Anchoring disablement: social definitions and social ontology in Britain’s Disabled People’s Movement

Intervening in debates around the ‘social model of disability’ (or the claim that biological/mental impairment is distinct from social processes of disablement,and that the latter constitutes a form of social oppression), this chapter argues that academic literature has mischaracterised variants of the claim emerging from social movement activity, and that an analysis of the social movement literature reveals competing and incompatible variants of it. Using Brian Epstein’s (2015a;2015b) distinction between grounding and anchoring definitions of social phenomena; I distinguish between the ontological assumptions of Disability Studies-type research, and the social ontological claims mobilised by competing variants of the social model. I conclude that much of the critical literature presumes social models to make grounding claims about the experience of disabled individuals, a presumption which is false when applied to what I believe is the theoretically strongest and best developed version in the social movement literature—the definition of disablement as a ‘by-product’ of capitalism’s unfolding, formulated by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation.