Poland
Karolina Kaliszewska
Disability, Issue 21 (2016), 2016, pp. 20 - 34
To get power over an individual, one needs to shape that individual as an item of knowledge: to construct knowledge of the person which will determine an account of every dimension of human life so as to sanction mechanisms of normalization. Knowledge shaped this way enables the differentiation of the „normal” from „not normal”. It is the same with knowledge about disability. Here also knowledge-power is the sphere that creates the discourses which define and classify disability, marking the border between what is normal and what is not normal.
In Poland we have institutions and praxis which construct the experience of disability. Those institutions and praxis are maintained by pedagogical, legislative or medical discourse. The aim of this paper is to expose the institutions and praxis which tame the subjectivity of disabled people, exposing how knowledge-power enables the normalization of a disabled person by shaping in him or her a submissive „me”. The paper exposes the taming mechanisms of knowledge-power, which are based on internalized norms and lead disabled people to take a determined position in the social sphere (which individuals then interpret as their own ambition), avoiding actions and behavior that do not conform to the norm (which individuals recognize as not normal and dangerous for themselves) and performing such social roles and in such a manner that will be a maximal realization of being socially useful, which the individual sees as co-working for the common benefit.