• Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.399-425
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• 2009

This study aims to conceptualize 'perceived disability discrimination', to evaluate the coverage of Korea's Disability Discrimination Act from the perspective of perceived discrimination, and to discuss the possibility of legal judgement on the perceived disability discrimination. As a general concept, it is the perceived discrimination that people with disabilities feel or experience any type of discrimination based on stigma, disability oppression, prejudice, or stereotype. The Korea's Disability Discrimination Act does not consider some perceived discrimination as a subject of legal judgement. Although indirect discrimination is a very good content to correct wrong social rules, values, institutions, actually, it is confronted with being remained useless. Perceived disability discrimination such as strangers' staring or benevolent disability discrimination are not included in the coverage of Korea's Disability Discrimination Act. The disability discrimination experienced by family members who has a disabled member was not a matter of current Korea's Disability Discrimination Act. Considering perceived disability discrimination, coverage of Korea's Disability Discrimination Act should be extended to the concept of discrimination against disability, not against people with disability. Based on the concept of indirect discrimination, social rules and institutions should be examined if they are discriminative or not in dealing with the matters of people with disabilities. Also, for judging perceived disability discrimination, it is necessary to use 'the standard of reasonable people with disability', which comes from judgement standard of sexual harassments. The reality of oppressive ideology against disability should be socially accepted and the social reconstruction for people with disabilities should go on.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.4
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• pp.597-618
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• 2010

This paper discusses American disability theater's representations of disability identity and disability identity politics. Dramatists John Belluso and Lynn Manning, among others, present characters with disabilities who experience oppressions at multiple, interlocking levels of domination on the basis of disability, race, and ethnicity. In Manning's Shoot, the black, blind hero iterates episodes in which he experienced discrimination and insults in encounters with whites who used derogatory racist words or belittled him and with some school children who taunted him for just being blind. This play, as in Manning's solo performance, Weights, presents narratives of a blind person traversing multiple locations of oppression in "a long litany of losses" in a white-dominated and ableist society. Belluso's Gretty Good Time similarly weaves together stories of disabled women, Gretty and Hideko, who bond together to resist the dominant ideology that reduces them into titillating commodities of mass consumption. Hideko's story serves the two-fold function of both affirming the specificity of her individual experience as an ethnic other and espousing the communal experience of stigmatization she shares with other disabled women like Gretty. In these plays, the intersection of the identity categories of disability, race, and ethnicity highlights the diversity of the body and the fluidity of boundaries, foregounding the specificity of disabled bodies, while at the same time overthrowing the hierarchical binarism between disabled and "normal" bodies.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.60 no.3
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• pp.83-106
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• 2008

The Purpose of this study is to explore if people with intellectual disabilities can play a role as 'meaningful informants' in research process in Korea, by challenging the existing paradigm which consists of suspicion on the communication ability of people with intellectual disabilities and truthlessness of their statements, which results in ignorance on the covered life of people with intellectual disabilities. In this research, lessons which could learn through reinterpretation of my research experience are as follows. Firstly, the deficits of communication ability can be supplemented with restructuring interview instruments such as research questions, visual aids etc and adopting conversation analysis methods. Secondly, Suspicion on the truthlessness of their statements can be restructured by epistemological and methodological reinterpretation on the representation of social reality. Thirdly, the mechanism of exclusion and oppression according to the ignorance can be substituted by 'uncovering the life of people with intellectual disabilities', which can be basis of reconstructing the contents of programmes in the disability service centers and disability policies in the government. With these research results it could be argued that there needs to include people with intellectual disabilities as meaningful informants in the research projects funded by the government and also to provide people with intellectual disabilities with diverse roles in the research process by virtue of the development of qualitative research methods in the near future.