How the disabled body unites the national body: disability as ‘feel good’ diversity in urban India.

This article analyzes both representations of disability in popular media and the role of disabled workers in urban India and demonstrates how the category of disability becomes a form of non-threatening ‘feel good’ diversity. Unlike other axes of difference such as class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion, India’s disability rights movement, corporations, and mainstream media represent disability as largely apolitical. Drawing on Nehruvian ideals about ‘unity in diversity’, this article discusses how disability functions as a means of imagining and creating unity in India. As a result of skillful manipulation that collapses and conflates nationalist and neoliberal projects, the success of disabled people is considered to be synonymous with the success of the nation. This essay thus examines how thinking, feeling, and representing through disability provides a new way of conceptualizing the nation and critically engages with ideas and ideals of ‘disability publics’. Disability is rendered into a representation and while tension exists between feeling good and feeling bad, the specter of a contentious disability politics is kept at bay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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