**RETAG** Framework is a violent rehabilitative attempt to

bring the disabled body back within normative standards of

civility reject their medical pathologizing of the affirmative.
Hughes 12 (Bill Hughes, Professor of Sociology and the Dean of the School of
Law and Social Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland. Civilising
Modernity and the Ontological Invalidation of Disabled People in Disability and
Social Theory New Developments and Directions)
There is another way to deal with disability, a technical (usually) medical solution designed to assuage the excess of
corporeality, the surplus of life (Kolnai, 2004) that upsets the civilised observer. This is the anthropophagic

the possibility of rescuing disability from the abyss of unacceptable

difference, through correction, rehabilitation, through finding ways to conceal or
heal the ontological deficit (Hughes, 2007). The quest to correct the disabled
body is about making disability and non-disability identical, about
transforming the pathological into the normal. In ableist culture, the bodily forms of
strategy,

disabled people are marked, not just by constitutional pathology but also by aesthetic unruliness. Disability
represents deficit in competence and beauty. Eugenics, for example, promised to make humanity not just strong
and smart but beautiful as well (Pernick, 1997: 91). The ontological disparagement of disability in the modern

Medical
and aesthetic prejudice work in combination to produce the view that
disabled peoples inabilities and deficiencies are products of the natural
distribution of competence and beauty rather than the social organisation
of opportunity. Insofar as one cannot exchange what one has not got or
(easily) transform a deficit into a credit, the disabled body is blocked in its
possibilities to acquire cultural, economic or symbolic capital (see Blackmore and
Hodgkins in this volume). Correction/rehabilitation involves the attempted erasure
of deficits of credibility that are simultaneously mechanical and
undesirable. To be what not to be is to be a stakeholder at the margins of
the human community with few opportunities to escape misrecognition
and exile. Correction offers a tangible promise of redemption, through to
steal a phrase from Bourdieu (1984: 251) ontological promotion. Making able (rehabilitation) offers
period is a double-edged sword. It thrusts and slashes in the quotidian spaces of the civilising world.

an alternative to long-term or permanent incarceration in quasi-medical institutions. Henri-Jacques Stiker (2000:

rehabilitation marks the appearance of a culture that attempts

to complete the act of identification, of making identical and that, this
act will cause the disabled to disappear and with them all that is lacking,
in order to drown them, dissolve them in the greater and single social
whole. The dynamic of the disgust response down to the removal of the
aversive object is , in a concrete way, reproduced in the practice of
rehabilitation. Modern professional therapeutic practice is designed to normalise in the name of sameness.
Aside from the positive value that it can and does have for many, it represents an assault on
bodily difference and embodies an assumption that the norm (of
wholeness) is redemptive. Winance (2007: 627) notes that in France from the 1950s onwards, the
128) argues that

term handicap relates to divergence from a norm of social performance and refers to a disabled person who,
through medical means, is to be re-adapted. Rehabilitation also signifies betterment indicating a moral element to

Rehabilitation is an offer of ontological promotion, an invitation to

join the community of civilised persons. Assumptions about civilised bodily performances are

correction.

clearly evident in the field of therapy and rehabilitation. Aides that facilitate the up-right stance and comportment
of people with mobility impairments are regarded as tools for enhancing physical capital. The difference between
homo erectus and his slouched, primate predecessors might have a quite a lot to do with our disdain for those who

do not walk tall as well as with the pervasive (nondisabled) view that a wheelchair is a place of confinement rather
than a vehicle of liberation. The medical term prosthesis is derived from the Greek word meaning addition,
suggesting nature in deficit. In a literal sense, note Mitchell and Snyder (2000: 6 ),

a prosthesis seeks
to accomplish an illusion, perhaps a deceit. It covers-up. It attempts to
represent what an individual is at the level of biology and ontology so
that she can be embraced by a community that will not tolerate her as she
is. Therapies improve and correct, some cure. The goal of speech and language therapy, for example, is to
transform deficit communicators by providing them with the tools to develop civilised speech patterns. Recipients
of the therapy are taught like the heroine of George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion to embody the protocols of

The
person with the speech impairment is presented as a portent of social
mess. To offend against protocol attracts aversion. Yet, these protocols
are themselves carnally informed and arise from the ways in which nondisabled bodies leave their imprint the imprint of normalcy on the
forms of communication that come to be defined as acceptable.
Impairment, in these normalised social spaces, is always an ontological
lack. Rehabilitation from the Latin habilitare, to make able is a corrective, a
pedagogical solution to our aversion for the disruption caused by an
ontological splinter in the otherwise perfect fleshy fabric of a slick social
encounter . Speech impairment is treated as a creeping unruliness that threatens civility. From a noncompetent communication and be able, therefore, to participate effectively in civil social encounters.

disabled perspective, the corrupting presence of ontological deficit is a source of moral apprehension.

Disabled people can attempt to erase their difference by passing as

normal (Goffman, 1969) a form of ontological bluff that is profoundly
precarious. In equating social competence with the concealment of
corporeal difference, disabled people trade pride in who they are for the
rewards of assimilation. Elias understands this all too well. Passing, from his perspective, can be
explained by fear of degradation and is underpinned by the alignment of ones super-ego with the social demands
for self-constraint (Elias, 2000: 414). Given the pervasiveness of ableism and the tyranny of normalcy, one can

The right side of civility is an

attractive place to be. One of the ways to sustain credibility as a disabled
person seems to be by convincing others that one is not what one is. Yet the
cost of this civilising, ontological strategy can be high. Its attraction hinges on the extent to
which its protagonist internalises as shame the disgust response that,
she assumes, she will invoke if her impairment is not corrected by
concealment. However, if the concealed impairment is exposed and the protective mantle of passing
understand why this can be regarded as an attractive bargain.

collapses, the individual is caught in a deceit that may have profoundly negative consequences for her social
relationships.