Illustrating the Social Construction of Disability: Traditional Associations in Chinese Script

1. Illustrating the Social Construction of Disability: Traditional Associations in Chinese Script Inclusive learning through technology Damien French

2. Lecture aim • To introduce the social construction of disability. • To use the traditional associations of the Chinese language to illustrate the social construction of disability.

3. Important qualifications • China is not unique, all cultures construct disability according to ableist norms. • The Chinese government is promoting a more positive attitude to people with disabilities. • I focus mainly on traditional associations.

4. Why Chinese script? • Chinese ideograms are helpful for illustrating the social construction of disability.

5. Why helpful? • Chinese ideograms are highly pictorial and associative. • We can see how attitudes are a function of language use. • Language has a history and socio-cultural context. This can be used to highlight social construction.

6. See ‘Modern slogan, ancient script: impairment and disability in the Chinese language’, Emma Stone, in Disability Discourse, Corker & French (eds), Open University Press, 1999.

7. Social constructionism • People experience the world in terms of interpretative categories that develop in social contexts. • A socially constructed reality is a meaning or an institution that is produced and reproduced through social interaction and symbolic systems. • Opposed to essentialism, which defines phenomena in terms of transhistorical or primordial essences.

8. Types of social constructionism • A rough cut at distinguishing some different approaches: • Sociological • Materialist • Semiological • Discursive • Linguistic

9. Types of social constructionism • Sociological • Emile Durkheim, Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann, Anthony Giddens. • Institutions are both subjective mental schemas and external, objective realities, e.g. English grammar. • People and groups interacting together over time develop sedimented, institutionalised roles. • Institutions are produced, reproduced and altered through habitual human action.

10. Types of social constructionism • Materialist • Karl Marx, Raymond Williams. • Human beings reproduce material life through social relations; social relations condition forms of consciousness. • Mike Oliver The Politics of Disablement (1990): the meaning of ‘disability’ results from the ideology of capitalist individualism and the social practices of capitalist labour market, medical intervention and welfare services.

11. Types of social constructionism • Semiological • Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous. • Signs take their meaning not from an objective referent but from their place in a system of differences. • More radically, identities are constituted through binary oppositions (male/female, speech/writing, nature/culture etc.) that privilege one term at the expense of the other.

12. Types of social constructionism • Discursive • Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe. • ‘Discourse’ has a number of meanings. • For Foucault, discourses are both forms of knowledge and ways of defining and shaping subjectivities. • They are inseparable from institutional practices and the power to observe, survey, manage and control (power/knowledge). • e.g. Discourses of delinquency, sexuality and sexual deviance.

13. Types of social constructionism • Linguistic • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Winch • Language meaning is embedded in conventional social practices. • Using language is rule-following; we use words in the same way on different occasions when we use them in accordance with a rule. • Rules have a social setting; to follow a rule is to act in a way that others could recognise as the following of a rule. • Think of extending a series: 1, 3, 9, 27… What comes next?

14. The context: Canfei, Canji • Canfei: (adj., pronounced tsan-fay) people with impairments, a common and derogatory Chinese term, translate as ‘useless’ or ‘worthless’. • Canji: (ad., pronounced tsan-jee) people with impairments: an apparently new and neutral term, translate as ‘disabled’.

15. ‘Canji erbu canfei’ • Canfei is now officially discouraged in China. • Emma Stone (1999) reports that the slogan Canjii erbu canfei was widespread in China during her time as a researcher in the 1990s. • It translates as ‘disabled but not useless’.

16. The background: Chinese script • Characters have at least one radical or dominant component, in addition to other components. • 214 radicals, the most complex requiring 17 brush strokes. • Many are stylised pictures, providing clues to traditional attitudes.

17. ‘Man’ = ‘field’ + ‘strength’ ‘Woman’ = stylised picture of a pregnant woman The background: Chinese script

18. The language of impairment • Canfei, the discouraged term: • Can is grouped under the Bone-fragment radical; connotations of ‘death’, ‘destruction’, ‘damage’, ‘the dregs’. • Fei contains ‘to expel’, ‘to do away with’, to get rid of’, ‘waste’, ‘useless’, ‘decrepit’.

19. The language of impairment • More than 150 impairment-specific characters in Chinese texts, about 30 still in everyday use. • Mostly physical impairments and learning difficulties. • Many descriptive, denoting physical appearance or movement. • Beliefs about causation evident in some of these. • Often meaning derived from the sickness radical (non-normative) plus a component signifying a desired (normative) state.

21. The language of impairment • References to poverty. • Jian (defect) and jian (lame) denote bitter cold and extreme hardship. • Proverb: ‘poverty and illness – closely linked’. • Dehumanising characters. • References to ‘idiots’, ‘simpletons’ or ‘mad people’ framed by animal radicals.

22. The language of normalcy • A conception of bodymind variation as undesirable, a departure from the Tao, embodying disorder in bodymind, family, society, nature and cosmos. • Co-exist with a culture also known for complementarity and polarity, yin and yang.

23. The language of normalcy • Quan • Complete, entire, whole. • When framed by the ox radical, denotes ‘a bullock of all one colour, perfect in its parts and fit for sacrifice’. • When framed by the sickness radical, means ‘to cure, to restore to wholeness’.

24. The language of normalcy • Zheng • Orderly, proper, regular, orthodox. • Wu guan bu zheng (‘the five senses/ organs/ parts are not in their proper place’). • Used for physical, sensory, behavioural impairments, facial disfigurement, scabies, leprosy.

25. The language of normalcy • Ding • An administrative category of imperial Chinese history. • The taxable individual, eligible for military service, able-bodied, able-minded, male, aged between 16 and 60. • Ding is a picture of a nail – solid, strong, straight, useful.

26. Summary • The descriptions and experiences available to people is a function of the language they speak; what it is possible to say; how the world is defined in the language. • Language is mediated by social context and culture. • Language reflects the assumptions of dominant groups. • Language can evolve, as a result of cultural shifts…

27. ‘Canji erbu canfei’ • “There are so many differences with the past. Before the 1980s, all the newspapers and broadcasts would call us canfei people…Under appeal from many disabled people, newspapers and the rest of the media started to change and started using canji pople. Since then, step by step, the rest of society has started to change”, (Mr. Liu, Quoted in Stone, 1999).