Disability Studies Theorising Disablism and Ableism

DIS/ABILITY STUDIES
In this groundbreaking new work, Dan Goodley makes the case for a novel,
distinct, intellectual and political project – dis/ability studies – an orientation that
might encourage us to think again about the phenomena of disability and ability.
Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary areas, including sociology, psychology,
education, policy and cultural studies, this much-needed text takes the most
topical and important issues in critical disability theory, and pushes them into new
theoretical territory. Goodley argues that we are entering a time of dis/ability
studies, when both categories of disability and ability require expanding upon as
a response to the global politics of neoliberal capitalism. Divided into two parts,
the first section traces the dual processes of ableism and disablism, suggesting that
one cannot exist without the other, and makes the case for a research-driven and
intersectional analysis of dis/ability. The second section applies this new analytical
framework to a range of critical topics, including:
• The biopolitics of dis/ability and debility

• Inclusive education
• Psychopathology
• Markets, communities and civil society.
Dis/ability Studies provides much-needed depth, texture and analysis in this

emerging discipline. This accessible text will appeal to students and researchers of
disability across a range of disciplines, as well as disability activists, policy makers,
and practitioners working directly with disabled people.
Dan Goodley is Professor of Disability Studies and Education in the School of

Education at the University of Sheffield, UK.
Dis/ability Studies proposes a new dialectic in which the twins disability and
ability – separated at birth – are re-united in a confrontation whereby the
alienated siblings come to terms with their distinctive experiences; one,
comfortable in the lap of privilege; the other, mired, deep down amongst
the wretched of the earth. Professor Goodley breaks new ground and re-sets
the template for the disability debate.
– Professor Bill Hughes, Glasgow School for Business and Society,
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Dis/ability Studies is a remarkable synthesis of the most distinctive strands of

Goodley’s thought, and yet expands current scholarly thinking. Goodley offers
a clear signal for a change of direction, if not a revolution, in disability thought.
– Dr Karen Soldatic, School of Social Sciences,
University of South Wales, Australia
With radical vitality, Dan Goodley’s latest invites us to inhabit the slash
between able/disabled in order to re-encounter the constitution of the
human. Exposing the ‘normal’s’ confused engagement with dis/ability,
readers are offered a transformative praxis opposing ideals of ableism while
respecting our desire to thrive in disability-as-life. Goodley addresses the
often unquestioned and deadly normative demands of our ‘austere’ times as
a way to work toward what he takes as the heart of being human, namely,
alliance, connections and interdependence. In the midst of disability studies,
queer and post-colonial theory, Goodley invites us to imagine politics as
the actualization of a committed interrelatedness affirming life that has been
made marginal by stark neo-liberal practices that feed markets trading in
degradation. Critical of rigid models, this book is an essential read and a
rallying cry for anyone who desires to put the question of embodiment into
the heart of what it means to be human.
– Professor Tanya Titchkosky, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
University of Toronto, Canada
With both the rigor and wit that marks all of his work, Dan Goodley maps the
landscape of contemporary critical disability studies in his comprehensive new
book. Dis/ability Studies: Theorising disablism and ableism, moreover, makes clear
to readers the urgent and innovative directions in which disability studies needs
to move. This book is not only an invaluable resource surveying the models of
disability that structure (and can transform) our culture, it is – in its attention to
a global austerity politics and the workings of what Goodley terms neoliberal-
ableism – an important part of the global turn that the interdisciplinary field
is taking. Through stories of oppression and resistance in multiple locations,
Dis/ability Studies ultimately welcomes critically disabled ‘becomings’ that can
dismantle the structures of ableism that Goodley theorises.
– Professor Robert McRuer, Department of English,
George Washington University, USA
DIS/ABILITY STUDIES
Theorising disablism and ableism
Dan Goodley
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Dan Goodley
The right of Dan Goodley to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodley, Dan, 1972-
Dis/ability studies : theorising disablism and ableism / Dan Goodley.
– 1st Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-415-82721-8 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-415-82722-5
(pbk.) – ISBN 978-0-203-36697-4 (ebook) 1. People with disabilities.
2. Discrimination against people with disabilities. 3. Disability studies.
I. Title. II. Title: Ability studies.
HV1568.G66 2014
362.4--dc23
2013043948
ISBN13: 978-0-415-82721-8 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-82722-5 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-36697-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo 10/12.5 pt by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham,
Norfolk NR21 8NN
CONTENTS
Illustrations vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xix
PART 1
Finding dis/ability studies 1
1 Disablism 3
2 Ableism 21
3 Intersectionality 35
4 Dis/ability studies 51
5 Researching dis/ability 67
PART 2
Exemplifying dis/ability studies 81
6 Precarious bodies: the biopolitics of dis/ability and debility 83
7 Becoming inclusive education: cripping neoliberal-able schooling 99

vi Contents
8 The psychopathology of the normals: why people are so

messed up around dis/ability 117
9 Markets, cruel optimism and civil society: producing dis/ability 137
10 Critical dis/ability studies 153
Notes 177
References 179
Index 195
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure
10.1 Working the productive excesses of the dis/ability complex 154
Tables
2.1 The valued ableist citizen of the twenty-first century 23
4.1 The binarisation of everyday life 59
9.1 Cruel optimism: making of the un/desirables 139
Boxes
1.1 New emphasis on environmental factors 15
9.1 Dis/ability training 149
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PREFACE
This book makes a pitch for a distinct intellectual project – dis/ability studies –
an orientation that might encourage us to think again about the phenomena of
disability and ability. How might it be helpful to think through the ways in which
disability and ability are co-constituted? How do the processes of disablism and
ableism differ from but also feed into one another? How can activists, researchers,
allies and practitioners associated with what we might loosely define as the
disability field address the contemporary concerns facing disabled and non-disabled
people in a time of austerity? To what extent does an analysis of disability immedi-
ately require one to scrutinise ability? In this book I pose and repose, address, play
with and seek to answer these questions. This text develops the argument that we
are entering a time of dis/ability studies, when both categories of disability and
ability require expanding upon as a response to the global politics of neoliberalism
and hyper-capitalism. Disability is re-sited as a moment of celebration and desire
that radically challenges the preferred desire to be non-disabled. Crip and disability
politics are combined as dis/ability politics.
One of the reasons that I came to write this text lay in a sense I had that
(certain kinds of) disability studies (at least in Britain) were in danger of backing
themselves into a theoretical and political cul-de-sac. While disability is, of course,
the master signifier for many disability studies activists, scholars and researchers,
we have witnessed the occlusion of concerns from equally transformative political
movements. Race, gender, age, sexuality, class intersect with dis/ability in many
complex ways but, too often, they are sidelined in pursuit of trying to under-
stand the master signifier of disability. The geographer David Harvey (1996: 116)
acknowledged about his beloved Marx that ‘there is much that is lacking (or
only lightly touched upon) in Marx’s schema, including the sexual and erotic,
the gendering and racing of bodies, the psychoanalytic and representational, the
linguistic and the rhetorical, the imaginary and the mythical’. At times I have
x Preface
found similar deficiencies in the schema of disability theory. Concurrently, my

sense is that there is a populist appeal to empiricism (e.g. Shakespeare, 2013) and
an ever-growing anti-intellectual undercurrent in British disability studies (see
Barnes, 2012; Sheldon, 2013). Because politics and theory are so deeply rooted
and involved with one other then the very act of theorising the disabling society
– or the ableist world – evokes a moment of political reflection. Harvey (2011:
102) draws on the work of Jacques Rancière to remark that ‘politics is the sphere
of a community that can only ever be contentious’. The same observation can be
made about studies of disablism and ableism; ‘isms’ we will define below. There is
much more to just thinking about dis/ableism: we want to disrupt these processes.
Consequently, following Harvey, we are left with a simple decision to make:
‘whose side are you on and which and whose interests do you seek to protect?’
(Harvey, 2011: 103).
In this volume my associations are with non-normative, queer, crip and
marginalised Others and their allies. I align myself with what Wynter (2003)
defines as the archipelago of Otherness. This is not to suggest that I am unproblem-
atically located on the non-normative side of the binary. That I have the time to
write a book suggests I occupy a privileged position. Maybe there is nothing more
ableist in character than a sole academic ‘banging on’ about the world. Whilst
accepting this contrary role my book seeks to be politicised: to expose the inherent
contradictions of ableism; to critique the conditions of disablism and to illuminate
the possibilities of the non-normative, the non-ableist, the crip and the queer; to
work inwards towards the normative centre from these politico-analytical outskirts.
I also want to think through some tricky ideas. To do so I will have to draw upon
social theory. I do this without apology. Theory has never been more needed than
in these troubling economic global times. To borrow from Hughes et al. (2012),
social theory not only gives us new vocabularies for thinking about society but
also gifts us with rich practices to match the inequities of everyday life. To use
the language of the great critical pedagogue, Paulo Freire, theory feeds conscien-
tisation: theorising and changing life. To paraphrase Johnston (2009), when dis/
ability studies succeed they do so when they open up frameworks for exploring
how ableist assumptions mediate and disability experiences complicate claims to
culture. My joint project is, to use Campbell’s (2012) term, to stalk ableism whilst
also, following disability scholars, contest disablism. I am also interested, though, in
the meaning making of either side of the disability–ability binary and the messy
stuff in the middle. Dis/ability is also a moment of contemplation: to think again
what it means to be dis/abled and what it means to be human.
Another aim of this book is to embrace what Watermeyer (2012: 9) wonder-
fully terms a generosity of engagement, ‘to allow our mistaken ideas about one another
to come to light, even if this involves dropping a few political clangers’. For him
the ‘hopeful fantasy of a single, grand narrative which makes sense of disability’
needs to be exposed as it is: a fantasy that promises much but after analysis is
found wanting. If the exclusion of disabled people could be addressed through one
approach then clearly there would be no need for this book. More importantly
Preface xi
there would also be no requirement for disability politics, no appeals for anti-
discriminatory policy and practice, no need for disability culture that speaks back
at power. If we know one thing it is that dis/ability is complex. Both ableism and
disablism are hard to pin down. A generosity of engagement encourages activists,
scholars and practitioners to keep minds open. My hope is that this text illuminates
debate and response by drawing on theories in and around the borders of dis/
ability studies. In so doing, we might seek to address the challenge set out by Tanya
Titchkosky (2011): to allow disability to spark a politics of wonder that demands
imaginative and creative ways of living our lives.
I argue for us to think simultaneously about disability and ability. We should
ask what does dis/ability do? What is evoked by its existence? What do we desire
of dis/ability? Before getting into detailed responses it would help to pause for a
moment to think broadly about the anchoring concepts of this book. I should
acknowledge here that foregrounding definitions goes against a running theme
of my text; not to reduce the complexities of dis/ablism nor dis/ability to simple
models or categorisations. Nevertheless, it is helpful to bring in some initial
thoughts around how we might map out some of our key reference terms. Here
are a few stories we can tell about these conceptual anchors.
We could start by sharing this narrative. Disablism relates to the oppressive
practices of contemporary society that threaten to exclude, eradicate and neutralise
those individuals, bodies, minds and community practices that fail to fit the
capitalist imperative. This is a powerful narrative that guides the politics of disabled
people’s movements and politicises the experience of life in a disabled world.
Disability might be understood as an identity position, often a negative, marked and
stigmatised social position. But, as we flesh out the narrative and seek its characters
and plot lines, we might find disability as something more positive. Disability asks
us to consider what we value in life. Disability is a potentiality: a moment, an event,
a calling and an encounter. Disability is also a signifier: a term that calls out for
signifieds or meanings to be attached. Too often the sign of ‘disability–pathology’
dominates our thoughts. Less well known are, for example, ‘disability–celebration’,
‘disability–subversion’, ‘disability–politics’, ‘disability–desire’. These productive
signs of disability demand our attention.
Often in the dis/ability world we will find tales of ableism which accounts for
the stifling practices associated with a contemporary society that increasingly seeks
to promote what Campbell (2009) terms the ‘species-typical individual citizen’: a
citizen that is ready and able to work and contribute; an atomistic phenomenon
cut off from others, capable, malleable and compliant. Ableism breeds paranoia,
confusion, fear and inadequacy. Ableism is an ideal that no one ever matches up
to. As McRuer (2006) carefully puts it: compulsory ableism is to disablism what
compulsory heterosexuality is to homophobia. Ableism provides just the right
amount of temperature and nutrients for disablism to grow. As we study ableism,
this engenders an analytical turn away from disability to ask: what do we mean by
being able? What is valued by being as able as possibly or ideally one could be?
Ableism is equally an individual and a global project. And ableists are prepared to
xii Preface
do deals with others who associate their practices of normalcy, including white,
heteronormative and malestream takes on the world.
Ability stories are ubiquitous. They speak of a phenomenon normatively under-
stood as an a priori capacity to do something and, often, to do something well.
When I think of my beloved football team Nottingham Forest FC (or ‘soccer team’
to those of you of a North American or Antipodean persuasion), I am reminded of
a number of players over the years whom I would describe, along with my fellow
fans, as having ‘wonderful natural talent’. There were other players who had good
‘engine rooms’, never knew when to stop running or gave 110 per cent each game
(it is always 110 per cent in football commentaries). But, when we think more
broadly and more seriously of ability (and here I have to acknowledge, against my
better judgement, that football is only a game) we find that one person’s abilities are
compared with another’s. An individual’s ability can only ever emerge in relations
with others. It has to be acknowledged, recognised and nurtured. The problem
with ability is that just like the high expectations of fans of their (in my case, low
achieving) football teams, when we think of ability we have a destiny in mind. This
destiny is associated with success. Away from the football field such linear, certain
and expectant notions of ability undergird many societies’ values around what it
means to be a valued human being. For many of us, ableist expectations are impos-
sible: and are set as impossible dreams for many. And, as a snowball effect, ability
picks up speed, expands in nature, drawing into it cognitive, economic, cultural
factors to become a monstrous entity: a great ball of ability. One might say that in
its beginnings ability emerges as a seemingly benign concept. We all want to have
abilities of some kinds in order to live. But when ability grows in scope and reach
and remains fundamentally linked to the valuing of distinct internal traits, qualities
and characteristics then it becomes an individualised, anti-social and idealised
phenomenon: wary of anyone or any practice that gets in its way. Yet, as I write
this, I still worry about my failing football team and wonder: are my anxieties
ableist, elitist and exclusionary? Is there something troublingly desirable about the
notion of ability? Or is the problem of ableism when it is allowed to stop being a
story, a debate, a conversation and becomes a fixed ideal?
Professional narratives, especially from medicine, psychology and social policy,
tell us that impairments are sensory, physical and intellectual differences or limita-
tions. Impairments are also endlessly being identified, constituted, constructed,
diagnosed and treated. Impairments may actually be part of the process of disablism
and cultural artefacts of the ableism industry that is quick to categorise those
ways of being in the world that fail to match up to – or worse threaten – global
capitalism. This feeds into another project: the disability project or what Longmore
(2003) defined as the disability industry: where the finding of disability provides
an opportunity for the exponential growth of the educational and rehabilitation
industries.
Playful stories have been told about the non-disabled; a concept strategically
appropriated by Linton (1998: 14) so that: ‘disabled is centered, and non-disabled
is placed in the peripheral position in order to look at the world from the inside
Preface xiii
out … Centering the disabled position and labeling its opposite non-disabled
focuses attention on both the structure of knowledge and the structure of society’.
You will note as we move through the book that the non-disabled are a curious
lot; constituting a community that reacts in the most contradictory ways to the
presence of disability. Later in the book we will also refer to them as the normals:
another tongue in cheek but serious moment too that recognises normality as the
preferred way of being (or, what philosophers would call, the preferred ontology
of everyday life).
A recurring story of this text – and one that I have already been unfairly using
without any explanation – is that around dis/ability. This is a split term that I
believe acknowledges the ways in which disablism and ableism (and disability and
ability) can only ever be understood simultaneously in relation to one another.
The slashed and split term denotes the complex ways in which opposites bleed
into one another. People find it difficult to define ‘normal’ and ‘ability’ but are
far more ready to have a go at categorising ‘abnormal’ and ‘disability’. Dis/ability
studies keep disablism and ableism, disability and ability in play with one another,
to explore their co-construction and reliance upon one another.
This leads us to the final conceptual anchor of this book – positionality – captured
by the question: why are we here? This question worries away at what might be
done to dis/ability. When disabled people (or non-disabled people for that matter)
become solely objects of study, are reduced to fetishised products of professional
or academic knowledge, are fixed as untroubled entities, are conceptualised only as
social actors caught up in processes of oppression, then we risk limiting not only
the lives of individuals fixed in this gaze but also the possibilities of the study of
dis/ability. Clearly, activists, artists, researchers, academics, policy makers, practi-
tioners and service providers are ‘here’ – in a context that is engaged with dis/
ability – for a number of reasons associated with dis/ability including categorising
and measuring; capturing meaning; administratively defining and responding to
dis/ability; treating, curing, rehabilitating, politicising and publicising dis/ability.
As we will explore more in later chapters, we now have a burgeoning literature
associated with disability studies, critical disability studies, studies of disablement,
studies of disablism, critiques of ableism, explorations of ableist normativity, inter-
sectional analyses and a fledgling dis/ability studies. In differing and rich ways
these new studies resettle dis/ability: not as an individual, medical or adminis-
trative phenomenon but as a social, cultural, political and historical construction,
artefact, process and metaphor. And in this re-siting of disability comes a critique
of ability. This text encourages us to ask where we as doers of dis/ability studies
find ourselves in relation to dis/ability.
The structure of the text

This book is split into two parts. Part 1 – Finding dis/ability studies – traces studies
of disablism and ableism and makes the case for the dual analysis of dis/ability.
Chapter 1 foregrounds disability as the unit of analysis and the source of inspiration
xiv Preface
for politics and theory. A case is made for the study of disablism: which we might
denote as the exclusion of people with sensory, physical or mental impairments
from everyday life. Like other modes of oppression and discrimination, disablism
is a complex and multifaceted process. We will require, therefore, different kinds
of disability studies that are engaged with different layers of attack including the
global, material, cultural and relational. We approach the serious challenge of
contesting disablism mindful of our current times of economic precarity.
Chapter 2 switches mode by turning to ableism: practices associated with a
contemporary society that promotes the species-typical individual citizen and
a whole set of values associated with this idealised individual. Our move is a
strategic one: we will consider ableism’s psychological, social, economic, cultural
character which normatively privileges able-bodiedness; promotes smooth forms
of personhood and smooth health; creates space fit for normative citizens;
encourages an institutional bias towards autonomous, independent bodies and leads
to economic and material dependence on neoliberal and hyper-capitalist forms of
production. We will explore the possessive of ableism and how it clings to its own
and repels outsiders. We will deconstruct its logics. One of these we will term
neoliberal-ableism: a logic that pursues the (hyper) normal.
Chapter 3 develops the view that ableist cultural reproduction and disabling
material conditions can never be divorced from hetero/sexism, racism, homophobia,
colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and capitalism. This necessitates an inter-
sectional analysis of dis/ability: because the process of ableism and disablism are
never simply about dis/ability. Hence, it is important to look for political and
thinking allies – others who are engaged in contesting oppressive practices – and
this will lead us to the work of queer, feminist and postcolonial studies. The
chapter makes a case for an intersectional analysis that connects dis/ability with
other subject positions and political groupings whilst also complicating our ideas
of dis/ability.
Chapter 4 unpacks the theoretical orientations of what I call dis/ability studies. I
define a little more the political and scholarly response that is theoretically vigilant
about the mutable and double-edged nature of the dis/ability complex. I offer
some theoretical stories about dis/ability; tales that will be re/told, expanded upon
and subjected to moments of digression and flights of fancy. This will, inevitably,
involve us undertaking a tour de force through a number of theoretical narratives
including materialism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and postconventionalism;
each engaged with the dis/ability complex.
In order to provide some empirical resources for this book I will use Chapter 5
to introduce and draw upon material from four research projects. The chapter also
pulls out some key lessons for researching dis/ability. Project 1: Parents, professionals
and disabled babies: towards enabling care, was an ethnographic study of disabled babies
and young children, their families and associated professionals. A key learning
point from this work is dis/ability knowledge is always being contested. In Project
2: Does every child matter, post-Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods, we
asked what life was like for disabled children/young people (aged 4–16) and their
Preface xv
families in the aftermath of the changes for children’s policy and practice since
1997 set in motion by the New Labour government in Britain. Like the first
project we combined ethnography and interviews with children, their families,
communities and professionals. We discovered that researching dis/ability requires
creative social theories. Project 3: The psychopathology of the normals involved sending
an email to a disability research mailing list asking disabled members to share their
‘favourite’ stories of how the non-disabled respond to disability. A key learning
point of this study? Dis/ability and disablist/ableist processes are co-constituted at
the mundane level of the everyday as well as being structurally and hegemonically
located. Project 4: Big Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities and civil society
is a new project, just underway at the time of writing. This seeks to bring the
human rights of disabled people with learning disabilities back to the foreground
of theoretical, policy and professional discourse (Goodley, 2000, 2011a). The
collaborative research team reminds us that dis/ability research can and should embrace
participatory models of research with emancipatory potential.
And so to the sustained analytical work of the book – Part 2 – Exemplifying
dis/ability studies – which theorises bodies, communities, markets, communities
and education. Our fledgling dis/ability studies will be exemplified; theoretically
informed by studies of disablism, ableism and intersectionality (introduced in
chapters 1 to 4), through reference to findings from the four research projects of
chapter 5.
Chapter 6 takes as a given that our bodies are precarious entities in these times
of the biopolitics of dis/ability and the politics of debility. We will examine the
paradoxical yet complementary societal emphases on the health of the citizen and
the epidemic of disability diagnoses. Drawing in part on interviews with parents of
young disabled children from Project 1, we will explore the co-constitution of dis/
ability; identify the gains and losses associated with accruing a dis/ability identity;
illuminate the processes of pathologisation alongside entitlement and consider the
limits and excesses of naming dis/ability. Not only is the notion of a body outside
of culture a myth but also, in actuality, our bodies are shaped by the alienating
choreographies of capitalism. All of us are left lacking in the market; debilitated
by the dance of capital. We therefore need our interconnections, communities
and alliances more than ever. The chapter is split into a number of sections:
sociable bodies (ab/normal hands and fingers); biopolitical bodies (pathologisation
alongside entitlement); dis/abled bodies (as they are being diagnosed across the
transhumanist globe); capitalist material bodies (labour, alienation, impairment);
desiring dis/abled bodies (the political potential of debility). While the chapter
offers a sobering account of the dangerous dealings of the precarious body, we
move to a more affirmative space (through the musings of crip theory) where dis/
ability is proffered as the place through which to develop debility politics.
Next, Chapter 7 captures an ambition (to identify ways of practising inclusive
education), a theoretical approach (becoming as a marker of postconventionalist
theory), an orientation (to crip and challenging mainstream school and educational
contexts), through reference to research (specifically, Project 2). When disabled
xvi Preface
children enter education – whether special or mainstream – they contravene the

ableist ideals of schooling. This chapter recognises these inequitable structural
horizons but also develops a thesis that, working at the divide of dis/ability, poses
a challenge to neoliberal educational institutions whilst offering new forms of
education, becoming and community. Disabled children and their allies advance
and revise critical pedagogical approaches to education. The chapter kicks off by
situating schools as sweatshops of neoliberal-able education. Then I introduce
dis/ability as a (necessary) moment of crisis in education. This leads us to cripping
education and the concepts of rhizomes, becomings and assemblages from postcon-
ventionalist theory. I will demonstrate, through reference to the educational and
community story of one family, that these concepts are actually played out in ways
the family works around being disabled and becoming dis/abled. Such innovation
pushes us to think about the development of crip pedagogies that illuminate
an ethics of integration and engagement, enhancing a sense of belonging and
connection with innovative educational practices.
Chapter 8 explores why so many people are messed up about dis/ability,
drawing upon findings from Project 3 to interrogate mundane responses to dis/
ability. Through a critical psychoanalytic reading of accounts shared with me by
disabled people and their families – specifically their encounters with the normals –
we will consider the uncanny nature of disability and the ways in which it provokes
cultural and community forms of anxiety, projection, fascination, disavowal and
erasure. These responses are symptoms of a wider malaise amongst the normals
indicating a cultural psychopathology of ableism, including charitable donations;
(ableist) Jesus wants you for a sunbeam; inappropriate intimate invitations;
ontological invalidation – putting the ‘dis’ in disability; disabled people, social
death and paranoid anxiety and disability kitsch and common parlance. While
disability evokes fear it also invites fascination. This ambivalence provides us with
an opportunity to playfully consider how we might therapeutically, culturally and
politically help the normals reject their impossible notions of the ableist ideal and,
instead, embrace the resistant position of the disabled Other. One of the most
powerful things we can do around dis/ability and ab/normalcy is to have conversa-
tions about them. I suggest that now is the time for a politics of abnormality where
each of us move out of our normative shadows and embrace our inherent potential
to be non-normative.
In Chapter 9, we will examine the production of dis/ability: in terms of the
ways in which disability is reproduced (as disabling and unwanted) and ableism
is promulgated (as hyper-capable and desirable). The chapter pitches analysis in
terms of the global marketisation of idealised forms of citizenship found in supra-
national discourses of the World Health Organisation, inter/national media texts
and British government policy drivers. Any engagement with disability is one with
ability. We return, again, to the split phenomenon of dis/ability and seek to analyse
the global neoliberal and capitalist constitution of the dis/abled citizen and the
opportunities for resistance that might occur through civil society. These analyses
must, therefore, combine materialist and posthumanist approaches in a way to
Preface xvii
galvanise a reaction to the marketisation of dis/ability. The chapter is split into five
sections. First we explore the cruel optimism found in the impossible promises of
neoliberal capitalism. Second, we focus on The World Report on Disability and the
ways in which it globally peddles troubling ideas of dis/ability. Third, we examine
the very different media portrayals of dis/ability that occurred during and after
London 2012 with a specific focus on Oscar Pistorius. Finally, we draw on Project
4 to examine the ways in which disabled people’s organisation and civil society use
and ref/use neoliberalism in these times of ‘Big Society’.
The final chapter of the book – Chapter 10 – pauses to consider where we have
been in the text and what openings this offers up for further thinking, research and
activism. This chapter is an essay of two parts. The first, studies, seeks to bring a
selection of intellectual projects that might emerge as a response to the analytical
work of this book including dis/ability, non/normative, ab/normal, life/death,
trans/human, in/human and dis/ability studies. The second, becomings, identifies
and develops a number of contemporary analytical themes of the text that animate
dis/ability including dis/ability desires, categorisation, politics (including debility/
slow death politics) and global activism.
My ardent hope is that this fledgling dis/ability studies not only feeds the
faculties of critical studies of ableism and disablism but constitutes a commons
upon which other radical theories and forms of activism share ideas and practices
that broaden our understandings of the human and society.
Join the debate #dis/abilitystudies

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To the women in my life – Rebecca Lawthom, Ruby Haf Lawthom Goodley,

Rosa Cariad Lawthom Goodley and Deb Goodley – for putting up with my
general nonsense. Thank you to Rebecca and Katherine Runswick-Cole, my
long-term writing partners in crime and research who continue to push and pull
our thinking and research apart and together.
Thank you to the Economic and Social Research Council for their funding of
a number of projects cited in this book.
To Mark Haydon Laurelut, Karl Nunkoosing and, especially, Rod Michalko,
Tanya Titchkosky and Katherine Runswick-Cole for reading and responding to
draft chapters. To Ema Loja for sharing stories from her own doctoral research,
a couple of which make an appearance in Chapter 8. To students and colleagues
at Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Sheffield who have
been willing to run with and/or contest some of the ideas in this book including
Angharad Beckett, Tom Billington, Geoff Bunn, Toby Brandon, Tsitsi Chataika,
Tim Corcoran, Leanne Dowse, Anita Ghai, Anat Greenstein, Shaun Grech, Bill
Hughes, David Hyatt, Jóna Ingólfsdóttir, Marek Mackiewicz, Toon Maillard,
Rebecca Mallett, Helen Meekosha, Soya Mori, Nagase Osamu, Griet Roets,
Karen Soldatic, Jill Smith, Jon Scaife, Tom Shakespeare, Jenny Slater, Rannveig
Traustadóttir, Simo Vehmas, Nick Watson, Tony Williams and Liz Wood.
And to Sara Ryan for your achingly beautiful blog. I hope you realise how
much your words inspire so many of us to keep chipping away at the shits called
disablism and ableism.
Thanks to Rod, Tanya, Radek Puky and Rinaldo Walcott for providing a
theoretical and political space to do Toronto, Cremore, ‘27 please’, Sylvia Wynter and
Vietnamese Pho. The human features a lot during this book and that is in no small
part down to you folks. Thanks to Routledge and in particular James Watson’s encour-
agement. And finally, to Fawaz Al Hasawi and Alan Goodley for keeping the faith.

PART 1
Finding dis/ability studies

1
DISABLISM
The study of disablism came of age at the end of the last century. Disabled activists
had wrestled for social recognition, petitioned for cultural representation and
lobbied for political participation. Studies of disablism reacted theoretically to
this politicisation. Scholars can now reminisce about 30 years of intellectual and
political progress that has moved disability studies, as Newell (2006) puts it, from
critique to a body of knowledge central to the discussion of disability in its own
right. We can unravel numerous theoretical predilections. We might locate these
geopolitically (in terms of pan/national location), place them temporally (by way
of an historical overview) or house them in various epistemological or disciplinary
dwellings. Disability theory emanates from the perspective that disability is a
sociological, economic and cultural thing rather than a psychological, embodied
or medicalised problem. This chapter captures different kinds of disability studies:
1. The usual problem/s of disability: medicalisation and individualisation

2. Social models and disabling barriers: made in Britain
3. Cultural locations: North American and Canadian landscapes
4. A World (Health Organisation) perspective
5. Conclusion: theorising disablism in a time of austerity.
The usual problem/s of disability: medicalisation and

individualisation
If any justification were required for critical studies of disablism, then one only
needs to interrogate common-sense ideas that float around disability. While we
live in a society that is increasingly sceptical about science and medicine, disability
has had a long history of connection with the men in white coats and the grey
institutional walls of the hospital, clinic and asylum. Disability is a problem and
4 Finding dis/ability studies
an almighty one at that. Disability is normatively understood through the gaze of

medicalisation: that process where life becomes processed through the reductive
use of medical discourse. This is not to say that medicine necessarily limits our
thinking about disability. Indeed, as Couser (2011) comments, medicine has given
many (disabled) people their lives. Simultaneously, medicine ‘tends to demystify
and naturalise somatic anomaly, stripping away any supernatural or moral signifi-
cance and characterising physical variation solely as a matter that science may
investigate and attempt to remedy’ (Couser, 2011: 23). Herewith lies the problem.
During those moments when disability is phrased through medical knowledge it
threatens to be read solely through biological, genetic, hormonal, neurological and
physiological language. Too often disability is found and medicalisation aroused.
The study of disablism reacts to the ubiquitous individualisation of the problems
of physical, sensory or cognitive impairments. Disability studies take as their bread
and butter an oppositional stance to the ubiquitous individualisation of disability
within the solitary individual.
We are all engaged in personal and private methodologies for making sense of
ourselves and others through dominant discourses that envisage the odd, different,
disruption, unusual and outlier in terms of ready-made labels, conditions and
syndromes from the medical register. Our obsessions with our own bodies and
biology, fuelled by institutional, expert, scientific discourse and the fascinations
of popular culture trains our thoughts on to our individual selves, our minds and
our bodies to check how we match up to a normative model of humanity. Our
dealings with biology – a term that derives from the Greek word bios (life) and the
suffix logia (study of) – start early in life. Antenatal stages of life implore would-be
parents to make choices around conception or termination of a fetus. Decisions
are complicated by the identification or risk of impairment: physical, sensory,
cognitive differences traditionally understood through the frames of medicine.
Moreover, potential parents are engrossed in the medicalisation of life itself when
one considers some of the choices that are being made in relation to genetics,
disability and parenting. Take, for instance, recent attempts by Deaf parents to have
Deaf children or the more commonplace incidents of would-be parents testing
for the presence of impairments such as Down syndrome. For Newell (2006:
276) parental screening for impairment is never a value-neutral ethical dilemma:
it is a decision that is inherently politicised, framed and structured by a dominant
community that values non-disabled lives and places disabled lives in the ‘risk
category of humanity’. Newell (2006: 277) understands genetics as an ‘essential
replicator of not just reductionist thought, but the entire worldview associated with
modern medicine including of course the notion that there are good genes and bad
genes’. While I take issue with Newell’s collapsing of medicine into medicalisation,
the latter process he describes references the ways in which valued lives – and lives
that evoke value – blur concepts of humanity, health and worth. Medicalisation
is, as we shall see in the next chapter, intertwined with other grand narratives of
ableism and neoliberalism. In those industries that sell the promise of technoscien-
tific and medical solutions – such as the pharmacological and prosthetic industries
Disablism 5
– disability occupies a privileged position: it is a key object of these interventions.

Paradoxically, for Sothern (2007: 146), disability ‘is the category that neoliberal
figurations of biomedicine promise to eliminate even while neoliberalism invests in
the proliferation of categories of disability as one of its founding moves’. Disability
is an inconvenience to rectify and problem requiring elimination. Disability holds
a bifurcated identity in the realms of medicalisation: it is something to be increas-
ingly diagnosed (made ever more present) and eradicated (requiring erasure).
If, as Michalko (2002) asserts, disability is called to mind as a problem then
– like any dilemma – a solution must be found. Human beings tend not to like
uncertainty. It makes us feel uncomfortable. It makes some of us seek certainty
in pretty bizarre and, now and then, dangerous places. Goggin and Newell
(2005) and Newell (2006) denote ways in which medicine, culture and the media
intersect:
1. The tragic life of an individual or several devalued individuals is portrayed in

a way designed to elicit maximum effect;
2. A technology is portrayed as delivering a person from disability, provided that
society legalises, funds, or embraces such a solution;
3. Securing the technology means that disability has then been ‘dealt with’;
after deploying such rhetoric there is to be no more appeal to emotion, and
the solution lies in the rational pursuit of the technology identified in step 2
(effectively there is only one, inexorable logical step);
4. Disability as a political issue goes away, until next time it is needed in the
powerful politics of media representation.
(Goggin and Newell, 2005)
This merging of medicine and technology – biotechnology – demonstrates

one aspect of medicalisation. Medicine is marketed as giving and improving
life; plotting interventions along a continuum ranging from improvement, to
prostheses, to rehabilitation through to cure. The global citizen, depending upon
how much they can access biotechnology, will perceive themselves and others
through the matrix of biotechnological practices of the international marketplace.
As Mills’s (2012) doctoral work demonstrated, the detection and pharmaco-
logical treatment of mental illness is big business; burrowing away just as easily
in the metropolis of London as it is in the rural locations of Northern India.
Biotechnology offers life but also takes certain lives away. We are witnessing a
blurring of the ambitions of the medical establishment, the economic ambitions
of nation states and the insatiable privatised demand for profits of globalised drug
and medical corporations.
Studies of disablism and disability studies have emerged in response to this
authoritative discourse of medicalisation. This discourse has been, according to
Vandekinderen et al. (2013), myopic in terms of its interpretation of disability.
It enhances the view, for example, that children with Down syndrome will
behave in distinct, measurable ways as a direct consequence of their impairments.
Medicalisation also has been historically predicated on a didactic monologue

about bodies. So, for example, doctors rather than parents know best about the
educational prognosis of children with Down syndrome. Disability studies pulls
these monologues of medical disclosure into a space of what Myers (2004) defines
as inter-subjectivity: where patients and professionals dialogue around the causes
and experience of impairment and disability. This recognition that different stake-
holders – in and outside medicine – always contest a medicalising discourse draws
us into debates around public health, welfare systems and health insurance. As we
shall see in later chapters, medicalisation, dis/ability and identity merge in compli-
cated ways particularly in the current economic context of neoliberalism. The
(post) modern global citizen is one increasingly more at home with the language
– if perhaps not the promise – of medicine.
Campaigns around gene therapy or prosthetic design prompt debates about
the rationalisation and justification of the biotechnological shaping of humanity.
Many of us deploy a sceptical eye on ‘current biomedical practices, policies,
inequities, and biases’ (Wahlert and Fiester, 2012: ii). This scepticism invites a
reassessment of biomedicine’s objects (bodies or brains with their associated condi-
tions, syndromes and illnesses) and subjects (sufferers, patients, recipients). Hence,
following Hannabach (2007: 255), while bodily and cognitive processes are often
described as ‘an unequivocally internal and personal process, the terms by which
we understand our bodies are themselves social, and so our perception of our
bodies and of other bodies are not entirely of our own making’. Disability studies
is, in part, a response to what is being said. This has led to a marked shift away from
disability as individual problem to disablism as socio-political concern. Ferguson
and Nusbaum (2012: 72) contend that the term disability studies ‘should not be
allowed to become little more than a synonym for special education or rehabili-
tation sciences’. Disability studies is not simply a reaction to the medicalisation and
individualisation of disability but also an antidote.
Social models and disabling barriers: made in Britain

The social model of disability is arguably the most recognisable critical voice
against medicalisation. Many trees have been felled to feed the countless publica-
tions that have been written about the social model. This book is not yet another
text that will discuss the relative merits or downsides of the model. Were it my
money you were spending on texts that capture the pros and cons of the model
then I would plump for Oliver’s (1990) first edition of The Politics of Disablement
and Shakespeare’s (2006) first edition of Disability Rights and Wrongs. Were I more
focused on my own citation analysis and bank account then I would, of course,
point you to Goodley’s (2011a) Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction.
The social model was written in concert with British activists as a corrective to the
medicalisation and individualisation of disability. Texts by Barnes (1991), Oliver
(1990) and Morris (1991) gave conceptual language to the politics of organisations
such as the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS, 1976).
Disablism 7
The model was developed as a heuristic devise for mobilising around disability
as a political category and provided a vocabulary for contesting the processes
of disablement: social, economic and cultural barriers that prevent people with
impairments from living a life like their non-impaired brothers and sisters. For
Ferguson and Nusbaum (2012: 72) ‘the social model has become one of those
umbrella terms – indeed, much like the term “disability studies” itself – that has a
broad recognition and understanding’. For many of us engaged with the politics
of disablement, the social model gave us our ‘aha moment’ or, more grandly
following Zarb (1992), our ‘Road to Damascus’ experience. When as an under-
graduate psychology student – pissed off with psychology and angry about the
treatment of people with intellectual disabilities – the social model of disability
gave me a new disability lexicon. The problematic lives of intellectual disabilities
were not caused by intellectual disability: many problems of access, support,
community participation and acceptance were problems of a disabling society that
threatened the very existence of people who were cognitively different to the
mainstream.
The social model perspective was and continues to be hugely inspirational. It is
not melodramatic to say that the social model of disability has saved and continues
to save lives. Intriguingly, the social model turned disability-as-impairment (a
classic medicalising strategy) into disability-as-oppression (in line with the socio-
logically modernist blueprint of many a political movement). Impairment relates
to an embodied difference in terms of the functioning of the body or brain. One
lacks sight. Another might not walk. Others cannot think in ways normally under-
stood as typical. Some will never reach intellectual levels valued by our knowledge
economy. The point remains that people with impairments will often experience
disablism (Thomas, 1999, 2007) and the social model seeks to penetrate disablism.
Perhaps what is lost, however, is the idea of disability as an entity around which
people orient themselves as an identity. An identity that might be celebrated as it
disrupts norms and subverts values of society. But, we are moving into different
territory here that we will pick up later on in the book. Suffice to say: the social
model concerns itself with the real conditions of disablism: and these conditions
are material, as real as stone, hard-hitting and potentially fatal.
Newcomers to British disability studies are often bewildered by key proponents’
steadfast fixation with the social model. Oliver and Barnes provide this declaration
on the social model:
What began life as an aid to professional practice has been slaughtered on the
altar of theory for not explaining everything about impairment and disability
… so, please, no more books or PhD theses about it, no more arguments in
the classrooms of consciousness raising and no more fights on the streets of
activism. If it is any good, use it and share your gains with the rest of us; if
it is useless don’t tell us so any more but invent something else.
(Oliver and Barnes, 2012a: 11)
If we are to accept the pretty obvious statement that disablism is a complex

process requiring nuanced theoretical and political response then ending debate
appears to be a rather worrying claim. Amusingly, like typical academics, Oliver
and Barnes actually cannot resist taking on their critics in spite of calling for the
end of debate (e.g. Oliver and Barnes, 2012b). Oliver (2009: 48–50) seeks to
address and repel five criticisms typically levelled at the social model. First, the
model does not deal adequately with the realities of impairment. He suggests
that impairment is acknowledged but should not be grounded as the basis for
forming social and political movements. Following in the tradition of C. Wright
Mills (1959), impairment is a private matter (and not really that interesting) while
disablism is a public concern (and therefore the real focus of disability theory
and activism). Second, the model does not account for pain. Oliver suggests that
pain is not simply a matter for disabled people and that such a personal bodily
experience is not really a concern of sociological critique. Third, the model does
not acknowledge links with race and gender. The counter-argument here, for
Oliver, is this: were the social model put into practice more often then connected
issues of racism and sexism would inevitably also be troubled. Fourth, the model
gives only an inadequate social theory of disablement. But, social modellists, as
Thomas (2007) defines them, never claimed to provide a totalising theory: the
model is a heuristic device. Fifth, the model does not engage with cultural ideas
of Othering around disability. For Oliver such concerns are immaterial in the face
of real disabling material barriers.
This defence is well couched right up until the point when questions of theory
and culture are sidelined. Let us be clear; Oliver and Barnes are no simple episte-
mologists: providing a model and nothing more. Their work can be characterised
as a totalising commitment to historical materialism or a hardline radical structur-
alist approach to the study of disablism (see Goodley, 2011a, for an overview). As
Oliver (2009: 89) argues:
My own theorising on disability is located in Marxist political economy ...

I would go further and argue that the social theory that underpins Marxist
political economy has far greater transformative potential in eradicating the
oppression that disabled people face in the world than the interactionist and
functionalist theories.
Barnes and Mercer (2003) refuse to engage with poststructuralism’s irrelevant focus
on culture and use of ‘obfuscating language’ (an ironic turn of phrase to use when
complaining about complex language). My own belief is that historical materialist
accounts of disablism offer indispensable insights into exploitative workings of
capitalism. To deny these practices, particularly in today’s threatening economic
times, would be suicidal. As Mawyer (2005: 62) argues, unless we recognise the
contribution of a materialist critique of structural oppression and exploitation
in capitalism, disability studies will ‘remain only a gesture and little more’. Yet,
engaging with material conditions and, crucially, clarifying what we mean by
Disablism 9
materiality in what Hardt and Negri (2000) describe as a global world that has
been subjected to postmodernisation, should not preclude us from looking outside
the social model material register or simply sticking with a narrow theoretical
agenda that portrays its offerings as the grand narrative. Instead, we need to ask
ourselves what we mean by materiality and materialisation in a contemporary
society where various nexus including immaterial/material, idealist/real, object/
subject are being used to service the exclusion of disabled people.
For now, it is useful to wheel back and ask what have been the contributions of
the materialist social modellists? To get a little Freudian for a moment, one begins
to understand one’s self better when others recognise us. Hence, it makes sense to
consider the ways in which the social model has been viewed by writers outside
Britain (and those who would not necessarily see themselves as paid-up members
of the neo-Marxist boys’ club).
The first viewpoint is provided by Durgin (2009: 163) who concludes that ‘the
social model of disability has emerged from the lived experience of disability to
define itself negatively against both the medical (or “deviance”) and the business
models’. ‘These models,’ Durgin continues, ‘as a rule, highlight the attribute
of impairment and variously disengage from and even denigrate the agency of
persons with disabilities.’ A more appreciative assessment comes from Ferguson
and Nusbaum (2012: 73) who pronounce ‘the importance of the social model as a
core concept of disability studies is not only that disability is more than individual
pathology and deficit but also that its meaning is more than a personal problem’.
Another is proffered by Nirmala Erevelles (2002b: 8) who, though writing from
the North American context, perfectly captures the aims of the social model
which she views as offering ‘a socio-political analysis of disability that distances
itself from the medical model’ and to that we could add individualising and
psychologising perspectives. Instead, she notes, this sociological analysis ‘described
disability as an ideological construction’, a construction that is used ‘to justify not
only the oppressive binary cultural constructions of normal/pathological, auton-
omous/dependent, and competent citizen/ward of the state but also the social
divisions of labour’. This last point of Erevelles’s skilled summation of the materi-
alist social model illuminates a key contributory factor: that we find the origins
of disablement in exclusion from or within the labour market. The segregation
of people from lifelong learning, the marginalisation of disabled people from the
workforce through institutionalisation or special employment schemes threaten to
totally deskill people. As work is often a context for politicisation then disabled
people risk being passive observers of workers’ uprising and revolution. As the
welfare state proliferated around the globe, creating new forms of labour, expertise
and capital, then disabled people became key objects of study and treatment.
Governments seek to reduce spending, particularly around health and social care,
and so redefine the category of un/deserving disability. A convenient signifier of
the parasitic lumpenproletariat of contemporary global North economies is the
benefit scrounger: the welfare-dependent individual passively reliant upon social
security payments, draining the public coffers, unprepared to do a day’s hard work.
These benefit scroungers are to be rooted out and put back into work. The fact
that politicians conveniently ignore rising unemployment is hardly coincidental
when one considers that a key area of cutting public spending relates to reducing
dependency on welfare. Disabled people are caught in a catch-22: either to show
that they are really disabled (so welfare dependent) or emphasise their readiness for
work (where their benefits are reduced as they try to access an ever more compet-
itive, aggressive, flexible, low-paying and as we shall see ableist labour market). The
emphasis on rights not charity – and in particular, a right to work – is emblematic
of the disabled people’s movement discourse. As we shall see, however, this appeal
to the market and a place within capitalist modes of production threatens to be
recuperated by rather than disrupt the neoliberal economic order.
Materialist social theories have implicated the individualisation of disablism
within the capitalist system (e.g. Oliver, 2009). Rational functional bodies and
minds work for capital; impaired ones do not. Hence, in the ideological practice
of obscuring the foundations of our oppression – that our bodies are being bought,
sold and exploited for the benefits of capitalists – normalisation, individualisation
and rationality are given to us as ‘gifts’ of capitalism. The merging of psycho-
logical and capitalist interests, for example, permitted the celebration of the
individual, functioning, labouring, rational citizen which hid the capitalist agenda
that required such bodies for the movement of capital. We are not oppressed, so
an ideology of individualism seems to go, we are skilled, valued and individual
labouring citizens. Notions of autonomy and rationality are not, as we shall see
in the next chapter, benevolent offerings of a progressive society but ideological
hooks required for the ‘efficient running of capitalism’ (Erevelles, 2002b: 13).
Challenging material physical barriers and opposing the segregation have long
been the concerns of disability studies (Gleeson, 1999a; Power, 2009). Space and
psychology are intimately connected. The arrangement of environments and the
place of social actors or objects within those environments play a role in what
Imrie (2000: 9) describes as ‘the constitution and transformation of the subject:
the various interpolations and practices through which individual subjectivities are
constituted’. As Masschelein and Verstraete (2012: 2) observe ‘at least in theory
the conception of space has changed from something which can be marked and
reserved for particular populations – think about Indian reserves or Jewish ghettos
– to something which has to be organised in such a way that it enables all people
to live in the presence of others’. Disabled children often occupy a distinct place
in what Kitchin (1998) describes as ‘spatialities of disability’: the different ways in
which disabled people are allowed to inhabit space. While disabled children might
occupy a space such as the school playground, classroom or leisure context, the
extent to which they feel a sense of belonging within these spaces is debatable.
Disabled people often feel unwelcome in mainstream spaces, struggle with a sense
of belonging, with subsequent impact upon personal well-being. Belonging evokes
identification and emotional attachment with one’s surroundings (Yuval-Davis,
2006). A barriers approach to disablism provides a powerful critique of the material
base of disability’s relationship with its environment. This begs questions about
Disablism 11
how we make sense of the more opaque, nebulous and immaterial facts of life. And
it is over the pond we will travel to address such questions.
Cultural locations: North American and Canadian landscapes

In their historical review of disability studies, Ferguson and Nusbaum (2012:
72) observe that it ‘became somewhat unclear whether disability studies could
be framed as a coherent and definable, if multi-disciplinary, field of academic
endeavor. As more and more academic programs began to spring up using the
label of disability studies, disagreements began to emerge about who could and
could not make legitimate use of the term’. North American and Canadian
disability studies burgeoned out of humanities, cultural studies as well as the social
sciences. We can account for this growth in a number of ways. First, of course,
the personal interests and drive of scholars. Scholars who live with disability have
driven their passionate analysis of disability. Second, the location in the humanities
may be read as strategic. Just as social modellists pulled an analysis of disability out
of medical and psychological circles into the social sciences, so too did cultural
studies theorists. ‘The worry’, as Ferguson and Nusbaum (2012: 74) put it, ‘by
some within the humanities and social sciences was that allowing the mantle of
disability studies to be assumed by professional schools’ of health, social care and
to some extent the social sciences ‘would co-opt the truly reformative potential of
this newly critical approach’. Third, while social modellists inaugurated a critique
of disablism, humanities scholars hailed disability as the cultural metaphor that
said something unique and important about wider modes of cultural production.
When thinking about the North American and Canadian landscape there is much
to go at here so I will be selective: Davis and Garland Thomson in the United
States and Wendell, Michalko and Titchkosky in Canada.
As I argue in Goodley (2011a), Davis (1995) provides a thoughtful account of
the interlinking of normalcy, statistical analysis, eugenics and evolutionary social
Darwinist theories of Karl Pearson and Francis Galton in late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century thought. In these practices we can find the roots of normalcy.
Davis (1995) argues that the ‘normal individual’ (and its counterpart the ‘feeble-
minded, parasitic and morally questionable’) is part of the history of modernist
progress, industrialisation and the ideological consolidation of the power of the
bourgeois. ‘An able body’, he argues, ‘is the body of a citizen.’ By contrast,
‘deformed, deafened, amputated, obese, female, perverse, crippled, maimed and
blinded bodies do not make up the body politic’ (Davis, 1995: 71–72). The
statistical average becomes equated with ‘average man’ – ‘L’homme moyen’ of the
statistician Quételet who was working in the nineteenth century – typifying the
expected and cherished norms of the ruling classes of a given time. For Davis, the
attitudes of middle-class society can be characterised as a sensibility of individu-
alism: the drama of individual attainment, exploration and achievement over the
wild savagery of nature. The achievements of average man cast average man as
heroic character. While it is possible to trace various civilisations rejecting disabled
bodies and minds long before the twentieth century, the sensibility of the average
individual, Davis argues, seeped into early twentieth-century pseudoscientific
theories of humanity and the population, to the extent that the norm and average
became confused and fused as the same entity. As a result, psychological under-
standings of human development came to view the norm-as-average-as-natural.
To paraphrase Davis (1995), disability sits in direct opposition to normalcy which
is ‘constituting, conforming to, not deviating or different from, the common type
or standard, regular, usual’.
Garland Thomson (1997) similarly extends an analysis of disability’s antithesis
through her use of the term normate which she defines as ‘the constructed
identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital
they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants
them’. In contrast, Garland Thomson (2002: 2) marks disability as a cultural trope
and historical community that raises significant questions about the materiality
of the body and the social formulations that are used to interpret bodily and
cognitive differences. Affiliated scholars ‘rejected a firm distinction between
impairment and disability because they viewed biology and culture as impinging
upon one another’ (Goodley, 2011a: 14). The imagery of disability has always
been used to symbolise the dangerous and inferior. Such imagery is used to
‘hide what scares us, to remove what repulses us, and to medicalise what shocks
us. The logic is irrefutable. Disability is the ultimate “other”’ (Ferguson and
Nusbaum, 2012: 73).
Heading further north brings us to the work of Canadian scholars. Wendell’s
work was and remains ground-breaking. It is impossible to fairly capture its impor-
tance. This was disability studies writing at its most raw, angry and perceptive.
Key to her analysis was the disabled/able-bodied (sic) relationship. As she asks in
an early piece: ‘Why are so many disabled people unemployed … impoverished,
lonely isolated … why are they victims of violence and coercion; why do able-
bodied people ridicule, avoid, pity, stereotype and patronize them?’ (Wendell,
1989: 246). Her answers were to be found in the rejected body of the disabled
person: a cultural artefact of able-bodied society that quickly risks becoming a
physical reality for disabled people. Remarking on what the able-bodied might be
psychically experiencing on facing disability she states:
Gradually I make her ‘other’ because I don’t want to confront my real body,
which I fear and cannot accept … our cultural insistence on controlling
the body blames the victims of disability for failing and burdens them with
self-doubt and self-blame. The search for psychological, moral and spiritual
causes of illness, accident and disability is often a harmful expression of this
insistence on control.
(Wendell, 1996: 248–249)
Unlike the severing of disability and impairment enacted by the social modellists,
Wendell sites the study of disability and society in the body–culture matrix. The
Disablism 13
bodily control mentioned by Wendell clearly evokes wider processes of able-

bodied society, which is obsessed with an attendance to normality.
Michalko’s influential work on the problem of disability asks us to consider the
Other that is constituted in opposition to the normate. As Michalko (2002) argues,
the problem of disability is firmly tied to the constitution of idealised individuals
and their monstrous alternatives. For Michalko (2002: 30), the dominance of
norming ideas around disabled individuals dismisses the metaphysical question of
‘why me?’ as superfluous:
What shall we do now you are disabled?

