Commonality or Community?: Disability Identity in the Twenty-first Century

• In Event: Disability and Its Challenges to Democratic Inclusion

Abstract

Pluralist understandings of democracy view political power as being located within loosely or tightly knit, identifiable communities of those who share political interests. In the case of disability, and disabled peoples' interests, the incoherence of the disabled social identity has had an understated effect on how both political scientists and civil society understand the efficacy of the interests of disabled people. This paper tests two propositions, citing empirical, historical and scholarly evidence, to test two competing claims about the political power and potential of disabled people. The first, more popular understanding: disabled people exist as a group with a communal understanding of their shared plight and exclusion from society and have thus acted to enact political, economic, and social change which seeks to break them free of the real and metaphorical shackles of oppression they face. The second, less popular: disabled people do not share much more than a common ascriptive characteristic, and have not had the political, economic, and social policy successes of other groups in seeking out substantive citizenship rights.

Disability in the United States, still defined by the state for purposes of identifying those who are free from obligations of their non-disabled peers at the expense of social citizenship rights, is still a contested and multifaceted concept. This paper argues that this fuzziness, of what disability is and who counts as disabled, obfuscates and distorts the perspective of the scholarly understanding of disability, a social model perspective in a medical model world. This in turn has both normatively positive and negative practical implications for disability politics today.

Author

• Andrew Jenks, University of Delaware