May 68 and the social model of disability: notes on protagonism and social activism

Abstract

The present theoretical study outlines the influence that the demonstrations of May 1968 had on the formation of social movements, among them, people with disabilities, by demarcating the expansion of the field of the possible and the radical criticism of institutionalization processes. Along these lines, it analyzes the origin and development of the social model of disability, understanding it as a product of social exclusion, which engenders disconcerting political implications with regard to the formatting of public policies for disability. Finally, it marks the emergence of associations of people with disabilities in Brazil as an important driver of changes in legal frameworks in society through the process of political struggle. A struggle that involves the modification of existing infrastructures, but also the reinvention of the grammar of customs erected by modernity that framed the difference in disability as abnormality, deviation and impairment. Revolutionizing these two dimensions are the mainstay of the movements of people with disabilities, aiming at a radical criticism of any form of segregationist and aristocratic thinking, of any speaking for or in the place of the other. It is a new anthropology consolidated in the concepts of recognition, redistribution and representativeness. Nothing about us without us.