Hunger Strike: The Body as Resource

Abstract

This chapter engages in a creative exploration of how it is that the disabled body is constituted within the British legal system. In examining both the socio-spatial enactment and the socio-spatial implications of the legal constitution of the disabled' body, it unveils the role of state law in its instigating of a politics of othering', and most contentiously, in inadvertently contributing to the recent rise in disability hate crime. The chapter argues, the relationship between the law' and those that it categorises as being disabled' is intensely convoluted. Rather, the overarching aim of the discussion is to advocate the application of a critical and porous mode of thinking that is able to permeate and to thus challenge the pervasive influence of legally bounded ideology. The chapter describes that if the law can dispel the able/disabled categorical dualism that is inherent in its entrenchment and defining of disability', and aspire instead to engage with the continuum of ability.