Theoretical Frameworks of Disability

The following social models 6 are dominant in disability studies which critically assess the praxis between institutions and society.

Disability is heterogenous and variable and defined within our social and professional institions

Themes Across 6 Disability Theories:

• Disability as Socially and Politically Constructed:

  Moves beyond seeing disability as a defect, and instead focuses on how society defines, regulates, and restricts bodies and minds.

• Lived Experience and Epidemiology

  These frameworks value narrative, personal testimony, and cultural expression as valid epistemologies to understand epidemiological, social, and demographic trends.

• Interdependence Over Independence:

  Challenges capitalist and ableist ideals of self-sufficiency; embraces care networks, relationality, and mutual aid.

• Crip Time & Disruption of Norms:

  Resists expectations around speed, productivity, linear time, and conventional metrics of success or recovery.

• Intersectionality:

  Disability cannot be isolated from race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, or colonialism. Systems of oppression are interlocking.

Models and Critical Theories in Disability Studies

1. Medical Model of Disability

Core Premise: Disability is an individual problem caused by physical, mental, or sensory impairments.

• Forms the basis of most clinical curricula and decision-making.

• Defines disability through diagnoses in DSM/ICD codes, functional scores, and productivity metrics.

Goal: Cure, fix, or accommodate the impairment through medical or rehabilitative intervention.

Critique:

• Pathologizes bodies. Focuses on pathology and treatment rather than lived experience.

• Upholds ableism by promoting a “normative” standard of health and function.

• Ignores social, cultural, and structural exclusion.

• Frames disabled students or patients as problems to be accommodated.

• Often leads to exclusionary policies on “fitness for duty,” technical standards, or licensure.

  
  

2. Social Model of Disability

Core Premise: Disability is not caused by the body but by societal barriers, exclusion, and inaccessibility.

Goal: Remove environmental, attitudinal, and institutional barriers to participation.

Key Contributions:

• Highlights systemic oppression, not individual deficit.

• Shifted disability discourse toward civil rights and accessibility reforms.

• Inspired universal design and anti-discrimination policies (e.g., ADA).

• Encourages institutions to remove structural barriers to access in learning, testing, and clinical environments (e.g., inaccessible lecture halls, inflexible rotations).

• Frames disability inclusion as a systems-level responsibility, not an individual accommodation.

• Promotes universal design in patient care delivery (e.g., accessible signage, exam tables, communication supports).

• Moves beyond compliance to intentional inclusion in care planning and health policy.

Limitations:

• May neglect the lived experience of pain or chronic illness.

• Focuses on external structures, sometimes excluding embodied realities.

  
  

3. Crip Theory (McRuer, 2006; Kafer, 2013)

Core Premise: Disability is a cultural, political, and performative identity that challenges norms of ability, productivity, and heteronormativity.

Value: Crip theory reimagines what bodies and minds should be like and who decides that — making room for fluidity, messiness, and alternative ways of being.

Key Concepts:

• Draws from queer theory to critique how both disability and queerness are constructed as undesirable.

• “Crip” is a reclaimed term, used as a political and scholarly stance against able-bodied supremacy.

• Challenges medical norms that equate health with productivity, speed, and standardization (e.g., “on time” academic progress, “normal” cognition).

• Introduces “crip time” to reimagine pacing in medical training, assessments, and recovery periods.

• Supports the integration of disability narratives, art, and cultural expression into health humanities curricula.

• Encourages care models that validate diverse bodyminds, resist compulsory treatment goals, and support autonomy.

• Reframes clinical language to avoid “othering” or normalizing able-bodied ideals.

• Rejects both normalcy and assimilation.

• Embraces crip time: nonlinear, flexible, and resistant to capitalist notions of time and productivity.

4. Disability Justice (Patty Berne et al., Sins Invalid)

Core Premise: Disability cannot be understood or addressed in isolation from other forms of oppression. It must be contextualized within race, class, gender, immigration status, and colonial histories.

Value: Disability justice moves beyond inclusion — it’s a transformative, decolonial framework that seeks not to fit into unjust systems, but to remake them entirely.

Principles:

• Intersectionality: Centering those most marginalized (e.g., BIPOC, queer, trans, chronically ill, neurodivergent). Demands that curriculum, admissions, and leadership structures center disabled BIPOC, queer, and gender-diverse perspectives.

• Collective access and interdependence as liberation strategies. Promotes interdependent, care collectives, and abolitionist pedagogies rather than neoliberal metrics of worth.

• Cross-movement solidarity: connecting with racial justice, queer liberation, reproductive justice, etc.

• Encourages trauma-informed, community-rooted medical training.

• Calls for integration of peer support, non-institutional care, and decolonial health practices.

• Prioritizes access as relational, not transactional — moving beyond mere ADA compliance.

5. Feminist Disability Theory (Garland-Thomson, Wendell, Price)

Core Premise: Gender and disability are both socially constructed systems that regulate bodies and assign value based on norms.

