The Thematic Universe of the Disability Rights Movement

Critically reflecting on the disability rights movement requires us to understand Freire’s concept of the “thematic universe.” A thematic universe consists of the dialectical interaction between the themes of an epochal unit, which are “characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values, and challenges” that interplay “with their opposites, striving towards plentitude” (Freire PO ch. 2 par. 34). The disability rights movement is born out of a dialectical interaction between subjectivity and objectivity, wherein individual subjectivity has the capacity to achieve critical consciousness and objectivity is the construction of a collective consciousness--the personal and the societal, respectively. Within this dialectic relationship, ableist objectivity is dominant and thus formative to the subjectivity of people with disabilities. However, we cannot categorize subjectivity/objectivity into a dichotomous relationship (Freire PO ch. 1, par. 22).

They do not exist as binaries, for we cannot have subjectivity without objectivity, nor can we have objectivity without subjectivity. In order for a dialectical production to occur, our existential lived experience and consciousness must be mediated by a social objectivity. Meaning, in order for us to transform the world through our activism, our subjectivity--our voice--must engage with objective reality. A true pedagogy of the oppressed necessarily implies a transformation of both individual subjectivity and collective objectivity (Freire PO ch. 1, par. 28).

Thus, whether the movement from the 1970s-90s or the movement today in 2020, the relying reciprocality between objectivity and subjectivity remains constant and parallels the relationship between limit situations and limit acts, as neither can exist without the other. The existence of structures of oppression (limit situations) ultimately require the oppressed and their allies to carry out tasks (limit acts) which overcome such dehumanization. This contradictory tension is fundamental to the themes of the disability rights movement: the dialectical relationship between the subjectivities of activists and the collective ableist objectivity constitutes the epochal units which generate the thematic universe of the disability rights movement.

Today, ableist objectivity seeks to combat disability activism by ahistoricizing the existence of the disabled body, to prevent the oppressed from “tri-dimensionaliz[ing] time in the past, present, and future, their history, in function with their own creations,” to “develop a constant process of transformation within which epochal units materialize” (Freire PO ch. 2 par. 33). Ableist objectivity, including its oppression of a multitude of identities that intersect with disability, constructs the illusion of a singular reality, a one-dimensionalizing of time. They seek to prevent the disabled subjectivity from becoming critical of objective reality and consequently transforming it. In the instant that the "Subject recognizes himself in the object (the coded concrete existential situation) and recognize[s] the object as a situation in which he finds himself, together with other subjects," the disabled subjectivity will challenge the dominant social reality (Freire PO ch. 3 par. 44). The moment that people with disabilities today as a part of the modern movement recognize their conditions of oppression and identify their part in a collective group experiencing shared injustice (with respect to a critical disabilty studies approach that recognizes every individual's unique experience with intersectionality), ableist ideological authority will be challenged.

Thus, the task of the disabled subjectivity is to “simultaneously create history and become historical-social beings” (Freire PO ch. 2 par. 33). Grounded in the knowledge that we are historical-social beings, our task to overcome structures of oppression created by albeist objectivity is to create our own history, to tri-dimensionalize our own existence and the existence of the group(s) to which we belong in order to fulfill our ontological vocation of becoming more fully human, more critical, and thus transformative. This goal constitutes the essence of the disability rights movement’s thematic universe, therefore calling us to be critical thematic investigators in order to decode the essence of our limit-situations (see, for example, the discussion of myth in "The Disabled Body" page). In doing so, we recognize ourselves as Subjects, rather than objects, and thus intervene in reality to obtain a historical awareness of our conditions of oppression. Ultimately, this awareness and critical reflection leads us to true praxis.