We shall cure you.
How shall you live when our cure fails and you are now permanently
disabled?
You shall adjust.
Previously (Goodley, 2012c) I have cited the work of Rod Michalko (1999) as an
opportunity to revisit conventional essentialist, problem-soaked understandings
of disability. Specifically, Michalko dismantles the normative understanding of
blindness (as individually deficient, lacking sight and therefore inevitably disabled)
and remodels a deeper, more interconnected, productive take upon blindness (as
a place from which to contest normative, disabling culture). Hence, his writing
around his connections with his guide dog, Smokie, constitutes some of the
funniest and most moving musings around disability. We hear strangers asking Rod
if Smokie is a blind dog (‘I hope not’ Michalko replies). We read of the smoothness
of movement that Smokie gives Michalko as he is guided along the sidewalk. We
are told of the deep connections of human–animal in circumnavigating not only
the perils of physical design to be found in crossing roads but the equally complex
cultural assumptions that abound around blindness, sight and dis/ability. Rod sets
up blindness as an oppositional, knowing, seeing subject position that has much
to say about the troubles of disabling society. This enchantment with disability is
taken further in the compassionate work of Tanya Titchkosky (2011). She coins
a beautiful phrase – the politics of wonder – that is called to mind when one
considers disability. Such poetic knowledge recasts the question of ‘how we make
the meaning of people, and how we develop our interrelatedness in social space’
(Titchkosky, 2011: 131). ‘Disability’, for Mawyer (2005: 64), ‘signifies to many
scholars in disability studies a social standing and a web of cultural meanings rather
than actual physical or mental ability.’ Disability is an invitation to think again about
the human. This leads us nicely back to the work of Davis (2002) and specifically
his notion that we are living in a time he coins as dismodernism: where disability
links together other identities as the moment of reflection. For Davis (2002),
disabled people are the ultimate intersectional subject, the universal image, the
important modality through which we can understand exclusion and resistance.
Faced with such unique theoretical interjections, McRuer (2012c: 357) concludes
that twenty-first-century disability studies is entering a critical turn:
When disability studies (from its inception to the present) challenges the
univocality of medical or rehabilitative models, what is at work in such
challenges is a counter-eugenic will to not eliminate but rather revalue that
which is freakish, deformed, twisted, crippled, or in any way atypical.
But, again, we are getting carried away with ourselves here and will return to these
more crip moments later in Chapter 3. For now, drawing on Goodley’s (2012a)
paper, it might be helpful to say that we are entering a period of critical disability
studies scholarship where theorising is evidently more trans-disciplinary in style
than it ever was: pulling together ideas from the social sciences and humanities at
a time when disability, arguably, has never had so much media or policy interest.
Two events might be cited to explain the increasingly conspicuous nature of
disability: the success of the London 2012 Paralympic games and the publication
a year earlier of the World Health Organisation’s 2011 World Report on Disability.
We will return to debates around the relative success of the games later on. For
now, let us briefly address the impact of the World Report on the wider landscape
of disability studies.
A World (Health Organisation) perspective

The 2011 World Report on Disability by the World Health Organisation (WHO)
and the World Bank provides a comprehensive account of the global position of
disabled people. The World Report concludes that there are over 1 billion disabled
people in the world of whom nearly ‘200 million experience considerable diffi-
culties in functioning’. This estimate suggests 15 per cent of the world’s population
live with an impairment. The approach to disability is a bio-psycho-social model
which aims to ‘represent a workable compromise between medical and social
models. Disability is the umbrella term for impairments, activity limitations
and participation restrictions, referring to the negative aspects of the interaction
between an individual (with a health condition) and that individual’s contextual
factors (environmental and personal factors)’ (p. 3). The report draws on one of
the other big contributions to the global disability discourse, namely WHO’s
International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). It is worth
reviewing page 5 of the World Report to indicate how disability is being understood
and reproduced (see Box 1.1).
This World Report is an administrative text, targeting an international audience,
saying many important things about the global positioning of disabled people.
It is a text that will undoubtedly be used to bolster human rights programmes,
inform anti-discriminatory legislation, and justify public funding of initia-
tives such as inclusive education, accessible workplaces and anti-discriminatory
cultural industries. This is an important report on exigent matters. A lot of space
is given to countries outside Western Europe and North America. Emphasis is
placed on environmental factors – such as participation restrictions – that can
substantively reduce the life opportunities of people living with impairments. Key
Disablism 15
BOX 1.1 NEW EMPHASIS ON ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (17)

advanced the understanding and measurement of disability. It was developed
through a long process involving academics, clinicians, and – importantly
– persons with disabilities (18). The ICF emphasizes environmental factors
in creating disability, which is the main difference between this new classifi-
cation and the previous International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities,
and Handicaps (ICIDH). In the ICF, problems with human functioning are
categorized in three interconnected areas:
•• impairments are problems in body function or alterations in body

structure – for example, paralysis or blindness;
•• activity limitations are difficulties in executing activities – for example,
walking or eating;
•• participation restrictions are problems with involvement in any
area of life – for example, facing discrimination in employment or
transportation.
Disability refers to difficulties encountered in any or all three areas of

functioning. The ICF can also be used to understand and measure the positive
aspects of functioning such as body functions, activities, participation and
environmental facilitation. The ICF adopts neutral language and does not
distinguish between the type and cause of disability – for instance, between
“physical” and “mental” health. “Health conditions” are diseases, injuries,
and disorders, while “impairments” are specific decrements in body functions
and structures, often identified as symptoms or signs of health conditions.
Disability arises from the interaction of health conditions with contextual
factors – environmental and personal factors as shown in the figure below.
Representation of the International Classification of

Functioning, Disability and Health
Health condition
(disorder or disease)
Body functions
Activities Participation
and structures
Environmental Personal
factors factors
The ICF contains a classification of environmental factors describing the

world in which people with different levels of functioning must live and
act. These factors can be either facilitators or barriers. Environmental factors
include: products and technology; the natural and built environment; support
and relationships; attitudes; and services, systems, and policies.
The ICF also recognizes personal factors, such as motivation and self-
esteem, which can influence how much a person participates in society.
However, these factors are not yet conceptualized or classified. It further
distinguishes between a person’s capacities to perform actions and the
actual performance of those actions in real life, a subtle difference that
helps illuminate the effect of environment and how performance might be
improved by modifying the environment.
The ICF is universal because it covers all human functioning and treats
disability as a continuum rather than categorizing people with disabilities as a
separate group: disability is a matter of more or less, not yes or no. However,
policy-making and service delivery might require thresholds to be set for
impairment severity, activity limitations, or participation restriction.
It is useful for a range of purposes – research, surveillance, and reporting
– related to describing and measuring health and disability, including:
assessing individual functioning, goal setting, treatment, and monitoring;
measuring outcomes and evaluating services; determining eligibility for
welfare benefits; and developing health and disability surveys.
Source: World Health Organisation (2011: 5). Reproduced with permission.
recommendations include the promotion of inclusive schools, stressing the impor-

tance of disability equality awareness and meaningfully drawing on the expertise of
disabled people as consultants and co-workers. Disability is established in the World
Report as a problematic dynamic phenomenon requiring the immediate response of
nation states, their governments and their citizens. Written with direct reference
to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,1
the World Report is a practical aid rolled out across the globe by numerous policy
makers and activists to agitate against the conditions of disablism. Krahn (2011:
141) is clear; the report has massive potential and mass appeal,
to inform governments of countries about the importance of disability,

analyze scientific information, and provide recommendations for action at
the national and international levels. The report successfully illustrates a great
need for improved data, policies, and programs, while describing promising
practices that can inform policy makers in addressing these needs. This
report is highly recommended reading for anyone interested in a global view
Disablism 17
on disability and should be required reading for any students in disability and
public health.
The World Report marks a global opportunity for ‘disabled people to use its
recommendations to bolster their collective struggle for a fairer and equitable
society’ (Oliver and Barnes, 2012b: 57). The report has inevitably received
criticism. Oliver and Barnes (2012b) offer a typically Anglocentric social model
commentary, pivoting around three points of contention.
1. The World Report authors’ owning of disability as a dynamic and complex

relationship between an impaired person and the social world is something
disability studies and organisations of disabled people have been saying for
years;
2. The report’s emphasis on more systematic, objective and scientific method-
ologies for assessing disability risk invalidating disability research enacted in a
politicised and more subjective manner;
3. The report cannot be viewed as an objective document; ‘we must clearly
recognise that all social research is political and, perhaps more importantly,
consider the political role of the WHO and the World Bank in sponsoring
the Report. Both are structurally positioned to facilitate the ongoing devel-
opment of global capitalism, which is based on the twin evils of domination
and exploitation’ (Oliver and Barnes, 2012b: 579).
Rather than dismissing the World Report one might, instead, productively read
it as a cultural text, uncovering discourses of disability being appropriated by
global policy makers, researchers and practitioners. If we accept the idea that
disability acts as a narrative prosthesis – a prop on which to lean and emphasise
the preference for ability (Mitchell and Snyder, 2006; Snyder and Mitchell,
2006) – then we might look for kinds of prostheses at play. Like any supranational
document – seeking to speak across geopolitical divides – its ambition lies in a
universal response to disability. While mindful of the cultural relativism of the
category of disability, the report has to pull disability out of the local into the
register of a more global appeal. Yet, like all texts, it has a constitutive character
to it: disability is constructed and created through the workings of the text. So
what does the report say and make of disability? We will return to this question
in Chapter 9. For now, let us think of its worldly nature: the extent to which any
document can speak of and to the world.
First, we should note that the World Report promulgates an interactionist model
of disability. This stance has close alliances with the Nordic relational model which
approaches ‘the study of disability with three main assumptions: (1) disability is a
person–environment mis/match; (2) disability is situational or contextual; and (3)
disability is relative’ (Tøssebro, 2004; Traustadóttir, 2004). For Campbell (2009: 95),
a relational model recognises the interactivity of impairment and disabling modes
of socio-economic organisation (Goodley, 2011a: 16). For Whitney (2006) this is
a dynamic move, incorporating aspects of biology, cognition, social and historical

surroundings without using a fixed linear scale. Anxieties arise for the materialist
social modellists and critical disability studies scholars around the reinsertion of
impairment. Cultural theorists would have misgivings about the reification of an
interactionist epistemology on a globalised platform.
Second, while the World Report’s remit is for universality, critical disability
studies emerging from the majority world demand us to recognise the historical,
cultural, economic and political specificities of disability in different parts of the
globe. Grech (2012) makes the powerful case that disability studies has not served
subjects of the majority world disability because it is dominated by white, Western,
middle class academics engaging in debate imbued with ideological, theoretical,
cultural and historical assumptions of Western urban post-industrialised societies.
‘Despite Western foundations’, Grech (2012: 59) continues,
a disability study has reached hegemonic status in the disability and majority
world debate as the exportation of its ideas (notably the social model of
disability) from North to South continues unabated. This seems to be
legitimised by numerous factors: the marginalisation/exclusion of disability
in the development sector; the monopolisation of most things disability by
the Western disability studies; and the assumption that disability theories
and writings from the West are transferable across the globe with few or no
modifications.
As Ghai (2006), Grech (2012), Soldatic and Meekosha (2012) remind us, through
reference to India, Guatemala and Australia, different kinds of colonial histories,
the suffering of indigenous groups and acute conditions of poverty will lead to
different understandings of disablism. A universalist approach risks whitewashing
over the specifics of disability. Critical disability studies seeks to reinsert this
cultural sensitivity.
The World Report has come at a crucial time. In a time of austerity disabled
people risk being further disenfranchised. The report places disability at the centre
of ethical and political debate where the values attached to global citizenship are
subjected to critical curiosity. For these reasons alone we should welcome its
publication.
Conclusion: theorising disablism in a time of austerity
We can or, rather, must start with how we speak, and how we listen, with
the right to education, and to dwell critically, fractiously, and freely in
political discourse together. Perhaps the word ‘justice’ will assume new
meanings as we speak it.
(Butler, 2013: n.p.)
Disablism 19
Is this the time for critical disability theory? In the current economic climate in
which Global North welfare states are being pulled back, unemployment is rising,
basic healthcare services, educational provision and social care are being stripped
away, do we have time for theory? A similar question was asked by Sedgwick
(1990: 13) about queer politics. Her response was that queer politics needed ideas
that embraced its ‘idealist and materialist impulses in order to develop a gestalt of
gay affirmative struggle’. It would appear from a review of the disability studies
literature that similar impulses reside here. Disabled people and those close to them
are facing a newly defined form of marginalisation. This will have huge material
impacts (finance, work, infrastructure). As importantly, the cuts in welfare threaten
the immaterial cultural centre of disabled people’s communities (the arts and their
counter-hegemonies). We will witness a potential dumbing down of disability arts
– the heartland of the creative industries of disability politics – as less and less funds
are distributed to our artists because the economic cupboards are bare. Critical
disability studies theory must respond to these challenges. During their review
of the disability studies literature Ferguson and Nusbaum (2012: 74) provide a
curious reflective moment when they conclude that ‘disability – and the concept
of disability – must be part of the very foundation of attempts to understand what
is different as well as what is normal’. This appraisal of the different and the normal
suggests that disability studies cannot go it alone. And it is this search for theoretical
alliance that we pursue in the next chapter.
2
ABLEISM
In this chapter we keep in mind our earlier exposition of disablism and manoeuvre
ourselves into the realm of ableism. For our purposes we will narrow down our
focus to five layers of analysis:
1. Introducing critical ableist studies

2. Unpacking the ableist context: exposing neoliberalism
3. Compulsory neoliberal able-bodiedness: meritocracy and entrepreneurship
4. The biopolitics of ableism: under the skin, across the population
5. Conclusion: thoughts on neoliberal-ableism.
Ableism’s psychological, social, economic, cultural character normatively privi-

leges able-bodiedness; promotes smooth forms of personhood and smooth health;
creates space fit for normative citizens; encourages an institutional bias towards
autonomous, independent bodies; and lends support to economic and material
dependence on neoliberal and hyper-capitalist forms of production.
Clearly, just as there exists a ‘polyvalent disability culture that contains within
itself sufficient diversity’ (Johnston, 2009: 155), disabled people’s dealings with
ableism will also be heterogeneous, varied and mixed. All the same, there is a
possessive nature to ableism that clings to its own and expels outsiders. Our task
must be to deconstruct its logics. One of these logics I have termed neoliberal-
ableism: a logic that pursues the (hyper) normal.
Introducing critical ableist studies

The work of Campbell (2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2012) and Wolbring (2007, 2008a,
2008b, 2009, 2012) are the starting points for any critical ableist project. Just
as the disability authors referred to in the previous chapter have provided us
with epistemological, ontological and methodological tools for making sense of

disablism and disability, so Campbell and Wolbring have cleared a theoretical space
for the critical analysis of ableism. Their work extends previous critical disability
studies interrogations of the able-bodied (Wendell, 1989), normalcy (Davis,
1995; Titchkosky and Michalko, 2009), the non-disabled (Linton, 1998) and the
normate (Garland Thomson, 2005). Wolbring and Campbell write, respectively,
from the contexts of medicine and law: disciplinary practices regularly associated
with the maintenance and proliferation of the autonomous, rational and healthy
citizen. This might partly explain their motivations for criticality. I will tease out
two overlapping conceptual contributions that they make which might ground our
analysis of ableism.
The first contribution is a definitional one. Wolbring defines ableism as ‘the
favoritism for certain abilities for example cognition, competitiveness or consum-
erism and the often negative sentiment towards the lack of favored abilities and has
a long history’ (http://ableism.wordpress.com/about-the-project/). In other work
Wolbring (2007: 1) describes ableism as ‘a set of beliefs, processes and practices that
produce – based on abilities one exhibits or values – a particular understanding of
oneself, one’s body and one’s relationship with others of humanity, other species and
the environment, and includes how one is judged by others’. Ableism, Wolbring
(2007: 1) elaborates ‘has been used by various social groups to justify their elevated
level of rights and status in relation to other groups (i.e. women were viewed as
biologically fragile and emotional, and thus incapable of bearing the responsibility
of voting, owning property and retaining custody of their own children)’. Ableism
is the system from which forms of disablism, hetero/sexism and racism emanate
and has in mind a ‘species-typical’ human being. This system promotes scientific,
therapeutic and medicalised interventions that maintain the ableist prerogative.
Campbell (2009: 7) writes of ableist normativity. ‘Whether it is the “species-typical
body” (in science), the “normative citizen” (in political theory), the “reasonable
man” (in law),’ she argues, ‘all these signifiers point to a fabrication that reaches
into the very soul that sweeps us into life.’ ‘Internalised ableism’, for Campbell
(2009: 7), ‘means that to emulate the norm, the disabled individual is required to
embrace, indeed to assume, an “identity” other than one’s own. I am not implying
that people have only one true or real essence. Indeed, identity formation is in a
constant state of fluidity, multiplicity and (re) formation.’ She continues, the desire
to emulate the norm establishes and ‘maintains a wide gap between those who are
loathed and that which is desired’ (Campbell, 2009: 21). Campbell’s work is an
elegant example of intersectional analysis. Her work shifts attention away from the
problems of disablism (the marginalised Other) to the problems of ableism (the same
or the dominant). As soon as disability emerges as a site of marginality then so too
do Other identities. Ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and pan-national identities
converge around the problems of disability as a consequence of attempts to maintain
what Campbell (2009) terms ableist normativity. Disabled people, women, children,
queer people, people of colour and poor people share an Other space to that of
the dominant same founded upon ableist, heteronormative, adult, white European
Ableism 23
and North American, high income nations’ values. A shift to ableism connects
with other processes of dominance and the reification of some societal groups over
others: in part based upon the processes of ableist normativity. This definitional
work names the cherished individual citizen of our times. As Wolbring (2012: 79)
puts it ableism in its general form leads to an ‘ability-based and ability-justified
understanding of oneself, one’s body, one’s relationship with others within one’s
species, other species and one’s environment’. We can connect this work with other
literature that has identified the contemporaneous citizen (see Table 2.1).
Merging overlapping discourses of privilege acknowledges what Ware (2011)
terms the imbricated nature of ableism. We know that colonial knowledges are
constructed as neutral and universal through the mobilisation of associated
discourses such as humanitarian, philanthropic and poverty alleviation measures
(Power, 2005: 608). We might also ask: how are ableist knowledges naturalised,
neutralised and universalised?
The second contribution of Wolbring and Campbell relates to their exposition
of transhumanism, its problematic support of ableist archetypes and fantasies
around enhancing the abilities of the species-typical human. ‘The transhumani-
sation of ableism’, writes Wolbring (2008a: 139), ‘is the set of beliefs, processes
and practices that perceive the “improvement” of human body abilities beyond
typical Homo sapiens boundaries as essential.’ This hints at merging bodies and
technologies towards a form of ultra or hyper-ableism (Wolbring, 2012). Wolbring
observes that the term transhumanism was originally coined by Julian Huxley,
TABLE 2.1 The valued citizen of the twenty-first century
The valued citizen is … … produced through the practices of …
Cognitively, socially and emotionally Disabling or ableist societies

able and competent
Biologically and psychologically Societies governed by biotechnologies and new
stable, genetically and hormonally potentialities of eugenics (e.g. prenatal screening or
sound and ontologically responsible the Human Genome Project)
Hearing, mobile, seeing, walking Cultures that value mobility, hearing, speaking,
sight, bodily control and comportment
Normal: sane, autonomous, Normal societies that value forms of cognitive
self-sufficient, self-governing, ability, mental health, meritocracy and
reasonable, law-abiding and entrepreneurship (that are actually deeply neurotic
economically viable about such achievements)
White, heterosexual, male, adult, Long histories of colonialism, heteronormativity,
breeder, living in towns, global patriarchy and class warfare that, to this day,
citizen of WENA continue to uphold abled-bodiedness as a key
associated mark of citizenship
Source: Adapted from Goodley (2011a: figure 5.5).
Note: WENA – West Europe and North America.

first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organisation (UNESCO), and has spread since then to be the foundation for a
whole social movement. According to the World Transhumanist Association, and
quoted in Wolbring (2008a: 141):
Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the

premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the
end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.
The association formally defines transhumanism as an ‘intellectual and cultural

movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving
the human condition through applied reason’. In time this will lead to new
‘technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual,
physical, and psychological capacities’ (Wolbring, 2008a: 141). For Wolbring
(2008a: 156) transhumanism heralds a brave but dangerous new world where
‘species-typical’ is passed over by an insatiable desire to improve on the inherently
limited abilities of Homo sapiens. A visit to the websites of Humanity+1 confirms
this fascination with improving the human stock:
Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation

and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently
human form and human limitations by means of science and technology,
guided by life-promoting principles and values … Transhumanism takes
a multidisciplinary approach in analyzing the dynamic interplay between
humanity and the acceleration of technology … such as biotech-
nology and information technology, and anticipated future technologies,
such as molecular nanotechnology and artificial general intelligence.
Transhumanism seeks the ethical use of these and other speculative
technologies. Our theoretical interests focus on posthuman topics of the
singularity, extinction risk, and mind uploading (whole brain emulation
and substrate-independent minds).
(http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/philosophy-2/ (accessed 4 February 2013))
Transhumanist praxis incorporates drug development to improve intelligence

quotient, cognitive enhancement through artificial intelligence, merging of
technology and brains to enhance human happiness, the transplant of synthetic
hearts to ward off heart disease and biotechnologies for sustainability of crops
in poor areas of the globe. One cannot accuse the architects of technological
advancement as necessarily being at odds with valuing and improving the lives
of all human beings. Medicine gives many of us life. But, as Reeve (2012)
carefully points out, impaired bodies and technology have endured a long history
of association. What we can take from Campbell and Wolbring is the ethically
questionable and ubiquitous presence of the disability metaphor within transhu-
manist discourse:
Ableism 25
Disabled people using the latest assistive technologies, with their eyes fixed
on medical progress, are a natural constituency for transhumanism. Disabled
people in the wealthier industrialized countries, with their wheelchairs,
prosthetic limbs, novel computing interfaces and portable computing,
are the most technologically dependent humans ever known, and are
aggressive in their insistence on their rights to be technologically assisted
in fully participating in society … Probably the most prominent symbol of
disabled transhumanist activism these days is Christopher Reeve, the former
Superman actor who became a tireless campaigner for biomedical research
after a horse-riding accident left him quadriplegic. Reeve has been especially
important defending the use of cloned embryos in stem cell research, and
his advocacy of cures for spinal injuries has made him controversial for the
disability rights extremists who see a zero-sum trade-off between disability
rights and cures for disabilities … But most disabled people are not Luddites.
Most disabled people think parents should have the freedom to choose to
have non-disabled children and that technology can be used to overcome or
cure disabilities, while we fight for equality for people with disabilities. Just
as we should have the choice to get rid of a disability, we should also have
the right to choose not to be ‘fixed,’ and to choose to live with bodies that
aren’t ‘normal.’ The right not to be coerced by society to adopt a ‘normal’
body is also a central demand of transhumanism.
(http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/communities/physicallydisabled/)
This uneasy transhumanist dance between the binaries of disability/normalcy,

deficiency/capacity, essentialism/freedom of choice demonstrates the ethically
questionable ambitions of human enhancement when the erasure of disability is
implicated. While disability studies recognises the disavowal of disabled people as
rejected citizens of wider society, critical ableist studies questions transhumanist
ambitions around human improvement and the negation of limited normal
humanness. Both Wolbring and Campbell urge us to de-neutralise the ‘neutral’
spaces of normalcy and the body politic; subjecting them to critical interpretation
(Ramlow, 2006). Celebrating normativity and dreaming of an enhanced life brings
an inevitable downside: the idealisation of some forms of life over others. ‘Being
human is equated with supreme normalcy as well as the ultimate ideal’ (Kannen,
2008: 150). ‘This sense of humanity’, Kannen writes, ‘is created by way of the
continual rejection of Other bodies, so that what is normal at any given cultural
moment is human.’ The focus of dominant social institutions and socialising
practice becomes interrelated with ‘reinforcing what is ideal – the normal human’
(Kannen, 2008: 150). At its most utopian, transhumanism extends versions of
humanity, ridding the human race of lack and replacing it with potential. What
this means for those of us unable to access expensive futuristic body-technology
couplings remains unclear. There would appear to be not only maintenance of
normality alongside the pursuit of transhumanist hyper-normative perfection. The
richest global citizens are no longer interested in being normal or non-disabled.
They desire technological, educational and social projects that promise supreme
forms of hyper-normalised, extended transhumanist lifestyles. This is a brave new
world but one that brings with it collateral damage. One would accept as Couser
(2011: 26) does that the mission of medicine, its raison d’être and professional
imperative, is to heal. But when this is elided with ‘making whole’, one wonders
what tropes of wholeness are being evoked and for whom? No one is suggesting
that medical intervention is wrong but where do we draw the line between making
lives more healthy than poorly (which surely all of us would agree with) and
promoting ableist standards of super health and wholeness that are, by dint of their
power, in danger of rejecting those who fail to reach such standards?
Let us acknowledge the hidden referent of disablism: ableism’s tacit, hidden,
masked, accepted, hegemonic privileging of a distinct idea(l) of humanity. Critical
ableism studies engenders a reading of what passes as normal, desirable and
progressive. For Weeber (1999: 22) ableism is a form of prejudice and bigotry that
‘marks us [disabled people] as less that those who are nondisabled’. She goes on;
‘Ableism causes pain to nondisabled people who are unprepared to deal with their
own vulnerability and mortality’ (ibid.). Yet, everyone across the dis/ability divide
is caught up in the processes and fantasies of ableism. We – the non/disabled, wo/
man, black/white, gay/straight, poor/rich – are all knotted up in the process of
ableism. This is a shared project and a common ground for the politicisation of
transhumanism and, for that matter, humanity.
Unpacking the ableist context: exposing neoliberalism

Where does the societal, cultural and economic drive for the ableist imaginary stem
from? To answer this question, as we see in Table 2.1, we find ourselves tied up in
a multitude of societal arrangements that incubate the ableist citizen. I propose that
we look at one discursive register – neoliberalism – to chip away at the surface of
ableism whilst digging away at its foundational moorings. This would appear to be
as good a starting place as any, especially if we accept that neoliberalism is the latest
stage in capitalism’s global hegemonic domination (Ong, 2007). Ableism clings to
economic and ideological conditions. For Cooley (2011) while the beginnings
of neoliberalism emphasised free enterprise, the ‘American way’ and working for
one’s family, latter iterations of neoliberal discourse induct each and every one
into, what Jakobsen (2009: 224) describes as, ‘a relational structure that provides
for privatized resource-provision’. Neoliberalism provides an ecosystem for the
privatisation of ableism; a state of affairs I define as neoliberal-ableism.
Neoliberalism entails not simply socio-economic deregulation at the national
and local scales (and the emerging re-regulation of various transnational forms)
but ‘a political project of rolling back the ‘normal’ forms of state regulation and
‘the (neo) liberal politics of self-help intervention in the economy’ (Sothern, 2007:
146). Neoliberal-ableism normalises through the constitution of the ideal citizen,
an idealisation pursued through transforming economies, restructuring nation
states and worshipping the market. Erevelles (2011: 2169) unveils the neoliberal
Ableism 27
paradox. On one hand this is a socio-economic movement associated with the

liberal mantra of the autonomy of individual choice (‘the individual changes the
world not the state’). On the other hand this ideology privileges an authoritari-
anism that moulds the autonomous subject according to predetermined norms and
educational needs (‘there are some individuals’ she notes, that are deemed ‘more
qualified and fit for purpose than others’). What started out as a utopian intel-
lectual movement became aggressively politicised by Reagan and Thatcher in the
1980s as the ideological software for competitive capitalism: free trade, flexible
labour and active individualisation (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 381).
Soldatic and Chapman (2010) tease out some of the main tenets of neoliber-
alism including casualisation, work readiness and productivity. The rationality of
market rule demands an adaptable worker able to deal with the insecurities of our
age of austerity and the winding back of welfare entitlements. Neoliberal-able
subjectivities emphasise individual over collective identities and are to be found
across the globe. From the emerging city-corporation, commodified culture and
reified metropolis of entrepreneurial Dubai (Kanna, 2010) to China, where labour
and consumption have permeated Chinese society producing sushi – a new type
of ontology – where one’s sense of self and value are judged in terms of one’s
worth in the market economy (Hairong, 2003). We buy into this ontological
valuation because it feels ours – it is about our individualism after all – but this
hides its very construction in the market value of embodied labour. We become a
knowing subject but a subject knowing of and known by the market. Behind the
ostensibly liberatory discourses of fulfilment, freedom, development and personal
growth lurk technologies of governance (Sothern, 2007: 153), held in concepts
such as self-monitoring, aggrandisement and entrepreneurial spirit. The message
in Australia, China, Dubai and other parts of the world is clear; neoliberal-able
citizens will progress through life via individual merit and hard work.
This individualisation of the ontological experience of labour comes at a
particularly violent time in the lives of some of the poorest members of our society.
As Harvey (2011: 106) has recently commented, we are witnessing ‘attacks on
the rights and power of organised labour from Chile to Britain augmented by a
draconian global austerity plan that entails losses in asset values, rights and entitle-
ments for the mass of the population, coupled with the predatory absorption
of hitherto marginalised populations into capitalism’s dynamics’ (Harvey, 2011:
106). For Ong (2007: 3) one might view neoliberalism as ‘an economic tsunami
that is gathering force across the planet, pummeling each country in its path and
sweeping away old structures of power’. How we can find resistance or productive
excess in this tidal wave will form one of the key analytical arguments in Part 2 of
this book.
Neoliberalism impacts upon global education. The ‘McDonaldisation’ of school
curricula mirrors the priorities of pan/national corporations with technocratic
rationality and the sorting, sifting and testing of students. Giroux (2003) concludes:
what is good for Disney and Microsoft is good for schools. The expected products
of schools are functioning pliant workers and active consumers. Educational
institutions are run along business lines; belief in the competitive edge of the
market and the individual. Neoliberalism is rooted in a laissez-faire economic
policy that privileges the market, downsizes the state and promotes an equally
relaxed attitude to human worth. All of life is performatively assessed and, as a
consequence, we all individually concern ourselves with our own productivity (see
Harris, 2005). This appears to offer freedom but only in ways inscribed by the free
market and hyper-individualism (Jakobsen, 2009: 221). Policy initiatives seek to
govern the capricious virtue of free individuals (Barnett et al., 2008: 626).
To paraphrase Foucault, we are free to govern ourselves. One might think
of neoliberalism as the blurring of late capitalism with the rise of Foucault’s
governmentality (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002). As labourers and consumers we are
empowered but only to discipline our selves. This privatisation and personalisation
of the logics of capitalism ensure the individual becomes the focus of the contem-
porary world. Each and every one of us strives to become more independent,
self-sufficient and productive. The functioning neoliberal self is an able-bodied and
minded one. This is a self that is widely desired. Such visions of selfhood threaten
to neutralise alternative ways of becoming. ‘Many disabled people’, Couser (2011:
26) muses, ‘fear the advent of a stealth eugenics – a kinder, gentler eugenics carried
out by supposedly free agents, pregnant women and elderly and disabled people’.
It is not the case that disabled people are hated (such opinions are going to really
break up the party), it’s just that they (note the Othering terminology here) don’t
fit the world’s (ableist) demands. Take for example our obsession with progression,
achievement, betterment (pick a term, any term). Our contemporary times are
development times. We want our children and our societies to grow. We want
our kids to mature into rational young people, to exercise choice, to compete
educationally and to succeed through labour. We know society shares these values.
But, just as market shares move up and down, accruing value one moment, losing
another, so too the psychological state of the individual jumps up and down as
if they were subjected to the demands of the market. Human development and
market development mirror one another. They need one another. Neoliberal-ables
constitute a dominant social group, a comfortable space, the very heart of the White
Anglo-Saxon and Protestant (WASP) liberation (Hughes, 1999: 158). Casting a
critical gaze across institutions and practices of contemporary society identifies a
number of overt and covert ableist idealisations at play. In the world of design, for
example, Palmeri (2006) observes that designers and users of material goods harbour
unconscious ableist biases that risk creating exclusionary technologies. Johnston
(2009: 153–154) shows how performance studies scholars have traditionally made
assumptions that the bodies they study are normative, missing opportunities to
engage with disability as an important identity rubric akin to race, class and gender.
In the health sciences and professions, ‘the semantics of rehabilitation is language
essentially propelled by promises: promises of health, normalcy, functionality,
prosperity; briefly, a promise of a (capitalist) dream’ (Kolárová, in press, np).
The analysis of Erevelles (2002a: 31) is, again, telling. She reminds us of the
ways in which late capitalism has been particularly successful in simultaneously
Ableism 29
institutionalising the concepts of the ‘free’ market and the ‘free’ subject in the
current consumer culture and, in doing so, has effectively obscured the exploi-
tation that occurs within these production processes. Not everyone is ‘free’ to
participate in the market (Erevelles, 2002a: 31) but those that do work the market
for their own benefits incite ‘a trope of liberal heroic individual exceptionalism’
through which we are all expected to achieve self-actualisation (Sothern, 2007:
155). It helps to be able to succeed in neoliberal-ableism as a worker and consumer
(Jenkins, 2005). As we witness the shrinkage of public sector provision and a
greater propensity to contract out service delivery (Williams et al., 2012: 1480)
then those who are not capable of existing without such support mechanisms risk
being cast out by neoliberalism and hounded by ableism.
Compulsory neoliberal able-bodiedness: meritocracy and

entrepreneurship
For Richardson (2005) neoliberal politics have normalised a ‘desiring of sameness’.
At the epicentre of our psychological and cultural desire for sameness is the
emulation of the individual that we have come to cherish, a ‘post-Cartesian
entrenchment of the notion that the self-possessive inviolability of the bounded
body grounds the autonomous subject’ (Shildrick, 2007: 225). The capitalisation
of the flesh that occurs through neoliberalism makes the body, as Vandekinderen
(2013) puts it, a key site of investment for the state. Here we find the production
of a viable and productive body politic: the able body and mind. Neoliberalism has
proven to be so compelling because in representing the world of market rules as a
state of nature, marketisation has been naturalised (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 382).
And the able body has also been naturalised. We can identify a number of other
elements of this moral fibre of the neoliberal-able individual.
First, the neoliberal self is an able-bodied entrepreneurial entity. The ideology
of ability is the unquestioned ‘preference for able-bodiedness … the baseline
by which humanness is determined, setting the measure of body and mind that
give or denies human status to individual persons’ (Siebers, 2008: 8). Neoliberal
discourses on freedom, borne through entrepreneurship, ‘reassert the ideas of self-
actualisation and self-development as one of the many needs and aspirations of
the enterprising self ’ (Masschelein and Simons, 2005). Progress is characterised in
terms of one’s life as a producer–consumer with needs and human capital situated
in a market environment where everything has an economic value. Similarly, for
Freeman (2007) we are witnessing the rise of the entrepreneurial project of the
self: to ensure we remain flexible, inventive and adaptable to the demands of the
market. This leads Slee (2012) to wonder aloud: how can educational inclusion
of disabled children occur when educational institutions are set up around these
neoliberal imperatives? If we are all entrepreneurs then learners simply need
to demonstrate their predilections for enterprise or, well, expect to fall by the
wayside. Naturalisation of the sameness of the entrepreneurial spirit serves as an
ideological function, a point taken further by McRuer (1998: 134). If we’re all
basically the same, then we need not attend to the homophobia, racism and sexism
that continue to undergird our everyday lives. People fail at school, in work,
in the wider cultural imaginary not because of social inequalities but because
they fail to match up to an entrepreneurial attitude and a system of meritocracy.
Youth, strength, and ability, however, are commodities that are both desirable and
‘disposable’ in regard to this workforce – long hours and hard labour ensure that
a system that wants ‘young and strong workers’ is always haunted by disability
(McRuer, 2006: 153; see also Slater, 2012).
Thus, what remains unquestioned are those historical, political and economic
conditions that permit only a small minority (think: white, rich, heterosexual,
bourgeois and able-bodied males) to exercise the ‘material freedom to choose’
(Erevelles, 1996: 523). Meritocracy is, for Erevelles (2002b: 10), a limiting
definition of citizenship that only values the productive labourer. This is ‘do it
yourself citizenship’ (Vandekinderen et al., 2012a). We must therefore follow Ware
(2011: 195) to explore the ‘ideology of ability’ so as to make it ‘legible and familiar
despite how imbricated it may be in our thinking and practices, and despite how
little we notice its patterns, authority, contradictions, and influences as a result’
(Siebers, 2008: 9).
Second, the able-bodied category is always and only provisional, requiring
constant replenishment (Hannabach, 2007: 255). The neoliberal-able self is
always making and repairing itself. Help is offered by Big Pharma, aiding the re/
making of the self through psychiatrisation, psychologisation and medicalisation
of everyday life. As the second biggest industry after the arms trade, Big Pharma
can help medicate us in our time of need; not simply when we are down but
also when we want to further enhance our productivity. The website Study
Drugs offers a positive rap on performance-enhancing stimulants noting that
‘Increasingly students are using Modafinil, Adderall, Ritalin, Dexedrine, Nootropil
& Ephedrine to get a competitive edge in exams’ (http://www.studydrugs.net/).
Here we find some of the transhumanist building blocks of civil status, involving
styling and enhancing the body and psyche. To be the ever more clean, fit, healthy,
normal, well groomed and well behaved, the psyche, similarly, must be rebooted.
Third, neoliberalism gets under your skin. It psychologises the conditions of
productivity: leading to what Carlson (2001: 140) terms cognitive ableism. This
is an attitude of bias in favour of the interests of individuals who possess certain
cognitive abilities (or the potential for them) against those who are believed not
to possess them. She suggests that two factors contribute to the perpetuation
of cognitive ableism: the tendency to essentialise cognitive disability (it is the
deficient problem of particular souls), and the failure to address adequately the
socio-political nature of cognitive privilege (we live in a literal, knowledge-rich
society that augments the cognitive over other qualities such as the embodied or
the emotional). She continues:
By ignoring the internal heterogeneity (for example, distinctions between

degrees of ability, vastly different etiologies), external heterogeneity (cognitive
Ableism 31
disability is defined externally by many different professions, including

genetics, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and education), and instability
(its definition is inextricably bound up with etiology, treatment, and social,
cultural, and biological norms), there is a danger of reifying this category.
(Carlson, 2001: 141)
Cognitive ableism smokes out those that fail to meet its rigid criteria of success
while also feeding society’s obsession with individual autonomy and responsibility.
Perhaps one of the more worrying underlying themes of transhumanism relates
to its pursuit of hyper-cognitive forms of life. We know that ableist practices are
flexible, mutable and responsive to the requirements of global capitalism. Taken
as a whole, ableism appears to be a rather monolithic term, which essentialises
one world over another. However, it is not stable, fixed and unchanging: instead
it responds to technological advances and capitalistic requirements. Carlson (2001:
142) recognises that the boundaries of disability as a category are permeable, and
though we may not be members now, we are all ‘temporarily able’. The existential
awareness of one’s being-towards-disability (to modify Heidegger’s turn of phrase),
Carlson argues, may provide the impetus to critically examine one’s personal
relationship to the possibility of disability and the meaning of disability in a broader
social context. What this means for ableism – faced with the realities of a body
rapidly moving towards being-disabled or as Shildrick (2009) puts it becoming-disabled
– is not quite clear. The realities of the embodied experience – especially across
the life course – appear, at the very least, to disturb or, ultimately, to reject the
promises of ableism. The fantasy of an able life has to live the unconscious realities
of living with an increasingly non-able life.
Fourth, this able-bodied citizen we have come to crave so much is, in actuality,
an abandoned citizen. This concept, taken from the work of Vandekinderen et al.
(2012b), relates to the ways in which citizens are abandoned and cast off if they
fail to meet the neoliberal imperative. But we can also turn the concept round on
to the ableist self: the citizen is abandoned, set afloat in the sea of ableist signi-
fiers, to find and contain himself or herself. For Vandekinderen (2013: 155) the
social construct of normality mainly concerns employability (italics in the original).
This humanist logic, Erevelles (2002b: 9) suggests ‘emphasises individual potential
and its associated traits of autonomy, competence and rationality as the necessary
pre-conditions for being recognised as a citizen’. When faced with the antithesis/
Other – those unruly bodies of disability – ‘humanism’s only defence is exclusion
– an exclusion that can only be achieved by a strict adherence to certain normative
concepts that are narrowly defined and that, if challenged, would topple the
edifice on which liberal individualism and capitalism is erected’ (Erevelles, 2002b:
9). Those deemed non-autonomous are either subjected to traditional forms of
care administered by a neoliberal workforce (Soldatic and Meekosha, 2012) or,
frankly, abandoned. It is perhaps hardly surprising that activists with the label of
intellectual disabilities have, in some corners of the globe, mobilised around the
notion of being People First. Citing the primary signifier of the ‘person’ evokes
with it notions of autonomy and independence: precisely the ableist competencies

automatically assumed not to be present in the midst of intellectual disabilities.
But, the trouble with evoking such a humanist concept is that the only successful
person is a socially productive one measured in terms of ‘value for money, flexi-
bility and, of course, the proverbial performance rating’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002:
387). In the cold light of day, many of us (including members of People First) fail
to match up to this impossible ideal of personhood.
The biopolitics of ableism: under the skin, across the population
The civil self is compelled to repeatedly display his purity by vigilant self-
monitoring and disciplinary purification rituals.
(Seidman, 2008: 18)
Ableism is part of our un/conscious everyday lives. We have internalised ableist

values into the very heart of our ontological souls. As McRuer (2006) writes, it
would seem as if there is something sexy about the ever-rising riches of some and
the growing gap away from the multitude of the poor. To understand the subjec-
tification of neoliberalism we can turn to the work of Foucault and his fans. In
this theoretical community, the individual is understood as being made through
biopower. We will give more space to the work of Foucault and others in chapters 4
and 6. For now, let us continue our exposition of neoliberal-ableism by deploying
Rabinow and Rose’s (2006: 197) analysis of biopower:
1. One or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings with
an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth (e.g. having
trisomy 23 leads to Down syndrome which is a genetically measurable abnor-
mality with a delayed developmental prognosis; e.g. being an adult citizen
involves having a productive body fit for labour).
2. Strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health
(e.g. antenatal testing to eradicate Down syndrome or specialist health
and social care in childhood; e.g. performance-related testing of labourers’
productivity).
3. Modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on themselves in the name
of individual or collective life or health (e.g. parental feelings of responsibility
for the care of their children – note that ‘parenting’ has been replaced with
‘caring’; e.g. one only feels like a productive, contributing member of society
when one is working).
Discourses, strategies and modes work on the population and the individual.
Biopower has micro and macro targets. As Barnett et al. (2008: 636) put it
eloquently: ‘government takes place between two poles: regulating the “species
body” through regulating whole populations while also regulating “the individual”
Ableism 33
as a speaking, working, desiring subject’. Moreover, as Hardt and Negri (2000,

2004) have demonstrated, biopower functions pan-nationally as part of a global
postmodernisation of knowledge about the body and soul. We have shifted
from governing through society to governing through individuals’ capacities
for self-realisation, self-fulfilment and self-awareness: to become a responsible,
moral, economically rational citizen (Rose, 1999). The good news for those of
us interested in disrupting neoliberalism is the realisation that biopolitics has re/
productive and de/constructive potential: discourses are, as we shall see, ‘over-
bearing’ (Barnett et al., 2008: 633); they produce in excess of themselves. And it is
in this excess that we can find possibility. To use Power’s (2005) terms; biopolitical
spaces and neoliberal subjectivities can be worked, that is, co-opted, resisted and
subverted. As we shall find out in Chapter 9 there are real possibilities for working
the spaces of neoliberalism. All is not lost. Globalised ableism might be viewed
as a form of what Hardt and Negri (2000) describe as Empire: a pan-national
biopolitical network of practices and discourses that have in mind the idealised
global citizen. Everything in Empire’s wake is either engulfed or pushed to the
edges if personhood fails to match up to the neoliberal-ableist prerogative. At these
edges we can find categories of disability. These edges are becoming ever more
populated and more resistant.
Disabled bodies exist as a stark reminder that ableist Empire cannot conquer
all. This is anxiety-provoking and has the dual effect of (1) re-enforcing ableist
re-sedimentation of bodily normativity and reworking of the utopic visions of
a perfectly regulated world without disability and (2) shoring up disability and
normal categories with each being categorised in such ways that they reduce each
identity to a depoliticised consumable (see Sothern, 2007; Cooley, 2011; Meleo-
Erwin, 2012).
As Erevelles (2002b: 9) reminds us, our neoliberal times need ‘the discourse of
the defective agent embodied in the disabled Other in order to reify the humanist
self or normate’. Consequently, as the ableist self becomes the desired choice of
the global citizen then disability becomes the antithesis of that which is chosen or
desired (see for example the analysis offered by Newell, 2006). For neoliberalism
and ableism to do their work then they need to get inside individuals as well as
targeting wider society. This dual process is precisely what Foucault had in mind
when he was describing biopower. While he did not write of disablism or ableism
his analytic method sits well with the aims of this book.
Conclusion: thoughts on neoliberal-ableism

Disability is the quintessential Other of neoliberal-ableist society. Ableism edits out
lack and emboldens (hyper) normality. There is no doubt that ableism is not only
a matter of life but also of death. In our contemporary times of austerity we are
witnessing a reduction of state support alongside a reworking of the ableist ideals
of independence and autonomy. This pincer action is having a huge impact on
citizens of nation states: reduced of potential support and expected to occupy an
individualist responsibility for one’s lot in life. Inevitably, there will be collateral
damage. As the renowned British disability activist Liz Crow blogged recently:
We can call it cuts but it’s not about saving money in the end. It’s something
more than that and that’s the impact on me and people like me. What we’ve
relied upon has just been stolen away now.
(Liz Crow http://www.thetallestorder.co.uk)
Erevelles (2002b: 11) asks two questions that resonate with the expositions of this
chapter:
What happens when the dominant assumptions that undergird the charac-
teristics of rationality, autonomy and competence that form the bulwark of
liberal society contravene the very existence of the oppressed group? What
happens when the very essence of the liberal humanist self is necessarily
predicated on the construction of the disabled other as the embodiment of
inalienable difference?
The short answer is, as Liz Crow indicates: disabled people are discarded by society.
This is tragic for a number of material reasons. There are cultural reasons too.
While the disabled Other is made ever more a rejected entity, the centre-staging
of the neoliberal-able self is, let us be clear, woefully dull and inadequate. There is
something fundamentally conservative about the cultural politics of neoliberalism
(Sothern, 2007). We need to attack the dull heartlands of ableist society. Disability
culture acts as an antidote to these concepts at the heart of the global ableist
machine: a sense of shared and open-ended identity rooted in disability experience
(Johnston, 2009). One could argue that in these neoliberal-ableist times disability
politics and theories of ableism/disablism have never been in more demand. We
live in neoliberal-able times. We therefore urgently require sophisticated critical
theories of ableism and forms of activism that draw in allies and alliances with
others subjected to the forces of neoliberal-ableism. We continue our search for
connection in the next chapter.
3
INTERSECTIONALITY
In a time of austerity, economic recession, rising unemployment and an ever-

growing divide between rich and poor across the globe, to what extent could it
be argued that comprehending disablism and ableism requires entangled engage-
ments with processes of racism, homophobia and sexism? When one evokes the
image of ‘the able’ to what extent are other processes associated with ‘the white’,
‘the straight’, ‘the Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘the male’? And, crucially, what strategies for
subversion emerge at the nexus of these intersections? I argue that modes of ableist
cultural reproduction and disabling material conditions can never be divorced
from hetero/sexism, racism, homophobia, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and
capitalism. There are five sections:
1. Introduction: a case for intersectionality

2. Queerly disabled, cripping queer
3. Racism and disablism: experiencing the Other, becoming a race-able traitor
4. Feminisms: outing the personal, publicising the private
5. Conclusion: queered, cripped, gendered and raced – for tomorrow we ride.
This chapter bestows a shadowy background to the conceptual category of ‘dis/

ability’ developed further in the next chapter.
Introduction: a case for intersectionality

The phrase intersectionality came from the work of African American feminists
such as Patricia Hill Collins who synthesised overlapping agendas of feminism and
black civil rights. What do mean when we adopt an intersectionalist approach to the
studies of disablism and ableism? The first response to this question touches the body
and specifically those ‘bodies that buck the normative sexual aesthetic (black/brown
bodies, gay/lesbian/transsexual/intersex bodies, disabled bodies, poor bodies, and so

on)’ (Erevelles, 2011: 2168). Our bodies are vital sites for the playing out of psycho-
logical, neurological, physiological and ableist fantasies. Autonomy, independence
and rationality are virtues desired by neoliberal-ableism, its institutions of family,
school and workplace, promulgated through popular culture. As soon as we begin
to unsettle these ideals – uprooting them from neutral, naturalised origins and
exposing their phantasmagorical character – we quickly find that they ‘co-exist
alongside those associated with race, sexuality and gender’ (Erevelles, 2011: 2169).
The normal citizen is ‘resplendent in his masculine, heterosexual, able-bodied, and
propertied existence, and of course, always magnanimous in his relationships to
Otherness’ (Erevelles, 2002b: 9). Body politics are inscribed upon our fleshy selves
in a time of receding public sector services, welfare state support and increased
privatisation of progress. For Erevelles, patriarchy, heteronormativity, compulsory
able-bodiedness and institutional racism are mutually constitutive discourses. Riding
atop these discourses can be found those ableist, white, straight men who, ironically,
were responsible for markets crashing, unregulated capital and unethical commerce:
the merchant or city banker. When Michael Moore (2001) ridiculed these cultural
clowns – dismissing them as Stupid White Men – he perhaps unknowingly gave
us an intersectional analysis of the idealised citizen of contemporary capitalism.
Remember, now, ‘merchant banker’ is cockney rhyming slang (Google it).
The second response to an intersectional analysis relates to the outskirts of our
studies. As McRuer (2006: 154) asks, ‘who haunts the margins of the work that
we do, the margins of the feminist, queer, and disabled worlds? What would an
ongoing commitment to those spectral presences entail?’ Too often critical ableist
and disability studies take place in the cosy bourgeois confines of university settings.
These are also places of performativity: where academic careers are made or lost on
measures of research income generation, publishing in peer review journals and the
ever-expanding globalisation of educational provision in the name of institutional
status. Academia risks losing its civic duties to the most marginalised members of
society. Intersectionality reaches out. Any theoretical engagement with dis/ability
that is also an encounter with race, sexuality, gender, class, nation state will inevi-
tably invite a consideration of some of society’s most oppressed.
The third response relates to what Erevelles (1996: 52) terms revision. She
asks, ‘in what ways can we, from the vantage point of disability, (re) write the
theoretical terrain occupied by the other axes of difference such as race, class
and gender?’ She recommends creating a space of contestation and a point of
departure; ‘to (re) theorise both disability and gender as well as to draw out its
implications for race, class and caste’. Something new happens when we connect
disability with other transformative political categories. Marginalised positions of
disabled, queer, raced, classed or gendered do not all share the same histories of
oppression nor exactly the same fights for political recognition. Accruing a label
of psychiatric disorder because one is gay or lesbian should be refused as an act of
psychiatric violence. Gaining a label of psychiatric illness might, for someone who
hears voices for example, provide access to services that may help them live their
Intersectionality 37
day-to-day lives. In both cases, when psychiatry becomes the dominant story of an
individual’s difference then it is likely there will be similar experiences of patholo-
gisation and, no doubt, shared resources when it comes to political agitation and
resistance. While fights around the processes of disablism might differ from those
around racism, sexism, homophobia, we can find some shared ground in relation
to struggles with ableism. Indeed, critical ableist studies provide the theoretical
terrain, broaching alliances between categories of humanity as Erevelles (1996)
terms it. Meanwhile, studies of disablism continue alongside these anti-ableist
alliances. Not all of us experience disablism. We are all plunged into the mire of
ableism. Critical ableist studies boast comradeship and shared politicisation. The
tangled webs of ableism can be contested in order to benefit all of us who fall into
the category of negated other.
This leads to a fourth response that contemplates the national and the geopo-
litical. For Ramlow (2006: 172) a rejection of the heteronormative fantasy of a
compulsorily able-bodied nation offers a multiply transformative consciousness,
connecting across fields of difference, rather than being immobilised by the fantasy
of normate physical and national unity (Ramlow, 2006: 180). Nation states are
founded upon the neoliberal-able, complete, civilised, responsible, able, normative,
self-serving individual citizen. Some of the more populist and stereotypical
comparisons of nations are made along the lines of development, progression
and civilization. The global soldier, according to Hardt and Negri (2000), is not
simply one involved in warfare in a foreign land: s/he is a biopolitical social worker
spreading the word of Western capitalist and neoliberal-ableist democracy.
The fifth response recognises material and economic oppression. Later on in
the book we consider materialist theory (Chapter 4) and the connection of class,
bodies and labour (Chapter 6), but for now should acknowledge the centrality of
social class to intersectional analysis. While we will excavate the interconnections
of dis/ability, gender, sexuality and race, we concede that inequities are so often
produced through our (lack of) economic standing (disabling choice of words
intended). As Jones (2011) convincingly argues in his exposition of the demoni-
sation of the British working class – through the sign of the Chav – poverty and
unemployment are too often explained not as consequences of structural inequality
but as the result of the individual moral failings of a stupid and lazy underclass.
Poor (and disabled) people are often the targets of such scapegoating (Quamby,
2011). .Recognising oppression should accompany outing moments of resistance.
The remaining arguments of this chapter, then, try to unpack some of the contri-
butions afforded in connecting queer, feminist and postcolonial theories with those
emanating from studies of ableism and disablism.
Queerly disabled, cripping queer

As queer crips, we’ve been isolated from society at large and even from one
another, by underemployment, institutionalization, poverty, and internalized
cripophobia. All these factors have not merely discouraged us from telling
our stories, they have brained-washed us into believing we have no stories

to tell.
(Guter and Killacky, 2004, xviii)
Crip theory is one of strongest growing insights in critical disability studies.

