Dispossessing disability: Life lessons from a precarious life

In this paper, we aim to investigate the relationship between precarity and disability by offering an intimate and embodied account of precarity as experienced by one of the authors, who received a kidney transplant and experienced over thirty years of living with a chronic illness. We propose an understanding of this relationship which goes beyond the polarized reading of precarious work characterizing the current debate about this topic, which tends to define precarity as a material or existential condition. Building on the Butlerian notion of dispossession, we propose encompassing the experience of living precarious lives by exploring how precariousness (as an existential and ontological condition of being dispossessed) and precarity (as an economic and politically induced state of becoming dispossessed) intertwine in complex ways in the case of individuals with disability. Whilst several papers have investigated disability vis-à-vis precarious work, more investigation is needed into how individuals with disability become dispossessed as a result of the operating of both work-related and health-care related norms and how they resist and resignify these norms. Keywords: precarity, disability, Butler, dispossession, work.