Journal of Literary Disability, Vol. 1, No.

2, 2007

Taking It to the Bank: Independence

and Inclusion on the World Market
Robert McRuer1

The essay examines contemporary uses of ‘independence’ and ‘inclusion’ within and around the disability
rights movement. The concepts are often positioned as self-evidently positive or as the obvious goals
towards which disability and other movements should be striving. Through an examination of the World
Bank’s appropriation of these concepts, and of the social model of disability more generally, the essay
argues for always understanding the concepts structuring the disability movement, including seemingly-
sacrosanct concepts such as independence, as historical and contingent. The essay considers both how
World Bank rhetorics of independence and inclusion mask the deeper dependencies generated by global
capitalism and how, in a different context, dependency theory in disability studies provides us with limited
but crucial tools for critiquing those rhetorics.

In March 2007, a unit dependent upon but not reducible to the World Bank published Social
Analysis and Disability: A Guidance Note. Part of a larger series devoted to consideration of the
ways in which critical analysis of social and cultural issues might positively influence Bank
operations, the Guidance Note on disability, running almost 90 pages, first attempts to explain
what a social analysis of disability might be and then details how that analysis could function as
an integral part of World Bank operations and projects. Although the “publication was
developed and produced by the Social Development Family of the World Bank, which is found
in the Sustainable Development Network,” the World Bank inner circle, in the front matter to
the document, claims autonomy and independence in relation to it, insisting that the “findings,
interpretations, judgments, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s)
and should not be attributed to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations, or to members of
the Board of Executive Directors or the governments they represent.” Although the subtitle to
the document is “Incorporating Disability-Inclusive Development into Bank-Supported
Projects,” the acknowledgements similarly position the project in the orbit of the World Bank
without compromising the Bank’s autonomy: “The Social Analysis and Disabilities Guidelines
2
Note is a product of a team of colleagues and consultants inside and outside of the Bank” (iii).
Despite their subordination to the actual World Bank (an ironic relationship of
dependency to which I will return later), this team of colleagues and consultants not exactly
identifiable as the Bank but nonetheless identified by it (for the purpose of generating Social
Analysis and Disability), and explicitly seeking to advise it, is worth taking seriously. I am
especially interested in this essay in how Social Analysis and Disability appropriates and
reproduces what Raymond Williams might term ‘vocabularies’ of independence and inclusion
developed within the disability rights movement. The terms independence and inclusion have
generally worked together within the movement, with declarations of disability independence
positioned as necessary for full inclusion within society or as simply part of full inclusion within
societies understood to place a high value upon independence. This essay attends to some of the
ways in which those vocabularies travel, specifically analyzing what happens when “colleagues
and consultants” take them to the Bank. Attending to how those vocabularies travel, I link their
problematic use in relation to disability to their use, by the World Bank or its affiliates, in
relation to other movements, women’s movements in particular. Although independence and
inclusion in these other contexts are not always or immediately legible as connected to disability
or disabled people per se, I intend in this essay to affirm the broad scope of concerns that can
and should be encompassed by disability studies and to insist that a critical attention to the

