Bodies in Resistance: ADAPT, the AHCA protests, and the Rhetoric of Rights

• In Event: Pitied but Ignored? Discrimination Toward Disabled People in Politics and Policy

Abstract

On June 22, 2017, 82 disabled activists with the group ADAPT staged a die-in outside then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office to protest the most recent draft of the Senate’s bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Proposing dramatic cuts to Medicaid, the bill would also repeal the individual and employer mandates, reduce access to birth control, and limit protections for individuals with pre-existing conditions. Chanting “No cuts to Medicaid—save our liberty!” protesters were pictured being dragged from their wheelchairs and bodily carried from the building by Capitol Police. In all, 43 arrests were made, with many new outlets and commentators expressing alarm at the violence of the arrests. This paper returns to this moment to consider the tactics employed by the protestors, specifically the participants’ strategic enactment of bodily vulnerability and disability. Employing what Kevin DeLuca refers to as a “body rhetoric,” by which bodies—in this case disabled bodies—become “the site and substance” of political argument, I show how ADAPT protesters knowingly played on public perceptions of disabled people as the proper objects of compassion and care. Where prior analysis of disability rights has tended to view the extension of rights as an evolution away from charity, this paper reveals its persistence in arguments for disability rights.

Author

• Ann Kathleen Heffernan, University of Michigan