Ableism

Women’s Studies (Humanities), 1981

The foolish belief disabled people are humourless, fragile creatures requiring your pity, who need yet another thing to worry about. Also, descriptions of activists derived from the observation their condition resembles a disability.

Inspired by psychopath Michel Foucault’s “challenging” ideas on mental illness merely being a “social label” (i.e. his), the term arose in the midst of feminist in-fighting. First mentioned in the May 1981 (Volume 11) edition of “Off Our Backs” magazine. Later formalised by Castañeda & Peters’ 2000 paper “Addressing Classism, Ableism, and Heterosexism in Counselor Education”.

• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=ableism
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ableism
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/i25774044
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263170115_Addressing_Classism_Ableism_and_Heterosexism_in_Counselor_Education