Justice and Bad Luck
July 24, 2025
The State’s Harms
July 25, 2025
Critical Disability Theory
Critical disability theory refers to a diverse, interdisciplinary set of theoretical approaches. The task of critical disability theory is to analyse disability as a cultural, historical, relative, social, and political phenomenon. Some call this work “critical disability studies” or CDS (e.g., Meekosha & Shuttleworth 2009; Vehmas & Watson 2014). The use of “critical disability theory” here intends to capture a broader swath of approaches, including those originating in the field of philosophy. Critical disability theory is a methodology, not a “subject-oriented area of study” (Schalk 2017). As a methodology, the theory
involves scrutinizing not bodily or mental impairments but the social norms that define attributes as impairments, as well as the social conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular populations. (2017)
Critical disability theorists direct their work toward activism, however, and do not intend insights to remain within academic confines. For example, Julie Avril Minich argues that critical disability theory involves the
scrutiny of normative ideologies [that] should occur not for its own sake but with the goal of producing knowledge in support of justice for people with stigmatized bodies and minds. (2017)
For this reason, thinkers should “recommit” to “social justice work”, including working in solidarity for the purposes of liberation with people “devalued” or “pathologized” but perhaps not labelled or self-identified as disabled (2017).
Others have argued that activism such as material practices related to access are a central part of critical disability scholarship, “whether in the classroom, at conferences, in web space, or in our writing” (Hamraie 2016).
In this way, critical disability theory is an emancipatory and developing discourse (Goodley, Liddiard, & Runswick Cole 2018: 206; Meekosha & Shuttleworth 2009: 48).
Theorists
Yet some theorists prefer to engage questions of power directly, rather than vulnerable embodiment. Some theorists argue that disability, and its “precursors”—impairments—are precisely the products of power relations (Tremain 2017: 86).
For others, disability refers to a body’s incongruence within “space and in the milieu of expectations” (Garland-Thomson 2002: 20). While power and incongruence have material effects, including disabling effects on embodiment, these critical disability theorists will describe disability in immediate reference to power, including its exclusions and hierarchies in discourses and institutions.
This, however, again points to the importance of critical disability theory. Attention to—for example—abnormality, hierarchies of capability, and other exclusionary constructions related to disability simultaneously deepen and are deepened by analysis of racism and sexism.
If disability is a direct expression of power, as these theorists argue, then power and its effect on human life cannot be understood without treating disability politically and socially.
Alliances among critical discourses, including queer theory and feminist theory, are essential to the task of critical disability theory, as no one theory or discipline alone can nor should attempt to handle the complexity and scope of the phenomena of disability (Sleeter 2010).
Broad coalitional possibilities are available to disability theorists, although these possibilities traditionally go unrealized or remain nascent.
These include “academic and political connections” with other identity-based areas of study, including “race/ethnic” and “sexuality/queer” studies (Schalk 2013; cf. Goodley, Liddiard, & Cole 2018: 206).
For Sami Schalk, critical disability theory must take up these potential coalitions wherever possible to further its goals. These goals, as already implied, are both political and conceptual. In an example of coalitional analysis, Revelle’s describes her work this way:
I have argued that the ideology of disability has been used to justify the racial and gendered division of labour based on heteronormative notions of the family and, in doing so, organizes class relations in a capitalist society. (Revelle’s & Kafer 2010: 206)
Tensions within Disability Studies
Critical disability theory challenges the normative assumptions, focus, and direction of more traditional disability studies. This more traditional disability studies is an interdisciplinary field with origins in the promotion of the social model of disability (Mallow 2017: 340; see the entry on disability: definitions, models, experience).
Disability studies largely focus on achieving political inclusion for disabled people. To that end, work done under the auspices of disability studies often uses the language of civil rights, minority politics, and liberal justice frameworks. Simi Linton describes disability studies as both a pedagogical effort—a “remedial endeavour, redressing the sins of omission and commission in the canon”—and as a necessarily political effort focused on the “epistemology of inclusion and integration” (1998: 525–526).
Linton cautions that there is a tendency within some academic fields, notably those in the health professions, to refer to themselves as “disability studies” by virtue of taking disabled people as objects of study (1998: 526).
