A Disability Studies Analysis of Alcohol Use: Understanding Personal Experiences through Dominant Discourses on Addiction

Abstract

This paper describes my experiences with coming to understand my own relationship with alcohol dependency and addiction. Disability studies has offered me a lens and guide through which I have critically interrogated discourses about addiction, while examining the ways dominant and counter-narratives have impacted my own recovery process. In this paper, I review historical information about the emergence of culturally accepted recovery ideologies in the United States that have led to a dominant disease model perspective. Then, I explain the disability studies-informed theoretical underpinnings of this paper, which include discourse theory and disability studies as applied to alcohol addiction. Using disability studies and autoethnography as a guide, the body of the paper uses examples from my own journals to elucidate salient themes that emerged about my experiences in early recovery. The paper uncovers the ways I came to understand my own identity related to addiction, how I navigated feelings of stigma and shame, the ways I found recovery spaces that embraced empowering frameworks aligned to a disability studies ethos, and how I discovered community and pride through this experience.