Introduction
Intersectionality, a term first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a feminist legal scholar, is a theoretical framework that examines how multiple social identities intersect with hierarchical systems of power to understand the lived experiences of historically disadvantaged groups within interdependent structures of privilege and oppression (Crenshaw 1989). Rooted in Black feminist scholarship, intersectionality was initially developed to address the exclusion of Black women from white feminist and anti-racist discourses, highlighting how race and gender interact to produce distinct and compounded forms of social and structural exclusion (Crenshaw 1989). While originally centred on the intersection of race and gender, intersectionality has since expanded to encompass a broader range of social identities, such as migration status, gender and sexuality diversity, socio-economic status and class and disability. This expansion acknowledges the heterogeneity within Black women (e.g., Black migrants with disabilities) and recognises the inequities faced by other structurally disadvantaged groups (Bowleg 2008; Nash 2008).
Within the Scandinavian context, a growing number of feminist scholars and researchers have suggested that intersectionality may also potentially offer a window to create new opportunities for members of oppressed groups. These scholars argue that intersectionality is both a theoretical and a methodological tool; it has the capacity to unearth how individuals with complex social identities actively generate strategic actions to build new opportunities and shared solidarities across the different groups in which they belong (Staunæs and Søndergaard 2006; Gullikstad 2013). As long-standing researchers working at the axis of disability, Indigeneity, Queer and sexuality studies, we found these juxtapositions curious for our own work and the communities in which our work is embedded. To understand the potential importance of these generative insights, we developed a small cross-country study, ‘Diverse Disability Identities’, involving in-depth narrative interviews with people with disabilities who self-identify as coming from diverse identities.
In this paper, we report on interviews with Norwegian people with disabilities who self-identify as coming from a range of diverse positionalities. Taking an intersectionality-agency-informed approach to the research framing and analysis, our aim was to understand the strategic mobilisation of their intersectional agency to expand their lifeworlds. Through adapting an intersectionality-informed, agency-based approach, the participants of this research provide a critical lens for examining how people with disabilities strategically anchor their social identities. Importantly, the approach facilitates the exploration of diverse disabled people’s lifeworlds across complex hierarchical contexts. This includes their active, embodied practices of navigating, resisting and transforming longstanding structural constraints to generate transformative social change. Ultimately, this article underscores the importance of such an approach to understand the richness of the lives of diverse disabled people who actively seek opportunities to assert and anchor their differentiated social identities as a strategic practice for social transformation.
Intersectional-agency and disability: Situating disability identity complexity beyond dominant narratives
There have been critiques and counter-critiques of the application of intersectionality within the broad church of disability studies, such as that between Watermeyer and Swartz (2024) and Ned et al. (2024). Despite this, an increasing number of disability scholars have adopted intersectionality as both a theoretical and methodological tool to explore the everyday experiences of people with disabilities, aiming to critically situate their socio-structural locations in relation to interlocking systems of power and oppression (see Abay and Soldatić 2024). This has been pursued at the macro level to ascertain socio-structural relations of disablement, meso levels of institutional practices that sustain ableist norms and at the micro level of everyday experience and embodiment. For example, disability scholars such as Wickenden (2023) have argued that utilising the theoretical frame of intersectionality within the realm of disability studies may help build a more rigorous understanding of disabled children’s lifeworlds and pathways. Scholars such as Deborah Stienstra (2018; 2022) have suggested that gendered-disability intersectional frameworks are necessary to situate and understand women with disabilities’ unique demands for justice, particularly within global development discourses and practices. Decolonial disability scholars, such as Nguyen et al. (2021), have highlighted the critical importance of applying an intersectional lens. Nguyen and her colleagues suggest that it offers an important avenue to understand women and girls with disabilities’ advocacy and leadership within the Global South and its impacts for social transformation. This collective body of work suggests that to understand the interlocking social relations of power in which disabled people are embedded, the deep, complex work of mapping through and across the disabled people’s diverse identity categories is critical to fully appreciate their individual and collective agency. Thus, despite numerous contestations, intersectionality has become a key epistemic strategy and methodological practice to explore and examine the multiplicity of people with disabilities’ embodied experiences and their social positions of power.
