Young Disabled People’s Fluctuating Activism: Challenging the Perfect Standard of Activist

Abstract

By combining ideas from social movement theory with disability studies, this article unpacks how young disabled people navigate the cultural ideals of the activist and activism as they narrate their past and present experiences of disability activism. Five life history interviews of young disabled people are analysed in detail by deploying the idea of the 'perfect standard of activist'. This allows taking into account the complexity of identifying as a disability activist. The findings indicate how the cultural ideals of activism and the figure of the activist are out of reach for young disabled people; as a result, they do not necessarily consider themselves as activists while still engaging in activism. The embodied standards of activism, and ways in which ableism frames these, provide a framework to think about young disabled people's fluctuating activism and the different forms it might take.

Individual legal action as minority activism: Romani Germans in 1950s West Germany

“…This disjuncture between self‐perception and external perception speaks to the fact that people who participate in activism are often reluctant to label themselves as activists, in part because the title seems to require a level of purity and commitment that almost no one attains (Bobel 2007). Indeed, many people who do things that they view as activism refuse to self‐identify as activists until someone else grants them this identity, and even then, if they do not frequently engage in highly visible political action, they may still feel that they do not deserve the title (Craddock 2019; Koskinen 2022; Stuart 2013).…”