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

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.