"The Gift of Mobility:" Disability, Queerness, and the Cultural Politics of Rehabilitation

Abstract

This essay examines the complex cultural work performed by the North American disability-focused evangelical group Joni & Friends. We analyze the group's devotional writing; prison-based volunteer work programs refurbishing wheelchairs for disabled people in the global South; missionary trips; and global acts of solidarity with evangelical activists. We argue that the group's international practices reflect and circulate a progressive, post–Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) understanding of disability as culturally valued. However, in so doing, Joni & Friends enacts a neoliberal double standard whereby some subjects are rehabilitated for incorporation and inclusion even as others—particularly queer others—are made more abject in and through that incorporation and inclusion. Building on transnational queer and disability studies scholarship, we illuminate how Joni & Friends materializes a new and expansive discursive mobility for disability in the age of neoliberalism, and we attend to the promise and the dangers of this new mobility.