Changing the Framework: Disability Justice

Mia Mingus’s “Changing the Framework: Disability Justice” is a key entry point for bringing disability justice into broader social justice movements. The essay argues that many experienced organizers still understand disability as an individual flaw, a service problem, or a minority rights issue, rather than as a political experience, a community history, and a framework for analyzing how the world is organized.

Its contribution lies in changing the question itself. Disability justice does not only ask how disabled people can enter existing spaces. It asks why those spaces are built around able-bodiedness, speed, productivity, independence, and standard bodies in the first place. It moves disability away from charity or sympathy and into an analysis of power, institutions, and movement culture.

This shift matters for feminism. Many feminist spaces are willing to discuss race, class, and gender while still treating access as a technical detail and bodily limitation as an individual exception. Mingus reminds readers that if a movement assumes everyone can attend long meetings, respond quickly, carry high emotional labor, and show up constantly, it is already excluding many people in practice.

The essay also helps explain why disability justice and intersectional feminism cannot be separated. Disability is not a single identity that sits apart from racialization, poverty, migration, queer and trans life, trauma, care responsibilities, incarceration, and medical violence. Changing the framework means placing these relations at the center of analysis rather than adding access as an afterthought.

The piece works well as a short introduction to disability justice. It does not attempt to provide a full theory, but it clearly explains why “disability rights” is not enough for many marginalized disabled people and why any serious feminist or social movement must build disability justice into its basic structure.