The work of Robert McRuer (2006) has catalysed interlinked relations between
disabled and queer activists. For Sykes (2009: 248), disability studies has ‘interro-
gated what gets counted as a “normal” body, challenging taken-for-granted ideas
about mobility, productivity, and even that any body is able across different circum-
stances and times of life’. She continues, ‘focusing critical analysis and politics
on the construction of normative bodies, in this case “able” bodies, has obvious
similarities with queer theory and has recently developed into crip theory, which
seeks to analyze, and challenge, connections between the social construction
of heteronormativity and able-bodiedness’ (Sykes, 2009: 247–248). Queer and
disability studies have the potential to unsettle one another and find shared vocabu-
laries embodied in McRuer’s term of crip theory.
Crip theory replaces ‘the narrative of abjection’ with a ‘narrative of attack’
(Sykes, 2009: 250). Part of this conscience raising involves the realisation that
‘an understanding of any aspect of modern Western culture must be considered
incomplete if it does not incorporate a critical analysis of the crisis of able-bodied/
disabled definition’ (McRuer, 2006: 152). This quotation from McRuer is his
adaptation of a seminal argument of the eminent queer scholar Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick (1990). The crisis McRuer identifies takes different forms. One occurs
when disability reminds ability of its own vulnerability. Ableism is an ideal and
a rarely attainable one at that. When disability emerges at the cultural edge
then that culture is reminded of its own instability. This crisis can be re(a)d in a
number of revolutionary ways. Disability unhinges ableism and shares similarities
with the challenges posed to heteronormative life by gay, lesbian, trans politics
and the associated theoretical terrain of queer theory. The explicitly subversive,
anti-normative perspectives of queer theory sit well with some of the language of
disability politics: pissing on pity, disabled and proud. Recently, the language of
queer theory has taken on particular relevance in a time when many across the
globe feel failed by neoliberalism. The neoliberal agenda produces winners and
losers. If you are judged to be fit, able and rational enough for work (or perhaps,
more fairly, amenable to exploitation) then a place waits for you at the neoliberal
table. If you are not any of these things then you face hardship, little to no support
from the welfare state and community isolation. Whitney (2006: 40) soberingly
reflects that ‘feelings of lacking community support that many queer women with
disabilities experience can be exhausting, isolating, and lead to internalized ableism
and homophobia’.
However, while the neoliberal ableist landscape is bleak, resistance and
subversion are readily found in queer and crip space. Julie Passanante Elman
(2012b: 318) observes that ‘crip, like queer, has a long history of pejorative use’.
Instead, she writes, we should think of queer and crip as ‘fluid, intersectional, and
contingent articulations of bodies, cultures, and power’. Just as queer activists have
questioned the homonormative character of gay marriage or inclusion of gay and
lesbian soldiers as recuperating the power of heterosexist and militaristic discourses
(Richardson, 2005), so too crip agendas disrupt normative conditions of the
neoliberal order. For Bond Stockton (2004) ‘being Q’, enacts a contrary role of
being viewed as a disavowed strange object while, simultaneously and ambivalently,
inviting a rejection of repressive norms:
When queer theory questions the ongoing pathologisation of non-normative

desires and practices or critiques the gay and lesbian rush toward validation
through marriage or military service, what is at work in such questioning
is likewise a will to not lose the singularity of those bodies, pleasures, and
erotic and inventive ways of being-in-common that cannot be so easily
domesticated.
(McRuer, 2012c: 357)
This is not to deny the civil, legal and political recognition afforded by marriage.
Rather, in parallel, queer/crip relationships recast loving, respectful relationships
outside of marriage and traditional dyads of lovemaking. For Kannen (2008: 157)
being queer or crip resists ‘white hetero-patriarchal able-bodied supremacy’,
and responds to ‘the failures of the hegemonic monothematic construction of
disability rights movements and as a rebuff to sexuality identity politics that rely
upon and reinforce ableist constructs (see http://www.bentvoices.org)’ (Sothern,
2007: 152).
In her most famous work – Epistemology of the Closet – Sedgwick (1990: 3)
argues that sexuality has become the distinctively privileged relation to our most
prized constructs of individual identity, truth and knowledge. Equally sexuality has
transformed these relations. Similarly, as McRuer has shown, disability has come
to occupy a central place in the fight for recognition and citizenship. Disability
crips narrow conception of what counts as human. When, for example, a young
disabled man with, quote unquote, profound physical impairments and learning
disabilities, coexists with many others in a circle of support then he broadens our
understandings of what it means to be a valued member of his community or,
for that matter, what it means to be human. Through the 24/7 support that he
receives, where others are invited into his life to offer support, advocate, liaise with,
shadow during his days either in education or leisure, he also asks us all, indirectly,
to conceptualise what we think counts as living a good life. The complexity of
living a life with others – of interdependence in practice – is clearly displayed. He
therefore demands new vocabularies and new ways of understanding and valuing
the ways which enact being human. He crips taken-for-granted neoliberal-able
conceptions of what it means to be an active citizen (unitary, alone, isolated) and
starts a very different conversation about the human (together, sharing, mutuality).
Namaste (2009: 15) writes that queer theorists such as Judith Butler zone in
on those excluded from the very category of human. Butler’s (2004) argument
– that many transgendered people are subject to violence based on their perceived
appearance – provides a compelling background for her broader project that seeks
to interrogate the limits of the human (Namaste, 2009: 16). Queer theory exposes
the limits of what counts as human and extends versions of what we might come
to know as human. Similarly, crip theory plays this extensive role: using theory to
document the promise of lives. For example, Kingsbury (2003: 349):
By queer, I refer, on the one hand, to aspects of psychoanalytic theory,

methodology and praxis that reject any universalizing, pathologizing and
regulatory tendencies underpinned by a metaphysical faith in pure and fully
present heterosexual or ‘normal’ desires, identities and identifications.
We are all party to normative desires and identifications. Disabled children and
their families, for example, are subjected to numerous assessments of child devel-
opment. Equally, non-disabled children are thrown into an ableist melting pot of
tests, assessment and more tests. No parent wants, whisper it now, ‘my child to be
stupid’. Increasingly, as Harwood and Humphry (2008) note, no one wants their
child to be anything other than top of the class: gifted and talented. Crip theory
pulls us to one side and asks what do we desire of human beings? What are children
made to desire? What do we desire of our children? There is clear evidence that
children are imbued with the neoliberal ambitions of parents, teachers and govern-
ments. Enforcing normalcy through educational assessment is a form of systemic
violence (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2011). For Adams and Holman Jones
(2011) queer theory’s commitments to uncertain, fluid and becoming subjectivities
advocates a similar sensibility to those found in critiques of ableism: disrupting
traditional ideas about what passes as ‘normal’:
For Freud, the pervert is neither neurotic nor necessarily cruel, but rather
can be perfectly happy. The only thing the pervert cannot be is normal.
But if normalcy is not one’s goal in and of itself, possibilities for perverse
happiness – and I would argue perverse moral life – open up.
(Jakobsen, 2009: 221)
Making perversity desirable – queer/crip by design – might mirror desire of a

disability. Queer readings of disability and sexuality have revealed unforeseen,
productive alliances. The piece by Goodley and Lawthom (2011), for example,
rewrites a family story of disability, adolescence and sexuality as a moment of
revelation.
Alex is 15 and lives at home with his mother Isobel, her partner Gail, and two
younger sisters in the South of England. He attends mainstream school. Alex is in
the full swing of puberty. Isobel, his mother, described how he had found masturbation
and the difficulties she has discussing this with him. Alex chooses to talk about
masturbation to Isobel and she wishes he would talk to someone else about it! When
Alex first discovered masturbation, Isobel recalled, he would ‘come downstairs from
his bedroom looking very hot and bothered’. Isobel and her partner Gail discussed
this and felt that Alex didn’t have a very good ‘method’. They discussed whether
they should talk to Alex about this and whether it was alright to show him how to
do it. They concluded that it wasn’t! Over time Alex has started to talk more and
more about masturbation. He says he doesn’t like the feeling. He often talks to Isobel
about it and recently said that he ‘wished his penis was a bottle of coke and his testicles
were roast chicken’ when Isobel asked him why he said that he liked coke and roast
chicken. Isobel feels that this is a part of her son’s life she was not expecting to be part
of. She is interconnected with an area of his life which is usually ‘private’ and which
has become an arena for discussion.
Alex has started noticing girls. He watches TV and picks out the girls he says
he ‘likes’. When Isobel went to an event at school with Alex, he pointed out (very
obviously) several girls to her. He tells her he likes the touch of girls – although Alex
isn’t sure whether he is able to touch girls and Isobel has tried to say he can only touch
a girl if she agrees first.
The Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO) at the school has also
spoken to Isobel about Alex deliberately arousing himself at school. The teaching
assistants have told him to stop. The SENCO asked if this was something Alex
did at home, Isobel explained he didn’t and that he knew that if he wanted to do
that he should do it in his bedroom. Isobel wondered about the level of surveillance
of home by school, but felt that in terms of ‘consistent’ messages for Alex, she had to
share the information with the SENCO. Isobel has also tried to talk to her daughters
about the possibility of sex and relationships for Alex. She feels that her daughters
may one day have a say in whether or not this is a possibility for Alex. She told her
daughters that ‘people with learning difficulties do have sex you know’. She couldn’t
work out whether their shocked reaction was because her daughters had never thought
of their brother having sex or because their mother had used the word ‘sex’! Again
whilst siblings may share sexual stories the transmission is normally between siblings
not parent as mediator.
(Goodley and Lawthom, 2011: 93)
Alex and Isobel extend conceptualisations of desire, sex and relationality. We

argued (Goodley and Lawthom, 2011: 94) that son and mother transpire to
publicly and explicitly address masturbation: an act that might be deemed to be
the epitome of an individual’s secret, private life. The verbal protocol around
masturbation is normally a masculinised achievement shared between boys whereas
Alex is relating his to Isobel. In outing his body Alex inevitably shifts his body
from a self-contained privatised bounded unitary-like subject to a position that
reaches out for connection with other bodies (whether or not those bodies neces-
sarily want to connect). For Shildrick (2009: 102) such a body turns towards
the positivity of intercorporeality rather than an anxiety about its dangerous
significations. Alex and Isobel open up dialogues not only about the practice of
masturbation (which we might easily understand as desire as it is normatively
constituted in terms of a desire of something we lack) but also about the objects
of desire (and the limits that are often placed upon the desires of young and
disabled people). A crip sexuality ‘becomes, then, a network of flows, energies and
capacities that are always open to transformation, and so cannot be determined in
advance’ (Shildrick, 2009: 132). We move desire away from genital sexuality per
se to a more expansive notion of desire. Funnily enough, in speaking of Coke
and chicken, Alex broadens and popularises the notion of what is to be desired.
Alex encourages us to think in terms of productive plays of desire: ‘a desire that
maps the multiplicity of becoming’ (Shildrick, 2009: 145) rather than a desire of
something we lack.
Far from crip being academic posturing, crip is a rallying call. Failure to pursue a
crip politicisation of life, for Sothern (2007: 156–157), only aids the neoliberal goal
of producing self-governing, discrete, enterprising individuals under the tutelage of
various professionals. Crip’s task is simple: ‘not to seek a safe passage over the river
of ableism and heteronormativity to some promised land of liberal inclusion; we
must, instead, blow up the bridge!’ (Sothern, 2007: 156–157), to expose the ways
in which sexuality and disability link into one another. Disability and sexuality
are key interlocutors: each speaks with one another (McRuer, 2006). For Elman
(2012a: 177) heterosexuality and health ‘often seamlessly imply one another,
while queerness and disability exist as epitomes of abnormality’. Compulsory
able-bodiedness bolsters heteronormativity. Boys show their virility through their
bodies while girls are encouraged to seek the desirability of others through their
bodies. Disability might enter as a moment of crip resistance: refuting deep-seated
gendered lines of desire. As Smith and Sparkes’ (2004) work with ex-sportsmen
who had acquired Spinal Cord Injury revealed: disability permitted some men to
rethink their relationships with the masculine bodies, opening up hitherto lacking
reflections on what should be desired about one’s body.
Similarly, Erevelles (2002b: 7) suggests that the difference embodied in people
with cognitive/severe disabilities contests normative ideas of equality (that are
bound up in the neoliberal-able imperative). When one requires the support of
others to eat, sleep, bathe, be mobile, access community settings, communicate
with others, perhaps even to touch others in sexual and sensual ways, what does
this do to our models of citizenship? To this we can add sexual citizenship and
when disability enters the fray then, in some cases, imaginative responses – perhaps
perverse encapsulations – arise. For Meleo-Erwin (2012: 395) queer (and to this
we can add crip) ‘moves us outside the politics of shame and toward a praxis that
neither denies the complicated messiness of the body nor redefines these charac-
teristics as normal as a strategy of stigma-management’. Paraphrasing Meleo-Erwin
(2012: 396) we can suggest that a crip perspective resists the naturalness of sexuality
and gender, calls into question the legitimacy of all identity labels thus ‘exposing
the identity’s historically contingent and socially constructed nature’. Our task is,
she commands, ‘to crack open the concept of normal and trouble it in order to
see what relations of power it acts in the service of ’ (396).
An open approach is offered by Vandekinderen’s (2013) crip analysis of mental
health. For Vandekinderen, individuals with the label of psychopathy who are
imprisoned as a consequence of violent behaviour, really go against the grain of
much of what we would understand as a respectable human citizen. To be fair,
they would probably embody traits that most people would find deplorable. They
are, Vandekinderen observes, a residual category par excellence. Her point is that
many a rehabilitative approach to such prison inmates risks failure because of the
underlying assumptions of humanity that undergird these processes. When rehabil-
itation has in mind the self-supporting, fixed, compliant, well-formed, solitary,
stable, economically integrated, recyclable citizen of neoliberal societies then many
individuals are doomed to failure. Vandekinderen’s alternative is to offer a relational
citizenship approach that seeks interconnection, sharing of responsibilities and
community participation and belonging. This is a radically different reading of
citizenship than the one offered by ableism. Drawing on Butler (2004) she asks
us to think again about what we understand as a viable life. The psychopathic
prisoner moves from being a disposable citizen to a transgressive citizen precisely
because he deconstructs normative understandings of human subjectivity and asks
us to develop what Erevelles (2002b) terms a post-dependence position on the
constitution of human identity.
Crip theory recasts what it means to be human. Erevelles (2002b) epitomises
this position in arguing that people with high support needs are not defective but
transgressive citizens: illuminating our mutual relationships with others, relocating
them in post-independent and post-human contexts. As we shall see in Chapter 4
of this book, the philosophical work of radicals such as Deleuze, Guattari, Butler
and Haraway – all philosophers of difference for Allan (2011) – has been adapted
and applied by critical disability studies scholars (e.g. Gibson, 2006; Shildrick 2009;
Reeve, 2012). These crip readings rework bodies, affect/emotion and subjectivities
as places of affirmation, newness and excitation:
The body, the subject, is never fully determined; not bounded, but
provisional, relational and enacted, in constant dialogue with objects,
environments, spaces, times and ideas. This multiplicity results in complexity,
but this complexity is so fundamental to our being, so commonplace, so
everyday, that it is taken-for-granted; it is lived not deliberated.
(Woodyer, 2008: 353)
Crip theory is lived: it should not be an esoteric set of concepts that are liberally
applied to social life in ways that bear no resemblance to everyday practice. All
bodies are potentially crip: they are destined to failure in the ableist landscape.
They are, as we shall see later in the work of Puar, already dealing with their
own debility. At the same time, the interconnection of queer and disability might
also be seen as an opportunity for, what Allan (2011: 153) terms, ‘a kind of sense
making’ within the fields of disability and ableism studies. Because ableism is so
endemic, then theory can offer a helping hand. As Allan (2011: 153) puts it, ‘it
is not easy to see, think, and act differently; it is necessary, therefore, to also use
some of the theory practices of the philosophers of difference to help achieve a

new orientation’. We might sit and ponder on queering the crip and cripping the
queer so elegantly defined by Sandahl (2003).
Racism and disablism: experiencing the Other, becoming a

race-able traitor
In a short but powerful piece entitled ‘What could I know of racism?’ the
disabled activist Weeber (1999) lists common experiences of in/visibility, public
denigration, second-hand citizenship, community marginalisation endured by
disabled people and people of colour (her term). She discloses ‘I experience the
pain caused by unconscious beliefs of a society that assumes everyone is, or should
be “normal”; white and able bodied’ (Weeber, 1999: 21). This elision of whiteness
and able-bodiedness fixes the attention on those dominant imaginary and symbolic
elements of culture that mark people of colour and disabled people as Other.
Marked as Other, Weeber (1999: 21) writes ‘we are left dealing with the pain of
being Other’. Weeber (1999: 23) concludes that ‘we need to sever the dialogue
with the authors of degradation’ and ‘we need to decolonize the mind’. This quote
evokes a relationship between disablist and racist colonisation. Countering the
impact of a culture built upon whiteness and ability requires a twinning of political
and psychological struggles.
The research of Parker (2012a, 2012b) is one of the few examples of critical
research in Britain that seeks to connect the whiteness and disability studies. More
work has emerged, unsurprisingly, in the United States. Erevelles (2002b: 19), a
notable contributor, provides a useful platform for merging critiques of ability
and whiteness when she argues that ‘whiteness as property was an intrinsic part
of the ensemble of discourses that included the related discourses of competitive
entrepreneurship, the work ethic, productivity, efficiency and autonomy’. Being
white is historically contingent with being intelligent, civilised and able. Whiteness
alongside ability are ‘important property rights that had to be safeguarded,
protected and defended in the effort to decide who could or could not be a citizen’
(Erevelles, 2002b: 19). In exposing the hidden cultural referent of whiteness we
might replenish a critical analysis of ableism.
Here we can turn to the work of Frantz Fanon (1993), the Martinique-born
revolutionary and psychiatrist writing in a (post) colonial context in which the
prominence of the white other always threatens to pathologise the black self.
When the black self, for example of the child, is expected to judge his self
against the preferred white other then this may lead to feelings of disconnection;
experiencing culture in a schizophrenic sense. Let us explain this heady mix of
disidentification with blackness and the urge to embrace the white other. Fanon
starts Black Skins, White Masks with what seems to be an outrageous statement
– ‘at risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the
black is not a man’ (1993: 1). Fanon is capturing the dominant cultural practices
and subjective preoccupations with the man/citizen (white, autonomous, rational,
labouring) that cast the black man as excessive Other: lazy, dependent, emotive,
highly sexed, insatiable. Racist discourse negating blackness runs alongside
another discourse augmenting the idealisation of whiteness. The black self is one
that is forever potentially erased. The only self that can be constituted is in the
vision of the white other. As Fanon puts it: all this whiteness burns me (1993:
86). Fanon has left us a rich political and methodological heritage for making
sense of the damage done in the name of the white (and to this we can add
able) imaginary. It does not take too much of an intellectual shift to see parallels
with the preferred ableist other and the negated disabled Other. The only valued
self that is permitted to exist is a neoliberal-able one. Soldatic and Fiske (2009)
deal with complex meldings of race and disability, found in the very fabric of
Australian cultural life. Indigenous and disabled people share a history of being
physically and morally removed from ‘the demos’ which refers to ‘those people
who are accepted as citizens with full political rights and freedoms’ (Soldatic
and Fiske, 2009: 298). White settler communities not only stole the land of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait people but also emphasised their otherness from the
white able demos. The Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, passed by Australia’s
new Federal Parliament, was specifically designed to protect the racially and
physically ‘pure’ new nation from illness, insanity or idiocy. Here, for Soldatic
and Fiske (2009), was a new nation being built upon the rational, healthy able-
bodied and white citizen of good moral character. Bodies are raced, classed and
gendered. Some bodies are ‘trapped dead-end prospects and impoverished zones’
(Harvey, 1996: 123). Indigenous Australians are three times more likely to have an
impairment label of some type than Australian settlers/colonisers. Disabled indig-
enous Australians further occupy a position of what Reeve (2008) has developed
in her use of Agamben: a double folding of a zone of exception.
Similar work has emerged in Canada where there has been a retheorisation of
disability through the referent of race. Titchkosky (2012a, in press), for example,
asks what kind of human do Western European and North American societies
have in mind and to what extent are these imported from the Global North
to Global South countries through charity, healthcare, insurance and service
provision? How is global citizenship, articulated in documents such as the World
Report on Disability, reaffirming the citizen of the neoliberal-able demos? What
is to be done about the horrors committed in the name of an ableist ideology of
whiteness? A number of strategies emerge at the race–dis/ability nexus. The first
is provided in the work of Kannen (2008) on the concept of race traitor. This
critical race studies phenomenon distances, subverts, and reimagines whiteness
to disrupt the power that whiteness maintains (Kannen, 2008: 149). Drawing on
the work of Ignatiev and Garvey (1996), Kannen asks the white race traitor to
commit necessary acts of treason in order to act against the normative register:
‘exposing the ways in which privileged identities are constructed (i.e. whiteness,
ablebodiedness, heterosexuality, etc.) elucidates how resistance to oppressive
identity categories is possible’ (Kannen, 2008: 149). Race traitors dislodge their
authority and seek new loyalties (ibid.: 162). Subverting ableism and whiteness
involves a form of what we might term race–able treason: acknowledging and

challenging the authority of a privileged position offered by the race–dis/ability
matrix. One of the first tasks is to expose the ridiculous, stereotypical, abusive
knowledge created by non-disabled people about disability (as we will explore in
Chapter 8).
This leads us to the second response: which we can term refusing the dual
processes of orientalism and ableism. As Namaste (2009: 24) surmises, the postco-
lonial author Edward Said demonstrated close connections between scholars who
provide an imaginary representation of the Orient (written in the West), and
colonial administrators who enacted policies based on such perceptions. Hence
the vision of the non-white Other developed in colonial contexts, and clearly
accounted for in the work of Fanon, is exported and adopted in (post) colonial
contexts. The black Other is constituted as uncivilised, emotive, fearful but is also
exoticised, fetishised by white cultures. Alterity – the Other of the Eurocentric
self – has become constituted on the boundary of the colony and the Metropole
(Hardt and Negri, 2000: 124). The European self ‘needs to confront its Other
to feel and maintain its power, to remake itself continuously’ (ibid.: 129). Hence
the ‘Orient’ is made in Europe and exported back to ‘the Orient’ (ibid.: 125).
We could add that ‘the disabled’ is made in an ableist culture and transported
back to ‘the disabled’ (Campbell, 2009). The disabled man is subjected to a host
of competing, contrasting images, which we will pick up on in Chapter 8 in the
analysis of the disavowal of disability. Think, for a minute, of representations of
Down syndrome constructed in the Western, ableist academy, that relied histori-
cally on racialised conceptions associated with the Orient (explicitly captured in the
original label of mongolism). Think of the portrayal of Down syndrome in popular
media; infantilised images of the handicapped person as innocent, happy, smiley
and simple. The race–able traitor rejects disability misconceptions and demands
his co-conspirators contest these discourses of disability that were conceived and
developed in the ableist register. Just as postcolonial scholars ridicule the Oriental
Other constituted in colonial contexts then the race–able traitor ridicules the racist
nonsense spoken about disability by ableist culture. This approach also recognises
colonialism in disability studies. For Grech (2012) uncomfortable questions need
to be asked about the inherent Western European and North American (WENA)
preoccupations of disability studies. For Grech, the materialist social model of
disability should be scrutinised as a WENA project. Race–able traitors continu-
ously problematise colonial models of life.
The third response to whiteness and ableism materialises from black/disabled
cultural imaginaries. Disabled artists and comics on popular television channels,
the cutting edge of disabled dancers, theatre companies and politicised cultural
industries all seek to take up Fanon’s challenge to test the dominant cultural
symbolic. This involves, at key times, a deliberate rejection of the tropes of
ableism and the tenets of neoliberal citizenship, daring to speak as rejected
members of society. Over to the comic work of Liz Carr who signifies such a
cultural turn:
I couldn’t go out the house during the Paralympics. People used to come up
to me and say: ‘don’t you love the Paralympics Liz? Aren’t they inspirational?’
‘No’, I’d say, ‘they make the rest of us look lazy. Know what I mean – fuck
off!’
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHIcKDV7Trw)
To appropriate a well-worn theme of postcolonial literature: the subaltern can

speak and is happy to inform people to ‘fuck off’ when necessary.
Feminisms: outing the personal, publicising the private

Feminist disability scholarship has profoundly impacted on advanced analyses of
the specific conditions of disablism and the patriarchal foundations of ableism.
The work of writers such as Garland Thomson (1996, 1997, 2002, 2005, 2006,
2011, 2012), Reeve (2005, 2008, 2012), Thomas (1999, 2007) and Wendell (1989,
1996), to name but a few, has shifted the paradigms of ableist and disablist studies.
This ground-breaking work demands – according to Wendell (1996) – social and
political theories of disability and deep understandings of ethical, psychological and
epistemic issues associated with disability. One task of feminist disability studies,
for Garland Thomson (2005), is retrieval: finding analytical potential in work not
explicitly deemed to be feminist disability studies scholarship. I came across a piece
by the female psychologist Meyerson, who, as early as 1948, made the case that
‘there is general agreement in the literature on physical disability that the major
problems of the handicapped (sic) are not physical but social and psychological’
(1948: 2). Let us consider the place of the private, personal and the domestic in
feminist scholarship and briefly trace some of the potential impacts on studies of
disablism and ableism.
The 1960s mantra ‘personal is political’ continues to this day to impinge
upon social theory. Feminists have complained about sociological emphases on
malestream labour, which ignore the politics of the domestic home, a context
historically associated with the everyday work of women. Similarly, disabled
feminists shed light on the private matter of bodies living with impairment,
suggesting disability was more than just measurable, overt and material examples
of exclusion. One way in which we might think of the wider contribution of
feminism to disability studies is the centrality given to the private. Just as feminism
emerged below the towers of patriarchy so disability studies emerged out of what
Jim Overboe (2007a, 2007b) terms the normative shadows of ableist society. Many
transformative arenas – including Marxism and critical pedagogy to name two
examples – have tended to adopt a politics of the public. This involves campaigning
around key practices of capitalist life such as the workplace, the welfare state and
educational institutions. While feminist disability scholars have also pushed for
emancipatory work in these contexts (for example, recognising the glass ceilings
of workplaces and promoting anti-sexist curricula) they honour equally other
elements of psychological and social life. These everyday aspects of living are often
forced to remain private and privatised, including parenting, care, embodiment,

love, sex and desire. Mindful of the dangers of leaving these aspects of life in the
hands of purveyors of medicalising and psychologising discourses, feminist theory
reinvigorates a theoretical and political engagement with the private.
Politicising the personal exposes the ways in which our interiorities – our
physiological, neurological and psychical lives – are felt through the social, cultural,
political and economic. One fertile intersection of feminism and disability pertains
to the leaky body (Shildrick and Price, 1999b). Let us take a literal example:
emptying one’s bowels. This is not simply a biological act. It is an act that calls forth
culture. Toilet training children is a cultural response to children’s comportment,
in keeping with responsibilities at certain ages around bodily control. In Britain,
primary school children – some starting at the age of 4½ – are expected to be
fully toilet trained. They have started the process of climbing the developmental
ladder, and it starts with what they do with their poo and wee. Emotions around
human waste are highly charged and circumscribed. As Ogden (2013) has clearly
demonstrated: when bodies leak poop it is anticipated that they will do so in ways
that are closely policed to fit embodied norms. There is a ‘right’ way to poo and
a ‘wrong’ way. Non-normative bodies are at risk of being pathologised. These are
the kinds of bodies already excluded from a host of community settings. If pooing
is socially prescribed then other bodily mo(ve)ments are too. Indeed, as Myers
(2004) demonstrates in her work on irritable bowel syndrome, being overactive in
one’s pooing can cause embodied predicaments and moments of cultural unease.
For Newell (2006: 278) living with a lack of bowel control can be dealt with as
tragedy or as ‘a matter-of-fact approach to many of the life feared circumstances,
an approach of embrace rather than revulsion, means that we can live through,
and indeed thrive and learn through, the very conditions that we “know” to be so
appalling’. Feminist appraisals of interiority have demonstrated its fundamentally
social character. Feminism has always been prepared to do body talk.
Disabled feminists occupy an especially powerful place. Such a position might
be described as misfit. ‘The situation of misfitting that I offer here’, says Garland
Thomson (2011: 591), ‘elaborates a materialist feminist understanding of disability
by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact
with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal
aspects.’ She continues:
First, the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived

embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body that can demate-
rialize if social and architectural barriers no longer disable it. Second, the
concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about
universal vulnerability and dependence. Third, the concept of misfitting as a
shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value
on disabled subjects at risk of social devaluation by highlighting adapt-ability,
resourcefulness, and subjugated knowledge as potential effects of misfitting.
(Garland Thomson, 2011: 592)
Misfitting throws into sharp relief the deeply malestream character of much
contemporary knowledge production. As Godrej (2011: 112) powerfully acknowl-
edges, ‘the abstract, purportedly genderless epistemic subject of traditional
philosophy who masquerades as everyone and anyone is really a male subject in
disguise’. Imposing such inherent gender bias has a host of potentially negative
impacts upon scholars and researchers alike. Godrej (2011: 113) continues; ‘the
internalization of this subject gives rise to the construction of an identity in which
the female self is continually apprehended as inferior and inadequate’. This hidden
reference of the malestream individual can be revealed in a host of transformative
and purportedly radical texts. For example, for Namaste (2009: 20),
within the field of Marxist scholarship, for example, feminists have written
against the ‘add women and stir’ approach embodied in the old Marxist
argument that if women enter the public sphere, they will help strengthen
the force of the workers’ movement and assist in the overthrow of capitalism
itself … [this] Marxist tradition relies on a notion of production that is
defined in androcentric terms – work in the public sphere.
In contrast, they conclude, feminism aids a critical analysis of the patriarchal ableist
politicised mainstream.
Conclusion: queered, cripped, gendered and raced – for

tomorrow we ride
Queer, crip, feminist and postcolonial studies are each motivated by a critique of
binary discourses and social policies that condition subjectivity and structure society
(Ramlow, 2006: 169). Critique feeds the building of alternatives ‘dismantling the
disciplinary entanglements of racism, heteronormativity, and compulsory able-
bodiedness’ (Ramlow, 2006: 169). One alternative acknowledges human beings as
interdependent (rather than autonomous and independent), mutually dependent
and desiring interconnections. We are, as Ramlow would have it, alliance builders;
bridging and border crossing. This feels like a desirable place to be: bound across
one another. For McRuer (2006) and Erevelles (2011) coming out crip celebrates
the transgressive act of recognising what we are not. This involves outing what
was once unsayable, invisible, that which was actively silenced. We can find hope
and resourcefulness ‘in the “coming out” narrative of Other students located at the
interstices of race, class, gender and sexuality’ (Erevelles, 2011: 2160). A critically
disabled position that borders crip and queer ideas invites for Erevelles a reimag-
ining of normative conceptions of what kinds of bodies/subjects are worthy. This
is a commitment ‘to the end of hegemonic conceptions of health, embodiment,
visual culture, representation, and spatiality and to the construction of what I’ve
elsewhere termed convivial visual rhetorics of embodiment’ (McRuer 2012b:
234). But conviviality can also breed resistance. Intersectional analyses provide
fertile grounds for such responses.
4
DIS/ABILITY STUDIES
We are now at a stage to take stock; where we are in terms of our analytical
concerns, theoretical priorities and political and conceptual rejoinders. We must
be theoretically vigilant to the mutable nature of dis/ability. I will offer some
grounding theoretical stories about dis/ability; tales that will be retold, expanded
upon and subjected to moments of digression and expansion.
1. Materialism: critical pedagogy

2. Psychoanalysis: splitting dis/ability
3. Poststructuralism: the dis/ability complex
4. Postconventionalism: affective disablism and cruel optimism
5. Conclusion: working dis/ability.
Throughout the chapter we will develop the concept of the dis/ability complex
which refers to the complicated though necessary ways in which disability–ability
and disablism–ableism feed into the production of one another. Furthermore, the
divided phenomenon of dis/ability invites a transectional analysis of this duality.
Materialism: critical pedagogy

Kannen (2008: 150) argues that ‘social order is maintained through the constructed
categorisations of privilege and power that we deem certain bodies to have, which
then demarcate what is possible for those bodies and for bodies that are then
considered to be Other’. At the heart of such categorisation is the economic,
cultural and psychical landscape of capitalism. It would be strange to write a book
analysing ableism and disablism that did not foreground this contextual reality. The
question remains, of course, how to theorise capitalism. In Chapter 6, for example,
we will draw on the work of the Marxist geographer Harvey to conceptualise the
ways in which the labour of the dis/abled body affords (a lack of) opportunities
for the release of capital, exploitation and, paradoxically, recognition. The marked
identity of a neoliberal citizen is as a worker: willing, capable and able. Those
bodies that fail to meet the debilitating impacts of labour will be impoverished not
only economically but also psychologically: the lumpen proletariat is pushed to the
societal periphery. The significance of the material world on the lives of disabled
people is not lost on Kolárová (in press, np) who notes that ‘the present austerity
cuts and once-again intensified precarisation of life of people with disabilities’
threaten to leave many people at risk. We need to develop a potent understanding
of the dual material realities of disablism and ableism.
Our first port of theoretical call is that dis/ability, neoliberalism and capitalism
feed one another’s existence. Oliver (1990), Gleeson’s (1999a, 1999b) and
Finkelstein’s (1981) writings on the rise of capitalism and disablement give rich
historical materialist critiques of mobility, independence and autonomy. Oliver
(1990) explains the social constitution of im/mobility through an analysis of
changes in British social policy that administratively shifted what it meant to
be im/mobile. This mirrors Abberley’s (1987) ground-breaking work on the
sociology of impairment that was keen to understand disablement (the socio-
economic exclusion of people with impairments) alongside a sociological critique
of impairment (the socio-economically defined nature of health and impairment).
In Britain, we are currently witnessing one of the most radical overhauls of the
neoliberal welfare state in which, as one example, there is an acute narrowing
of definitions of impairment diagnoses that will elicit state benefits. As Soldatic
and Meekosha (2012) similarly observe in Australia, disabled people are being
forced to prove their eligibility to access welfare services through recourse to an
ever-narrowing and more severe definition of disability. Austerity measures seek
to reduce the numbers of people with impairment and increase the severity of
impairment.
Simultaneously, and paradoxically, there is the rampant manufacturing of dis/
ability across the globe. This can be explained by the ramping up of new disorders
through the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (see Chapter 6) and, also, as Sothern (2007: 146) notes,
as a consequence of ‘the deplorable practices of neoliberal capitalism and its failure
to provide adequate protection in sweatshops and in the informal spaces of the
global economy in which avoidable industrial accidents regularly maim and injure’.
Disabled people, their families and many others who are in precarious relation-
ships with labour and/or the welfare state acutely feel the inequities of capitalism.
There is nothing queer nor sexy about living on the poverty line. There is nothing
playful nor ironic in material deprivation. That said, there will be dis/ability
responses to such drastic conditions that require our crip attention. We need to hold
together contradictory positions of negativity and affirmation. We must document
the failings of capitalism and the potential workings of – and resistance to – its
practices. Dis/ability capitalism will be something we return to later.
When disablism and ableism crash down on people’s lives, we witness the
Dis/ability studies 53
materialisation of ever-narrower forms of neoliberal citizenship. The economy,

state and citizen are implicated in dis/ability. Each and every one of us negotiates
the dis/ability divide in order to live, never mind blossom, and this happens
across the globe. Harvey (2007: 58) is crystal clear in his definition of globali-
sation as ‘living in a world of more or less universal capitalism in which capitalist
imperatives are universal instruments of capitalist domination’. ‘What is called
“globalisation”’, Harvey continues, ‘is nothing more than a massive resort to
geographical displacement and restructuring, the systematic breaking down of all
spatial barriers and “battering down” of the closed doors of recalcitrant nations’
(Harvey, 2007: 64). An analysis of dis/ability has to incorporate the globalisation of
dis/ability. And we require precise concepts that are sensitised to the marketisation
and materialisation of dis/ability.
One responsive theory is critical pedagogy. This approach is borne out of an
intimate relationship with material oppression, economic deprivation and cultural
marginalisation. Originating from the work of Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy
seeks to blend education and activism; to expose and challenge exclusion. Critical
pedagogy pertains to open up, re/learn and re/encounter the world, revising
education along the way to augment connections between people. While critical
pedagogy has had a rather distanced relationship from dis/ability (Ware, 2009;
Goodley, 2011a; Greenstein, 2013), it remains a positionality open to theoretical
development: one that I find useful in thinking through the materialisation of
dis/ability. As Liasidou (2012) puts it, critical pedagogy’s focus on power, justice
and social transformation mobilises new theorisations of the complex nature of
dis/ability and the ways in which disabled students are socially and educationally
positioned. Critical pedagogy, in its efforts to unveil dominant truths behind
school ideology, seeks to become everything the traditional curriculum is not
– liberating, populist and revolutionising rather than oppressive, elitist and repro-
ducing (Friedrich et al., 2010: 573). Indeed, the appropriation of concepts such as
‘ideology, hidden curriculum, official knowledge, reproduction, and many others,
either produced or adopted by critical studies have changed the way education
is understood and viewed, altering its predominantly innocent reputation and
making it an inherently political practice’ (Friedrich et al., 2010: 573).
While always mindful of economic oppression and exclusion, critical pedagogy
has also acknowledged changes to knowledge society, culture and the market.
This has ensured an engagement with digital, technological and knowledge
societies and their associated theories. Critical pedagogy broadens materialism;
maintaining a preoccupation with economic and structural foundations whilst also
attending to cultural, literary and immaterial registers. Efforts have been made to
de-centre Eurocentric and North American materialist critique. Through Freire
and comrades, critical pedagogy originated from low income Latin American
nations, each with their complex historical entanglements with European coloni-
sation, Americanisation and global capitalism, thus engendering an historical and
cultural sensitivity. Indeed, the 2009 establishment of the Aboriginal Disability
Network (documented by Soldatic and Chapman, 2010) and the 2012 setting up
of Disability and the Global South journal (led by Shaun Grech in Manchester in the
UK) exemplify a blending of dis/ability and Global South politics.
Giroux (2003: 14) has argued that ‘educators require a politics of resistance that
extends beyond the classroom as part of a broader struggle to challenge those forces
of neo-liberalism that currently wage war against all collective structures capable
of defending vital social institutions as a public good’. One task is to challenge
the marketisation and neoliberalisation of education. As Barton (2004: 64) put it:
when market ideology directs how we view education then we think of learning
not as liberation but ‘through the lens of cost effectiveness, efficiency, and value
for money leading to more competition, selection and social divisions’. Conflating
capitalism’s obsession with labour value and progressive education, risks depoliti-
cising the very bases of education, which, for many, from Dewey through to Freire,
are about individual and collective emancipation. Critical pedagogy intervenes: it
reminds us of the material divisions of dis/ability, attends to the structural founda-
tions of material inequalities and makes education a form of cultural politics in
which ideological battles are waged (Apple, 1982).
The gap between rich and poor children ever expands, yet education focuses
more and more on the self-producing self-regulating autonomous subject who can
function equally effectively at school and at work (Richardson, 2005). This new
right thinking combines the marketisation of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism of
late capitalism, encouraging schools to select desirable and reject tricky learners. The
neoliberal-able education system excludes those who are unable to step up to ableist
demands. Dis/ability is there in the background as neoliberalism insists that we
‘become active, entrepreneurial selves, which promises to herald a utopic vision of
a perfectly deregulated world without chronic illness and disability’ (Sothern, 2007:
146). Dis/ability perfectly captures this moment of disavowal and ambivalence:
contradictory processes borne out of the machinations of ableism and disablism.
Psychoanalysis: splitting dis/ability

Dis/ability studies apprehend the co-constitution of either side of the binary and
the simultaneous processes of disablism and ableism. This co-production of dis/
ability also takes place at the level of the individual; captured well by Hannabach
(2007: 254) in her argument that the ‘human body is imagined as able through
the active abjection of bodies rendered … disabled and such imagining and such
rendering are co-constitutive and inextricable from one another’. Recognising the
split nature of dis/ability is reminiscent of other psychoanalytic splits including self/
other, reality/pleasure, good/bad, child/(m)other and libido/thanatos, all of which
rely on one another’s co-constitution. Psychoanalytic theories are well placed
to interrogate the dis/ability complex. Theorists such as Marks (1999a, 1999b)
and Watermeyer (2012) would agree, as each have spearheaded critical and social
psychoanalytic analysis disability studies (for an overview see Goodley, 2011b).
This theoretical seam might be mined for concepts that resonate with the aims of
studies of disablism and ableism ranging from a mistrust of simplified medicalised
views of humanity through to the cathartic release of un/conscious reactions to the

presence of disability. Watermeyer (2012: 10) suggests the ‘the suffering’ of disabled
people is, in fact, perilously nearby for everybody, ‘by virtue of the universal frailty
of the body and the reality of societies shot through with inequality of every sort’.
Now, while we might challenge the author’s alliance to notions of universality and
contest the adverb of suffering, Watermeyer reminds us all of our vulnerabilities of
body and mind. For those of us who use sight, who doesn’t wake of a morning,
make our way to the bathroom and feel affronted by what meets us in the mirror?
I am struggling to think of anyone other than David Beckham or Beyoncé who
would not find his or her appearance to be challenging at some point in the day.
Maybe even Beyoncé gets bad hair days. I doubt Beckham does.
Social psychoanalysis tells stories of psychical experiences of bodies as they are
formed in time and space. Our bodies are subjected to individual and collective
fantasies. For Watermeyer (2012: 6), if we were less threatened by these uncon-
scious evocations then this would allow us to have a clearer sense of the psychical
and political work that has to be done. Our task then is to ‘deliberately model an
engagement with those realities which are often hidden and always complicated’
(Watermeyer, 2012: 6). Through this modelling disability researchers, activists and
professionals can take a more courageous position: drawing on social psychological
theories that provide practical resources for ‘signposting the obscure terrain of
unconscious disability symbolism, relational dynamics and internal experience’
(Watermeyer, 2012: 7). Indeed, for Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life, psychoanalysis tackles more problems than medical knowledge could ever
do because of the insights it gives into concealed idealisations and conflicts of
the unconscious. If we were to push this a little – sociologically speaking as
Watermeyer (2012) does – then we might be able to reveal those ableist ideals
and disablist tendencies of the collective unconscious. It is important not to settle
psychopathology within the individual. The psyche should be configured not in
terms of the interiority of a human being but as an entity, often associated with
attitudes, desires and feelings, that comes to be known and felt in the culture,
communities and relationships in which we live. This approach fits well with
Hook’s (2004: 115) psychopolitics: the explicit politicisation of the psychological
through the placing of a series of ostensibly psychological concerns and concepts
within the register of the political. A psychopathological study of ableist culture
would excavate institutional practices and cultural norms around dis/ability that
serve those we know as normals. Chapter 8 reports on such a study, addressing
what Hughes (1999: 164–165) terms as ‘the perceptual pathology’ of the normals.
Those occupying this position are pathological because they think of themselves as
neutral but, in contrast, are partial in the ways in which they gaze at and threaten
to annihilate objects of disability.
A variety of deviants, as Newell (2006: 273) ironically pitches it, like those of
us living with dis/ability, continue as Others outside of that which is ‘nice, normal
and natural’. Nice; safe, clinical and unproblematic is the common unhappiness
that Freud described as the preferable outcome of therapy. The capital O denotes
the process of one self Othering an Other. Psychoanalysis attends to the ambivalent
and contradictory ways in which the self deals with the Other. This includes the
negation of the Other and, in contradiction, attraction to the Other. Disability
evokes competing, ambivalent responses ranging from hate–love, care–control,
charity–extermination, use and refusal. On the same day in 2011 I read the disturbing
account of a disability hate crime in the local paper in the morning and by the
evening was being stopped outside the supermarket to give generously to a charity
raising money for a disabled children’s charity. From hate to charity in six hours.
What is needed, to paraphrase (Marks, 2002), is a more sophisticated understanding
of the experiences of disability as analytic encounters, with a particular focus on
non-disabled people’s investments and an investigation into the social, cultural and
political formations that feed such investments. When we analyse these borderlines
between the non/disabled – and those working at the dis/ability borderline – I
am following the urgency of Curti and Moreno’s (2010: 414) call to keep in mind
geopolitical manoeuvrings (as evidenced through a materialist approach described
above) and to consider ‘the little mo(ve)ments – that is the embodied and shared
micro-political moments as movements – that are the vital relational circuits through
which negotiations, capacities for responsible and effective agency and change can
most tangibly be grasped, explored, expressed and understood’.
Against these movements is a cultural horizon upon which dis/ability is
ubiquitous. While disabled people have endured a history of social and community
exclusion (and concomitant forms of institutionalisation) disability as a cultural
trope has become ever more present. Alongside the exponential rise in impairment
labels, the growing medicalisation of difference and distress, the pharmaceutical
monopolisation of unhappiness, disability remains a favoured referent point of
novels and film. Disability haunts and produces humanity (a humanity often
rested on ableist ideals). When the good life, a functioning body, being sound of
mind are understood they can only ever be done so in relation to their apparent
opposites: the monstrous lives of the poor, the broken bodies and those lacking
intellect (Reeve, 2008; Campbell, 2009). But to suggest that disability only acts
as a cultural vent of what is lacking from the ideal life of the able citizen ignores
an equally important role played by disability in everyday life. Disability is one of
the curious ‘other Others’ described by Braidotti (2003) who fulfil a crucial role
in society. Just as blackness and feminity remain key cultural touchstones of the
occidental or patriarchal gaze, disability is an opportunity to gaze at the exotic and
the unexplained (Michalko, 2002).
Dis/ability studies writers can find inspiration in the politicised writings of
psychoanalysis from Marxist, feminist and postcolonial scholars (e.g. Mitchell,
1974; Fanon, 1976, 1993; Parker, 1997; Lukes, 2009). One of the gifts of critical
psychoanalysis, according to Watermeyer (2012), is this realisation that the ego’s
independence, mastery, conscious control of the human subject is not only a
fantasy but also a fiction. To deal with this troubling realisation then individuals
and contemporary culture seek solace in the fantasy of autonomy. These
fantasies inform ableism. When disability enters then it causes chaos. Dis/ability
contradicts the humanist premise that we all inhabit autonomous, rational, stable
and coherent subjectivities. There is no doubt that some disabled people – for
example, those with the labels of mental illness or severe cognitive impairments
(note the definitive quality of these scientific and psychiatric categories as really
outside of the humanist rational register) – risk being depicted as the real Others
of neoliberal-ableism: inherently defective, useless, unproductive (see Erevelles,
2002a, 2002b). Meanwhile the rest of the body politic are blatantly ignorant of
their own deficiencies when it comes to matching up to the autonomous ego
ideal of contemporary society. Psychoanalysis also allows us to think again about
cultural scapegoats: those individuals and groups in society who act as much needed
recipients for the projections of the vulnerable, precarious, anxious able-boded.
Just as the ‘mysterious, exoticised gay male body had indeed become the site on
which fears and fantasies about AIDS were inscribed’ (McRuer, 1998: 134), so
too disabled people found themselves occupying a fantasised site within contem-
porary life. Freud can be criticised for many things – the denial of child sexual
abuse, inherent conservativism of therapy and heterosexism rife within his work
(see Masson, 1984, 1989, for readable critiques) – his work boasts contemporary
relevance when we consider the ways in which his writings focused on the neuroses
of everyday life. Neurosis, for Freud, was the sine qua non of a civilised society.
A neurosis is an emotional disorder, manifest at the level of personality,

which stems from the conflict between a powerful (often instinctual) impulse
or wish and the need to repress this instinct. Neuroses hence can lead to a
whole series of irrational behaviours and beliefs that are the result of the
conflict between powerful unconscious urges and the social/cultural need to
keep these urges outside of the conscious mind.
(Hook, 2004: 116–117)
Humanity is necessarily neurotic in order to contain and display its desires and
maintain a bounded sense of self and autonomy. Consequently, certain perceived
human differences promote neurotic responses such as phobia, hysteria, fear and
compulsive fascination. One of these differences is race in which black people
are subjected to and objectified by neurotic reactions of non-black others within
a broader racist socio-historical landscape (see Fanon, 1976, 1993; Hook, 2004).
Another of these differences is disability; promulgating neurotic responses on
the part of non-disabled people galvanised by a contemporary disablist society
that economically, culturally, socially and psychically excluded disabled people
(Thomas, 2007, Goodley, 2011b). Fanon (1993: 141) describes ‘the negro’ [sic] as
phobogenic object, a concept we can easily apply to disabled people. Phobias are
‘neuroses characterised by fear of an object in which the object is endowed with
negative intensions’ (Fanon, 1993: 142). As Butler (in Puar, 2012: 173) notes,
Fanon had even bigger fish to fry; he wanted to show how some individuals and
groups are humanised (made human) whilst others are not (and risk being cast
as the monstrous fascination objects of others). Where there is fear there is also
fascination. Dis/ability as we shall see in Chapter 8 evokes contradictory processes

of disavowal – looking at and away at the same time – raising huge questions about
society’s de/humanisation of dis/ability.
Poststructuralism: the dis/ability complex
To say that something is constructed is not at all to claim that it is unreal,

insignificant, or easily dismissed. Rather, it is to denaturalize the way
that difference is imagined, opening up the possibility of imagining and
perceiving not only difference but also differently.
(Hannabach, 2007: 255)
Our third resource for dis/ability studies is poststructuralism. There have been
many dismissive takes on poststructuralism within disability studies, especially those
produced within Britain (e.g. Sheldon, 2013; Shakespeare, 2006; Barnes, 2012).
Fortunately, there has been a steady deployment of poststructuralist ideas, encour-
aging a two-pronged analysis of dis/ability and ableism/disablism. This approach
to knowledge production works away at the dis/ability complex to consider how
forms of human life (or non-human life) are processed. I draw out two processes
here: binarisation and biopower.
One undertaking of poststructuralism concerns itself with how significant
binary opposites are constituted through social, cultural and economic practices
in relation to one another. Disability only ever makes sense in relation to ability:
traces of ability can always be found in thoughts of disability and vice versa.
Greenstein (2013: 50–51) puts it beautifully, ‘once we understand disability not
as a trait tied to an individual body or mind but as a socially created binary – it
is impossible to claim that only one side of the binary (the disabled) is socially
constructed, while the other (the “normal”) is a natural or neutral position’. Dis/
ability is the main binary relationship of our investigation, although, an array of
binaries may be revealed.
Table 4.1 hints at the violence of binarism described by Ramlow (2006) as a
structure upon which the authority and consciousness of the dominant is imagined
and maintained through the constant negation of the Other. The co-construction
of binary opposites promotes a fight between ignorance and knowledge. Ignorance
competes with knowledge in mobilising the flow of people, desire, goods,
meanings (Sedgwick, 1990: 8) and there are a plethora of ignorances. Sedgwick1
employs a very interesting take upon this binarisation. She asks us to consider the
phylogeny (culture and history) and ontogeny (cause and effect upon an individual)
of binarisation. How is the individual made by culture? How does culture rely
upon the individual? What kind of socio-cultural and psychology work are done
in the service of each binary? As we saw in Chapter 1, there have been attempts
within critical disability studies to distinguish between the realness of impairment
and the materiality of society, with the realism/relativism debate continuing to
TABLE 4.1 The binarisation of everyday life
The Same … … and his many Others
Able Disabled
Hetero Homo
Life (Slow) Death
Capitalism Socialism
Canonic Noncanonic
Public Private
Population Individual
Recognised Negated
Reason Passion
White Black
Health Illness
Human Animal
Same Different
Adult Child
Disciplined Terrorist
Majority Minority
Masculine Feminine
Art Kitsch
Utopia Apocalypse
Active Passive
Science Story
Voluntarity Addiction
Old New
Source: Adapted from Fanon, 1976; Braidotti, 2003 and Sedgwick, 1990: 11; Braidotti, 2002;
McRuer, 2006 and, in particular, Goodley, 2011a.
mark this scholarship (see, for example, Kristiansen et al., 2009). A poststructur-
alist approach provides a way out of this debate. For Sedgwick (1990: 41) to prize
loose essentialism and constructivism is always liable to a tragic misfiring because
as we ask about the origin of the impaired body we are already structured by an
‘implicit, trans-individual western project or fantasy about the eradication of that
identity’. Such a debate is, after all, already ‘referring to a whole history of other
nature/nurture debates’ in cultures which were committed to eradicating amongst
other things homosexuality (p. 42). We know from history, she observes, that
most essentialist ideas accrue a gravity and we have witnessed numerous Cartesian
bipolar psychoses about nature/nurture including the medicalised dreams of the
prevention of gay and disabled bodies. Such a dream fits with a relatively ‘unchal-
lenged aegis of a culture’s desire that gay people not be’ (p. 42). Sedgwick (1990:
44) advocates that ‘there is ample reason and evidence to keep our understanding
of gay origin [and to this we could add the origin of disability], of gay cultural
and material reproduction, plural, multi-capillaried, argus-eyed, respectful and
endlessly cherished’. It is better to understand homosexuality (and we could add
disability) as the product of ‘overlapping, contradictory and conflicting definitional
forces’ (p. 45). To work the binaries invites us to analyse not only the dis/ability
divide but also the in/human:
To think critically, usefully, about how the norm of the human is constructed
and maintained requires that we take up a position outside of its terms, not
as the nonhuman or even the anti-human, but rather precisely through
thinking forms of sociality and interdependence, no matter how difficult,
that are irreducible to uniquely human forms of life and so cannot be
adequately addressed by any definition of human nature or the human
individual. To speak about what is living in human life is already to admit
that human ways of living are bound up with nonhuman modes of life.
Indeed, the connection with nonhuman life is indispensable to what we call
human life. In Hegelian terms, if the human cannot be the human without
the inhuman, then the inhuman is not only essential to the human, but is
therefore the essence of the human. The point is not to simply invert the
relations, but rather to gather and hold this merely apparent paradox together
in a new thought of ‘human life’.
(Butler in Puar, 2012: 174)
As Shildrick (2009) recognises, disability is familiar to the non-disabled because

of its haunting effect upon the normative. Simultaneously, when the non-disabled
gaze they find disability familiar and explainable. Disability is not Other it really is
us (Wendell, 1989). For Meleo-Erwin (2012: 394) bodies of disabled people elicit
great anxiety through the disruption of norms about how bodies are supposed to
look and how they are supposed to function. This might explain why non-disabled
people often ‘make the imaginative leap into the skins of people physically unlike
themselves’ (Wendell, 1989: 248) and underpinning this for Wendell is the fear and
pity associated with a body that is either suffering or lacking control. Yet, while fear
as a common response to disability has long been identified in the disability studies
canon, perhaps what we are less in tune with is the curious or fascinating desires
of the non-disabled. Malec (1993: 23) observes that when disabled people are
subjected to the ‘dehumanizing effects of being made into an object of self-absorbed
curiosity and sympathy’ then the consequences are felt politically and subjectively.
Poststructuralism also introduces the analytical concept of biopower. Berlant
(2007: 756) writes that biopower permits something to live or die, the power to
regularise life, the authority to force living not just to happen but also to endure
and appear in particular ways. In Chapter 2 we drew upon the Foucauldian
analyses of Rabinow and Rose (2006). Let us recap on their work: biopower refers
to the making of individuals and the population held together by three practices.
First, one or more truth discourses are produced about the ‘vital’ character of living human
beings, and an array of authorities are considered competent to speak that truth.
Truth discourses may not themselves be ‘biological’ in the contemporary sense of
the discipline, for instance they may hybridise biological and demographic or even
sociological styles of thought, as in the contemporary relations of genomics and
risk, merged in the new language of susceptibility (Rabinow and Rose, 2006).
We can speak of an individual’s dis/ability. Second, strategies for intervention upon
collective existence in the name of life and health, initially addressed to populations that
may or may not be territorialised upon the nation, society or pre-given commu-
nities, but may also be specified in terms of emergent biosocial collectivities,
sometimes specified in terms of categories of race, ethnicity, gender or religion, as
in the emerging forms of genetic or biological citizenship (see also Rabinow and
Rose, 2006). We can intervene at the levels of the individual and the state around
dis/ability. Third, modes of subjectification, through which individuals are brought
to work on themselves, under certain forms of authority, in relation to truth
discourses, by means of practices of the self, in the name of their own life or health,
that of their family or some other collectivity, or indeed in the name of the life or
health of the population as a whole. Rabinow and Rose’s (2006) account indicates
that our thinking and feeling of dis/ability straddle individual and state interests.
We all come to feel and think our dis/abilities. Biopolitical constitution of dis/
ability immediately recognises the dynamic and complicating processes involved in
measuring, making and thinking a dis/abled self. Subjectivity consists of multiple
performative, fragmented and incoherent subject positions (Sykes, 2009: 240–241).
Poststructuralist research strives to reveal the normalising biopolitical effects of
dominant discourses (Sykes, 2009: 242). And in this striptease of the normal we
might find queer/crip possibilities.
Crip analyses of biopower and binarisation have illuminated the pressure dis/
abled bodies come under to be governed in normative ways and the resistance
inherent within dis/ability to disrupt normative biopolitical discourses. Hence,
for example, while disabled bodies face the impossible demands of meeting the
demands of normative sexuality ‘that the sexualized disabled body elicits an anxiety
revolving around the instability and unrepresentability of disabled sexual practice
(as a “queer” other)’ and that this anxiety ‘garners its purchase within the context
of these neoliberal spatialities of disability’ (Sothern, 2007: 145). ‘Sex’, Sinecka
(2008: 482) reminds us, ‘not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory
practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made
clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce – demarcate, circulate,
differentiate – the bodies it controls’. This productivity – that discourses of sex
produce in excess of them – can be found in dis/ability too. Crip possibilities
imagine how the injection of crip personhood might complicate or trouble the
usual biopolitical practices of making dis/ability (Wahlert and Fiester, 2012: iii).
Crip conjures the oppositional political and intellectual project of identifying and
critiquing ‘compulsory ablebodiedness’, or the multiple institutionalized tactics of
normalisation that present able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as the unmarked
‘natural order of things’ (Elman, 2012b: 318).
Following Wahlert and Fiester (2012: ii), crip poststructuralism
places the ‘less powerful’ center-stage; it challenges the status quo and the
presumptive legitimacy of the normative; it employs powerful intellectual
resources from neighboring fields (queer theory, disability studies, medical

humanities, etc.); and it challenges our complacency in the face of injustice
and discrimination in [everyday] encounters, systems, and policies.
For Erevelles (1996: 523) poststructuralist theories privilege the space of the
discursive; the space where language and ideologies signify material reality. ‘The
discursive space’, she writes, ‘is itself read as the material space where language can
be creatively manipulated to produce many empowering possibilities.’
Postconventionalism: affective disablism and cruel optimism

