Intellectuals and the Disability Movement

Abstract

This final chapter is completely new and is an attempt to make sense of my own experience in, and relationship to, the disability movement. It is neither a statement of what I think my position in this relationship is or should be but an attempt to open up the issue of the role of individuals in collective movements. In discussing this, I use the word intellectual not in the bourgeois sense of the term but to describe all individuals who think critically about their lives. Not all disabled people do of course: some think the only problem is non-disabled people; some think the problems they face are their own fault; some think disabled people should accept the hand-outs they are given and be grateful. What unites disabled people within the movement is that not only do we think our lives could be better, we know they should be. Intellectual work is but one path to achieving the social transformation necessary to make it so.