Yet, this is inaccurate, as disability studies takes the opposite approach, seeking leadership by disabled people and investigation into social circumstances. Along similar lines, it is important to notice that the language of disability studies has been coopted, for example, by “rehabilitation and special education departments” that remain tied to the medical model and are not “rewriting the script” when it comes to disability (Meekosha & Shuttleworth 2009: 49).
Disability studies, working in tandem with the disability rights movement, shifts the focus from the medical model and correlational intervention on disabled people to increase “fit” in society to the “rigidity, faultiness, deficits, and pathological structures” in society itself (Linton 2005: 518). For example, Linton writes,
Disability studies’ project is to weave disabled people back into the fabric of society…as full citizens whose rights and privileges are intact, whose history and contributions are recorded, and whose often-distorted representations in art, literature, film, theatre, and other forms of artistic expression are fully analysed. (ibid.)
As aforementioned, traditional disability studies rely on the social model. The social model explicitly draws from critical theory, which makes it “paradoxical” that critical disability theory uses the same tradition to critique traditional disability studies (Meekosha & Shuttleworth 2009: 50). Yet, for Meekosha and Shuttleworth, the turn to the language of critical disability theory and away from the language of disability studies
signifies an implicit understanding that the terms of engagement in disability studies have changed; that the struggle for social justice and diversity continues but on another plane of development—one that is not simply social, economic and political, but also psychological, cultural, discursive and carnal. (ibid.)
Critical disability theory thus responds to the traditional disability studies project by pointing to its limits, including exclusions and framing.
Concerns and objects of critique include disability studies’ largely liberal approach (Sleeter 2010), narrow consideration of physical disability, focus on the global North (Meekosha & Shuttleworth 2009: 49) and independent living (2009: 52–53 and Kelly 2010), downplay of pain and suffering (Mallow 2017: 350), and ties to or investment in class elitism (Revelle’s & Kafer 2010: 208), neoliberalism (Sleeter 2010), masculinism (Kelly 2010), materialism (Vehmas & Watson 2014), symmetrophobia (Goodley, Liddiard, & Runswick Cole 2018: 201 and Snyder & Mitchell 2001), and white supremacy (Bell 2006; Revelle’s & Kafer 2010: 208; and Moore, Lewis, & Brown 2018 – see Other Internet Resources).
Further, critical disability theory demonstrates the ways exclusions in traditional disability studies come about. Some differences, such as “radical linguistic difference”, including that introduced by Deaf Studies, and “cognitive disabilities and related communicative differences” are regularly excluded from disability studies (Revelle’s & Kafer 2010: 212–213).
Interdisciplinary Approaches
This section explores interdisciplinary approaches to critical disability theory, along with the areas where there are overlaps and tensions. It describes the intersection of critical disability theory with queer theory and critical race studies, as well as encounters with indigenous thought.
Crip theory, dis/ability critical race studies and black disability studies, and indigenous theory and postcolonial theory, are all discussed. This section aims to be highly inclusive yet is at the same time limited by the fact that this literature is developing.
Crip Theory
Queer theory and critical disability theory productively collude under the umbrella of “crip theory”, pushing understanding forward in both arenas and along new lines (McGruder 2003, 2004, and 2006a; Mallow 2017; Schalk 2013).
Queer theory and disability theory have shared interests, including challenging medicalization, and some argue that the AIDS crisis catalysed the connection between the two (e.g., Mallow 2017, 342). Further, crip theory derives from disability studies but uses queer theory to develop new analyses (Schalk 2013).
Consider, for example, questions of passing and coming out, fruitfully analysed at the nexus of queer theory and disability theory (see Garland Thomson 2002: 21). Crip theorist Robert McGruder argues that crip theory
should be understood as having a similar consecratory relationship to disability studies and identity that queer theory has to LGBT studies and identity. (2006b: 35)
Expanding on this, Alison Kafer describes McGruder’s work (e.g., 2006b) as placing “crip theory in a consecratory relationship to liberal notions of acceptance, tolerance, and assimilation” (2009: 292).