Significantly, this broad engagement within the field of disability studies has aimed to identify the unique harms, injuries, constraints and limited opportunities afforded to people with disabilities in all of their heterogeneity and articulate alternative strategies and practices to promote inclusive and accessible worlds (see Abay and Soldatić 2024). Importantly, the increased take-up and embedding of intersectional scholarly inquiry within the realm of disability studies more generally has become critical to expanding the canon of disability studies, not only for its inclusion of diverse disability lived experiences but also to distill the unique disadvantages, discrimination and violence experienced when living at the axis of disability with another marginalised identity. Most significantly, it has actively demonstrated the ways in which dominant narratives of disability have both assumed and potentially subsumed the heterogeneity of lived experiences under the rubric of disability. As Ned and colleagues (2024) recently suggested, one of the core concerns of this work is that disability has become the central point of contention even with the adoption of an intersectional lens. And in turn, the differentiated experiences across issues of identity and social categorisation in relation to race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, sexuality and social class remain hidden within the broader rubric of ‘disability’.
Outside of dominant US intellectual traditions, intersectionality is frequently taken up to reflect the complexity of everyday lifeworlds and the embeddedness of social identity across multiple axes of social categorisation. An increasing number of scholars working at the forefront of theorising social identity analysis have begun to contest intersectionality as predominately a negative social relationship of power (see Jackson, Mohr and Kindahl 2021). This group of scholars is demonstrating through rich empirical research that, often, anchoring oneself within a particular identity at any given moment is a strategic imperative, an agential decision or a social positionality driven by individual, communal or collective goals.
Scholars working with intersectionality as an agential strategic practice position identity assertion that is reflective of the scholarly work of post-colonial scholars (see Chakraborty 2010 for a full discussion). Drawing upon the work of Spivak (1988), post-colonial scholars have argued that situated social practices of identity categorisation for oppressed groups navigating interlocking relations of power actively take up the technique of ‘strategic essentialism’. Spivak argued that as active subjects from deeply stigmatised communities, they are more likely to agentially prioritise one of their social identities to stake necessary claims. The agential act to assert a preference for an identity category at any given moment is therefore dependent upon the power relations in which they are embedded at the time they are confronted with socio-structural constraints. Thus, the subjective goal of intersectional agential decision-making is to actively navigate the complexity of the socio-structural locations to achieve a collection of goals and outcomes as they need. While Spivak grounds her arguments within the post-colonial context of India, Soldatić (2018) has identified similar intersectional agential decisions with Indigenous mothers with disabled children in the context of settler colonial Australia. Intersectional-agential decision-making, as a strategic practice, enables structurally oppressed community members to prioritise one identity above another with a particular intent. This approach aims to gain recognition, access to greater social resources and capital, and open opportunities for inclusive participation within social, political, cultural, or economic institutions. Thus, as embodied subjects, marginalised subjects recognise the complexity of their intersectional identities and the unique opportunities that can be afforded through anchoring a particular social identity within a given moment.
In considering these arguments, a growing group of scholars has begun to recognise that not all identities ascribed to an individual are without power, privilege or social status. Even though ‘parts’ of their embodied identity may be considered in other contexts to have limited social, political, economic or cultural power, individuals will strategically determine how to position their identities to reposition their structural location for strategic goals with intent (Sabik 2021). For example, an increasing number of researchers have begun to document and map the active selection and anchoring of different components of one’s identity in order to gain access to material, social, political and cultural resources. Importantly, this work signifies the strategic importance of embodied reflective practices as applied by highly stigmatised and marginalised individuals within their own contexts at any given moment to achieve both immediate and long-term goals. Through adopting an intersectional-agential strategy, individuals thus actively engage in socially embedded practices aimed at transforming their lifeworld even with all their structural constraints. New levels of depth have therefore been added to Crenshaw’s original theory of intersectionality, including that in relation to gender and class (Monroy, Cowen and Keltner 2022; Engström and Laurin 2024).
