American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 28, No.

5, 2000

Self-Determination and Empowerment: A Feminist Standpoint Analysis of Talk about Disability1

Joey Sprague and Jeanne Hayes
Department of Sociology, University of Kansas

In this paper we offer a feminist analysis of talk about self-determination and empowerment in the context of disability, focusing on the case of developmental disabilities. We nd strains of the same patterns feminist epistemologists have argued shape the organization of formal knowledge from the standpoint of the privileged. At the extreme, people with developmental disabilities appear as objects without selves, outside of the context of interpersonal and social structural relationships that constrain who they can be by dening them as other, often in multiple and interacting ways. Empowerment, from the dominant standpoint, becomes an abstract attribute or condition; something a person has or does not have. Taking the standpoint of women and other marginalized people offers a view of self-determination as a persons development of his or her self. Empowerment becomes a potential characteristic of a social relationship, one that facilitates the development of someones self. The most empowering relationships are mutual, recognizing and building on the diverse contributions and needs of participants in ways that seek to minimize inequalities over time. The reason some of us are selfdetermining is that we are in interpersonal and social structural relationships that empower us. To construct interpersonal and social structural relationships that empower people with developmental disabilities requires challenging the way dominant conceptualizations of independence and productivity also express the standpoint of the privileged. The standpoint of women allows all of us to talk more of how we connect with and facilitate one anothers developing selves within communities.
KEY WORDS: self-determination; empowerment; developmental disability; feminist.
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We thank Gary Brunk, Judy Howard, Michael Wehmeyer, Mary Zimmerman, anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this issue for empowering us through challenging and supportive comments on earlier drafts. 671
0091-0562/00/1000-0671$18.00/0 2000 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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In this paper we offer a feminist critique of talk about self-determination and empowerment, focusing on the case of developmental disabilities. Talk about disability is important because talk expresses the categories we use to organize our understanding: talk gives shape to knowledge (Foucault, 1980; Goffman, 1986). Feminist standpoint epistemology provides a gateway to patterns in the way scholars and other professionals are talking about self-determination and empowerment, and it also can be used to weave together the threads of an alternative, a way of talking about disability that can facilitate social change that is empowering. Self-determination and empowerment have become key words among those committed to the cause of people with disabilities. Self advocates with developmental disabilities have focused attention on their desire and need for self-determination (Brunk, 1991; Miller & Keys, 1996; People First of California, 1984; People First of Tennessee, 1991). Professionals and family members who care for people with developmental disabilities have reached a broad consensus on the importance of self-determination (Brotherson, Cook, Lahr-Cunconan, & Wehmeyer, 1993; Harchik, Sherman, Sheldon, & Bannerman, 1992; Institute on Community Integration, 1989; Klein & Cnaan, 1995; Parsons, Reid, Reynolds, & Bumgarner, 1990; Wehmeyer, 1992; Wehmeyer & Berkobian, 1991). Scholars and practitioners in community psychology and rehabilitation have carried the banner for the empowerment of all people who are socially marginalized, including people with disabilities (Balcazar, Seekins, Fawcett, & Hopkins, 1990; Beck, 1994; Cornell Empowerment and Family Project, 1990; Emener, 1991; Fawcett et al., 1994; Hahn, 1991; Rappaport, 1981; Serrano-Garcia & Bond, 1994; Trickett, 1994; Vash, 1991; Zimmerman, 1990a). Despite all the attention being paid to the importance of self-determination and empowerment for people with disabilities, there has been little critical discussion of what the concepts mean, much less the potential of a relationship between them (Abery, 1994; McWhirter, 1991). Yet, feminists have identied persistent problematic patterns in the construction of knowledge, evidence that we should all pay critical attention to the concepts that guide us. First we will identify major themes in the feminist critique of knowledge. Then we will consider how these themes permeate discourse about self-determination and empowerment. Finally, we will identify trends in the literature that can be used to develop an alternative to current ways of thinking. FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF KNOWLEDGE Feminist scholars have examined traditional mainstream approaches to knowledge along several lines and found a lot to criticize. For one thing,

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too often knowledge producers focus on men, assuming that the issues and experiences of men parallel those of women. Secondly, even if as scholars we do incorporate women into our analyses, we tend to talk about them as special cases who deviate from normal males, whether because of biology or because of enduring personality shaped in early socialization. We tend not to study how womens apparent distinctiveness is a response to the way we as individuals and as communities use gender to allocate opportunities, inform expectations, and hold people accountable for their actions (Ridgeway, 1993; Sherif, 1979; West & Zimmerman, 1987, 1995). These two streams of criticism have revealed the gendered character of the questions scholars ask and the populations we study as we produce ofcial knowledge in the academy and in other professional sectors. They have, for example, revealed the degree to which mainstream understanding of disability has had a male bias (e.g., Deegan & Brooks, 1985; Fine & Asch, 1988; Hillyer, 1993; Wendell, 1993). These approaches have also supported the development of a third stream of feminist critique, standpoint epistemology, which focuses on the conceptual organization of our knowledge. In this paper, we work to integrate critiques based on feminist standpoint epistemology with progressive work on disability. Standpoint epistemology argues that all knowledge is constructed in a specic matrix of physical location, history, culture, and interests (Harding, 1998). A standpoint is not the spontaneous thinking of a person or a category of people. Rather, it is the combination of resources available in a specic context from which an understanding might be constructed. Hartsock (1983) illustrated the idea of a standpoint by analyzing the way standpoints of capitalists, production workers, and caretakers allow the development of three distinct conceptualizations of a concept central to the concerns of this paper: power. Capitalists are removed from the concrete circumstances of producing goods and services, including their relationship with workers. The work and interests of capitalists leads to a focus on exchanges in the market. This standpoint, Hartsock says, provides resources for understanding power as a thing, a commodity that a person has more or less of, as something that can be exchanged, taken, or given away. The practical experience of workers is more likely to foreground their subordinate position in the capitalist-worker relationship. Workers must sell their labor to those who own means of production, expend their labor socially (in coordination with the labor of other workers), and nd that their wages are lower than the market value of what they produce. The workers standpoint offers resources for understanding power as a relationship of domination, in which one party, by virtue of their control over wealth, is able to exploit and extract compliance from, that is, has power over the other.