For example, McGruder “builds on queer critiques of neoliberalism”, by adding, for instance, to existing queer analyses of the World Bank as a site of heteronormativity by describing its ableism or “ant disability” logic (Kafer 2009: 291).
Crip theorists insist on the idea that full analysis of this and other sites of interest require both “queer and disability theory” (ibid., cf. McGruder 2003, 2005, 2006a). These sites include the cultural imperatives of heterosexuality and able-bondedness, which are significantly tied together (Kafer 2003).
With this in mind, the study of sexuality is one obvious site for crip theory (McGruder 2011; McGruder & Mallow 2012). Literature taking a crip theory approach to sexuality is varied, and much of it intersects with race.
Here noted are a few prominent examples. Eli Clare has written extensively, in both personal and political registers, at the intersection of queer experience and disability (e.g., 1999, 2001, 2013).
Ann Mollow theorizes the ambiguity of disabled sexuality in terms of both lack and excess, connecting her insights to psychoanalysis (2012). Lydia X. Z. Brown writes about relationships and sexuality from and for an autistic perspective (2013).
Kenny Fries, the author of several significant memoirs linking disability and sexuality (2003, 2007, 2017), writes about beauty and body image (1995 [1998]). Michael Gill, whose work focuses on sexual agency and intellectual disability, including sexual abuse and consent (2010, 2015), analysed an online reality show entitled
The Specials (2012). The article interrogates an episode in which an encounter among five white intellectually disabled adults and sex workers from Bangkok raises questions of consent and sex and gender transgression (ibid.).
In response to the history of racism and ableism’s explosive and continued violence in the U.S., Michelle Jarman theorizes the “eugenic castration of cognitively disabled men” to claim that “reading race and disability as interrelated, dynamic processes can inform our understanding of both past and present violence” (2012: 89–90).
Ellen Samuels theorizes the limits of the language of coming out of the closet in crip terms (2003). Meanwhile, Alexandre Baril uses a crip framework to engage a variety of questions connected to trans identity and disability, including Anglo normativity, cisnormativity, debility, and transability (2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2016; Baril & Trevena 2014).
Crip Theory Part3
Similarly, Kim Q. Hall supports radical hope for just access to the future and argues that such hope has wide-ranging impacts, for not only queer, crip, and feminist movements, but also mitigating climate change (2014).
Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg, along the same lines, seek the collaborative creation of inhabitable worlds, focusing on the futurity of disability and leveraging demographic studies to “make disability count” for the future rather than “counting disability” in the future (Ginsburg & Rapp 2015, see also Ginsburg & Rapp 2017).
This focus on futurity links tightly with the tradition of critical theory. For instance, Fritsch, using Theodor Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics, argues that disability is a central part of the “sensuous critical thought” that is required for critique and living otherwise (2013, cf. Adorno 1966 [1973: 11]).
Adorno describes a world dominated by homogenizing “identity thinking” that “erases contradiction, antagonism, and difference” and “aids and abets capitalism”.
Yet, the queer/disabled figure, the “transfigured crip”, is a misfit that can “haunt the able-bodied world” of difference-refusing identity thinking (2013). Fritsch is thus hopeful that the transfigured crip can break open identity thinking. She writes,
the transfigured crip, through the assertion that there is always a remainder that exposes contradictions and haunts the limits of thought, will pose the greatest challenge to, and undo, both neoliberal capitalism and the category of disability itself.
In taking the differences and similarities of our sufferings seriously, critically, and reflectively, we open spaces, cracks, and possibilities for the difference of uncomfortable crip communities to come. (ibid.)
2.2 Dis/ability Critical Race Studies and Black Disability Studies
Critical disability theorists argue that racism and ableism operate jointly, intensifying and borrowing from each other. These phenomena, along with other forms of oppression, thus call for intersectional analysis.
This requires the simultaneous investigation of the multiple, intersecting power relationships that affect whole persons through pathologization, stigma, and exclusion (see the entries on feminist perspectives on power and discrimination; see also Crenshaw 1991 for the origin of the term “intersectionality”).
