Description
An eye-opening portrait of the diverse disability community as it is today, and how disability attitudes, activism, and representation have evolved since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
In Disability Pride, disabled journalist Ben Mattlin weaves together interviews and reportage to introduce a cavalcade of individuals, ideas, and events in engaging, fast-paced prose. He traces the generation that came of age after the ADA reshaped America, and how it is influencing the future. He documents how autistic self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement upended views of those whose brains work differently. He lifts the veil on a thriving disability culture—from social media to high fashion, Hollywood to Broadway—showing how the politics of beauty for those with marginalized body types and facial features is sparking widespread change.
He also explores the movement’s shortcomings, particularly the erasure of nonwhite and LGBTQIA+ people that helped give rise to Disability Justice. He delves into systemic ableism in health care, the right-to-die movement, institutionalization, and the scourge of subminimum-wage labor that some call legalized slavery. And he finds glimmers of hope in how disabled people never give up their fight for parity and fair play.
Beautifully written, without anger or pity, Disability Pride is a revealing account of an often misunderstood movement and identity, an inclusive reexamination of society’s treatment of those it deems different.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Too Defiant?
PART I: THE ADA GENERATION GROWS UP
CHAPTER 1
Creating Rights
CHAPTER 2
Successes, Disappointments, and Shortcomings
CHAPTER 3
What Is Pride—And Why Does It Matter?
CHAPTER 4
Disability Studies and the Afterlife of Cultural Icons
PART II: PRESENTATION AND REPRESENTATION
CHAPTER 5
Neurodiversity and Autistic Self-Advocacy
CHAPTER 6
Disability Justice
CHAPTER 7
Visibility, Community, and Context
CHAPTER 8
The Politics of Beauty
CHAPTER 9
Casting and Miscasting
CHAPTER 10
What’s So Funny About Disability?
PART III: THE CONTINUING EVOLUTION OF DISABILITY ACTIVISM
CHAPTER 11
Health-Care Disparities: Lessons of COVID-19
CHAPTER 12
Not Dead Yet vs. the Right to Die
CHAPTER 13
“Easy to Get In [but] Impossible to Get Out”: The Struggle for Deinstitutionalization and Medicaid Dollars
CHAPTER 14
Sparks of Activism Everywhere
EPILOGUE
Trending or Truly Empowering?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Indes