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shifting vocabularies of contemporary political economy (or, put differently, to the cultural
logics of neoliberalism) should be indispensable for the field.
Vocabularies, as Williams describes them, are “particular formations of meaning” that
provide “ways not only of discussing but at another level of seeing many of our central
experiences” (15). Independence and inclusion have been so measurably successful as disability
keywords—helping to secure access to a wider range of housing options (indeed, founding an
entire housing movement based on independent living); providing leverage for the elimination
of discrimination in education, employment, voting rights; locating disabled people within
public spaces and public cultures—that it is easy to forget that they are in fact part of larger
vocabularies, which for Williams are always situated within “structures of particular social
orders and the processes of social and historical change” (22). Forgetting that independence
and inclusion are part of larger, fully historical vocabularies is facilitated by how readily the
keywords—again, because of the successes they have effected—can be situated, in a way, at the
end of disability history. If, in other words, medical models most prominently, but also varied
and at times competing models of eugenics, charity, pity, dependency, and freakery are
undeniably part of disability’s history, then independence and inclusion—and the minority
model that often holds those concepts precious if not self-evident—can be deployed to mark a
3
necessary and liberatory end to that history. Claiming independence secures a space for looking
back on, bearing witness to, the more sordid histories we have survived.
I argue in this essay, however, that the consultants responsible for Social Analysis and
Disability make it possible to again comprehend independence and inclusion as part of ongoing
historical vocabularies. As such, they are always contingent and can never simply reflect, from a
position outside of processes of social and historical change, the natural culmination of a
narrative of disability oppression and liberation. I argue further that vocabularies of
independence and inclusion are risky, although by risky I mean that they are multivalent and
that the work they perform is not fully predictable, not that they should be avoided or that they
are unnecessary. Indeed, we must risk using them, to adapt Williams, as ways of perceiving and
comprehending many of our central disability experiences. But, following Jacques Derrida—
who himself claimed solidarity, whenever necessary, with those who are “threatened,
marginalized, minoritized, [and] delegitimated”—I insist that the social and cultural model of
disability showing up in advice to the World Bank makes clear that “the risk must be reevaluated
at every moment, in shifting contexts giving rise to exchanges that are in each case original”
(Derrida and Roudinesco 22).
Social Analysis and Disability, the front matter additionally tells us, is “circulated to
4
encourage discussion and comment within the development community.” I expect that I would
be an outcast from “the development community” as comprehended by the World Bank and I
thus do not expect that my particular discussion questions and commentary will be appended to
the document anytime soon. However, taking the call for discussion, comment, and circulation
seriously, after spotlighting the section of the document where vocabularies of independence
and inclusion are most evident, I do provide some questions to frame the remainder of my
critique. I then return to Williams and other more contemporary cultural studies scholars to
introduce ways in which these keywords have functioned in relation to neoliberal
understandings of development. I note, in the process, how insufficient independence and
inclusion are for countering the “dependent development” (Parker 101) the World Bank
sustains or the proliferating dependencies it and other global economic bodies generate. Finally,
I offer some brief reflections on how dependency theory, as it has germinated in close relation to
feminist disability studies, helps us resist the end of disability history.
Dependency theory, as feminist theorists such as Eva Feder Kittay and others have
developed it, concerns itself with arenas of life where human dependence on others is
unavoidable or even inevitable—as a body of theory, it attends, in other words, to some of the
human relationships that have in many ways been most difficult for disability studies or the
disability movement to theorize, given the degree to which independence or even
interdependence (which still presumes, to a certain extent, two autonomous subjects) have been
valorized. As such, the ‘dependency’ most discussed in and around dependency theory is

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arguably far removed from the ‘dependency’ analyzed by critics of global capitalism (that is, the
dependency of nations, economies, peoples that has been generated by uneven and inequitable
development). Through my linkage of the two very different meanings of dependency, however,
I ultimately want to both affirm and redeploy in the service of an anticapitalist analysis the ways
in which dependency theory has usefully historicized—thereby opening up for critique—notions
of independence and inclusion.
Social Analysis and Disability’s Annex (or Appendix) 4, “Comparison of Medical/Charity
and Social/Cultural Models of Disability” (74), could not be more transparent in its description
of different models, so I quote it here at length. The sentiments spelled out for readers in Annex
4 saturate the body of the document; indeed, one could say that Annex 4 functions as a cheat
sheet for Social Analysis and Disability as a whole, both in the sense of a one-page summary
enabling quick understanding of the larger text and in Gayatri Spivak’s famous use of ‘cheat’ in
what she called a clear and ‘monosyllabic’ sentence: “We know plain prose cheats” (qtd. in
5
Danius and Jonnson 33, italics in the original).
Like a pictorial advertisement for before-and-after cosmetic surgery, Annex 4 gives us, on
the left side of the page, the “medical model,” and then, on the right side of the page, the clearly
preferred “social/cultural model.” The “Medical/Charity Model,” the authors explain, includes
the following “assumptions” and “consequences”:

Assumption
• People with disabilities are the problem
• People with disabilities are “sick” and need to be cured by doctors
• People with disabilities will always be dependent on others [. . .]