In this project, ‘Diverse Disability Identities’, we actively drew upon these insights to explore the potentially important ways that intersectional agency was a strategy to socially transform the lifeworlds of disabled people and those around them. While this initial set of interviews cannot necessarily be generalised more broadly, they point to the intersectional-agential strategies adopted by peoples with disabilities who live at the axis of a diverse set of identities to create opportunities for broader social change across multiple social spheres.
Methods
We undertook qualitative in-depth interviews to explore the ways in which disabled people living at the intersections of multiple identities develop different facets of their identities. Participants were selected using purposeful sampling, a method described by Creswell and Plano Clark (2011) as the process of identifying and choosing individuals who possess specific knowledge and experience relevant to the study’s focus. Our participants were chosen because they had complex social identities that are generally considered to belong to oppressed groups, with disability being a central social identity across all participants. Additionally, we wanted participants who had made decisions to participate in a range of social spheres outside of their disability identity. The participants were primarily recruited online via disability representative organisations demonstrating an identification with disability but not necessarily as central to their lives.
Ethics
Our research was conducted following the guidelines of the National Ethical Committee for the Social Sciences and received approval from the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NCRD) (no. 779691). Participants received written information about the study in Norwegian or English, explaining that participation was voluntary and could be withdrawn at any time. This was reiterated verbally before the interview, and oral consent, including permission to audiotape, was obtained at the start.
As emphasised by Herington et al. (2023), conducting research with diverse populations, including participants of different genders, races, ethnicities, disabilities, and religions, requires heightened ethical awareness. They highlight that informed consent may necessitate varying levels of information and underscore the increased risks of reidentification for individuals with complex social identities, as well as their differing vulnerabilities to harm, such as social sanctions. To address these challenges, we tailored verbal consent information to each participant, clarifying, for example, the meaning of voluntary participation in greater detail for some. Additionally, anonymisation and reidentification risks were discussed more extensively with participants from multiple minority groups. Some participants, already well-known contributors to public discourse and represented multifaceted social identity backgrounds, expressed less concern about anonymisation. Others, however, had not disclosed certain aspects of their identity and were more concerned about avoiding identification. Norway, with only 5.5 million inhabitants and limited diversity, is particularly transparent. To mitigate reidentification risks, we, for example, provide only general descriptions of affiliation, such as referencing immigrant backgrounds without specifying countries. Moreover, before submission, all participants got to read the article and to approve or suggest revisions to how they were presented and anonymised. All approved the presentation, but one noted that linking quotes to informant numbers increased re-identification risk, so we removed the numbering.
To respect participants’ individual agencies, we began interviews by asking them to describe their own identity. Such a self-identification approach allows participants to avoid predefined identity categories and use terms they feel most comfortable with (Jankowitz & Johnson 2021). Furthermore, in line with Henrickson et al.’s (2020) recommendations for ethical research with gender and sexually diverse populations, we sought to respect participants’ dignity during interviews by using their self-identified pronouns and employing inclusive, non-stigmatising language.
All data was handled using de-identification practices at the point of transcription, adhering to the stipulations set by the NCRD in the approval guidelines. The de-identified transcripts were held within the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Health Equity & Community Wellbeing security data platforms, securitised through the Canadian research national data security network offered by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (The Alliance). As a national research data government provider, The Alliance applies high-level data security measures in line with national and international data privacy and confidentiality standards (The Alliance 2024).
Participant Profiles
We provide a general description of the entire participant profile to ensure de-identification of research participants in line with our approved ethical research protocols. In total, eight participants aged between 20 and 40 years of age participated in the study. All self-identified as living with a disability, which can be broadly defined across the categories of physical, sensory or psycho-social impairment. As a group, participants also strongly self-identified across other identities of social categorisation as either Indigenous (Sami) or coming from a new migrant community as either first or second generation. Religious status was also highlighted by our participants, and the cohort included those from Protestant Christian, Catholic or Muslim backgrounds, none of whom were actively engaged in religious practice. Beyond cultural, racial, ethnic and religious identities, the majority of participants identified as Queer. Among them, some identified as cisgendered men, some as cisgendered women, and some as transgender. This emphasis on sexuality and gender diversity within the participant cohort was not deliberate, as many participants self-selected to join this study through the public call-out for participation through organisations in line with the approved ethics protocol. There was a diversity of class backgrounds across the group. All participants were actively engaged in society. Participation cut across a range of social, cultural and political activities, such as holding positions in political, disability or lbhq organisations, competing in national and international sport events, performing concerts, and producing artwork displayed in public settings.
