Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper, I dissect the sticky complexity of claiming disability benefits – a bureaucratically ambiguous realm where multiplicities of truth unfold. Drawing upon my fieldwork with disability benefit claimants in the UK, I explore how claimants ‘prepare for’ and ‘perform’ welfare eligibility. 

Paper Abstract:

To be a benefit claimant in the UK is to enter a space comprised of competing narratives; a cacophony of commonsense logics on what a disability claimant ‘should’ be. The benefits process, characterised by rigid biomedical classifications of disability, sits against a wider political landscape which portrays benefit claimants as ‘undeserving scroungers’. Discordantly, claimants’ own lived experiences ‘fit’ within the officialised parameters of disability taxonomies with varying levels of success.

My interlocutors examine these commonsense logics of biomedicalised and moralised deservingness – perceived truths on what disability benefit claimants ‘should’ be - and strategise accordingly. Evocative of Cassandra Hartblay’s ‘disability expertise’ (2020), my research explores how rumour, speculation and performativity are exercised by benefit claimants (and their support networks) in preparation for their benefit assessment(s). Characterised by opacity and scepticism, disability benefit advisors warn claimants to ‘show [benefit assessors] what you’re like on your worst day’. Facial expressions and physical appearance, my interlocutors warn one another, will be narratively reconfigured as able-bodiedness and, therefore, ineligibility. For the many benefit applicants denied welfare eligibility, similar negotiative tensions take place during their tribunal hearing – where testimonies of disablement are picked apart and/or defended. Through rumour, speculation and preparatory practices, my interlocutors ‘do’, or perform, disability.

Overarchingly, my research proposes the following questions: can we disentangle the ontological ‘truth’ of disability? Or rather, extricate these multiple biomedicalised and moralised truths (legitimised through classificatory schemas)? Through rumour, speculation and performativity, how might we reconceive disability as a relational category?