Consequences
• [. . .] Violation of the autonomy of people with disabilities, with medical
professionals and others acting as the primary decision makers
• People with disabilities may become passive recipients of charity and treatment,
rather than active claimants of human rights [. . .]
• People with disabilities may become permanently dependent on others and
marginalized from society so that they do not fully enjoy their human rights (74)

The “Social/Cultural Model,” in marked contrast, and even employing in the first bulleted
point the all capital letters that have colloquially (in cyber space) come to connote typeface that
equates with ‘shouting,’ insists:

Assumption
• People with disabilities are NOT the problem
• Barriers created by society are the problem [. . .]
• If barriers are removed, people with disabilities are fully capable of leading
independent lives, participating and being fully included in society [. . .]

Consequences
• [. . .] Respect for the autonomy of people with disabilities
• People with disabilities become active claimants of their human rights
• People with disabilities become empowered as full participants in society and
members of their communities (74)

Annex 4 is somewhat stunning to me in its reproduction of recognizable, liberatory

disability rhetoric. Indeed, it is not impossible to imagine a page like this functioning as a class
handout at The George Washington University, where I teach—a class handout, let’s say, for
something like “Disability Studies 101.” What does it mean, then, when the exact same handout
is passed around three blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue, at the World Bank? Are the terms

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marginalization, dependency, and exclusion and autonomy, independence, and inclusion

working in the same way in the two locations? Can ‘independence’ and ‘inclusion,’ in particular,
actually mask, and thereby paradoxically entrench, deeper relations of dependency? Should the
disability activist slogan that is now in use around the globe—“Nothing About Us Without
Us”—make its way into the World Bank? Is that slogan best understood, then, and in all
locations, as an integrative slogan, procuring the proverbial place at the table? Or does it work
differently (and better) in a litany of turn-of-the-century slogans that instead refuse integration
into the current order of things: “Another World Is Possible,” “More World, Less Bank,” “¡Ya
6
Basta!”?
I will not in this short essay answer these questions thoroughly, but reflecting on them
requires consideration of how independence and inclusion might serve current paradigms of
development. According to Williams, “The most interesting modern usage of a group of words
centred on development relates to certain ideas of the nature of economic change” (102-03,
bold in original). Development, especially since World War II, has come to connote seemingly-
natural ‘stages of development’ in a capitalist progress narrative, with ‘developed,’
‘underdeveloped,’ and ‘developing’ societies positioned at various points along a world market
spectrum. Development banks or agencies have been major players both in securing these
meanings for development and in making them seem self-evident. Under late-twentieth-century
and early-twenty-first century neoliberal economic paradigms, the development narrative (as
innumerable activists and scholars have pointed out) has been increasingly wedded to
deregulation of national and international barriers to free trade and the global flow of capital, to
cut-backs in social services and spending, and—in turn—to privatization of those services. From
the late 1970s on, deregulation and privatization buttressed the ‘trickle down’ approach—the
approach that implied (sometimes explicitly, as in Ronald Reagan’s use of the phrase) that
benefits at the top (say, in ‘developed’ nations or among the wealthy) would eventually trickle
down to the bottom. What the World Bank formerly called structural adjustment policies tied
‘development aid’ to these principles. By the end of the century, these programs had been
renamed “Poverty Reducing Programs” or “Poverty Reduction Programs” (PRPs), but as
André Frankovits makes clear, even if “the ‘trickle down’ approach is no longer active in
popular parlance . . . it still infects current development paradigms” (80). In his reworking or
updating of Williams’s history of development, Frankovits suggests that neoliberal development
paradigms, still tied to a trickle down theory, have been readily embraced by the national
bourgeoisie in various locations targeted for structural adjustment or poverty reduction, but not
by others in those locations, and certainly not by those most negatively impacted by such
policies. There has, thus, increasingly been a need for development agencies to “come up with a
series of approaches designed to garner popular support both in their own and in the recipient
countries” (81).
Independence and inclusion, I argue, are flexible terms particularly well-suited to meet
this development need. They are, moreover, meeting that need quite directly in Social Analysis
and Disability. Disabled people, in this particular World Bank document, become the ‘women in
development’ of the turn of the century. By this I mean neither that the document is not very
centrally focused on both disabled women and disabled men (on the contrary, gender is never
simply assumed or avoided but is rather named and discussed directly throughout), nor do I
mean that ‘disabled people in development’ has supplanted ‘women in development’ as a sign
circulating throughout the development community and international development agencies.
Instead, I mean that an understanding of women in development, for the World Bank, has
proven to be so useful ideologically that its spin-offs are being product tested for the world
market.
What has been useful ideologically has not, as Frankovits argues, had much “subsequent
demonstrable effect”; “women in development”—along with “sustainable development,”
“equitable development,” “human development,” and “social development”—might garner
some popular support but neither this sign nor the others has stemmed the upward
redistribution of wealth that neoliberalism in practice allows for (81). Indeed, it has instead,
largely, facilitated that redistribution of wealth upwards. An incredible array of politicized

