Work Yourself Better: The Disabled Person as Benefit Scrounger

Abstract

This chapter considers how both welfare reform and disability policy narratives contribute to the construction of the disabled person as benefit scrounger. It explores how the narrative appropriates elements of the social model of disability and the disability rights movement’s mobilizing of a language of independent living and autonomy, while using them for very different purposes, and how it consolidates and intensifies the production of the disabled person as subject of governmentality, as a subject that needs to be taken in hand, managed and produced through the surveillance and disciplining of the state. In these policy documents, the possibilities of subject status for disabled people are reduced almost exclusively to their relationship to paid work. At the same time, in its articulation of both crisis and resolution, the narrative retracts any space in which to consider the complexities of a debilitated body, consolidating the neo-liberal move to ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’. While this narrative is not explicitly gendered, the chapter argues that a large part of what its political grammar forecloses is the social activity of reproductive care, which is always implicitly gendered. The reproductive sits as an uncomfortable excess to the vision of constrained entitlement being offered to the disabled person under austerity; it is what needs to be left out for the narrative to proceed in its own terms.