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Hartsock maintains that the predominant notion of power in our culture constructs it as an attribute or a quality of an individual, expressing the capitalist standpoint. A critical countercurrent sees power as a relationship of domination, expressing the standpoint of the wage laborer. But, Hartsock argues, there is a third construction of power, one that becomes available to those whose social location engages them in transforming commodities into the food, clothing, and shelter that nurtures people. The work of meeting peoples needs allows the potential to develop a notion of power as capacity or potential. Because the sexual division of labor in our culture makes women responsible for domestic labor in the home, Hartsock argues, the standpoint of women offers unique resources for developing the notion of power to. Hartsocks analysis illustrates key themes in feminist critiques of ofcial knowing as well as the general argument that the conceptual frameworks that guide the organization of ofcial knowledge in our culture tend to reect the experience and interests of men, particularly racially and economically privileged men (Aptheker, 1989; Collins, 1990; Connell, 1995; Harding, 1998; Smith, 1990; Sprague, 1997; Sprague & Kobrynowicz, 1999). Taking the standpoint of the privileged, scholars organize our understanding in ways that are (1) objectifying, (2) decontextualized, and (3) logically dichotomous.

Thinking From the Standpoint of the Privileged First, ofcial knowledge tends to be highly objectied. Knowledge producers tend to fragment interrelated social phenomena into disconnected objects. Hartsock (1983) gives the example of seeing power as a thing in itself rather than a relationship between people. Positivist epistemology encourages this through its emphases on the standardization of measures of empirical phenomena and researcher control over the measurement process (Harding, 1998; Smith, 1990; Sprague & Kobrynowicz, 1999). Thus in studying people, we tend to transform them from thinking and feeling people into abstract bearers of attributes or traits and often fail to shift back to envisioning people in lived experience as we develop our interpretations (OBrien, 1989; Sherif, 1979; Smith, 1990). Segmenting experience into objects enables the second problematic pattern in the conceptual ordering of knowledge in our culture: decontextualization. Scholars tend to represent phenomena at high levels of abstraction, divorced from the context in which they occur. Hartsock (1983) shows that we tend to see power as the possession of individuals, removed from the exploitative relationships that allow them to accumulate resources and

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maintain control. Scientic standards value parsimony, the simplest possible expression of a principle or law, a simplicity that is achieved by stripping away the particularities of specic contexts. In our stratied society, however, race, class, and gender inequality interact to create categorically distinct matrices of opportunity and constraint (Collins, 1990; Connell, 1995). The press to abstract leads scholars to generalize from their own experience, and the most powerful scholars tend to be afuent, white, and male (Collins, 1990; Smith, 1990). Decontextualization and objectication lead all of us to talk about institutions (e.g., the family) or organizations (e.g., a school district) or social systems (e.g., the economy) as if they had an autonomous existence, were things in themselves. But organization, institution, and structure are abstract terms that we use to refer to our daily practices, the actions we take mindful of what we have learned about one anothers expectations and likely practices (Smith, 1987, Chapter 3). We are all connected through these practices, through relationships of unequal power. These frames of decontextualization and objectication also facilitate the third conceptual pattern feminists have criticized in mainstream knowledge: the tendency to organize phenomena into logical dichotomies. Jay (1981) describes a logical dichotomy as a specic kind of dualism, one that denes two phenomena in opposition to one another. Further, she notes, one of the pair tends to be identied as more central and/or valued and the other is dened as a deviation from the rst. As Aristotle constructed the laws of logic, everything is either A or not-A and nothing can be both. Western knowledge organizes our thought through logical dichotomies like mind/body, culture/nature, public/private, male/female, White/not-White (OBrien, 1981). In lived experience, Jay (1981) observes, most contrasts exist on some kind of continuum (e.g., sick/well, good/bad, acorn/oak tree). The feminist alternative to the logical dichotomy is making connectionsasking how elements that appear to be opposed are intimately related. Maintaining the male/female dichotomy requires continual attention, cooperation, and sanction (West & Zimmerman, 1987). The personal is political because interpersonal power differences between men and women are both the causes and consequences of their inequality in the broader social system (Sprague, 1988). The processes of objectifying, decontextualizing, and dichotomizing create a major blind spot in mainstream knowledge: the dichotomization of individual and society. We see individuals as the basic unit of analysis. In this paper we argue that these processes of decontextualizing, objectifying, and dichotomizing permeate the way we talk about self-determination and empowerment and reproduce a logical dichotomizing of normal/disa-

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bled. We further argue that a good way to break out of the standpoint of the privileged is to see relationships as the unit of analysis, which reveals the crucial connection between self-determination and empowerment.

