‘They Make Me Feel like I Matter’: An Ethnography of Three Learning-Disability Arts Groups

Learning-disabled adults often remain at the margins of UK society and are assumed to live a life of isolation and marginalisation. Moreover, popular cultural representations of learning-disabled people have been critiqued for trading on deficit configurations of disability. But what possibilities are there for learning-disabled adults and their allies to counter such narratives? In this talk, I discuss the findings of a sociological project focused upon how learning-disabled adults and their allies (i.e. artists; parents) confront dominant oppressive narratives and articulate their lives in more affirmative terms. I carried out ethnographic observations for around 15-months at a theatre company, dance group, and drag troupe, along with conducting 36 interviews with artists involved with these and similar organisations.

Drawing on this data, I sketch out how learning-disabled adults and their allies lament the patronising stereotypes and treatment of disabled people. The three groups subsequently herald theatre, dance, and drag - as art forms - as a vehicle for celebrating learning-disabled adults as creative, talented, disciplined, and resourceful agents. Popular deficit narratives and expectations are ‘cripped’ (Kafer 2013; McRuer 2006) through the presence and celebration of learning-disabled people in public-facing spaces. These spaces work to assert the humanity, contribution, and value of learning-disabled adults, and to build communities of care, solidarity, belonging, and interdependence. Yet, I also unpack how these aims are complicated by, and exist in tension with, the treatment of learning-disabled people both inside and outside of these spaces. Participants identified structural (e.g. welfare, care, housing) and attitudinal barriers, the latter including assumptions and unease concerning the (in)capability, exploitation, and potential abuse of learning-disabled people. Nonetheless, I conclude by sketching out how the arts provide a platform for resisting assumptions of vulnerability, passivity, and isolation, to showcase the creativity, resistance, vigour, and interdependence of learning-disabled adults.