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CALIFORNIA SOCIOLOGY FORUM VOL. 7 

The Denial of Self and Belonging: Exploring Disability 
Identity and Society Using Classical Sociological Theory 

Lauren Whiting 
Department of Sociology 

California State University, Los Angeles 
ABSTRACT 
Researchers of disability studies define disability identity as 
intertwining disability with a sense of connection to the disability 
community. However, with continued social and spatial barriers, 
people with disabilities may not always form a disability identity, 
resulting in issues that may span throughout the lifespan, ranging 
from ostracization, a decline in psychological wellness, and 
difficulties collectively pushing back against stigma. As 
contemporary academia and society expand their documentation 
of the challenging experiences people with disabilities undergo 
regarding identity formation and community belonging, it poses a 
unique opportunity to explore the nature of disability during 
modern social analysis. Therefore, outlining Harriet Martineau's 
work as a deaf female social analyst presents space to examine 
George Herbert Mead’s hope for a “universal society” critically 
through the insights of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and W.E.B. Du 
Bois to address how to create a society that is equitable and 
diverse.  
 
From a social analytical perspective, people’s humanity lies in the 
ability to engage in creative labor, create identity, and develop a 
sense of belonging to a community (Edles and Appelrouth 2021). 
However, what are the outcomes for people who struggle to 
experience these developments? In the contemporary era, 
academia and society have expanded their documentation of the 
challenging experiences people with disabilities undergo 
regarding identity formation and community belonging. For 
instance, Muller (2021) found that as primary and secondary 
educational spaces failed to normalize disability in the teaching 
pedagogy (reflecting a disinterest in disability within the social 
epistemology), children with disabilities did not have adults with 
disabilities to model after or learn language relevant to their lived 
experiences. Expectedly, Muller’s (2021) participants expressed 
shared experiences of schools encouraging them to deny their 



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disabled identity and not create a community with other students 
with disabilities, suggesting the lack of disability identity. 
Conceptually, researchers understand disability identity as “a 
sense of self that includes one’s disability and feelings of 
connection to, or solidarity with, the disability community” (Dunn 
and Burcaw 2013:148). Significantly, the problem of people with 
disabilities not forming a disability identity can translate into more 
severe issues throughout their lifespan, ranging from a decline in 
psychological wellness to difficulties collectively pushing back 
against stigma (Muller 2021). Considering the current state of 
concern, it raises the need to explore its social analytical 
beginnings in the era of modernity.  

Markedly, Harriet Martineau, a deaf social analyst, 
explored the difficulties she and other deaf people encountered in 
developing identity and belonging in her work, Letters to the Deaf 
from 1834. In this writing, she explicates some of the realities 
regarding the ablest behaviors of society during her lifetime, 
which often forced herself and other people with disabilities into 
social isolation and a deteriorating sense of belonging (Bohrer 
2003; Naples and Valdez 2020). For instance, she outlined how 
the adverse reactions she and other deaf people endured when they 
communicated and utilized assistive technology led to a “willful” 
social exodus to avoid social faux pas and stigmatization (Naples 
and Valdez 2020). Once pushed to the outskirts of society, 
Martineau notes, deaf people also experience a dehumanizing 
form of interdependence through practices of paternalism (Bohrer 
2003). Unfortunately, regardless of her contributions to making 
sense of the social world in modernity, social analysts of 
Martineau’s time regularly questioned the reliability and validity 
of her work, citing that people with disabilities and women could 
not interact with the social world proactively (Bohrer 2003). They 
further libeled her character through the outward belief that her 
rejection of femininity and domesticity led to her neurosis of 
health (i.e., invalidism) (Bohrer 2003). One outcome of this 
scrutiny is that her works experience infrequent epistemological 
discourse compared to other modern social analysts in the 
contemporary world (Bohrer 2003).  

With context about disability and social analysis in the 
modern and contemporary worlds, it creates a more prominent 



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concern regarding the stagnant action to address the concerns of 
people with disabilities, implying and reinforcing their 
ostracization from identity and community building. As such, their 
plight leads to questions about the nature of the strained 
relationship between identity and belonging when holding a 
marginalized identity and how inquisitively thinking about other 
modern social analysts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and 
W.E.B. Du Bois presents concerns about George Herbert Mead’s 
hope for a “universal society.” 

