ABSTRACT
The civil rights model of disability, exemplified by the Americans with Disabilities Act, views people with disabilities as an oppressed minority who are entitled to legal protection to amend historical discrimination and exclusion. This model stands in contrast to a universal view of disability, which emphasizes the notion that “everyone is disabled in some way,” and is often used as a tool to draw support for disability-related causes. After all, if everyone is disabled, then each of us deserves to receive disability accommodations that often could make life easier for all of us. This chapter emphasizes the clash between the civil rights model and the universal view of disability. It points to the danger of using the universal view, as doing so could bolster already existing popular perceptions of disability rights as “special rights.” The chapter, rather, suggests using an articulation of disability as a fluid state instead of a universal view to help the public better understand the lived experience of disability without hurting the legitimacy of disability rights as a civil rights issue.