Interview structure, language use and translation, and length
The interviews were conducted in either Norwegian or English and did not require interpreters, although this option was offered if participants preferred other languages. Three interviews took place in person, while five were held online due to considerations of time and cost. This digital format was suitable, as participants, who were geographically dispersed, were already familiar with digital meetings from their work and/or daily lives. Using our theme-based interview guide, we encouraged participants to share their stories of everyday life, focusing on how they experienced living with impairments in various contexts, such as social, cultural, religious, leisure, political, and economic settings. Additionally, we asked them to share accounts of their experiences as Queer, Indigenous, or part of a racially or ethnically diverse minority within the context of disability, such as within disability organisations. The order of the themes was partly determined by what the participants themselves chose to highlight. As typical of in-depth interviews (Legard, Keegen and Ward 2003), participants’ answers were followed up with questions and probes to explore them further. Prominent subthemes explored by the participants included agency and advocacy across different settings. The interviews were conducted during 2023 and lasted from 1 to 2.5 hours. The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim.
Analysis of interview transcripts
All interviews were analysed according to the principles of thematic analysis identified by Braun and Clark (2006): familiarising oneself with the data, generating initial codes, and searching for, reviewing and defining themes. Thus, we started reading the transcripts thoroughly before generating codes to identify data relevant for our research question. After identifying and actively discussing potential themes, we organised our findings in accordance with the following overarching themes: ‘Identity construction and conscious use of minority anchoring’ and ’Complex category anchoring as a resource to social change’. Author One (1) led the first round of analysis, with Author Two (2) undertaking a second-stage analysis to ensure consistency in coding within each of the transcripts, and then the broader themes emerged across the participant group. Several meetings were held between Authors 1 and 2 to refine the analysis over a period of 12 months. The content of these meetings focused on the following: a) the interpretation of the findings; b) the representation of participants within each of the research outputs (conference papers, journal articles and so forth); and c) strategies for participant feedback loops across the analytical and data representations within such outputs.
Prior to peer review submission, Author 1 asked each of the participants to review the article in relation to the use and representation of quotes, enabling them a final opportunity to review their narratives within the context of the paper’s theoretical framings and the use of their narratives throughout each of the thematic areas within the findings section. This involved emailing each of the participants with quotes highlighted to clearly mark out their own quotes included in this paper. Each of the participants was provided with a two-week window for feedback. Thus, the participants approved the citations and interpretations.
Results and Discussion: Recognising the Importance of Their Non-Disabled Identities for Disabled People
In this results section, we draw out the diverse ways in which the participants within this study anchor their identities across a range of social categories as an active strategy to assert their intersectional agency where they actively prioritise a facet of their non-disabled identity. As discussed in the following section, this is an active decision, a practice of intersectional agency. As outlined below, the in-depth narrative findings from each participant suggest that strategically asserting their non-disabled identities is a more powerful tool to mobilise opportunities and social resources. This approach often elevated their social positions and locations as people with disabilities with embodied diverse identities. This was particularly the case for the research participants, who were actively engaged within social and political movements (e.g., disability, political or queer/LGBT organisations) to transform broader systemic structures for socially just change.
Anchoring identity
First, our interviews revealed how the participants anchored themselves in a complex array of social identities beyond that of disability. When asked to introduce themselves in terms of how they perceived themselves—that is, who they are—the participants described themselves as an employer, politician, friend, brother, uncle, queer, trans, non-binary, human rights activist, indigenous/Sami, wheelchair user, Muslim, athlete, person with a muscle disease, bisexual, artist, communist, immigrant, actor, woman, disabled, dark-skinned, visually impaired, smart, musician, upper middle class, disability activist, IT technician, polyamorous, romantic and as an anarchist. Thus, there was no consistency in describing their positionality under the single category of disability. All the participants in this research saw themselves as complex and multi-dimensional embodied subjects with an array of social identities that could be actively drawn upon in relation to their social, cultural, political and material location at any given time. The choice of social categorisation was strategic. It was agential decision-making, aimed to achieve a particular purpose, social standing or resource within the given social settings in which such decision-making occurred. Thus, our findings align with those of Gustavsson and Nyberg (2015), whose research emphasised the fluidity, multiplicity and continuity of the identities of people with disabilities across a diverse range of social locations, depending upon the given context at the time in which they self-described.