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women’s movements globally has been fiercely critical of both liberal and neoliberal
development. That criticism is strategically answered by ‘women in development’; that is,
‘independent’ women in development, women ‘included’ in development initiatives. According
to Suzanne Bergeron, the World Bank “is attempting to depoliticize the concerns raised by
women’s social movements (among others) by positioning them as clients of developments and
objects of expert administration” (164). Disabled people, in Social Analysis and Disability and
other development documents, are likewise positioned as clients of development and objects of
expert administration even as—and this is a key difference—the “expert administration” of
disability history is actually disclaimed in and by the document, or positioned properly in the
past. In other words, the paradigmatic place of independence and inclusion in the disability
movement—the terms have a dominance that currently far surpasses their more limited or more
contested use in women’s movements—allows the sign ‘disabled people in development’ to
function all the more efficiently and insidiously.
Although (as she demonstrates) it began much earlier than this, Bergeron locates a clear
attempt at the depoliticization of women’s social movements in a well-known 1997 speech of
former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, “The Challenge of Inclusion.” It is ironic
that the World Bank places the colleagues and consultants crafting a social understanding of
disability in a relationship of dependency to the supposed independent operations of the Bank,
vociferously disavowing any direct connection to the mere written ‘notes’ toward inclusion
published in Social Analysis and Disability. It cannot, after all, so easily disavow the spoken
words of its president, authoritatively presented on September 23, 1997, in the World Bank’s
Annual Meetings Address. The desire to protect itself from the dangerous effects of writing
notwithstanding, much of what gets repeated in Social Analysis and Disability was already
inscribed in the official, independent voice of the Bank. “The time . . . has come to get back to
the dream,” Wolfensohn says. “The dream of inclusive development.” Having learned that
“people are the same wherever they are,” Wolfensohn turns this hard-won lesson into an
epiphany: “I realized that this is what the challenge of development is all about—inclusion.
Bringing people into society who have never been part of it before. This is why the World Bank
Group exists. This is why we are all here today. To help make it happen for people.” Like the
1980s LiveAid song—we are the world, we are the children—Wolfensohn puts forward a happy
humanism that would seemingly exclude no one.
For Bergeron, however, what is telling about this speech is not so much that it gives us
more of the same; although it “is often hailed as a turning point by Bank officials,” she points
out quickly that it did not “launch a new initiative so much as reflect and further institutionalize
trends that were already in place” (157). Instead, Bergeron is interested in how women are
located in the speech and in how the location of women secures consent for Bank-supported
projects. Wolfensohn frames the speech with a verbal snapshot of women living in the favelas of
Rio de Janeiro; at the beginning of his speech, going from “one makeshift home to the next,
talking with the women who live there and who used to carry water on their shoulders from the
bottom of the hillside to their dwellings at the top,” Wolfensohn simply stands in awe of them.
Because of a water sanitation project supported by the Bank, they “proudly showed . . . their
running water and flushed their toilets and told . . . how the project had transformed their lives.”
Wolfensohn does not specify the neoliberal conditions imposed upon Brazil in relation to this
particular project, preferring to focus on “stakeholders”—that is, in World Bank parlance later
spelled out in Social Analysis and Disability, “all those who have a stake or a specific interest in
the outcomes of a project or program. . . . [those who] may actively support the project, as they
perceive benefits to themselves or to their community” (35). Focusing, then, not on the mere
trickle expected from neoliberal interventions, but on flows, on gendered stakeholders running
water and flushing toilets, allows Wolfensohn to use those stakeholders figurally at the end of his
speech, where he turns again to the favelas of Rio and sees “in the faces of the women there”
faces he recognizes from India, China, and Uganda. “The look in these people’s eyes,”
Wolfensohn says, “is not a look of hopelessness. It’s a look of pride, of self-esteem, of inclusion.
These are people who have a sense of themselves.”

