Eli Clare argues that cure in American society is not viewed only as the complete elimination of disability, disease, debility, infirmity, and illness but also includes the structures and rhetoric around diagnosis, treatment, management, rehabilitation and prevention since all of these structures seek to define, classify disability in order to assimilate ones experience back into non-disabled dominant society. Clare argues that the ideology of cure emplores people to seek a state of no harm that is deemed as a "superior state."

Eli Clare's Arguments about Cure

The idea of the need, and inherent good, of finding a cure has been widely critiqued in disability studies for how aggrandizing the idea of a cure devalues disabled experiences and assumes both that all disabled people desire to be non-disabled and that non-disabled lives are inherently better and more valuable than disabled people.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

American culture typically assumes that preventing illness and disease is an inherently good act. However, historically illness prevention has worked hand in hand with movements like the American eugenics movement and medical racism in ways that have subjected disabled people, people of color, and poor people to isolation, incarceration, medical experimentation, and nonconsensual and nontherapeutic medical treatment. Also, many of the reasons American culture views prevention as an inherent good is because of larger glorifications of the idea of curing illness and disease.

The Tricky Politics of Illness Prevention

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

Black Disability Politics

The Ideology of Cure

Dr. Elena M. Andresen, a professor emerita from Oregon Health and Sciences University, details that one of the main sites of friction between public health and disability studies is the differing view of prevention work between the two fields. Andresen notes that in disability studies literature prevention is often presented akin to eugenics in preventing the existence of people with disabilities - whereas folks in the Public Health field view prevention through the lens of preventing the incidence and severity of an injury or condition, public health does not consider disability selective abortion or euthanasia as part of public health work but it is easy to see the slippery slope from preventing incidences and severity to preventing disability.

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