From a disability standpoint, the next interesting finding is how disability seems to play a minor role compared to their other social identities. Most of the participants clearly stated that they did not perceive disability as one of their main identities and frequently tried to avoid being identified as disabled. However, several participants emphasise that embracing other identities is not about denying their impairment, but rather an expression of how disability plays a minor role in their lifeworld overall and, most significantly, how they understand, embody and perceive ‘who they are’. As one participant stated, ‘I do have an impairment, but I do not feel disabled. It is a word I never use. I am not “reduced” in any way; I just function a little differently’. Another participant stated, ‘…disability is the most irrelevant aspect of my existence!’. This perspective contrasts with how disabled people are often perceived in their social environment, where disability is viewed as a dominant identity that overshadows other aspects of their social identity, such as gender and sexuality, in addition to their social roles, reducing them to being viewed primarily as ‘disabled’ (Wickenden 2023; Shakespeare 1996). Moreover, it is striking how the participants’ peripheral view of disability as part of their identity reflects a deliberate and agential decision. For instance, one participant emphasised, ‘I have chosen not to let…[disability] become a part of my identity’. From our interviews, many of the participants expressed agreement with this position, suggesting that they actively resisted internalising society’s broader perception of being defined primarily as people with disabilities.
Although participants describe their identity anchoring as an agential choice, they also acknowledge that the ability to make such a choice is shaped, for example, by their socio-structural locations and the socio-contexts that have shaped their understanding of the self and their lifeworlds. For instance, one participant described how his parents consistently treated him as ‘normal’ during his childhood and expected others, such as his school, to do the same. He emphasised that, although this approach did not eliminate his disability, it prevented it from becoming the defining aspect of his identity. This, in turn, allowed him to explore other dimensions of himself. He characterises his family’s mindset towards him as follows: ‘Yes, you have a disability. But first and foremost, you are [name], our son, our brother, etc’. Reflecting on what this mindset has done for him, he states, ‘That it’s okay to believe that most things are possible, right?’
Moreover, participants’ narratives also revealed differing levels of acceptance of their embodied complex social identities within the contexts of disability organisations. While some felt welcomed and observed efforts to embrace diversity within disability organisations, including queerness, other participants left a disability organisation due to experiences of ethnic discrimination. Thus, while participants’ identity formation was shaped by personal agency, it was also influenced by factors such as upbringing, organisational cultures and discriminatory practices. These experiences within social contexts, such as disability organisations, underscored the importance of external acceptance and inclusivity in enabling them to navigate and express their multifaceted identities. Importantly, as discussed in the following section, the participants also became the drivers for strategically mobilising a particular identity in an effort to create inclusive and accessible social change.
Complex category anchoring as a resource for social change
The quote about choosing disability not to become a part of his identity brings us to our next main finding. That is, how participants made conscious agential decisions to strategically anchor a particular social identity as intersectional agential subjects to move away from socio-structurally determined notions of disability. From the findings from the narrative interviews, participants suggest that this expansion seemed to happen on different levels, that is, 1) an individual level, 2) a group level and 3) a systems level. We illustrate these findings respectively in the following section.
Individual level: Projecting who I am
Many of the participants interviewed in this study stressed how in everyday life, they often chose to actively make use of other identity affiliations instead of claiming their disability identity as a strategic decision to change how they were perceived by others. As the quote outlines below, participants consciously choose to engage in practices that will divert attention away from their disability and promote other facets of their social identities, such as race and ethnicity, religion, sexuality and gender diversity, in discussions about ‘who they are’:
I wear nice, cool shoes, and it’s something I’ve done very consciously because ever since I started wearing them, I almost never get comments like, “Oh poor you! Are you in a wheelchair?” /…/ Most people say, “Oh my God, what nice shoes you have!” And that becomes the dialogue because that’s what they see. Or they obviously notice the wheelchair, but it doesn’t take up as much space because I stand out in other ways. And the fact that I often dress very nicely means that people rather say, “Oh, you look so stylish!” instead of “Poor you for being in a wheelchair!” It still happens /…/, but it happens much less frequently after I became very conscious of what clothes and shoes I wear. And you could say that this also has to do with being queer. Within the queer community, it’s much more acceptable to stand out in terms of shoes and clothes. And having a much more people style is for many a part of being queer.
