Neurodivergence &…Episode 3: Ableism, Disableism & and the Capitalised Body
Neurodivergence &... Activism, advocacy and analysis from the front-line of neurodivergent politics and cultures, with Heledd (Hel) Straker & Gareth Farmer.
Hel (Heledd (Hel) Straker, (Intagram: @adhdjoy), an HR coach and consultant specialising in neurodivergence, and Gareth (Gareth (S.) Farmer (Instagram: @writingautism).
Introduction
If disablism is individual, institutional or cultural and social prejudice against people with disabilities, what is ‘Ableism’? In short, ‘ableism’ is a socially constructed system which values people’s bodies and minds in relation to often unquestioned and unexamined notions of ‘normality’, ‘productivity’ and ‘intelligence’. As such, ableism is also rooted in white supremacy.
Jay Dolmage’s (2017) Academic Ableism synthesises the evolution of disability scholarship brilliantly. Disablism, he writes, “negatively constructs both the values and the material circumstances around people with disabilities”, whereas ableism “positively values able-bodiedness”. (p. 6) He continues:
In fact, ableism makes able-bodiedness and able-mindedness compulsory. Disablism constructs disability as negative quite directly and literally. Ableism renders disability as abject, invisible, disposable, less than human, while able-bodiedness is represented as at once ideal, normal, and the mean or default. (Dolmage, 2017:7)
In other words, the constructions of disability as negative are more overt, whereas ableism is a more subtle or stealthier way of rendering the disabled body and mind obsolete or without value. While disablism can be nominally combatted by anti-discriminatory language, ableism is more difficult to wield. And this difficulty is because, as Gillberg (2020: 25) writes: “ableism is deeply rooted in historical and political ignorance of the material realities of disabled people’s lives and there is no incentive to examine such ignorance as there are no repercussions.” Like laissez-faire marketisation, if left un-touched or examined by critique, ableism and its attendant ideologies of bodily and intellectual perfectibility, remain unchallenged and continue to oppress the ‘able’ and ‘disabled’ alike.
But disableism and ableism are also tied to economics and, yes, capitalist modes of being. Wendy Brown’s pioneering work Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) makes agonisingly clear the ways in which neoliberal ideology and its “normative order of reason” (p.9) have stealthily “transmogrify[ied] every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic.” (p.10) Efforts by governments and leaders of institutions, by the preponderance and naturalisation of neoliberal ideas of free markets, privatisation, efficiency (and austerity), have made it so that bodies, minds and being are always-already measured by their use-value to a capitalist system. So, external and then internalised forces are designed to keep us this way, disabling us to compliance to the conformities of ableism.
References
Andrews, A. (2020). “Autoimmune actions in the ableist academy.” In Ableism in Academia: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illness in Higher Education, edited by Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh. London: UCL Press: 103-123.
Brown, N. (2020). “Theorising ableism in academia.” In Ableism in Academic: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illness in Higher Education, edited by Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh. London: UCL Press: 1-10.
Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalisms Stealth Revolution. London: Zone Books.
Cain, Susan (2012) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. Crown Publishers
Carnegie, D. (1936) How to Win Friends and Influence People
Dolmage, J. T. (2017). Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Gillberg, C. (2020). “The significance of crashing past gatekeepers of knowledge: Towards full participation of disabled scholars in ableist academic structures.” In Ableism in Academic: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illness in Higher Education, edited by Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh. London: UCL Press: 11-30.
Goodley, D. (2017). “Dis/entangling Critical Disability Studies”. In Culture – Theory – Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies, edited by Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem and Moritz Ingwersen. Open Access. Online. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1xxs3r (accessed 14 April 2023): 81-97.
Kafer, Alison (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip. University of Indiana Press
Siebers, Tobin (2010) Disability Aesthetics (Corporealities: Discourses of Disability). University of Michigan Press
