Ableism
Coined by US feminists in the 1980s, the term ableism refers to social prejudices against people with disabilities and the assumptions that able-bodiedness is the social norm. Like racism and sexism, ableism classifies entire groups of people as less than, and includes harmful stereotypes and micro-aggressions. Ableism assumes everyone has the same material and symbolic needs and gains access to resources in the same way.
Ableism was addressed in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights which outlines what cannot be done to humanity in response to the Holocaust. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990 and updated in 2009 which covers equal employment opportunity, full participation in society for everyone, and the right to independent living and self-sufficiency. In 2006, United Nations ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which “reaffirms that all persons with all types of disabilities must enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
Humans relate to, and interact with, their surroundings in diverse ways, which is why multimodal theorization of cognition is more inclusive and enabling. Able-bodiedness is a fiction that has been normalized.
The first step towards eradicating ableism is the development of inclusive vocabulary. For instance, the word deaf is sometimes capitalized to “distinguish the culture from the audiological condition” (Baynton 48). Deaf refers to individuals who identify culturally as Deaf. However, people in the d/Deaf, hard-ofhearing, and hearing-speaking communities, as well as disability scholars no longer make as strong a distinction between prelingual and postlingual deafness, because some communities overlap (Brueggemann 14–15, 163–64 n1). Samuel Yates writes, for instance, that “where Deaf communities flourish, d/Deaf and hearing persons live alongside each other with Deaf persons modeling different ways of being in the world” (79).