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Discourse Of Disability

Decent Essays

Main Discourses:
One of the main discourses that faced Donald is “Normality”. Donald is seen normal in the eyes of his partner and peers. They depend on him in solving their problems and asking for his opinion. However, he was viewed as “deviant” in his parents’ and his employer’s eyes. Foucault (1977) was interested in how certain ways of seeing phenomena come to be reified as truth. Years later, Jorgenson &Phillips (2002) discussed that reality and truth are only accessible to us in sort of categories. The impact of that on a disabled child can affect his identity and sense of self as mentioned in Michel Foucault’s theory of identity (Jorgenson &Phillips, 2002; Foucault, 1977). Many arguments and studies mentioned that disabled people are not struggling with their disability, but are struggling with who they are (MacNaughton, 2003). For example, when Donald invited his boss to have dinner at his house, he asked Isabella ”his partner” to act normally and they had a big fight where Isabella told him, “You do not know who you are, you are trying to show people that you are as normal as them.” (Lawrence et al., 2005).
Another discourse is the equality and the inequality which relates to the social justice. After a long journey of looking for a job that …show more content…

Many jobs excluded him because he was autistic. Even when he found the job of his interest (as per an important man’s recommendation), at the beginning, his employer did not believe in his abilities, but hired him because of the company’s policy that obligated him to hire some people with a special need. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) as well as the Equal Opportunity Act (2010) focused on the equal employment opportunities and the importance of respect for difference and acceptance of persons with disabilities as part of human diversity and humanity (Dempsey, in Foreman,

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