Intersectional analyses in critical disability studies, including, for example, the work of Nirmala Revelle’s and Andrea Minear (2010) and Fiona Kumari Campbell’s analysis of internalized ableism (2008a), employ and supplement the strategies of critical race theory. Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (Discrete) is deeply engaged in this work.
District finds its primary location in the field of education but has a wide remit because intersections between race and disability appear at diverse sites of experience and oppression.
Theorists tackle topics ranging from pedagogy (Annamma, Boel, Moore, & Klingner 2013) and the family (Annamma, Ferri, & Connor 2018) to mass incarceration (Annamma 2014a and 2014b), immigration (Annamma 2013), and school violence (Watts & Revelle’s 2004).
They track the pipelines and continuities among governing institutions to demonstrate how these sites interweave to condition the educational experiences of racialized, disabled subjects.
Consider the school-to-prison pipeline. Subini Annamma engages spatiality and geography in a Discrete approach to the education experiences of undocumented dis/abled persons, especially young girls, who are caught in this pipeline (2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2017).
Annamma, with frequent collaborators David Connor and Beth Ferri, sets the tone for the use of District in the field of education (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri 2013; Annamma, Ferri, & Connor 2018).
Their wide-ranging edited volume District: Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education presents the work of 21 scholars on key topics and displays a variety of methodologies and applications (Connor, Ferri, & Annamma 2016).
The “foundations of District in Black and critical race feminist scholarship and activism”, including Anna Julia Cooper, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and a variety of “intellectual ancestors” such as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Sojourner Truth (Annamma, Ferri, and Connor 2018: 47).
Crip Theory Part5
This racial double bind, to borrow from Marilyn Frye, positioned black people as at once disabled and hyper able and yet suited for slavery in both cases. (2017)
Liat Ben-Moshe, whose work on incarceration, deinstitutionalization, and mad studies supports several threads in critical disability theory and significantly intersects with race, has also worked on issues of disability in pedagogy and education.
Ben-Moshe co-edited Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts (Ben-Moshe, Cory, Feldbaum, & Sagendorf 2005), a text offering resources for accessibility in higher education and integrating disability into curriculum.
She has attended to the issue of using disability as metaphor in the classroom, suggesting ways to incorporate a critical perspective by which educators can fruitfully teach the use of disability in literature (2006).
Ben-Moshe also co-edited a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on the topic of “Interventions in Disability Studies Pedagogy” (Volume 35, No. 2).
In the introduction to this issue, Ben-Moshe writes, “I perceive Disability Studies as missionary work and much of my pedagogy is the work of conversion”. In describing conversion, Ben-Moshe refers to access but also “converting students to understanding disability intersectionality, as an identity and a culture” (Ben-Moshe, Day, Ferris, & Nielsen [eds] 2015).
Thinkers
Thinkers use the method to both describe the socio-political constructions of disability and track the impacts of these constructions on oppressed persons, including but not limited to those to whom the concept “disability” attaches.
Critical disability theory, then, necessarily refers to lived experiences and attempts to transform the circumstances under which oppressed subjects live through critical, intersectional analysis.
Complicating this expansive approach, accountability to disabled persons is paramount to this work (Minich 2016). But some call for accountability and simultaneously argue that critical disability theory should resist distinctions between disabled and non-disabled subjects.
Nirmala Erevelles, for example, does not seek to claim, “everyone is disabled” but prefers historically embedded materialist accounts of disability at intersections among multiple categories of analysis, including “race, class, gender, nation, and sexual identity” (2014, cf. Revelle’s & Kafer 2010: 219).
Similarly, Alison Kafer refuses a “fixed definition” of disability. She Favors leaving open the boundaries of the concept of disability and, therefore, does not settle who counts as disabled.
She uses Joan W. Scott’s notion of “collective affinity” to describe disability as a wide net, inhering in no persons, but rather describing disability as a complex set of features, attributed to individuals, that pathologize and oppress (2013: 11). At root, as Dianne Pothier and Richard Devlin argue, critical disability theory will claim that
disability is not fundamentally a question of medicine or health, nor is it just an issue of sensitivity and compassion; rather, it is a question of politics and power(lessness), power over, and power to. (2006: 2, as quoted in Gillies 2014 and Sleeter 2010)
While it is clear, then, that critical disability theory attends to devalued persons, controversy over who the subject of critical disability theory is lies at the heart of the approach.
