Tentative Disability — Mitigation and Its Discontents

Abstract

Increasingly law mediates medico-technological formulations of impairment. Many years ago it was hard to imagine a scenario where disabled people could be pressured into obtaining surgical, prosthetic or pharmacological interventions in order to avail themselves of the identity of the ‘disabled person’, thus enabling them to access social services and legislative protections. This chapter first explores how law operates as a narrative and provides an outline of legal baggage and backdrops. The legal story-teller makes certain unconscious and implicit choices regarding the spaces and places within which the narrative or story of disability unfolds. Rather than being neutral, these choices reinforce a performative compulsion for sameness and a notion that disability is inherently negative. I then explore disabled peoples’ encounter with the law and the matter of mitigation of disability in law. Finally, I demonstrate how these legal formulations have the capacity to redefine disability as being provisional or tentative.