The Disavowal of Uncanny Disabled Children: Why Non-Disabled People Are So Messed Up Around Childhood Disability

Abstract

We know from recent research that disabled children, their families and other allies are subjected to a whole host of responses from people, organizations and systems in society. What we perhaps know less about are the reasons why ‘the non-disabled’ or ‘normative’ imaginary responds to disability in terms of the often contradictory processes of fear/fascination; attraction/repulsion; recognition/extermination. Genetics, medicine and clinical psychology formally capture this ambivalent response to childhood disability — recruiting bodies and minds into the psycho-biological register in order to recognize them as disorders while, simultaneously, threatening to erase these bodies/minds as deficient kinds of humanity. Just as important are those informal moments that disabled people experience every day, in mundane and recurring encounters with what we might call the normative imaginary. In this chapter we want to explore this imaginary through the stories of disabled people. Adopting a social psychoanalytic account, we will consider the ways in which disability becomes wrapped up in responses of the non-disabled. We will make, employ and evaluate the concepts of the ‘uncanny’ and ‘disavowal’, and consider them in light of stories shared with one of us (Dan). Finally, we will conclude with some thoughts on cure, rehabilitation and therapy for the non-disabled — those poor souls caught up in the normative imaginary — albeit with tongue in cheek.