Pigeon-Hole

MY WIFE HAS just finished an essay questioning whether disability rights activism has resulted in a 'movement'. Needless to say, after she finished I nicked all her books and did some reading of my own. A common opinion, according to some sociologists and academics, is that a disability rights movement has not formed completely because, well, disabled people can't physically form political groups, can they? And even if they did give it a go, they don't have a single agenda like the feminists, black or gay rights groups do because there are too many different types of impairments and needs. But most disabled activists themselves argue that there is a movement going on, an underground movement which focusses on our similar experiences and feelings of discrimination and social exclusion. This movement, they say, has nothing to do with impairments, but everything to do with shared experience. The only people who do not see a movement forming are those who don't share that experience. The reason that the academic or sociological (often able-bodied) world do not see a movement forming is their habit of pigeon-holeing disabled people as politically or physically 'unable'. And there, my friends, lies the inspiration for the above comic...

Disabled people? Pigeons? We aren't so different.