Teodor Mladenov
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Independent Living and the state
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Chapter 3 explores the relationships between Independent Living and the welfare dimension of the state. These relationships are conceptualised in terms of a critique of professional power deployed in conjunction with a defence of public support (decommodification) and affirmation of interdependence. In turn, professional power is approached in terms of biopower (drawing on Michel Foucault’s critical theory), and more specifically of the biopower realised within the postwar juridical–administrative–therapeutic state and manifested in the power of caring professionals over disabled people’s lives. The understanding of Independent Living as critique of professional power reveals the movement’s affiliations with anti-psychiatry, critiques of medicalisation, sociologies of total institutions, and radical/critical social work. This understanding also illuminates Independent Living’s scepticism towards discourses of ‘care’ and ‘ethics of care’. The attendant (partial) convergence between Independent Living and neoliberalisation is acknowledged, but the claims that the movement can be reduced to a neoliberal assault on the welfare state are rejected (an argument fully developed in Chapter 4). Instead, Independent Living’s critical interrogation of the welfare state, biopower, and ‘care’ is considered as a strategy of individual emancipation that negates neoliberal self-sufficiency and advances a complex affirmation of interdependence. To conceptualise this complexity, a distinction between ‘paternalist care’ and ‘egalitarian care’ is proposed. These considerations are then grounded in a discussion of welfare regimes (with reference to the work of Gøsta Esping-Andersen and its critical responses). Thus, Independent Living’s critique of professional power is contextualised by exploring the movement’s interactions with liberal, social-democratic, conservative, state socialist, and postsocialist welfare states.

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