Following Shildrick (2009, 2012) a postconventionalist perspective can be
described as an affirmative consequence of poststructuralism. While poststruc-
turalism is brutal in its deconstructionist tendencies – and one might say
necessarily so – postconventionalists orientate towards affirmative possibilities.
Postconventionalism does not mark an end to old school conventional theories
of disablism – best epitomised by materialist social theories – but builds on them
by theorising contemporary social, technological, cultural and economic modes
of production. Dis/ability in the hyper-textual, globalised, networked societies of
the twenty-first century is a very different phenomenon to the dis/ability found in
previous centuries. Raab (2012), for example, suggests that dis/ability is caught up
in a strange paradox. While capitalism galvanises discourses of ableist productivity,
we are currently witnesses to a conspicuous growth in the production of particular
impairments.
Postconventionalists borrow from queer, postcolonial and crip theories to
enable a multidimensional way of thinking (Sykes, 2009: 239). Postconventionalists
acknowledge and, to some extent, magnify changes in culture, economics, society
and subjectivity. The human being is constituted through a complex array of
material and discursive formations. One of these, neoliberal-ableism, recognises the
liminal influence of government and welfare states alongside increased expec-
tations placed on the autonomy of self-responsible individual citizens to care,
educate and govern themselves. Postconventionalist theories accept these changes
but do not accept the reified view of neoliberalism as an all-persuasive process
acting independently to reconfigure the welfare landscape (Williams et al., 2012).
Rather than viewing neoliberalism as an untouchable ‘seemingly monolithic
force “out there” that effortlessly reproduces itself ’, postconventionalists attend
to ‘neoliberalism-as-assemblage’ (Williams et al., 2012: 1485). Hence the power
and potential of neoliberalism is created through a specific set of resonances,
interconnecting relationships and ‘precarious maintenance work required to make
durable these convergences, and the mundane, hybrid, and mutating processes that
lead to different variegations of Neoliberalism’ (Williams et al., 2012: 1485). We
might want to consider the ways in which we all wear the cloak of neoliberalism
but contemplate whether or not it is possible to ‘refashion the garment for more
equitable uses’ (Williams et al., 2012). The blurring of technology, biology and
society is an especially posthumanist concern. One might think of posthumanism

as the folding into one another of culture and bodies. As an example of postcon-
ventionalist thought, posthumanists are therefore sceptical about the centrality of
the individual in our everyday thinking. The fully functioning person as an entity
psychologised, internalised, rational, autonomous, individualised self – distinct,
bounded and separated from others – is a classic humanist trope. Appropriating
Braidotti (2003) this categorisation of the same human as distinct from his many
monstrous Others has many origins. One can find many origins of this individual.
One, of course, is the enlightenment in which rational man emerged as victorious
over irrational nature. Not only are valued forms of humanness found to have deep
historical roots in the rise of science, rationality and capitalism, they have been
moulded further into preferential categories (reified types of humanity) and their
opposite (disposable forms of humanity). As usual it is over to Erevelles (1996: 522)
to carefully guide us through a changing relationship with humanness:
when even those who espouse radical discourses seem unable to recon-
ceptualise an alternative world without being locked into the political
constructions of what constitutes appropriate humanness, then it becomes
apparent that the disability movement has a task that goes above and beyond
merely extending the boundaries of the discourses that celebrate humanism
and instead needs to focus its energy on re-theorising itself.
Postconventionalists are highly critical of the kinds of bodies, emotions and

thoughts associated with the preferred human valued and promulgated by nation
states, institutions of society and the capitalist free market. Indeed, what it means
to feel human is also a matter of what and how one is meant to feel as a human in
contemporary society. This critical turn around emotion (or affect) can be traced
in the queer feminist writings over the last decade that has taken seriously the
vulnerable and precarious nature of life in the twenty-first century. One lovely
overview is provided by Puar (2012) in her conversational piece ‘Precarity talk: a
virtual roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejic, Isabell Lorey,
Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanovic’.2 In Puar’s (2012: 166) piece, Berlant argues that
precarity is a useful concept in our contemporary times of a ‘thriving new world
of interdependency and care’ because it explains an existential problem (life has
no guarantees), an ongoing economic problem (evidenced by the mood swings of
global capitalism), a problem of reproduction of life (we never have enough time
to live), privatisation of wealth (and bankrupting of the state) and a rallying call
for political organisation (we are engaged in contested antagonisms and nostalgias
about times when we could, for example, ‘rely on the security of a welfare state
that is now being rolled back or is nothing more than a diminution of the state to
a servant of capitalism’). To these observations we can also add the poststructur-
alist observations that society and culture are folded into the politics of biopower:
where citizens know more about their embodied and psychical failings and
realise they are expected to do something about it. I like to think about this as a
neoliberalisation of the soul or, equally, a marketisaton of the psyche. Hardt and
Negri’s (2000, 2004) highly influential work on Empire and the Multitude dovetails
well here. They suggest that we are witnessing a globalisation of biopolitics that
touches each and every individual with formalised languages of the body and
mind, in order to govern oneself. If we know one thing about self-governance it
is this: it will inevitably lead to feelings of doubt, lack and anxiety. Precarity moves
us to connect with the support of one another.
Precarity appreciates the historical makings of the human but also desires new
conceptualisations. As Butler has it (in Puar, 2012: 16), to call something precarious
acknowledges the bonds that support life: mutual need and exposure. Precarity
exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency
(Butler in Puar, 2012: 170). ‘There is something very practical at hand here: we
have to rethink the human in light of precarity, showing that there is no human
without those networks of life within which human life is but one sort of life’
(Butler in Puar, 2012: 173). There are two ways in which this vulnerability, affect
and culture have been theorised. First, there is what I am terming affective disablism,
the notion of psychoemotional or ontic violence (Žižek, 2008), and second is the
ableist fiction of cruel optimism.
First, affective disablism. Disability studies have often struggled to build a
conceptual bridge between ideology and individual subjectivity (Watermeyer,
2012: 28). This gap has been filled in British disability studies through the work
of Donna Reeve and Carol Thomas who, in a leap of faith long desired by many
within the field, investigated the psychological consequences of living in disabling
contexts. For Thomas (1999, 2007) this meant recognising that impairment could
have effects within the relationality of disablism. Hence feeling depressed or
devalued (or proud and valued) is never simply down to the presence of impairment
but the result of how one’s impairment is embodied in a social context. For Reeve
(2008) the work of writers such as Agamben exposed zones of exclusion occupied
by disabled people creating dis-belonging. Within this complex matrix of cultural
dislocation, belonging and embodiment can be found the notion of impairment
effects such as feelings of pain, weariness and slowness. The psychoemotional move
was perfectly synchronised with the affect turn in social scientific and humanities
research (see Puar, 2009, 2011; Kolárová, 2012). While there are huge theoretical
discrepancies around how emotion and feelings are theorised, Matthew (2010)
suggests that it is possible to identify an emphasis on the embodiment of affect
and on its intersubjectivity in most contemporary accounts of affect. How we feel
our bodies and how our bodies feel will depend on how we are expected to feel
embodied. Hence, while the effects of impairment hint at an asocial, biological,
non-social realm of embodiment, acknowledging the psychological/emotional or
psychical/affective experience of impairment and disablism troubles a reductive
turn back onto the ‘natural body’. ‘In a world of fervent somatic symbolizing,
disability is at centre stage’, so Watermeyer (2012: 16) tells us.
It is possible to think about the psychological experience of disability while
‘retaining a contextual, politically relevant analysis of discrimination’ (Watermeyer,
2012: 28). The affective layer of disablism embraces a whole continuum of

emotions from shame, paranoia, fear, anxiety, hate to feelings of pride, security,
boldness and love. But where are we to place these emotions? In the interiority
of individual psyches and embodied selves? Or could we understand the psycho
emotional mode of production as a relational, cultural and political one: where
the affect of disability and disablism is carried on the backs of floating discourses,
cultural politics and exchanges of capital? To reduce psychoemotional disablism
to individual cognition or emotion would ignore the cultural investments within
the affects of disability and disablism. One useful trope to keep in mind is the
relationship between the self and the Other. Much of what constitutes disabling
cultural practice relies upon the binary distinction between the same and his many
Others (see Table 4.1).
The second mingling of society and affect is cruel optimism. A critical writer
of affect is Lauren Berlant (2011) who has addressed the intersections of body,
culture and the economy. She is keen to understand the ways in which the
human is a most precarious thing. Her interest in precarity relates to, first, its
recognition as a fact of living in capitalism and, second, as a rallying call for
politics for a new world of interdependence and care (Berlant, 2011). In a time of
economic downturn and crises perhaps one of the few things many of us share is
the feeling of precarity. We have witnessed, she argues, a destruction of life and
the decimation of optimism under neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberalism has worn
away the fantasies of upward mobility associated with the liberal state: we are
going to fail and be failed by neoliberalism. Cruel optimism is when we desire the
impossible or too possible – where we become attached to compromised condi-
tions of possibility – where we ride the waves of our chosen affective attachments
(Berlant, 2010). Cruel optimism is the affective attachment to that we might term
the good life. We project onto an enabling object, which is also disabling. So in
labour we produce but also wear ourselves out. We generate optimistic fantasies
to survive zones of compromised ordinariness. Berlant (2010) is urging us to look
at the everyday at habituated normative life. Kolárová (in press, np) is clear; ‘it is
important to consider the potential cruelness of humanism, and the ways in which
the principles of humanism invoked as strategies of emancipation, in fact reinforce
the inequalities upon which the politics of (neoliberal) exceptionalism and regimes
of compulsory ablebodiedness rest’. Neoliberal capitalism promises to give us
emancipation through work and consumption but grossly fails us.
We are quite literally working ourselves to wreck and ruin – under the fantasy
that labour will save us and allow us to be recognised – under the inequities of
capitalism. People are worn out by the activity of life building. This is especially
so for poor people where family, work, wealth and property are the sites of cruel
optimism and scenes of normative desire. Cruel optimism is revealed to people
who have no control over their material conditions (Berlant, 2010). This has been
particularly cruel to disabled people (Kolárová, in press). Indeed, for Kolárová (in
press), affective attachments to the vision of the free, democratic futurity cruelly
reduce the meaning of freedom to the freedom of the market and economy,
freedom to individual independence and responsibility. Cruel optimism only has a

healthy–functioning–labouring late capitalist vision of the future.
How can we, following Berlant (2010), work with life-building modalities and
cruel optimism that have failed us? In an earlier piece, Berlant (2004) is critical of
the impulse to re-cement individuality with consciousness at the centre of critical
enquiry. Instead, she is interested in the sociability of people across things, spaces
and practices – an optimism of collective attachment – where we spend more time
thinking through modes of subjectivity that are disorganised and non-coherent and
negative. Cruel optimism inevitably leads to some down emotional spaces – forms
of political depression – the realisation that work and shopping no longer work for
us. This is the hallmark of potentially revolutionary forms of feminist feel-tanks
that stand in opposition to neoliberal think-tanks (Berlant, 2010). Berlant (2011)
urges us to channel this emotional activist energy (a world-building endurance) to
find something better other than the brittle good life of capitalism. One way is, as
she puts it, making new spaces away from the normal (Berlant, 2010). My sense
is that dis/ability has much to offer Berlant’s activism and critique, while postcon-
ventionalist dis/ability studies scholars have found much in the queer writings
of Berlant, Haraway, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari. We will return in particular
to these contributions in Chapters 7 and 9. Suffice to mention here, following
Barnett et al. (2008: 639), that while ‘Foucault is credited with re-theorizing power
as a productive, rather than solely negative, repressive operation’ then perhaps
postconventionalist writers such as Deleuze and Guattari can be credited with
giving us new vocabularies and schema for understanding where this productivity
goes, what it feels like, looks and how it takes shape. Hence, a move from cruel
optimism through to a capturing of the crip nature of dis/ability.
Conclusion: working dis/ability

This chapter has made a pitch for dis/ability studies theory. We have come full
circle back to a theme of Chapter 3, to expose the intersectional character of dis/
ability but also to identify strategies for resistance, appropriation and contestation.
Moreover, the concerns of the first two chapters are addressed as dis/ability studies
balances an analysis of abelism and disablism. Part 2 of this book pursues resistant
strategies in relation to the body, education, community and market. And this
exploration will be theoretically informed by studies of disablism, ableism and
intersectionality alongside the fledgling dis/ability studies. In order to ground this
exploration, Part 2 of the book will draw on findings of empirical accounts from
research studies that we account for in the next chapter.
5
RESEARCHING DIS/ABILITY
This chapter presents four funded research projects that I have collaboratively led
with colleagues. Research is always a distributed relationship; demanding intercon-
nection, dialogue and debate. When research works well, at least in my experience,
relationships are flattened, non-hierarchical, boasting all of the best things of
mutuality and interdependency. Research always breeds uncertainty. This can be
scary. It can also be liberating. Consequently, it therefore feels rather fraudulent, in
a single-authored text such as this, for me alone to write when research projects are
always necessarily communally developed. Moreover, in introducing these projects
as neat packages, I risk creating a fictitious trajectory of research as certain, linear,
conceptually clear and practically coherent. All of the research projects I have been
involved in come with a twist of chaos and a large measure of head scratching.
As to my co-researchers, I seek to acknowledge these relationships, point you
to collaborative writing and publications that came out of this work and briefly
introduce the studies we worked upon. This will, I hope, place me in a position
to draw on the theoretical and philosophical musings of Part 1 of the book and
develop analyses through Part 2, drawing, in part, on the projects cited in this
chapter. Alongside this more descriptive overview, I pull out some key lessons from
each study in relation to researching dis/ability.
Introduction
The empirical projects described below were qualitative social scientific studies
utilising various methodologies, methods and analytical frameworks. Every study
worked alongside a host of professionals and disabled people and their families in
a wide variety of health, social care and educational settings. A case can be made
for the ways in which each of these studies target and straddle disablist and ableist
aspects of contemporary life, drawing on a rich mix of theoretical ideas and episte-
mological orientations outlined in the last chapter.
Disciplines demand intellectual conventions. In the social sciences there is a
tendency to draw upon rich empirical data and information from respondents,
participants and in some cases co-researchers. In the humanities, it is an analytical
convention to draw on a few sources in a partial and directive fashion. I want
to encourage a pan-disciplinary study of dis/ability that is flexible, reflexive and
imaginative. I am interested in a dis/ability studies that is prepared to draw on
variegated sources of knowledge from a plethora of disciplinary and theoretical
places. I will give you an example. One of the things I enjoy doing in my job
is working with educational professionals at doctoral level around their research
projects. One of the ways in which these researchers face the methodological and
analytical task of doctoral research is to ask what new sources of information or
empirical data can be gathered in order to address a research question. Many is the
time when I speak with teachers who have over 20 years of teaching experience
but do not consider this experience includes stories worthy of consideration.
Research as something to do empirically rather than something that has already occurred
and been experienced appeals to the empirical imperative that threatens to engulf
the social science and humanities research agenda, at least in the British context.
As Hughes et al. (2012) warn: an obsession with empiricism threatens to suck
disability studies dry of any theoretical invention. The retrospective that I provide
of some of my empirical research, in this chapter, will also seek to ask methodo-
logical and analytical questions about what can be done with dis/ability research.
Project 1: Parents, professionals and disabled babies: towards

enabling care (2003–2006)
This research project was jointly carried out by researchers at the Universities
of Sheffield (myself, Claire Tregaskis, Pamela Fisher) and Newcastle (Janice
McLaughlin, Emma Clavering), funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council (ESRC grant RES-000-23-0129). Following Clavering et al. (2006) the
project team sought to examine the care experiences of parents of babies and
children needing specialist care and support in hospital and community settings.
We wanted parents’ voices to be heard in debates around care provision and
were particularly interested in looking at how parents and young children up to
the age of 5 were treated by professionals in the care they received. We aimed
to identify, amongst other things (a) responsive care that enabled the disabled
child to find a place in the parents’ and family’s lives with positive views about
future development and (b) how disability and impairment were constructed in
the relationships between children, families and professionals. The fieldwork was
broken down into distinct but related stages (McLaughlin et al., 2008):
1. Narrative interviews with parents of young disabled children regarding their

experiences of services, professionals and related interventions in the early years.
Researching dis/ability 69
2. Observations of parent–professional interactions and parents’ support networks.

3. Focus group interviews with professionals.
We ended up working with 39 families, carried out 93 interviews, 55 days of

observations and six focus groups. A number of publications were produced
including McLaughlin et al. (2008). One striking discovery of this project in terms
of researching dis/ability was that dis/ability knowledge is always being contested.
Take, if you will, disability diagnoses. At the time of writing there are debates in
the mainstream media about the imminent arrival of the American Psychiatric
Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition
(DSM-5 – a debate we will roll with in Chapter 6). One concern pertains to the
psychologisation of the spectrum of human behaviours, which risks pathologising
ways of being that might actually simply be extensions of what it means to be
human. Some labels and diagnoses are stickier than others. We found with Project
1 that parents of disabled children have a complicated relationship with diagnosis
(Goodley, 2007b; McLaughlin and Goodley, 2008a; McLaughlin et al., 2008;
Goodley, 2009). One outcome of this tense relationship was an elaborate dance
between diagnosis and normality:
Because Thomas is like he is, sometimes, it makes me feel like a freak or

there is something wrong with me. The other day in the supermarket, it felt
difficult, he was looking a bit more drugged up than normal. I’m so used to
having everything just right – I’ve always done well. At the end of the day,
though, my view is that there is no such thing as normality. This idea of
normal is what you set out; it’s very oppressive how it works.
(Rebecca Greenwood; Goodley, 2007b: 153)
You see, I can’t keep chasing the normal. I mean I’ve done so much to try
and make my son normal but I can’t keep that up. … I need to accept him
in the ways that he is and just enjoy them and him. I must stop pressurizing
myself.
(Rebecca Greenwood; Goodley, 2007b: 150)
Faced with such tiring battles some parents found peace in becoming of parent –
that is, just rolling with it:
I am coping. I do one thing at a time, one day at a time. I do not make huge
plans, I don’t expect certain things. If we overcome a hurdle then great but
there’ll be something else around the corner.
(Cheryl Smith, mother of Danny who has been labelled as having autism;
Goodley, 2007b: 155)
Uncertainty is rarely deemed a quality of human functioning. But, from carefully

listening to parents, we found uncertainty to be a productive space for keeping
competing ideas together whilst not privileging one over the other. This might
promote openness to new ideas and locations. Researching dis/ability knowledge
must acknowledge the shifting nature of such knowledge. As we shall see in
Chapter 6 through reference to the work of Harvey (1996), our bodies are
always and for ever situated in the global context of capitalism. There has been,
according to Harvey (1996: 197), an extraordinary efflorescence of interest in the
body in the social sciences and humanities. The body is an unfinished project;
historically and geographically malleable, evolving and changing in ways that
reflect internal transformative dynamics and the effect of external processes. This
interest in the body is not reserved for academics or professionals but is also a
place of contestation and battle for disabled people and their allies (including their
families).
Project 2: Does every child matter, post-Blair? The

interconnections of disabled childhoods (2008–2011)
This project was also funded by the Economic and Social Research Council
(RES-062-23-1138) (‘Does every child matter, post-Blair? The interconnections
of disabled childhoods’, see project website1). Based at Manchester Metropolitan
University, the project involved Katherine Runswick-Cole, Tom Campbell and
myself. Our overarching aim was to ask what life is like for disabled children/
young people and their families in the aftermath of the changes for children’s
policy and practice since 1997 set in motion by the New Labour government in
Britain. To meet this aim, we had a number of objectives, including:
• To identify the extent to which Every Child Matters [the guiding philosophy
of the then British government around children’s services] and related policies
are reflected as a policy discourse and a reality in the provision of enabling
environments for children and families within the contexts of health, care,
education and leisure.
• To investigate how the ‘parent’, ‘professional’ and ‘disabled child’ are constructed
across contexts, over time, nested in a host of policies and practices and how
these relate to notions of ‘good’ parenting, ‘good’ professional practice and
‘well-adjusted’ children.
• To examine interactions between children, parents and professionals in terms
of the ways in which disabled children and their families are empowered to
take an active and enabling role in the spheres of health, care, education and
leisure.
The study took place in England (as reported in Goodley et al., 2011) and a
number of phases of empirical work were carried out including:
• Parental stories of disabled childhoods, over 18 months: 13 parents of disabled

children aged 14+ were interviewed three times to reflect on their experiences
with their disabled children and 7 parents of children (4–16 years) were inter-
viewed four times.
• Interviews with two groups of children (4–11 and 12–16 years old): 10 children
were interviewed three times.
• Six focus group interviews with professionals – exploring care and intervention: were
held with different professional groups, including voluntary sector workers,
teachers, early years professionals and teaching assistants.
• Ethnography: 50 days of participatory and non-participatory observation
allowed us to access contexts such as nurseries, schools, children’s parties,
supermarket visits and theatre events.
Children had a range of impairment labels including autism, cerebral palsy, develop-
mental disability, Down syndrome, achondroplasia, profound and multiple learning
disability and epilepsy. Katherine Runswick-Cole acted as research fellow to the
project and was involved on a day-to-day basis with the design and implementation
of the empirical work (as well as the analysis). Katherine accessed families via
parent support groups and other community contacts. Our sampling also had an
element of snowballing to it as potential families were informed by word of mouth,
emails and via websites about our research. The ethnography involved Katherine
attending children’s birthday parties, bowling alleys, shopping with families. She
was also invited to impairment-specific leisure activities, including an autism-
specific social club, parent groups and user consultation meetings set up by local
authorities, services and professionals to access the views of families.
Children and parents came to divulge deeply personal stories and confess
intimate feelings as a consequence of the familiar relationships they had built
up with Katherine over nearly two years of involvement with the research
project. Katherine’s own positionality as a mother of a disabled child, and her
willingness to share this with the families, undoubtedly built mutual trust. In
the course of the analysis of interview transcripts and ethnographic notes we
visited and revisited the data to search for themes. One analytical venture found
us grappling with the embodiment stories of disabled children (Goodley and
Runswick-Cole, 2013b). We aimed to provide readings of intimate accounts
of the bodies of disabled children that also evoked wider considerations of the
politics of disability. This aim led us to a key finding in relation to researching
dis/ability: researching the complexities of dis/ability requires imaginative social theories.
On page 13 of Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2013) we offer a story from the
research project:
An authoritative body
Greg is 10 years old. At the time of the interview, he lived with his mother,
father and older sister. His parents have recently separated. Greg attends a
mainstream school, and a conductive education centre at (some) weekends.
He loves sport, loves talking and has just won a letter-writing competition
in which he wrote about ‘why my mum is my hero’:
I was at McDonalds with cousins and all that. And I was just eating my
meal and a little kid he was just staring at me nonstop. He was actually
eating his meal looking at me. And I was ‘WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU
LOOKING AT??!!!’ He was eating and looking at me and I was like mm,
and then when I came home I was like ‘mom, give me a hood’ How could
I teach people not to stare? I mean my friends don’t stare because they had
a friend who actually is … disabled. I sometimes stare back. There should
be a law that kids must not stare or you go to prison for 4 years. And if you
do that again you are sent for life, and if they do both they’ll be executed.
Imagine the judge ‘You are going down for staring’. We could CCTV
cameras for staring. £10 fine just for staring. Hey, that would be fine.
To help us make sense of Greg’s story in ways that honoured the intimacy and
politics of his account, we found ourselves drawn to the postconventionalist theories
of Shildrick (2009) and the posthumanist possibilities of Braidotti (2003). This
was not a flight of theoretical fancy – theory for theory’s sake – but the search for
authentic concepts that would do justice to Greg’s story. Greg’s reaction to being
stared at takes him into some new and exciting pastures. In theoretically grappling
with Greg’s activism we encroached upon what appeared to be complementary
theoretical ideas from Rosi Braidotti (2006). Greg and Rosi seemed to have much
in common not least in their shared doings of becoming-activist. In our paper we
suggest that ‘Greg’s embodied politics appear to capture him “elaborating a site,
that is to say, space and time” (Braidotti 2006, 46) through which to challenge the
processes associated with the pathological stare’ (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2013:
13). ‘Greg’s narrative arouses an affirmative passion and desire for the destabilisation
of a number of identities (Braidotti 2006, 52) including, in this case, those that stare
and those who are stared at. We know from Garland Thomson (2006) that staring
is saturated with meaning’. ‘Greg’, we conclude, ‘turns the stare back on to those
bodies that threaten his ontological security.’ We suggest that such a reading allows us
to understand children’s engagement with the processes of dis/ability in terms of the
‘possability … captur[ing] the affirmative possibilities of the disabled body’ (Goodley
and Runswick-Cole, 2013: 1). Theoretically elucidating the potentiality of dis/abled
children to radicalise the world around them will be taken up later in Chapter 7.
Project 3: The psychopathology of the normals (2012–2013)

In October and November 2011 an email request was sent out to the Disability
Research distribution list (DISABILITY-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK):
Subject: The psychopathology of the non-disabled: a call for stories
Comrades
I am writing a slightly tongue in cheek (as you can tell by the working title)
but also, I hope, serious, article exploring non-disabled people’s reaction to
disability. I would like to collect stories from list members about non-disabled
people’s verbal or other responses to disability that you have witnessed. In
writing the article I will be making clear that not all non-disabled people
engage in such responses, that many non-disabled people are allies, friends,
supporters and parents of disabled people and that we are all marked by differ-
ences associated with class, gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. Moreover,
of course, what counts as non/disabled is open to debate. However, I do
want the article to expose, hopefully explain and also challenge some of the
common reactions of non-disabled society to disability …
If you would be willing to share some similar (or not!) stories then please
could you email them to d.goodley@mmu.ac.uk.
Thanks for reading

Dan Goodley
My email managed to solicit stories, reflexive accounts and theoretical musings

from 25 respondents. This approach to narrative inquiry – which positions the
storyteller as commentator and critic – adds certain ethical and political weight to
the stories (see for an overview Goodley and Clough, 2004). Most of the accounts
were from disabled people. A few were offered by non-disabled allies. No attempt
was made to record impairment labels though stories included experiences of
people with physical, sensory and cognitive impairments from countries including
Australia, Britain, Canada, Norway, Turkey, North America and Zimbabwe.
Respondents were emailed to ask how they wanted their stories cited. Many asked
for their stories to be anonymised. Others wanted their names to be kept. For
reasons of legality, ethics and uniformity, all names presented here are pseudonyms.
Each respondent was responded to individually. Four respondents challenged
the premise of the question suggesting that disabling reactions could be equally
found in the disabled population as much as in the non-disabled. A few responses
suggested that I focus on the hierarchy of impairments and potential power differ-
entials within the disabled people’s movement. One commented:
There are many very supportive non-disabled people and, as individuals

some disabled people have more power than some non-disabled people.
There are analogies between the position of men and women or white and
black people. Factors such as gender, race, class, visible/invisible impairment
etc. also affect power relationships. While we clearly need to avoid oversim-
plifications, I would assume that the aims of this book include fighting back
and demystifying the power of non-disabled people. However, I would
suggest that psychopathology is not the most appropriate expression.
(June)
Indeed, while many respondents shared troubling stories they were keen to
challenge any suggestion that the reactions of non-disabled people were simply
the responses to oppressive individuals. Some were at pains not to paint too
negative a picture of the non-disabled that they wrote about, in similar ways to
Malec (1993: 22) ‘those who intrude on my privacy are motivated, quite often,
by genuinely felt admiration for what they perceive as my courage … I can see
the sincere desire for knowledge or the awe they feel because they are unable
to imagine living without sight’. Others were less sympathetic. Accounts were
subjected to thematic analysis to tease out recurring themes (see Banister et al.,
2011, for a useful overview). A first draft version of this paper was uploaded
to an open access BlogSpot. The disability research mailing list was informed
of the draft and list members were encouraged to give their responses to the
paper. Only two commentators visited the BlogSpot to review the paper. Both
of these comments pertained to literature that I could draw on to enhance the
paper. Abridged versions of the paper appeared in a book chapter (Goodley
and Lawthom, 2013a) and three keynote presentations (Goodley, 2013a, 2013b,
2013c). The most comprehensively developed version of the paper appears as
Chapter 8 of this book.
A key finding pertaining to researching dis/ability was that dis/ability and
disablist and ableist processes are co-constituted at the mundane level of the everyday as
well as being structurally and hegemonically located. We know that materialist and
cultural analyses of disability often seek to probe the public, macro-political,
structural processes and cultural imaginaries. In order to tease out the hegemonic
one needs, so it seems, to aim high and think big: ideological underpinnings
of national welfare models, supranational discourses of disability and difference,
interconnected global flows of capital and labour are all essential targets of the
social sciences and humanities. But should we also ask more ordinary, mundane
questions of ourselves and others? Whom and what do we encounter, for example,
when we leave home in the morning? What kinds of spoken, verbal, embodied
moments of interaction happen on a day-to-day basis? How do children respond
to an encounter with difference? What do these interactional moments and
passages of time say about the makings of dis/ability? Project 3 highlighted the
importance of theorising the mundane. One is permitted to ask other questions
about the possible cultural, structural and historical foundations that give rise
to that moment. Theorising and challenging disablism and ableism might be
part of a grand project but this also requires personal and relational moments of
contestation. Indeed, this post from Charlotte illuminates the complexity of the
mundane:
In reply to your request for reactions from non-disabled people I find that
almost every encounter I have indicates that non-disabled people react to
what they see in front of them with a tendency to feel sorry for me, think
I am brave or think that as well as not being able to move I must be intel-
lectually impaired. Whether I am annoyed or amused by their reactions
depends on what sort of day I have had and whether I can be bothered to
engage in constant disability equality education!
C. Wright Mills (1970: 14–16) famously declared that sociology should examine
two key concepts: ‘private troubles’ of individuals that occur in our relationships
with others (often when our own values are threatened) and ‘public issues’ of
organisations and institutions (that often arise as a crisis of institutional arrange-
ments). In dealing with these public issues and private troubles, he suggested that
the sociologist asks key questions about history and biography (ibid.: 13): What is
the structure of this particular society as a whole? Where does this society stand
in human history? What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society
and this period? To these important questions we might add that one of our tasks
as dis/ability researchers is to identify and theorise elements of the public issues of
society in the private troubles of individuals’ encounters with others.
Project 4: Big Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities

and civil society (2013–2015)
Unlike the earlier studies, Project 4 is new, just underway and ongoing at the time
of writing. This new Economic and Social Research Council funded research
project: ‘Big Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities and civil society’,
running from June 2013 to July 2015,2 seeks to bring the human rights of disabled
people with learning disabilities back to the foreground of theoretical, policy
and professional discourse (Goodley, 2000, 2011a). A collaborative research team is
working with people so-labelled, their key impact partners3 and research partners (see
below) from civil society to consider people in the current Big Society context,
with a specific focus on three regional locations in England. There are a number
of research questions, including:
1. To what extent are people with learning disabilities participating in (civil)

society of the twenty-first century?
2. In the current climate what opportunities exist for people with learning
disabilities to contribute to and benefit from the Big Society and, hence, civil
society?
3. What can be learnt about the realities of the Big Society in practice from
current and emerging examples of civil society for people with learning
disabilities?
This project provides a useful exemplar of dis/ability research that engages with
social policy, service provision and disability activism. As documented in our
research proposal4 and written about in a recent paper (Runswick-Cole and
Goodley, 2011), Big Society has been hailed as the British Prime Minister David
Cameron’s and the Coalition government’s big idea. Some commentators have
described Big Society as the bits of society that are left over outside of the state or
the economy (Davis, 2011). In defining what Big Society is not, politicians have
stressed that it is not a substitute for statutory services (Nicholson, 2011). More
affirmative definitions of Big Society focus on Big Society as being about enabling
local communities to have the things that add to their quality of life (Nicholson,
2011). However, Big Society is a hands-off approach (Nicholson, 2011) with the
assumption that citizens are competent and capable and should be able to do the
things the state used to do (Lent, 2011: n.p.). Big Society reflects a contemporary
distrust of the state and a belief that individual citizens should pull themselves up by
their bootstraps instead of relying on the state (Lent, 2011). In order to ensure that
the Big Society philosophy is felt throughout government, the Office for Civil
Society (OCS) was created in the Cabinet Office in May 2010. OCS is ‘supporting
Ministers in their commitment to make it easier to run a charity, social enterprise
or voluntary organisation; get more resources into the sector and strengthen its
independence and resilience and make it easier for sector organisations to work
with the state’ (taken from http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/).
To help fund these areas of practice the OCS launched a £2m Access to
Volunteering grant fund in 2011 in three test areas to increase both the number
of disabled people volunteering and the organisations supporting them. A further
£100 million Transition Fund was released for the voluntary sector to bid into
as part of the government’s comprehensive spending review. Tackling inequality
(Lister and Bennett, 2010) is the overarching aim of Big Society politics and so
Big Society is based on three underlying assumptions about what needs to be
done: (1) tackle broken families: the three key and interconnected themes of the
family breakdown thesis concern: marriage; family break-up and lone parenthood,
and poor parenting; (2) address welfare dependency: Cameron states that ‘mass
welfare dependency is a waste of the country’s human resources and a huge
drain on the taxpayer’ as well as ‘one of the primary causes of low aspirations and
social breakdown’ (Conservative Party, 2008: 1); and (3) tackle big government:
according to Cameron, state anti-poverty programmes, including redistribution,
‘have now run their course. The returns from big state intervention are not just
diminishing, they are disappearing’ (Cameron, 2008).
Relatedly, the Cabinet Office (2010b) identified three core components of
the Big Society policy agenda that should address the key problems of ‘broken
society’ (the government’s rhetoric not mine): (i) empowering communities:
giving local councils and neighbourhoods more power to take decisions and shape
their area; (ii) opening up public services: the government’s public service reforms
will enable charities, social enterprises, private companies and employee-owned
cooperatives to compete to offer people high quality services; (iii) promoting
social action: encouraging and enabling people from all walks of life to play a
more active part in society, and promoting more volunteering and philanthropy.
The government is committed to these three components being enacted by civil
society and our research proposal seeks to analyse them in practice. ‘Civil society’
has been defined
as charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups. To this list we would

expect to add faith communities and churches (a major provider of support
and engagement in local communities), and we would also argue that the
informal and unpaid care provided to millions of people by family and

friends also needs to be considered part of the civil society definition.
(Mental Health Foundation (MHF) and Foundation for People with Learning
Disabilities (FPLD), 2011: 1)
Indeed, many people with learning disabilities are themselves involved as carers
and supporters of others.
The extent to which civil society is ready for these elements of the Big Society
is unclear. Few would deny the important role that the institutions of civil society
can play as part of any anti-poverty strategy (Lister and Bennett, 2010). But, the
voluntary sector has, thus far, provided a complement to rather than an alternative to
the state. As the government recognises, opportunities for Big Society to develop
‘will not emerge overnight and that to take advantage of them the [Third Sector]
will need some support’ (Cabinet Office, 2010b: 3). What this means for people
with learning disabilities remains unclear.
Disability is a key focus in social and educational policies and the government
has stated that Big Society is about ‘fairness and opportunity for all’ (Cabinet
Office, 2010a). Disability LIB (2010) has recognised that Big Society may increase
opportunities for disabled people and their allies including: the growth of a new
generation of activists with Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) having more
independence from local councils. Yet, the extent to which the opportunities
will be compromised by government spending cuts remains unclear. Disability
LIB’s (2010) report paints a bleak picture of job cuts in the public sector leading
to greater poverty and deprivation amongst disabled people. Lack of affordable
housing and a cap on housing benefit will also lead to some disabled people
becoming homeless and others facing greater challenges in getting an accessible
home or adapting their current homes for their needs. Increased competition in
the job market might lead to greater discrimination against disabled people and
more barriers in the workplace. The demand for information, support, advice,
advocacy and other enabling services provided by DPOs will only grow, meaning
some organisations already working on a shoestring budget may be forced to close
(Disability LIB, 2010: 1).
The Charity Commission estimated that charities might lose around £5bn
under the programme of cuts and because many DPOs have been reliant, to
varying extents, on charitable contributions, it is anticipated that they may fold.
Greater demand for support, fewer volunteers, less money for services associated
with the benefit-dependents, a move away from human rights discourse to fairness,
competition between different Big Society organisations and an emphasis on
charity rather than politics have been identified by Disability LIB (2010) as key
threats to services for disabled people. Our research seeks to capture a range of
voices in considering the very real social and economic impact of the rolling out
of policies associated with the Big Society.
We know that adults with learning disabilities are neglected or actively
victimised in our culture (Panorama, 2011). Mencap’s (2007) study Death by
Indifference – which documented the malpractice that led to the deaths of six
adults in hospital – horrifically captured the lack of value and care meted out
to people on account of their learning disabilities. The recent high profile
deaths of David Askew, Raymond Atherton, Rikki Judkins, Fiona Pilkington
and Christine Lakinski remind us that the rise in hate crimes against people
with learning disabilities says much about wider society’s troubling and troubled
relationship with disability (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2011). ‘Disabled
people with learning disabilities’ is a term used by the renowned self-advocate
Simone Aspis (in Campbell and Oliver, 1996) to recognise that people with the
label are also people disabled by society. There is substantive evidence to suggest
that people with learning disabilities face day-to-day experiences of disablism,
defined by Thomas (2007: 73), as ‘a form of social oppression involving the social
imposition of restrictions of activity on people with impairments and the socially
engendered undermining of their psycho-emotional well being’. Against this
backdrop of disablism it could be argued that disabled people rely on the support
of their communities, allies and supporters that make up civil society. Overall,
the ‘Broken Britain’ narrative represents a behavioural and cultural analysis that
attributes the underlying causes of poverty to the failings of individuals rather
than to socio-economic structural factors (Lister and Bennett, 2010); this analysis
confronts analyses of disability premised on social oppression theories of disability
that have traditionally located ‘the problem’ of disability in society, rather than
in individuals. The stated aim of Big Society is ‘fairness and opportunity for all’
(Cabinet Office, 2010a). And yet as Davis (2002: 30) has noted, all too often:
‘Politics have been directed towards making all identities equal under a model
of the rights of the dominant, often white, male, “normal” subject’. In the Big
Society, it is not clear how the ‘dismodern’ subject ‘the partial, incomplete subject
whose realization is not autonomy and independence, but dependency and
interdependence’ (Davis, 2002: 30) will fare. To answer this and other questions,
our study will draw on ethnographic methods to explore the three layers of
Big Society as they relate to three existing practices of civil society in the lives
of disabled people – enacted by our three research partners in distinct areas of
England.
1. Empowering communities? Circles of Support (Lancashire) aim to place disabled

people at the centre of their communities from which they are supported by
a circle of supporters and allies. The Foundation for People with Learning
Disabilities (FPLD, 2010) defines a ‘Circle of Support’ as a group of family,
friends and supportive workers who come together to give support and
friendship to a person. The circle helps the person do the things they would
like to do and achieve new things in their life. Circles are a way of achieving
person-centred support. This raises a number of questions including: Do
circles of support encapsulate the notion of empowering communities? Can
circles of support draw on the new community organising programme of the
present government that seeks to ‘activate’ communities? What risks exist in
drawing back services for people – will circles struggle to support people who
‘fall’ between services?
2. Opening up public services? FPLD’s Real Employment initiatives (Bristol) seek
to promote self-employment, small business ownership, job coaching and
real work opportunities for people with learning disabilities through social
enterprises, voluntary sector supports, local authority provision, Department
for Work and Pensions (DWP) provision and local cooperatives. The Office
for Civil Society (Cabinet Office, 2010b: 7) clearly states in relation to its
public service agenda around ‘Welfare to work’ that ‘local communities and
partners will have a key role to play in delivering employment support’. Are
social enterprises increasing their work with disabled clients? If ‘reforms will
enable charities, social enterprises, private companies and employee-owned
co-operatives to compete to offer people high quality services’ – does this
mean that organisations run by disabled are competing to provide these
services? In an era when measures of incapacity and fitness for work are being
revised to what extent can people with learning disabilities be supported to
partake in meaningful paid and voluntary work?
3. Promoting social action? Speak Up Self-advocacy, Rotherham and South
Yorkshire: is an established group that supports the self-determination of
their members and offers training and consultation. Self-advocacy groups
have the potential to feed into the aims of encouraging and enabling people
from all walks of life to play a more active part in society, and promoting
more volunteering and philanthropy. Questions are raised including: Does the
Big Society agenda provide an opportunity for the self-advocacy movement
to find its civil societal, self-advocacy-led activist origins? Do the ‘giving/
charity’ aspects of Big Society threaten the politicisation of disability? Could
the Big Society push for community volunteering to aid the support of
self-advocacy?
The contribution of our three research partners highlights a further aspect of

researching dis/ability: dis/ability research can and should embrace participatory models of
research with emancipatory potential. Our impact partners and research partners will,
we hope, help drive the influence of our research on outside agencies. Our impact
expert research management and advisory group team capture expertise from across
the sector. They will guide the research but, crucially, draw on their expertise to
ensure that findings and recommendations from our project are felt in policy-
making, practitioner and service contexts. We will engage in a host of innovative
impact activities (with specific milestones) to ensure knowledge transfer to/from
key beneficiaries of the research. We also seek to develop and deliver a series of
‘good practice impact workshops’ aimed at (i) professionals, supporters and allies;
(ii) organisations and services and (iii) people with learning disabilities. We will
run these as knowledge cafés (see www.disability-café.com) separately for children,
parents/carers and professionals in an accessible and safe and inclusive environment
in order to share findings, to listen and to respond to these stakeholders.
Dis/abled people and those close to them are facing newly defined forms of
marginalisation in these times of austerity. This will have huge material impacts
(finance, work, infrastructure). As importantly, the cuts in welfare threaten the
cultural centres of disabled people’s communities. Simultaneously, Project 4 desires
the documentation of the ways in which dis/ability organisations are not only
surviving but working the processes and practice of neoliberal-ableism as this
ideology cuts at the very core of civil society. Chapters 9 and 10 aim to represent
some of the ways in which those at the dis/ability complex actually might be able
to exploit and appropriate the excesses of neoliberal civil society. These excesses
relate to the language, practices and politics of neoliberalism and biopower that
cannot stop themselves from producing more than they originally intended. We
will contemplate the possibilities inherent in the notion that dis/ability ruptures
and reworks moments of neoliberal capitalism. A participatory approach has the
potential for disabled people with intellectual disabilities and their research allies to
make sense of these brave new times of civil society.
Conclusion
As well as introducing a number of method/ological and analytical considerations,
this chapter has briefly introduced some empirically based research projects that
will be drawn upon in Part 2 of this book. This has been a strange chapter to
write because without this collaborative research with colleagues I would not have
been positioned to write this single-authored text. I want to acknowledge again,
therefore, my debt to this collaborative work.
PART 2
Exemplifying dis/ability
studies
6
PRECARIOUS BODIES
The biopolitics of dis/ability and debility
This chapter will examine the paradoxical yet complementary societal emphases,
which currently prevail, on the healthy citizen and an epidemic of disability
diagnoses. Drawing on interviews with parents of disabled babies and young
children, the analysis will delve into the co-constitution of dis/ability; identify
the gains and losses associated with accruing a dis/ability identity; illuminate the
processes of pathologisation alongside entitlement; and consider the limits and
excesses of naming dis/ability. Not only is the notion of a body outside of culture
a fantasy, in actuality, our bodies are moulded by alienating choreographies of
capitalism. All of us are left lacking in the market; debilitated by the dance of
capital. We therefore need our interconnections, communities and alliances more
than ever. The chapter is split into a number of sections:
1. Social bodies: ab/normal hands and fingers

2. Biopolitical bodies: pathologisation alongside entitlement
3. Dis/abled bodies across the DSM-5 and transhumanist world
4. Capitalist materialist bodies: labour, alienation, impairment
5. Desiring dis/abled bodies: the political potential of debility
6. Conclusion: a long, slow death
While the chapter offers a sobering account of the dangerous dealings of the
precarious body, we move to a more affirmative space (through the musings of
queer theory) where dis/ability is proffered as the place through which to develop
debility politics.
84 Exemplifying dis/ability studies
Social bodies: ab/normal hands and fingers

The body should be a big deal for dis/ability studies. Bodies feel joy and pain.
They live and die. They experience intense feelings of desire and physical pleasure.
Some bodies move in smoother ways than others. Some bodies are subjected to
arduous forms of labour while others are allowed to rest with regularity. Some
bodies suffer. Many are impoverished. Some bodies survive longer than others.
Some love our bodies. Some do not. Meaning is inscribed upon bodies. Autism.
ADHD. Down syndrome. Life-limiting impairments. Cancer. These inscriptions
invite medical or educational intervention. Bodies bear the marks of the economic
conditions in which they find themselves. To conceptualise the body as if it were
outside of our economy, culture, language and material practices would be very
much at odds with a socially interested dis/ability studies. What would it mean
to talk of a body outside of the social? How useful would this be? Indeed, how
possible would it be to rip a body outside of its socio-cultural moorings? By
attempting to erase the social context in which bodies become known seems to
suggest that there is a body outside of culture and understanding. Even if one were
to acknowledge life-limiting or painful impairments – and one of course should
– I would suggest that it is disrespectful to consider these phenomena outside of
the registers of the familial, relational, scientific, community, media, the mundane
and the everyday. How we value bodies that live short lives compared with those
that are long living draws upon a complex body of knowledge associated with
quality of lives and lives of quality. Any understanding of the body is always imbued
with a host of complex social, psychological and physiological meanings. One of
the few comforting thoughts we have is that we come to understand our bodies
in the social realm. Accepting this argument, as I clearly do, I want to consider
some of the ways in which the body’s dis/abilities are constituted and marked
through a host of practices. This is not to deny the materiality of the body but –
as I will show – conversely, to recognise the materialities and materialisations that
constitute the dis/abled body. This begs the question: How are dis/abled bodies
crafted in the social?
To start addressing this question, let us briefly turn to a story from Project 1:
Parents, professionals and disabled babies: towards enabling care. Through inter-
views with parents of disabled children in their early years we, as a research
team, were encouraged to hear their complex dealings with the ab/normal social
registers of everyday life. As we reported in McLaughlin and Goodley (2008b: 59),
Jane, who had refused to be guided by medical advice about what autistic children
could not do was, conversely, keen to get her son Jack out of nappies much earlier
than would have been expected for a child with this label. She told us:
But I really think it’s made him a better person for it, he’s a lot more normal
if you like. We were trying to discourage him doing like the flapping hands
and the pointed fingers and that. And if he gets really loud we’ll say ‘you
know Jack you’re shouting too loud and turn it down a bit’. He does take
Precarious bodies 85
note of things like that I think because he wants to fit in, and I genuinely
think he does want to fit in with other kids and what they’re doing.
(Jane)
We argued in the original analysis of this account that
parents of non-disabled children are involved in attempts to ensure their

children conform to social expectations of behaviour and attitude. However,
because disabled children trouble the category of the acceptable child, this
can lead their parents to work harder at trying to ‘overcome’ those behav-
iours or limitations that are assumed to be troubling. Parents appreciate that
the social costs of not fitting notions of acceptable behaviour will be carried
by their children.
(McLaughlin and Goodley, 2008b: 59)
Rereading Jane’s account, now, I am struck by the clear vision she has of what
her son should be doing with his hands, fingers and arms: acting normally. Jane
has a definite notion of how her son’s comportment should be. This connects
with Imrie’s (2013) analysis and his critique of Le Corbusier’s concept of Modulor
Man.1 The Modulor was meant as a universal system of proportions. Le Corbusier’s
ambition, according to Wiles (2008), was vast: to devise a universal concept for
design that would reconcile maths, the human form, architecture and beauty into
a single system. This system could then be used to provide the measurements
for all aspects of design from door handles to cities, and Le Corbusier believed
it could be applied to industry and mechanics. The fundamental ‘modul’ of the
Modulor is a six-foot man, allegedly based on the usual height of the detectives in
the English crime novels Le Corbusier enjoyed (Wiles, 2008). This Modulor Man
is segmented according to the ‘golden section’, a ratio of approximately 1.61; so
the ratio of the total height of the figure to the height of the figure’s navel is 1.61.
An expansion of this is provided by Wiles (2008). In Le Corbusier’s buildings and
art a recurrent silhouette appears. It’s a stylised human figure, standing proudly
and square-shouldered, sometimes with one arm raised: this is Modulor Man, the
mascot of Le Corbusier’s system for reordering the universe.
Returning to Jane’s account, one feels that she is haunted by her own version
of modulor man: a stylised human figure that carefully holds himself rigidly still,
his hands and fingers kept in place, indicating self-control and purpose. Jack’s
difference (labelled as autism) risks being erased through reference to ableist
ideals of modulor man. I profoundly believe this does not make Jane an agent of
ableism. Instead, it unearths those entrenched cultural un/conscious ideals around
normality that always exist alongside any naming of ab/normality. This is a clear
example of the co-constitution of dis/ability: a constitution, which is always and
forever shaky and unpredictable.
Biopolitical bodies: pathologisation alongside entitlement

There are a number of mutually compatible ways in which ableist ideals and
disabling practices simultaneously create impossible standards of autonomous
citizenship while threatening to expel disabled Others. At the heart of these
practices is embodiment. We might understand this complicated phenomenon as
the ways in which the body is made in the social. How we understand this elusive
concept will depend upon the theoretical positions summarised, in particular, in
Chapter 4. But, for the sake of argument, let us accept for now that the body,
and its relationship with the world, is a complex thing: not easily reducible to
the biological nor the social. Let us also think about the ways in which we have
to know, feel and live in our bodies. One strong frame through which emotions
and ontological experiences of our bodies are cast is that of medicalisation. Now,
for Soldatic and Fiske (2009: 297–298) modern medicine was based upon what
they refer to as a ‘pseudo-scientific construction of biological superiority and
inferiority, providing the rational framework for a hierarchy both of race and
able bodiedness’. While this observation is important one could suggest that their
prefix of pseudo ignores the inherent problems of science per se. Indeed, while
Soldatic and Fiske are correct to point to the disabling and racist consequences of
science, dismissing this work as ‘pseudo-science’ threatens to fully interrogate the
oppressive workings of all science. Put simply; questioning medicine and science
is not enough for our requirements. In addition, we need a conceptual frame that
attends to the complex ways in which current ‘neoliberal economic and socio-
political rationalities urge responsible individuals to control their health not only
for their own sake but also for the socioeconomic good of the nation’ (Erevelles,
2011: 2168).
Here the concept of biopolitics is incredibly useful. As we have already seen,
this trope encourages us to disentangle the governance, shaping and couching of
our postmodern, late capitalist, neoliberal embodied citizenship. If the body is
‘where it is at’ in contemporary social theory (and there is plenty of evidence to
suggest that body theory is ‘down with the kids’) then I want to argue that the
split binary of ableism and disablism and dis/ability bodies are really where it’s
at. The makings of the idealised able body and the exclusion of the monstrous
disabled antithesis can be fruitfully understood through an examination of some
of the biopolitical work that goes in, on and through bodies. As Viego (2009:
134) reminds us, one aspect of biopower concerns ‘power’s taking charge of life
through knowledge-objectification practices like calculation, measurement and
diagnoses’.
A lovely starting point for furthering our biopolitical criticism is gifted to us
by Sedgwick (1990: 10) when she asks: Why did the homosexual rather than
masturbator become so central to sexual politics? What was it about this sexual
practice that made it become so important to sexual and political citizenship? This
is a great question and one we can appropriate and revise for our analysis of dis/
ability. One could ask, why did autism become so central to disability discourse
rather than, say, shyness or aloofness? Why has the autism spectrum grown as
the disability label of the twenty-first century rather than, for example, the shy
spectrum? We know, from Sedgwick (1990: 11) and some of the poststructur-
alist theorists such as Derrida that she uses, that ‘ontological valorised position a
exists because it excludes b’. We can say that a is always unstable, always fighting
its corner, endlessly making its ontological case, as the opposite of b. There is,
following Sedgwick (1990: 48): an urgent need to denaturalise the dominance of
a (e.g. ‘autism’) over b (e.g. ‘normal’). We need to ask again about how dis/ability
is co-created.
Let’s turn to some narratives. A recurring finding of Projects 1 and 2 was the
paradoxical process of naming impairment within a child. When labels worked for
families and their children this was often related to a particular kind of function-
ality: the ability to release financial, cultural and relational support. Indeed, in
McLaughlin et al. (2008) we met with families whose children were yet to receive
diagnoses. At times this was viewed positively; parents, for example, talked of
enjoying their children for ‘who they are’ rather than thinking of their children
through an impairment label. On other occasions, the lack of a diagnosis could
substantively deny families access to specialised health and social care; no label,
no help. Furthermore, no label meant no explanatory framework to draw on
to explain to the world about one’s child’s unique difference. Meanwhile, those
families with a (biopolitical) tale to tell about their children often spoke of those
times when they felt they had to exaggerate their children’s impairments in order
to qualify for support, services or benefits:
[As part of a social services assessment] I had to describe Henry as autistic …

I told them he has an IQ of 49. I had to explain that he couldn’t do things
that other children his age can do, that we can’t leave him on his own, that
he can’t organise himself to get a meal, that he still needs help with his
personal care, including washing his hair and wiping his bum, that we have
to take him everywhere with us and that sometimes he doesn’t want to go.
She started to type ‘he can’t do things that normal fourteen year olds can
do’. I said, ‘I didn’t say that he isn’t ‘not normal’. She apologised and said
she didn’t mean that, she meant ‘average’.
(Imogen; from Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2010: 8; italics are my emphasis).
Imogen is forced to break the continuum of abnormality–normality. She is driven

to carve out and separate off a segment of life entitled ‘autism’. Other embodied
practices are drawn in to emphasise co-morbidity: inability to wipe a bum, to
organise a meal, wash hair. Profound problems and needs are hinted at. The
discourse of naming autism in order to access support reads like a colonial master’s
assessment of unruly, raw, savages in need of the civilising process. In making a
disability call one should ensure that its antithesis – the able – is banished from
view. As McGuire (2012) would have it, the terror of autism is announced in order
to infer entitlement.
Dis/abled bodies across the DSM-5 and transhumanist world

