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Disability as solidarity: political not (only) metaphysical
Author(s) -
Dougherty Tom
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/phpr.12666
Subject(s) - chapel , solidarity , metaphysics , politics , citation , sociology , art history , philosophy , art , library science , theology , law , political science , computer science
What is disability? What do we want it to be? In slogan form, these questions characterise an “ameliorative” project for disability (Haslanger 2000, 2012). Elizabeth Barnes pioneers such a project in The Minority Body, arguing that we should affirm disability as a social category, because it is one that “people have found useful when organising themselves in a civil rights struggle” (Barnes 2016, p.41). This motivates her innovative social constructionist account of disability as solidarity:1 “disability just is whatever the disability rights movement is promoting justice for.” (Barnes 2016, p.43). But why should we adopt the category of disability in our theories just because the category is useful for activists? I will explore two answers. The first is that we ought to have the same explanatory aims as activists. The second is that we ought to join activists in disrupting ableist ideologies. The latter answer could motivate a nearby account of disability to Barnes’s, according to which disability just is whatever the disability pride movement is celebrating as valuable.