Biopolitics of disability determination: Consequences of austere biomedical assessment regimes

Abstract

Social protection policies for disabled people are in crisis, as governments across the world have implemented neoliberal reforms that curtail the scope of support by limiting social safety nets and producing stricter criteria for who counts as disabled. The financial crisis of 2008 in the global north caused governments to enforce austerity measures, which were subsequently exported to the global south (Martins, 2020). These austerity measures have ushered in stringent eligibility standards to limit who should be considered disabled, compounding the precarity of disabled people globally as they are required to undergo intense scrutiny and testing to prove their disability and access necessary support. Determining disability is at the heart of the crises of disability social protection policies. To address these crises, it is critical to understand the biopolitics of disabilitymaking that states rely on to manage their own resources. To this end, this article explores the processes states employ to demarcate the boundaries around the category of disability. Drawing from existing literature as well as my research on disability and social protection in India, I examine the challenges of state-sanctioned disability determination processes, which view disability through the lens of the medical model. States rely on austere assessment regimes to restrict who ‘counts’ as disabled, allowing them to accumulate resources. By governing populations across the lines of capacity and incapacity, these biopolitical processes produce disabled body-minds that can be forced into the labor market (Foucault, 1980). This results in two significant consequences: first, fewer people who need social protections receive them; second, these biopolitical processes actively narrow the category of disability itself. Finally, this article concludes by analyzing potential ways forward for disability researchers and policy-makers.