Catherine Hale

In my introduction to this series I talked about how chronic illness feels relegated to the outer fringes of the established disability rights movement. We (who sometimes call ourselves "spoonies") tend to locate our disadvantage and exclusion more in our malfunctioning bodies, than in society's failure to accommodate us. As a result we sometimes overlook and fail to address the discrimination and the hostile attitudes that disable us still further. And we get dismissed as unemancipated, or worse, as traitors to the cause, by veterans of the DR movement who may fail to understand the lived experience of an impairment very different to their own. So this is an attempt to redraw the map of disability, or rather of impairment, so that the experience of chronic illness is less peripheral. The idea is this: all forms of disability/impairment* can be located along two axes: Well to Ill, and Visible to Invisible. I realise how challenging it is to attempt to place cond