ABSTRACT
The Union of the Physically Impaired (UPIAS) in the UK may have first formulated the concept of the intimate relationship between disability and oppression. UPIAS's definition of disability as an entirely social phenomenon has come to be defined as a process 'imposed on top of our impairments. UPIAS formulated their argument by splitting the experience of differential embodiment into the well-known impairment/disability divide. To experience embodiment is, by nature, to experience one's vulnerability – that vulnerability may be the result of human on human cruelty, but that is only one dimension of the complex subjectivities we should be pursuing. Low-level agency is often about the ways in which experiences of docility allow those who receive support to experience their own future expanding agency. Peripheral embodiment involves the analysis of those who could be characterised as experiencing lives of 'low-level agency'.
