ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the concept of invalidation as a social and cultural process of moral regulation that is based on two key dimensions: deficit of credibility and confinement through incapacity. It shows how strategies and repertoires of invalidation are deployed in the ableist ‘project’ of dispossession and privation that draws the line between human validity and invalidity. The invalidation of disabled people and the validity of non-disability as ‘ways of being’ in Western culture pivot on patterns of moral regulation that undermine the ontological credibility of impairment. The moral validity of actors is shaped by historical processes, by the struggle for power to control the meaning of value and the right to decide who is worthy or unworthy, valid or invalid. Ableism, networked with property and propriety, embodies the power to invalidate at the level of social ontology and to inscribe bodies with or without worth, credibility, validity.
