ABSTRACT
This chapter consists of a three-hour conversation with activists representing the board and national secretariat of the Swedish self-advocacy organisation Grunden. The politics of being seen, heard, and able to voice one's opinions, offer both the opportunity to transgress and the threat of reifying, cultural presumptions about intellectual disability. In Spivak's analysis of post-colonial patterns of representation, attempts to provide oppressed groups with a 'voice' are bound up with a notion of the subject as coherent, autonomous, and carrying experiences that can be accounted for as 'true' representations of what such people are like. The role of representatives thus easily becomes to validate and exemplify 'otherness' whilst leaving the very status of being 'other' intact. Spivak argues that the impulse to represent, to give voice to, paradoxically mutes: represent themselves as transparent and as able to give a true account of the authentic needs of the group in question.
