ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how thinking about dis/ability (disability and ability) opens up what counts as work to critical and creative investigation. It will examine three, inter-connected, notions of work; the often unnoticed – and differential - work involved in negotiating our built surroundings: the commonsense ‘ordinary’ work of making and re-making particular social, spatial and material practices through our everyday attitudes, talk and actions: and the work of perpetuating and/or contesting unequal and normative practices through architectural, artistic, political and personal interventions.
These types of work are not new to feminism, which also aims to expose the invisible and/or marginalised work around gender, and to develop creative and critical forms of contestation. The key argument here though, is about taking notice of how and when feminism – along with cultural theory more generally – can assume that work to be the work of only particular kinds of bodies, ones that are inherently mobile, rational and autonomous. The privilege of being able-bodied (or white or middle class) becomes part of what is unnoticed and unspoken about, with disability as a concept, and disabled people as a constituency left to disappear down the gaps. In response, I will suggest that starting from dis/ability has a huge amount to offer across our everyday, professional and academic thinking about, and actions in, the world; and to show the essential relevance of the work of disability studies scholars and disabled artists and activists to contemporary architectural feminisms.