McGuire’s use of the language of terror is an apt choice in these times of increased
signification, labelling and naming of human difference. At the time of writing, the
world is preparing for the DSM-5 (formerly known as DSM-V), the planned fifth
edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders. An article in The Guardian by Doward (2013) provides
an accessible overview of debates raging around the relative merits of this rewritten
diagnostic manual. New diagnoses include:
Disruptive mood deregulation disorder or DMDD, for those diagnosed with

abnormally severe and frequent temper tantrums.
Binge-eating disorder. For those who eat to excess 12 times in three months.
Hoarding disorder, defined as ‘persistent difficulty discarding or parting with
possessions, regardless of actual value’.
Oppositional defiance disorder, described by one critic as a condition
afflicting children who say ‘no’ to their parents more than a certain number
of times.
(Doward, 2013: 10)
From poststructuralist and postconventional perspectives these new diagnoses

implicitly carry with them constructions of normality against which disorders are
judged. An able child controls their temper, eats responsibly and is appropriately
obedient to their parents. Appropriating Braidotti (2003), disability can never be
understood alone: it has to be conceptualised as an Other to the dominant Same of
ability. Critics of the DSM-5 object to the practices of medicalisation that pathol-
ogise individually located behaviours and thoughts that stand in opposition to
the rational, self-controlling and self-governing citizen so cherished by neoliberal
societies. ‘It is now common knowledge’, argues Erevelles (2002a: 20), ‘that the
enlightenment ideal of the rational, coherent, unified, and stable humanist subject
has come under considerable critique in the current context of poststructuralism.’
Watchwords of the neoliberal-able self (self-fulfilment, personal development and
entrepreneurial responsibility) are recast as essential/ist attributes of our symbolic,
cultural and ideological discourse. Mindful of our own failings to match up to
these ideals one can seek solace in finding failures in others. The project of ableism
ticks along nice and steadily as the disability industry is renewed, as in the case of
DSM-5. Each are but one side of the same coin of biopower: where modern states
regulate their citizens’ bodies by various practices and institutions, some medical,
some quasi-medical (Couser, 2011: 25). This move to biological citizenship has
occurred across the globe. In Australia, Soldatic and Chapman (2010) observe
that the 1990s saw division occur within the disability movement with it largely
becoming segmented around impairment-related concerns such as autism and
intellectual disability. Fortunately, the dis/ability knowledge of the DSM-5 has
been contested.
Statement of Concern About the Reliability, Validity and Safety of DSM-5 (Brief
Version)
• Includes many diagnostic categories with questionable reliability, which

may lead to misleading assumptions about their scientific validity;
• Did not receive a much-needed and widely requested external scientific
review;
• May compromise patient safety through the implementation of lowered
diagnostic thresholds and the introduction of new diagnostic categories
that do not have sufficient empirical backing;
• Is the result of a process that gives the impression of putting institutional
needs ahead of public welfare.
… and, because of the above, we are concerned that DSM-5:
• May result in the mislabeling of mental illness in people who would fare
better without a psychiatric diagnosis;
• May result in unnecessary and potentially harmful treatment with
psychiatric medication;
• May divert precious mental health resources away from those who most
need them.
(http://dsm5response.com/)
One can read the development of the transhumanist movement and the rewriting
of the DSM psychiatric corpus as complementary processes of ableism and
disablism. One finds lack within humanity while the other seeks enhancement.
It is easier to enhance something when it’s deficient. And limitation evokes
improvement. Ablebodiedness and the neoliberal self are only provisional and
therefore require ‘constant replenishment in order to make and repair themselves’
(Hannabach, 2007: 255). As Puar (2009: 168) observes, drugs prescribed to treat
mental disorders are also being used as part of the burgeoning field of ‘cosmetic
neurology, a term used to describe the practice of using drugs developed for
recognized medical conditions to strengthen ordinary cognition’, such as ‘the
growing use of Ritalin and Adderall amongst college students and marathon poker
players’. Similarly, disability requires work to maintain it. Disability discourse
boasts potentialities for new forms of exchange, production and consumption. As
Mallet and Runswick-Cole (2012) have argued, the presence of autism – as an
embodied festishised entity – brings with it new ways of being, producing and
buying in the world. While some of these ways appear to offer empty moments
of exchange – buying autism toys for children – others fundamentally reshape
bodies’ engagements in the world and the relationalities that occur around different
‘autistic’ marked bodies. For example, the provision by cinemas of autism-friendly
film showings at the very least call for new modes of production: ones that tolerate
and perhaps encourage different types of embodied expression. In our work for
Project 1, we came across biopolitical knowledge that produced in excess of itself:

or what Viego (2009) terms the affirmative character of biopower:
The National Autistic Society are good … they’ve given me some cards that
say ‘he’s got autism’ … Yeah. If anybody says anything or … and it’s got a
number on if they’ve got any questions. And it says that they can’t talk and
they can’t interact and stuff like that so.
(Helen; in Goodley and McLaughlin, 2008: 119)
Here we have a very clear sense of using signs of autism as a means of explanation
that contrasts with Karen and David’s emphasis on signs of normality presented
earlier:
I’ve been proven exactly right to this day because, you know we were told
that Daniel was basically going to be unable to do anything at all for himself.
And now he sits up, he stands, he has a drink, he feeds himself, he’s aware
of himself, he’s aware of other people. All of those things that they basically
said, he’s just going to lie there. And I think that’s the biggest thing that we
stick to them and say ‘you know, you were wrong’.
(David; in McLaughlin and Goodley, 2008b: 69)
Indeed, building up dis/ability knowledge has the potential to invite a reconcep-

tualisation of one’s role in life.
My parents were coming up at different times ... her dad learned how to
work the tube feeding, her dad’s mum learned how to do it, my mum and
dad, my sister – because they were going to be all those people that were
going to be my network of people that were going to help me look after her.
At the time I was living at my parents, I wasn’t with her dad, so I mean they
had to ... well they wanted to but they had to learn how to do it.
(Eva; in Goodley and McLaughlin, 2008b: 109)
My own Dad and my son, because they have that time together on their
own. I mean my Dad, he comes and, he says ‘Is my little lad coming now?’
Do you know what I mean, and he crawls up to him and he’s ‘mmm … ’ so
you can tell he’s happy to see him.
(Helen; in Goodley and McLaughlin, 2008b: 111)
In this biopolitical to-ing and fro-ing between disability and ability emerges a
productive consequence – a conversation around what it means to be human:
I think Katy belongs to the world too. Because she’s her own person, so she
does belong out there in the world, and I think the world will be a horrible
place without her. I really do believe that, I really, really, truly believe that
the world would be a horrible place without our little girls, especially her.
And she brings that bond into this house; she makes it a stronger place.
(Sarah; in McLaughlin and Goodley, 2008b: 61)
It is as if in the eye of the storm of the dis/ability complex that Sarah finds a
moment of hope. We shall return to this hope later. For now, let us consider the
place of the dis/abled body in the market.
Capitalist materialist bodies: labour, alienation, impairment

Any conception of the dis/abled body in the social must attend to the body’s
materialisation in and through capitalism. As we touched upon in Chapters 2
and 3, we must be attentive to the capitalisation of the flesh. While children’s
encounters with diagnosis take place in the cultural context of families, schools and
community setting, their future destinies are clearly signposted by the neoliberal
imaginary: work and consumption. The body has, at times, been off limits to some
materialist disability studies sociologists. In contrast, the Marxist geographer David
Harvey2 has applied a historical materialist analysis to the body: situating it in the
global context of capitalism. There has been, according to Harvey (1996: 197),
an extraordinary efflorescence of interest in the body in the social sciences and
humanities. This interest has not escaped social theorists of a materialist persuasion
and he sets his task as developing a relational understanding of the body. The
body, he argues, is an unfinished project: historically and geographically malleable,
evolving in ways that reflect internal transformative dynamics and the effect of
external processes (p. 98). From a relational dialectical view the body is conceptu-
alised as a ‘thing-like entity’ that internalises the effects of the processes that create,
support, sustain and in some cases dissolve it (p. 98). Borrowing from Judith Butler
(e.g. 1990, 1993, 2004), Harvey assumes that the body is a mix of performative
activities dependent on contemporaneous practices of the social, economic and
technological (Harvey, 1996: 98). ‘Class, race, gender’, to which we can add
dis/ability, ‘are marked upon the human body by virtue of the different socio-
ecological processes that do their work upon that body’ (p. 99). Only viewing the
body as open and porous to the world can it be meaningfully considered (p. 99).
So having set out his relational narrative of the body, how does Harvey go on to
explain this?
Well, Harvey begins by turning to early Marxist thoughts on ‘real sensual and
bodily interaction with the world’ (Harvey, 1996: 101) and Marx’s theory of the
production of the bodily subject under capitalism. As with social class, the body
comes to occupy a positionality in relation to capital circulation and accumu-
lation (p. 102). In short, the body is the place through which capital moves. Most
obviously we find this in relation to the labouring body, where the extraction
of labour power gives rise to surplus value. People work, their labour is bought
and their bodies produce in ways that create profit and capital for those who
have bought their labour. ‘The gap between what the labourer as person might
desire and what is demanded of the commodity labor power extracted from his
or her body is the nexus of alienation’ (p. 106). Or, following Carlson (2001)
and Young (1990), the central insight expressed in the concept of exploitation is
that this oppression occurs through a steady process of the transfer of the results
of the labouring bodies of one social group (proletariat) to benefit an other
(bourgeoisie).
Equally of importance to Harvey is the body as consumer and the site of
consumption that involves mobilising ‘animal spirits, sexual drives, affective feelings
and creative powers of labour to a given purpose defined by capital’ (Harvey, 1996:
103). ‘On the one hand,’ he argues, ‘capital requires educated and flexible laborers,
but on the other hand it refuses the ideas that laborers should think for themselves’
(p. 103). These contradictory processes of capitalist progression necessarily involve
a radical transformation in what the working body is about: hence capitalism is
precisely about the production of a new kind of labouring body (p. 104). Think
here, for example, of the moves from Fordist to post-Fordist economies. In the
South Wales valleys, in the UK, the closure of the mining industry in the 1990s
left mass unemployment. Where once there were mines there are now leisure
complexes, shopping retail parks and in one specific valley (Rhondda Cynon
Taff) a mining park attraction where visitors can pay to get an opportunity to
experience what it was like to work in a mine. Some of the employees of this
attraction are ex-miners-cum-contemporary-park-attendants: showing visitors
around the simulacrum of a mineshaft. Their bodies have been refashioned by a
complex dance of capital: from long days of work leaving bodies dirty and tired
to short days of flexitime work where attendants dirty their faces with face paint
at the start of the day in readiness to present themselves as authentic miners.
These park attendants embody the flexible and precarious worker demanded of
late capitalist, neoliberal times expressed by Soldatic and Chapman (2010) and
expanded upon in Chapter 2. This a working body inscribed with the ideology
and accountability demanded of neoliberalism.
In other less flexible mutations of capitalism we find a lack of productivity,
sickness and, to this, we can add disability as ‘defined within the circulation process
as inability to go to work, inability to perform adequately within the variable
capital (to produce surplus value)’ (Harvey, 1996: 106). People so defined risk
being cast into the ‘inferno of the lumpenproletariat (read underclass)’ (p. 107).
What we are finding here, thanks to Harvey’s use of Marx, is a very clear sense that
capitalism frequently violates, disfigures, subdues, maims and destroys the integrity
of the (labouring) body (Harvey, 1996: 108). Increasingly, as markets are global
markets, bodies are different in some geographical locations (the poor are more
concentrated in global South nations) and across geographical locations (sweat-
shops in Europe and Asia). Globally, we could argue with some justification and
evidence, disabled people are consistently excluded from workplaces. As austerity
measures grow rather than reduce, and governments panic over debt, spending
and the need to further roll back the welfare state, then disabled people are being
denied access to some of the most basic of life-saving services. The recent case
in the UK of a disabled woman who killed herself rather than give up her home
in line with the new bedroom tax,3 indicates that social policy is a matter of life
or death. Simultaneously, disabled people are being invited to occupy the role of
labourer: to come off welfare and to enter the workforce (albeit a workforce that
is, to use a disablist metaphor, on its knees). Disabled people are, let us be frank,
being asked to become able: either in terms of moving from ‘welfare dependent’
to productive labourer or swapping a previously occupied disability identity for an
able-labouring one.
Harvey notes that the ‘laborer does not only lie in the path of variable
capital as producer and exchanger. He/she also lies in the circulation process as
consumer and reproducer of self ’ (Harvey, 1996: 110). The organisation, mobili-
sation and channelling of desires – so wonderfully captured by Marcuse (1964) as
‘one-dimensional man’ – produces all sorts of pressures on ‘the body as the site
of and a performative agent for rational consumption for further accumulation’
(Harvey, 1996: 111). In the twenty-first century we can include forms of therapy
and surgery as ‘rational’ choices of embodied practice:
The experiential world, the physical presence, the subjectivity and the
consciousness of that person are partially if not predominantly forged in
the fiery crucible of the labor process, the passionate pursuit of values and
competitive advantage in labor markets, and in the perpetual desires and
glittery frustrations of commodity culture. They are also forged in the matrix
of time–space relations between persons largely hidden behind the exchange
and movement of things.
(Harvey, 1996: 113)
An understanding of the conditions of variable capital is indisputably a necessary

condition for understanding what happens to bodies in contemporary society (p.
115). Marxism provides an ‘epistemology … to approach the question of how
bodies get produced, how they become the signifiers and referents of meanings,
and how internalised bodily practices might in turn modify the processes of
their self-production under contemporary conditions of capitalist globalisation’
(p. 116). When one’s labouring body is excluded from the labour market – or
included in its alienating processes – one risks being endlessly impaired and
disabled by the economy. When one’s labouring body finds a place, albeit a
troubling place, then at the very least this evokes a moment of ableist inclusion.
One thing we can conclude is that ability and disability are produced together:
that is dis/ability is made through capitalism and that this is a very precarious
thing. If, at this stage of the chapter, you are feeling somewhat depressed at the
damaging effects and affects of capitalism, then I can only apologise. I did not
mean to depress anyone. Indeed, understanding the body’s constitution in the
cultural and the economic sensitises us to the capacity of the social body. So,
whilst keeping in mind these market pressures on the body, let us now turn to
the possibilities of dis/ability.
Desiring dis/abled bodies: the political potential of debility

If we accept Harvey’s (1996: 117) suggestion that all dis/abled bodies are
embedded in a social process that never renders such bodies docile or passive but
energises these bodies as ‘form-giving fire’ of the capacity to labour, then we can
start to think more productively. Each labourer has the transformative and creative
capacities of their labour to fashion alternative modes of production, consumption
and exchange. While Harvey has in mind a rather stereotypical, ableist, working
labourer we can develop some of his ideas in relation to disabled people as
producers of new forms of labourer. It would be beneficial to briefly summarise
Harvey’s theory of the potentiality of labour before moving on to a more nuanced
disability-centred analysis. His ambition is to translate the body from the ‘realm of
body as meat’ to the concept of the labouring body as political agent. Concepts
‘such as person, individual, self and identity: rich with political thought and possi-
bilities, emerge phoenix-like out of the ashes of body reductionism to take their
places within the firmament of concepts to guide political action’ (Harvey, 1996:
118). However, rather than allowing the concept of ‘the person’ to be recuperated
by the individualising scientific practices of some forms of psychology and some
kinds of societal practice, Harvey is committed to a view that is inherently relational
and always social. ‘The sense of self and of personhood is relational and socially
constructed’, he argues, ‘in exactly the same way as the body is a social construct’
(p. 119). Harvey is keen to contest the ‘individual’ as a child of the enlightenment
but also to reclaim it as a politicised and socially embedded concept. Equally, the
body is fundamentally enculturised. ‘No body’, he argues, ‘exists outside of its
relations with other bodies and the exercise of power and counterpowers among
bodies is a central constitutive aspect of social life’ (p. 120). His preferred trope of
the labourer is reaffirmed when he suggests that his or her body is embedded as
political person in the circulation of capital and his conception of bodily politics
is inherently modernist:
The body (like the person and the self) is an internal relation and therefore
open and porous to the world … the body is not monadic, nor does it float
freely in some ether of culture, discourses, and representations, however
important these may be in materialisations of the body. The study of the
body has to be grounded in an understanding of the real spatio-temporal
relations between material practices, representations, imaginaries, institu-
tions, social relations and the prevailing structures of the political-economic
power.
(Harvey, 1996: 130)
While sharing Harvey’s views on the capitalist individualisation of personhood, I

am less convinced by his rather dismissive approach to culture. Indeed, I would
suggest that one place to look for politicisation and resistance is at the cultural
divide of the dis/abled social body. This leads us nicely to the work of the cultural
studies theorist Jasbir Puar (2009, 2010, 2011). Neoliberal capitalist regimes of
biocapital produce bodies that are never healthy enough, and thus always in a
‘debilitated state in relation to what one’s bodily capacity is imagined to be’ (Puar,
2009: 167). Puar suggests that neoliberal capitalism’s working over of the body –
so well described by Harvey – places us all in a relationship with debility. ‘The
political mandate behind such rethinking about disability’, she argues, to ‘move
from disability to debility – would not be to disavow the crucial political gains
enabled by disability activists globally, but to invite a deconstruction of what ability
and capacity mean, affective and otherwise, and to push for a broader politics of
debility that destabilizes the seamless production of abled-bodies in relation to
disability’ (Puar, 2009: 167). Puar is spurred on by contemporaries such as Butler
who encourage us to ask about the performative potential of bodies that are
discarded or disposed of.
Bodies of debility, Puar argues, deconstruct the presumed, taken-for-granted
capacities-enabled status of abled-bodies. In contemporary times, as we explored in
Chapter 4, there are ‘heightened demands for bodily capacity and exceptionalized
debility’ (Puar, 2010: n.p.). So disabled, queer, raced bodies are exceptionalised
and hyper- or transhumanist forms of capacity are celebrated. Wherever we lie in
relation to the dis/ability binary we are found lacking: there is debility amongst
us all. I agree with Puar (2011: 155) that ‘all bodies are being evaluated in relation
to their success or failure in terms of health, wealth, progressive productivity,
upward mobility, enhanced capacity’. While some bodies and populations are
deemed more precarious than others, we are all debilitated in and by neoliberalism
capitalism.
Capacity and debility are on the one hand, seeming opposites generated
by increasingly demanding neoliberal formulations of health, agency, and
choice – what I call a ‘liberal eugenics’ of lifestyle programming – that
produces population aggregates as well as the technologies of bioinformatics
and biopolitics.
(Puar, 2010: n.p.)
Reflecting on Puar’s analysis, debility invites new ways of thinking about and
politically agitating around our (labouring) bodies of debility. Many of us fail
to meet the demands of neoliberal ideals. And debility is to be found at that
moment when dis/ability collides. Inspired by Butler, when we gather and hold
the apparent paradox of dis/ability this permits us to explore how forms of human
life are being made through this complex. Recognising our debility, creates a
meeting ground, a dis/ability commons if you like, in which we each have, as
Harvey (1996) would suggest, the transformative and creative capacities of our
labouring bodies to fashion alternative modes of production, consumption and
exchange. Can we, appropriating Puar (2011: 152), create a society that acknowl-
edges, accepts and even anticipates dis/ability? Would this be a society enhanced
by debility politics?
This posthumanist perspective thinks again about capacity, resources and

potentiality; not as individualised phenomena but as phenomena located in the
relationships between one another. Labour is broadened to cross the im/material
divide. This is not simply about traditional work but also, following Hardt and
Negri (2000, 2004), forms of immaterial labour including care, support and
community activism. As we saw earlier in relation to Project 1, the skill and sophis-
tication of the parent of a disabled child to move across the dis/ability divide in
order to access services and, simultaneously, demonstratively celebrate their child’s
humanity clearly feed into a productive debility politics. Challenging the rise of
psychological labels and new forms of medicalising aspects of humanity feeds into
a debility politics that accepts rather than pathologises the inability of any of us
to match the neoliberal imperative. Appropriating the language of dis/ability and
debility indicates a coming of age of our biological citizenship. Queer theorists
such as Puar and others emphasise the im/material labouring potential of bodies:
thus supplementing Harvey’s rather ableist and modernist Marxist account.
In a time of affective economy – when more and more bodies come into
contact (Muñoz, 2009: 124) and we are being ever more encouraged to emote
about, talk of and feel our bodies – does debility speak truth to the power of ableist
and disability knowledges? Perhaps, debility demonstrates the failings of ability
discourses to have the final say. As Puar (2009, 2010) asks: Is there no such thing
as an ‘“adequately able” body anymore?’ Where will our debility take us in terms
of contesting dis/ability? Could we become dis/abled together? What forms of
humanity are demanded by human debility?
Conclusion: a long, slow death

As we come to a point where we seek alliance with others who share our precarious
bodies of debility, can we find any possible place for theorising together? A space
is provided by Berlant (2007) through her notion of slow death, a concept that
refers to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people
in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and
historical existence. We are, she suggests, all exhausted by neoliberalism and late
capitalism: we are all in slow death. Nevertheless, for some, this is more apparent,
for example ‘the bodies of U.S. waged workers will be more fatigued, in more pain,
less capable of ordinary breathing and working, and die earlier than the average
for higher-income workers, who are also getting fatter, but at a slower rate and
with relatively more opportunity for exercise’ (Berlant, 2007: 775). ‘For ordinary
workers’, she continues, ‘this attrition of life or pacing of death where the everyday
evolves within complex processes of globalization, law, and state regulation is an
old story in a new era.’ For Berlant, we do live a life but not very well.
Either side of the dis/ability binary we are joined together in our fights with
slow death. Alliances can be made. Interconnections should be sought. Dis/ability
and debility are already, by their social and economic constitution, moments of
slow death. Disabled activists and union workers have much in common. But,
dis/ability might also offer a challenge to those caught up in slow death who seek
recognition and identity through neoliberal projects of work, spend, improve,
work, die. Dis/ability might offer opportunities for reconsidering our relationships
with slow death. Could care, rather than work, be a place to find identity and
recognition? As the parents cited in this chapter demonstrate there are alternative
ways of living a life. Dis/ability provides a moment to intervene in slow death:
Why work yourself to death? Why work? Why sweat to improve one’s embodied
and cognitive lot; why be hyper-normal, clever, achieve? Why wear yourself out
with the normal? What do we gain when we fail to meet neoliberalism’s normative
labouring standards? For Kolárová (in press, np):
cripness is rich with failure; cripness is infused with negativity; yet we do

not always see it as such. The rich archive of the labour of crip failure is here
and at hand. Take only the crip culture and works by Bob Flanagan, Terry
Galloway, Carrie Sandhal, Lisa Merri Johnson, Greg Wallach and so many
more – but do we, as the crip community celebrate those as crip failures
that can sustain our visions of utopia and whose negative energies move us
towards the crip horizon?
These crip horizons might be found in dis/ability being, simultaneously, for and
against slow death. And in this worn-out place that we occupy we might find new
collectivities and assemblages that recuperate our possibilities. Together we might
find interdependent alternatives of life and living for our worn-out bodies.
7
BECOMING INCLUSIVE EDUCATION
Cripping neoliberal-able schooling
Dis/ability defines and compromises educational institutions. When disabled

children enter mainstream education they contravene the ableist ideals of
schooling. This chapter recognises inequitable structural horizons but develops the
thesis that working at the divide of dis/ability poses a challenge to the neoliberal
prerogative of contemporary educational institutions like schools and offers new
forms of connection, education, becoming and community. Specifically, in the
case of children and their allies working the dis/ability complex, they advance and
revise critical pedagogical approaches to education. The chapter is split into the
following sections:
1. Neoliberal-able education: schools as sweatshops

2. Dis/ability and a crisis of education
3. Cripping education: being disabled, becoming dis/abled
4. Crip pedagogies: becoming-crip and an ethics of integration
5. Conclusions/becomings.
Neoliberal-able education: schools as sweatshops

The biopolitics of neoliberal education reaches far and wide into the contem-
porary school, in and outside of the classroom. Sykes (2009), for example,
suggests that queer bodies are impacted by heterosexism, transphobia, ableism
and fat phobia in Canadian physical education. She maintains we deconstruct the
ways able-bodiedness is normalised through physical education discourses about
health, fitness, productivity and ability (Sykes, 2009: 249). Normative, anxious,
harmful discourses are ‘tenacious, flexible, and increasingly generated through the
neoliberal governmentality of physical education discourses that legitimate sexual
regulation, healthism, and able-bodied productivity’ (Sykes, 2009: 250). This
perceived threat to the sporty body hints at a more general societal and educational
hostility towards non-normative bodies.
Following Sedgwick (1990: 20–23), just as the homosexual panics of the
1970s pathologised the enactment of a socially sanctioned prejudice – obscuring
the systemic function of societal homophobia by suggesting that homophobes
were simply bad people – we are currently witnessing a resurgence of hate crime
against disabled people that are being explained in terms of a few mindless, evil
souls. Hate crimes are often portrayed in the media as yet further evidence of
individual criminality and the feral nature of the feckless. As we have demonstrated
elsewhere (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2011), however, hate crime might be
better understood as the symptomatic expression of an institutionalised disablist
systemic violence. Decreases in public expenditure, increased social unrest, inten-
sified feelings of social isolation amongst our communities will inevitably lead to
hostilities. And hostilities are often enacted against those who are perceived to be
amongst the weakest or disruptive in society. Add to this the dominant ideology
of neoliberalism: of self-governing, self-serving, moral responsibility for oneself
and one’s family, then anyone considered unable or unwilling to take on such a
citizenship role will receive a marked identity (Bauman, 2011) such as scrounger,
waster, dependent. The 2013 British Conservative Party conference in Manchester
flew a flag with the slogan, ‘For hardworking people’ – thus showing where their
loyalties lie.
These are crucial times for member organisations of civil society, including
disabled people, advocates, family and parental organisations. Oppressions, as
Sedgwick (1990: 36) shows us, are differently structured and complexly embodied.
We need a richly pluralised range of imaginings about (tackling) oppressions. One
wonders how children engaged with dis/ability will fair. This begs a question:
will disabled children (still) be allowed to access mainstream schooling? Erevelles
has made some exceptional interventions into the areas of special and inclusive
education over a number of years (e.g. Erevelles, 1996, 2002a, 2002b, 2005,
2011). Combining queer, postcolonial and disability studies theorists, she asks us
to think again about the ableist formations of schooling. Mindful of the impacts
of segregated schooling on North America’s poorest and most disenfranchised
disabled students, she views separatism as engendering ‘dis-belonging’ (Erevelles,
2011: 2157). Dis-belonging contrasts with, Yuval-Davis’s (2006) conceptuali-
sation of belonging, in which one find’s oneself spatially and psychologically cast
outside of the core community membership. Special schools are not always in the
locality of students’ communities. This distancing is magnified by the disconnect
of special from mainstream schools. Yet, while it might seem ideologically easier
to critique segregated schooling, dis-belonging can be found just as often in the
mainstream. Ordinary, mainstream public schools are arguably the quintessentially
most ableist of all institutions especially when one considers the shaping of bodies
and subjectivities described in Chapter 6. Schools serve governments well. They
are places of (self) governance. They are subjected to endless shifts and turns in
policy. They are shaped by whims of government ministers. ‘Even if students enjoy
Becoming inclusive education 101
spatial inclusion,’ Erevelles (2011: 2157) argues, ‘ideologies present in the school
curriculum serve to unwittingly construct certain student subjectivities as deviant,
disturbing and dangerous, therefore justifying their exclusion.’ To what extent do
the values of heteronormativity, ableism, maleness and whiteness merge in the
cultural constitution of schooling?
This is a question addressed by Erevelles (2011). She picks the account of
18-year-old, out and proud lesbian Constance McMillen from Mississippi, who
was tricked in to attending a separate school prom to that of her school. When she
arrived a small number of other students from her school had also been invited.
These students had the label of learning difficulties. The good news is that by all
accounts this segregated prom was a huge success. The issue, of course, relates
to why such a separatist activity was organised in the first place? For Erevelles
(2011) inclusive education is no longer the radical idea it was once purported to
be perhaps because ‘education’s pre-existing notion of normativity foregrounds
the exceptional characteristics of some students and can only at best allow for
tentative inclusion of these students who fail to research the normative standards’
(Erevelles, 2011: 2157–2158). The main thrust, Erevelles argues, appears to reside
in making different children less intrusive rather than shifting schools to become
more inclusive. The relocation of Constance to a separate queer/crip site during
the time of the school prom can be read as exemplifying this curious paradox of
inclusive (meaningfully involving all learners regardless of their different learning
styles or ways of being) education (an institutional process built on the standards of
ableism). Constance’s lesbian identity and the identities of students with learning
disabilities are infantilised: cast off from the right of passage of the mainstream
prom, a ritual associated with a normative coming of age. The prom has no time
for those who destabilise its heteronormative and ableist character. Unlike Stephen
King’s Carrie where the outsider brutally heaps her revenge on her tormentors,
Erevelles laments, Constance and her new crip prom colleagues remain outside
– dis-belonging.
During the time of Project 2, Katherine Runswick-Cole and I unearthed a
number of stories of what I now read as maintaining ableism through the exclusion
of disability.
There was a group of parents who said, ‘Oh we’ve got a trouble-maker child
coming into this school,’ and that has kind of lived on to haunt us really, that
this group of parents were not happy that Lily had suddenly joined her class.
And that’s kind of escalated, you know, they seemed to have identified Lily
with any trouble in the class and also alerted their children to the fact that
Lily’s trouble and so that any problems in the class Lily’s blamed for it. And it
may be she contributes to quite a lot of the trouble in the class, but not all of
it. To the point that just before Christmas a parent came up to my husband
before school to say that a group of them are trying to get Lily out of the
school, that they don’t think she should be there. So we immediately went
to see the head teacher and said what had been said to us and he instantly
knew who it was and one of the incidents that might have provoked that
reaction at the school disco the previous Friday. He said he would support us
and the school needed to be inclusive and he wasn’t prepared to have parents
saying that at the school gates to other parents. So he said he would tackle
it. And that was just before Christmas, so after Christmas he obviously had
this parent in whom, at that point, had written a formal complaint to the
school saying that the children were not safe and the school was failing in its
duty of care to the children by having Lily in the school. And that had gone
to the governors – was about to go to the governors, so he said that he was
supporting us and he didn’t think that it was as bad as she was saying and that
she’d labelled Lily and she was kind of tarring and feathering her and, you
know, for whatever reasons identifying Lily as more trouble than she actually
was ... so yesterday I sent a letter to the authority to say, ‘Please could Lily
be considered for special school entry for this September?’ So there’ll be a
lot of parents who’ll be very happy and I think the year five teachers and
SENCO [Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator] will be very happy. Lily
doesn’t know anything about it yet.
(Roberta, mother of Lilly)
We were told stories of kids with statements of Special Educational Needs being
transferred from their usual classrooms to the computer lab during exam times so
that their non-disabled peers could be assessed. Children with SEN were left to play
computer games while their teaching assistants were redeployed to help supervise
and support exams. An early years inclusion support teacher, Chris, told us:
Because of the very clear need of the schools to prove that they’re doing well
academically … even head teachers will say, ‘I’ve got all these targets at the
moment and you’re telling me to find the time to include this child?’
Lucy, mother of Ralf with learning disabilities, explained:
You don’t feel like you are a normal family any more, whatever normal is we
don’t know so we say we are disabled by association because again you end
up isolating yourself as a family you know you watch which places you go
to, you watch which activities you do, you look at who you interact with,
what shall we do if this happens, is it better not to go anywhere so you only
stay home all the time so Ralph wouldn’t get the same social experiences so
it is very, very hard to balance everything.
Roberta had two adopted children aged 10 and 12 with the label of global devel-
opmental delay and had explored mainstream and segregated provision:
So it was clear then, she was then kind of being rejected by her peer group,
not accessing the curriculum and we came to the point of thinking, ‘What
is the point of her being there?’ I mean, you know, school’s supposed to be
very inclusive … but it just wasn’t suiting her needs academically or socially
… they could have adjusted the curriculum, but they can’t adjust her peers,
and when they get a bit older and a bit more mature and a bit kind of cool
and cliquey she’s just – just out of it.
‘Out of it’ is a brutal way of explaining disability’s place in normal education.

Cooley (2011: 315) employs the queer analysis of Edelman’s book No Future (2004)
to evaluate the position of people with the label of intellectual disabilities in wider
cultural politics. Edelman’s work, Cooley suggests, exposes our culture’s binary
opposition of the ‘child-as-national-future’ and the ‘queer as society’s-biggest-
threat’. He implies that any society that stakes its perpetuity on the symbol of the
child will ultimately be hostile to those of its citizens who, like the dangerous,
futureless homosexuals, refuse to reproduce. Edelman questions the limited space
made for queer (and I would add crip) subjects in any society that emphasises
the importance of its own futurity. ‘The queer figure, and its adamant refusal to
adhere to a doctrine of “reproductive futurism,” becomes a sort of harbinger of
death, a sinister antithesis to the child who embodies the societal destiny’ (Cooley
2011: 315). Similarly, for Cooley, ‘the cognitively disabled come to occupy a
vague borderland between these two polarized figures’ (p. 315). The able child,
too, has to deal with the burden of being society’s future (Burman, 2008). Their
reproductive qualities are assessed through an extended reference to labour/work:
a practice that many engaged with the dis/ability complex will struggle with.
Dis/ability and a crisis of education

A trans-sectional study of dis/ability reveals resistance alongside marginalisation.
Erevelles (2011: 2160) articulates a newfound task for inclusive education: ‘to
come out crip’ and to talk back at discourses of compulsory normativity and
disablism. Following Davis (2002) and Erevelles (2011), we live in a dismodernist
world where transgression, difference and possibility are some of our biggest hopes.
Disabled children occupy the messiness of the borderlines – those transgressive sites
that ‘celebrate hybrid subjectivities and in which one can find the proliferation of
difference’ (Erevelles, 2011: 2181). The dis/ability paradox permits one to be in
and out of school. Disabled children offer an olive branch to educators: to embrace
a ‘dialogic ethic’ of collaboratively working together to develop ideas in local
contextual environments (Palmeri, 2006: 58).
Disability as the productive side of the dis/ability complex pervasively appears
in educational settings as a problem. Cue a host of commonly heard objections
to disability. Non-normative and badly disciplined children stalk our classrooms.
Disability disorders normative curricula expectations. Some kids just do not
have the wherewithal to ‘get it’. Disability opposes expectations of educational
achievement. Schools are measured for attainment and exams; disability haunts
these performative expectations and so school standards are lowered. In contrast, if
we were to adopt Brenkman’s (2002) image of disability as the anti-symbol of the

normative, then how might we rethink educational practices and philosophies?
Garland Thomson (2012) highlights the offerings of disability. These include
disability as a narrative (to rethink stories of our bodies), disability as an epistemic
resource (to think again about ableist standards of life) and disability as an ethical
resource (contesting fixed notions of disability found in official discourses of
medicine, science and professional texts). Disability as provocateur fits beautifully
with the accounts of the disability activist Paul Hunt (1966) and the decolonising
Black psychiatrist Franz Fanon (1976). As I have suggested in a previous piece,
what brings these two radicals together is their shared sense of provocation: that
those on the periphery of dominant culture occupy guerrilla positions (Goodley,
2012a). They enter the landscape, plant some ideas and watch what happens.
Disabled kids are guerrillas encroaching upon education.
Such radicalisation resonates with the dis/ability provocateur Rod Michalko
(2012b) who asks: how can we be humbled by disability? We might want to answer
Rod’s question in a number of ways. Disability demands humility on the part of
educators in terms of what they are trying to achieve in educational settings. The
presence of disability provokes a reconsideration of ableist education. Education’s
obsessive relationship with academic standards and school performativity becomes
destabilised or cripped by disability. Pedagogies are found lacking and educational
settings are revealed to be horribly instrumental. Disability exposes the failings of
educational institutions that still, after years of disability advocacy and activism,
fail to anticipate their responsibilities to a wide body of students and to the varied
bodies of individual learners. Being surrounded by such failings – and our candid
appreciation of their failings – provokes action. One of these, stealing from Tanya
Titchkosky (2012b), is evacuation: leave the institution! And only re-enter if and
when the institution has changed for the better. Disability, for Titchkosky, creates
a necessary crisis in education. We might push this further to examine how this
crisis might be characterised.
First, disability disturbs our image of the typical student. While the neoliberal,
ableist student is the ego ideal of the educational system, undergirding forms of
teaching, learning and assessment, many dis/abled students fail to match up to this
simulacrum of a pedagogical subject. Second, characterisation relates to the destab-
lisation of the practices of the typical teacher or educator. How often have we attended a
conference in the hope of learning only to be subjected to an endless, often far too
long, set of didactic lectures from experts in the field? I myself have been invited
to speak in public settings (normally universities) about the radical potential of
disability theory only to bore a room to tears with an hour-long diatribe (an hour
and a half if you’re unlucky) that invited no consistent moments of debate, conver-
sation and encounters. And I got my travel paid. If dis/ability studies scholars are
unprepared to crip their own standards within the academic space then how can
they believe that they are qualified to educate others about new inclusive ways of
learning? Fortunately, critical educators such as Paulo Freire and those who have
adapted his work (including Peter McClaren, Henry Giroux and bell hooks) have
contested hierarchical, top-down, expert-led and laden approaches to pedagogy

and proposed more inclusive alternatives. Third, disability contests the separation of the
school and the community. Schools are parts of communities. Community members
permit schools to exist. Any programme, philosophy or utopia of education as
inclusion has to cross the borders of school and community. Let us now explore
then what we might excavate from the wreckage of the educational crisis brought
upon it by dis/ability. Let us crip education.
Cripping education: being disabled, becoming dis/abled
So whereas the benefit of fitting is material and visual anonymity, the cost
of fitting is perhaps complacency about social justice and a desensitizing to
material experience. Misfitting, I would argue, ignites a vivid recognition of
our fleshliness and the contingencies of human embodiment.
(Garland Thomson, 2011: 598–599)
The clear misfit between (ableist) education and the dis/ability complex provides a
cause célèbre, emphasising the productive potentialities of non-normative children
to radically intervene in the workings of normative education. I seek to develop
a much-desired optimism about the possibilities engendered by dis/ability and
education. This is not, I hope, a cruel optimism depicted by Berlant (2010, 2011)
that holds on to the possibilities of transformation through the neoliberal project.
Rather, the optimism I desire is tied to postconventionalist notions of becomings,
machinic assemblages and rhizomatic connection (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).
These concepts are borrowed from the work of Deleuze and Guattari and postcon-
ventionalist dis/ability studies theorists (Hickey-Moody, 2006, 2009; Gibson,
2006; Shildrick, 2004, 2007, 2009; Shildrick and Price, 1999a, 1999b; Roets
et al., 2004; Vandekinderen, 2013; Allan, 2011; Mercieca and Mercieca, 2010;
Mercieca, 2011). Some of my own recent (collaborative) writing draws upon the
ideas of Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) to analyse the lives of disabled children and
their educational encounters (Goodley, 2007a, 2007b; Goodley and Lawthom,
2011; Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2013). Ramlow (2006: 181) offers a lovely
summative account of the theoretical contribution of D&G whom he describes as
‘opposing an understanding of desire and subjectivity constituted on an originary
lack and insufficiency, which by extension is reproduced in the normative ordering
of society’. Rather, Ramlow continues, ‘Deleuze and Guattari cast subjectivity as
machinic assemblages, and desire as productive of new and different relationships
and social arrangements’ (p. 181). Let us consider now the three concepts of D&G
that resonate with the misfitting potential of children engaged with the dis/ability
complex.
First, becomings. D&G conceptualise desire as a productive (not lacking) reaching
out for connection with others. Rather than the desire to be a particular kind of
subject (e.g. autonomous, functioning, self-contained), D&G ask: what might it
be like to desire becoming the other? How might we become in the company of
others? What kinds of connections might we make in the process of becoming
(with) other(s)? Too often we have seen the dangers created by segmenting
the subject along fixed binary lines (e.g. disabled/non-disabled; stupid/clever;
included/excluded). The question, therefore, is not which subject to become
(Lawlor, 1998) but how to escape the forces of subjectification that block flows of
desire (Goodley, 2007a). We should look for those moments when human subjects
transcend the given: to become and engage with places of immanence, to create
actions and results that are always becoming as lines of flight. We can extend this
notion through reference to our second concept, the rhizome.
A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between

things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is
alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric
of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and ... and ... and ...’. This conjunction
carries enough forces to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 27–28; original emphasis)
Rather than thinking of the dis/abled learner as a tree rooted in a particular soil
giving rise to a distinct form of arborescent growth, the rhizome pitches the learner
in a rich terrain as ginger or weed: multiply rooted, expansive, difficult to pin
down, potentially everywhere. The rhizome is not singularly rooted but multiply
interlinked and ever growing (Bearn, 2000). The dis/abled learner is no longer a
lacking subject nor a fixed entity (Goodley, 2007b). S/he is ever moving. A body
no longer embodied. A learner always plugged in to relationships with others. As
Smith (2013) suggests, the dis/abled learner is ever becoming. S/he is rhizome:
Write to the nth power, n – 1 power, write with slogans: Form rhizomes
and not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, forage! Be neither a One nor a Many,
but multiplicities! Form a line, never a point! Speed transforms the point
into a line. Be fast, even while standing still! Line of chance, line of hips,
line of flight. Don’t arouse the General in yourself! Not an exact idea, but
just as idea.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 27)
Rhizomes are constantly evolving and always becoming (Goodley, 2007b).

‘Rhizomatic learning’, then, for Allan (2011: 156) ‘is always in process, having to be
constantly worked at by all concerned, and never complete.’ This in-betweenness,
she argues, ‘is an inclusive space, in which everyone belongs and where movement
occurs’. Learning might constitute what Curti and Moreno (2010: 416–417)
define as ‘communal becomings; communities of relations, ethics and mappings
of togetherness which always challenge the delimitations of borders. Rhizomatic
learners constitute their own communal becomings’.
This leads us to the third concept of machinic assemblage. D&G reappraise
subjectivity by visualising self-and-others as types of machine and assemblages

that are ‘composed of multiple and variously embodied parts that interchange and
create new relationships, alliances, and communities’ (Ramlow, 2006: 181). One
popular example of a machinic assemblage of human/technology is the cyborg.
Grue (2013) has pointed to the potentials and pitfalls of the figure of the cyborg
as it relates to dis/ability. This builds on the careful analysis of Reeve (2012) who
refuses to be seduced by the sexy, spunky and irreverent nature of the cyborg
described by Siebers (2006). Disabled people’s relationships with technology are
not always desired, chosen nor productive. Lifesaving tubes to feed and painful
prostheses are hardly the stuff of sci-fi fantasy or transhumanist rebirth. That said,
as we saw in Chapter 2, dis/ability promotes a conversation with technology,
cyborgs and just as importantly (though perhaps not as marketable) extended
senses of self and competence. Technology enhances humanity – not simply in
the ways lauded by the transhumanists – but also on the level of the everyday.
Just as the wheelchair extends the embodied fleshy self into a close touching
sensual relationship with the machine – a classic D&G assemblage as described
by Shildrick (2009) and Gibson (2006) – so other technologies blur bodies/
machines in ways that would undoubtedly excite and whet the appetites of the
posthumanists. Erevelles (2002a: 29) celebrates the case of ‘persons with autism’
(sic) who use Facilitated Communication and are assisted ‘not only by the human
facilitator but also by Canon communicators, Apple Computers’. In occupying
such a distributed relationship between self/technology, Erevelles continues, ‘the
normative discursive structures that define autonomy and subjectivity in humanist
terms are radically disrupted’ (p. 29). This, she suggests, is because the dependence
of persons with autism on such technology ‘blurs the boundaries between
human beings and machines in order to re-define the subject in the image of
the blasphemous and transgressive cyborg – a hybrid of machine and organism,
a creature of reality as well as a creature of fiction (Haraway, 1990, p. 191)’. Dis/
ability is played with in some interesting ways here – shifting the perspective from
individual with profound communication difficulties in to a distributed entity at
the heart of a profoundly complex relationship between human–science.
Talk of technology is all well and good but I want to take heed of the alarm
bells sounded by Haraway (1990), Siebers (2006) and Grue (2013) against the
romanticisation of technology. Instead, I am attracted to more mundane cyborgian
relationships or machinic assemblages. I am raising the image of the posthuman
assemblage as a form of humanity always connected to and desiring of connections
with others. This posthumanist trope is one of a Body without Organs (another
D&G concept): a distributed process of becoming evoked by the presence of dis/
ability. Take, for example, Newell’s (2006: 278) account of living with a lack of
bowel control. This she argues ‘can be dealt with as tragedy’ or as ‘a matter-of-
fact approach to many of the life feared circumstances, an approach of embrace
rather than revulsion, means that we can live through, and indeed thrive and
learn through, the very conditions that we “know” to be so appalling’. Thriving
and learning through a matter-of-fact encounter, with others, around one’s body,
beautifully captures the potential of working at the dis/ability divide. If we accept

Meleo-Erwin’s (2012) view that bodily normativity is an unstable category that
must be constantly re/performed because it is always, in effect, failing – then
perhaps dis/ability activism ‘may be better framed in terms of what we desire rather
than who we are’ (p. 389). What kinds of desires are aroused by working through
in/dependence and dis/ability? One of these might be to desire what McRuer
(2006) terms a ‘critically queer/severely disabled’ perspective, which envisions
‘political solidarity among queer, seropositive, disabled, nondisabled, and hetero-
sexual individuals in a cultural moment when such coalitional alliances remained
fraught’ (Elman, 2012b: 322). Machinic assemblage might refer to ‘the flows of
energy that bring together separate objects – both living material and machinic
– to create surprising new assemblages. In place of the limits that the ideal of
independence imposes, the emphasis is on connectivity and linkage’ (Shildrick and
Price, 2006: n.p.). And this includes caring, loving relations, community ties and
relational associations; not the usual sexy cyborgian images one might evoke but
have equal importance.
Let us turn to a story from Project 2. This is the story of the Derbyshires, a
family that we came to work closely with, whose potentiality formed the focus
of a recent paper (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, forthcoming). I will provide
a D&G reading that builds on analyses offered in this paper. The story of the
Derbyshires is told in two parts. Part 1 demonstrates the dangers of being disabled.
Part 2 highlights the potentiality of becoming dis/abled; evoking the concepts of
becoming, rhizome and machinic assemblage.
Part 1 of the story – being disabled

Linda told us about the time she worked for a temping agency that asked her to go
and work in a company that employed disabled people. Linda told us that some of the
temps didn’t want to work there, but Linda was happy to go and was made to feel
very welcome. When tea break came the employees with learning disabilities had their
breaks and lunches in the staff canteen, however, the employees with physical impair-
ments would take their breaks and lunch in a separate room where they were served
tea in cups and saucers by people with learning disabilities. In the canteen people with
learning disabilities got their tea in mugs.
Fast forward to the early 1990s and Linda is a proud Mum of Hannah. Her
daughter has the label of learning disabilities. The secondary school is questioning
whether or not Hannah should be allowed to attend – or whether or not a segregated
special school might ‘suit Hannah better’. Linda and John had other ideas, they had
been determined from the beginning that Hannah should go to mainstream school –
they didn’t want her to be part of a ‘special needs merry-go round’. Hannah was
two and a half when Linda was told that Hannah had a ‘learning disability’. Linda
described how she held Hannah in her arms and made her a promise: that nobody
would hand her a mug, Hannah was going to be a teacup and saucer girl. Linda and
John found that having a daughter labelled ‘special needs’ was enough for some people
(even sometimes those who hadn’t event met her) to offer her the mug. They had to
fight to get Hannah into mainstream primary school and to keep her at mainstream
school. They challenged the attitudes of teachers, psychologists and other professionals
in their fight to keep Hannah in mainstream. At the same time, they challenged the
discriminatory attitudes of the other parents who left Hannah off the list of birthday
party invitations when they invited every child in the class to Hannah’s party.
(Goodley and Runswick-Cole, forthcoming, np)
Linda’s account explicates the dangers of being disabled. As we write in Goodley

and Runswick-Cole (forthcoming, np) ‘Hannah risks being given a mug like the
individuals with the label of learning difficulties in Linda’s recollections. Being
mugged captures the limitations of “being disabled” that can occur at what Curti
and Moreno (2010) identify as fixed boundaries between parent/child; school/
child; child/community; dis/abled’. The child risks being made Other: a learning
disabled student which Sykes (2009: 243) describes, I think really well, as an ‘ostra-
cized learning designation’. These fixed boundaries of being are tricky to transgress
and Hannah risks being known only in relation to the category of disabled.
Fortunately, Hannah and her family have some D&G tricks up their sleeves.
Part 2 of the story – becoming dis/abled

Hannah enjoys school. She has lots of friends and finds the teachers helpful. She
has recently completed some work experience at a local department store. This is hard
work but she enjoys arranging the clothes on the rails, making tea for herself and her
work colleagues and attending to the tills when punters come to pay for their garments.
A letter of commendation from the department store manager is proudly displayed
in her scrapbook at home. The scrapbook documents her many activities at the shop
and includes pictures of meals out with friends and family, the school prom and the
limousine that took her and her friends on prom night …
… Linda tells us how life has continued to be full of promise and potential since
they bought the caravan on the caravan park some 30 miles from home. They spend
most weekends down at the caravan. Within minutes of arriving Hannah is off to
the social club and bar which is situated in the centre of the park. Here Hannah
meets with friends, helps with the bar and more often than not discusses plans for
the Saturday disco with her pals. Linda and John feel like the caravan has given
the family freedom: space for Hannah to do what all teenage girls do and time for
them to spend a few hours as a couple catching up on the week. Some Saturdays are
punctuated by trips to their cherished football team for Hannah and her Dad. This
is the football ground where even the most prudish individual can be caught up in the
most outlandish of chants, irrational emotions and fanaticism. This is another space
of belonging.
Hannah’s presence in the school has made Linda say and do things that she
never envisaged she might do. She is an advocate. She is versed in knowledge of
disability legislation, disability living allowance and concepts of ‘eligibility criteria’
for disability support. Mum/advocate/expert hats are swapped continuously. Linda
has given herself no choice: Hannah will get her teacup and saucer. Linda’s expertise
is recognised by other parents who go to Linda for help in filling out forms and for
support in their battles with schools.
… Linda and Hannah sit nervously waiting for their timeslots. In a short time
both of them are going to give presentations at a conference in the university. Linda
will talk about fighting for Hannah’s inclusion in school. Hannah will proudly share
her story of work experience, parties and friendships. Conference delegates (children,
young people, parents/carers, professionals, activists and academics) will learn about
possibilities and hope.
(Goodley and Runswick-Cole, forthcoming, np)
Hannah and her family rhizomatically connect with one another. In so doing they
dispel assumptions of handicap and advance notions of capacity. The Derbyshires
make a very impressive family assemblage: an affirmation machine ready to
become, transcend and contest. Their assemblage works at the borders of dis/
ability. There is a dual sense of becoming dis/abled where categories of disabled
and able are worked through and weaved in and out of the story. Hannah is able
to go to a mainstream school. As a disabled person Hannah is protected by anti-
discriminatory legislation. But these are not isolated, neoliberal, autonomous
categories: Hannah provokes connection, support, alliance with others. She is
rhizome. Together with her family Hannah works the dis/ability complex. We
also can read her connections and lines of becoming in the caravan park, the
football ground and the school. In these contexts we find communal becomings
(Curti and Moreno, 2010). And, if becoming breeds uncertainty, then uncer-
tainty unavoidably opens us to new ideas, spaces and locations. The Derbyshire’s
machinic assemblage invites imaginings and practices that view the world in new
and exciting ways. The family/school borders are transversed. Following Goodley
and Runswick-Cole (2013a) the school is visited, assessed, educated and advised
by Linda. As Hannah enters the space of the caravan park then its members are
moved to consider their responsibilities around care, support and inclusion to
think, perhaps for the first concerted time, about their ‘affective relations of love,
care and responsibility that children’s revolutionary imaginings and their differenti-
ating geographical movements and actions create’ (Curti and Moreno, 2010: 424).
The story of the Derbyshires captures key elements of Newell’s (2006) thriving
and learning through the presence of dis/ability that pushes the family assemblage
to contest the assumptions that are drawn to this divide. Rigid notions of educa-
tional readiness for learning are disrupted by a child that rhizomatically invites a
host of social actors including parents, children and community members to join
with her. This is neither without conflict nor without moments of exclusion: as
testified in part 1 of the story of the Derbyshires. At the very least ableist concep-
tions of behaving well and pathological diagnoses of disruptive behaviour were
brought out into the open for discussion and debate. In thinking about queer
politics, Sothern (2007: 157) asserts that ‘it is important that disability studies be
careful to realize that the struggle for disabled sexual liberation cannot be based
upon normative sexual constructions, for these may ultimately prove antithetical to
the project of dismantling ableism itself ’. One could say the same about schooling.
The Derbyshires illustrate the possibilities for cripping education.
Crip pedagogies: becoming-crip and an ethics of integration
Northtown is a co-located special school. The deputy head told me that both the head
of Northtown and the mainstream school head were keen to co-locate. They both saw
this as an opportunity for inclusion but also saw the potential that sharing resources
might have for improving provision for both schools. The schools share the sports
facilities, canteen, school hall and theatre. The schools share one reception area but the
special school is on one half of the building and the mainstream school on the other.
The Deputy Head told me that the special school parents had accepted co-location
as a positive step, partly because they could see that their children would have access
to better resources and partly because the school moved a very short distance. Many
children in the special school come from the local area and are therefore part of the local
community, so there is a sense that they share a sense of community with peers. The
Deputy Head said there had been concerns that the mainstream pupils would tease
or stare at or name call the disabled pupils but this hasn’t happened. He felt that this
had been a very positive outcome of the re-location. The school itself is extremely well
appointed with break out areas, interactive whiteboards, sensory room, huge accessible
changing/toilet facilities, music, art, science rooms and soft play. The atmosphere in
the school was incredibly calm and purposeful with children engaged in a range of
practical activities. The art room was stunning and I met the art teacher who the
Deputy Head described as ‘bonkers’ but brilliant. This seemed to be a bit of a theme
among the staff. Another teacher was constructing a display that would use lighting to
move from day to night and different creatures would emerge throughout the day. This
was alongside his construction of a display, which glows under UV lights. He uses
projectors to display moving pictures of animals and UV paint to bring to life a huge
ant. He explained how he had used a projector to take the children to the moon and
that they had asked ‘where are we?’ then speculated on the fact that they couldn’t live
there because there was no water. He said that there was no way his pupils could have
learnt this looking at books. The Deputy Head said that the science teachers from the
mainstream school had said ‘why can’t we teach science like this?’’
(Ethnographic field notes by Katherine Runswick-Cole cited in Goodley and
Runswick-Cole, 2010: 287)
My colleague Katherine’s field notes, represented above, perceptively capture the

elusive nature of inclusive teaching. As another story from Project 2, Katherine
urges us to connect with the rhizomatic relationships between students, teachers
and families. That a ‘good teacher’ is aligned with madness (‘bonkers’ being British
slang for such a term) is instructive: we open up the negated Other of neoliberal-
ableist schooling. Rather than viewing madness as pathological, as Crowley (2010)
suggests is usually the case when a clinical imposition is inserted, we recast madness
as productive: bonkers – becoming Other. Ferri et al. (2011: 223) suggest that too
much research in special and inclusive education often adopts a ‘unidimensional
focus on what works’ which ‘may inadvertently lose sight of what matters’. Crip
pedagogies, according to Fox (2010) twist our expectations of pedagogy, defamil-
iarise it, and render it anew in ways that open up new kinds of possibility. Cripping
is radical. It is also edgy. Crip pedagogues experiment with their learning methods
in order to get closer to Others (the students): to become-student, become-learner
and inexorably, become-Other.
Becoming-Other might also be termed becoming-crip: embracing those
moments of interconnection between teachers–students and self–others that
transcend normative pedagogies and ‘traditional constructions and arbitrations of
the “ideal student”, embodied in Western-centric and neoliberal constructions
of pedagogical discourse’ (Liasidou, 2012). Crip pedagogies involve ‘immersing
ourselves in the flow of life’s perception’ (Colebrook 2002, 12, quoted in Mercieca,
2011: 9). Colebrook continues:
The human becomes more than itself, or expands to its highest power,
not by affirming its humanity, nor by returning to animal state, but by
becoming-hybrid with what is not itself. This creates ‘lines of flight’; from
life itself we imagine all the becomings of life, using the human power of
imagination to overcome the human. (My italics)
Lines of flight are rhizomes. And vice versa. As we already know, the rhizome ‘is
a plant that grows horizontally, is able to creep (therefore move) and adapt itself
relatively easily to new environments and circumstances’ (Mercieca, 2011: 9).
The crip pedagogue – our bonkers/brilliant teacher – is also (always) rhizomatic:
territorialising new environments. As another rhizomatic teacher puts it ‘my
purpose with all these strategies, then, is ultimately to blur the divide between
disabled and nondisabled, to multistream rather than mainstream, to complicate
that binary rather than eradicate differences in some kind of elusive or illusory
search for universals’ (Fox, 2010: 46). To reiterate: crip pedagogy complicates
the dis/ability complex. Our Northtown school, then, appears to be made up of
intense moments of breeding inclusivity; moments that Liasidou (2012) equates
with belonging and meaningful participation in mainstream neighbourhood
schools. Inclusive education, she argues, involves fostering new regimes to make
schools and teachers redistribute and focus resources on groups of students who
are entangled in a complex web of social and educational disadvantage (Liasidou,
2012). That this inclusive work takes place in and outside of a co-located special
school should not mean that its work is downgraded. On the contrary, and
demonstrated by Greenstein (2013), many moments of radicalism, disrupture
and democratic practice can be found in so-called special schools: contexts
that have traditionally been rejected by some inclusive education scholars and
activists. Greenstein’s anarchist postconventionalist analysis of a Special Needs
Unit (SNU), housed in a mainstream school, demonstrated ample opportunities
for engaged pedagogies and relational ethics between staff and pupils. When
these becoming-together interconnections were working well then this fostered
a sense of belonging, shared pride and a context that stressed enthusiasm and joy.
As one of the mantras of the SNU puts it: ‘There’s no I in team’ (Greenstein,
2013: 221).
This recognition of the potential radicalism at the special/mainstream schooling
divide evokes the D&G educational scholarship of Semetsky (2012), who proposes
an approach to pedagogy that embraces becoming-Other as part of an ethics of
integration. ‘Learning’, she writes, ‘presupposes an encounter with something as
yet unknown … and in order to make sense for this experience we will have to
create new meanings and concepts in practice’ (Semetsky, 2012: 49). This might
be learning without books. This might also be an encounter with the Other of
disability. From a D&G perspective, ‘education would begin not when the student
arrives at a grasp of the material already known by the teacher, but when both
of them together begin to experiment in practice with what they might make of
themselves and the world’ (Semetsky, 2012: 50). Remember Katherine’s story of
Northtown: why can’t we all teach science like this? Our bonkers/brilliant teacher
and his pupils are experimenting together. This conjunction of teacher and pupil
is crucial to a productive educational moment. ‘It is the conjunction “and” that
enables interaction between the otherwise dualistic opposites, such as self and
other, or subject and object, or teacher and student, and connects them in a
rhizomatic network of relations so that both are transformed by mutual experience’
(Semetsky, 2012: 54). Our bonkers/brilliant/becoming-Other teacher calls out to
all teachers and students from across mainstream and special settings to revisit their
practices. This is, following Friedrich et al. (2010), a rhizomatic connection with
potential for thinking through what is meant by democratic education. At the
heart of this inclusive practice is the desire to connect with dis/abled students: for
teachers to become-Other.
Such a desire ‘emerges from our awareness of moral interdependence, that is,
self-becoming-other by means of entering into another person’s frame of reference
and taking upon oneself the other perspective. In the context of education, to
become capable, explicitly or implicitly, of becoming-Other, means to confirm
the potential best in both oneself and another person’ (Semetsky, 2012: 55). The
disabled student, then, is shifted from a fixed position of incapacity (being disabled)
to a dynamic image of potential and becoming-learner (becoming dis/abled).
Semetsky relates this shifting pedagogy to an ethics of integration ‘that should help
us in overcoming the dualistic split between self and other, to integrate “the other”
completely’ (p. 56), and goes on:
I propose that the ethics of integration, as a follow-up to the ethics of care,

should emphasize the relations and interdependence, at the ontological,
psychological, socio-cultural and ecological levels alike.
(Semetsky, 2012: 57)
Paralleling this approach I have suggested elsewhere (Goodley, 2007a) that D&G
and pedagogy overlap in key affirmative ways:
• Refuting the static formation of human subjects, e.g. good and bad learners
– all, instead, are becoming-learners.
• Challenging the fixed boundaries between disabled and non-disabled bodies
– thus opening up dis/ability to enquiry.
• Promoting the interconnected nature of human becomings – crip pedagogies
become-Other in interdependent ways.
A D&G crip pedagogy emphasises interdependent human activity and productive

desire. Our bonkers/brilliant teacher invites others to form a plane of immanence
on which non/disabled learners create new concepts and values (Goodley,
2007b). And if desire is productive then (dis/abled) students are always considered
productive. To engage with different forms of meaning making. To decon-
struct disability/impairment via rhizome. To becoming-learners and, crucially,
becoming-educators together (Goodley, 2007b). Our school story promotes
new sensibilities for all involved in the doings of pedagogy. Crucial to critical
pedagogies is experimentation with a caring pedagogy: not in terms of caring
for subjects but caring becomings. As I have argued elsewhere (Goodley, 2007a:
332):
this may well involve elucidating those everyday happenings that constitute
social justice: caring, reciprocity in the educational relationship, ordinariness,
extraordinariness, intuition and personal shared understandings between the
agents of pedagogy. It also involves accepting and facilitating becomings
rather than beings. Creating concepts not in order to determine some
things’ essence but as vehicles for expressing events: pedagogy of the concept
(Peters, 2004).
And, following Greenstein (2013: 225–226) relational becomings should be