TALK ABOUT SELF-DETERMINATION Deci denes self-determination as the freedom to choose ones own behaviors in accordance with ones inner needs, feelings and thoughts (1980, p. 112). He argues that because we have the capacity to make decisions and respond emotionally to our circumstances, human beings need to be able to make conscious choices about our lives. Decis conceptualization puts subjectivity at the centerhe argues for the freedom to be a self-reective person. However, when professionals talk about the self-determination of people with developmental disabilities, they tend to talk about the possession of attributes that lead to specic behavior patterns or outcomes (Abery, 1994). Self-determination for people with developmental disabilities has often been equated with having a paying job and living in an apartment or group home for the disabled (cf. Devlieger & Trach, 1996; Dossa, 1992). Professionals using the functional-limitations model focus on developing the cognitive skills that enhance physical or vocational opportunities (Deci & Chandler, 1986; Hahn, 1991; Thomas, 1989). This focus on specic outcomes is an example of objectication: denying the subjectivity of people. As Wehmeyer and Berkobien (1991) point out, positing a particular lifestyle as self-determining contradicts the idea that self-determination is a matter of people making choices based on their own preferences. Others who talk about self-determination emphasize decision-making skills and behaviors (Schloss, Alper, & Jane, 1993; Wehmeyer, 1994b). Wehmeyer, for example, denes self-determination as acting as the primary causal agent in ones life and making choices and decisions regarding ones quality of life, free from undue external inuence or interference (1994b, p. 2). Scholars and professionals working in this vein have emphasized the importance of problem-solving skills (Goldfarb, Brotherson, Summers, & Turnbull, 1986; Rickards, 1974; Schloss et al., 1993; Spivack, Platt, & Shure, 1976; Wehmeyer, 1994a). They have implemented practices like person-centered planning, for example, through Individualized Education Planning (IEP) meetings. Brotherson et al. (1993) expand the conceptualization of self-determination into the arena of civil rights when they assert that rst and foremost self-determination means access to basic rights like freedom of speech and association, due process, freedom from cruel

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and unusual punishment, and other basic constitutional rights that people with developmental disabilities have often been denied. This decision-making approach to self-determination recognizes and builds on the subjectivity of people with developmental disabilities. The development and exercise of decision making and other cognitive skills, backed up by basic civil rights, are important for people to secure the kind of residential arrangements they prefer, to get employment in an attractive job, or to participate in recreational, religious, and other activities. However, the unit on which we are called to focus our attention is an individual and the emphasis is on autonomy. Abery (1994, 354 ff.) locates self-determination in particularand sometimes overlappingsocial systems such as the family, employment, school, and peer group. Potential action in each context is shaped and constrained, he says, by systems from which people with disabilities are typically excluded; for example, those systems through which teachers and residential staff are trained. Further, all of these layers of social organization exist within and are shaped by the broader institutional and belief structures of a society. Although his discussion of abstract systems tends to obscure the specic practices of people, Abery does begin to include specic and varying contexts and social relations of unequal power. For the most part, though, when people speak of self-determination, the picture is one of decontextualized individuals, even pieces of people specic skills, attitudes, behaviors, or choices. Decision making is important. Consistent with Decis argument about the human need to be able to choose, people with developmental disabilities are more motivated, perform better, and are happier when they exercise more choice (Harchik et al., 1992; Heal & Chadsey-Rusch, 1985; Parsons et al., 1990; Wehmeyer, 1992; West & Parent, 1992). Ironically, talk about self-determination seems to focus very little on what a self is. Social psychologists describe a self as the human ability to think about, that is, be aware of ourselves, to look at ourselves from the perspective of others, to know the kind of person we would like to be, could be, or think we should be, and have a sense of our own worth (Howard, 1991). A self is socially constructedall of us infer and revise our sense of who we are and who we can and should be through our daily lives, particularly in social interaction (Bem, 1972; Blumstein, 1991; Goffman, 1963). Different kinds of social situations, embodying different potential relationships with others, allow us the opportunity to enact, see ourselves enacting, and see others responses to different aspects of the person we can be. We draw on cultural beliefs and frameworks to develop our interpretations of our experiences of ourselves and others and, in our culture, expectations about peoples attributes, dispositions, and inherent

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value vary with their gender, class, and race/ethnicity (see, for example, Bem, 1992; Collins, 1990; Tokarczyk & Fay, 1993). In terms of how selves are constructed, self-determination is both the expression of and the means for developing ones self. Yet, few scholars have explored the selves of people with mental retardation. We do not see the individual as a motivated, thinking person who has an intellectual decit, but who nevertheless attempts to deal effectively with his or her world (Zigler & Burack, 1989, p. 226; cf. Deci & Chandler, 1986). Bogdan and Taylor (1976) claim that our cultural understanding of mental retardation presumes that people with cognitive limitations cannot say who they are or make sense of their life situation. That is, the prevalent assumption is that people with mental retardation have no self. They become an other to us. This tendency to objectify people with developmental disabilities may explain why it is unusual for professionals to actively support participation in the building of positive, satisfying relationships (Dossa, 1992; Gresham, 1984; Hahn, 1991; Wehmeyer, 1994a). Sustaining relationships takes effort, and cognitive skills alone are not sufcient to the task. Relationships draw on the full range of human capacities, including ones sense of self. One needs to be able to identify and be willing to express ones own values and feelings, and to be assertive about ones rights and preferences, while, at the same time, be able to envision and take into account the values and likely responses of others. One needs to be able to enter into relationships that allow one to enact some desired aspect of oneself. Overall, talk about self-determination tends to focus more on traits than on selves, more on autonomy than on connection. In examining this discourse, we nd what feminists see when they look at other aspects of mainstream knowledge: an objectied individual that appears detached from a context and separate from, perhaps even the dichotomous opposite of, us.

