ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the journey of the research project contained within the book and introduces its main themes, epistemological standpoints, and concepts. The author sets out how the research changed from inception to conclusion, where original notions of violence and hate crime subsequently became too restrictive in the analyses of the life history narratives provided by thirteen ‘intellectually disabled’ participants. Before introducing abjection as the main theoretical focus, Thorneycroft puts forth his conceptions of the disabled body and subject influenced by the work of Judith Butler. Borrowing from Butler’s sex/gender problematisation, questions of materialisation and signification, and her account of subjectivation, the author claims that dis/ability is performative. Thorneycroft thereby engages in a politics that moves away from a medical account of disability and towards a theorisation of disability as social, contingent, and revisable. He then provides a preliminary overview of the theory of the abject informed by Julia Kristeva and Anne McClintock. He illustrates how abjection will be interrogated as a psychic and social, individual and collective experience. Importantly, however, the author also documents his emphasis on exploring the spaces of possibility in which abjection can be resisted.
