Disability, Neoliberal Inclusionism and Non-normative Positivism

In this chapter we diagnose neoliberalism as the arrival, during the latter half of the twentieth century, of what Henry Giroux calls ‘hyper-market-driven societies [that] organize identities largely as consumers’. As such, neoliberalism offers few spaces from which to ‘recognize (our)selves outside of the values, needs, and desires preferred by the market’ (2012, xiv). Within this limiting framework of consumptive recognition, however, opportunities have opened up within neoliberal governance systems to the potential inclusion of formerly excluded groups, such as people with disabilities. Here our primary contention is that meaningful inclusion is only worthy of the designation “inclusion” if disability becomes more fully recognized as providing alternative values for living that do not simply reify reigning concepts of normalcy. While an egalitarian concept of disability has sought to free disabled people from the restraints of able-bodied oppression (i.e., ableism), a nondialectical materialist account of disability—that which we refer to throughout this chapter as non-normative positivism—pursues disability as something other than the oppressed product of social constraints.