Thread by @jsmilges

I think it’s time the disability community begin confronting its own hierarchies of capacity and inclination toward approximating abledness more seriously. I’ve been calling it healthism.

Disability scholar Susan Wendell long ago distinguished between “healthy” and “unhealthy” disabled people based on how well a person can pass as nondisabled in a capitalist context, wherein ability is measured by productivity. This distinction is useful but insufficient.

If we expand our focus to include @jkpuar’s work on “debility,” we can account for the conditions that produce incapacity, such as poverty, colonial and racialized violence, and environmental damage. These factors sustain healthism without always qualifying as “disability.”

Admittedly, disabled people are already more likely to encounter debility throughout their lifetimes, thus rendering them more disabled, more incapacitated, and accorded less value by a healthist metric.

Nevertheless, I think healthism can be a useful way of reframing our focus on the “unhealthy” as an exceptionalized category (again, see @jkpuar) restricted to the province of disability toward one that is more capacious in its reach.

How else, for instance, might we address the labor put on graduate students and contingent faculty to advocate for themselves, even when these populations are getting paid less to work more, often without sufficient benefits?

And how else can we account for the fact that physical disability remains the focus of most Disability Studies scholarship? Might it be because mental disability frustrates the legibility of our work when read within a healthist framework?

To clarify, healthism differs from ableism—for me—by the way it accords value to disabilities by how closely they resemble or can be realigned with abledness.

Healthism is ableism’s playmate and stealth operative. It’s the dude who infiltrates our own community, who we internalize, and who we spit back at one another without even realizing it. Healthism is what happens when “disability pride” becomes a show of remaining capacity.