Key Insights:

• Challenges binary norms (e.g., independent/dependent, abled/disabled, male/female).

• Centers care work, embodiment, and the politics of appearance and medical authority.

• Highlights the role of reproductive control, bodily autonomy, and visibility in disability oppression. Supports informed consent, reproductive autonomy, and patient-defined health goals.

• Interrogates how medical education regulates appearance, behavior, and professionalism through gendered, ableist, and racialized norms.

• Supports care ethics and relational pedagogies over hierarchical, depersonalized approaches.

• Encourages faculty development on the politics of the body, autonomy, and institutional bias.

• Elevates care work, embodiment, and chronic illness as legitimate forms of knowledge

  
  

6. Critical Race Disability Theory (DisCrit)

Core Premise: Disability and race are co-constructed systems used to discipline, segregate, and marginalize communities — especially in education, healthcare, and criminal justice.

Contributions:

• Reveals how BIPOC students are overrepresented under deficit-based labels.

• Exposes disproportionately pathologized racial minorities as excluded through disciplinary and diagnostic labeling.

• Critiques “colorblind” and “ability-blind” policies that ignore structural racism and ableism.

• Promotes antiracist, anti-carceral approaches to clinical assessment and medical professionalism.

• Explores how medical and psychological diagnoses are applied disproportionately and punitively to marginalized groups. Critiques how diagnostic frameworks are racialized, especially in mental health, pain management, and behavioral health.

• Advocates for abolition of punitive models in psychiatry, school-based health, and correctional medicine.

  
  
  
  

Synthesis Across Models:

Framework	Focus	Disability Is...	Key Values
Medical Model	Clinical diagnosis	A problem to fix	Cure, normalization
Social Model	Environmental barriers	Socially constructed exclusion	Access, accommodation
Crip Theory	Cultural + performative	A resistance identity	Queer temporality, anti-normativity
Disability Justice	Intersectional, activist	Inseparable from race, gender, class	Liberation, collective access
Feminist Disability Theory	Gendered body politics	Regulated by social norms	Autonomy, care ethics
DisCrit	Racialized control systems	Tool of racialized exclusion	Abolition, anti-pathologization

Synthesis of Disability Theory and Humanities Frameworks

Framework	Core Focus	Definition of Disability	Central Concepts	Key Values	Critiques of Dominant Systems
Medical Model	Biomedical & clinical	Individual pathology or deficit	Diagnosis, impairment, cure, rehabilitation	Normalization, independence	Medicalization, ableism, erasure of social context
Social Model	Structural barriers & environment	Disability is created by external barriers (not impairment itself)	Accessibility, universal design, anti-discrimination	Inclusion, systemic access	Overlooks embodied experience, pain, chronic illness
Crip Theory	Queer theory + disability studies	Disability as a performative, political identity	Crip time, anti-normativity, bodymind, narrative resistance	Fluidity, resistance to able-bodied norms, identity pride	Binary thinking, normativity, productivity culture
Disability Justice	Intersectional activism	Disability is shaped by interlocking systems of oppression	Interdependence, collective access, cross-movement solidarity	Liberation, anti-capitalism, community care	Institutional ableism, racism, colonial able-bodied supremacy
Feminist Disability Theory	Embodiment, gender, and identity politics	Disability is gendered and socially constructed	Visible/invisible bodies, care ethics, reproductive justice	Autonomy, body agency, ethics of care	Gendered medical violence, binary regulation of bodies
DisCrit (Critical Race + Disability)	Race and disability as co-constructed tools of oppression	Racialized control in education, healthcare, policing	Anti-pathologization, racial capitalism, abolitionist lens	Justice, dismantling racialized ableism	Diagnostic bias, carceral systems, structural racism

Key Themes Across Critical Disability Theories:

• Disability as Socially and Politically Constructed: Moves beyond seeing disability as a defect, and instead focuses on how society defines, regulates, and restricts bodies and minds.

• Lived Experience as Knowledge: These frameworks value narrative, personal testimony, and cultural expression as valid epistemologies (e.g., storytelling, performance, art, peer advocacy).

• Interdependence Over Independence: Challenges capitalist and ableist ideals of self-sufficiency; embraces care networks, relationality, and mutual aid.

• Crip Time & Disruption of Norms: Resists expectations around speed, productivity, linear time, and conventional metrics of success or recovery.

• Intersectionality: Disability cannot be isolated from race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, or colonialism. Systems of oppression are interlocking.

Application in Medicine and Medical Education:

Application Area	Medical Model Approach	Critical Disability Approach
Clinical Practice	Diagnose and treat impairments	Understand patient context, power dynamics, and lived experience
Medical Education	Accommodate disabled students	Transform pedagogy, curriculum, and culture through inclusion & justice
Research	Quantify deficits, outcomes	Value narrative, qualitative, and community-based knowledge
Policy	Compliance (e.g., ADA)	Structural redesign for equity and liberation
Assessment	“Fitness” and performance metrics	Flexibility, anti-ableist evaluation standards