ABSTRACT
This essay examines pressures that affect people’s portrayal of disability to offer an account of how common, largely pernicious, conceptions of disability get (re)produced. How do we make disability status legible to a nondisabled audience (or even an audience of people with disabilities)? Often, we “perform” disability in ways that emphasize dependence or vulnerability. Conceptions of individualism and individuality critiqued by Dewey in Individualism Old and New cohere with underlying motivations and pressures to enact disability in this way. That is, accounts of individuality akin to old individualism undergird a logic that pressures some individuals to produce images and performances of themselves as “disabled” in terms of economic or social dependence. This chapter emphasizes that these pressures can be self-reinforcing. Disability performances not only stem from the pressures of old individualism, they (re)produce pernicious shared meanings of disability.
