This year’s Venice Biennale features a large retrospective of the UK’s Disability Arts Movement, curated by Shape Arts. A vibrant movement in the 90s, but somewhat anachronistic now, it is nevertheless a show worth seeing. We are also still on tenterhooks as to whether the Mary-Archer-led review into Arts Council England instigated by the previous government will proceed in light of the recent election. After such debacles as the defunding of LGB Alliance, and the hounding of Denise Fahmy, the arts sector is much in need of depoliticization and refocusing on funding artistic endeavour from a position that upholds principles of institutional neutrality and freedom of expression. (Given that seven of the ‘expert panel’, including the chair, feature pronouns in their public bios, you’ll have to forgive my scepticism.) In light of some of these things, it seems timely to join some dots between a niche political movement of the late C20th, and the current reification of identity to a quasi-religion. There are many strands to tease out when it comes to understanding how we arrived in a dystopian absurdity, where middle-class people claim oppression by cross-dressing. But disability activism, particularly in disability arts, is a significant one that is rarely pulled.

The Social Model was politically expedient because it put the onus of action on society to provide access

Tracing the evolution of contemporary social justice tropes is now well-trodden ground. From Fanon to Foucault to Feminism, fingers point, justifiably, in many directions. One culprit, however, remains largely uncredited: the seeds of today’s cult of self-identification, extreme social constructivism, linguistic authoritarianism, lived experience/standpoint epistemology, and the trumping of material reality by narrative construction, are all seen sprouting in the Disability Rights Movement activism of the 80s and 90s. The gradual morphing of activists into today’s be-suited DEI wallahs has played a major, but relatively unrecognised, role in capillary-ing these ideas into every corner of the public realm.

Anyone involved in an industry where filling out equality forms with banal frequency is a fact of life, may recall that there was an interim period where the now-ubiquitous language of self-identification was not used for ethnicity or sexuality, but confined to one question: ‘Do you identify as D/deaf or disabled?’ This language has now migrated to all identity questions – but patient zero, the Typhoid Mary of self-identification, was disability.

At the heart of UK disability politics is something called ‘The Social Model of Disability’, which attempts to unceremoniously uproot the word ‘disability’ from its referent, to claim that we are merely ‘disabled by society’. Disability is socially constructed, and if you refer to ‘my disabilities’ you will be gently, but firmly, corrected – you have ‘impairments’, not disabilities – only society disables you, silly billy! This results in painfully arch conversations, and God help you if English is not your first language. Whilst groping for the meaning concealed beneath tooth-grindingly abstruse language is a post-modernist rollout we’ve all come to ‘enjoy’, there is method to this madness – contextualized, it is not as ludicrous as it first appears. The pros and cons of The Social Model are for another, substantial, essay, but in a long social history where disability could be couched as anything from moral failing to tragedy embodied, that the great and the good may display their mercy and virtue, it had merit. Taking the locus of the problem out of the body of the disabled person, and placing it on society was tremendously empowering for people who were marginalised and objectified by a solely medical model of disability. It was also a very effective political tool.

Disability self-id

Disability politics and activism blossomed in the UK in the late 80s, focussed around campaigning (successfully) for the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. The Social Model was politically expedient because it put the onus of action on society to provide access (thus ‘un-disabling’ you). If you are, for example, a wheelchair user, and you struggle to participate in society because you can’t get on the bus or into public buildings, it makes a kind of sense to say that, if the barriers to access are removed you are no longer ‘disabled’, because you can, at least in public life, do everything that non-wheelchair users can do.

The Social Model promotes self-identification, because it puts the power in the hands of disabled people to identify what barriers they face, as well as removing the unpleasant dynamic of having to ‘prove’ disability with doctors’ letters, etc. Only the strongest form of the social model entails self-identification, though – the agency to say ‘my disabilities’ must be removed in order that disability is definitively socially constructed and not within the self. None of this was supposed to imply that you could abracadabra disability via self-identification, nor was it the intention that it become a mechanism for the reification of any delusion narcissists choose to embrace. 

There were several activist groups touting strong and weak versions of The Social Model jostling for primacy around this time, but the emergent winner in terms of which political model stood the test of time and became widely adopted, was UPIAS (The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation). With Marxist leanings, they adopted the strongest (most linguistically authoritarian) version of The Social Model. They were co-founded by an anti-apartheid activist, Vic Finkelstein who characterised mainstream society’s treatment of disabled people as analogous to apartheid, and adopted the language and models of anti-apartheid activism. You can’t fault the strategy. 

