ABSTRACT
Disability experiences and personal narratives have been the primary epistemological and political resources for disability activism and disability studies. Yet, biomedical categories remain the locus of disability identities resulting in the predominance of diagnosticism in disability identity politics. This diagnosticism precludes the experiences of the large numbers of people who do not have a formal diagnosis of disability from having their epistemological perspectives included in disability scholarship. Moreover, the intersectionality of disability with other axes of structural inequality such as class, race, caste, and gender are gaining prominence but relatively little scholarship exists on disability and non-normative gender and sexual identities. This chapter is an attempt to explore the cultivation of a disability consciousness in the absence of a clear diagnosis of a disability; and the simultaneous exploration of a queer consciousness that is rendered precarious through its evasions of a clear inclusion within contemporary LGBT+ socio-political spaces in India and the epistemic guilt emanating from occlusion of easy inclusion that ensues.