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Bergeron fairly easily critiques “The Challenge of Inclusion,” arguing in a particularly

incisive reading of microcredit initiatives that the story of “empowering, people-centered
development alternative[s] offers a justification for the Bank to withdraw its support for other
kinds of economic aid programs, particularly those that are focused on social protections for the
poor” (167). Bergeron sustains some optimism that feminist rhetorics or rhetors in the orbit of
the Bank might generate unexpected alternatives or agendas. She sees little cause for celebration
in relation to Bank operations themselves but wonders whether the Bank’s flirtation with social
analysis might materialize critics who “recognize and seize the opportunities for challenging the
neoliberal and colonial logic of the World Bank opened by its recent social turn” (169). My own
analysis both (cautiously) concurs with Bergeron in the sense that indeed such criticism is now
possible because of the social turn (her article as well as my own attest to that) and qualifies or
reinflects Bergeron in the sense that I am interested in what the incorporation of disability
vocabularies into Bank initiatives might suggest about the current limits of those vocabularies.
With Brazil in particular, indeed, it is easy to demonstrate, as Bergeron does with her
analysis of microcredit initiatives, that the celebration of a few apparent successes covers over
more sustained failures. One cannot bank on the self-esteem legible in the individual,
independent Brazilian faces Wolfensohn rhetorically positions as turning towards him given the
history of what Richard Parker terms “dependent development” in Brazil. To call back Spivak,
who has herself critiqued ‘women in development’ and microcredit initiatives, we know plain
prose cheats. Playing the independence card in a location already deeply dependent on
international financial institutions and made more so by Bank-supported projects is equivalent
to cheating. In plain prose, with clearly-understood words serving as the factors, Wolfensohn
gives us an equation that does not add up, essentially claiming that ‘women’ plus ‘flush’ plus
‘toilet’ equals ‘inclusion’ and ‘self-esteem.’
Parker’s multi-faceted story of dependent development in Brazil carefully traces more than
a century of imperialism, dictatorship, and global subordination in relation to Portugal, the
United Kingdom, and the United States. Late-twentieth-century cultural and economic
processes in Brazil, however, overseen by the global development community, have most deeply
entrenched dependency. Parker’s own analysis of these trends and their connection to cultural
identities (especially, for him, gay or queer subjectivities) is indispensable, but in the context of
Wolfensohn’s plain prose, I find the comments of one of Parker’s interview subjects particularly
compelling. Vitor (the pseudonym Parker uses) is a twenty-six-year-old student in Rio, from a
lower middle class background (Parker 237). Vitor says:

These days, everything seems to be motivated by neoliberalismo—in politics, society,

economy, everything. . . . At some kind of higher level, I think that this is supposed
to mean the integration of Brazil into the global system. . . . But more locally, it
means the privatization of estatais [state-owned industries], the reduction of
government spending, cutbacks in social programs such as health and education. . . .
Neoliberal reforms have been taking apart whatever was left of the social welfare
system. The militares had started the process, of course, but the civilian governments
that followed have continued the process. It is the price you pay to make accords
with the FMI [the International Monetary Fund] and reschedule the debt: you can
have a civilian government, but only so long as they agree to implement policies that
will make the world safe for capitalism. So the rich get richer and the poor get
poorer. It is just what happens. Brazil has always been one of the most unjust
7
societies on earth, but it just keeps getting worse. (qtd. in Parker 114-15)

