The Affirmations and Gains of Disability: The Affirmation Model

The article addresses three questions: Where does the affirmation model come from? What does the affirmation model do? Is the affirmation model important? It identifies the affirmation model as a practical tool for making meaning of the experience of impairment in a disabling society, tracing its emergence from the collective resistance of the (UK) disability arts movement to narratives of personal tragedy and replacement of these with narratives of pride, anger and strength. It outlines the affirmation model’s first suggestion by Swain and French in 2000 as an intervention in an ongoing debate in Disability Studies around the adequacy of the social model, and its further development in research listening to disabled people’s accounts of their own understanding of impairment and disability. It considers affirmative statements by disabled people and relates these to the understanding expressed in the affirmation model. Finally, it explains the affirmation model as a framework which enables recognition of the absurdity in situations and encounters where disabled people are required and expected only to experience their impairments negatively and to distance themselves from their impairments: to seek not to be defined by them, to eschew personal association with them, to go to sometimes absurd lengths to demonstrate how little they are affected by them. In summary, it establishes the affirmation model as a basis for a rejection in everyday life of the assumptions and expectations usually held about impairment and for a self-respectful assertion of disabled identity.