There’s no doubt that disabled people were often incredibly marginalised in the UK at this time, although it is somewhat of a leap to place them in the same ballpark as black South Africans. Planting the association in people’s minds by using the same framing, the narrative of enforced separatism, is a great tactic. We see a similar trope in the forced teaming of the alphabet soup (everything to the right of the ‘B’) with lesbians and gays – the association leads the wider public to unconsciously accept theirs as an analogous civil-rights movement – a kind of gay rights 2.0). This is way back in 1972, but we can already see the prototype: extract the narrative template of one type of oppression, apply it to your own identity agenda, fast forward to 2023, and voila! Intersectional grift! At least the disabled people of the 70s can claim genuine oppression – it becomes a grotesque distortion when today’s blue-haired ‘speshul-identities’ employ the same schtick. 

Disability arts has been woven into the heart of disability activism since this time, and this is where my own experience comes from. I have had countless demeaning experiences in the art world that might lead one to expect I’d be an unqualified supporter of The Social Model. The humiliation of having to write deeply personal medical details for strangers to justify my application for a disabled fellowship, non-disabled artists eyeing me with resentment because I’m getting a slice of intersectional pie they can’t grab, and being reduced to tears at my own opening by a famous artist, who looked me up and down with exaggerated manner, commenting “you don’t look disabled to me”.

So, I think it’s important to grasp why ideas like self-ID and The Social Model were useful, and arguably still are in some contexts, when we seek to understand how they evolved to become so corrosive to liberal society today. In a zeitgeist that gives rise to the phenomenon of healthy people self-identifying as ‘trans abled’, and white people (often academics) self-ID-ing as black, these little political semantic tricks take on a different complexion, becoming part of the generalised flight-from-reality we see on the left. Self-identification has become part of the younger generation’s desperate roulette-spin to self-identify as anything and accrue ever more granular categorizations (with matching flags). It’s a hopelessly misdirected grope for authenticity in a paradigm where the authentic has been defined away. If you exist only within a social construction, where truth is at best unknowable, then what can authenticity possibly mean? There is nothing against which to calibrate truth – only the unmoored solipsistic silo of ‘lived experience’. You are as you create yourself. It is not surprising for the digital natives that the idea of the self as something one curates is more than plausible – their perception of self is coded in 1’s and 0’s on Instagram and tiktok – ruthlessly filtered and edited – who cares about the confines of this mere meat suit? 

Why are these young people so eager to wed themselves to a plethora of empty identities? I rather think Jung knew his onions when he declared that “man cannot stand a meaningless life”. And life is meaningless without struggle – we must find a way to crowbar our experiences into a convincing hero’s journey narrative of our very own. Yet one thing most of these mollycoddled Western children have not known is genuine struggle. Moreover, within a rigid conceptual framework that permits life to be parsed only via the lens of oppressor vs. oppressed, the only struggle in town deemed meaningful is against ‘institutional oppression’ – an epic civil-rights battle against a society that would keep our plucky hero down because of marginalised identity. That this is not a reality for most identity groups in today’s UK – it is a paradigm imported from history and faithfully pantomimed like battle re-enactment – doesn’t matter, because indexing reality is not a criterion. The larp itself is the reality; the bastard love-child of post-modernism and the fetishization of civil rights movements. 

The very definition of disability in The Social Model is as a form of oppression – the presumption of the now-familiar oppressor vs oppressed binary is inherent. This entails the politicization of all disabled people. There is no option to be disabled and not oppressed. Or disabled but not interested in being a political actor – merely someone who has their struggles with their condition, and has interest in neither language games nor activism. But it is a branch of identity politics, so everything, no matter how personal, will be forced through the political sausage machine. 

The coal face at which we find ourselves in today’s culture wars, this kind of subjective vs objective tussle, is the same one that has existed around the social model since its inception. Activists and organizations claiming, on behalf of all, that disability is about identity and discrimination, versus the vast majority of average disabled people, who assert a common-sense realist position that disability is a matter of something physical (or cognitive, or psychological) within one’s person not working. (One of the great paradoxes of activism is that it comes with its own built-in oppression: the loudest most-extreme voices land up subsuming most of whom they claim to represent.) We see an analogue in the notion that ‘if I adhere to society’s construct of femaleness then I am actually female’. This bracketing away of embodied reality as something either irrelevant, or worse, actively denied, which feels like a phenomenon of our present moment, is actually what’s been going on in disability politics for decades (not to mention in functionalist philosophy even longer!) As with gender ideology, it is the vocal and politicized minority who have succeeded in forcing their conception of reality (or lack of it) upon public policy. 

