Disability Justice: A Working Draft

Patty Berne’s “Disability Justice - a working draft” is a key text for understanding the disability justice framework. It begins with a crucial distinction: disability rights has produced important legal and service-based gains, but when it remains organized around single-issue identity, white experience, independent living, and litigation, it cannot fully address disabled people’s lives across race, gender, class, migration, incarceration, colonialism, and gender normativity.

The essay matters for feminist resource work because it places disability justice squarely inside intersectional and anti-capitalist politics. Berne argues that ableism is not an isolated oppression. It is built with white supremacy, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist standards of productivity to produce an “ideal” bodymind. Disability justice therefore cannot mean only adding ramps or services; it asks who is valued, who leads, and whose pace is allowed to exist.

The principles outlined include leadership by those most impacted, cross-movement organizing, recognizing wholeness, sustainability, cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation. For FemRes, the text adds an organizing vocabulary to the disability justice shelf: the book entries provide theory, narrative, and movement experience, while Berne’s essay distills those concerns into principles that classrooms, collectives, and communities can repeatedly use.

It also challenges a common feminist reliance on “equal access” to existing institutions. Letting disabled people enter a system does not make that system just if it still demands speed, productivity, commodification, individual responsibility, and constant self-management. Berne’s deeper question is whether movements can build forms of life that do not measure human value by productivity or normality.

As a working draft, the essay is not a final definition. That is part of its importance. It shows disability justice emerging from communities, conflicts, and organizing needs rather than from abstract academic classification.