ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the use of ‘lawful violence’ in the disability sector, and the ways by which ableist dispositions and law’s violence work together to silence the voices of people with disability who are subject to coercive controls. The chapter engages with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s notion of ‘the differend’ to draw out the catch-22 situations that render people with disability’s dissenting accounts of ‘lawful violence’ in the disability sector simultaneously ‘impossible’ and counterproductive. It further reflects on some of the conditions that make it improbable, if not close to impossible, to not only question the apparent need for coercive practices in relation to people with disability, but to further bear witness to these practices as violence and abuse.