To begin, Mead used symbolic interactionalist 
methodological approaches to showcase the intrinsically dialectic 
relationship between the self and society. For instance, he 
highlighted how the self is created through language to convey 
how people view themselves as the subject and object when using 
perceptions others create. Additionally, Mead conceptualized the 
“play stage” and the “game stage” to explain the development of 
the self (Edles and Appelrouth 2021). He believed that as children 
age, they shift from internalizing the attitudes of discrete, 
disconnected others to simultaneously internalizing the attitudes 
of multiple others. From the “game stage,” Mead coined the term 
“generalized other” to describe the phenomenon where societies 
develop general attitudes all ascribe to as people assume their 
roles and the roles of others (Edles and Appelrouth 2021). 
However, in applying these concepts to people with disabilities, 
unique problems arise where they cannot healthily achieve these 
social developments due to perceived inferiority, which Du Bois 
notes with “the veil” and “the double-consciousness.” 

In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois (1903) explored his 
conceptualizations of “the veil” (experiences of subjective and 
objective estrangement) and “double-consciousness” (a 
separation of self) that Black Americans experienced as a 
byproduct of colonization, slavery, and segregation in the United 
States. Though Du Bois created these concepts to discuss race 
relations, they are universal in design and can apply to various 
experiences of oppression (Edles and Appelrouth 2021). For 
instance, by focusing on Du Bois’s research question of how those 
who are “the problem” navigate society, the social analysis of 
individuals with disabilities reveals their forced separation 
between their disability and humanity. With the knowledge that 



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they cannot be disabled and human simultaneously, people with 
disabilities recognize how they are perceived by the able-bodied 
world and respond accordingly, as Martineau previously showed. 
In turn, they experience an increased risk of experiencing 
estrangement from society and creating a distorted sense of self. 
Therefore, Du Bois presents a fascinating concern for Mead’s 
theoretical orientation regarding the development of the self. If 
those who are “the problem” grow up experiencing the use of 
language and modeling that emphasizes their inferiority and need 
to interact with the world accordingly, they grow up to become 
adults who internalize the attitudes of a generalized other who 
does not value their marginalized identity, increasing the risk of a 
negative sense of self.  

Notably, this micro-level concern culminates into 
concerns about Mead’s macro-level utopian hope, which he called 
the “universal society.” Mead believed that for a “universal 
society” to exist, people needed to engage in universal discourse, 
the ability to take on the attitudes of the abstract, distant other, to 
understand the rippling effect of personal behavior (Edles and 
Appelrouth 2021). From a speculatory approach, this raises the 
question of whether the distant other is symbolically (not 
physically) distant, as the “generalized other’s” collective 
sentiments can normalize the dehumanization of those who do not 
meet social expectations, as shown by Gilman and Martineau.  

First, Gilman explored women’s experiences with 
disability (i.e., post-partum depression) within the context of 
patriarchal rest cures that intensified symptoms, rather than 
alleviated, in her semiautobiographical work, The Yellow 
Wallpaper in 1892. Despite never addressing disability issues 
overtly, her work touches on how the experience of disability can 
be intensified by oppression, specifically the intentional practice 
of denying a person their communicative autonomy due to their 
marginalized identity (Edles and Appelrouth 2021). Likewise, 
Martineau noted how she and other deaf people often experienced 
physician inadequacy due to the latter’s reservations about 
communicating the state of their disability and treatment solutions 
(Naples and Valdez 2020). Second, another point of interest from 
Gilman is her 1898 work Women and Economics, where her use 
of the corset metaphor underlines how the patriarchy “chokes” 



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women into conformity until they internalize their oppression 
while also fearing liberation (Edles and Appelrouth 2021). As 
Gilman notes this metaphor extends beyond gender inequality, it 
quickly finds applicability in Martineau’s observations on the 
creation, internalization, and acceptance of oppressive attitudes 
towards deafness stemming from popular scientific fields of the 
time, such as phrenology (Bohrer 2003). Third, though Gilman’s 
exploration of disability ends with The Yellow Wallpaper, she and 
Martineau both highlight the effects of denied power due to 
oppression. 

