Biopluralism, disability, and democratic politics

Abstract

The rejection of disability as a tragic biological condition is central to affirmative disability politics in the twentieth and twenty-first century Anglo tradition. If disability was primarily tragic, then pity, prevention, and elimination are the most adequate responses. If disability was primarily a tragic biological condition, then medical science would be the best form of redress. In disputing that disability is a tragic biological condition, disability activists and scholars have articulated a variety of ways to redefine what disability is and why a political response to disability is vital. This paper focuses on one particularly widespread approach to disability as a political question: the universalization of disability. The universalization of disability 1 has two main components: (1) if a person lives long enough, they will eventually be disabled by age or accident (Bérubé 1998; Breckenridge and Vogler 2001;Carlson 2009;Garland-Thomson 2009; Simplican 2015) and ( 2) the universal condition of disability reveals disability exclusion from politics and justice as the result of prejudice and oppression and not legitimate concerns of appropriateness (Bérubé 1998;Davis 2006;Garland-Thomson 2012;Simplican 2015). There is an intuitive appeal here: many people have seen family and friends experience impairments of age or injury or have experienced them personally; the notion that previously qualified people are now disqualified from democratic citizenship seems, again intuitively, wrong.I want to resist the intuitive simplicity of this claim for a politics of disability because it is productive of a problematic democratic politics. Securing disability's claim to politics through universal disability produces a political horizon of equality and sameness. It becomes the task of politics to (re)produce that basic human equality. Yet when politics inevitably fails to equalize the status of all persons in relation to their disabilities, the question of what a disability politics is and how to contest the anti-politics of disability remains unanswered. A reimagining of politics may produce new horizons for a democratic sense of disability.This paper is an attempt at that reimagining. I posit that disability's difference, not its universality, secures a potentially more productive claim on democratic politics. I term this turn to disability's difference biopluralism. Biopluralism asserts that what we share as humans is that we each inhabit distinct bodies that condition but do not determine our relation to a shared world. Biopluralism posits that disability is an inherent part of that pluralism but does not require that all people see themselves as potentially disabled in order to secure the claim that disability matters for democracy. Biopluralism transforms the Arendtian claims that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the

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