Chapter 3: Impasses of Disability Alliance Building in Bulgaria: Successful Phantom Activism and Toxic Grassroots Mobilization

Purpose: In this chapter, I explore the current activist disability landscape in Bulgaria, focusing on its apparent insusceptibility to change. My objective is to examine the interplay between the conflicting parties, focusing on the factors that conditioned their successes and failures.

Methods/Approach: Relying mainly on directed content analysis, I analyzed website publications, online discussions, official statements released during the protests, as well as 18 interviews of mothers of children of disabilities and the data from five focus groups.

Findings: On the local disability scene, we discern two types of collective action – phantom disability activism and toxic grassroots mobilization. The first one held strongly to the traditionally construed notion of disability as confined in the need-based system and defined solely as medical condition. The second one – although very important for putting on the agenda issues as personal assistance and demedicalization – embraced deeply disturbing and toxic activist rhetoric, giving rise of an “abled-disabled” citizen thus reinforcing neoliberal images of human worth and failure.

Implication/Value: This chapter offers a closer look at the different meanings and implications of success, failure, and enabling or halting political renewal with regard to disability. On an empirical level, it adds more to the existing knowledge about the opportunities for, the role, the outcomes, and the specific features of alliance building in a context as Bulgaria, which presents us with specific combination of socialist legacies, post-socialist ways of abandoning disabled people, and, at best, short-term and transient embodiments of the “Nothing about us without us” tenet.