A new disability studies paper has proposed a controversial new theory of the disability movement. The paper, titled “Accommandeering Disability Rights,” poses that the foremost goal of the disability movement is to integrate people with disabilities into higher education and then confuse everyone else with cultural theory jargon.
“‘Accommandeering’ is a neologism that combines the words ‘accommodation,’ a central tenet of the disability rights movement, and ‘commandeering,’ the act of taking something over through one-way force,” said the paper’s author, Dr. Moira Byrnes, an English professor at Stanford University. “As a Marxist, I look at social movements through the lens of class conflict. You have a popular front — or a Luddite front — and then you have a patrician, erudite class. The highest evolution of a cause is when the plight of the masses is extracted from its human sources, then transformed into cultural, artistic or academic capital. From there, a boutique class of modish nonparticipants can yield that capital to dominate representation of ‘the community,’ sell books, define stylish intellectual trends and basically revert every public conversation on the topic back to themselves.”
Byrnes continued: “We’ve seen countless other movements reach this place. But disability was always neglected in the world of academic, intra-movement appropriations. Well, guess what? The intersectionality of the bourgeoisie is finally getting some ADA-accessible ramps.”
When asked why the work sounds so dismissive of most people with disabilities, Byrnes explained, “Well, that’s a class of people that has a lot of power to realize together, should they coordinate their consciousness and commitments in a truly radical direction. As my subject of inquiry depends on having incidents of injustice to theorize about, if they actually attain justice, then my job becomes obsolete. Which is why it’s important to try to control the concept of disability rights and obfuscate language around it as much as possible.”
Local man with a disability Tom Halkias was asked for his opinion on the theory. He told us he’d have to pay $70 to get behind a JSTOR paywall to read the academic paper, which he couldn’t afford given the meager $943 per month he gets from SSI.