A Disability Theory of Anti-Surveillance Tactics

Abstract

This article sketches how disabled people resist surveillance in the liberal democracies of the Global North. Since there is a dearth of scholarship on disability and surveillance, this article first overviews the surveil- lance state’s primary mechanisms of capture inflicted on disabled people. Building on insights from queer, trans, and feminist surveillance studies, I gesture toward the need for disability surveillance studies. Second, I outline tactics used by disabled people to resist surveillance as well as tactics of my creation inspired by activist practic- es and recent events in social organizing. Highlighting the radicality of these tactics validates disabled people as critical knowers and makers in the efforts of anti-surveillance. Lastly, I use crip theory to contend that examining how disabled people experience and fight surveillance is insufficient to account for the ways that the disabili- ty-ability binary—as a structural set of relations—shapes the discursive and material production and execution of surveillance.