The Communicative Disenfranchisement of Disabled Individuals During Healthcare Appointments: Material Ramifications of Inaccessible Talk and Space
2025-10-27
Hintz and Scharp’s explication of the theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement describes how hegemonic ideologies are reified through talk. This paper approaches communicative disenfranchisement from a critical disability studies perspective to make visible the ways systemic ableism operates as a hegemonic ideology that harms disabled individuals. To do so, we employed Price’s theory of crip spacetime to illuminate how communicative disenfranchisement is magnified when the spaces that talk occurs in are disenfranchising themselves. Based on interviews with 20 disabled and chronically ill individuals, findings illustrate how ableism is enacted communicatively through epistemic erasure and spatially through (in)accessible environments. Findings also demonstrate how navigating multiple dimensions of disenfranchisement is costly, negatively affecting individuals’ physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. This disenfranchisement accumulates and leads to what we term illness burnout , which occurs when structural inaccessibility exhausts individuals from seeking the care they need. To conclude, we provide an illustrative case of crip communicative (dis)enfranchisement , a material-discursive reality that individuals experiencing illness must navigate in pursuit of health care.