Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Archives and Used Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Politics of Disability: Structure and Agency in Nation Building in Czechoslovakia
- Part 1 Building the Czechoslovak Nation and Sacralizing Peoples’ Health: The Vicissitudes of Disability Discourse during the Interwar Period
- Part 2 Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
- Conclusions: Going from Knowledge about the Violent Past to Acknowledging It
- Abstracts in German and French
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The Discourse of Disability: A Noah’s Ark for the New Nation?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of Archives and Used Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Politics of Disability: Structure and Agency in Nation Building in Czechoslovakia
- Part 1 Building the Czechoslovak Nation and Sacralizing Peoples’ Health: The Vicissitudes of Disability Discourse during the Interwar Period
- Part 2 Postwar Institutionalization of Care for the Disabled: Toward a Universalized Discourse of “Defective Gypsies”
- Conclusions: Going from Knowledge about the Violent Past to Acknowledging It
- Abstracts in German and French
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter explains the core concept of the Czechoslovak politics of disability, functional health (prescribing health even to those who had disabilities but were able to work), its intersectionality with gender and race in propaganda and institutional strategies concerning two main target groups: legionnaires and children with disabilities. In line with the Eliasian vision of national elites and their role in the sociogenesis of the nation-state, we explore how the intensive institutionalization of public health and social care was accompanied by exaggerating the role of health in public and professional discourses.
Keywords: disability, functional health, public health propaganda, institutionalization of health care
Functional health: The utilitarian discourse of disability
The normalization of those who had disabilities played a special role in the discourse of the Czechoslovak ideologues about the new health care during the 1920s. Having disabled people participate in building the nation highlighted a heroic past and a promising future – because the main target groups of normalization were war veterans and children with physical as well as mental disabilities. The Czechoslovak official ideology proclaimed the systematic reform of care for the disabled, providing options for its normalization: “The world war brought the care of the handicapped back to the state of the Middle Ages.” Remarkably, people with disabilities gained a twofold status, as those whose lives were aggravated by the war, and as those who were unable to make a positive contribution due to the postwar hardship of the Czechoslovak people: “The permanently impaired are those who remain the most abandoned Cinderellas of our social health care. Sustainable care of these unhappiest people is not only profound for the national economy but also reconciles the life of ordinary people.”
By summarizing the problem of disability, the ideologues of public health reform attacked the dependence of those with disabilities on others’ care as blocking the dignity of not only the individuals but of society in general: “The main risk for those who were handicapped was to remain beggarly creatures who are sentenced to the care and charity of their surroundings.” Thus, the ability to work was seen as “the only one way to provide, essential for the existence of individuals and society, the true gold treasure of the state, labor has become a precious outstanding and wanted value.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of Disability in Interwar and Socialist CzechoslovakiaSegregating in the Name of the Nation, pp. 61 - 76Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019
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