Disability Politics and Theory

A. J. Withers organized with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty for over 20 years, including as a paid organizer. They are the author of Fight to Win: Inside Poor People's Organizing, A Violent History of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working (with Chris Chapman) and Disability Politics and Theory and numerous other articles and book chapters. They are the Ruth Wynn Woodward Jr. Chair in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University.Robyn Maynard is an Assistant Professor of Black Feminisms in Canada at the University of Toronto-Scarborough in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, with a graduate appointment in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the St. George Campus. She is the author of Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the Present and the co-author of Rehearsals for Living. She has published writing in the Washington Post, World Policy Journal, the Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Scholar & Feminist Journal, and a number of peer-reviewed book anthologies. Maynard's research and teaching focus on transnational Black feminist thought Black social movements, policing, borders and carceral studies, Black-Indigenous histories and praxis, Black Canadian studies, as well as abolitionist and anti-colonial methodologies.Rachel da Silveira Gorman is an associate professor in York University's Critical Disability Studies Program, where she is program development lead for a new undergraduate program in Racialized Health and Disability Justice with a certificate in Mad Studies and Critical Mental Health. She is an artist and activist with expertise in fine arts, cultural studies, transnational social movements, aesthetics of disability, and critiques of ideology.

“The starting point for this the book resonates with my desire for the histories of slogans and chants as it provoked me to refuse to forget that the original version I heard was not “Stand Up! Fight Back!” but from ACT UP New York City in Montreal in 1989 calling for us all to “Act Up! Fight Back!” In this powerful revised and expanded second edition of Disability Politics and Theory activist scholar A.J. Withers weaves together critical analysis of the social relations of struggle surrounding disablism and its integral mediated connections with colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, queer and trans oppression and so much more. For non-disabled people this is a crucial thinking through and learning experience for the many forms and sites of disability oppression and resistance from social assistance policies to sterilization laws and procedures, to Covid, to MAID and much more. It is a devastating refusal of eugenic (including feminist and queer uses of eugenics), medical, rehabilitative, and charity-based constructions of disability and a discerning of the limitations of reformist rights-based approaches and the limitations in many more socially oriented ones as well. Withers captures how radical disability and transformative struggles are always relational and interdependent. This is a must read for all activists and organizers engaged in transformative praxis in the multiple areas of oppression and resistance disablism is connected to. While ruling relations routinely expel “expendable” disabled people from the social fabric of life and support, Withers makes clear how our collective resistance and organizing can build a world based on caring where the social power of disablism and oppression and exploitation more generally is undone.”

• : Foreword by Robyn MaynardChapter 1: : Building Models and Constructing DisabilityChapter 2: : Constructing Difference, Controlling Deviance: The Eugenics ModelChapter 3: : Diagnosing People as Problems: The Medical ModelChapter 4: : Being Pushed into Normalcy: The Rehabilitation ModelChapter 5: : For Us, Not with Us: The Charity ModelChapter 6: : Revolutionizing the Way We See Ourselves: The Rights and Social Models Chapter 7: : Looking Back but Moving Forward: The Radical Disability Model and Disability Justice: Afterword by Rachel da Silveira Gorman