The Politics of Ableism:Investigating Ableist-intersections in Disabled People’s Lives Through Internalised Processes of Discrimination

When young men diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome (TS) perform adolescence they do it in figurations of “adults”, “dis/adults” and “disadults”, intersecting social categories of disability, gender, and age differently but embedded in contours of ableism. The article is looking into the doing of the relation between the social categories, the outcome of this doing and how this doing results in troubled or untroubled subject positions. If you manage to keep up appearances and pass as normal you can perform ableist-masculinity as the doing of Mr. Right Masculinity – as Man. If you fail to perform ableist-masculinity you become marked as dis/Man through understandings of dis/adulthood and becomings of the dis/human. Transgressing the forward slash becomes possible through imagistic becomings of the disadult through disclosing TS in an inclusive environment were dishumanity makes room for the becoming of the disman—not disMan because “Man” is an ableist assumption debunked by the notion of dishumanity. Coming of age as a young man with TS intersects with both gender and disability through ableist formations of gendered disability and disabled gendering. Ableist-intersections of social categories becomes a way to approach social figurations in general, which can be translated into different institutional arenas, i.e. educational arrangements, adding further social categories to the doing of ableist-intersections. Departing from social figurations broaden the scope of investigating ableist-intersections in disabled people’s lives to disclose the social workings of becoming through the construction of un/troubled subject positions. The article presents ableist-intersections through poetic representations of young men’s lived experiences with TS.