Intersectionality, healthcare and myalgic encephalomyelitis: Reflections from experience

Healthcare practice and policy impacting disabled groups has historically reduced disability to an individual phenomenon and homogenised experiences of disability. Such practices – which lack cultural and structural sensitivity – risk not only individualising, pathologising and responsibilising social oppressions tied to disability, but also erasing multiply marginalised experiences, knowledges and needs within any given disabled group. Moreover, by overlooking the interlocking macrosystems of oppression that shape identities and produce inequities, the potential for transformative practice and systemic change is reduced. In contrast, intersectionality demands that disability be understood as emerging from personal-political interplays, and beyond a single-axis issue, constituted through mutually reinforcing systems of representation and power. Focusing on myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and drawing on my own experience as a multiply marginalised disabled person in the UK, I make a case for UK healthcare to be informed by intersectionality, not as empty rhetoric but as critical social praxis and much-needed epistemic intervention.