Critical studies of dis/ablism have shown how the ability/disability binary operates as a central apparatus in the production of the ‘human’ (Campbell 2008; Goodley 2014): and thus, the non-human, the less-than-human, and liminal and devalued forms of humanity (Butler 1993). This process can be understood through the mutually constitutive relationship between ableism and disablism.
The term disablism, whose genealogy can be traced to the British disabled people’s movement and their conceptualisation of the social model of disability (UPIAS & DAU 1976; Abberley 1987), refers—like sexism or racism—to a specific form of oppression faced by people with ‘impairments’, outlining practices aimed at excluding, neutralising or eradicating them (Thomas 2007; Goodley 2014). More recently, the concept of ableism has been introduced to analyse disablism in its articulation with other systems of oppression such as heterosexism and racism, which are based on the presumed ‘inferiority’ of the capacities of ‘women’, ‘homosexuals’ and ‘non-white’ people (Sanmiquel-Molinero 2020). It designates the process of producing and promoting a ‘typical’ and ‘perfected’ subject of the human species, whose constitutive outside is the production of disability–impairment (Campbell 2008, 2019).
‘Impairment’, like ‘sex’ in relation to ‘gender’, is the naturalised foundation upon which ‘disability’ is constructed (Tremain 2001). By defining certain forms of human variability as ‘defective’ it produces the ‘typical’ or ‘normal’ human being in terms of structure, functions, abilities, mental and behavioural attributes, and social roles. This ‘typical’ human was created to uphold a patriarchal, colonial and capitalist social order in which the only fully human and legal subject was the white, adult, property-owning, heterosexual, sane, able-bodied man. Thus, enslaved people, women, the dispossessed and disabled people were deemed to lack, to a greater or lesser degree, the ability to reason, and consequently civil and political rights.
Examples of ‘impairments’ from the 19th century include the pathologisation of enslaved people’s desire to escape (drapetomania), the classification of ‘non-white races’ as mentally and morally inferior, and the definition of women as a morbid deviation of the ‘male type’; whereas in the late 20th, homosexuality was still internationally coded as an ‘impairment’ of ‘heterosexual function’ (Pérez-Pérez 2023). In this vein, the recent recognition of universal legal capacity as a human right (Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2014) seeks to repeal the determination of ‘mental incapacity’ as an entry point to a medicalised states of exception in which violence and abuse against many disabled people are legitimised in the name of care and protection (Weller 2017).
Compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness is a pervasive regime that affects everyone by subjecting the value and intelligibility of lives to the fulfilment of unattainable normative expectations. It organises desire, futurity and self-realisation aspirations in ableist terms while underpinning systems of oppression such as hetero-sexism and racism. Its relationship with disablism is mutually constitutive and has been theorised as analogous to the relationship between compulsory heterosexuality and homophobia (Kafer 2013; McRuer 2006).
Keywords: Disablism, ableism, intersectionality, production of the human, oppression, universal legal capacity.
References
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- Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge.
- Campbell, Fiona Kumari. 2008. “Refusing Able(ness): A Preliminary Conversation about Ableism.” M/C Journal 11 (3): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.46
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- Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 2014. General Comment No. 1 (2014): Article 12: Equal Recognition before the Law. United Nations. https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/TreatyBodyExternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CRPD/C/GC/1&Lang=en
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- Thomas, Carol. 2007. Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology. Red Globe Press.
- Tremain, Shelley. 2001. “On the Government of Disability.” Social Theory and Practice 27 (4): 617–636. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract200127432
- Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), and Disability Alliance (DAU). 1976. The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation and the Disability Alliance Discuss Fundamental Principles of Disability. UPIAS and DAU. https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/40/library/UPIAS-fundamental-principles.pdf
- Weller, Penelope. 2017. “Mental Capacity and States of Exception: Revisiting Disability Law with Giorgio Agamben*.” Continuum 31 (3): 400–410. doi:10.1080/10304312.2016.1275135