7. Cultural model

Contents: Disability as a cultural construct, origins and development, notions of normality and related discourses, focus on body images.

The cultural model views disability as discursive and culturally constructed. It focuses on notions of normality, systems of knowledge and symbolic representations that mark certain bodies and abilities as the norm, whilst labelling others as deviant (Hirschberg, 2022, p. 101).

The model is regarded as a further development of the social model and was refined primarily during the 1990s within the field of American Disability Studies. The focus is on the question of how societal notions of normality arise in cultural contexts and how deviations are defined through their demarcation. In particular, the model examines how knowledge about bodies, body norms and body images is produced, and which social processes have an inclusive or exclusive effect in this regard. In this way, it also reveals the social power relations that determine whose bodies and abilities are taken for granted and whose are not (Egen & Waldhoff, 2023, p. 195).