Expulsions: Disability, Power, Land and Citizen’s Rights

Abstract

This chapter is about evictions, in a double sense. By telling the story of a real eviction affecting one of the polio-houses, Its objective is to shed light on the logic of expulsions, the tendency of late capitalism to conquest and occupy older forms of human and natural life spaces, producing in this way masses of superfluous populations as well as vast stretches of dead land, made unsuitable for living. Disabled beggars and squatters are easy prays for this form of spatialised oppression, against which disability theory offers little protection. In a quest for new theories to be combined with disability theory suitable to respond to the very real challenges faced by the polio-disabled squatters, the concept of the ‘right to the city’ is proposed, which annuls the original antagonism between the abled and disabled bodies, creating space for new alliances without denying the specificity of the disabled experience.