This controversy strongly signals the import of critical disability methodology for theoretical work more generally. Critical disability theory deals seriously with the heritage and construction of disability identity, but that identity is in flux and related to the very nature of human embodiment.
Disability is unique as an “identity category” because “anyone can enter [it] at any time, and we will all join it if we live long enough” (Garland-Thomson 2002: 20). Indeed, the concern for vulnerability in the approach extends to non-human animals, as some critical disability theorists engage critical animal studies (Taylor 2017).
This makes critical disability theory, insofar as it reveals crucial aspects of embodiment, an essential ingredient of any political and social analysis.
Critical analysis
Critical analysis of the phenomena of heterosexism, sexism, and racism, therefore, must refer to the insights of disability theory to achieve their goals. As this entry will demonstrate, critical disability theory and its nuanced approach to vulnerability and power is a key ingredient of critical theory more generally.
This entry intends to describe the contours of critical disability theory, including historical antecedents and key debates. It examines key approaches in critical disability theory and what these approaches offer for the study of disability.
It also considers what critical disability theory offers to the analysis of other socio-political phenomena and philosophical problems. Further, this entry describes how critical disability theorists leverage normativity and politics.
This entry takes into account the considerable overlap between critical disability theory and feminist theory, both within and outside the traditional confines of the field of philosophy. It does not, however, explicitly explore feminist approaches to disability (e.g., K. Hall 2011; Kittay & Feder 2002; Mackenzie, Rogers, & Dodds 2014; and Wendell 1996; see the entry on feminist perspectives on disability).
Additionally, although critical disability theory engages legal issues, work using this approach done in the field of law is not explored here (e.g., Bass 2008, 2013a, 2013b; Belt 2015, 2017; Brown 2014; and Nelson 2016; see the entry disability and justice).
This entry, however, does cover Continental philosophical approaches to questions of disability, as these intimately intertwine with and provide examples of critical disability theory. One final note: terminology varies significantly in literature on disability, and so this entry uses the language of the thinkers whose work it describes.
This method generates inconsistencies within the entry itself, but any resulting tensions are more fruitful than imposing an arbitrary set of terms that thinkers themselves would not recognize.
This entry has five primary sections. First, by way of background, the entry articulates and explores critical disability theory’s origin in and continued resonance with critical theory.
Then, it introduces tensions within disability studies, including the use of the new language of “critical disability theory” to mark off critical approaches against traditional “disability studies”.
Second, the entry considers key interdisciplinary approaches in critical disability theory, including crip theory, work at the intersections of disability and race, including dis/ability critical race theory, indigenous approaches, and postcolonial approaches.
Third, the entry covers philosophical approaches employing Continental philosophy, with special attention paid to the influence of Foucault. In the fourth section, the entry discusses political engagement, including challenges posed to psychology in the critical disability theory milieu and activism around critical disability theory. Finally, the entry offers concluding thoughts regarding the future of critical disability theory
Part2
One way these exclusions occur is through investment in the figure of the public disability studies scholar and activist, who attempts to “demonstrate a powerful, resistant, and rational voice in the public arena”; Nirmala Revelle’s argues, “more often than not, that voice embodies the normative modes of communication and rationality” (2010: 213).
Revelle’s calls critical theoretical and political coalitions with those with cognitive difference and mental illness “dangerous alliances”, given the importance disability studies has placed on embodying and using that voice (2010: 214). She advocates for brokering these alliances and defusing the dominant voice of disability studies.
On a different note, Revelle’s sees radical potential in Deaf Studies, but recommends it remain its own field to maintain positive tension with other areas of disability studies (2010: 210–212). Critique in these areas, and others, has led to the growth of critical disability theory and set its agenda.