‘guided by a stance of getting-to-know, openness to communication that recog-
nises differences cannot be erased and that sees conflict and resistance as inevitable
within human relations, but as a productive positivity’.
Conclusions/becomings
How to speak disability? It might help us to pose and to love difficult

questions, without effacement, without erasure and to immerse ourselves
amid the enduring mystery that is body, affect, becoming; becoming
pedagogy, becoming disability.
(Crowley, 2010: 555)
In this chapter we have sought to explore postconventionalist analyses of education,

pedagogy and community. These theoretical ideas have been checked by a number
of stories from Project 2. We have examined the ways in which the presence
of disability and working the divide of dis/ability make particular demands of
educational institutions and their members. While the able side of the coin lies at
the heart of neoliberal schooling, flipping the coin to introduce the disabled side
urges us to ask what problems and possibilities are posed by disability to current
educational practice. It is true, at the very least in Global North countries, that we
are witnessing a narrowing of curricula, a loosening of power of the unions, less
community–school dialogue about the meaning of education and an intensification
of performativity, assessment and measurement of schools, teachers and children
alike. Dis/ability allows a moment to pause, reflect and re-evaluate. What do you
want from education? Whose interests are being served? What kinds of human are
valued and made by contemporary educational praxis? Through working the dis/
ability divide we can address these questions whilst, crucially, releasing new possi-
bilities, vocabularies and practices for thinking of education anew.
8
THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF THE
NORMALS
Why people are so messed up around dis/ability
We now move to consider the ableist undertones of culture. We will draw upon
findings from Project 3 to interrogate everyday responses to dis/ability. With
reference to the accounts of disabled people we will employ what Watermeyer
(2012) defines as a critical psychoanalytic perspective. This will lead us to the
uncanny nature of disability and the ways in which it provokes cultural and
community forms of anxiety, projection, fascination, disavowal and erasure. These
responses may be viewed as symptoms of a wider malaise amongst ‘the normals’
or cultural psychopathology of ableism (Goodley, 2013a, 2013b; Goodley and
Runswick-Cole, 2013a). While the disability end of the dis/ability complex evokes
fear it also invites fascination. This ambivalence provides us with an opportunity:
to playfully consider how we might therapeutically, culturally and politically help
‘the normals’ to reject their impossible ableist ideals and, instead, embrace the
resistant position of ‘the disabled Other’. It makes sense also to view the normals’
reaction to disability as, simultaneously, a reaction to their own precarious ability.
Hence, again, we work away at the dis/ability phenomenon. The chapter is split
into the following sections:
1. The normals: an introduction

2. Social psychoanalytic concepts, psycho-political interpretations
3. The psychopathology of ableism: six analytical themes
4. Conclusion: therapeutic intervention in the lives of the normals.
The normals: an introduction

In order to investigate non-disabled people’s verbal and non-verbal reactions to
disability, I have chosen to refer to the former group as the normals. We know
that not all normal people engage exactly in the same ways to disability. Many
individuals we might suspect of being normal are advocates, friends, supporters,

family, parents and partners of disabled people. Each of us is marked by differences
associated with class, gender, age, sexuality and ethnicity. The normal category
exists not as a simple fixed position of humanity but as a register, a subject position,
a preferred way of living life and a phenomenon of ableist cultures. Being normal
is one of society’s preferred ontological states and moral categories. Remaining
normal is a somatic preoccupation of contemporary life. Normality is a preferred
moral category of neoliberal-ableism. The normal is chosen over other synonyms
such as the able-bodied (Wendell, 1989), normalcy (Davis, 1995), the normate
(Garland Thomson, 2005) or ableist normativity (Campbell, 2009) to emphasise
the cultural, relational and psychological processes involved in distancing the
(non-disabled) normal self from the (disabled) abnormal other. Normal is
dominant culture that struggles with the precarious nature of trying to be what it is
often not. Just as disability functions as a narrative prosthesis – a prop on which to
lean and emphasise the preference for ability – so abnormality is made to be known
by those confused, unstable and ambivalent souls on the normal side of society.
Normals respond to disability in terms of curiosity and dismissal because disability
is actually the most common grounds on which to forge a normal humanity.
Thinking through ab/normal takes us to the epicentre of the dis/ability complex.
Social psychoanalytic concepts, psycho-political interpretations

Let us flesh out some specific psychoanalytic concepts that will help us account
for the psychical and cultural practices of the normals in their encounters with
dis/ability. In the spirit of social psychoanalysis (Goodley, 2011b), critical psycho
analysis (Watermeyer, 2012) and psycho-politics (Hook, 2004), these concepts
will be contextualised against a backdrop of disablism and ableism, politicising our
theory of the normals’ neuroses.
As we suggest in Goodley and Lawthom (2013a) the uncanny is a Freudian
psychoanalytic term denoting something that is ‘undoubtedly related to what
is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror … that class of frightening
which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (Freud, 1919: 219,
cited in Allison, 2004: 277). The uncanny is a typically contradictory psycho-
analytic term. The first sense is the most literal: domestic, familiar and intimate.
The second meaning departs from the positive, literal sense to the more negative
metaphorical sense of hidden, secret, clandestine, furtive. What appears unfamiliar
and unhomely is actually familiar and homely. Uncanny things are simultaneously
familiar and unfamiliar, strange and terrifying, fearful and fascinating (Carlin,
2008). It is impossible to encounter the uncanny without getting caught up in it
(Allison, 2004: 281). When faced with the uncanny we may ask ‘Why does this
strange thing seem so familiar?’ ‘Why is the uncanny provoking such feelings of
fear but also fascination?’ The thing is, you see, normals are often obsessed with
dis/ability (and either side of the binary).
What do we do with the uncanny? We engage with its contradictory nature
The psychopathology of the normals 119
through contradiction: we bring it home and expel it; look at and look away;
see the familiar and augment the strange. While disability has long been equated
with death, evil, animalism, monstrosity and inhumanness (Cubbage and Thomas,
1989) it has historically been a figure of intimate fascination, study, curiosity and
charity. Why? Because disability includes the hidden yet present referent of ability.
It should come as no surprise to argue that dis/ability is an uncanny thing. After
all it exists as an apex between binaries such as in/competent, strange/familiar and
ab/normality. Reactions range from hatred, to benign curiosity, to desire. These
reactions might be broadly termed as disavowal: the simultaneous contradictory
and ambivalent response to the uncanny (see also Hevey, 1992, and Shakespeare,
1994). So what does disavowal tell us of the collective psyche of the normals?
Drawing on the psychoanalytic writings of Lacan, Goodley (2012b) and Goodley
and Runswick-Cole (2013a), I argue that disabled bodies (and minds) expose the
ontological insecurities of the normals’ psyche, body and culture. While all bodies/
minds fail to match up to the autonomous, whole, speaking subject demanded by
the imaginary and symbolic aspects of neoliberal-able culture, the normals deal
with such failings by finding failings in Others. Disabled people are cast out by the
normals as the true other: ‘You are lacking not I’. Simultaneously, and paradoxi-
cally, people mourn the loss of dependence and narcissism associated with their
early lives where they were nothing more than a psychic scrambled egg, a desiring
body in flux, nurtured by the love of the primary (m)other (Goodley, 2012b).
Disability – as one of the key markers of dependence – appears as a reminder of
nurture that is so often desired though made to be repressed. Disability is a curious,
familiar thing: ‘what must it mean to be disabled?’ These normative reactions to
disability need to be understood in the emerging socio-cultural and economic
context of modernity. Hughes (1999) observes that the oppression of disabled
people is umbilically linked to the constitution of impairment in modernity.
Hence, Hughes (1999) is quick to point to the ways in which impairment is
invalidated by modernist modes of perfectionist perception that render disabled
people as strangers. But disability is not simply rejected; it also entices and intrigues
the ableist register. The uncanny refers to that part of culture that is imbued
with uncertainty, tied to narcissistic time of life, where the body dominated long
before the lifelong obsession with knowing the self (ego), following the law of
the father (superego) and the control of desire (id). Disabled people become
essential uncanny uncertain objects of modern society. Disabled people populate
that uncanny space that resides between strange/familiar, alive/dead and animate/
inanimate. Hence, normative society responds to this uncanny phenomenon in
some often contradictory ways, as evidenced by Rachel’s email:
On a more mundane level I am often approached by people in the street

where I live saying that it is nice to see me getting out. They mean this
kindly, but to me it suggests that their view of disabled people is that they
stay at home all the time and no longer take part in any community activities
… On the other hand I have family and friends who see me rather than a
disabled person. They will automatically adjust what they are doing to make
sure that I am able to join them and don’t go on about it. It’s not all bad.
(Rachel)
Similarly, a number of respondents indicated that they found it ‘only human’

for people – in particular children – to be curious of disability. Other responses,
as we shall see, were more extreme replacing curiosity with almost psychotic
forms of abuse and marginalisation. Disavowal documents, then, these moments
of cultural catharsis, projection, anxiety, paranoia, uncertainty and ambivalence
on the collective part of the normals towards the phenomenon of disability.
We can add to these moments a number of other psychoanalytic responses. The
paper by Hook (2004) provides a culturally and politically charged reading of
psycho analysis inspired by the Martinique-born French-Algerian psychiatrist,
philosopher, revolutionary and writer Frantz Fanon. We briefly touched upon
Fanon in Chapter 3, but we revisit his work here to think through some of the
ways in which he appropriated the terms of psychoanalysis in order to make
sense of the impacts of colonial racism in his classic text Black Skin, White
Masks (1993). Hook is drawn to Fanon because of the potential to explain the
cultural antecedents and the psychical workings of racism. Their shared project
has parallels with our study of dis/ability. Fanon’s version of the development of
the European collective unconscious – the repressed Other within us – is purely and
simply the sum of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group (Hook,
2004: 126). Projection is a process by which specific aspects of self, or certain
wishes or impulses, are imagined to be located in something or someone else. ‘It
means that the individual is able to avoid confronting certain truths about him
or herself, and hence functions as a means of avoiding guilt’ (p. 120). The black
man, for Fanon, is often a projection object of white culture: seemingly naturally
embodying unruly desire. But these desires are actually those of the dominant
culture that are projected onto all of culture. Ambivalence is defined by Hook
(2004: 121) as a ‘phenomenon in which powerful emotional reactions appear
to coexist with contrary affective impulses (even if these contrary impulses exist
at a predominantly unconscious level)’. The black is not simply an object to be
rejected, negated or erased; he is, for Fanon, an ambivalent object: generating in
equal measure fear and fascination. The black male body is simultaneously desired
and feared; just as the disabled mind – epitomised by the ‘autistic savant’ – is both
pushed away (excluded from school settings) and admired (for his purportedly
special gifts: see the movie Rain Man for details). Paranoid anxiety for Hook (2004:
123) refers to the ‘irrational, yet consistent belief that one is being systematically
undermined, persecuted or attacked by a “bad” object, that is, a person, group
or thing which intends to do me damage’. Just as the black community evokes
paranoid anxiety in the white racist so too the disability community strikes fear
in the ableist register.
The psychopathology of ableism: five analytical themes

Armed with our psychoanalytic arsenal we now ‘stalk ableism’ (Campbell, 2012)
through an analysis of our respondents’ accounts from Project 3, in light of
the ideas of the uncanny and disavowal, allowing us to loiter at the bifurcated
complex of dis/ability. We should, of course, acknowledge that the term psycho-
pathology has a dangerous genealogy and problematic historical association with
dis/ability. My use of the term, however, owes something to a critical reading of
psychoanalysis and the view that this approach grapples with complex interplays
between culture, society and the psyche (Goodley, 2011b). I use psychopathology
playfully: to turn the psychopathological gaze back onto the normals. Disavowal
and uncanny do emerge as strong conceptual ideas with empirical adequacy (the
data appear to be captured by them), comprehensiveness (the ideas work across a
body of rich data) and coherence (the concepts stand up/sit well to their usage in
relation to stories collected). Yet, these concepts only display their merits when
they are firmly enshrined within an epistemology that situates any relational,
psychology or embodied response, reaction or feeling within the wider context
of a society that disables Others (that is makes the disabled other an abject erased
Other or fascinating Other) and (often as a hopeless cause) precariously upholds
the standards of being not, non, or far-as-possible from disabled – of being normal.
Charitable donations: disavowal par excellence

In Goodley and Lawthom (2013a) we suggest that disavowal is often found in
those clumsy attempts on the part of the normals to recognise disability in ways
that actually negate it:
Incidentally, the friends with the ASD child get comments like ‘We love
[your son] regardless of what he has.’ Something I would find incredibly
offensive.
(Babs)
This remark is classic ambivalence: knotted up in a contradictory relationship with

disability. Furthermore, the admittedly implicitly ableist saying ‘giving with one
hand and taking with the other’, perfectly captured in the following acts of charity
on the part of the normal, encapsulates disavowal:
One time I was in a lift and an old lady wanted to give me money and I told
her ‘Madam, I don’t need it, I work’ and she kept saying ‘But take it’ and I
got the money, it was a coin, one euro. She was very insistent and I had to
take it otherwise she would be upset. So then she was happy and for me it
was fine. She could’ve given me more money, right?!
(John, interviewed by Ema Loja)
Dan, I had a story from one of my students. She and her partner both use
guide dogs and had arranged to meet outside a popular Liverpool pub at
the end of their day. Her husband got there first and was drinking a can of
coke while he was waiting. A passer by approached him and forced a pound
coin in his can.
(Troy)
This is recognition characterised by pity and charity. In the second account, the
normal passer-by deals with the ambivalent character before him, chooses not to
recognise a man having a drink but presumably responds to the cultural signifier
of the wheelchair as signifying charity. One might also see this as a very extreme
response to paranoid anxiety. In Babs’s story, above, the normative imaginary
charitably responds to the disabled child through looking at and then looking away.
This was demonstrated to us by a family in Project 2 who on coming to pay for
their tickets on the ride at a theme park were told by the attendant: ‘Don’t worry
your child can come on for free because we do not charge for retards.’ Children are
aware of this disavowal and may use it to fit their own requirements:
Memories: My older sister taking me (in my clearly displayed leg splints) to

ice cream vans and her explaining that her poor sister is disabled so we would
both get free ice cream. (This always worked, ingenious of her, really). I
also used to do this, as awful as it sounds ... I have one memory of being
in Harrods Food Hall aged about 7 yrs and going round and asking for free
stuff because I was aware that being a disabled child was a powerful thing,
particularly to adult women. I ended up with a massive cardboard tub full
of free Harrods cakes and nibbles ... I also, aged around 8/9, (this is really
bad), would write to celebrities telling them about my disability (the ‘woe
is me’ story) and they would send me free stuff ... I had obviously caught on
to the fact that it was very easy to evoke peoples’ pity, and that this could
be productive.
(Karen O)
The choice of the term ‘productive’ is insightful here: in which the uncanny of
disability is utilised as a means to access one end of the axes of disavowal (the
giving). ‘Free stuff’ is elicited through exploiting the paranoid anxieties of the
ableist register and playing the giving end of disavowal. The question is, of course,
who wants to live as a charity case? Sadly, if we are to accept that the collective
unconscious of normal society views disability-as-charity, it is difficult to see how
disability can be wrenched free from such an embedded worldview. Similarly,
work, support or alliance with disabled people is often in danger of being wrapped
up in the politics of charitable giving:
I sometimes work as a personal assistant – especially when it’s pub time. I

was pushing my office mate Randall in his wheelchair across the street when
an elderly white-haired woman patted me on the shoulder and gave me a

‘knowingly’ nod and a big grin while also smiling at Randall … [later] As
Ryan and I were walking together, another woman who was walking in the
opposite direction stopped in her tracks to smile and nod at me in approval.
She quickly frowned and gave a bit of a harrumph when she saw we were
opening the door to the liquor store.
(Kurdt)
A stranger told my wife she was a heroine for looking after me when in reality
she has an invisible impairment and I have worked to enable her to be well!
(Peter)
Workers, assistants and supporters risk being beatified by association with dis/ability.
(Ableist) Jesus wants you for a sunbeam

One way of addressing disability-as-uncanny is to seek its annihilation (Hughes,
2009). This psychotic reaction is, arguably, rationalised by an ableist epistemology
that maintains cure, rehabilitation and treatment. While much of the critical
disability studies literature has emphasised medicalisation, less interest has been
spared to the religion of the normals as a hotbed of disavowal (Goodley, 2011a;
Grech, in press):
When I was sixteen a man came up to me and a friend in a cafe, told me

that Jesus loved me, gave me $20 and then walked off ignoring my protests.
I was really offended, though my friend thought it was great and suggested
that we buy cake.
(Kissy)
I’ve had people knock on my car window pretending to know me … to

tell me about how Jesus can heal me … I’ve had so many of these experi-
ences and they are always public, embarrassing, draw attention to me and
emphasise that I am not normal.
(Heather)
A toilet attendant in a ladies public convenience in Ireland asked me what

had happened and when I said ‘Nothing happened, I have MS’. She threw
her apron over her face and suggested that was awful and I should try going
to the Lourdes in France to be cured.
(Petra)
Religion is not simply a heart in a heartless word but also a helpful practice for
dealing with everyday neuroses and collective unconscious conflicts. ‘The disabled’
emerge as an object of practices that permit religious practices around the saviour.
Intimate and inappropriate invitations

In contrast to Wendell (1989: 248) who argued that ‘able-bodied people [sic] do
not want to know about suffering caused by the body’ many of the respondents
divulged accounts of normals demanding knowledge about the disabled body.
Rather than deal with one’s own failing ontological and embodied progress – a
key marker of neurosis and debility politics described in the last chapter – it would
appear that the normals displace this urge by seeking answers in an other’s appar-
ently questionable bodily integrity. Rosa wrote:
I have noticed that most obnoxious interactions I’ve had, in the form of
inappropriate questions, tend to be from drunk 30ish year old men in bars
… But I think that both alcohol and religion are just different ‘excuses’ for
feeling that it’s okay to talk to someone you don’t know about their body.
In a taxi coming from the airport. The driver asked ‘Can you have sex?’ (I
wasn’t being propositioned, I am certain he just wanted to know if it was
possible rather like some alien species!). My answer ‘If I felt like it’. And that
was that. Life among the non-disabled is never boring!
(Courtney)
Interest in the sexualised potential of the disabled body has been captured in
previous work by Shakespeare et al. (1996) with Campbell (2009) commenting that
the sexed disabled body is increasingly a festishised entity. Fanon (1993) claimed
that it is through the projection of sexual anxiety and/or guilt onto the figure of
the black (who is, after all, characterised as uncivilised, barbaric, uncultured) that
the European avoids a neurotic sense of his own sexuality. We can conclude similar
things about the normals’ projections onto the sexualities of those that they consider
to be non-normal. We know that many disabled women are subjected to normals’
curiosity with their sex lives (Wendell, 1989) but this also appears to extend to
disabled men:
The hotel manager was clearly surprised when we preferred a double bed. I
look forward to your paper; recent media coverage of disabled people in the
right wing redtops [tabloid newspapers] worries me a great deal as it seems
to give permission for this sort of ill informed or even hostile interaction
when in public as a disabled person.
(Alan)
Borrowing from Fanon (1993) we could argue that the disabled body evokes a
moment of cultural catharsis: where highly sexed desires, interests, fascinations
and questions of the normals are purged on to the unlucky disabled recipient. On
other occasions the disabled body is considered to sit so far outside of (hetero)
normative modes of sexuality, that this evokes not only questions around intimacy
but an invitation to be more broadly intimate with disabled people’s bodies, often
without their consent:
My partner and I were out for lunch in a local pub that was quite full and we
couldn’t find an empty table. We were waiting at the bar and an older woman
approached and invited us to use their table because they had nearly finished.
Without warning she kissed me on the cheek and said to my partner ‘Doesn’t
she have lovely rosy cheeks.’ Unusually for him my partner challenged her
and was surprised when I couldn’t be bothered to set her straight.
(Charlotte)
Yoko shared this with me:
‘How wonderful for you’ people tell me about my guide dog. ‘They are such
good companions aren’t they’ … etc. and on and so forth along the lines of
‘at least you have a dog’ which for some reason makes me feel slightly feral
myself. As if I should never, being disabled, be even thinking of getting a
boyfriend when a dog is clearly good enough.
George emailed me these two little gems:
Two stories for you.
STORY 1
I am sitting in my wheelchair in the checkout queue at B and Q behind me is
a non-disabled man about my own age (mid 50s), he is a total stranger to me.
Man: Do you mind if I ask you a question?
Me: (Through gritted teeth) No go ahead.
Man: Can you still have sex?
Me: Not here let’s go behind the wallpapers!
STORY 2
Again in a checkout queue. A five-year-old boy sidles up to me.
Boy: Can you push that (points at my wheelchair) around this shop?
Me: Yeah
Boy: Can you push that ALL AROUND this shop? (Clearly he is
unconvinced)
Me: yes of course I can.
Boy: Can you push that ALL AROUND this shop BY YOURSELF?
Me: Yes
Boy: (In an exasperated tone) Can you push that ALL AROUND this store
WITHOUT YOUR MUMMY?
Me: YES! (Now I am exasperated)
Boy: MMMMMM He’s still not convinced.
What interested me was that the boy was genuinely curious and trying
to put me somewhere within his own experience of prams etc. (I guess).
The man however was much more worrying after all i am a 22 stone 6' 2''
(When I could stand up) Glaswegian, bearded, long haired and would
fit the stereotype of Billy Connolly’s older slightly harder cousin. Had I
been standing next to him in the queue I expect he would have avoided
eye contact instead of going straight in with a very intrusive question. I
think it speaks volumes about how he saw me and my place. I however
was dressed in my overalls, covered in wood dust and expected a question
about DIY.
Questions about sex might indicate an interest in sexuality though this blurs into
a fascination with functionality. The normals might well use the disabled person as
an opportunity to explore (their own) bodily integrity.
A disabled comedian and wheelchair user is on a train. A little boy comes

over to her and asks ‘are you imaginary?’ ‘No,’ she replies, ‘I am real.’ ‘Good,’
said the boy, ‘then can you tell me; do you have a vagina?’
(Fiona)
A few respondents distinguished between those who ‘should know better’ (adults)
and those that cannot (including young people). The thing about disability is that
it really does prompt discussion about bodies per se. Disability seems to also, at
times, prompt intimate sometimes-uneasy discussions in the wider family. Claire
remembers her mother-in-law asking her sister-in-law ‘Do you not want a baby
because your sister has a disabled son?’ She was worried it was catching. Yoko told
me:
An acquaintance/friend on introducing me to her new baby while we were

talking about motherhood (just a few years ago): ‘Well, at least you can have
babies’ (This one hurt a lot ... the assumption obviously that disabled women
can’t reproduce).
Karen O was good enough to share this personal account:
My older sister on losing my virginity (ages 16/19): ‘Well at least you know
you can have sex’.
These disclosures back up Shildrick’s (2009) view that disabled bodies are
dangerous in the sense that they uncannily trouble self-contained modes of ideal
embodiment: prompting intimate and inappropriate questions.
Ontological invalidation: putting the ‘dis’ in disability

If ontological validation refers to others positively valuing our selves, then
ontological invalidation captures those times when our selves are left shaky, unstable
and uncertain in the face of a lack of value from others. This is, as Goodley and
Lawthom (2013a) argue, a common experience for non-normative members of
our society. When disabled people are reacted to as an ‘inexplicable oddity’ (Malec,
1993: 23) they become objects frozen in the vision of the normals (Hughes, 1999).
As Wendell (1996: 250) once put it: ‘If you are “other” to me, I see you primarily
as symbolic of something else – usually, but not always, something I reject and
fear and that I project onto you.’ Wendell argues that we live in a world structured
for people who have no weaknesses, in a socio-cultural context that values the
activities of labour and commodity exchange, the physically strong and the ideally
shaped. This is the world of the normals (and at their most confident, the hyper-
normals). Disavowing that which sits/stands outside of the normative imaginary
threatens the very ontological status of disabled people: fear brings with it distrust
and dismissal. Dude (an activist with a visual impairment) told me:
A man approaches me on the street and we talk for a few minutes when
he asks, ‘What can you see?’ We’ve met before and he has been meaning
to ask for some time but was unsure how to bring it up so decided to
blurt it out. His uncertainty is understandable: I use a white cane but also
have some obvious vision. I reference some brake lights and street lamps
in the distance. He seems impressed but wants to know if I can see him or
anything around us. I assure him that I can but this does not stop him from
pivoting from side to side during our conversation, watching whether my
eyes follow him.
Joyce wrote:
So, briefly, I was raised in a home where being different was just not
acceptable. We pretended I could see better than I did, and never, never,
talked about it. There was a complete no talk zone, and Mom particularly
would tear out someone’s throat if they ever mentioned it ... Remarkably
narcissistic if you think about it.
Joyce’s use of the psychoanalytic term of narcissism lends support to the argument
that, whether we like it or not, we live in a psychoanalytic culture (Parker, 1997).
Such language fills institutions of work, education and family:
I’m talking to a cousin who I think of as one of the healthier members of the
extended family. While discussing types of literature, she drops the sentence
‘I just can’t handle the physical manifestation of difference’. There it was,
9 words that sum up my family and much of my experience dealing with
people in the world. As my brother has said on more than one occasion, ‘it’s
just hard to watch’.
(Ringo)
Furthermore, certain impairments appeared to carry more ontological weight than

others. Patricia told me:
A number of non-disabled people have said to me ‘I would rather be deaf

than blind’ now this one really confuses me as I am assuming that they have
never been either deaf or blind and why would anyone say that to someone
that is registered blind as I am and I think the fact that they don’t seem to
see anything offensive in saying this to me is what really amazes and at times
amuses me. I am still trying to figure that one out!
This resonates with the confused discourse around blindness often found in
the sighted community written about by Michalko (1999). He tells of the time
when he was waiting to cross the road with his guide dog Smokie and a stranger
approached and coo-ed over Smokie asking Rod ‘Is that a blind dog buddy?’ Rod
replies, ‘I hope not.’ This confusion over impairment reminds us that denial is not
just a river in Egypt. Yoko wrote:
There were the PRE guide dog comments:

‘What’s up with her ..? What’s her problem?’ When trying to negotiate
crowds.
‘Get out the fucking way’ Used by cyclists riding on the pavements (I live
in Cambridge).
‘You don’t need that!’ bloke in pub apparently chatting me up.
‘Can you see me’ see above just different bloke.
But mostly it’s the staring and the tutting and the assumption I am ‘faking’.
POST guide dog comments:
‘Well you are obviously not blind’ lady in vet: see blog posts on.
‘You’re training her then?’
‘But its obvious you can see me.’
Such denial might be seen as being tied to paranoid anxiety and the negation of
non-normative personhoods. Over to Karen O again:
A parking attendant at the university wrongly accusing me of illegally

parking on a double yellow line (it’s not illegal with a parking badge which
was clearly displayed): ‘You get away with murder, you lot!’
And June:
A supply teacher on sports day reacting to my unique ‘running’ style (I can

only have been about 8, how funny some things stay with you): ‘Is it your
shoes, or is there something wrong with you?’
And Asraf:
One of my favourite is from my head of department, who wrote to the

disability service alleging that my request for a photocopy of lecture notes
was part of a conspiracy against him (I actually have the email). Then there
is the Deputy Academic Registrar who described a lawsuit from a disabled
student as ‘feedback’.
Here the disabled Other becomes caught in the violent maintenance of the
normative order. For Hook (2004), the threat of the Other needs to be hopelessly
exaggerated and this response needs to be continually repeated. Why? Well,
because each of these operations provides a means of defending against the
normals’ own sense of lack and insecurities. Garland Thomson’s (2006) work on
staring at (and back at) disability firmly roots the origins of normals society’s gaze
upon disability in the visual frame. Yet, what is interesting about staring is that
it both denotes recognition (staring at) and negation (staring through). As one
participant put it ‘One of my research participants (young woman with intel-
lectual disability) said she didn’t know who stared more – kids or their parents’.
Such intrigue may prompt further investigation, for example in professional
contexts:
I go into a physician’s office (for a routine medical report procedure), she said
me to sit down, ask about my condition (mobility problem due to cerebral
palsy). Then she looked at me and ask: Could you able to read and write?
My answer was: Yes, I am writing a PhD thesis. My husband (who has visual
problems) was making a job application and the main eligibility criterion was
having a Bachelor’s degree. The office boy asked to me: Is he illiterate? My
husband answered: I am a literature teacher, is it enough?
(Ayesha)
I remember my mother telling me some time after I sat state examinations

that a neighbour had asked her ‘did she do the same exams as everyone else
or were they “special” ones?’
(June)
These common encounters are wearisome: disabled people are ‘tired of being
symbols to the able-bodied, visible only or primarily for their disabilities’ (Wendell,
1996: 252).
My sister on my asserting I wanted to be a barrister (ages 14/17): ‘Well, you

can’t do that, what would you wear?’ Her assumption being that all female
barristers wore smart skirts and heels (I can’t wear heels and always went for
a kooky ‘scruffy’ dress sense as a teen to hide this fact).
(Karen O)
Ontological invalidation is not solely a case of misrecognition. In some cases recog-

nition of embodied difference led to mimicry and mockery:
Basically, I have walked all my life visibly different from non-disabled people.
People tend to comment on my walking style or ask questions. Children
sometimes try to mimic my slightly asymmetrical walking style: ‘Amazing
that you can walk that way!’ (This was said by a teenager who tried to mimic
my walking style but did not succeed.)
(Petra)
Attempts to redress invalidation might coalesce around some clumsy form of

disavowal:
I sometimes have this strange thing, seeing a disabled person, that I obsti-
nately do not want to stare, and then on top of that, that I think that the
disabled person sees this sees me not looking; and then I sometimes do look,
to restore the balance!
(Adam)
This account captures, I would contend, a common reaction of the normals. This
is not inherently prejudiced it is, instead, a typically confused disavowing response
to the uncanny presence of disability. Some disabled respondents felt it necessary
to challenge invalidation head on:
I loved the day a room of undergraduates ignored me and kept asking each
other when they thought the lecturer would arrive. When the time for the
lecture came, I stood up and said: ‘Right, shall we make a start then?’ The
look on their faces was wonderful.
(Brian)
For Malec (1993: 22) many ‘persons with disabilities are made into the “other” by
many, if not most, non-disabled people’. Disability is something to be imagined
by the normals self, which risks turning the uncanny, disabled other into an object
of curiosity thus overshadowing complex humanities.
It is seldom comfortable to know that one is on display, on stage, as it were

… In public places, whether alone or with friends, I’m constantly aware of
remarks made by others in my hearing … When I am alone, I know that
I am being watched as I walk down the sidewalk or through buildings. I
am told that people in cars will turn their heads as they pass me in order to
continue staring.
(Malec, 1993: 22)
Uncanny figures come to occupy a contradictory place: they exist as romantic

figures seemingly outside of the realm of modernity but also as frightening/fasci-
nating targets for invalidation (Dolar, 1991). There is some deeply complex work
going on in these encounters.
I had a weird encounter recently when I was in a shop and a woman

thought she was in my way – though she wasn’t. The usual thing of someone
suddenly registering a disabled person is present and expressing some level of
unease by saying ‘sorry’ as if she was in my way. I said ‘It’s fine, you’re not in
my way’ and her reply was ‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you’. I couldn’t work
out why I felt so offended by her response until my daughter pointed out
that embarrassment is associated with shame and therefore the woman was
projecting a feeling of shame on me – presumably just for being there and
being different (as signified by my wheelchair).
(Maya)
On occasion, normals’ culture exhibits tendencies for paranoid anxieties around

dis/ability. On sharing her daughter’s diagnosis with a group of other new mothers,
Maya recalls the commentary of one of the mum’s ‘Well, I suppose they can’t scan
for autism can they?’ How else could we explain such a death-making response to
disability other than the consequence of extreme anxieties? According to Cubbage
and Thomas (1989), disability elicits anxiety and, in extreme cases, aversion:
One time I was in Alentejo (countryside in south of Portugal). My parents

were born there. And we were going to a pub. The street was deserted and
the pub was down the street and you could hear the noise of the pub, people
talking, on the top of the street. So we started to get close to the pub and we
could hear the noise louder and louder and when we got in there, total silent!
Total silent! And everybody was staring at me. We went to a table … I am not
exaggerating, it was really total silent. And then slowly the tone of conversation
started and increased. And then it got louder and louder until it was as normal
as I heard before I got in. I’ve never forgotten this situation. It was so funny.
(John, wheelchair user interviewed by Ema Loja)
Most often as I walk past people they go quiet and hunch themselves up on
the pavement or step into the road to let me pass. Sometimes even holding
their breath. Obviously this means I am unsure if they are there. So may still
bash into them or not be able to say ‘Thank you’. I have always wondered
why they don’t just say something.
(Doreen)
My partner, a friend and I went to a racing event at Beverley Racecourse.

While my partner was getting some beers my friend and I went to the
finishing post and waited by the rails for the next race. A woman approached
my friend and said words to the effect of ‘Is she enjoying the sun and having
a good time.’ My friend and I giggled and she said why don’t you ask
Christine. Again the woman addressed her remark to my friend on the lines
of ‘she is lucky to be brought here. Does she like horses?’. My friend and I
collapsed in laughter and left her to it.
(Julie)
These stories display two things. One, the generosity of spirit of disabled people
to these devastating normals’ responses and two, the lengths the normals will
apparently go to dis the disabled. Hook’s (2004: 132–133) appropriation of Fanon
is useful here when he asks of the racist: ‘Why, one is tempted to ask the racist,
is it necessary continually to reaffirm, to reiterate and act out one’s own racial
superiority to continually point out the Other’s supposed inferiority if this is
simply a known fact? Why does one continually need to reassert this fact of one’s
own superiority and the Other’s inferiority if you are so confident of it?’ Similar
questions could be levelled at the normals to ask why they spend so much time
drawing attention to the apparent incapabilities of disabled people. One wonders
what the normals are hiding (and how big it is).
Disability kitsch and common parlance

The psychopathology of the normals also appears to reside in the practices of
consuming disability and imbuing these cultural disability artefacts with certain
values (McGuire, 2012; Mallett and Runswick-Cole, 2012). If kitsch is a form of
art that is considered to be a worthless imitation of art of recognised value then
popular cultural images of disability are appropriated and festishised by the artless
normals in their depictions of disabled people. As Goodley and Lawthom (20013a)
comment, it has been said that kitsch is the art form, which the soul has departed.
One respondent had; ‘quite a few stories about how normals people react towards
people with dwarfism. A lot of the comments made by people relate to dwarf
stereotypes such as Snow White and Willy Wonka. Here are a few things that have
been said to me’:
Where’s Snow White?

Where’s the yellow brick road?
Do you get your clothes specially made?
Are your parents small?
You’re the right size for a blowjob.
I know a dwarf from Scotland, do you know him?
Also like the quote below a Doctor once asked my Mam if I had thought
about joining the circus.
While the social history of people with restricted growth or ‘Dwarfism’ has been
marked by a move from oppressive curiosity/exoticism to disability politics and
activism (Adelson, 2005), the account above would suggest that people with
restricted growth are still reacted to as uncanny exotic creatures fuelled by kitsch
views of the small person as pantomime actor. Similarly, Maya wrote of the
response of a stranger to the disclosure of her son’s impairment: ‘He’s autistic? [She
said] Well, all the celebrities have them, don’t they? It’s like a Gucci handbag or
Jimmy Choos.’ Disability can be viewed as an opportunity for normalcy to unveil
its nastier side.
This happened many, many years ago – 1970s – when I was at a local
football match. The local team was playing badly and a man behind me
started shouting: ‘Come on, you’re playing like a bunch of spastics!’ After the
third repeat, I turned around and yelled: ‘Do me a favour mate, I wouldn’t
have that lot in MY bloody team!’ At half time he came and apologised and
promised never to say it again.
(Brian)
The reiteration of disability slang such as ‘spastic’ says much about the insecurities
of the normals. Disability kitsch unveils a commodification of dis/ability discourse
– from deficit to enhancement – described in Chapter 6. Undergirding the
disavowal of dis/ability is a growing dis/ability capitalism and state of consumption
where various festishised forms are being made and sold: directly feeding the ways
in which we de/value different bodies.
Conclusion: therapeutic intervention in the lives of the normals

How can we treat ableist culture and how might we help these poor normals?
Let us finish with some suggestions that might help the treatment of the normal.
First, let us spread the word about disability activism. Hughes (1999: 162) suggests
that resistance is the refusal to be seen as one is supposed to be seen by the eye of
power while Wendell sites potential in sitting outside of the normative imaginary:
Not only do physically disabled people have experiences, which are not
available to the able-bodied, they are in a better position to transcend
cultural mythologies about the body, because they cannot do things that the
able-bodied feel they must do in order to be happy, ‘normal’ and sane.
(Wendell, 1996: 253)
Clearly, the politics of disability and disabled people’s politics must continue to be
supported and celebrated as direct methods and means for challenging the psycho-
pathological tendencies of normals society. To this we can add a politics of debility,
alluded to in Chapter 6. Such a politics contests the disavowal of disability on the
part of the normals on the grounds that the normals are unconsciously caught up
in their fantasies of capacity and productivity. In truth, all of us around the dis/
ability complex are failed by such fantasies. Dis/ability as debility reminds us of this
failure and opens up opportunities for finding new fantasies and desires.
Second, how about therapy for the normals? Perhaps new forms of counselling
– undergirded by disability studies theories and activism – would proliferate.
Could we set up self-help groups, drop-in centres and neighbourhood visits run
by disabled or debility activists in which we tackle the psychopathologies of the
normals? I wonder if we might rekindle interest in the Primal Therapy developed
by Arthur Janov and used by John Lennon in the 1960s: to scream out the pain
of internalised normalisation. Perhaps we could produce documents that tackle
the inadequacies, the social incompetencies and maladaptive functioning of the
normative imaginary? The United Spinal Association, for example, produced a
2008 booklet Disability Etiquette: Tips on Interacting with People with Disabilities.
There are many very useful suggestions for training the normals to engage with
disabled people in respectful, considerate and thoughtful ways. This might be a
good start but one wonders if the deeper issues of the normals can be sufficiently
challenged through a set of fairly normative and commonsensical rehabilitative
procedures. But how about turning the tables and producing a pamphlet entitled
Dis/ability Etiquette: Tips on Interacting with Normal People. One wonders if the first
section of the chapter might focus in on ‘the Normals: their common fears and
anxieties’.
Third, let us engage in a wider politics of a dumbing down of normality and
a celebration of our potential for abnormality. Rather than reinvigorating the
arenas of psychology, therapy and rehabilitation we might better see our task as
targeting the deeply insidious nature of normality endemic within our culture.
This task is, of course, more complex but fits well with the primary challenge of
critical disability studies. On one level this means reconfiguring those aspects of
humanity that we value. Jim Overboe’s (2007a, 2007b) work is helpful here as he
demands we rethink how we understand humanity and its reliance upon normative
shadows: a normativity that threatens to impose a ‘wholesome, ideal, flavourless,
odourless, colourless, and non-threatening identity’ upon us (Malec, 1993: 23).
Respondents to Project 3 were good enough to share resources including websites
that publicise encounters with the normals and in some cases amusingly turn the
tables to pathologise the normals among us. One of these is the website of Tourette
Hero, whose work subversively and hilariously celebrates the vibrancy and potency
of a label normally understood as morbid, pathological and tragic.
I’m making biscuits out of crack cocaine and marzipan.

Rhianna Stalley (http://www.touretteshero.com/gallery/)
Welcome to the gallery. Every picture is inspired by a tic, and each one’s been created
by a member of the site. You can search the gallery by tic, or just have a browse.
In embracing the countercultural narratives of the abnormals one would hope

that schools, communities, work, families and other institutions recognise their
own potential for abnormality: and with it the potential for affirmative lives. One
of the most powerful things we can do around dis/ability and ab/normalcy is to
have conversations about them. Perhaps now is the time for us all to move out of
our normative shadows and embrace our inherent potential to be non-normative.
Perhaps now is time for a politics of abnormality.
9
MARKETS, CRUEL OPTIMISM AND
CIVIL SOCIETY
Producing dis/ability
This chapter examines the production of dis/ability in terms of the ways in which
disability is reproduced (as disabling and unwanted) and ableism is promulgated
(as hyper-capable and desirable) by the global market’s idealisation of forms of
citizenship found in supra-national discourses of the World Health Organisation,
the inter/national media and British social policy. We return, again, to the split
phenomenon of dis/ability and an emphasis on analysing the global neoliberal and
capitalist constitution of the dis/abled citizen and the opportunities for resistance or
excess offered via civil society. These analyses use materialism and posthumanism
to galvanise a reaction to the marketisation of dis/ability. The chapter is split into
five sections:
1. Cruel optimism: affect in neoliberal-able markets

2. The World Report on Disability: globalising dis/ability neoliberalism
3. Consuming dis/ability: paralympic heroes, welfare scroungers
4. Big Society: ref/using neoliberalism?
5. Conclusion.
Cruel optimism: affect in neoliberal-able markets

We start our exposition of dis/ability and the market by thinking through the ways
in which our hopes, ambitions and emotional life are shaped in and through the
market. One of the ways in which dis/ability reveals itself is in our relations with
capital and labour: our work and consumption. Let us start by reminding ourselves
of Berlant’s cruel optimism; a concept we were acquainted with in Chapter 6.
Cruel optimism can be found in those moments when we become attached to
compromised conditions of possibility, that is, where we ride the waves of our
affective attachments (Berlant, 2010). These compromised attachments are with
the market: our labouring and consumption within it. Cruel optimism is the
affective attachment to the consuming and labouring good life. For Berlant, we
project into this ‘good life’ an enabling object of capitalistic endeavour which is
also, always and simultaneously disabling. While work translates our ambitions, it
often lets us down. As the Welsh punk rockers the Manic Street Preachers once
wrote: ‘Libraries gave us power, then work came and made us free.’ In labour we
produce but also wear ourselves out. Yet, we maintain an optimistic fantasy to
survive in these zones of what Berlant terms compromised ordinariness. Let us
summarise Berlant’s take on current economic times and conditions. The 2008
financial crisis brought with it the realisation that the state is in the same abject
and contingent relation to private capital as the individual is. Both state and
individual are screwed by capital. The response? Austerity. For Berlant (2011),
austerity is nothing more than a fantasy of governments and states that believe
they can intervene in the capitalist crisis. This fantasy is a further example of a
familiar emotional response to the failings of neoliberal capitalism: a form of cruel
optimism. This concept refers to the belief we have in the power of the market to
liberate us. This is an optimism that rapidly reveals its cruel intensions.
So, what are these cruel intensions? The first, for Berlant (2007), is the practice
of slow death, a concept that refers to the physical wearing out of a population
and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining
condition of their experience and historical existence. We are, she suggests and
as we considered earlier, all exhausted by neoliberal capitalism: we are all in slow
death but for some this is more apparent. This includes ‘the bodies of U.S. waged
workers will be more fatigued, in more pain, less capable of ordinary breathing
and working, and die earlier than the average for higher-income workers, who are
also getting fatter, but at a slower rate and with relatively more opportunity for
exercise’ (Berlant, 2007: 775). Neoliberalism, McRuer (2012c) argues, displays a
special genius at making lopsided growth, wealth for a few and immiseration for
many more, seem sexy and – well – progressive and modern.
A second intention of cruel optimism is the belief that the labouring and
consuming body will mobilise all dis/abled people out of poverty and unhap-
piness into the smooth, rapidly moving and ever-mobile space of the productive
worker. Hence, a disabled entrepreneur can differentiate himself from his lazy,
unproductive disabled brothers and sisters through the power of the market. Cruel
optimism leads to distinct, counterposed types of dis/abled citizens. We feel, think
and enact the cruel promises of labour and consumption. Think around Christmas
time and the packaging of consumption for the good life. In Britain, companies
such as department store John Lewis and supermarket chain Tesco readily rely
on heart-string-stretching, emotion-sapping and (I hate to admit) lump-in-the-
throat inducing depictions of perfect (non-disabled) families revealing their love
for one another through idealised forms of consumption. One recent Christmas
ad campaign even had snowmen getting to the shops on time before Christmas
Eve: putting many a man of the secular nuclear family to shame. This is the affect
economy at its most crude: coming to feel the emotional-sating effects of the
Markets, cruel optimism and civil society 139
market. Gammon (2012) argues that neoliberalism is akin to a narcissistic neurosis,

obstructing identification with others, and manifests itself in a dispassionate social
destructiveness. While this might be some of the end goals of neoliberalism, the
notion of an affect economy suggests that neoliberalism utilises affect in order to
produce labour and consumption in ways that are enacted but also felt by citizens.
Hence, working hard is also about being empathic with one’s work colleagues.
Buying Christmas presents demonstrates our love for our family members.
Personal worth and love are transmitted through work and consumption and we
feel this more. In the words of a reality TV contestant: we can feel the love (and
the pain of love).
A third intention relates to the appropriation of dis/ability in making a case
for the capitalistic progression and the boundless market. Kolárová (in press) has
carefully unpacked the ways in which Eastern European political discourse and
stories of political change draw on dis/ability to make their case. Hence, disability,
illness and disorder symbolise the constricting pathology of the socialist/communist
past, while the ideologies of health and ability become the means to celebrate the
new social order (capitalism) and legitimise such an order as if it were beyond
critique. Borrowing directly from Kolárová (in press) we are witnessing binaries
hunting in packs, one side of a pole associated with the desired and the other with
the not wanted (see Table 9.1).
Similar switch points appear in recent literature on civil society, in which the
‘retarding’ effects of an overpowering welfare state are contrasted with the sophis-
ticated, able and willing responsibilities of the neoliberal-able citizen: an individual
who is ready to support himself (and his family and those poor fellows less well
off than he in his local community). The danger is that ‘disability is outlined as
either the abject Other of (capitalist) freedom, or is positioned as something that
can be sacrificed on the way to rehabilitation’ (Kolárová, 2013: np). Puar (2011)
comments that while neoliberalism upholds the ableist self it cannot stop itself
TABLE 9.1 Cruel optimism: making of the un/desirables (from Kolárová (in press))
Negated/Desired
Disabled/Abled
Socialism/Capitalism
Failure/Success
East/West
Past/Present
Constraint/Opportunity
Stagnation/Development
Abnormality/Normality
Human design/Human nature
Irrationality/Rationality
Immorality/Morality
Collectivism/Individualism
from categorising disabled, unproductive selves. What is required, then, is a new

and nuanced way of thinking about civil society that learns lessons from dis/ability
and feeds these into new conceptions of community, interdependence, support and
politicisation.
In a time of economic downturn, where nations are working to clear their
overdrafts that are explained as stemming from the overexpenditure on welfare
from previous left-leaning governments, citizens are subjected to what Kolárová (in
press) denotes as the affectivity of debt. The market shapes us all to feel pain and
pleasure. We occupy different places in the wider affective economy (Muñoz, 2009:
124): where the body, psyche, culture and economy are folded into one another.
Government discourses around the world, particularly in Global North nations,
play with a key idea that we (read the mass populous, not bankers nor major indus-
trialists) have lived our lives in debt and now we must not live above our means.
For citizens of post-communist contexts, Kolárová asserts, this individualisation of
the responsibilities of dealing with debt, intimately felt at the level of affect, are
additionally wrapped up with the shame of communism. The therapeutic outlet
is provided by the logics of neoliberal capitalism: our emotional life will be made
better through embracing the rationality of capitalism and the austerity measures
of neoliberalism. This embracing of the rationalities of capitalism is a long held
slogan of the disabled people’s movement embodied in rights not charity discourse.
One key right is the right to work, which we could also read as the right to be a
neoliberal subject. As Erevelles (2002b: 9) puts it, minority groups such as disabled
people, while conscious of the limits of liberal discourses, are nevertheless ‘forced
to appeal to these same discourses’: it feels good to work. Conversely, it hurts not
to work. Pain, as Siebers (2012) reminds us, has not only organic psychological
origins but also political and epistemological origins. Recognising the affective
aspects of – or the emotional complexes tied to – the false promises of capitalism
allow us to feed into the affective turn in cultural and dis/ability studies (see
Elman, 2012b). Living in capitalist times might be framed as ‘affective labor, the
fundamental power of any emotional habitus, involves the ability not only to incite
emotion but also to establish and enforce norms delineating appropriate feelings
and their expression’ (Elman, 2012b: 188).
Dis/ability permits new ways of speaking truth to the power of an affective
economy in which we are witnessing a neoliberalisation of emotion (Muñoz,
2009). Dis/ability contravenes the cruel optimist hopes of capitalism. Like Puar’s
debility, dis/ability asks whether or not there is an ‘adequately able’ body anymore.
What new forms of humanity, hope and living are demanded by dis/ability? Dis/
ability and debility demand new ways of thinking about the human; living a
productive life, for example, where labour and consumption are not the be all and
end all of our desires and ambitions. Dis/ability reframes desire. We will return to
these productive questions later on in the chapter. For now, let us consider some
of the makings of dis/ability by and through the market.
The World Report on Disability: globalising dis/ability

neoliberalism
If we are to provisionally accept the postconventionalist critique of neoliberalism
and dis/ability sketched out thus far, let us consider then how dis/ability is made
through the workings of what we can term dis/ability neoliberal-ableism. In
Chapter 1 we reported on the 2011 World Report on Disability. Now let us examine
the impact of this document and what it actually does with dis/ability. This is a
concern of crip activism and theory: because such a perspective seeks to transform
a given space by bringing to light the exclusions that structure it (McRuer,
2012c). Our task here is to tease out exclusions and problematic relationships with
dis/ability that are found in this significant supra-national document. Initially, the
World Report re/emphasises the problem of disability. The ownership of the body
is fundamentally crucial to some forms of disability activism. Some people with
the label of autism, for example, recast their difference not as a pathology but as
a valuable neurological variant (Couser, 2011: 25). Erevelles (1996: 535) forces us
to move beyond theorisations of biology that at some point or the other continue
to re-inscribe nature as the central determinant of our lives and calls for us to
construct the terms of the debate on more radical grounds. These radical grounds
are opposed to being biologically overdetermined. Critical commentators on the
World Report such as Michalko (2012a) and Titchkosky (2012a) worry that, yet
again, supra-national discourse re/positions disability as a problem of the body.
Titchkosky (2012a) pushes this a little further and suggests that in seeking to
capture the global nature of disability we are left with a figure of 1 billion people
and, potentially, 1 billion individual problems of disability. Such an individualising
turn is reminiscent of neoliberal discourses around impairment. Furthermore, in
seeking a universal approach to disability the World Report risks quashing other
emergent more extended, less individualised forms of being human. As we
witnessed in Chapter 3, crip readings of disability foreground its disruptive and
imaginative possibilities.
The World Report extends a liberal rights perspective on dis/ability. The report
dovetails directly with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons
with Disabilities. And this deliberate inter-textuality ensures that dis/ability is
represented as a legislative issue, tied to the valuing of human liberties. Preventing
the participation of people in wider society is a denial of their human rights.
The global human rights project necessarily pulls together activists from across
the world to draw on a shared discourse of liberty, freedom and emancipation.
The potency of this cannot be underestimated. For Ong (2007), the human
right to live, be educated, work and have loving relationships might be viewed as
the desirable aspect of neoliberal policy and therefore an exception to the more
damaging impacts of economic expansion. Nevertheless, as Brown (1997: 58)
contends, international regimes that attempt on a global scale to promote human
rights are engaging in a near-impossible task. ‘From the liberal perspective’, he
notes, while human rights are promoted as universal rights of all citizens of the
world it is important to acknowledge that ‘they are associated with a particular

kind of society, and to promote these rights is to promote this kind of society’
(Brown, 1997: 59). ‘Proponents of universal human rights are’, Brown concludes,
‘proposing the de-legitimation of all kinds of political regimes except those that
fall within the broad category of “liberal democracy”’ (p. 59). One of the firmest
of liberal beliefs is that liberal values are indeed universal – ‘that we would all be
liberals were it not for the distorting effects of ignorance on the one hand and
privilege on the other’ (p. 60). This is not to say that neoliberal human rights
are unimportant. They are of strategic importance and have had huge impacts
on the lives of individuals who have experienced histories of systemic violence.
Notwithstanding this understandably pragmatic alliance to human rights, we must
recognise that ‘the contemporary human rights regime is in general, and, for the
most part, in detail, simply a contemporary, internationalised and universalised,
version of the liberal position on rights’ (p. 42). This liberal position is predicated
on the existence of distinct legal systems and ethical communities. Liberties,
powers and immunities are ultimately notions that make sense only against the
background of a system of law. Hence, ‘a bill of Human Rights will work well
in contexts that have a legal system that will adhere to this set of Universal rights’
(Brown, 1997: 46). But, as we also know, human rights are ‘tricky, slippery things,
and rights-discourse is a minefield, where each conceptual step risks a detonation
and self-destruction’ (p. 49). Moreover, we know from McRuer (2012c: n.p.) that
the good disabled subject – the one enacting the right to live, be educated, work
and have loving relationships – is often the one most distanced from queerness
(that is, the unruly kind of queerness that cannot be so easily domesticated). We
might find it easier to fight for a little recognition through rights-based legislation
around specific institutional arrangements such as the right to marriage, rather than
fundamentally revolutionising the worlds we live in.
Human rights work well in ethical communities where rights are widely honoured
and respected. Such a community has three institutional elements or moments:
the family, civil society and the state, ‘the role of these institutions being to
“constitute” individuality, that is to construct the kind of individual that liberal
rights-based thought takes as given’ (Brown, 1997: 50). Just as it ‘is implausible
to think that rights can be extracted from liberal polities, decontextualised and
applied as a package world-wide’ (p. 49) so too it is impossible to think of human
rights discourse working in national contexts in which legal systems and ethical
communities have not been constituted upon liberal values. This pushes Brown
further to suggest that ‘UN declarations, covenants and the like cut no ice, because
human beings create themselves and if they have not created themselves in ways
that are amenable to a human rights perspective nothing can get through to them’
(p. 58). Similarly, as Butler (2013) observes, human rights courts, the European
Union, the United States and the UK, have all failed effectively to rectify the
manifest injustices in nations such as Palestine. The analysis of Erevelles (1996:
524) permits us to further interrogate the neoliberal convictions of the World
Report. Liberal theories of disability, she argues, have ‘sought to uphold the logic
of liberal humanism (which presumes the free, rational, sovereign, autonomous,

human subject) in efforts to produce more empowering meanings of disability (or
deviance) so that disability can continue to exist at the margins of this humanist
world’. As we increasingly enter a period of human development where it would
seem that neoliberalism has won the day: to what extent does such a philosophy
of human development threaten to promote certain able citizens whilst sidelining
others who fail to meet these liberal imperatives?
One could make the case that the World Report correctly identifies barriers to full
participation in society but that the model of participation is one firmly fixed on
an individualised, meritocratic and ableist conception of citizenship. What happens
when individuals cannot work, access the wider curricula of schools, contribute
to their communities through their individual capabilities? What happens when
formalised educational programme initiatives in the name of inclusion cut across
existing informal community responses to education? Could it be argued, as
Meekosha and Soldatic (2011) assert, that human rights are a neoliberal concept
that fails to deal with emancipation such as the redistribution of resources from
rich income to poor income nations? When British foreign aid and development
in poorer countries accompanies an exponential rise in psychiatry and psychology
in India, bankrolled and pushed by the World Bank, what versions of humanity
are we witnessing being made through these powerful psy-discourses (see for more
discussions Power, 2005; Mills, 2012)?
Following Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004), the writing and rolling out of the
World Report is an example of Empire. Empire refers to a globalised biopolitical
machine (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 40) – through which distinct theories and
practices of dis/ability spread across the globe – infecting or affecting citizens
in every corner of the world. Following Goodley and Lawthom (2011), dis/
ability empire has a distinct biopolitical subject in mind: augmenting the healthy,
rational, autonomous, educated, economically viable, self-governing and able: a
self-contained individual. The World Report has the authority of the World Health
Organisation and the World Bank, supra-national organisations that, through their
extensive spread of governance discipline, prohibit and norm the subjectivities of
their trans-national subjects (Hardt and Negri, 2000).
Dis/ability scholars have contested dis/ability incursions by supra-national
organisations such as the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. McRuer and Wilkerson
(2003: 3) note that one of the International Monetary Fund’s loan requirements of
Argentina has been the reduction of pensions and programmes for elderly people,
many of whom are disabled (McRuer and Wilkerson, 2003: 3). Chaudhry (2011)
attacks the World Bank’s funding of self-help groups in India to pacify the impact
of neoliberal policies on rural agricultural life. She notes that a decrease in state
funding, an emphasis on urban living, means that self-help groups are bankrolled
in order to help the rural poor get themselves out of poverty. The cosmopolitan
rhetoric of these institutions conceals a punitive function that is focused on the
events of political dissent and the revolutionary imagination, which emerges from
the biopolitical regime (Abbinnett, 2007: 45). While Mills (2012) directly links
the health promotion measures of the World Health Organisation to the growing
psychiatric and pharmacological treatment of mental illness in India which have
rendered many people drugged up, passive and pathologies, filled psychiatric
institutions and ripped apart traditional community-based forms of support and
care. In theorising the global production of dis/ability we must remain vigilant of
the manufacturing of the neoliberal ideal of the global citizen that resides at the
epicentre of pan-national discourse.
Consuming dis/ability: paralympic heroes, welfare scroungers