TALK ABOUT EMPOWERMENT These same themes of objectication, decontextualization, and logical dichotomy also run through talk about empowerment, though to much more varying degrees. Further, how people talk about empowerment implies how they understand power and we nd strains of each of the three constructions identied by Hartsock (1983): power as a thing, power over, and power to. Some equate empowerment with a set of attitudes, abilities, and even behaviors (Koren, DeChillo, & Friesen, 1992). Others focus on a kind of

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passion. Emener, for example, says to a great extent, empowerment is a mind set (1991, p. 8). Vash (1991) describes it as being centered in ones self and excited about ones purpose and meaning. Beck (1994) talks about having the courage to act despite the possibility that the consequences will be negative. These approaches call to mind a decontextualized individual and construe power as a thing, a quality, or an attribute that people do or do not have. Community psychologists generally retain the idea of empowerment as a psychological state but bring in social context as crucial for its attainment (Florin & Wandersman, 1990; Rappaport, 1981, 1987; Sue & Zane, 1980; Zimmerman, 1990a, 1990b; Zimmerman & Rappaport, 1988). Zimmerman (1990a), for example, says that to be empowered, individuals need to be aware of what their options are but they also need to enjoy a good personenvironment t (1990a, p. 175), one that gives them regular opportunities to use the skills they develop to exercise control over life circumstances (Zimmerman, 1990b). Thus, empowerment requires organizing situations to enhance the possibilities for people to control their own lives (Rappaport, 1981, p. 15). Trickett argues that context is so important that we can only talk about empowerment within a specic context, that the concept must be ecologically grounded (1994, p. 591; cf. Riger, 1993). Fawcett et al. (1994) operationalize the notion of person-environment t. Individuals, they note, bring to a social context a set of competencies and experiences and perhaps some physical or biological impairments. Environments may present barriers (e.g., discrimination, poverty, and physical hazards) and/ or supports (e.g., people, resources, policies, cultural values). Thus, empowerment can be increased by sharing skills, removing obstacles, or enhancing access to resources (Fawcett et al., 1994). The person-environment t notion of empowerment moves us towardalthough not quite reachingconceptions of power as a relationship of domination. People distribute resources, construct physical space, and evaluate others differentness, and some people are able to advance their agendas at the expense of others. However, talking about person-environment t can make the relationships between people fade into the background on one or another side of a fairly abstract dichotomy. Some talk about empowerment as the degree to which people can actually inuence service providers and policymakers, calling attention to specic actors in relationships (Hahn, 1991; Klein & Cnaan, 1995; Riger, 1993; Staples, 1990; Trickett, 1994; West & Parent, 1992). West and Parent (1992), for example, say empowerment is the transfer of power and control over the values, decisions, choices and directions of human services from external entities (i.e., government funding agencies, service providers, social forces, etc.) to the consumers of services, resulting in increased motivation

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to participate and succeed and a greater dignity for the consumer (1992, p. 48). Klein and Cnaan (1995) say that the provider-client relationship is crucial for the development of empowerment and call for an advocacy/ empowerment approach, in which the main goal is to facilitate the transformation of the client from a passive recipient of services into an active consumer/advocate. Talking about empowering someone as providing the conditions for rights to be enacted, or more generally adjusting our practices and arrangements to be responsive to the needs of people with disabilities, moves us in the direction of constructing power as capacity, that is, power to. Feminist scholars, including community psychologists, have criticized empowerment talk for focusing on individual feelings and thereby failing to recognize the way life choices and outcomes vary systematically by social category (Asch & Fine, 1992; Riger, 1993; Serrano-Garcia & Bond, 1994). For instance, there is a danger . . . that community or empowerment can be substituted as a goal when what people actually need is better jobs and more income (Riger, 1993, p. 289). Serrano-Garcia and Bond (1994) say that we need to begin with the recognition that no group is homogenous. In other words, empowerment talk has been about an abstract individual. Real people with disabilities live lives marked by gender, race, and class relations and where they fall on these other dimensions of inequality shapes the resources they can draw on and the constraints they face. For people with disabilities, diverse as they are, to be empowered requires that members of all marginalized groups are empowered. This feminist critique signals an even deeper problem in the way we are talking about empowerment. Riger (1993) also touches on it when she criticizes discussions of empowerment in mainstream community psychology as being too individualistic and emphasizing agency, mastery, and control. This conceptualization, Riger charges, encourages competitiveness and denies connection, creating an opposition between empowerment and community. She traces this conceptualization to Western political philosophys valorization of individual rights and freedoms (a tradition feminists have argued expresses the standpoint of the privileged). We believe that Riger is pointing to a limitation of a power-overconstruction of power: it identies some key dynamics of the problem but makes it hard to visualize a solution. Riger expresses this frustration when she calls us to nd a way of talking about empowerment that allows us to value both empowerment and community. We argue that the way to begin is from the standpoint of women and the disadvantaged, to think of power as capacity or power to and to see people struggling to create and enact their selves in the context of the social relationships in which they live their daily lives.

