Remapping an Ableist World: Disability and Oppression under Capitalism

Remapping an Ableist World examines the forces shaping our lives in an able capitalist world. It draws on examples including human enhancement and the organ trade to illustrate connections between able capitalist ways of life, impairment, disability, and oppression.

The book addresses ableness as a regime of power and oppression intrinsic to global capitalism and, as such, a system that touches all of our lives, albeit in different ways. Vera Chouinard offers an intersectional analysis of the production of impairment and disability, drawing on autoethnographic and autobiographical methodologies, case studies of disability in the Global South and North, and comparative accounts of processes such as the uneven development of disability law. Inviting readers to rethink the causes and consequences of the ableist capitalist order in which we find ourselves, Remapping an Ableist World reminds us that for our own well-being and that of generations to comes we must forge a less destructive and more nurturing way of life.

Vera Chouinard is a professor emeritus of Earth, environment, and society at McMaster University.