Gradations of Debility and Capacity: Biocapitalism and the Neoliberalization of Disability Relations

This article explores how disability as a political identity emerged alongside the neoliberalization of social relations and the boom in the life sciences. This has had lasting consequences for the ways in which disability is mobilized in contemporary neoliberalized biocapitalism, including how disability has become differentially included through modes of debility and capacity that are not clearly defined along traditional abled/disabled binaries, implying that disability is not a uniformly oppressed category of being. I attend to how grievances about particular forms of disabled oppression and structural ableism are made through “wounded attachments” and question how to forge a disability politics that is able to traverse the complexities of the contemporary social and economic landscape.