A wheelchair in the Cape Flats (South Africa). Negotiating one's mobility and identity with a locomotor disability

Abstract

As a tool for social participation and inclusion, the wheelchair constitutes an interesting entry point to study the everyday experience of people with physical disabilities. This paper offers to discuss how people learn to use the wheelchairs, how they move with them, and how the chair influences their inclusion. Based on an eighteen-month ethnography in a Coloured township in Cape Town (South Africa), such a reading of the wheelchair calls for a relational and intersectional approach of citizenship. Defined broadly as one's relationship to their body, their environment, their relatives, and the State, citizenship is experienced through a web of social, institutional, and material relationships. This approach ultimately raises issues of inclusion, belonging, and stigmatisation. After presenting the context of the research, I discuss the notions of active citizenship, modern citizenship and the right to the city. The conclusion comes back to the ideas of relational and intersectional citizenship as a way forward for research in disability studies and in South Africa.