Disability, generation and the life course
Mark Priestley, Centre for Disability Studies, University of Leeds
Abstract
The paper explores the application of generational and life course approaches to contemporary disability debates, highlighting how disabling societies and practices affect people of different generations in different ways. This enables us to see how societies organize generational boundaries and life course transitions in a collective way, and how this shapes our understanding of disability in the social world. Just as gender theorists have shown what may be gained by adopting a gendered perspective, so a life course approach suggests that we must think more carefully about the impact of generational systems on disability. Disability studies has been influenced by a particular view of the social relations of production and reproduction in modern capitalist societies that relies on a modernist and adult-centred view of the life course. Yet, as social stratification and identity become increasingly defined by patterns of consumption in consumer societies, so analyses of disability and generation based on the social relations of production must be continually re-examined. Using a generational approach may help to explain why the claims of disabled people to full participation and equality have occurred at the same time as those from non-adult generational minorities (such as children and older people). The progress of such claims suggests that marginal groups can win concessions towards 'adult' citizenship but there is also a danger of colluding with the exclusion of those more distantly displaced from traditional adult rights (especially young disabled children and disabled people at the very end of life).