Disabling Scaffolds: The Lived Embodiment of Disability in an Oppressive Sociomaterial Environment

Abstract The influential social model understands disability in terms of oppression instantiated in a material environment that disables bodily impaired people. Many of the demands of disability activists for what we might call equal material access have since been satisfied. Yet oppression of subtler psychological and emotional forms persists for many disabled people. We will argue that the results of these psychosocial forms of oppression is that scaffolding which was set up to provide access to disabled people may become disabling. We introduce the concept of “disabling scaffolding” to refer to environmental structures that inhibit the disabled person’s abilities because of social structures of intersubjective and material oppression. We borrow Iris Marion Young’s concept of “inhibited intentionality” to describe the effects of oppression, which come to operate “from within” the disabled person, deeply affecting the person’s experience of the body as an “I-can”. Disabling scaffolding is a consequence of material and intersubjective oppression that leads to inhibited intentionality, gradually leading to a pathologization of the disabled person’s embodiment.