Now, if I were an intersectionalist, I might make mischief and suggest it’s not a coincidence that the model for disability arrived at by middle-class straight white guys in wheelchairs was the one that most suited middle-class straight white guys in wheelchairs. Having non-visible, as opposed to very visible, disabilities throws up very different issues within society – one’s less concerned with repelling pity, more interested in asserting that you need help, even if that can’t immediately be discerned. Asserting the reality that is not apparent to others, via a medical model, becomes something you are rather invested in. Being born with your impairments as opposed to acquiring them has a massive effect on whether disability is experienced as part of the self – in fact, the very antithesis of a mere social construct. And what if you’re disabled but aren’t oppressed at all? 

Whose lived experience?

It’s a deep irony that it is the feminist critiques, such as those by Liz Crow and Jenny Morris, which favour the primacy of ‘lived experience’, that most successfully undermine the social model. Bracketing away suffering and erasing the ability to define and describe one’s own experience, is a disservice to the vast proportion of the people these constructions purport to help. Indeed, someone like me, for whom the possibilities of practical access are minimal, risks finding themselves in the absurd position of all but being defined out of being disabled altogether. (If only I had clicked my ruby-slippered heels to self-identify as not-disabled!) Furthermore, as Crow points out, whilst skin colour or sexuality is, outwith the context of society, fundamentally neutral, bits of one’s body not working isn’t! Disability simply cannot be crow-barred into the identity politics model without bashing off some pretty important parts to make it fit. 

That I am not disabled by my body is a patent untruth

Some subsets of disabled people, particularly amongst the D/deaf or higher-functioning neurodiverse, are especially vehement about rejecting a medical model. They have developed cultures and a sense of identity around their disability, and resent it being framed as negative or ‘not normal’ – they have a different and valid culture that stems directly from their impairment. This is eminently understandable, but rather like the white-blokes-in-wheelchairs, their empathy towards those with different sorts of impairments falls off a cliff. Their insistence on a combination of the social model and a cultural affiliation model isn’t much use to, say, a person with a debilitating illness, for whom receiving appropriate help depends upon getting a diagnosis. Whilst attempts to build ‘spoonie’ cultures around those with chronic pain and/or fatigue are kind of sweet, the idea that one would choose to be in these states because it’s a ‘valid culture’ and not an unpleasant and limiting bodily experience you’d opt out of in a heartbeat, requires an inhuman effort at reality-denial. 

I got involved in disability arts because I am what is rather condescendingly referred to as an ‘outsider artist’, and it offered me a way to get funding in a sector that remains hostile to genuine outsiders. One might think an industry bending over backwards to do ‘social justice’ might be receptive to disabled outsider artists. But amidst the stampede of avocado-quaffing Tarquins identifying as oppressed there isn’t space for anyone who might have the temerity to be actually marginalised. It works out very well for the artworld – endless posturing of virtue, whilst working with precisely the same mediocrities as always. Status Quo successfully maintained. The whole simulacrum might be straight from Baudrillard’s wet dream. What a perverse pretzel is made of reality, when we no longer act according to it. Perhaps I, too, should dye my hair blue, put my cap out, and watch the funding roll in. 

Needless to say, when baptized into all this, I found it rather Orwellian. Wet behind the ears, I unwittingly isolated myself as a trouble-maker, when I remarked that my impairments determine my life experience far more than society’s ‘ableism’, and I didn’t buy the policing of disabled people’s own language as the radical progressivism it was being sold as. That I am not disabled by my body is a patent untruth. From the get-go I found there to be something dystopian about being required to embrace a surreal unreality, to toe a politically correct line. To disability activists, being honest about what it’s like to live in my body means I am playing into the hands of those who belittle us as ‘tragic’. The wrong kind of crips will not be suffered to suffer. 

The standard defence of these kinds of criticisms is that The Social Model was not intended to be an actual theory of disability, merely a tool to help identify and remove social barriers faced by disabled people in society. However, I’ve yet to encounter an institution that heeds this distinction. In actuality, all disability arts organizations, and now all arts institutions, museums, public bodies, academia and, increasingly, the private sector, use this precisely as if it were a comprehensive theory, and will assiduously police disabled people’s language of self-description. Moreover, adherence to this orthodoxy, demonstrated by framing everything with the tortuous language of self-identification, is the acid test for whether an organization has the ‘correct’ values. Language use in public life is successfully nudged in order that deeply politicized ideologies become institutionalised by the back door. (In much the same way, the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index will predicate your position on your removal of language like ‘woman’ and ‘mother’.) This is a tyranny of petty bureaucracy. In order to apply or interact with the institution at all, you are given drop-down forms that only exist in the ‘self-identify’ construction. If you want to participate, you must conform to this world view, or you can’t even fill out the application! When I started crossing out ‘identify as’ and replacing it with ‘am’ it was, funnily enough, around about the time I stopped getting funding. Planting a flag in the sand for material reality doesn’t go down well. Like all tyrannies, The Social Model started as a benign attempt to do good. But now it is a rigid, authoritarian, highly policed, deeply-ideological, indoctrinating choke-hold on our academic and cultural institutions. 

