Surplusisity : neoliberalism and disability and precarity

This chapter provides an overview of three core areas of neoliberalism that have subjected everyday life to its hegemonic power, particularly from a disability standpoint. I argue that these entail core processes of neoliberal development, intensification and normalisation. First is the process of de-democratisation and the diminishing political sphere for citizen-subject participation. As noted earlier, neoliberalism often begins with militarisation of the state. I discuss how processes of de-democratisation have emerged with the global orthodoxy of neoliberalism and suggest their implication for disabled people’s political representation within the national polity, the sovereign nation state. The second area of focus is the neoliberal reordering of the economic sphere and the generation of heightened economic insecurity and precarity in everyday life generally and specifically for disabled people. Though neoliberalism has promised economic mobility through disabled people’s inclusion and participation within the labour market, assured through the standardisation of non-discriminatory labour-market legislation, the question of what types of labour market and the quality or, to use the International Labour Organization’s wording, the “decency” of available jobs has become paramount for disabled people. With the ongoing retraction of the welfare state, disabled people are increasingly asked to give up their right to economic security and justice via state systems of welfare so that they can be employed in low-wage, precarious jobs and are churned through disciplinary welfare-to-work programming regimes. In turn, this results in the normalisation of the idea of “surplus populations”, those people on the economic fringes who are increasingly found to be disabled people who are no longer considered “disabled” enough to be worthy of state-sanctioned supports and welfare services. Rather than discussing these processes as separate, and unique, spheres of the lived experience of neoliberalism for disabled people, my analytical narrative is presented in a way to illustrate the intertwining, and what often feels as inseparable, relationship between them.