Rights? I Want Liberation – BADD 2017

It’s blogging against disablism day today so I thought I’d get on and blog. For non-UK readers, or those in the UK that have grown up on US blogs, I’m going to use the following language here because;

disability defs

I’ve got to the point where I don’t think being for rights and social justice is enough to get rid of disablism.

When we look at the patriarchal capitalist system we live in, it becomes clear that disablism is a function of it. Anyone that doesn’t fit societies standard of “normality” due to a perceived impairment experiences it. The looks, the “oh, people like you can’t come in here”, the pity, the stereotypes, the anger, the judgement. As long as we live in a world that believes that the ideal body and mind is that of a “healthy” person, where “healthy” is a way of describing an “ideal” worker in a capitalist world, we will always have disablism.

To fight for rights and the associated justice, we fight to make this capitalist system more accommodating. But as long as it remains no amount of rights or justice will provide us with an end to disablism. Society will continue to praise the non-impaired, the non-disabled, and to look at those of us that don’t fit the bill as abnormal. Society will continue to make the harmful moral case that to be “healthy” is to be a “better person”. People with impairments will still be disabled people.

No. If we want to end disablism, and achieve liberation then we need to end capitalism and build a new society that no longer idealises certain types of bodies and ways of thinking over others.

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