Paper short abstract:

This paper examines strategies of identification and self-organization of disabled people living precarious lives in Sierra Leone. It explores the political possibilities and limitations of strategic essentialism and the theoretical potential inherent in the concept of "class intersectionality".

Paper long abstract:

Between 2008 and 2015 I studied a group of disabled people living in extremely precarious conditions in the heart of Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital. Abandoned by public policy, they organize themselves in autonomous self-managed collectives, maintaining porous boundaries with the non-disabled world. The same people, often stereotyped as "disabled beggars", became an important collective political force as members of officially recognized disabled people's organizations where disability is not only the organizing principle but the necessary condition of belonging. In a book published early this year I described and analyzed the tension between these two dimensions of their existence.

In the present paper, I propose to revisit some arguments of the book and discuss the possible larger political implications of disabled people's self-organization based on these two modalities, which I identify as strategic biosociality (Rose:2008, Rabinow: 1996), on the one hand, and strategic essentialism, on the other. While strategic biosociality organizes social relations around a particular biological condition, it does not create exclusive, homogenous groups. In contrast, the strategic essentialism of the official disability movement emphasizes ideas of self-sameness, homogeneity, fixed boundaries and invariability. The theoretical question which I wish to address here concerns the potential of this hybrid form of organization to develop toward what Hardt and Negri (2019) call a "multitudinous class", a new form of class based on shared experiences of subordination able to accommodate the variegated struggles of distinct identity groups.