Internalised Psycho-Emotional Disablism In Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room

Abstract

The disabled have always been looked at through an alien lens by the non-disabled bodies. This had led to an exclusion or complete invisibility of them in the societal structure. Evidently, the disabled suffer from two major forms of disablism. This paper attempts to analyse how the disabled suffer damage to their emotional well-being that arises from various factors which become internalised over a period. The constructed ‘disabled identity’ and the ‘abled gaze’ push the disabled towards the margins and makes them lose their self-esteem and identity. They are made to believe that they are inferior to the constructed normative ideal body. Psycho-emotional disablism isolates the disabled individual from the mainstream society. This paper hence argues that disability is a cultural construct as much as it is physical phenomenon, which ultimately leads to an internalised psycho-emotional disablism. As an interdisciplinary discourse, the novel ‘Toby’s Room’ by the British novelist Pat Barker is taken to situate and analyse the aforementioned ideas.