Vitor is actually, to adapt Wolfensohn, rather clearly someone who has a sense of himself.
It is a materialist sense of self that recognizes that declarations of independence do not function
outside of history and can thus be used in the service of capital and existing relations of
production and, more specifically, that global relations of production subordinate Brazil and
widen the gap between rich and poor, both intra- and internationally. It is a sense of self that in
some ways cannot be called independent, not simply because Vitor’s insights are in excess of his

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individuality (emerging from collective critiques of neoliberalism in and out of Brazil), but
because he demonstrates an awareness of the contingency of ‘independence.’
I emphasize, again, that I am not arguing that the disability rights movement should no
longer risk using ‘independence’ and ‘inclusion’ simply because they can also be used, in Vitor’s
words, to make the world safe for capitalism and to mask the neoliberal consolidation of
dependency and exclusion. I am arguing instead for always understanding those keywords as
rhetorical, not sacrosanct: the work they do is neither sufficient—bringing the disability
movement to a satisfying endpoint or to a goal we all agree on—nor guaranteed—deployed
always and everywhere in ways that are fundamentally good for disabled people or other
marginalized groups. The cultural and rhetorical work of those keywords, like all rhetorical
work, is always risky. Sometimes we should take that risk and sometimes we should reevaluate it.
Dependency theorists, as their work has developed in proximity to feminist disability
theory, have not necessarily said this explicitly. By offering an alternative to the disability
movement’s sometimes-rigid emphasis on independence, however—an alternative that still
values some uses of the concept and thus need not, importantly, provide a satisfying endpoint
‘beyond independence’—dependency theory has at least provided a space for reflection on the
limits of independence, and in that space has imagined or even materialized other ways of being
and relating. Like Vitor reflecting on neoliberalism and Brazil, dependency theory essentially
brackets independence and inclusion in such a way that they can be questioned and historicized.
In the process, dependency theory, paradoxically, materializes independence and inclusion, not
in the sense of bringing them into being but rather of attending to how human beings have
hitherto brought them into being, and with what consequences. Kittay argues quite directly, for
instance, “It is a source of great inspiration and insight in the disability community that
independent living, as well as inclusion within one’s community, should be the goal of education
and habilitation of the disabled. But this ideal can also be a source of great disempowerment if
applied with too harsh a brush” (171). Kittay goes on to theorize both how the exploitation and
exclusion of dependency workers might function in relation to disability independence and how
ideals of inclusion cannot sufficiently value the lives and pleasures of, or attend adequately to the
needs of, those who are and will always be dependent.
In a way, one could say that independence and inclusion matter more in dependency
theory, since when those concepts (or any concepts, including minority identity, or liberation, or
access) are kept sacrosanct in the broader disability movement, they are dematerialized; that is,
removed from the productive social relations that generated them. This is not to deny that
dependency theory, even as it directly critiques classical liberalism, has thus far largely been a
8
liberal project. It is, however, to value dependency theory as one site where independence and
inclusion matter and to push it beyond liberalism by mapping its relationship to other such
sites—in particular, its potential relation to more radical critiques of neoliberal capitalism. If
another world is possible, we cannot bank on independence, or inclusion, or the end of disability
9
history. Instead, we can continue to generate a range of disability histories, a range of disability
vocabularies, circulating them freely to encourage discussion and comment within the disability
community, but also remaining vigilant about how they travel and what their limits might be.

