ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to an enduring problem in disability studies, namely the valuation of different lives and kinds of lives. The disability field is in dire need of coalition building in order not to be fragmented into a million diagnostic pieces. Harriet McBryde Johnson, along the same generalising lines, indicates a kind of American disability politics that stresses particular forms of experience. Historically, the academic fields that study disability and animality have not been in close communication. In fact, their relationship can perhaps more accurately be described as being wary of the implications of findings in the other field. By contrast, American disability studies, in which Johnson’s work is situated, has much more strongly emphasised identity formation in opposition to state power and disability as a defining identity marker, or ‘master status’, to borrow the phrase of the sociologist Everett Hughes.
