From the healthy position, illness (and old age) can be approached through such politically correct euphemisms as “loving differently” or “differently abled,” terms which have gradually been replaced by “possessing alternative motor and sensory skills”. Illness and aging can also easily be ignored, since the lack of representation or plain invisibility removes the risk of confrontation, allowing the public to remain unaware of the existence of certain postulates or claims.
Within the context of neo-Marxist movements, Judith Butler wrote in Merely Cultural (1997) about the practice of reducing queer activism to demands for the recognition of cultural identity alone, divorced from economic concerns. Political activism on behalf of disabled or old bodies cannot be reduced to such demands, for we cannot ignore the problem of access to life-saving/sustaining technologies and services and various types of infrastructure. There is sometimes no way to eradicate or even alleviate physical pain unrelated to aspirations for change in the social sphere. (Are there any forms of political and socials activism that can or should be reduced to the “merely social”?) Thus activism organized around disability – which cannot, after all, be essentialized as a single identity – constitutes an ideal point of departure for a kind of queer thinking that reaches far beyond issues of identity and cultural representation, focusing instead on the broadly understood distribution of “the good life.”