I heard an interesting thought in class today from one of my peers: disability is (partly) defined by one’s economic usefulness. If you cannot use your body to produce an economic output, then you are considered “disabled”.

This very reasonable sounding peer brought up the example of “gifted” programs in American public schools. These programs championed the success of neurodivergent students, but only with the goal of making them employable.

In a different situation, these students may have been labelled as “special needs”, those who wouldn’t go on to make a boss very happy one day.

Not only was this an acute observation of the economic motives of the public school system as they relate to disability, but it also made me think about economic exploitation of the body in general.