ABSTRACT
This chapter explores discussions about failure in relation to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The act prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities and is seen as one of the great achievements of the US disability rights struggle. The decades that followed the passing of the ADA in July 1990 were however marked by a narrow interpretation of its provisions by federal courts (Colker 2005; Krieger 2003b). This development resulted in a sense of disappointment at the failure of progressive politics that chimes with the notion of left melancholia. Indeed, alongside the judicial backlash to the ADA, the theoretical underpinning of the law, the social model of disability, also faced significant challenges (Shakespeare and Watson 2001). 1 This left disability activism and scholarship without the grand narrative that fuelled the global disability rights movement and the emergence of disability studies in the late 20th century. The chapter looks at how disability scholar-activists debated engaging with failure productively to articulate lessons to be learned from the failings of the ADA. I trace different interpretations of how the Americans with Disabilities Act failed, and how to respond to this failure, that loosely form a “backlash” and a “tension” narrative. The “backlash” narrative took as its starting point the assumption that the ADA failed to achieve its goals because the act was met with a backlash by courts and the media (Krieger 2003b). Disability activists should therefore respond to this failure by learning to limit future backlash. In contrast, the “tension” narrative suggested that the “backlash story” does not account sufficiently for the contradictions already present in the ideas and goals of the various organizations that form the US disability rights movement (Bagenstos 2009). It was these contradictions that facilitated a selective interpretation of the ADA by federal courts and that should be the focal point of a response to the failure of the ADA.
