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Democratizing Disability: Achieving Inclusion (without Assimilation) through “Participatory Parity”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2014

Amber Knight
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Abstract

More than two decades after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), people with disabilities continue to live at the margins of American democracy and capitalist society. This persistent exclusion poses a conundrum to political theorists committed to disability rights, multiculturalism, and social justice. Drawing from feminist insights, specifically the work of Nancy Fraser, among others, I examine the necessary conditions for meaningful inclusion to be realized within a deliberative democracy. Using Fraser's concept of “participatory parity” as a proxy for inclusion, I strategize how to overcome informal barriers—economic inequality and misrecognition—that persist even after disabled people are granted the legal right to participate. The analysis concludes that a truly inclusionary and multicultural democracy requires the redistribution of wealth and a more expansive model of political deliberation, one that can recognize unconventional (even nonverbal) modes of communication through practices of translation.

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Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies , Winter 2015, pp. 97 - 114
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Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Susan Bickford, Michael Lienesch, Jeff Spinner‐Halev, Joanne Hershfield, and Michele Berger for comments on earlier versions of this article.

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