Criticisms along these lines is well-received by some theorists. For example, Ann Fox frames such criticism as a reminder that the traditional disability studies must strive to be “critical”; she specifically notes the problems of
[disability studies’] erasure of bodies of colour, reinforcing hierarchies, policing points of view, and moments of careerism over coalition. (2017)
Others, meanwhile, argue that criticisms are unfair and stem from a misguided approach. For example, Simo Vehmas and Nick Watson defend disability studies against some key challenges made by “critical disability studies”, including a rejection of disability studies’ materialism (in this case, the authors mean classical Marxist theory; Vehmas & Watson 2014).
Referring to critical disability theorists as “post-structural anti-dualists”, Vehmas and Watson reject their approach as lacking the foundation to do normative, and therefore necessary political, work (2014: 638–639).
They write, “[Critical Disability Studies] does not examine how things ought to be for disabled people in terms of right and wrong, good and bad” (2014: 638). Yet, critical disability theorists consistently conceive of themselves as doing normative and political work.
For example, Margrit Sheldrick responds to the critique that her feminist postmodernism is non-normative. She writes,
the very absence of laws, absolutes, and guiding rules and principles necessitates a high degree of personal responsibility in the face of the demand for response,
which issues in a “profound engagement with the issues at hand” (2008: 33; see also Sheldrick 2012).
As aforementioned, some critical disability theorists worry that pain is not taken seriously enough in traditional disability studies (Mallow 2017, 350).
Yet, those working to transform traditional disability studies have not settled the role of pain in critical work on disability. Indeed, the question of pain behaves as metonymy for the role of embodiment in disability more generally (Tremain 2017: 114).
Some have argued that, as the lasting impacts of the social model of disability drives theorists away from embodiment and toward political and social descriptions of disability, the body has been lost.
Feminist thinkers of disability like Jenny Morris want to maintain a narrative of disability by which they can achieve recognition of the obstacles that bodies can present. According to disability theorists Tom Shakespeare and Mark Erickson, these thinkers:
do not deny that society causes many problems, [but] they also feel that their bodies may cause difficulties, and they want any theory of disability to take account of the physical dimension to their lives.
They suggest that in developing a social and structural analysis the disability movement has omitted a key facet of their experience. (2001: 195)
Indeed, Susan Wendell argues that the desire to relegate pain, and the possibility of pain, to another while fantasizing about a “normal” body importantly undergirds ableist exclusions and the refusal of disabled people.
For her, attending to pain must play a role in becoming reconciled to one’s body (1996: 179). So, to disregard pain and its role in disability would be to misunderstand hierarchies of normality.
Shelley Tremain, however, maintains a tight focus on the social and political, arguing that “pain and the experience of it are historically and culturally relative and interpreted” (Tremain 2017: 116). Whether or not pain is denied, and how pain is seen to play a role in disability, has become a flashpoint in critical disability theory.
These tensions, and more, have arisen in the literature. Even as seismic transformation occurs, it is not clear whether critical disability theory is a new movement or the continued development of more traditional disability studies.
Language use varies among theorists as well as among intersectional, politically engaged work on disability that emerges in multiple scholarly circles.
Along these lines, Meekosha and Shuttleworth wonder if critical disability theory “constitutes a radical paradigm shift or simply signifies a maturing of [disability studies]” (2009: 48).
This entry will not attempt to settle this matter, as it is not settled; rather, it will cover those signature methods and topics that theorists largely agree count as developing work in critical disability theory.
Crip Theory Part2
These questions related to sexuality do not exhaust the possibilities of crip theory; as McGruder’s work makes clear, crip theory extends to a variety of concepts using the springboard of queer and disability theory. Indeed, crip theory is highly inclusive and invites coalitions among pathologized persons, in the tradition of critical disability theory more generally. Sami Schalk notes that
Alison Kafer has argued that crip theory allows for the inclusion of “those who lack a ‘proper’ (read: medically acceptable, doctor provided, and insurer-approved) diagnosis for their symptoms” and “people identifying with disability and lacking not only a diagnosis but any ‘symptoms’ of impairment”. (Kafer 2013: 12, 13, as quoted in Schalk 2017)
For instance, Schalk’s productive “disidentification” with crip theory has led her to take on, as a queer black non-disabled woman, the language of crip theory in new academic and political engagements (2013).
