Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >But it is the medical profession who commit disabled persons to these
> >institutions and which has been complicit in organizing the
> >segreation! You cannot separate them.
> >
> >Marta
>
> So, where do you go from here? Give up on medicine? Or reform it?
> If the latter, criticisms had better be concrete & discriminating --
> instead of abstract & all-encompassing -- with suggestions for better
> practices.
It requires moving from a medical model of disability to a social one.
I would suggest reading Michael Oliver's The Politics of Disablement
1990 St. Martins Press.
>
> Moreover, the medical profession doesn't exist in isolation from the
> rest of social relations. Modern discrimination against & oppression
> of the disabled -- especially the Great Confinement of the disabled &
> other groups that Foucault discusses -- arose in response to
> capitalism that demanded the confinement of the unproductive & the
> disruptive (unproductive & disruptive from capital's point of view).
> Medicine is but a vehicle through which capital's class power has
> been exercised. Capital's power over experts (medical or otherwise),
> however, is contestable. The best example may be the removal of
> homosexuality from DSM in 1973, in response to the demand by the
> rising gay liberation movement.
No argument, here this is what some disability theorists have been
saying for years.
>
> While a multitude of micro-politics of power that pit doctors against
> patients, teachers against students, lawyers against clients, social
> workers against participants in state-funded programs, etc. are not
> unimportant, focusing upon them in such a way as to put capital out
> of sight (of theory & practice) is in the end counter-productive. In
> fact, capital would love you to think of doctors, nurses, orderlies,
> & other care-giving workers as your main enemies, just as it would
> love women to think of men as our main enemies. Micro-politics,
> instead, should be waged with a view to how they fit into the big
> picture: capital's exploitation of labor; & socialists' project to
> abolish it & establish the system of production for human needs &
> desires, not for profits.
No argument here, but right now the medical model of disability dominates most people's thinking about disability. This paternalism is everywhere! People talk about "care" instead of "services" for instance. Disabled people need to be in charge, on policy making committees, etc. and that is what we are actively doing now -- instead of being the objects of professional interest.
I always write about capitalism as the overarching oppressor. Several large pieces will be coming out this year, here are a couple that are available now:
Russell, M. (2000) Backlash, the political economy, and structural exclusion, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 21, pp. 335 - 366.
Russell, M. (2001) The new reserve army of labor? Review of Radical Political Economics 33 (2), pp. 224-234.
Check out what Chuck Grimes wrote. The independent living movement has already answered many of your questions though unfortunately it has accepted the foundations of free market ideology.
Marta