Disability as subordination

Abstract

This thesis advances an account of disability on which to be disabled is to be socially subordinated in virtue of being believed by others to have bodily features that are taken to be evidence of a defective body, in combination with a societal ideology on which those features motivate and justify that subordination. I motivate the account by showing that it serves the political project of overturning the oppression of disabled people in the ways that defenders of the popular ‘social model’ of disability demand, and does so while by passing many of the problems the social model faces. I defend the account from its principal objections in the literature: that it problematically leaves out a role for the body in disability; and that it cannot accommodate disability pride. The thesis’s principal contribution to the literature is in its offering a substantial motivation, development, and defence of the account– Disability-as-Subordination – for the first time. Disability-as-Subordination has previously received a small amount of attention in the literature, but has been inadequately motivated, and thought to obviously be unviable in virtue of straightforward objections. Additional contributions include the clarification of the debate between the traditional medical and social models of disability – where I find that the social model minimally commits its adherents to less than is often thought – and a novel treatment of the requirement that accounts of disability must be able to accommodate disability pride – where I find that this demand is unclear in content and less able to do useful work in adjudicating between candidate accounts of disability than previously thought.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Liam Livesley: orcid.org/0000-0001-9620-0960

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