Finally, and significantly, crip theory has taken up the question of futurity; that is, access to the future and dreams about the future. This includes the complex politics of reproduction (e.g., Jarman 2015) but stands in contrast to what some describe as queer theory’s anti-futurity emphasis (e.g., K. Hall 2014).
This thread of crip theory is explicitly set up against neoliberalism and the assumption that disability marks a “life not worth living” and a “future no one wants” (Fritsch 2016: 11, cf. Kafer 2013: 1–3). As Kafer describes it, if disability is understood as tragedy, futures without disability become the only desirable futures (2013: 1).
Yet, disability is not a fact about the body with static meanings; instead, our orientation toward the future, especially desires about a future without disability, have material impacts and can be politically leveraged to reshape the meanings and impacts of disability (M. Hall 2016).
Indeed, these desires and orientations are factors upon which some persons flourish and some do not. Kelly Fritsch writes,
The withering of some disabled lives and the capacitation of others result from neoliberal material and discursive processes that orient and imagine disability as a life without a future unless capacitated through such bio capitalist practices as cures or body/mind enhancement technologies and procedures. (2016: 11–12)
Resistance comes from insisting on a crip future and an accessible future (Kafer 2013: 153). Of the dream of disability to come, McGruder writes,
The disability to come…will and should always belong to the time of the promise…It’s a crip promise that we will always comprehend disability otherwise and that we will, collectively, somehow access other worlds and futures. (2006b: 207–208, as quoted in Kafer 2009: 293)
Crip Theory Part4
Even though disability was not significantly treated by these ancestral and contemporary Black feminists, the “intersectional nature” of this “pioneering work” has nonetheless been foundational to the development of District” (2018: 47–48).
Considering foundational claims in disability studies, including “privilege[in] knowledge based on lived experiences of disabled people” (2018: 49) and combining this and other insights from disability studies with work in critical race theory,
District challenges “special education” and allows theorists to better “frame and analyse the lives of disabled youth of colour” (2018: 49).
Annamma, Ferri, and Connor provide a thorough lineage of District and review existing literature (2018). Out of this intensive review of themes and topics, they surface seven foundational tenets of DisCrit and include examples in the literature of each. These tenets are as follows:
“DisCrit focuses on ways that the forces of racism and ableism circulate interdependently, often in neutralized and invisible ways, to uphold notions of normalcy” (2018: 55).
“DisCrit values multidimensional identities and troubles singular notions of identity such as race or dis/ability or class or gender or sexuality, and so on” (2018: 56).
“DisCrit emphasizes the social constructions of race and ability and yet recognizes the material and psychological impacts of being labelled as raced or dis/abled, which sets one outside of the western cultural norms” (2018: 57).
“DisCrit privileges voices of marginalized populations, traditionally not acknowledged within research” (2018: 58).
“DisCrit considers legal and historical aspects of dis/ability and race and how both have been used separately and together to deny the rights of some citizens” (2018: 58);
“DisCrit recognizes Whiteness and ability as property and that gains for people labelled with dis/abilities have largely been made as the result of interest convergence of White, middle-class citizens” (2018: 60);
“DisCrit requires activism and supports all forms of resistance” (2018: 61).
While DisCrit literature is growing, with contributions from a circle of dedicated scholars, Annamma, Ferri, and Connor note that in their original field of special education thinkers are largely “quite resistant to engage in the racialized nature of education and dis/ability in meaningful or sustained ways” (2018: 48).
The three are “cautiously optimistic” that growth in DisCrit will involve more “engagement across disciplines” and “studies that take up all seven tenets in a sustained way” (2018: 63).
Meanwhile, Black disability studies has developed a distinct approach to pedagogy, advocating for interventions that would shift entire educational paradigms and refuse obfuscating, special-topic treatment in curricula (Dunham et al. 2015). Approaches to disability must change to open useful racial analysis.
For instance, it is impossible, Sami Schalk argues, to theorize the intersection of race and disability without considering both disability and ability. For instance, she argues that disability,
in terms of claims of lesser intellectual abilities, was used to justify the enslavement of black people, while at the same time an understanding of black people’s bodies as hyper strong and impervious to heat and pain also justified conditions of slave labour.