The disability-industrial complex

Disability Arts is constantly engaged in outreach to ‘educate’ public bodies how to think ‘correctly’ about disability. The same people who were out standing in front of buses with placards in 1989 are now invited into boardrooms as HR consultants, imparting their entirely non-neutral notions of disability, and how it must be reflected in language. The reason this ‘education’ is perpetually needed is that it is really a process of indoctrination. There is a reason why people outside of disability politics hate The Social Model, and immediately hone in on the absurdity that someone non-disabled could self-identify into disability, whilst those who are actually disabled do not have the symmetrical luxury of self-identifying out of it. You have to have gone through a very particular process of un-anchoring your ideas from reality, that truly only the most ‘educated’ disciples of post-modernity, whose hands have never graced dirt, can ascend to. This is what the universal cry of the outraged progressive – ‘Educate Yourself’ – means. It means, cleanse your mind of any link to reality. ‘Decolonise’ your very soul. Cast out your sin. Then you can be imprinted, baptised with correct thoughts: you will believe your painful body is merely a social problem; your sex doesn’t exist, only your shining inner gender identity. Come bad ideas, one and all, for I am but a vessel for your holy transmission. Educate Yourself! 

In arts, identity-based lobbies exist because of the perception that they are underrepresented. That you would struggle to make an evidence-based case for that in today’s artworld doesn’t seem to stop the juggernaut. It is not helped by the Arts Council’s Let’s Create policy, which is very focussed on apportioning funds on an identity tick-box basis –  as Kathleen Stock pointed out, you’re especially quids-in if you’re ‘queer’ – a matter of unverifiable self-identification (blue hair optional), which is especially convenient for upper middle class white people. I’m not convinced, however, that disabled people have ever been underrepresented in art. History is littered with tales of artists struggling and sometimes dying from physical or mental health conditions. There are many artists in the mainstream art world today who have, for example, hearing impairment, or arthritis, or a chronic condition, or are wheelchair users – these people are not involved in disability arts not because they’re not disabled, but because they’re uninterested in identity politics. For several centuries paintings were mostly various configurations of classical Gods or biblical vignettes – triumphantly pointing out the lack of wheelchairs depicted is not the bullet-proof evidence of discrimination activists seem to think it is.  

Disability arts does not exist to fund disabled people who make art. Although it gets millions of pounds on this pretext (Unlimited, the most powerful disability arts funder has received £5.8 million so far. Its leader is also on the Mary Archer review expert panel). It exists to fund people who will be indoctrinated and indoctrinate, who will self-identify, and who will go forth and proselytise in every institution they come into contact with. It has been the archetypal long march through the institutions, successfully conquering all of the arts and museums sector, then academia, then: the world. Now, the idea that any identity could be calibrated with the yardstick of reality is distasteful to millennials and anyone younger – identity is a matter of sacred inner feelz (or your aspirational curation of the self), and self-reporting. 

But those who fund these organizations are not having the wool pulled over their eyes – they are in ideological lock-step. Whether it’s Esmee Fairbairn, Paul Hamlyn Foundation or The Arts Council, following the circle jerk of money flowing round these bodies is an eye-opener. Paul Hamlyn, for example, also fund Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence. I predict much of the future work that will be done in the arts sector (and way beyond!) will involve untethering from the vast amounts of money pumped into ‘gender’ by these organizations, much like the process undertaken with Sackler and oil-industry patronage in recent years. In order to do this, disability arts organizations will have to be bypassed or rebuilt from the ground-up, without the ideological foundations of The Social Model. 

I eagerly await the outcome of Mary Archer’s Labour-ratified review, should it happen, presided over by its be-pronounced ‘experts’. Maybe they’ll declare a new artworld dawn where freedom of expression is prized, funding is unfettered by ideology, and nobody gives a fig about your immutable identity characteristics! In the meantime, I have an important artwork comprising flying pigs to finish.