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THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SELF-DETERMINATION AND EMPOWERMENT Taking the standpoint of women and the disadvantaged allows us to conceive of empowerment as a characteristic of relationships. To empower someone is to facilitate their self-determination. Empowering relationships are constructed on both interpersonal and social structural levels. The reason some of us are self-determining is that we are in interpersonal and social structural relationships that empower us. We begin our analysis from the daily experience of people with developmental disabilities. Nancy Ward, a self-advocate, describes that experience this way: . . . People who have disabilities have all these labels on them and we are never seen as a person. When we become empowered we can start telling people who we are and that we have feelings and needs just like everyone else because we are people (quoted in Miller & Keys, 1996, p. 313; see also Hahn, 1991; Morris, 1991). Ward is describing the struggle to construct a positive self in the relationships shaping the daily life of people with developmental disabilities. They confront such negative cultural images as being menacing, innocent or childlike, burdensome, shameful, sick, and less than human (Kurtz, 1977; Wolfensburger, 1983). Aspects of disability interact with other dominant cultural stereotypes to give content to and exacerbate the negation of peoples worth (Ferguson, Ferguson, & Taylor, 1992; Fine & Asch, 1988; Goffman, 1963; Hillyer, 1993; Morris, 1991; SerranoGarcia & Bond, 1994). For example, the dominant culture associates femininity with passivity and dependence. Women who are disabled are seen as redundant, whereas men who are disabled are seen as a contradiction (Asch & Fine, 1992). Women with physical disabilities encounter a culture that tells them their value is primarily based on their bodies, judged against a very narrow standard of physical beauty (Fine & Asch, 1988; Wendell, 1993). People with disabilities get the message. Children with mental retardation have lower self-esteem than children with average ability; thus, they are less likely to think they can succeed at a task and less willing to risk further damage to their evaluation of themselves through trying and failing (Chiu, 1990; Tice, 1991). Youths with mental retardation have lowered aspirations and see less reason to strive than other young people (Widamon, MacMillan, Hemsley, Little, & Balow, 1992; Zigler, Balla, & Watson, 1972; Zigler & Burack, 1989). Gendered messages have an impact: girls and adult women are even more likely to underestimate what they can do and the potential payoff for trying (Wehmeyer, 1994c; Widamon et al., 1992). Adults with disabilities work to maintain their sense of self-esteem but often in

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situations that sharply limit the options for doing so (e.g., see Zetlin, Turner, & Gallimore, 1981). Some intriguing qualitative work gives us a window into the struggles of people with mental retardation to develop a positive sense of self in a social environment that relates to them as other. Angrosino (1992) describes the ways four adult men construct metaphors as a way of making sense of their life histories. For example, one sees himself as an adventurer while another sees himself as an outsider who sometimes gets dragged into trouble. Bogdan and Taylor (1976) present an extended narrative edited from transcripts of multiple interviews with a 26 year old man they call Ed Murphy. Murphy speaks about the negative denitions imposed on him by others and, in telling his story, reveals his struggles to construct a self:
When youre growing up you dont think of yourself as a person but as a boy. As you get older it works itself outwho you are deep downwho you ought to be. You have an image of yourself deep down. You try to sort it all out. You know what you are deep inside but those around you give you a negative picture of yourself. Its that umbrella over you (Bogdan & Taylor, 1976, p. 51).

Peoples persistence in struggling to preserve a positive sense of self in the face of so little social support speaks volumes about the importance of self as a grounding in each of our lives.

Empowering Relationships If self-determination is the expression of a self and empowerment means facilitating that self-determination, then what kinds of relationships are empowering? Judging from the experiences of people with developmental disabilities, one very promising context for developing a positive self is ongoing connections with others who share ones struggles and need ones support. Mest (1988), for example, described the positive effects of group support among adults with mental retardation employed in a rehabilitation center who informally created a mutual support system. Sharing experiences and concerns with one another helped them to recognize the stigma associated with their disability without internalizing itthey were contented and happy with their difference. They did not construe their difference as their problem; rather they saw it as a problem for those who could not see past it. Mest reports that the relationships these adults developed in their group empowered them to develop a sense of self that was resilient even in the context of other, potentially damaging relationships. Szivos and Grifths (1990) observed a 9-week series of group therapy sessions involving adults with mental retardation and found the process

