Disability counter-communities: resisting precarity with friendship

Inventing ‘a relationship that is still formless’ is how we propose to counter the precarity of disabled people in modern British (Community and) Society. We are concerned with disability in this chapter and the governmental tactics of welfare reform, which creates disabled people as ‘community-threatening’ and consequently outside the scope of so-called community rights. To find a way out of this, and to resist the precarity that results from this community-threatening label, we suggest a new collectivity that we call counter-community and a new relation whereby we understand that collectivity that we call friendship. We take Michel Foucault’s quintessential reading of ‘friendship’ here to understand it as a creative relationship between disabled and non-disabled people that can innovate a new way of life and new cultural forms. Friendship, exercised in counter-community, allows for the disabled to perform a relational right (as opposed to juridical right) to not work and to live enriched lives in new collective bonds. These bonds have the potential to transform a culture of disability as community-threatening and to create culture – whereby, through lived relations of friendship, we can see performing the right not to work/ to not be ‘active citizens’ as a non-threatening way of life.