ABSTRACT
This chapter looks more specifically at injustices of cultural misrecognition. It traces the genealogy of contemporary ableism in the postsocialist region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to state socialist medicalisation, productivisation and denial of disability and provides examples of medical-productivist systems for disability assessment inherited from state socialist disability policy in a number of postsocialist countries. The understanding of disability institutionalised in such assessment systems is criticised for facilitating disparaging representations of disabled people in public discourses and on the level of everyday life. The chapter discusses the effects of postsocialist neoliberalisation on the cultural recognition of disabled people by highlighting neoliberal stigmatisation of public assistance through discourses of 'welfare dependency'. Such stigmatisation has been coupled with novel 'technologies of the self' that have promoted self-sufficiency and have rendered welfare recipients individually responsible for their own wellbeing. The state socialist denial of disability was structurally similarly to the state socialist denial of 'racial' or ethnic issues.