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gave participants an opportunity to confront their feelings of loss and work together to develop ways to deal with the social stigma associated with their disability. Their research led Szivos and Grifths to call for a revival of the consciousness raising group, a crucial means by which many women empowered one another in the early days of the second wave of the womens movement. Self-advocacy groups provide another example. Working together to ght for their rights has created a context in which self-advocates have been able to challenge dominant cultural dichotomies like normal/other and independent/dependent (Hahn, 1991). Not only are they developing more positive selves, they have been vocal in demanding that the rest of us recognize and respect their selves (Brunk, 1991). We believe that the reason that people with disabilities can develop positive selves in these support and self-advocacy groups is that these groups provide a model of empowering relationships. People need opportunities both for achievement and reection to develop skills and explore identity, to respond to expectations and experience the esteem of others (e.g., see Bandura, 1982; Heckhausen, Schmalt, & Schneider, 1985; Michela & Kelley, 1980; Seligman, 1975; Weiner, 1974). In other words, people need to be able to contribute to as well as to benet from relationships, which is the organizational premise underlying both consciousness-raising and selfadvocacy groups. Brown and Smith argue that self-segregated groups are so important that decent service provision should include a requirement to seek opportunities for people with disabilities to have meaningful association with others who share their oppression and for services to develop skills in protecting such association and [others should participate in] facilitating it when, and only when, it is appropriate for them to be involved (1992, p. 155). Can empowering relationships also be constructed between people with very different cognitive abilities? The question emerges because we rely on the dominant conceptualization of hierarchy as natural, xed, and even appropriate. Again the standpoint of women provides an alternative perspective. Our culture has traditionally absolved menespecially privileged menfrom responsibility for the care and nurturing of others and assigned those caretaking responsibilities to women. The experience of the child-rearer, the nurse, or the teacher offers a view of relationships among people with unequal abilities in which inequality is not xed but dynamic. These relationships are organized to minimize inequalities among participants over time. The contrast in standpoints between caretakers and non-caretakers, offers different perspectives on the idea of ethics, as elaborated by Gilligan (1982). From the standpoint of those who have no responsibility for the

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care of others, ethics can seem a matter of abstract rights and universal principles. The standpoint of the caretaker, however, directs us to connect choices with their consequences for the persons being cared for. From this perspective, moral judgements are decisions about relationships. The most developed ethical stance integrates responsibility to the self with responsibility to those with whom one is connected (Gilligan, 1982). In short, the standpoint of women allows us to see relationships varying in terms of how mutual they are; that is, the degree to which each party negotiates a balance between commitment to the others and to ones own journey of self-determination. In mutual relationships each strives to recognize the others unique and changing needs and abilities, takes the others perspective and interests into account, and provides comfort and support. A nonmutual relationship is one that is characterized by an unequal division of rights, responsibilities, and care. People with developmental disabilities are familiar with extremely nonmutual relationshipsall too often they nd themselves in relationships in which they have no rights (e.g., see Houghton, Bronicki, & Guess, 1987). Klein and Cnaan (1995) call for increasing the mutuality of the providerclient relationship when they argue that service providers must work to take their clients perspectives into account and integrate that with their own professional judgements of realistic options. This can only be done effectively, they observe, through dialogue and careful listening that occurs in a relationship based on mutual trust and respect. There is a form of relationship that at rst glance might seem to be benevolence but which actually works against empowering one of the parties to it. In an analysis that parallels Millers analysis of hierarchies, Hillyer (1993) notes that there are two kinds of help: necessary and unnecessary. Necessary help provides the infrastructure for independence; unnecessary help fosters dependence. Caretakers or service providers who do tasks for a person rather than help that person develop the needed skills are constructing nonmutual relationships that are obstacles to the self-determination of both parties. Empowering relationships can be built even when the differences in ability are extreme. Bogdan and Taylor (1989) describe the kinds of human relationships they have sometimes found between people with the most severe cognitive disabilities and those who care for them. The caretakers see the person with the disability as a thinking person who can be understood through careful attention and empathy. They nd a person who is unique in their personality, preferences, and life history. They help integrate the person with the disability into both immediate kin and friendship groups and broader social networks. The caretakers Bogdan and Taylor talked with see themselves as benetting from their relationship in things like

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increased sensitivity, enhanced tolerance, connection to networks they would otherwise not become involved in, and a sense of accomplishment in small achievements. These caretakers are recognizing the self of the person with a disability, nding the value in his or her contribution to the relationship. Mutually empowering relationships build on the distinctiveness of the participants in a process Bond and Keys (1993) call co-empowerment. Attempts to build empowering relationships by treating everyone the same when they are not constructs difference as a problem. This practice leads to the privileging of one set of skills and experience as normal or more important, and give rise to informal hierarchies that allow people with expertise in those areas to dominate (cf. Gruber & Trickett, 1987). The differences among participants enrich the relationship when the relationship is strategically organized to maximize each persons contribution. Mutually empowering relationships involve sharing skills where feasible and appropriate, and being accountable in other cases. For members of a decisionmaking group who want to advocate for a position based their particular expertise, being accountable means teaching others in that group enough to allow them to make a critical evaluation. For example, education is a relationship among teachers, students, and family members. Teachers know how to teach; students know what excites them and what makes them uncomfortable; family members know their students strengths, strategies, and social context. Relationships in which each perspective engages with the others are essential for effective education. The work of Bond and Keys (1993) suggests that those whose experience has crossed the boundaries between diverse standpoints are important resources in facilitating the integration of diverse perspectives. Building empowering relationships with people who have developmental disabilities is likely to require interaction strategies that are exible and multichanneled. People who are less verbal may rely more on nonverbal communicationposture, facial expression, movement, and other visual channels. Dossa (1992) understood the communication of a young woman who could neither see nor speak by learning to read her gestures and body language. Words may be used metaphorically, to suggest a mood, or to refer to a shared experience. Angrosino (1992) found he could have a better understanding of the men he interviewed once he looked at their words metaphorically. Experience can teach more than words. Klein and Cnaan (1995) emphasize the importance of clients either participating in or, at least, observing service providers advocating on their behalf. In essence, these scholars have taken the standpoint of a person with cognitive limitations in developing strategies for communicating. We all tend to think about relationships as personal and even private,

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but feminist standpoint theory warns against the dichotomizing of private and public. Our interpersonal relationships are the means through which we are connected in social structures and the ways our community and society are organized shape and constrain the kinds of interpersonal relationships we can form and sustain. Thus, the notion of relationships empowering self-determination needs to be broadened to also include social structural relationships.

