Re-cognising Disability: Cross-Examining Social Inclusion through the Prism of Queer Anti-Sociality

Studies in medical sociology and law construct disability as anti-productive, unthinkable and unintelligible. This article takes the view, long recognised in the phenomenological tradition, that alternate embodiments result in markedly different forms of human ontology. Enter queer theory. Antithetical to the proposition that disabled people are the same as the ‘abled’, I point to a (trans)difference and suggest that a way out of the confines of recuperative liberal intolerance is to figure the disabled body conceptually as anti-social and ableist normativity as (non)compulsory. I propose that the disabled body is counter-intuitive and actualises, negotiates ‘negative’ ways of knowing or disidentifications. Can queer theory be merely grafted onto the cripped body and dragged onto another inflection?