From Gilman’s perspective, women are perceived by their 
gender first and their humanity second (Edles and Appelrouth 
2021). For instance, in Women and Economics, Gilman famously 
analogizes women to domesticated horses as the gendered 
division of labor forced women into the economic dependency of 
men due to the former’s domestic labor generating no 
compensation. Adding to this, Martineau expands the thought 
process by exploring how deaf people are also forced to exist 
within the confines of domesticity but are denied gendered 
expectations as a reflection of their believed biopsychological and 
intellectual limitations (Bohrer 2003). Notably, Martineau offers 
substance to Gilman’s understanding of Social Darwinism as the 
latter attempts to redefine who is the fittest to survive based on 
biological distinctions to generate social equity, while the former 
highlights the impact of focusing on biological distinctions on the 
lived experiences of people with disabilities. To Gilman, gender 
denied people their humanity. To Martineau, disability denied 
people their gender and humanity.  

Considering the insights of Gilman and Martineau, here 
lies a unique concern for Mead’s vision of society; he did not 
account for marginalized identities forgotten through intentional 
practices of minimizing language. Instead, he focused on the 
notion that despite people experiencing a natural inclination to 
engage in self-protective and self-preservationist behaviors, they 
would realize that engaging in pro-social activities (e.g., 
cooperation) would allow them to maximize their desires (Edles 
and Appelrouth 2021). Additionally, he believed that as society 
organizes to reach universality, intrapersonal and interpersonal 
conflicts will arise and find resolution through reconstructions and 



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modifications made through communication. Further, his 
expectations for conflict resolution do not account for power 
dynamics, which creates the invisibilization of language to 
describe the experiences of marginalized individuals and can 
prevent successful communication. Although Mead held an 
optimistic perspective of conflict as a symbolic interactionalist, he 
did not explore the nature of resolving power imbalances (Edles 
and Appelrouth 2021). Therefore, a final exploration of Du Bois’s 
theoretical orientation offers space to explore the work needed to 
create Mead’s “universal society.”  

Du Bois argued in his essay The Souls of White Folks from 
1910 that the inability to move past conflict stems from the 
privileged not realizing their privileged consciousness (Edles and 
Appelrouth 2021). Moreover, he presented the issue that 
regardless of historically marginalized people’s attempts to claim 
their humanity, conscious and unconscious processes of 
dehumanization will ensure the preservation of their lower value, 
ensuring the privileged can continue their practices of exploitation 
and profit. Using this perspective, Du Bois presents a critical 
concern for Mead’s conceptualization of a “universal society,” 
especially in the context of disability. Specifically, Mead was a 
white, non-disabled man alive during the early stages of 
Reconstruction U.S. (Edles and Appelrouth 2021), which raises a 
positionality question about whether his conceptualization of a 
“universal society” prioritizes assimilating people into the white, 
Western world or offers dignity, equity, and inclusivity for 
diversity. Despite the inability to answer these questions, Du 
Bois’s analysis suggests that developing a “universal society” 
must be intentionally critical. As social analysis is a byproduct of 
the human survival skill to predict the behaviors of an 
environment (Lemert 2021), Du Bois presents one more note 
about the talents of those experiencing marginalization and its use 
to build a better society. 

Interestingly, Du Bois believed experiences of oppression 
allow people to develop the “gift of clairvoyance,” the ability to 
recognize the actual operations of society (Edles and Appelrouth 
2021). Markedly, this gift is highlighted in the writings of 
Martineau (Naples and Valdez 2020) as she details how people 
with disabilities describe the turbulence experienced in 



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developing a sense of self and belonging to society at a nuance 
other social analysis did not fully address at the time. Alongside 
this clairvoyance, Du Bois advocated for the privileged to become 
aware of their consciousness and its impact on historically 
marginalized individuals and communities. Principally, achieving 
these ends requires a willingness to intentionally incorporate 
people of marginalized identities by increasing the value of their 
“gift of clairvoyance” to ensure people reevaluate the nature of 
power dynamics to move towards self-actualization, community 
advancement, and the merging of previously separated identities. 

For contemporary examples of attempts to shift 
epistemological power imbalances throughout the life course, 
there is a growing demand for special education to update their 
teaching pedagogy to become more pro-disability and foster 
students’ disability identities (Muller 2021). Scholars highlight the 
importance of institutions of higher education providing queer and 
disabled students with online and in-person venues to improve 
their community building and student development experiences as 
they become adults (Miller 2017). Tangibly, strikes led by the 
2022 University of California graduate students strove to address 
obstacles disabled graduate students experienced in their media 
and bargaining stances (Salanga 2022). Additionally, disabled 
parents from Ohio made national news as they challenged state 
laws allowing the use of disability for family courts to remove a 
child (Staver 2022). Their activism reached fruition in 2023 as 
Ohio passed SB 202, which not only ended the use of parental 
disability as the sole determinant to limit or deny 
parental/custodial rights but emphasized the right for parents to 
access supportive services deemed reasonable and necessary 
(Szilagy 2023).  