Social Structure as Relationship Social structural relationships can be analyzed in two ways: (1) the way the community relates to each member and (2) the way the community organizes various members into relationships. In looking at these broader relationships we can see how the self-determination of normal individuals is supported through social practices that are tailored to meet their needs. This point has been made by those who argue that disability is socially constructed (e.g., see Ferguson et al., 1992; Groce, 1985; Hahn, 1991; Miller & Keys, 1996; Salios-Rothschild, 1976; Wolfensberger, 1983). A feminist perspective allows us to also see that our notions of normal are biased toward the needs and interests of the privileged. It is common to think of communities as collectivities of citizens presumed to share common needs and similar goals. Thus, for example, local communities pool resources to meet shared needs for re and police protection, education, transportation, and usually some support for economic development and recreation. The problem is that when common needs and shared goals are dened, the needs and values of certain categories of citizens are assumed to be normal and the needs of others are dened as special, or perhaps not even recognized. Transportation provides an example. Most communities see it as normal to be a car-owning, car-driving person so they assume normal transportation needs revolve around things like adequate roads and parking facilities. Organizing to meet these needs creates and maintains a high demand for automobiles, fuel, and insurance, all highly protable industries. If communities took the young, elderly, disabled, and poor as normal citizens, they would assume normal individuals do not own a personal vehicle or cannot drive a car. Then meeting the communitys transportation needs would involve exible, accessible, and inexpensive mass transportation. When a community denes transportation needs from the standpoint of the automobile owner, it empowers car owners but not those who cannot drive, who by default become others who require special services. People who have been structurally dened as other by the organization

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of transportation face sharp limits on the kinds of face to face relationships they can formtransportation becomes a barrier to any family, friends, employers, and teachers who are at some geographical distance. The quality of interpersonal relationships is constrained because those whose needs have not been recognized in the communitys organization of transportation become dependent on those who are nearby and on normals, in this case, family, friends, or special service providers who can drive and have access to a vehicle. Thus, difference gets translated into dependence. Another aspect of social structural relationships is the way that the community organizes its members into relationships through centralized control of bureaucratic structures. Bureaucracies enforce routinized procedures that constrain the ability of workers to be responsive to the specic needs, strengths, and desires of each person they serve. When institutions are highly bureaucratized, it is difcult to even identify who specically can be held accountable for the organizational practices or initiate change (Bandura, 1982). Thus, those who fall far from the organizations notion of a normal participantworker, client, or memberare not likely to be successful and are very likely to be held personally responsible for their lack of success. The way the institution of public education organizes relationships among children, parents, teachers, and others involved in the teaching of the young is a good example. School systems categorize children into groups by age and assume a certain annual rate of development. Centralized planning and high student/teacher ratios mean that lesson plans have to be built around the average student. Decision-making authority about educational practices is highly centralized, so both teachers and parents are left to implement decisions made by ofcials. Student ability and attainment are assessed by standardized tests and those whose scores deviate far enough from the statistical norm are formally labeled non-normal (e.g., educably mentally retarded and gifted) and come under the supervision of experts (Skrtic, 1991, p. 179 ff.). Educational structures with decentralized authority and radically reduced class size would be more empowering to teachers, students, and families.

CONCLUSION: MAKING CONNECTIONS People with developmental disabilities, like people in general, seek to express and explore their selves and need to be in relationships that are empowering in that they support that effort. Their efforts at self-determination have been severely constrained by interpersonal and social structural relationships that in one way or another dene them as other, as object

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rather than subject, as client rather than person, as dependent rather than valued member of a community. Values guide and legitimate both interpersonal practices and public policy (Rioux, 1994; Ward & Flynn, 1994). What are the social values that keep us from forming empowering relationships involving people with disabilities? The standpoint of women and other marginalized groups offers a critical perspective on two of our most widely held social values independence and productivity. As a society, we place a high value on independence, which we understand primarily as economic self-sufciency, and we tend to logically dichotomize our populace into independent and dependent people with clear moral preferences for the former (Fraser & Gordon, 1994). This is why many people who are committed to the self-determination of people with disabilities are uncomfortable with the notion of one person empowering another. They understandably see this as repositioning the person with the disability in a devalued relationship of dependence. Yet the independent/dependent dichotomy is illusory: we are all interdependent. The owner of a large business is dependent on the hard work of all his or her employees, government policies that support continued prot, and the paid and unpaid work of those meeting his or her personal needs. The hard working and successful academic who puts in long hours in the ofce each week is dependent on clerical staff, student input, and often much lower paid or unpaid others who prepare meals, clean house, do laundry, care for children, and perhaps even copy edit manuscripts. All human beings depend on the recognition and esteem of others for our sense of self-worth. When someone appears to be independent, what we are not seeing tells us a lot about the standpoint we are adopting. We do not see the contributions of working class employees and we do not see the work of caretaking. Caretaking is so devalued that we accept very little social responsibility for it, expecting it should be done in the home without compensation. When it is expected as part of the job at work, it is assumed to be natural, not a matter of skill and effort (England, Herbert, StanekKilbourne, Reid, & McCreary Megdal, 1994). In both cases, those who are making the contributions we are not recognizing are unpaid or underpaid, overwhelmingly women and usually working class and/or women of color (Brown & Smith, 1992; Glenn, 1992). The person who appears to be independent is a person who lives within and depends on interpersonal and social structural relationships that are empowering him or her. This person is very likely to be an afuent white male. Similarly, how we talk about that other core value, productivity, is open to discussion and the meaning we assign has direct consequences for

