Criptiquing Disability Models: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness, Nursing Practice, and Reimagined Disability

Within nursing education and practice, disability has been shaped by models of disability that narrowly focus on rehabilitating the body to a normative, able-bodied state. This has profound moral implications for nursing practice and affects the nurse-patient dynamic. Typically, this empowers the nurse while disempowering the disabled person by portraying the nurse as the expert in disability and the disabled person as a passive recipient of care. This paper applies crip theory, specifically McRuer's framework of compulsory able-bodiedness, to critically examine the enduring presence of the charity, moral, and medical models of disability in nursing education and practice. Compulsory able-bodiedness is the system that produces disability by othering non-normative bodies. This produces a hierarchy of bodily normalcy, with people who are able-bodied at the top, people with visible disabilities in the middle, and people with invisible disabilities at the bottom. I argue that these three historically dominant models are etic, ignore disabled people's voices, and perpetuate ableist assumptions that limit the profession's capacity to support disabled people in liberatory and socially just ways. I then present an alternate crip paradigm: the social model of disability. The social model of disability offers nurses the opportunity to honour the disabled person as the expert in their care, focus on the individual's strengths rather than deficits, and recognise the complex interplay between physiological, social, political, and environmental factors that contribute to the experience of disability. In raising this critical consciousness, I call for a reimagined nursing education and practice that honours disability as a source of knowledge, transformation, and resistance.