As Puar (2011) has written, the contradictory processes of neoliberalism uphold
the ableist self whilst categorising disabled unproductive selves, with the latter
forced to endure a slow death. We have recently witnessed precisely this kind of
bifurcated constitution of the dis/abled soul around the London 2012 Olympics
and Paralympics. Other than the wheelchair signs on accessible washroom doors,
Oscar Pistorius was the global signifier of disability in the summer of 2012. In
August 2012 he was lauded as a ‘gallant’ loser who had failed to reach the 400
metre mainstream Olympic final in spite of overcoming ‘tremendous odds with
both his physical disability and the mental disability of critics believing his “legless”
status gives him an unfair advantage’ (Sease, 2012: n.p.). This after a long-winded
legal process that eventually saw him qualify. From this he went on to star in the
Paralympics, not without controversy, questioning the relative parity of athletes’
prostheses along the way. Notwithstanding these controversies, Oscar was the
poster boy of all that can be good around the dis/ability complex.
Then, in February 2013, he went from hero to zero; Pistorius was a South
African macho bullyboy accused of murdering his girlfriend, his masculinity
compromised by his physical impairment, according to one journalist who wrote
‘Disabled men and women often struggle with their sense of masculinity or
femininity because they are to some degree dependent. I have seen examples of
them placing particular pride on physical attractiveness. Maybe he struggles with
that. The guns and sports cars gave an impression that he was over-compensating
so as to be seen as “normal”’ (Duval Smith, 2013). Pistorius had gone full circle
from dis/ability sex symbol to tragic crip villain. The only things to remain intact,
ironically, were media references to his ‘broken body’ and his ability to overcome
it (either through running or gunning). Pistorius is a symbol of the globalised
production of dis/ability: of hero/villain. As McRuer (2012a) and Grue (2013)
have also demonstrated, my sense is that the life story of Oscar Pistorius can be
read as mimicking the binarised constitution of dis/ability.
Hero (productive citizen)

Oscar is a transhumanist’s wet dream: an entity materially shaped by the processes
of elite sport, technological capital and disability discourse. Oscar can be storied
in myriad ways, at different times, for complex purposes: as a hyper-ableist entity

of technological capitalist moulding, a very desirable transhumanist phenomenon,
a high functioning machine–human hybrid and a cyborg poster boy for disabled
people. Oscar embodied all that is good with a hyper-ableist philosophy: blurring
man–machine, re-enabling disability, blurring the lines between disability and
ability – performing dis/ability. His message to those of us working the dis/ability
complex was clear – you shall overcome. This was elite sport at its best, demon-
strating what could be achieved through dedication and hard work, in search of a
wider international legacy of increasing sports involvement for all.
Villain (welfare scrounger)

In February 2013, the disability end of the dis/ability complex reared its patho-
logical head. The death of Pistorius’s partner allowed the media to interpolate
him into the familiar identity category of disabled man struggling to live with
impairment. He worked perfectly as a media figure – inviting the gaze of ableist
culture (something we have already demonstrated in the last chapter) – permitting
the usual suspects of disability stereotyping to take place. His transhumanist dis/
abled masculinity that had been held up as inspirational in the summer of 2012
was now resold as, well, fucked up. As Grue (2013) put it: we lost Pistorius as a
symbol of cyborgian positivity or as a shining light of the achievements of disabled
athletes – and were left simply with a messed up misogynist. Such a haunting
image of the ‘sinister disabled’ was, of course, always lurking at the edges of the
Paralympics; evidenced by the sponsorship banners of Atos at the Paralympics
(McRuer, 2012a). Whilst enjoying the transhumanist and ableist pleasures of elite
athletes in the Paralympics these took place against a backdrop of an organisation
currently involved in weeding out the true disabled from the sinister wasters and
welfare scroungers.1 And when the Pistorius story spun out of control the popular
media seemed to say that this was hardly surprising: after all many disabled people
are just as phony.
As Runswick-Cole (2012) has powerfully argued, the benefit scrounger strikes
at the heart of the neoliberal ambition that one betters oneself through self-
realisation, self-fulfilment and self-containment. At the same time, one should
not be surprised by the presence of Atos at the Paralympics. The fact that the
‘Atos’ shone out behind Paralympians as they collected their medals, teary eyed,
with national anthems blaring out one after the other, should not be seen as
a contradiction. This is how dis/ability works. Whenever we see a successful
disabled person then there is always the tendency to wonder: yes, they did well,
but the rest of them are (1) not as lucky; (2) did not work as hard; (3) are more
handicapped than our hero (tick the option). One could argue that to promote
the success of the Paralympics it was essential, discursively sound and politically
clever to ensure the prominence of Atos. After all, Runswick-Cole (2012) reminds
us, Atos roots out and penalises the ‘undeserving cripples’. While the Paralympics
illuminates those neoliberal crips who overcame all odds to get there, dis/ability
is a phenomenon that is essentially bifurcated, binarised and wedded together and

across itself. The legacy of the Paralympics might be that it exposed the strange
paradox dis/ability. The bifurcated super-crip/welfare scrounger appears, at first,
to be a confusing contradictory set of practices. In reality, however, this perfectly
captures each side of the dis/ability binary and its making in the image of global
media.
Big Society: ref/using neoliberalism?
We are continually generating a multitude of ways of being queer and crip,

and of coming together. If we hope for another world that is not possible
but livable, we can and should continue to generate more.
(McRuer, 2012c: n.p.)
What possibilities exist for crip organisations to come together and work against
or through neoliberalism? I want to push our analysis of neoliberal-ableism by
contemplating the place of disability organisations, specifically those in the third or
voluntary sector, often referred to as non-government organisations and key players
in the civil society community. Gill (2000: 131) suggests that we are witnessing a
postmodern civil society where a set of conditions (particularly political, material
and ecological) are giving rise to new forms of political agency whose defining
philosophies are associated with ‘the quest to ensure human and intergenera-
tional security on and for the planet, as well as democratic human development
and human rights’. Similarly, for Hardt (1995), civil society is the institutional
infrastructure for political mediation and public exchange; between ideological,
cultural and economic institutions outside of the state. We know from previous
research in disability studies that organisations run by and for disabled people have
played a huge role in supporting and campaigning for the community inclusion of
their disabled brothers and sisters (Oliver, 1990; Barnes and Mercer, 2003). Jenkins
(2005: 615) positions these organisations within the cornerstones of the state, the
market and the informal sectors; they have traditionally generated social cohesion
and economic vitality of civil society. These organisations, therefore, are never out
of the reach of neoliberalism. There is a real risk of us witnessing a neutralisation of
the dynamism of civil society organisations as they get caught up in the neoliberal
project. Entering the competitive marketplace to barter for funds, for example,
risks tempering this vitality.
Yet while entrance into the neoliberal marketplace is a risky business this raises
interesting opportunities. For Williams et al. (2012) while neoliberalism threatens
to hollow out the welfare state this does allow for third sector organisations to fill
the gap as repositories of resources, mobilising and training volunteers, providing
venues and funding which provide a suitable platform to engage with individuals
who are socially excluded. Consequently, organisations ‘can serve to subvert,
resist, and rework the performative assemblage of neoliberalism’ (Williams et al.,
2012: 1481). This more affirmative view of civil society suggests all might not
be lost.
In Britain, we have recently witnesses a new policy driver; the focus of Project 4:
Big Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities and civil society. As we explored
in Chapter 5, Big Society involves a neoliberalisation of the voluntary sector and
civil society. You will recall that the British government’s Cabinet Office (2010b)
identified three core components of the Big Society policy agenda: (i) empow-
ering communities: giving local councils and neighbourhoods more power to take
decisions and shape their area; (ii) opening up public services: the government’s
public service reforms will enable charities, social enterprises, private companies
and employee-owned cooperatives to compete to offer people high quality services;
(iii) promoting social action: encouraging and enabling people from all walks of
life to play a more active part in society, and promoting more volunteering and
philanthropy. Big Society is classic neoliberal economics: individuals will pick up
where the state has receded. There will be winners and losers in this policy mire.
For Harvey (1996: 124) ‘the marks of all this violence upon individual bodies are
not hard to read. Systemic studies again and again emphasise the stark impacts of
inequalities upon life chances’ (and see also Harvey, 1998). A key question emerges
here: does neoliberalism produce only greater inequities or can it be ref/used in
order to agitate for resistance and change? One wonders what can be done with
what Power (2005) terms the ambiguities, ambivalences and contradictions of
neoliberalism. Dis/ability should therefore seek to draw out counter-tendencies
that are produced by neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell, 2002). While conscious of
the domineering nature of global dis/ability discourse we should seek to explore
those moments when we can work the spaces of neoliberalism (Power, 2005):
through imagination, appropriation and subversion. The civil society does, thank-
fully, give us hope.
Williams et al. (2012: 1487) suggest that ‘while governmental rationalities
and technologies may reduce space for autonomy and discretion by encoding
certain behaviours, they cannot be assumed to dictate what happens in particular
contexts’. There is emerging evidence that civil society organisations are ‘not
docile subjects co-opted under institutional pressures of their funders’ (Williams
et al. 2012: 1488). In contrast, they conclude, there is an ‘obdurate streak of
prophetic radicalism among some campaigning NGOs (non-government organi-
sations) that has successfully placed structural interpretations of, for example,
international poverty and debt on the public agenda’ (p. 1489). The ethical perfor-
mances of staff in voluntary organisations ‘rework and reinterpret the values and
judgments supposedly normalised in the regulatory frameworks of government
policy, bringing alternative philosophies of care into play’ (p. 1496). For Williams
et al. there are three types of response: revision (fulfilling the remit of a government
contract but refashioning for other outcomes); resistance (developing alternative
strategies in order to achieve outcomes other than those set out) and refusal (disen-
gaging with official rationalities).
Project 4 was put together through collaborative discussions with our impact
expert research partners. What quickly became apparent were our partners’
examples of working the spaces and edges of neoliberalism and our discussions
revealed their revision, resistance and refusal of Big Society discourse. It is possible
to plot the work of our partners against the three core components of the Big
Society (lifted again directly from the Cabinet Office, 2010b, publication) in ways
that reveal moments of blockage and potentiality.
• Empowering communities: giving local councils and neighbourhoods more power

to take decisions and shape their area. Our Inclusive Living colleagues – Pete
and Wendy Crane, along with colleagues including person-centred planning
coordinator Max Neil, have developed the Circles of Support approach to
community living. This involves individuals such as Matt (a pseudonym)
using their welfare benefits to recruit a network of advocates and support staff
to support him 24/7 in his own home which is located a couple of streets
down from his parents. This exemplifies an empowered community and
demonstrates the possibilities for interdependency, cripping normative ideas
around independent living and replacing them with, I would suggest, more
posthumanist understandings of alliance and connection. On the downside,
our research partners have also alerted us to the closure of key community
facilities and services as a result of the current government’s austerity package,
which puts pressure on the individuals and services of Circle of Support
(Crane and Crane, n.d.).
• Opening up public services: the government’s public service reforms will enable
charities, social enterprises, private companies and employee-owned cooperatives to
compete to offer people high quality services. Another of our research impact
partners – the Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities (FPLD) –
has developed a host of projects and interventions that draw deeply on the
organisation’s knowledge of disability policy and practice to support people
with learning disabilities to set up their own small business enterprises.
While government-funded schemes through the Job Centre have had varying
successes in relation to increasing the work opportunities of disabled people,
the FPLD draws on its wider philosophy of community living to support
people in specialist and nuanced ways. What we have here is the potential
for ‘creative, inventive, resistant responses of subjects positioned by overbearing
discourses and technologies of subjection’ (Barnett et al., 2008; 633; my
italics). Discourses of the self, citizenship and responsibility produce in excess
of themselves, permitting individuals and organisations to utilise the terms of
neoliberalism: in this case entrepreneurial business development. The FPLD
starts with a rather reductive discourse (promoting work opportunities) and
moves it into the extended realm of interdependent living with people with
learning disabilities developing networks of support and distribution types of
competence. From cruel optimism to networks of mutuality.
• Promoting social action: encouraging and enabling people from all walks of
life to play a more active part in society, and promoting more volunteering and
philanthropy. The third of our research partners and impact experts is Speak
Up Self-advocacy, Rotherham. They exemplify perfectly the opportu-
nities for accessing government funds through the opening up of services
(described above), which then allow them to promote social action and
critical pedagogy. They cleverly turn the tables on professional-led expert
models of training, as the extract taken directly from their website indicates
(Box 9.1).
Speak Up troubles the more patronising disablist charity discourses associated with
Big Society’s emphasis on volunteering and philanthropy. Those volunteering
their expertise in Speak Up are not the charitable non-disabled, but, conversely,
disabled people with the label of intellectual disabilities. The clients of Speak Up
BOX 9.1 DIS/ABILITY TRAINING
Speak Up offers high quality and affordable training that is practical and
tailored to meet your organisation’s needs. Our training courses can be
delivered in your workplace or at our training centre and are delivered
by experts in the field of learning disability and/or autism. Speak Up has
worked with a large range of individuals and organisations to ensure our
training is unique and promotes best practice. All of our training courses
have been developed and are delivered by people with learning disabilities
and/or autism working in partnership with qualified tutors. We can deliver
training to large or small groups (often larger groups can provide a more cost
effective option for your organisation). Speak Up currently has the following
courses available to your organisation:
•• What is a learning disability – “I’m a person too!”

•• Autism
•• How to support people with learning disabilities and/or autism on Work
Choice/Work Programmes
•• Mental Capacity Act
•• Easy Read
•• Safeguarding vulnerable adults
•• Communication
•• Person Centred Planning
•• Person Centred Reviews
•• Person Centred Train the Trainer
•• Money Management
Source: http://www.speakup.org.uk/?page_id=282
are the wider public. The discourse of Big Society is subverted. Speak Up exploits
opportunities provided through funding to revisit tacitly accepted notions of dis/
ability and training. For Jacobs (2000) the discourse of civil society has existed
through the development of a semiotic binary that combines the inclusion of
the ambitions of some alongside the exclusion of others. This might explain the
historical dominance of organisations for disabled people over organisations of
disabled people. Fortunately, Speak Up Self-advocacy is engaged in political work
that troubles benevolent ideas of charity and volunteering: instead, reappraising
the assumptions that many members of civil society hold around dis/ability. They
alert others to the possibilities of difference and diversity – embodied through the
phenomenon of learning disabilities – which might lead to different ways of living
life. This life might not necessarily be one that is independent and labouring.
Speak Up Self-advocacy and the Foundation for People with Learning
Disabilities do something profound when they uphold the idea that not every one
(individual) can nor should work (alone). They crip normative ideas associated
with ‘playing a more active role in society’. This brings us back neatly to cruel
optimism (of labour, which is being contested), debility studies (the recognition
that some many bodies will not work) and posthumanism (to develop new config-
urations of human life and connection). If we follow Puar (2009, 2010) that there
is no such thing as an ‘adequately able’ body anymore then does this new found
new knowledge of our debility ask us to become dis/abled together? What forms
of humanity are demanded by human debility? Interdependent living also offers us
new posthumanist ways of thinking how we might crip and queer together.
Conclusion
As Hardt (1995) has recognised, civil society is education and education means
discipline. Dominant practices of civil society threaten to produce a version of
the citizen that many engaged with the dis/ability complex will fail to match:
the liberated, labouring individual so desired of modern society. It is increasingly
difficult to escape this idealised labouring citizen of late capitalism. As Hardt (1995)
has shown, through reference to Deleuze, we live in a smooth space of disciplinary
practices and governmentality. The practices of what makes for a good productive
citizen are not simply found in the walled confines of the prison, school, mental
institution or family home, they are found throughout and across these spaces.
This borderless, boundaryless nature of the spreading of disciplinary discourses
throughout civil society can be seen like a smooth space. Neoliberal economic
and socio-political rationalities urge responsible individuals to control their health
not only for their own sake but also for the socio-economic good of the nation
(Erevelles, 2011: 2168).
So where can we find spaces for resistance? For Hardt (1995) in those moments
of desiring production, kin work and care work. This evokes the kinds of inter-
dependent connections, support networks, distributed competencies, shared
knowledge production found in the disabled multitude and something we will
develop in the final chapter. Crucially, dis/ability studies gifts civil society an
opportunity to re-educate itself about the kinds of civil society subjects it values
and produces. If we can talk about a post-queer politics (Brenkman, 2002) then
can we also engage with a post-crip politics? Such politics urge a change to the
political order through a process of what Garland Thomson (2011) terms misfitting.
Dis/ability as misfit might be a suitable slogan for our neoliberal post-crip civil
society.
10
CRITICAL DIS/ABILITY STUDIES
This final chapter is an essay of two parts. The first, studies, seeks to bring a
selection of intellectual projects that might emerge as a response to the analytical
work of this book including dis/ability, non/normative, ab/normal, life/death,
trans/human and in/human studies. The second, becomings, identifies and develops
analytical themes that animate dis/ability including desires, categorisation, politics
(including debility/slow death politics) and global activism.
Studies
A number of intellectual projects proliferate from this book. In thinking through
each of these studies I am reminded of the poststructuralist sensibility to uphold
a binary and subject it to close scrutiny. I want to push this point a little further
and, mindful of the other dis/ability theories employed in this text, outline what
can be gained from working the dis/ability complex. As we contemplate this binary,
we might think about how we work either side, to flip between each and reveal
the productive excesses of such a dynamic process. More importantly we come
to the idea of working the binary not simply as a theoretical game but precisely
because there is clear evidence that people associated with the dis/ability complex
are already engaged in working it.
Clearly the overarching meta-narrative of this text is a call for dis/ability
studies: the bifurcated study of coexisting processes associated with dis/ability and
disablism/ableism. Disability is always haunted by the spectre of ability. Ability
needs disability to be by its side in order to speak of what it is not. I agree with
DeShong (2008: 2) that we need to centralise dis/ability in our work. There are
occasions, of course, when one should spend one’s time addressing a particular side
of the binary. Disability studies has necessarily needed to foreground the politics
of both disability and disablism precisely because of the lack of recognition of such
FIGURE 10.1 Working the productive excesses of the dis/ability complex
phenomena on the part of mainstream society and other transformative arenas.

Disability is so often – far too often – ignored by others who should, frankly,
know better. Yet, whether one likes it or not, disability studies is neither broad nor
politically mainstream enough to attract the activism of others (or we should say
Others) associated with class, race, gender, sexuality. In contrast, ableism threatens
to defeat us all through its impossible ideals, narrow conceptions of personhood, its
arrogance and propensity to buddy up with other fascistic ideologies that celebrate
the minority over the majority. This is a worldview, a preferred ontology and
methodology for the making of humankinds that will eventually, if left unchal-
lenged, bulldoze the disparate variegated nature of humanity. Abelism is an entity
around which many ethical political souls can organise against. When we start to
interrogate ableism and ability, then disability emerges not just as the Other side
of the oppressive coin but also as a resistant alternative. Disability provides highly
politicised, nuanced, focused and immediate responses to ableism. Rather than
sucking the life out of it, dis/ability studies rejuvenates studies of disability: re/
connecting disability with other transformative praxes that sit in opposition to the
ideals of ableism.
But let us spare a little more space here to contemplate the relative merits
of an analysis informed by a focus on ableism. The phenomenon of ableism
that is developed by Wolbring (2008a, 2008b), for example, has a pervasive and
Critical dis/ability studies 155
all-encompassing quality to it: ranging from an emphasis on species-typical man

through to the proliferation of prosthetic and technological implants, devices
and alterations. My worry, to use the language of ableism and the sommelier, is
this: does ableism as an explanatory category or epistemological orientation have
any legs to it? Like a good wine, does ableism boast some potency to it as an
explanatory approach to study? Or are there certain formations of ableism that
have more conceptual fluency than others? I worry that the category of ableism is
being stretched too far to encompass all aspects of life that are frankly a lot more
complicated than a monologue about ableism will allow for. Take, for example,
these tricky questions:
• When you celebrate one of your children excelling and getting A grades in
their end of year exams are you being ableist?
• If my football team beats your football team and I punch the air with glee: am
I embracing ableist normativity?
• By treating his depression with antidepressants has Brian bought into
neoliberal-ableism?
• Does the treatment of Dan’s shortsightedness with eye laser treatment
denounce the ontologies of blind people?
• When activists with the label of learning disabilities use the term People
First to describe their politics are they distancing themselves – in a normative
fashion – from other disabled people?
The answer to each question, so it seems to me, is no – as long as the debates,

questions and conversations about the dis/ability complex continue. If dis/ability is
privatised, and no longer publically interrogated, ableism and disablism will prolif-
erate. If the only valid ontology is a sighted one then we are clearly committing
a dangerous negation of other ontological positions (or, as I like to call them,
lives). When drugs are the only signifier of the treatment of distress then we
ignore wider struggles with life experienced by the majority of the population.
Dis/ability bends our heads and bodies into some awkward shapes. We all feel
a fundamental problem of the seductive nature of (hyper) ability in terms of its
individualistic tendencies. It yearns to internalise. To find a home in each and
every one of us. To reside in our interiorities. To fuel our desires. To narrow
our ambitions. To shape our worlds. A periscopic concern for only our child
and our team: distinct from an Other’s. If we only celebrate our individual child’s
achievement or our team’s singular moment and fail to reconnect with wider
conceptions of what we value about education or sports then we reduce the
complexities of dis/ability, education and sport. When we pursue educational
achievement geared up to the assessment of the solitary learner couched in the
language of individualistic achievement we will always be lost to the ableist
imperative. When we value individual athletic, financial, educational achievement
of one over the collective achievements of the many then our celebrations will be
occasional and our potential for joy limited. When achievement and progression
are narrowly defined and held up as the main qualities that we value in others and
ourselves then we are in trouble.
If, however, whilst supporting our kids or team, we also consistently seek
those moments of joy associated with connecting with disparate learners, or
chatting with other fans of sport who are there at the match because of the love,
sometimes obsessive love, of an imagined community, the marker of relationship
between parent, son or daughter, the opportunity to jump about with abandon
alongside 25,000 other paying punters as a goal is scored, then we are extending
what it means to be human beyond the rigid confines of elite sporting or educa-
tional achievement. We have to re-find those moments of alliance, connections
and interdependence that are at the heart of what it means to be human. Without
these bonds we will be forever alone in our ableist silos (even if our team wins
the championship or our kid gets the A grade). Without community and alliance
we will be in a pretty lonely place. Critical ableist studies engender a reading of
what passes as normal, desirable and progressive. We contest a discourse that only
acknowledges a ‘do-it-yourself ’ citizenship. Critical disability studies politicises
the experience of living with impairment in contemporary society. Critical dis/
ability studies then keeps in mind the pressure of both and contemplates how we
circumnavigate these often contrary and conflicting positions.
Dis/ability studies asks us then to consider how we value the human and what
kinds of society are worth fighting for. In recent writing (Goodley and Lawthom,
2011; Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2013b) I have repeatedly asked and sought
to address this question with writing comrades. One might suggest that for many
disabled people they have been denied the opportunity to occupy the position
of the modernist humanistic subject: bounded, rational, capable, responsible and
competent. Being recognised as having these ableist ideals is understandably a big
deal. Ask any Paralympic athlete whose work, preparation and athleticism was
recognised in terms of sporting athleticism rather than achievements in spite of
their disabling impairments. Ask parents with intellectual disabilities who have
been judged fit enough to keep their children. Each athlete and parent has proven
their individualistic worth in their respective fields of sport and parenting. We
know, too, that this modernist ideal of the human subject – that undergirds and
feeds our philosophical, sporting, educational and legal frameworks – if left to be
the only way to live life as a human subject would displace large sections of the
population who will, perhaps, fail to match to ideal. The time is therefore rife for
new conceptions of what it means to be human in our increasingly interconnected,
technologically structured and im/materially related lives. Disability asks of ability:
Is that all you’ve got? Are you really that superficial in what you consider to be
worthy of merit?
Greenstein (2013: 49) has argued for a dis-ability studies perspective to indicate
‘a spectrum or multitude rather than the binary dis/ability which was constructed
through power relations and hegemonic beliefs about ideal productive bodies
and about notions of usefulness’. This is an interesting posthumanist take on
the complex terrain of dis/ability through which humanity is often mapped.
Reminiscent of the old argument that if we are not already disabled then we are
temporarily able-bodied, Greenstein’s (2013) notion of dis-ability evokes Hardt
and Negri’s (2004: 66) multitude; a biopolitical and dialectical concept that suffers
and produces, is poor though also rich, that extends beyond the Marxist proletariat
to include poor people, migrants, workers, the unemployed, parents, children and
carers; a concept that captures the realities of the ‘global recomposition of the
social classes’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 66). While this is a concept we will return
to under our beginnings section below, we recognise here a dis/ability multitude,
which cuts across dichotomies of rich/poor, un/employed, parent/child. Hence,
to take one example, parents of disabled children come together to contest the
abusive conditions of dis/ableism. This is beautifully but also tragically captured
on the Blogspot (http://mydaftlife.wordpress.com/): a Blogspot of a mother of
a disabled young man (Laughing Boy or LB). Two extracts poignantly capture
mother and child’s entanglement in the dis/ability multitude:
I can’t move beyond wondering how a hospital unit, with only four or five
patients, who made such a fucking fuss about asking LB’s permission for us
to visit on a daily basis, could let him die in the bath.
If anyone can effect change in the way in which learning disabled children/
adults are treated, I’d lay my money on a bunch of (raging) mothers of
disabled children.
(Both from: http://mydaftlife.wordpress.com/2013/07/)
I urge you to visit and read this deeply significant blog. Suffice to say what it
captures is the diversity of membership of the dis-ability multitude, spanning
children and parents. Indeed, Ryan and Runswick-Cole (2008) have been crystal
clear about the urgency of taking seriously the potential politicisation of parents
of disabled children (whether those children are young or old) in contributing to
the politics of disability. We can extend this further by connecting it to the dis/
ability multitude highlighting the need to cut across binaries and the spectrum in
order to identify shared moments of rupture. We will return to this point later in
the chapter under Global dis/ability politics. Safe to say, LB’s mum is not alone in
her battles (and nor should she ever be). What I will state here is that cases like
LB raise enormous questions about the kinds of humanity and difference that we
value and tolerate, or not, in contemporary society.
Non/normative studies
LB pushes us to consider non/normative studies. During her recent dedication of
a conference to the memory of LB (normalcy 2013 conference in Sheffield),
Katherine Runswick-Cole suggested that, tragically, LB’s death reminds us of
the accumulative consequences of mundane forms of ableism and disablism. We
need to recognise the disavowing quality of the normal. Being treated as normally
as other individuals is a powerful political tool, for example, for self-advocacy

groups of people with the label of learning disabilities. As Boxall (2013) suggests,
access to a normal life, community acceptance, work, play and love are goals for
many people so-labelled, who have been positioned as the opposite of the normal
human. We need, therefore, normative studies that recognise what the normal
register gives (as well as what it takes away). Non-normative contexts, identity and
subject positions, may be places of exile: banished far away from the normative
homelands as Michalko (2002) describes them. In Chapter 7 we saw how carefully
the Derbyshire family worked their way in and out of each side of the non/
normative as they made a case for the worth of their daughter. In doing so, I would
agree with Vehmas and Watson (2013) that when one thinks through the values of
life one often does so with recourse and reference to a normative register. It should
not be normal to expel some children from mainstream education simply on the
basis of their physical or cognitive impairments. It should be normal, following
the Derbyshires, that everyone is given a cup and saucer to drink from (a point
we extend in Goodley and Runswick-Cole, forthcoming). Moreover, as critical
mental health activists and mental health system survivors have long demonstrated,
feeling a little more normal about oneself might be a crucial part of dealing with
one’s challenging mental health. Feeling normal and feeling better are desirable. I
would accept the argument played out in Vehmas and Watson (2013) that thinking
about dis/ability involves an engagement with ethical and political norms: what
do we value as our foundational ideas about a good life? My problem with their
approach is that they risk leaving dis/ability only in the realm of the normative.
They risk ignoring the productive potential of dis/ability to crip a whole host
of norms that are, in actuality, limiting and stifling. As we have seen, playing
with ideas around what it might mean to live non/normative lives extends what
we might understand as being human and, by proxy, how we configure society.
Non/normative humanities posit exciting, radicalising and alternative practices of
everyday life in counterpoint to the idealised normal citizen of our times. Non/
normative studies find and celebrate cripping potentialities. Non/normative
children, for example, disrupt, contest and subvert educational policies, practices
and pedagogies that have been founded upon the assumption that education is the
normal child’s playground. Mad Pride activists have, in certain cases, upheld the
potentiality of the non-normal of madness, suggesting that new ontological and
epistemological opportunities are opened up by such as stance. Disabled young
women, as Slater (2012) found out, are keen to deconstruct disablist ideas around
their bodies at the same time as enjoying the normative temptations of lipstick and
fashion marketed at women of their age. Always, and at the same time, like any
binary we are also left with those moments when we consider what we want to
retain and discard of the normative.
Ab/normal studies
Chapter 8 deliberately ‘did a job’ on the normals of contemporary society exposing
their confused dealings with dis/ability. Clearly, normative standards have the
potential to feed some pretty fucked up responses to that which is deemed to
be abnormal. Nevertheless, we have seen the importance of keeping the non/
normative binary hanging especially in relation to dis/ability politics. Slater’s
(2012) work is insightful again here as she draws attention to the un/reasonable
nature of knowledge production. Too often, she argues, Mr Reasonable dominates
our thinking, pulling in neoliberal expectations associated not only with work and
consumption but also with comportment, psychology and culture. Schools are so
obsessed with how reasonable they are in terms of their academic standards and
behavioural expectations that disruptive children threaten to be an unreasonable
presence. Slater recognises, however, how disabled young people crave contexts
that are reasonable, tolerant and accepting of their difference. Many also have
ambitions around work, marriage and kids. This does not simply make them
normative citizens.
In this sense, again, dis/ability crips the distinctions of the un/reasonable
and ab/normal. Many disabled people have been denied access to a reasonable
citizenship. Bringing disability to the party shifts how we might understand the
reasonable life. Bringing our discussion back to ab/normal, we saw in Chapters 7
and 9 how families and activists working with the politics of learning disabilities,
are constantly moving in and out of either side of ab/normal. Self-advocacy group
members crave to be recognised as people – as normal human beings just like
everyone else – but they do so whilst simultaneously recognising that their activism
emerged around the phenomenon of learning disabilities. There is no denial here
of difference; though, equally, there is an emphasis on the similarities with people
per se. This complex political work around the dis/ability complex indicates
an ambition to share in the usual offerings of normative adulthood – sex, love,
shopping and work – whilst also demanding new configurations of personhood,
which might permit such offerings to be consumed. The pioneering work of
Tim and Wendy Booth (1994) on the lives of parents with intellectual disabilities
and their children demonstrated the desire to mother and father alongside an
imperative: that significant community and family others necessarily provide forms
of distributed competence and autonomy that kept children with their families.
Looking back now at this work, it would seem that ab/normality studies offered
by parents remind us of the desire to parent (normal) requires more imaginative or
cripped forms of familial support (abnormal).
Life/death studies
A key area of dis/ability studies research to emerge for me during the writing of
this book is what I term life/death studies. Death and disability often go together.
For example, as Erevelles (2002b: 6) puts it in her analyses of cognitive impairment
and education, ‘death-invoking discourses constitute disability as marking the

outermost limits of human existence, and therefore, never engage the everyday
reality of what it means to be a citizen with cognitive/severe disability’. So death
and disability are always lacking, denied and disavowed bedfellows. However, I
would like to ask this: How might we speak positively, affirmatively and produc-
tively about death and disability? This question was posed directly during Project
3 when we were lucky enough to work with parents and their children who had
life-limiting and life-threatening impairments. What seemed so remarkable to us
were the ways in which children and their families were living so productively with
short lives. Their responses captured the tragedy of dying young with the wonder
of enjoying times together. Their stories demanded research to develop novel
social theory, innovative methodological approaches and enabling professional
and community responses that transform contemporary understandings of death,
disability and short lives through dialogue between the social sciences, medicine
and palliative care. Puar (2009: 165–166) proposes that all global citizens are ‘living
in prognosis with their own debility’. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the
case of children and young people with life-limiting and life-threatening impair-
ments (LL/LTIs). If social theory, professional practice, community discourse or
social policy speak of these young people at all then this tends to be in terms
of tragedy, negativity and sadness. In contrast, recent developments in feminist,
queer, postcolonial, disability and death studies have provided new vocabularies for
speaking of and celebrating the lives and death of ‘non-normative’ human beings
(e.g. McRuer, 2006). Being disabled is not a tragedy but a possibility, an affir-
mation, a queer or crip space for rethinking what it means to be human, to live a
quality life and a life with quality. My suggestion is that life–death studies demand
social theory to productively speak of and with young people who are living
short lives. Could we work with young people, their families and professionals in
hospices to develop new affirmative understandings of living short lives? Death is
a difficult subject and discussing the death of a child is more difficult still. Social
embarrassment around death and disability means that a silence is often imposed
upon families. However, we need to talk about death before and after a child dies.
We should promote valued understandings of real bodies facing death. Dis/ability
studies should theorise death, disability and short lives in ways that honour these
lives. Indeed, a consideration of death, disability and short lives extends social and
natural science understandings of well-being and humanity. Our focus should
move to the lives of children and people with the highest support needs which
will have much to contribute to wider understandings of children and childhoods.
Trans/human studies
Undoubtedly, we are entering a frenzied time of human enhancement, biotech-
nological intervention and hybridised forms of techo-humanity. This raises huge
ethical and political issues as well as the rise of trans/human studies. As Braidotti
(2006: 198) reminds us ‘new kinds of bodies are being constructed right now’.
There is an urgent need for dis/ability studies to become more and more involved
in the ethics and project of transhumanism. Clearly, there are scholars in the
human and natural sciences who are engaging with these tricky ethical issues.
For example, the Academy of Medical Sciences (2012) publication ‘Human
enhancement and the future of work’, reported on a joint workshop hosted by
the Academy of Medical Sciences, the British Academy, the Royal Academy of
Engineering and the Royal Society. The disability scholar Jackie Leach Skully is
referred to in the report as raising a number of ethical dis/ability issues in relation
to the use of enhancement technologies. Questions are raised about the use
of technological aids, which might make workplaces less likely to think about
adapting their environments to make them more accessible to people with a variety
of mobility, sensory and cognitive needs. Trans/humanist studies will and should
incorporate cyborg studies. Reeve’s (2012) sensitive and careful handling of the
cyborg as a potentially useful metaphor and practice for reconsidering disability
studies’ relationship to the body suggests that much work can be done. She is
also keen to remind us that the cyborg has been thrust upon disabled people
often against their wishes. Think here of forms of conductive education and
painful prostheses that have, so accounts tell us, actually decreased quality of life.
Wolbring (2009) necessarily complicates the debate further when he observes that
enhancement technologies will very likely generate new ability divides as well as
gradations of wealth from techno-poor to techno-rich.
While these complications exist within transhumanism, the cyborg might
be deployed as a useful metaphor for capturing the interdependent relation-
ships desired through dis/ability. For Raab (2012) reworking the cyborg through
crip representations offers us new ways of thinking about human subjectivities:
hybridised, ensembled and collectivist notions of what it means to be human. This
may allow us to think about the importance of more mundane conceptualisations
of the cyborg: of interconnection and mutuality found in many care, family and
friendship relations.
In/human studies
All this sexy talk of technology, bodies and identities should not deter us from
attending to a form of studies that hints at the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday
and the given but, in reality, might be the biggest question of them all: What does
it mean to be human? Work by dis/ability scholars Titchkosky (in press), Shildrick
(2009) and Michalko (2002), in their own ways, asks us to think about the kind of
valued human that is illuminated by dis/ability. In/human studies ask again what it
means to be considered human (or not): a question that is fundamental to contem-
porary politics:
The struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing
imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethno-class (i.e.,
Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which over-represents
itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and
therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species
itself/ourselves.
(Wynter, 2003: 260)
Through recourse to the work of postcolonial and disability studies scholars,

Titchkosky (in press) worries away at the rigidity of what we often pass off as human.
It remains the case today, she argues, that despite the universal human condition of
embodiment, and even with efforts to establish a universal and transcendent sense
of human, not all bodies are granted the status of persons (let alone of human).
In this sense, she concludes, ‘segregated from life, disability appears as though it is
detached from the wider question of what it means to be human’ (no page, in press).
The normative, taken-for-granted, working in the Global world, born of WENA
category of human remains one that can account for itself only by positing ‘something
(or someone) outside its borders’ (no page, in press). This refers directly back to the
species-typical character of the ableist human critiqued by Campbell (2009).
The study of the human strikes right at the heart of the ontogeny/sociogeny
relationship, that is, how we understand our individual selves as human and the
ways in which these understandings reflect and empower wider social scripts about
what it means to be human (scripts that enjoy historical, economic and cultural
foundations). The postcolonial writer Sylvia Wynter (2003) moves us through
some wonderfully productive considerations of the human. It is worth visiting in
some detail her analytical-political project: Human Struggle vs. Ethnoclass Man
(the capitals are in the original paper). Her project circles around two questions:
Who is excluded from ethnoclass man and, in contrast, who is engaged in human
struggle? Those categorised as outside, excluded and often invisible are that:
category defined at the global level by refugee/economic migrants stranded

outside the gates of the rich countries, as the postcolonial variant of Fanon’s
category of les damnés (Fanon 1963) – with this category in the United
States coming to comprise the criminalized majority Black and dark-
skinned Latino inner-city males now made to man the rapidly expanding
prison-industrial complex, together with their female peers – the kicked-
about Welfare Moms – with both being part of the ever-expanding global,
transracial category of the homeless/the jobless, the semi-jobless, the crimi-
nalized drug-offending prison population.
(Wynter, 2003: 260)
To this list of outsiders we can add, I would argue, those people caught up in the
dis/ability complex. For citizens to claim a ‘normal’ North American identity
entails putting up a ‘visible distance between themselves and the Black population
group’ (Wynter, 2003: 260), and then over-presenting their normative selves as
the way to live. Hence, the struggle of our times, ‘one that has hitherto had no
name, is the struggle against this over-representation’ (Wynter, 2003: 262). ‘The
central over-representation’, she notes, ‘enables the interests, reality, and well-
being of the empirical human world to continue to be imperatively subordinated
to those of the now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of “Man”’ (p. 262; my
italics). This is heady stuff! Human struggle is to be found not in the maintenance
of (ethno) ‘mankind’ but with those in the ‘empirical human world’ (I love that
phrase) agitating on the outside on the boundaries as Others. Indeed, Wynter
writes, ‘one of the major empirical effects of which would be “the rise of Europe”
is its construction of the “world civilization” on the one hand, and, on the other,
African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation’ (p. 263).
This colonising history shares much in common with the colonising principles of
ableism and normalisation that we have uncovered in this text.
As we follow Wynter in her paper, weaving her way through ancient, enlight-
enment and contemporary times, we are drawn to the folding and refolding of
increasingly rigid mouldings around what it means to be human-as-ethnoclass-
able-man. The modality of normative man is, she suggests, a ‘descriptive state of
the human’ (Wynter, 2003: 281). In our contemporary times the civic–humanist,
rational self-conception of the citizen was built on a violent genealogy where,
all other modes of being human would instead have to be seen not as the
alternative modes of being human that they are ‘out there,’ but adaptively,
as the lack of the West’s ontologically absolute self-description … With this
systemic repression ensuring that we oversee (thereby failing to recognize)
the culture and class-specific relativity of our present mode of being human.
(Wynter, 2003: 281–282)
‘The new descriptive statement of the human, Man, as primarily a political subject
– of, therefore, the West’s own self-conception’ (p. 233): ‘optimally economic man’
(p. 314) was ‘in a law like manner through the systemic stigmatization of the Earth’
(p. 321). And, once this ‘had been instituted as the only, universally applicable mode
of being human’, ethnoclass able man ‘would remain unable, from then on until
today, of conceiving an Other to what they call human’ (p. 299). ‘All Others’, she
writes, ‘had to be read through the descriptive statement of the human’ (p. 300):
inhuman. Some were included so gradations of rationality, civilization, devel-
opment, skin shade, caste could account for one’s interpellation in the ethnoclass
able-man imaginary, although many others were cast off as animal, non-human
(p. 300). With the result of legitimating ‘the expropriation and internment of the
Indians, the mass enslavement of the Negroes, and the internment of the Mad – all
ostensibly as living proof of their naturally determined enslavement to irrationality’
(p. 305). This was about a line being drawn ‘between, on the one hand, divinely
created-to-be-rational humans, and on the other, no less divinely created-to-be-
irrational animals’ (p. 313). Here we find a ‘socio-ontological line now drawn
between rational, political Man (the settler of European descent) and its irrational
Human Others (the categories of Caliban [i.e., the subordinated Indians and the
enslaved Negroes])’ (p. 314). And to the latter groups we can add disabled people.
All were made to occupy ‘the matrix slot of Otherness – to be made into the
physical referent of the idea of the irrational/sub rational Human Other’ (p. 265).
And, again, we can see parallels with the constitution of Abled man and disabled
Other as ‘The savage Other, the fossil Other, the abnormal Other, the timeless
ethnographic Other’ (p. 267).
Following this devastating critique of WENA man, Wynter’s challenge then
is to develop a new descriptive statement of the human that calls upon the
archipelago of Human Otherness (her term, my italics) ‘peopled by a new category
… the politically condemned’ (Wynter, 2003: 321). Re-describing the human
involves recognizing the ‘Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, with the
logical inference that one cannot “unsettle” the “Coloniality of power” without
a redescription of the human outside the terms of our present descriptive statement of
the human, Man, and its over-representation’ (p. 268; my italics). Were we to add dis/
ability to the mix one might suggest that there is a cripping/decolonising flavour
to this theoretical and political work. There are also resonances with our attack, in
this book, on the ableism of everyday life:
This issue is that of the genre of the human, the issue whose target of
abolition is the ongoing collective production of our present ethnoclass
mode of being human, Man: above all, its overrepresentation of its well-
being as that of the human species as a whole, rather than as it is veridically:
that of the Western and westernized (or conversely) global middle classes.
(Wynter, 2003: 313)
We should never underestimate ‘the degree of psychic devastation wrought on

the non-middle-class group’ (Wynter, 2003: 324) by this limited description of
the human. But we should also acknowledge the place of the Other in this mire.
For Wynter (pp. 327–328), we need to recognise how we have come to represent
the human in such tragically reduced ways. In short, there is a huge amount of
culturally creative and politically informed work to be done.
Reading Wynter (2003), I am reminded of Fanon’s (1993) call for a new
humanism: one not locked into the colonising and colonised imprint of humanist
man that he and Wynter so devastatingly denounce but one associated with
‘finding the lost motives, related no longer to Man’s but to our human self-
interest’, that is, ‘to come to grips with … still-to-be-explained puzzle of (human)
consciousness(es)’ (Wynter, 2003: 331). In these post-ethnoclass able-man times,
who defines our humanness and humanity? What makes for us all to be human?
What kind of humanity do we want to cherish? Can we define our humanness
together?
One direction we might follow to address such questions is postconvention-
alist dis/ability studies. For Braidotti (2006: 197) the very notion of the human
is not only destabilised by technologically mediated social relations in a globally
connected world, but it is also ‘thrown open to contradictory redefinitions of what
exactly counts as human’. As we explored in Chapter 7, a postconventionalist
rethinking of the human has profound implications for education. Posthumanist

