Who's disabled, babe? : carving out a good life among the normal and everyday

Helen (first author), whose individual and collective subjectivity is the subject/object of this chapter, begins to coalesce understandings of disability activists' desire to live an ordinary life, a good life, a normal life, and how these desires are entangled and enacted in the everyday. As a long-standing self-described disability feminist activist, Helen's life history and engaged everyday practice begins to open up the political imagination which combines the personal of disability with the disabled political identity. It is an individualised account, but it is an individualised account which reveals the intensity of internal negotiations of the everyday self emerging with the struggles of being in the world; individual desire is coupled with collective change, self-realisation demands structural change, sexual intimacy and expression challenges heteronormative assumptions, and moments of isolation are entrusted to long-standing friendships.