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Notes
1
Dr. Robert McRuer, Department of English, George Washington University.
2
The acknowledgments to the document list a range of individuals and agencies involved in the project,
identifying the team leaders as Kathleen Kuehnast and Estanislao Gacitua-Mario (iii). The
rhetorical distancing in the front matter appears to be pro forma in documents such as this one,
allowing the World Bank to use any and all material generated by the team it has convened to
produce the document while simultaneously protecting the Bank in at least two ways: no necessary
action from the Bank should be expected and no charges against the Bank can be made based solely
on the words of Social Analysis and Disability (or similar documents). As I suggest later, however,
even as my very specific critique in this essay is of a document solely ‘in the orbit of’ the World
Bank, the general ethos of the document is echoed in (or prefigured by) more official Bank
statements.
3
Although I would claim that these earlier models are in many locations residual, I also recognize that in
many locations they are still quite strong (for Williams, a residual model may have been formed in
another era, but can nonetheless continue to influence the contemporary era significantly, even as
other models have emerged or become dominant). As will become clear, additionally, I am making
no claim that independence or inclusion (or the minority model) are somehow necessarily or
essentially bad. For a critical consideration of the supposedly ‘post-Marxist,’ liberal end of history
narrative most associated with Frances Fukuyama, see Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State
of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (esp. 14-15, 56-70).
4
It is partly with this phrase that I would claim a larger relevance for this project; although my specific
object of critique is a World Bank document, I would argue that notions of independence and
inclusion have been taken up by many other players in “the development community” including,
for instance, European Union investors in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In other
words, even if direct World Bank influence has waned (or has been supplanted) in a given location,
the identity trouble I am tracing in relation to disability independence and global capital can be
nonetheless operative.
5
In this interview, Spivak is reflecting on the oft-repeated criticism that her work is too difficult, and
laughingly offers these thoughts on ‘plainness’ to complicate the notion that clarity or transparency
are somehow inherently better. For a related argument within feminist postcolonial theory, consider
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature
in language, namely, its instrumentality. . . . Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of
official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together
they flower, vertically, to impose an order” (16-17). The clarity of the Guidance Note on disability,
I suggest throughout this essay, masks its neoliberal instrumentality, its subjection of disabled
people, and its unidirectional and univocal order.
6
“Another World Is Possible” is the slogan most associated with the annual World Social Forum, which
began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. The World Social Forum consists of groups in civil society
seeking alternatives to multinational corporate capitalism and to imperialism. “More World, Less
Bank” has been shouted in innumerable street protests against the World Bank, including during
the most significant disruption of their annual meetings in Washington, on April 16, 2000. ¡Ya
Basta!—loosely, “enough already!”—has been used throughout Latin America as a sign of
resistance, in the global south, to the economic and political domination of the north and of
international financial organizations. The Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, are perhaps most directly
associated with the cry “¡Ya Basta!” but it has nonetheless circulated freely among those opposed to
neoliberalism.
7
Although Vitor’s statement was made in the decade before the election of Worker’s Party leader Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) in 2002, there is at this point widespread agreement among the
Brazilian left that Lula’s administration has continued if not tightened Brazil’s allegiance to
neoliberal models (Lula pledged shortly after the elections to sustain the financial commitments of
the previous administration). For a good analysis placing this critique in the larger history of Brazil,

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see Emir Sader’s “Taking Lula’s Measure.”

8
Of course, both Kittay and, more recently, Martha C. Nussbaum, have been sharply critical of classical
liberalism, in particular of perceived shortcomings in the work of preeminent liberal theorist John
C. Rawls. However, even though Nussbaum at times calls some of her analysis “Marxian” (278), it
seems to me to put forward a (necessary but limited) liberal critique of “global inequality” rather
than a critique of global capitalism—calling, for instance, on multinational corporations and the
“main structures of the global economic order” (including the World Bank and the IMF) to be
“fair” (319).
9
I approach these questions from a slightly different, but related, perspective in “Specters of Disability,”
the epilogue to Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (199-208). I argue there for
what I call the “disability to come” and for the necessity of accessing other worlds and futures,
partly through a rigorous commitment to “always understand disability otherwise” (208). The
imperative to understand disability otherwise, which is not intended as a simple call for
interdependency, might be situated productively here within my own critique of disability
independence in this essay, as well as within this volume’s commitment to theorizing what the
editors have termed “the dialectic of dependency.” A dialectical analysis requires us to rework what
we think we know as the contradictions within that epistemological field become more urgent; I
contend that, in relation to what we know about disability, both dependency theory and critiques of
neoliberal globalization have made those contradictions more apparent and that more work remains
to be done linking these two bodies of thought.

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