Power Without Class Is Not Power Analysis

Standpoint, disability, and the consequences of abstraction

Context and Scope: What This Essay Is (and Is Not)

This essay emerges from a public exchange prompted by the article Autism, Disability, and the Question of Power. My purpose here is not to evaluate the author as a person, speculate about intent, or adjudicate motives. It is to examine the ethical and methodological implications of how disability, class, and power are being theorized—and how critique grounded in lived material positions is received when it challenges analytic hierarchy.

The article in question offers an important intervention in autism discourse by rejecting deficit-based framings and situating disability within institutional design, governance, and enforced norms. It correctly argues that disability is not reducible to individual biology and that institutions organized around neurotypical assumptions predictably produce exclusion, coercion, and harm for autistic people. These claims are well established within disability studies and critical sociology, and I am broadly…