ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Critical Disability Studies (CDS) forms a ‘second wave’ of disability thinking that supersedes the first wave radicalism of the social model of disability. The omission of impairment from politics and culture has been a force for CDS in its critique of the social model. CDS is drawn to the problematic of the privileged-self in the name of the other and to a theoretical tradition in which the relationship is discursively central. For CDS, disability is produced and reproduced as a ‘problem’ in the non-disabled imaginary by entrenched, cultural barriers to being that arise from fear of impairment. Disability Studies struggles with the obligation to be the theoretical expression of the disability movement. As internal debate in Disability Studies has become more theoretically diverse and politics far less homogeneous, emphasis on the cultural significance of impairment, the hegemony of ableism and the nature of the non-disabled imaginary has come to the fore.
