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The Politics of Disability Performativity

Disability is a concept that grows as we think about it, forcing us to adjust our conversations in vocabulary and rhetoric depending on which disability world we inhabit or address. Understanding disability starts with exposure to disabled people’s bodyminds in their own spacetime and an appreciation of disability expertise. The disability justice movement pulls the intersectional performance of disability out of the intimate sphere so that it can play a role in policy, an analytic where anthropology should shine. This article is particularly addressed to anthropologists with a new interest in disability and critical disability studies scholars with a frustration with anthropology. I use exemplary analysis of actual dialogues drawn from an autoethnographic record of my own perceived mobility and speech impairments to explore my biopolitical positioning as disabled. Anthropologists have the capacity to move disability theory forward, feeding it with ethnographic fuel. While the anthropology of disability uses insightful ethnographic methods to understand specific impairments in specific contexts, the reflexive turn in anthropology has not yet embraced disability. We are still better off remaining individual disability experts; our collective efforts are still an “embarrassment to power.” This article, as part of a collective special issue, aims to change that.