Disability and Its Challenges to Democratic Inclusion

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel grapples with the challenges that disability poses to liberal forms of democratic inclusion. According to postwar theorist T.H. Marshall, liberal democracies gradually extend the rights of citizenship to their population, starting with civil rights, then political rights, and finally social rights, including the right to education, health care, and income support. Disability serves as a mediator of social rights, described by Deborah A. Stone in her classic text The Disabled State as a “privilege” because it provides a “ticket out of the workforce.” Disability, Stone argued, resolved the “distributive dilemma” by excusing people with the “privilege” of disability from the expectation of labor placed on all other citizens in capitalist societies, an expectation that has emerged with significant authoritative force in the current neoliberal age. Among working-aged citizens, only people with disabilities are entitled to income support and social services from the welfare state during their “productive” years. But it is a ticket purchased at the price of social citizenship. People with disabilities must navigate complex legal and administrative processes in order to claim their “privilege,” and despite formal recognition of their civil rights and entitlement to benefits, they still experience significantly higher rates of joblessness, underemployment, and poverty compared to people without disabilities. Societal discrimination, stigmatization, and isolation remain all too common experiences for people with disabilities.

The four papers in this panel examine why it is so difficult for liberal democracies to extend equal civic belonging to people with disabilities, and they consider the ways that inclusion – through discourses or expectations of health, normality, and reason – embeds ableism into citizenship. Among the questions that this panel analyzes are: In what ways are rights and civic membership conditioned by ableism? How has the retrenchment of social rights for democratic citizens been facilitated by conflicts over the meaning and scope of disability as a legal and administrative category? How do people of diverse minds and bodies navigate the state processes and structures that construct citizenship? How have they attempted to create communities that welcome differences? How can new ways of imagining liberal inclusion foster the social and political incorporation of not only citizens with disabilities but other vulnerable groups? What kinds of vistas and alternatives does disability open up for us in our quest to reimagine political community and democracy?

Sub Unit

• Division 27: Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence

Individual Presentations

• The Normalization Approach to Disability and Its Deficiencies - Giulia Corno, University of California, San Diego

• Commonality or Community?: Disability Identity in the Twenty-first Century - Andrew Jenks, University of Delaware

• Reimagining Democracy in Disability Communities of Care - Lorraine Krall McCrary, Wabash College

• Special? Disability and the Politics of Medico-Legal Classification - Heather Ann Swadley, Lehigh University

Chair

• Ann Kathleen Heffernan University of Michigan

Discussant

• Jennifer Leonor Erkulwater University of Richmond