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Disability, ambivalence, and the law.
1U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, USA.
American Journal of Law & Medicine
|February 2, 2012
Summary
Disability elicits mixed feelings, attracting and repelling due to its connection to humanity. The law should acknowledge this ambivalence, rather than promoting one-sided views, to prevent harmful outcomes.
Area of Science:
- Socio-legal studies
- Disability studies
- Legal theory
Background:
- Current legal discourse on disability often simplifies complex societal attitudes.
- Ambivalence, the coexistence of conflicting feelings, is a common but often unacknowledged aspect of disability encounters.
- Existing legal frameworks may fail to address the nuanced emotional and psychological responses to disability.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce the concept of ambivalence as a framework for understanding disability and law.
- To argue for a legal approach that acknowledges and expresses societal ambivalence towards disability.
- To challenge prevailing, often unequivocal, legal orthodoxies concerning disability.
Main Methods:
- Conceptual analysis of disability discourse.
- Examination of the descriptive and normative implications of ambivalence in legal contexts.
- Critique of existing legal doctrines and their handling of disability.
Main Results:
- Ambivalence is a pervasive, yet often denied, feature of human encounters with disability.
- Denying ambivalence leads to suppressed sentiments that can emerge in harmful ways.
- Unequivocal legal stances on disability (valued, devalued, or neutral) mask genuine societal complexity.
Conclusions:
- The law should actively express and expose ambivalence about disability.
- Acknowledging ambivalence allows for a more accurate representation of societal sentiments.
- Exposing ambivalence can mitigate the negative consequences of suppressed emotions and challenge current disability law paradigms.
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