ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the problems with focusing on the individual capacity of families to cope with disability due to their resilience. It explores the significance of medical therapies and treatments in the lives of disabled families. The chapter looks at the meanings associated with care and the value of recognising the interdependencies which lie at the heart of all family life for challenging the social and institutional marginalisation of disabled people. An online search for information about disability and family will produce an array of work focused on and framed around burden. Care is a problematic category in disability debates. Feminists have rightly been criticised for being solely bothered by the gendered division of labour within the ‘burden’ of care within families. The assumptions made about non-disabled women as carers and about disabled women as inadequate carers take us towards a consideration of the politics of care.
