's interactions with employers and employment agencies have important influences on how disability identities are constructed. We borrow from the "doing gender" and "racial formations" paradigms to introduce an interactive approach to looking at how disability identities are constructed. We introduce the concept of disability formation to highlight how disability identities are continually negotiated through interactions with employment agencies and employers. Our findings are based on focus groups with 58 people who self-identified as having a disability and were working or searching for work. Disability theorists have spent much time discussing how disability is defined . These debates, coupled with disability-based social movements, advance our understanding of disability and help push forward new ways of conceptualizing what disability means. While these debates are informative, there is currently an insufficient amount of empirical research looking at how people come to identify themselves as having a disability (Putnam 2005). Rather than focus on how disability is (or should be) defined, we turn our attention to how disability identities are actually constructed in the search for work. We show that

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