Finally, in comparing cultural differences from 
Martineau’s deaf experience during the age of modernity to the 
contemporary world, Padden and Humphries (1988) highlight the 
distinguishment between “lowercase deaf” and “uppercase Deaf.” 
Specifically, “lowercase deaf” refers to the inability to hear due to 
an audiological condition, while “uppercase Deaf” refers to the 
deaf people who use sign language as their shared, inherited 
language and share a culture that generates their sentiments about 
themselves and relationships with society at large. This relates to 



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current deaf culture, where deaf individuals experience more 
opportunities to generate their Deaf identity by attending Schools 
for the Deaf, attending Deaf-friendly universities (e.g., Gallaudet 
University and California State University, Northridge), and 
associating with resource and community-building agencies (e.g., 
Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness).  

So, while Mead’s theoretical expectation for a “universal 
society” has not yet come to fruition, work to normalize universal 
discourse through classical influences from Martineau, Du Bois, 
and Gilman generates hope for people with disabilities (and 
people of other marginalized identities) to participate in society 
authentically. Moreover, the evaluation of classical ontology 
emphasizes the importance of contemporary developments about 
identity and society. For instance, Patricia Hill Collins’s 
(1986:118) Black Feminist Thought argues that the theoretical 
understandings of society hold more depth and complexity when 
they originate from individuals whose standpoint exists at the 
intersections of oppression, who she calls the “outsiders within.” 
For “outsiders within,” their status allows them to analyze society 
from a lens that often goes disregarded by those who do not hold 
the same standpoint, and to trust the validity of their personal and 
cultural epistemologies to analyze and solve social problems. 
Unsurprisingly, the themes within Collins’s work 
paradigmatically align with the works from modern sociology as 
she intertwines their scholarship and her positionality to further 
the value of epistemological heterogeneity in sociological thought 
and equitable societal formation. 
 

REFERENCES 
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1986. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The 

Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social 
Problems 33(6):S14–32. DOI: 10.2307/800672. 

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. 
Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. 

Dunn, D. and Burcaw, S. 2013. Disability Identity: Exploring Narrative 
Accounts of Disability. Rehabilitation Psychology, 58(2):148-157. 

Edles, Laura D. and Scott Appelrouth. 2021. Sociological Theory in the 
Classical Era Text and Readings. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE 
Publications, Inc. 

Lemert, Charles. 2021. Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and 
Classic Readings. 7th ed. New York: Routledge. 



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Miller, Ryan A. 2017. “‘My Voice Is Definitely Strongest in Online 
Communities’: Students Using Social Media for Queer and 
Disability Identity-Making.” Journal of College Student 
Development 58(4):509–25. 

Muller, Carlyn O. 2021. “‘I Didn’t Know People with Disabilities Could 
Grow up to be Adults’: Disability History, Curriculum, and Identity 
in Special Education.” Teacher Education and Special Education. 
44(3): 189-205.  

Naples, James and Tulio A. Valdez. 2020. “Letters to the Deaf: Present-Day 
Relevance of History’s Earliest Social Analysis on 
Deafness.” History of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck 
Surgery 162(3): 319-321. 

Padden, Carol and Tom Humphries. 1988. Deaf in America: Voices from a 
Culture. Harvard University Press.  

Salanga, Janelle. 2022. “‘Disability Rights are Workers’ Rights:’ Disabled 
UC Davis Workers on Strike Advocate for Greater Accessibility on 
the Picket and in the University.” 
https://www.capradio.org/articles/2022/11/28/disability-rights-
are-workers-rights-disabled-uc-davis-workers-on-strike-advocate-
for-greater-accessibility-on-the-picket-and-in-the-university/ 

Staver, Anna. 2022. “Disabled Parents Say Their Differences Are Being 
Used against Them in Ohio Family Courts.” The Columbus 
Dispatch. 
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/03/28/disabled-
parents-ohio-family-courts-treat-them-unfairly-
ableism/7139758001/ 

Szilagy, Sarah. 2023. “New Ohio Law Protects Disabled People’s Parental 
Rights.” https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/new-ohio-law-
protects-disabled-peoples-parental-rights/ 


	The Denial of Self and Belonging: Exploring Disability Identity and Society Using Classical Sociological Theory - Lauren Whiting



