2025 Theses Master's

Fragility, Division And Exclusion: Identity and the Intersectional Limits of the Disability Rights Movement

Maton, Polly

This thesis asserts that there are acute barriers facing the US pan-disability rights movement’s progress towards embodying intersectional praxis: a necessary feature of any social movement furthering human rights.

These obstacles largely revolve around the fragility of disability’s collective sociopolitical identity. The porosity and heterogeneity, combined with persistent medicalised perceptions, which characterise the Disabled experience, undermine the manufactured common identity the movement hinges on. In so doing, not only do contentious impairment-based politics subsume activist theorisations of inclusion, but a lack of external validity stalls intersectional practices in its own right as well as inspiring a culture of marginalisation and victimhood, which motivates actors to double down on disability essentialism.

The paper utilises oral history sources, survey data, eight expert interviewees and website content analysis in making its conclusions. The first section starts by establishing the current state of intersectional praxis in the US disability rights movement, which can be deduced to be failing those in the movement who are multiply marginalised. The development and nature of disability identity are then established before its impacts on the movement’s intersectional praxis are substantiated. This thesis concludes with the suggestion that not only can DRM itself learn from understanding its own internal culture and mechanisms but other movements as well.