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whom we empower. We conceive of productivity quantitatively, as the rapidly paced production of countable goodsfrom material objects to entries on a c.v. We scorn those from other cultures who are not as compelled to live by the clock as we are, and the contributions of people from this culture who are slow (Hillyer, 1993). There is a man who lives in the neighborhood of one of the authors who always seems to be working. He slowly and methodically covers an area of several blocks, carrying a broom and a bag and picking up every bit of litter on his way. His efforts, no doubt, are the main reason why even busy streets in the area are pleasantly clean, making a contribution to the health and property values of the people who live in the neighborhood. His work produces a social good but his labor is not linked to or recognized with an income. The man who cleans his neighborhood has something in common with many other members of the community whose labor is not typically rewarded with a living wage: those who are caring for the young, the sick, the frail; those who maintain healthy and pleasant living environments for families; those who create art and beauty in our lives. In our society we have limited our notion of productive to something that can be linked to the generation of prot, either immediately or through some identiable chain of events. In fact, it may be that we rank contributions by the immediacy of their efforts to the creation of private prot: basketball players are above CPAs who are above nurses who are above daycare providers. All of them are ranked above the man who keeps his neighborhood clean. How would we reorder the above list if we were to reward people on the basis of their contribution to the social good, not just to the generation of private prot? The term productive implies work that creates something of value. It implies a social contract: people who create valued services or products for the society are rewarded with the resources they need to live. When we value the nurturing of people in the fullest sense, our notion of social contribution will include creating opportunities for each of us to be challenged, responsive, nurturing, creative, and all in the community together, as well as to make or do something useful or even marketable. As Ferguson et al. (1992) say, we all need to be talking less about competition and independent living and more about cooperation and interdependent living. A feminist critique of the ways we talk about self-determination and empowerment reveals that as scholars, professionals, and members of the community, we tend to localize the problem in the isolated, abstract individual and see it dichotomously. Thus, our problem-solving strategies center on changing the individual and/or providing special accommodations to his/her disability. Feminist standpoint theory leads us to a different construction of the problem and the solution: self-determination is the expres-

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sion of a self that occurs within the context of empowering interpersonal and social structural relationships. The reason that some of us seem to be normal is that social structures and practices have been more or less designed with our needs and abilities in mind. We have been living in empowering relationships. We need to do more research on the ways existing social structural relationships facilitate the self-determination of the privileged, often at the expense of the most vulnerable members of the community. Feminist standpoint theory suggests that an important way to develop this line of research is to build on the standpoints of those who are least empowered in our current relationships. People living in different intersections of gender, class, and race are likely to have different stories to tell. Thus, a good way to start is to listen to people with disabilities who are also women and/ or poor and/or people of color, and the people who nurture them, as they describe in their own ways the constraints on their daily lives (Morris, 1992; Stone & Priestly, 1996). An interesting thing about linking self-determination and empowerment together in the context of relationships is that it sets into motion a whole chain of connections. Centering on what is common to us all, this framework erodes the dichotomy of normal/disabled. We shift our focus from the limitations of an individual with a disability to the ways we all depend on and connect with one another, both interpersonally and as members of communities. We gain a strategy for working to achieve more broadly empowering relationships in our communities: we need to talk about social policy in terms of interdependence and care-taking, making shared needs more salient than special services. Curb cuts and easy-open doors address the needs of people pushing strollers as well as those of people using wheelchairs. Small class size allows teachers to be responsive to the learning strategies and emotional needs of kids for whom English is a second language, kids experiencing divorce, kids who are hyperactive, kids whose homes have no crayons or books, kids who are particularly skilled at cognitive activities, and kids who have developmental disabilities. Mass transportation serves all those who cannot drive young, old, low income, and/or disabled, as well as those who prefer to be responsible to our environment. Understanding self-determination as the outcome of empowering social relationships creates the potential for coalitions among members of communities who have been separately categorized as not normal, increasing the likelihood of real social change (cf. Skocpol, 1992). A rst step in the evaluation of community and institutional policies should be to turn the tables on the old implementation of the normal/other distinction. Let us decenter our idea of normal and evaluate policy and

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practices also from the standpoint of people who do not drive, are not comfortable with counting money, learn at radically different paces in a wide variety of styles, do not read, do use a wheel chair, do push a stroller, and/or are personally responsible for the care of others. The American Association of Mental Retardations (Luckasson et al., 1992) new denition of mental retardation in terms of person-environment t is a move in the right direction. In talking about a persons state of functioning in the context of his or her particular constellation of needs and abilities, history, community context, and access to support systems, this re-conceptualization directs us toward a conversation about the ways existing social structural relationships create systematic disadvantage. Bogdan and Taylor observed that what and who others, as well as we, are depends upon our relationships with them and what we choose to make of us (1989, p. 146). An important part of the self-determination of people with developmental disabilities is who we choose to empower within our communities.

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