thought dislocates the centrality of the isolated human and instead asks us to think
of humanity as distributed across a dynamic web of interconnections and hybrid
connotations. Such a conception troubles the usual distinctions between nature/
culture, human/animal and individual/society, producing what Braidotti (2006)
terms process ontology. This version of human posits ‘the primacy of relations over
substances’ (Braidotti, 2006: 199). So, out go fixed, normed and traditional ideas of
lacking/able bodies and, in their place, ‘new forms of literacy’ that decode today’s
world (p. 200). For Braidotti, ‘a radically immanent intensive body is an assemblage
of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify in space, and consolidate in
time, within the singular configuration commonly known as an “individual” self ’
(p. 201). The other common signifier of note is the human: a familiar term dis/
ability studies renders strange and in need of a rethink.
Becomings
Fresh on the heels of our exposition of a panoply of studies, let us now think
through a number of analytical themes that animate dis/ability and might form the
bases for some future work in critical dis/ability studies. Engaging with the dis/
ability complex invites us to think through a number of contemporaneous political
and theoretical quandaries.
Dis/ability desires
A strong theme of the book is dis/ability desires. For Braidotti (2006) and other
postconventionalist thinkers, desire is normatively understood as wanting that
which one lacks. Such a conception of desire owes much to the capitalist system
that drives the directions of our desire: to consume what we feel we really need
to make us happy. This conception of desire lies at the heart of psychoanalytic
theory and therapy and at the very centre of the messed-up everyday responses to
dis/ability described in Chapter 8. Dis/ability has the potential to drive a stake in
the heart of this formation of desire urging us to ‘scramble established codes and
destabilize the subject’ (Braidotti, 2006: 202). Desire is recast as a force through
which we connect with one another. We are asked to think of our desires for new
forms of kinship, relationality and interdependence. We are encouraged to desire
human, animal and technological forms of becoming alongside one another. In the
company of dis/ability one should feel obligated to invent new conceptual schemes
that allow us to cherish the interdependence of our humanness. Greenstein’s
(2013) work is crucial here as she recasts our educational desires in terms of the
boundless desire for connection, merger and collegiality.
Desiring dis/ability invites us to study society and the individual in ways that
are often at odds with generally taken-for-granted practices and activities associated
with human emancipation including money, work, education, sex, material
desire, independence, autonomy. It is not the case that dis/abled people do not
desire such normative pleasures (pleasures that can also be very painful) – after
all, should anyone be denied access to such pleasures (or pains) – it is simply the
case that dis/ability makes us think again about what we value in life. Desiring
ability reproduces many of the neoliberal and capitalistic desires of everyday life.
Indeed, for McRuer (2012c: 358) eugenic logics can be found everywhere in
global capitalism, once we know how to look for them. One wonders if we might
block some of these unconscious idealisations while, at the same time, considering
how a desire for ability always produces in excess of itself. As soon as one builds
up the Über-able we produce the ultra-disabled. Instead, we are asked to think
about what dis/ability gives us. In Chapter 7, for example, we considered the ways
in which the Derbyshire family worked through the dis/ability complex. From
the outset, having a disabled daughter pushed the family to engage with a whole
host of professionals and community members in order to sate their desire: that
their daughter was included in educational and community settings. This journey
involves working in and out of the dis/ability complex in imaginative ways: hence
dis/ability desires imagination. This is not to deny that travel was difficult with the
family traversing a rocky road with many obstacles. Nor should we forget that, as I
write this, the family continues to fight their corner. Desiring dis/ability reminds
us that those associated with this phenomenon are engaged in many ingenious
practices. Inclusive education can only hope to break the inherent paradox through
supporting the radical vision that disability is in fact desirable (Erevelles, 2011:
2179).
One of the most exciting revisionings of desire, at least in my opinion, has
been through the interventions of posthumanists. Shildrick (2009, 2012) suggests
that critical disability studies combine the material, discursive and phenom-
enological in order to comprehend the complexity of dis/ability. For Erevelles
(2002a, 2002b), a key task of contemporary critical writings from the Frankfurt
School through to feminist disability scholarship has been to rescue desire, affec-
tivity and the body from its exiled position away from the dominant imaginary
enshrined with the offerings of cognition, reason and the rational mind. Dis/
ability studies reinvigorates, for example, an interest in the potency and potential
of the emotional register: seeking stirrings of resistance in places so often
deemed to be irrational, other, dark and uncivilised. Shildrick’s work has pulled
Deleuzian theory into dis/ability studies, thus further enhancing dis/ability desire.
For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is everything that exists before representation,
flowing through us, manufacturing connections between humans, non-humans
and the material world. We are all desiring machines; desiring assemblages. If
we were to accept, at least for a moment, that our desires are not governed
by the logic of lack, then we can think again about the relational and political
possibilities of our assemblages. This notion fits with Puar’s (2012) description
of posthumanist thought as always challenging the boundaries of material and
discourse, body and technology, human and nonhuman. Hence, the physically
impaired body is recast not as a lack but the epicentre of moments of desiring
production. In this brave new world of desire, the disabled body then is the rule
not the exception (Mitchell and Snyder, 2006). Our desires around education,
love, life and pleasure move from a fixity of a being-in-lack to fluid assemblages
of becoming-the-connection-with-Others.
Dis/ability categorisation
This leads us to the theme of dis/ability categorisation. One of the defining features
of crip theory’s take on dis/ability would appear to be the claim that identity
categories need to be destabilised and exploded in order to embrace a more polit-
ically-savvy fluid identity that is difficult to survey and pin down. This position
owes much to the intersection of queer and disability studies. Sedgwick (1990:
28) – a giant in queer theory – argues that rather than insisting on a fixed gay
identity one should respect different views of one’s sexuality and one’s performa-
tivity of such sexuality. Similar arguments have been made around dis/ability
especially about the problematics of diagnosis, pathologisation and psychologi-
sation. Dis/ability studies researchers have for a long time drawn attention to
the problematics of categorisation. Yet, at the very same time, the category of
impairment or disability is important for two reasons. First, the DSM-5 and
other supra-national discourses are producing an epidemic of signification to the
extent that one wonders if it might be easier to find individuals who have not
been labelled than those who have! Add to this the growing influence of transhu-
manism and we are left with an ever more extended, souped-up, drug-enhanced
version of the human that makes the idea of natural humankind a quaint notion
from the past. Second, dis/ability categorisation is important not only in terms of
what it takes away but also what it gives. Each side of the dis/ability divide either
brings with it privileged or denounced access to social, cultural and economic
capital. Ability undergirds citizenship. Yet, disability diagnosis gives access to
support systems and welfare systems (depending of course on where one is in the
world). Dis/ability categorisation is a process of disavowal: it provides and steals.
Wise words are offered by Sedgwick (1990: 36) who reminds us that ‘oppres-
sions are differently structured and complexly embodied and we therefore need
a more richly pluralized range of imaginings about oppressions’. In this spirit of
embracing plurality, then, we should think of the offerings and rejections of dis/
ability categorisation.
Autism, for example, as an identity category gives much. Due to its ubiquity,
in no small part down to the twenty-first-century autism industry (see Mallett and
Runswick-Cole, 2012), autism has become a handy marker for popular culture
to justify different behaviour and request environmental adjustment. Citing the
needs of autistic people as the reason to ask a conference room of delegates not
to clap their hands holds huge currency. The wearing of a T-shirt emblazoned
with the declaration ‘I am not rude I have Tourette Syndrome’ is a handy marker
and easy introduction. And of course identifying impairment unlocks access to a
host of material, relational and community resources. Yet, at the other side of the
dis/ability category, is the obvious argument long made by disabled activists that
impairment labels threaten to totalise the experience of life simply in terms of that
impairment.
My sense, following Sedgwick (1990), is that the dis/ability complex permits us
to work the contrary nature of categorisation in richly pluralised ways. The secret,
perhaps, is never to settle the debate on one side nor the other. Keeping dis/ability
categorisation hanging is precisely what activists and allies (whether they be
disabled people or family allies) do in their everyday dealings with oppression. So,
for example, a family may use an impairment label to draw down services for their
child in the morning whilst challenging deficit thinking of educational profes-
sionals in the afternoon. Maintaining debate around dis/ability takes on particular
potency when one considers some of the recent arguments for a return to the
body in disability theory. I will not waste space to rehearse these debates (I have
written extensively about this in Goodley, 2011a). Suffice to say, my experience of
recent disability studies debates would suggest that a number of scholars are keen
to reinsert the category of impairment as a very real biological predicament (e.g.
Shakespeare, 2006). Thoughtful words are, again, supplied by Sedgwick (1990:
40) who reminds us that any appeal to a natural body takes ‘place against a very
unstable background of tacit assumptions and fantasies about the natural body’.
Any conception of the body immediately unearths historical narratives about
nature. And nature has too often been tied to a ‘hygienic Western fantasy of a
world without any homosexuals in it’ (p. 40). And, we could add to that, following
our discussion of Wynter (2003) above, the fantasy of ethnoclass able-man. We
should keep in mind Sedgwick’s warning that essentialist understandings of the
human often accrue certain values.
Dis/ability reminds us that categorisation of impairment and other more
ableist writings upon the body are fundamentally social practices with very real
material consequences. We might want to pause here and ask who benefits from
categorisation? It is clear that the rise in the number of diagnoses of Asperger’s
syndrome (or as it will be called post-DSM-5, the high-functioning end of the
Autistic spectrum) conveniently sits with the preferable dis/ability identity of late
capitalism: solitary, bright and productive. Indeed, such a categorisation evokes the
ideal of the humanist subject – ‘rational, coherent, and above all autonomous’ on
many levels (Erevelles, 2002a: 27). The surplus production of dis/ability categories
serves to furnish psy and transhuman industries with a host of new impairment
labels and associated therapies. Categorisation is at the heart of a new dis/ability
capitalism (see McRuer, 2012a) and therefore requires our sustained analysis.
Dis/ability politics
Where do the arguments developed thus far leave us in terms of dis/ability politics?
You will recall from the last chapter Williams et al.’s (2012) three-fold response to
the neoliberalisation of civil society; (i) revise (refashion governmental demands to
fit with one’s own political interests); (ii) resist (develop alternative strategies) and
(iii) refuse (disengage with official discourse). Dis/ability adds further creativity
to working the spaces and edges of neoliberalism. Such an approach mirrors the
possibilities found in Hardt and Negri’s (2000) analysis of the globalised biopolitics
of neoliberalism. Their point is a simple but profound one: these biopolitics inevi-
tably produce in excess of their practices. Neoliberalism and neoliberal-ableism
cannot stop themselves from producing versions of dis/ability and humanness that
can be seized upon by global citizens for their own ends, dependent of course
upon their socio-economic position and their access to material, economic,
cultural and social capital. Across Britain, as Big Society stories are pedalled out,
a number of disability organisations are mobilising themselves in ways that are a
collectivist community response to austerity. These reactions, detailed in the last
chapter, to the austere economic times are just some of the ways in which dis/abled
communities are collectively mobilising. McRuer (2012a) offers a convincing and
complementary reading of crip resistance in his analysis of the contemporary
politics of disability. He suggests that we are entering a particular time of disability
capitalism: where disability appears more and more as a consequence of austerity,
with disabled people having to prove their disabilities in the face of new work
assessment procedures being enacted by Atos, through the throwing into poverty
of many disabled people as the consequence of welfare cutbacks and through
neoliberal attacks on scrounging disabled bodies. On a more productive and
exciting note, McRuer highlights a number of examples of crip politics across
the globe that indicate disabled people are at the forefront of political campaigns
against neoliberal reforms. Crip politics, according to McRuer (2012a), refer to
those moments across the globe where anti-capitalist politics coalesce around the
moment of disability. These include Arnieville camp protests in California, hunger
strikes in Chile, protests by healthcare professionals in Spain and Greece. All these
examples of resistance site political resistance and dis/ability politics together. This
leads McRuer to suggest that rather than positing ‘one day we will all be disabled’
he recommends ‘one day all politics will be crip’.
I really value and agree with this productive analysis and would also agree
that we are witnessing a growing (crip) cynicism to neoliberal-able citizenship.
My friends tell me that in post-crash Iceland people are knitting again. In
South Wales, here in the UK, there has been a rise in work share in the valley
communities (e.g. ‘I will mend your broken heater boiler while you cook for my
family’). These are just small incidences of collective responses to the inequities
of economic downturn and austerity. In addition, as we have seen, dis/ability
adds something to the political mix – forcing us to revalue care and dependency
relationships – feeding into what Berlant (quoted in Puar, 2012) under-
stands as a resurgent political interest in human interdependencies post-austerity.
Neoliberalism definitely has a version of the human in mind though its rapidly
expanding associated markets of the psy-industries cannot prevent the production
of excessive discourses of dis/ability. Contemporary queer and crip scholarship
seek to further the politics of dis/ability as the space for challenging and contesting
neoliberal discourse that threatens to get under our skin, colonise our minds and
shape political resistance. What work is done already by those of us at the centre or
at the periphery of the dis/ability binary that offers new hopes for working with
and against neoliberalism? We have sought to address this question throughout
the book though, specifically, Chapters 6 and 9 paid attention to the dis/abling
impacts of late capitalism on the individual labouring body and the wider body
politick. Such conditions are further complicated by the presence of dis/ability and
place individuals working around this complex in potentially very vulnerable and
precarious positions. We might refer to such positions as conditions symptomatic
of debility and slow death politics. This analysis merges the work of Berlant (2004,
2007, 2010, 2011) and Puar (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) in order to recognise the
importance of debility as, equally, commentary on the damning impacts of late
capitalism (it wears us out) and an ontological position around which to politi-
cally organise (it politicises us). Debility like precarity ‘allows us to think about the
slow death that happens to targeted or neglected populations over time and space.
And it is surely a form of power without a subject, which is to say that there is
no one centre that propels its direction and destruction’ (Butler in Puar 2012: 8).
Elman (2012b: 189) notes that the promise of ‘the good life’ is becoming clearly
unfulfilled in ‘a neoliberal age characterised by precarity – a by-product of insecure
employment, exploitative demands for workers’ limitless physical and emotional
flexibility, disappearing government investment in forms of social welfare, and the
collapse of radical post-1968 social movements’. A politics of debility acknowl-
edges the slow death of capitalism and recognises the ways in which some groups
in society are debilitated more quickly than others. This is a profoundly materialist
and posthuman politics.
Debility acknowledges human fragility in the face of economic hardship but
also taps into a fundamental human need for connection with others. According
to Butler, ‘there is something very practical at hand here: we have to rethink the
human in light of precarity, showing that there is no human without those networks
of life within which human life is but one sort of life’ (Butler in Puar, 2012: 173).
Indeed, in Chapter 9, we have seen how a Deleuze and Guattarian simulation
of interdependency, becoming and assemblage in educational practice holds the
potential for recasting what we mean by critical pedagogy. This is a pedagogy that
troubles from the very outset that which we take for granted when we think of the
human or education. This is a desiring pedagogy that responds to debility. After all,
as Puar (2009: 165–166) advises, ‘the proposition that “living in prognosis” might
be usefully deployed to re-tool disability studies beyond its current imbrication
in Euro-American identity-based rights politics’, moving us – as she suggests –
‘from the disabled subject to the prognostic subject, from the subject of disability
to the subject of prognosis, thus changing the category of disability itself, while
temporally decomposing the common disability activist mantra: “you’re only able-
bodied until you’re disabled”’ (pp. 165–166). We are all living with debility but, as
we have seen in Chapter 3, we need to ask where gender, race and sexuality are
in these discussions of slow death, debility and precarity. Truth be told: we know
that some bodies, subject positions, community members and political activists
are made to have very different relationships with debility. Some are more playful
and giving than others, that is for sure. For example, as Adams and Holman Jones
(2011: 114) argue: ‘the queer means telling a story about being half in and half out
of identities, subject positions, and discourses and having the courage to be fluid in
a world relentlessly searching for stability and certainty’. The same applies to dis/
ability studies: that we need to be able to straddle both sides of the binary in order
to gain some coherence about the making of each. There are times and places for
stability and debility. Just as dis/ability studies recognises, for example, the shared
but also different engagements of parents and their disabled children, then debility
studies brings us together to recognise the debility and wearing out of our bodies
and lives through capitalism and neoliberal-ableism. My sense is that the politics of
debility and slow death provide a very welcoming space to a heap of transformative
agendas and activist groups spanning class, age, sexuality, dis/ability and race. Such
a multitude can have huge local and global impacts.
Globalising dis/ability activism

The crip potential of dis/ability collectives to ref/use neoliberal capitalism has been
demonstrated in Chapter 9 through reference to Project 4. We can add similar
kinds of activism to this through a turn to the practices of parents of disabled
children represented in Project 2 and their local and global relationships. Research
with parents permitted us to also explore, on a smaller scale, the experiences of
a small number of Indonesian mothers and their disabled children. As reported
in Goodley and Lawthom (2013b), two of the mothers we met – Wayan and
Isabelle – displayed sophisticated workings of neoliberal knowledge in relation to
disability, care and the family. Something deeply productive emerged out of the
mothers’ refashioning of local and global knowledge. The parents exemplify new
forms of ‘trans-local political solidarity and consciousness amongst those who find
themselves marginalized and excluded on a global basis’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002:
399).
Ong (2007) urges us not to passively accept neoliberalism but to think of how
its ‘flows articulate diverse situations and participate in mutating configurations
of possibility’ (p. 3). Neoliberal logic, Ong continues, is best understood as a
‘migratory technology that interacts with situated sets of elements and circum-
stances’ (p. 4). These ‘promiscuous entanglements of global and local logics
crystallize different conditions of possibility’ (p. 4). Ong is interested, then, on
the situated interplay between neoliberalism as exception and exceptions to
neoliberalism. Let me explain. Ong (2007) shows how East and South-East Asian
nation states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order
to position themselves to compete in the global economy. Ong’s ethnographic
case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of
special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s
rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and
flexible labour and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific. A key concept
for Ong (2007: 4) is the notion of exception: that is the intricate interplay of
neoliberalism as exception (neoliberalism emerges as something else or something

new and is brought into national or local practices) and exception to neoliber-
alism (the ideals of this ideology are refuted). For Ong ‘the very information and
communicative tools that have been used to regulate them become weapons for
the multitude as a counter-Empire, arming them to demand global citizenship in
capitalism’s Empire’ (p. 4). This productive view of the ways in which individuals
and their communities appropriate or reject the processes of neoliberalism is often
overlooked. Instead, what we need to do is to look for evidence of ‘neoliberalism
with a small n; that is a technology of governing free subjects’ (p. 4) or what Peck
and Tickell (2002) describe as local neoliberalisms.
In our paper (Goodley and Lawthom, 2013b) we developed a similarly
productive reading of ref/using neoliberalism by deploying Hardt and Negri’s
(2004) concept of the multitude: a biopolitical concept that suffers and produces, is
poor though also rich, that extends beyond the Marxist proletariat to include poor
people, migrants, workers, the unemployed, parents, children and carers; a concept
that captures the realities of the ‘global recomposition of the social classes’ (Hardt
and Negri, 2004: 66). We contend that our Mums are key axes of a dis/ability
multitude through which they play with the excesses and exceptions of neoliberal
capitalism in local and globalised ways. Let us turn to our two stories:
Wayan
The centre of the disabled person’s organisation is a good hour’s drive away from the
nearest big town. The organisation is housed in a compound, quite typical of domestic
living on this Indonesian island, but bears the marks of its preview incarnation as
a special school and residential setting for disabled adults and children. Unlike the
steep and sloping steps of the pavements so typical of the inaccessible villages and
towns, the compound boasts smooth, wheelchair friendly accessible paths between the
buildings, which are formed to create a quadrangle. On one side is the organisation’s
headquarters and office. Filled with filing cabinets, desks and three computers, the
office allows communication via the Web and telephone. The organisation’s website
details their aims to promote the inclusion and integration of all disabled people in
Indonesian society. Previous activities have included the performance of a traditional
cultural show by disabled actors, dancers and musicians – combining dance, music and
an epic Hindu tale – and a demonstration that took to the streets of a nearby town
demanding accessible transport and pedestrianisation. The show has been filmed and
the office workers were working flat out to burn the show onto DVD to keep up with
demand. To another side of the quadrangle are living quarters. Shared bedrooms are
occupied. This includes Wayan and her newborn child. Wayan is also the president
of the organisation and explains to us how she juggles her professional and parenting
commitments. Our time together was interrupted by colleagues’ enquiries as they
sought advice on various ongoing projects. The baby was passed to a colleague, the
wheelchair was moved over, and Wayan took to it and made her way to the office.
The third part of the building boasts spaces for physiotherapy and classrooms for the
education of disabled children. Some children attend the classroom for most of their
education. For others, they use the organisation for the early years of their primary
education before moving on to local mainstream schools. The organisation is part-
funded by rich benefactors from places such as Hong Kong and Singapore. During our
meeting we were introduced to a Singapore businessman who explained the kinds of
fund raising activities that had been undertaken back in Singapore to raise funds for
the group. The talk is distinctly about ‘charity’, ‘helping the group’ and ‘supporting
their independence.’ Local disabled artists use the final part of the quadrangle. Their
work combines traditional Indonesian illustrations and modern paintings. The work
is exhibited and sold at the organisation’s shop in the local town and supplies regular
and essential funds for the organisation.
(Goodley and Lawthom, 2013b: 12)
Isabelle
Isabelle is the mother of a five year old daughter, Pearl, who lives in a town in
England. Amongst many other qualities, Pearl has the label of Down Syndrome.
She has two brothers (who have not been labelled as disabled) and she attends a
mainstream school. Isabelle spoke to one of our colleagues, Katherine Runswick Cole,
about the challenges faced by Pearl and how these differed from those experienced by
her sons. If her sons wanted to do something, like Karate or football, they just do it
because ‘they are physically here in the community. If I want something for Pearl I
actually have to make it appear, make it happen, find the place, get the support, and
sometimes I just can’t be bothered. I know it sounds awful but I want to be lazy for
her as I am for the boys’. Making things happen has become a full time, 24-7 job
for Isabelle.
Isabelle has refused some forms of professional support such as social work. She told
us that she does not care for social services; ‘telling me how I am and what I should
be doing’. In contrast she has embraced the local parents’ group and values the oppor-
tunity of being with similar families who accept the difference of children. She has time
for professionals: ‘I’m learning all the time with Pearl. And teachers, they do a really
complicated job, for not really that much money, they have no time during their day
to make resources for my daughter. But, I suppose that we are looking for the people
who are more than just ‘9 to 5ers’. You do find the most incredible people, the people
who do the transport to special school are just great, and Pearl has a great relationship
with them’. One of Isabelle’s friends has a daughter who has seizures. This proved
difficult for the child and the family because the school insisted on phoning the mother
every time the child had a fit. This made it hard for Isabelle’s friend to keep a job
and raised questions about the potential of the school to accept disabled children; ‘if
the school is going to say it’s inclusive then that includes the child’s medical needs. It’s
ridiculous. Her son just needs to sleep after he has had a fit’. In her own case Isabelle
has found her dealings with Pearl’s school tiring and demoralizing. Indeed, she has
spent a lot of her own time designing bespoke books – which include photographs and
text – that can be used by the teachers with Pearl to aid her reading and has developed
sign language with Pearl to aid communication. Neither the books nor the signing has
been followed up in the school. This is clearly a shame because, as Isabelle mentions;
‘When I go into the school playground people are so happy to see Pearl, I absolutely
believe that she makes a positive contribution to that school and that children’s life are
better for it. And children are quite tolerant, they just shift a bit and accommodate,
in general I think they are quite kind, they just say well she can’t do this so we’ll
do that, in a way the adults don’t most of the time’. Changing the way people view
disability is a constant driving force for Isabelle.
(Goodley and Lawthom, 2013b: 13)
In our paper we argue that the networked nature of Wayan’s organisation shows
how activism is spread through the very communicative networks through which
global capitalism functions (Abbinnett, 2007: 47). While accepting that a digital
divide still persists between poor and rich income countries (and within countries
between the technologically rich and poor), technology opens up possibilities for
an externalisation of the self: an opening up of flows and communication; the
flattening of life itself (Lash, 2001). We suggest, following Deleuze and Guattari
(1987), that Wayan is interconnected with others engaged with the dis/ability
complex in a rhizomatic fashion: a horizontal, ever-morphing interconnection of
desires. The surplus nature of the immaterial labour of Wayan and her colleagues
(care and parenting) allows them to combine multiple roles of educator, mother,
carer, advocate, activist, fundraiser, worker and cultural performer. They seek to
educate Indonesian society through demonstration and cultural performance and
in this sense appear to ‘create new institutional and social models based on its [the
Multitude’s] productive capacities’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 308). The discourse
of human rights – a modernist ‘truth’ – can be used by Wayan’s organisation in
ways fit for the purpose of the local. Wayan, we argue, is true hybridised subject:
parent/activist, service provider/user. The work of the organisation connects
with other disability organisations such as the Independent Living Movement and
Community Based Rehabilitation. Also, we note (Goodley and Lawthom, 2013b)
that Wayan overturns the orientalist view of the ‘Global Southerner’ as uncivilised,
untouched by globalised networks of knowledge and lacking. She is potential. The
organisation captures the notion of the common: a place for heterogeneous forms
of activism to emerge (including human rights activism, radicalism, ecologism,
etc.): a gathering of alterity (Abbinnett, 2007: 54). Yet, just as we acknowledge
the potential of the multitude, we are also reminded of the repressive elements of
Empire. This is, perhaps, most apparent in the Singaporean funding of Wayan’s
group. As Grech (2012: 52) observes, the hierarchical relationship between (high
income nation) donors and (poor income nation) recipients is often all apparent,
threatening to create conditions of loyalty and accountability of NGOs and
Disabled People’s Organisations to those holding the purse strings, ‘with ideologies
moving from donor to recipient (almost invariably from North to South)’. We
sense the potentially limiting impacts of Empire’s charity and patronage (Goodley
and Lawthom, 2013b).
In our paper we conceded that Isabelle is subjected to repressive actions of
biopolitics of parenting that seek ‘physically to control the expression of dissent’
(Abbinnett, 2007: 49). Simultaneously, though, we are drawn to Isabelle’s

(alongside Wayan) place within a dis/ability multitude, where parents of disabled
children and disabled activists labour for more enabling versions of their children
and responsive forms of care and education (Goodley and Lawthom, 2013b). This
might be seen as the ‘becoming biopolitical of production’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004:
115): a contradictory process of being caught up in the biopolitical acts of schools
and the becoming productive of the parent (the resistant dis/ability multitude).
Isabelle not only responds to services and institutions she is, like Wayan, recast as
‘immaterial labourer’ as, what Hardt and Negri (2000: 408) term, ‘social worker’
(a broader notion than the practitioner role normally associated with this title), an
element of the power of the multitude as ‘an embodied power of knowledge and
being, always open to the possible’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 408). Isabelle is part
of a multitude that ‘through its practical experimentation will offer models and
determine when and how the possible becomes real’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 411).
It is now possible to refigure Isabelle and Wayan as part of a dis/ability multitude
across which ‘desire and labour regenerate it [biopower] continuously’ (Hardt
and Negri, 2000: 358). As mothers both Isabelle and Wayan tap into the wider
politics of dis/ability. While the neoliberal biopolitics of Empire always threatens
to engulf all in its wake; the fact that it produces in excess of itself means that these
biopolitics can be used in the ways celebrated by Hardt and Negri (2004) and Ong
(2007). Our two Mums demonstrate the complexities of dis/ability activism.
Conclusion
Dis/ability theory creates new vocabularies that are in tune with contemporary
times. As an emerging analytical approach, dis/ability studies welcomes a host
of theories and activisms that are engaged with troubling narrow notions of the
human of service to contemporary capitalism. One should be mindful, however,
that any discourse could be ‘appropriated, commodified, and made to serve
dominant interests’ (McRuer, 2006: 148). Dis/ability studies is not immune to
this appropriation. However, when it does work well, it feeds the faculties of
critical studies of ableism and disablism and constitutes a commons on which other
radical theories and forms of activism can share ideas and practices that broaden
our understandings of the human and society. Dis/ability studies is producing new
theories, kick-starting nuanced analyses and responding to emerging forms of
political activism.

NOTES
1 Disablism
1 The full Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities can be accessed at:
http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml
2 Ableism
1 http://humanityplus.org/ or http://www.uktranshumanistassociation.org/
4 Dis/ability studies
1 Interestingly, disability metaphors are rife in Sedgwick’s work though they are often
used as terms of put-down (‘idiotic’ and ‘retardation’ are well mentioned). She does
though, to her credit, mention wheelchair use in her analysis of the closet as ‘a weighty,
occupied and epistemological space’ (p. 77).
2 We could also add the work of Martha Nussbaum on vulnerability and Eva Feder
Kittay’s reworking of dependency.
5 Researching dis/ability
1 http://post-blair.wordpress.com/
2 http://bigsocietydis.wordpress.com/
3 Including the following colleagues and universities: Goodley (University of Sheffield),
Toby Brandon (Northumbria University), Katherine Runswick-Cole and Rebecca
Lawthom (Manchester Metropolitan University), Kelley Johnson (Bristol University).
Key impact expert partners include Max Neill (Social worker Circles Facilitator with
people with intellectual disabilities), Pete and Wendy Crane (Independent Living
consultants), Molly Mattingly and Keith Bates (Foundation for People with Learning
Disabilities).
4 http://bigsocietydis.wordpress.com/
178 Notes
6 Precarious bodies: the biopolitics of dis/ability and debility

1 Thanks to Katherine Runswick-Cole for flagging up Imrie’s analysis here.
2 Thanks to Karen Soldatic for suggesting I turn to the work of Harvey as a materialist
thinker prepared to work imaginatively with the body.
3 Relates to a much lambasted 2013 British government policy that asks council tenants
to move out of social housing if they have more bedrooms ‘than they need’, see: http://
www.channel4.com/news/bedroom-tax-suicide-woman-lorry
9 Markets, cruel optimism and civil society: producing dis/ability

1 Atos is an international information technology service company that carries out the
Work Capability Assessment on behalf of the British government’s Department for
Work and Pensions. This assessment decides whether or not a person qualifies for
employment and support allowances in England and Wales. Atos has been hugely
criticised by disabled people’s organisations for withdrawing life-saving allowances from
many individuals who are not fit or ready for work.
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INDEX
Page numbers in italics indicate boxes, figures and tables
ab/normal studies 159 Anglocentric social model 17

abandoned citizen 31–2 antenatal period 4
Abberley, P. 52 anti-discrimination legislation 14
ability, use of term xii anti-sexism 47
able-bodiedness, compulsory xi, 29–32, 36, anxiety 117, 120
42, 49, 61, 65; and whiteness 44 Argentina 143
ableism xiv, 33, 34; biopolitics of Askew, David 78
32–3; imbricated nature of 23; and Asperger syndrome 168
medicalisation 4; and orientalism 46; Aspis, Simone 78
psychopathology of 121–33; studies of Atherton, Raymond 78
153–7; use of term xi–xii, 22 Atos 145–6, 169, 178 n9.1
ableist citizenship 23 austerity 18–19, 27, 33, 52, 80, 92–3, 138,
ableist normativity 22–3 140, 169
ableist self 33 Australia 18, 27, 45, 52, 88
Aboriginal Disability Network 53 autism 69, 85, 86–7, 89–90, 107, 141, 167
Academy of Medical Sciences: ‘Human ‘autistic savant’ 120
enhancement and the future of work’ 161 autonomy 10, 31, 32, 33, 36, 49, 56–7, 62,
Access to Volunteering 76 86, 107, 159
activity limitations, use of term 14, 15 ‘average man’ (l’homme moyen) 11–12
Adams, T.E. 40, 171 aversion 131–2
Adderall 30, 89
‘adequately able’ body 96, 140, 150 Barnes, C. 6, 7, 8, 17
Agamben, Giorgio 45, 64 Barnett, C. et al 32, 66, 148
alienation 92 Barton, L. 54
Allan, J. 43–4, 106 Bates, Keith 177 n5.3
Allison, L. 118–20 becoming/s 105–6, 109–10, 114–15,
ambivalence 120, 121, 122 165–7, 170; crip 112; disabled 31; other
American Psychiatric Association (APA) 107–8, 111–12, 113
69, 88–91 bedroom tax 93, 178 n6.3
American Psychological Association (APA) beginning(s) 157
52 being-disabled 31
196 Index
being-towards disability 31 caring 96, 97

belonging 10, 43, 64, 90–1, 100–101, 109, Carlson, L. 30–1, 92
112–13 Carr, Liz 46–7
benefits see welfare state Chapman, A. 27, 53, 88, 92
Berlant, Lauren 60, 63, 65, 66, 96, 105, charity 121–3
137–8, 169, 170 Charity Commission 77
big government 76 Chaudhry, V. 143
Big Society 75–80, 146–50, 169 child development 102–3; assessments of 40
binarised constitution of dis/ability x, 9, China 27, 171
25, 49, 54, 58–60, 59, 61, 86, 95, 96–7, Circles of Support 78–9, 148
106, 118–19, 144, 171 citizenship 31, 42–3, 46, 53, 88, 96, 159,
binge-eating disorder 88 167; global 5, 6, 18, 25–6, 33, 45, 144,
bio-psycho-social model 14 160, 169, 172
biological citizenship 88, 96 civil society 75–80, 146–50, 168
biology 62 Clavering, Emma 68
biomedicine 6 co-morbidity 87
biopolitical bodies 86–7 cognitive ableism 30–1
biopolitics 90, 143–4, 157, 172; of ableism cognitive enhancement 24
32–3; globalisation of 63–4, 169; and cognitive privilege 30
repression 173–4, 174–5 Colebrook, C. 112
biopower 32–3, 60–1, 63, 88 collective unconscious 120, 123
biotechnology 5, 6, 24, 160–1 Collins, Patricia Hill 35
black/disabled cultural imaginaries 46–7 commodification 27, 133, 175
black man, as Other 45, 46 community 156; empowering 78–9, 148;
black self, pathologising 44–5 ethical 142; separate from school 105
blindness 13, 127–8 Community Based Rehabilitation 174
body: conceptualising 84, 168; as social Conservative Party (UK) 100
construct 94 constructivism 59
body-culture matrix 12–13 consuming dis/ability 144–6
body politics 36 Cooley, R. 26, 103
body-technology 23–6 cosmetic neurology 89
Body without Organs 107 countercultural narrative 134–5
Bond Stockton, K. 39 Couser, G.T. 4, 26, 28
Booth, Tim and Wendy 159 Crane, Pete and Wendy 148, 177 n5.3
bowel control 48, 107 creative social theories 70–2
Boxall, K. 158 crip activism 141
Braidotti, R. 56, 63, 72, 88, 160, 164–5 crip failures 97
Brandon, Tony 177 n5.3 crip organisations 146
Brenkman, K. 103–4 crip pedagogies 111–14
British Academy 161 crip politics 169
Broken Britain 78 crip poststructuralism 61–2
Brown, C. 142 crip resistance 169
business development 148 crip sexuality 42
business model of disability 9 crip theory 38, 49, 52, 61–2, 66, 141, 150,
Butler, Judith 18, 39–40, 43, 57–8, 60, 64, 158, 161, 167, 169
66, 91, 95, 142–3, 170 cripping education 103, 104, 105–11
critical ableist studies 21–6
Cameron, David 75, 76 critical pedagogy 47, 51–4, 53, 170
Campbell, E.K. x, xi, 17, 21–3, 24–5, 124, ‘critically queer/severely disabled’
162 perspective 108
Campbell, Tom 70 Crow, Liz 34
Canada 11–14, 45; physical education 99 Crowley, N. 111, 114
capacity 16, 95 cruel optimism 65–6, 105, 137–40, 139,
capitalist materialist bodies 91–3 150
Index 197
Cubbage, M.E. 131 disability industry/project xii

cultural analysis of disability 8, 18, 74, disability kitsch 132–3
94–5 disability knowledge, as contested 68–70
cultural relativism 17 Disability LIB 77
curiosity 120, 130–1 disabled: as constructed 46; dangers of
Curti, G.H. 56, 106, 109 being 108–9
cyborg 107, 145, 161 Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs)
77, 174
D&G see Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Feliz disablement 7, 8, 9, 52
Davis, L.J. 11–12, 13, 78, 103 disabling barriers 6–11
deafness 128 disablism: affective 64–6; and racism 44–7;
death 159–60 use of term xi, xiv
Death by Indifference (Mencap) 78 disablist/ableist processes, level and location
debility politics 83, 94–6, 133–4, 140, 153, of 72–5
170–1 disavowal 117, 119, 120, 121–3, 127, 130,
debt 140 133–5
Deleuze, Gilles 43, 66, 105–7, 109, 113, discipline 150
114, 150, 166, 170, 174 dismodernism 13, 78, 103
demos, the 45 disruptive mood deregulation disorder
denial 128 (DMDD) 88
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Doward, J. 88
79, 178 n9.1 Down syndrome 5–6, 32, 46, 173–4
Derrida, Jacques 87 drug development and use 24, 30, 89
DeShong, S. 153 Dubai 27
desire 105–6 ; of disability 40–2, Durgin, P.F. 9
94–6; educational leadership 165; Duval Smith, A. 144
posthumanism 166; reframing 140; of dwarfism 132–3
sameness 29–30
Dewey, John 54 East Asia 171
Dexedrine 30 Eastern Europe 139
diagnosis 87, 88, 91, 167; and normality Economic and Social Research Council
69 (ESRC) 68, 70, 75
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Edelman, L., No Future 103
Disorders (DSM) 52, 69 education 54, 99–103, 158, 159, 161,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental 170; and assessment 40; civil society
Disorders (DSM-5) 88–91, 167, 168 as 150; cripping 103, 104, 105–11;
dis/ability: co-created 87; constitution of crisis of 103–5; democratic 113;
84–5; manufacturing 52; split nature of globalisation of provision 36; leadership
54–8; use of term xiii and desire 165; marketisation of 54;
dis/ability activism 75, 95, 104, 108, McDonaldisation of school curricula
133–5, 171–5 27–8; separation of school and
dis/ability categorisation 167–8 community 105; typical student 104;
dis/ability neoliberal-ableism 52, 141–4 typical teacher/educator 104–5; see also
dis/ability politics 168–71 critical pedagogy
dis/ability studies, call for 153 Elman, Julie Passanante 38–9, 42, 140, 170
dis/abled bodies, desiring 40–2, 94–6 emancipation xv, 47, 54, 65, 75–80, 141,
dis-belonging 64, 100–101 143, 165–6
disability: humbled by 104; as ideological embarrassment 123, 131, 160
construction 9; interpretation of 5–6; embodiment 48, 49, 64, 71, 86, 105, 126,
level and location of 72–5, offerings of 162
104; problem of 141; use of term xi, 14, emotion 5, 57, 63–5, 66, 78, 86, 120, 137,
15–16 138–9, 140, 166, 170
Disability and the Global South 54 Empire 33, 64, 143–4, 172, 174
disability equality awareness 16 England 173–4
198 Index
entitlement, and pathologisation 86–7 Freudian approach 9, 118–20

entrepreneurship 29–32 Friedrich, D. et al 113
environmental factors 14, 15–16 functionality 126
Ephedrine 30
erasure 117 Galloway, Terry 97
Erevelles, Nirmala 10, 141, 166; citizenship Galton, Francis 11
31; coming out crip 49; concepts of Gammon, E. 139
the ‘free’ 28–9; death and disability Garland Thompson, R. 12, 47, 48, 72,
159–60; humanity/humanism 37, 43, 104, 105, 129, 151
88, 107; inclusive education 100, 101, Garvey, J. 45
103; intersectionality 36; liberal theories gender 8, 170–1
143; meritocracy 30; neoliberalism genetics/gene therapy 4, 6
26–7, 42, 86; Other/Otherness 33, 34; generosity of engagement (Watermeyer)
poststructuralism 62; revision 36–7; x–xi
social model 9; whiteness and disability Ghai, A. 18
44 Gibson, B.E. 107
essentialism 59, 168 Gill, S. 146
ethics 142; human enhancement 25, Giroux, H. A. 27, 104
160–1; of integration 113; and Gleeson, B. 52
transhumanism 160–1 global developmental delay 102–3
ethnoclass able-man 162–3, 168 Global North 10, 19, 45, 115, 140
etiquette 134 Global South 45, 54, 92, 174
eugenics 28 globalisation 53, 141–4; of biopolitics
Every Child Matters 70 63–4, 169; provision of education 36
exclusion and segregation 9–10, 19, 28, 31, Godrej, F. 49
38, 64, 92, 100–3 Goggin, G. 5
‘golden section’ 85
families, broken 76 ‘good practice impact workshops’ 79
Fanon, Frantz 44–5, 46, 57–8, 104, 124, Goodley, D. 11–12, 14, 40–2, 69, 71–2,
132, 162, 164; Black Skins, White Masks 84–5, 87, 90, 108–9, 110, 111, 118,
44, 120 119, 121, 127, 132, 143, 171, 172–4,
fascination 57, 60, 117 177 n5.3; Disability Studies: An
fear 60 Interdisciplinary Introduction 6
Feder, Eva 177 n4.2 Grech, Shaun 18, 46, 54, 174
feminism 47–9, 56, 63, 66, 160, 166 Greenstein, E. 58, 112–13, 114, 156–7,
Ferguson, P.M. 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 19 165
Ferri, B.A. 112 Greenwood, Rebecca 69
Fiester, A. 61–2 Grue, J. 107, 144, 145
Finkelstein, V. 52 Guardian, The 88
Fisher, Pamela 68 Guatemala 18
Fiske, L. 45, 86 Guattari, Félix 43, 66, 105–7, 109, 113,
fixed boundaries 109 114, 166, 170, 174
Flanagan, Bob 97 Guter, B. 38
Foucault, Michel 28, 32, 33, 60, 66
Foundation for People with Learning Hannabach, C. 6, 54, 58
Disabilities (FPLD) 77, 78, 79, 148, Haraway, Donna 43, 66, 107
150 Hardt, M. 9, 33, 37, 96, 143, 146, 150,
Fox, A.M. 112 157, 169, 172, 175
Frankfurt School 166 Harvey, David x, 27, 51, 53, 70, 91–3, 95,
free, concepts of 28–9 96, 147, 178 n6.1
Freeman, C. 29 Harwood, V. 40
Freire, Paulo x, 53, 104 hate crime 100
Freud, Sigmund 40, 55, 57; The health conditions, use of term 15
Psychopathology of Everyday Life 55 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 60
Index 199
Heidegger, Martin 31 Indigenous Australians 45

heteronormativity xii, 22, 36, 37, 38, 42, individual potential 31
49, 101 individualisation 3–6, 10
heterosexuality xi, 36, 39, 40, 42, 61, 108 individualism 11, 28, 32–3, 34
historical materialism 8–9, 52 Indonesia 171, 172–3, 174
hoarding disorder 88 integration 113
Holman-Jones, S. 40, 171 intellectual disabilities: labelling 7, 31–2,
homosexuality 59–60; see also queer 80, 88, 103; parents with 159
politics; queer theory interaction, intimate and inappropriate
Hook, D. 55, 57, 120, 129, 132 124–6
hooks, bell 104 interactionist model of disability 17–18
hospital malpractice 78 interdependence 49, 170
housing benefit 77 internalised ableism 22
Hughes, B. 55, 119, 133 International Classification of Functioning,
Hughes, B. et al x Disability and Health (ICF) 14, 15–16
human development 143 International Monetary Fund 143
human enhancement 23–6, 160–1 intersectionality 22, 35–7, 66, 167
human identity 43 intervention 32, 61, 133–5
human life 60 invalidation 130
human rights 10, 14, 140, 141–3, 174 invitation, intimate and inappropriate
humanism 31, 63, 65, 143, 156–7, 164, 124–6
168 irritable bowel syndrome 48
humanist self 33, 34 isolation 38
Humanity+ 24
humanity 37, 39–40 Jacobs, R. 150
humanness 63, 90–1, 161–5, 169 Jakobsen, J. 26, 40
Humphrey, N. 40 Janov, Arthur 134
Hunt, Paul 104 Jenkins, K. 146
Huxley, Julian 23 Job Centres 148
John Lewis 138
Iceland 169 Johnson, Kelley 177 n5.3
identity 6, 7, 22, 43, 167; labels 42–3 Johnson, Lisa Merri 97
ideology of ability 30 Johnston, K. x, 21, 28
Ignatiev, N. 45 Jones, O. 37
im/mobility 52 Judkins, Rikki 78
imagery of disability 12
Immigration Restriction Act (Australia, Kannen, V. 25, 39, 45–6, 51
1901) 45 Killacky, J. 38
impairment xii, 7, 8, 9; and disability 12; Kingsbury, P. 40
growth in production of 62; Indigenous Kitchin, R. 10
Australians 45; labelling 71, 73, 87, knowledge cafés 79
167–8; life-limiting and life threatening knowledge production 159
72–5, 160; realness of 58–9; and Kolárová, K. 52, 65, 97, 139
relationality of disablism 64; sociology of Krahn, G.L. 16–17
52; use of term 14, 15
Imrie, R. 10, 85 labelling: identity 42–3; impairment 71,
in/human studies 161–5 73, 87, 167–8; intellectual disabilities 7,
inclusive education/schools 16, 29, 143, 31–2, 80, 88, 103
166 labour/work 27, 31, 47, 103; immaterial
Inclusive Living 148 96, 172–3, 175; market 92–3, 137–40
independence 32, 33, 36, 49 labouring body 91–2, 94–6, 170
Independent Living Movements 174 Lacan, Jacques 119
India 18; mental illness 143, 144; self-help Lakinski, Christine 78
groups 143–4 Latin America 53
200 Index
Laughing Boy 157 McGuire, A. 88

Lawthom, Rebecca 40–2, 118, 121, 127, McLaughlin, J. et al 69, 87
132, 143, 171, 172–4, 177 n5.3 McLaughlin, Janice 68, 84–5, 90
Le Corbusier 85 McMillen, Constance 101
learning difficulties, people with 101, McRuer, Robert xi, 13–14, 29–30, 32,
108–9 36, 38, 39, 49, 108, 138, 142, 143, 144,
learning disabilities, people with 39, 146, 166, 169, 175
75–80, 102, 150, 158, 159 medical/deviance model of disability 9
Lennon, John 134 medicalisation 3–6, 4, 6, 30, 54–5, 86, 88,
Liasidou, A. 53, 112 96, 123
liberal democracy 142 Meekosha, H. 18, 52, 143
liberal eugenics 95 Meleo-Erwin, Z. 42, 60, 108
liberal humanism 143 Mencap, Death by Indifference 78
liberal rights 141–3 Mental Health Foundation (MHF) 77
liberal theories of disability 143 Mercer, G. 8
life/death studies 159–60 Mercieca, D. 112
life-limiting and life threatening meritocracy 29–32
impairment 72–5, 160 Meyerson, L. 47
lifestyle programming 95 Michalko, Rod 5, 13, 104, 128, 141, 158,
‘lines of flight’ 112 161
Linton, S. xii–xiii Mills, C. 5, 144
lives of quality 84 Mills, C. Wright 8, 75
London 2012 Olympic Games 144 misfitting 48–9, 105, 151
London 2012 Paralympic Games 14, 47, misrecognition 129–30
144, 145–6 Modafinil 30
Longmore, P. xii modernism 174
modernity 119
machinic assemblages 105, 106–8, 110, Modulor Man 85
166, 170 Moore, Michael 36
Mad Pride 158 Moreno, M. 56, 106, 109
madness (bonkers) 111–12, 158 Morris, J. 6
Malaysia 171 multitude 64, 172–4, 175
Malec, C. 60, 74, 130–1 mydaftlife blog 157
malestream individual 49 Myers, K.R. 6, 48
Mallet, R. 89
Manic Street Preachers 138 Namaste, V. 39–40, 46, 49
Marcuse, Herbert 93 narcissism 127, 139
marginalisation 19, 80, 103 nation states 37
market: labour/work 137–40, 146 National Autistic Society (NAS) 90
marketisation of the psyche 64 Negri, A. 9, 33, 37, 96, 143, 157, 169,
Marks, D. 54 172, 175
Marx, Karl ix, 91, 92 Neil, Max 148, 177 n5.3
Marxism ix, 8, 47, 49, 51, 56, 70, 91, 93, neoliberal-able self 88
96, 157, 172 neoliberal-ableism 21, 26–7, 29, 32, 33–4,
Masschelein, J. 10, 29 36, 38, 39, 57, 62, 80, 146, 155, 169,
masturbation 41–2 171
materialist social model 8–9, 10, 18, 46, neuroses 57, 123, 124, 139
51–4, 62, 74, 170 New Labour 70, 77
materialist theory 37 Newell, C. 5
materiality 59 Newell, D. 3, 4, 5, 33, 48, 55, 107, 107–8
Matthew, N. 64 non-disabled xii–xiii; see also normals, the
Mattingly, Molly ix, 177 n5.3 non/normative studies 157–8
Mawyer, R. 8, 13 Nootropil 30
McClaren, Peter 104 Nordic relational model 17
Index 201
normalcy: enforcing 40; roots of 11–12 pathologisation 88; and entitlement 86–7
normalisation 10 patriarchy 36
normality: diagnosis 69; and employability Pearson, Karl 11
31 Peck, J. 172
normals, the xiii, 117–18; perceptual People First 31–2
pathology of 55; psycho-political performance 16
analysis of 118–20; psychopathology of performance-enhancing stimulants 30, 89
72–5; social psychological concepts of personal factors 15, 16
118–20; and therapeutic intervention ‘personal is political’ 47
133–5; see also non-disabled personhood 94, 154, 159
normate, use of term 12 Peters, M.A. 114
normative citizen 22 phobias 57–8
normativity, celebrating 25–6 phylogeny of binarism 58
North America 11–14, 100, 162 physical education 99
Northtown special school 111–14 Pilkington, Fiona 78
Nusbaum, E. 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 19 Pistorius, Oscar 144–5
Nussbaum, Martha 177 n4.2 pity 122
political theory 47
Office for Civil Society (OCS) 76, 79 politics of disability 94–6, 133–4, 157
Ogden, C. 48 politics of the public 47–9
Oliver, M. 7, 8, 17, 52; The Politics of politics of wonder 13
Disablement 6 positionality xiii
‘one-dimensional man’ 93 post-crip politics 151
Ong, A, 27, 141, 171–2 postcolonialism 47, 49, 56, 160, 162
ontogeny of binarism 58 postconventionalism 62–6, 72, 88, 105,
ontological invalidation 127–32 112–13, 115, 164–5
oppositional defiance disorder 88 posthumanism 63, 96, 107, 150, 156–7,
oppression 100, 119, 167–8 166, 170
optimism of collective attachment 66 postmodernism 9, 33
orientalism 46 poststructuralism 8–9, 58–62, 63, 87, 88,
Other/Otherness x, 8, 13, 22–3, 25, 153
28, 31, 33, 34, 36, 49, 51, 55–6, 57, Power, M. 33, 147
63, 86, 88, 113, 121, 127, 130, 139, precarity 63–4, 65, 170
163–4; becoming 107–8, 111–12, Price, J. 108
113; black man/non-white as 45, 46; Primal Therapy 134
experiencing 44–7; negation of 58; and private troubles 75
self 65; supposed inferiority 132; threat process ontology 165
of 129 prognosis 170
Overboe, Jim 47, 134 Project 1: Parents, Professionals and
disabled babies: towards enabling care
Pacific region 171 (2003-2006) 68–70, 84–5, 87, 90, 96
pain 8, 140 Project 2: Does every child matter,
Palestine 143 post-Blair? The interconnections of
Palmeri, J. 28 disabled childhoods (2008-2011) 70–2,
paralympic heros 144–5 87, 101, 108–11, 111, 115, 122, 171
paranoia 120 Project 3: The psychopathology of the
paranoid anxiety 120, 122, 128–9, 131 normals (2012-2013) 72–5, 117, 121,
parental screening 4 134, 160
parents: of disabled children 68–70, 157, Project 4: Big Society? Disabled people
171; with intellectual disabilities 159; with learning disabilities and civil
politicisation of 157 society (2013-2015) 75–80, 147–8, 171
participation restriction, use of term 14, projection 117, 120, 127
15 prostheses 4–5, 6, 25, 107, 144, 155, 161
participatory model 75–80, 143 ‘pseudo-science’ 86
202 Index
psychiatric illness 36–7 Ritalin 30, 89

psychiatrisation 30 Rose, N. 32, 60–1
psychoanalysis 54–8, 117, 127–8, 165 Royal Academy of engineering 161
psychoemotional approach 64–5, 78 Royal Society 161
psychology 10, 30, 96 Runswick-Cole, Katherine 70, 71–2, 87,
psychopathology 55; of ableism 121–33; of 89, 101, 108–9, 110, 111, 113, 119,
normals 72–5; use of term 121 145–6, 157, 173, 177 n5.3
psychopathy 43 Ryan, S. 157
psychopolitics 55
Puar, J.K. 43, 60, 89, 95, 96, 139–40, Said, Edward 46
144, 150, 160, 166, 170; ‘Precarity Sandahl, C. 44
talk: a virtual roundtable with Sandhal, Carrie 97
Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana scapegoating 57
Cvejic, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar and scientific method 17
AnaVujanovic’ 63 Sedge 87
public funding initiatives 14 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 19, 38, 58–60, 86,
public issues 75 100, 167, 168, 177 n4.1; Epistemology of
public services 76, 79, 148 the Closet 39
Seidman, G. 32
quality of lives 84 self: neoliberal-able 88; and Other 65;
queer feminism 63 sense of 94; and technology 107
queer politics 19, 110–11 self-advocacy 78, 79, 158, 159
queer theory 66, 96, 160, 167, 169; self-determination 79
cripping 37–44 Semetsky, I. 113
Quételet, A. 11–12 sexual anxiety 124
sexual liberation 110–11
Raab, H. 62, 161 sexuality 39, 42, 61, 124–5, 126, 167,
Rabinow, P. 32, 60–1 170–1
race 8, 57, 170–1 Shakespeare, T. 124; Disability Rights and
race-able treason 45–6 Wrongs 6
race traitor 45–6 shame 42, 65, 131
racism 36, 44–7, 49, 120 Shildrick, M. 29, 31, 41, 42, 60, 62, 72,
Ramlow, T.R. 37, 49, 58, 105 107, 108, 126, 161, 166
Rancière, Jacques x Siebers, T. 30, 107, 140
rationalism 10 Simons, M. 29
rationality 36 Sinecka, J. 61
Reagan, Ronald 27 Singapore 171, 174
realism/relativism debate 59 Skully, Jackie Leach 161
Reeve, Christopher 25 slang terms 133
Reeve, Donna 24, 45, 47, 64, 107, 161 Slater, J. 158, 159
rehabilitation 43, 123 Slee, R. 29
rejected body 12 slow death 96–7, 138, 144, 170
relational citizenship approach 43 Smith, B. 42
relational model 17 Smith, J. 106
religion, and disavowal 123 social action 76, 79, 149
repression, and biopolitics 173–4, 174–5 social bodies 84–5, 93
‘reproductive futurism’ 103 social class 37
retrieval 47 social enterprise 79
revision 36–7 social model of disability 6–11
rhizomatic connection 105, 106, 110, 111, social modelling 12
112, 113, 114, 174 social psychological concepts 55, 118–20
Richardson, D. 29 social theory of disablement x, 8, 47, 160
right to work 140 social worker, use of term 175
rights not charity discourse 140 socio-cultural approach 127
Index 203
socio-politics 6 Tregaskis, Claire 68

sociology of impairment 52 truth discourses 32, 60–1
Soldatic, K. 18, 27, 45, 52, 53, 86, 88, 92,
143 ultra/hyper ableism 23, 166
Sothern, M. 5, 42, 52, 54, 110–11 un/desirables, making of 139
South-East Asia 171 uncanny, the 117, 118–20, 121, 122,
South Wales 92, 169 130–1, 133
space, and psychology 10 Union of the Physically Impaired Against
spaces for resistance 150–1 Segregation (UPIAS) 6
Sparkes, A. 42 United Nations 143
spatialities of disability 10 United Nations Convention on the Rights
Speak Up Self-advocacy 79, 149–50 of Persons with Disabilities 16, 141
Special Educational Needs 102 United Nations Educational, Scientific
Special Needs Unit (SNU) 112–13 and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)
special schools 100, 111–14 24
species-typical body 22 United Spinal Association, Disability
species-typical human 23, 24, 162 Etiquette: Tips on Interacting with People
Spinal Cord Injury 42 with Disabilities 134
sporting achievement 155–6 United States 44; see also North America
sporty body 99–100 universalist approach 18
staring 72, 129
Statement of Concern About the Reliability, Vandekinderen, C. 29, 42–3
Validity and Safety of DSM-5 (Brief Vandekinderen, C. et al 5, 31
Version) 89 Vehmas, S. 158
stem cell research 25 Verstraete, P. 10
Study Drugs 30 Viego, A. 86, 90
subjectification 61, 106 visual impairment 13, 127–8
subjectivities 27, 32, 33, 40, 43, 44–5, 49, voluntary sector 76, 77
57, 61, 62, 64, 66, 93, 100–1, 103, 105,
107, 143, 161 Wahlert, L. 61–2
sushi 27 Wallach, Greg 97
Sykes, H. 38, 99 Ware, L. 23, 30
synthetic hearts 24 Watermeyer, B. x, 54, 55, 56, 64, 117
Watson, N. 158
technology 62, 107, 145, 172–3, 174; Weeber, J.E. 26; ‘What could I know of
and exclusion 28; and self 107; see also racism?’ 44
human enhancement; transhumanism welfare benefits 76, 148
Tesco 138 Welfare Moms 162
Thatcher, Margaret 27 welfare scroungers 9–10, 100, 145–6, 146,
Thomas, Carol 8, 47, 64, 78 169
Thomas, K.R. 131 welfare state 9–10, 19, 33, 36, 38, 52, 62,
‘thriving and learning through’ (Newell) 63, 80, 92–3, 139, 140, 146, 167, 170
107–8, 111 ‘Welfare to work’ 79
Tickell, A. 172 Wendell, S. 12–13, 47, 60, 124, 127, 133
Titchkosky, Tanya xi, 13, 45, 104, 141, whiteness, and able-bodiedness 44;
161, 162 idealisation of 45; reimagination of 45–6
toilet training 48 Whitney, C. 17–18, 38
Tourette Hero 134 Wiles, W. 85
training courses 149 Wilkerson, A. 143
trans/human studies 160–1 Williams, A. et al 146–7, 147–8, 168
transhumanism 23–6, 30, 31, 89, 107, 145, Wolbring, G. 21–5, 154, 161
160–1, 167 Woodyer, T. 43
transgressive citizens 43 working the dis/ability complex 153
Transition Fund 76 World Bank 14, 17, 143–4
204 Index
World Health Organization (WHO) Young, I.M. 92

14–18, 15–16, 143, 144 Yuval-Davis, N. 100
World Report on Disability 14, 17, 45,
141–4 Zarb, G. 7
World Transhumanist Association 24 zones of exception 45
Wynter, Sylvia x, 162–4, 168; ‘Human zones of exclusion (Agamben) 64
Struggle vs. Ethnoclass Man’ 162–3

Disability Studies Theorising Disablism and Ableism

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Disability Studies Theorising Disablism and Ableism

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DIS/ABILITY STUDIES

• The biopolitics of dis/ability and debility

Dis/ability Studies provides much-needed depth, texture and analysis in this

Dan Goodley is Professor of Disability Studies and Education in the School of

Dis/ability Studies is a remarkable synthesis of the most distinctive strands of

6 Precarious bodies: the biopolitics of dis/ability and debility 83

7 Becoming inclusive education: cripping neoliberal-able schooling 99

8 The psychopathology of the normals: why people are so

9 Markets, cruel optimism and civil society: producing dis/ability 137

10 Critical dis/ability studies 153

found similar deficiencies in the schema of disability theory. Concurrently, my

The structure of the text

children enter education – whether special or mainstream – they contravene the

Join the debate #dis/abilitystudies

To the women in my life – Rebecca Lawthom, Ruby Haf Lawthom Goodley,

Join the debate #dis/abilitystudies

Finding dis/ability studies

1. The usual problem/s of disability: medicalisation and individualisation

The usual problem/s of disability: medicalisation and

an almighty one at that. Disability is normatively understood through the gaze of

– disability occupies a privileged position: it is a key object of these interventions.

1. The tragic life of an individual or several devalued individuals is portrayed in

This merging of medicine and technology – biotechnology – demonstrates

Medicalisation also has been historically predicated on a didactic monologue

Social models and disabling barriers: made in Britain

If we are to accept the pretty obvious statement that disablism is a complex

My own theorising on disability is located in Marxist political economy ...

Cultural locations: North American and Canadian landscapes

bodily control mentioned by Wendell clearly evokes wider processes of able-

What shall we do now you are disabled?

A World (Health Organisation) perspective

BOX 1.1 NEW EMPHASIS ON ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) (17)

•• impairments are problems in body function or alterations in body

Disability refers to difficulties encountered in any or all three areas of

Representation of the International Classification of

The ICF contains a classification of environmental factors describing the

Source: World Health Organisation (2011: 5). Reproduced with permission.

recommendations include the promotion of inclusive schools, stressing the impor-

to inform governments of countries about the importance of disability,

1. The World Report authors’ owning of disability as a dynamic and complex

a dynamic move, incorporating aspects of biology, cognition, social and historical

Conclusion: theorising disablism in a time of austerity

1. Introducing critical ableist studies

Ableism’s psychological, social, economic, cultural character normatively privi-

Introducing critical ableist studies

with epistemological, ontological and methodological tools for making sense of

TABLE 2.1 The valued citizen of the twenty-first century

The valued citizen is … … produced through the practices of …

Cognitively, socially and emotionally Disabling or ableist societies

Source: Adapted from Goodley (2011a: figure 5.5).

Note: WENA – West Europe and North America.

first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the

The association formally defines transhumanism as an ‘intellectual and cultural

Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation

Transhumanist praxis incorporates drug development to improve intelligence

This uneasy transhumanist dance between the binaries of disability/normalcy,

Unpacking the ableist context: exposing neoliberalism

paradox. On one hand this is a socio-economic movement associated with the

Compulsory neoliberal able-bodiedness: meritocracy and

By ignoring the internal heterogeneity (for example, distinctions between

disability is defined externally by many different professions, including

with it notions of autonomy and independence: precisely the ableist competencies