Strategic identification, actively pivoting towards a non-disabled aspect of their social identity, was a consistent practice for many of the participants. The example illustrates what Staunæs (2003) refers to as ‘doing’ intersectionality in a way that co-constitutes an untroublesome subject position. Like many of the research participants, this participant consciously foregrounds their queer identity within their lifeworlds. The agential decision to adapt and take up associated social norms of Queer identity expression through clothing was a deliberate strategy to redirect attention from their disability and disability mobility devices. Their aim is to reposition the self, who they are, and how they are defined by others. Significantly, as the quotation above suggests, defining the self as stylish and queer is an active strategy to manoeuvre around dominant disability public positions of pity. As disability remains largely a stigmatised position of pity (Barbareschi et al. 2021; Cureton 2018), the participants of this study actively harnessed divergent practices to propel and foreground other aspects of their identity to avoid such social perceptions of disability stigma.
Interestingly, at the individual level, an important finding across most participants was related to the role of social class, an area that is being increasingly researched within disability studies (Björnsdóttir and Traustadóttir 2010; Chatzitheochari and Butler-Rees 2022). Class status and economic power appeared to be the one category affiliation that, when combined with the category of disability, created the greatest opportunities at the individual level and, at times, even reduced negative social consequences of disability affiliation, such as pity and stigma. The implications of social background were articulated in detail by one participant:
I am privileged. I come from a middle-class family. My mother was alone, but academic and highly educated. So, I have a way of speaking, and I know the rules of the game. Which meant that from my early twenties, I got all the assistive devices I needed. I have complained a lot. But I had the resources then and the language to be able to complain and to navigate these documents. So, there I experience being taken seriously, and have received good services that I know others in similar situations do not get. That is, those who do not have the privileges to be resourceful and to know the language and the paragraphs and all that.
This personal account aligns with Calderón-Almendros et al.’s (2016) argument that a high social background enhances opportunities to construct one’s own identity, as access to and control over cultural codes enable this process. Conversely, those from disadvantaged backgrounds often face barriers to such codes, raising questions about how differentiated positions of social inequality across the axis of identities restrict one’s ability to shape an identity that aligns with their own preferences.
Group level: Identifying with others like myself with and beyond disability
Expanding their identity by using their intersectional identity affiliations was also something the participants of this research sometimes did on a group level. For example, one participant stressed that in order to nurture his cultural background, he actively socialised with other immigrants from his home country. This participant stressed that this opened opportunities for him to experience safe and comfortable spaces where he could identify himself as someone who ‘fits in’ and not as different due to their disability, queer or racial identities:
We who are part of the culture (from the same country) we are like a family all together /…/ We are the same kind /…/ The culture is amazing. It’s very chill and very… Then I can relax and not think about the disability, that I am Muslim or gay.
This example illustrates how disabled people with multiple social backgrounds, as described by Miller (2018), navigate between their various identities and different contexts as an active practice of resisting disability stigmatisation and oppression they experience elsewhere. In this situation, the participant’s immigrant background provides him with a more positive subject position in relation to his cultural-religious background and sexuality than they experience in other contexts as a disabled man. Spending time with his cultural community overrode heteronormative perceptions of being a desexualised disabled man, enabling him to enjoy his culture and, simultaneously, not hide his sexual identity.
While the last cited participant primarily focused on being perceived as an equal through involvement in their homeland diaspora community, other participants emphasised how group participation provided an opportunity to explore and further develop aspects of their identities beyond disability. This was particularly important for participants who identified as Queer or transgender. Some of them found that being both Queer and disabled offered a unique opportunity for self-discovery. It allowed them to actively explore and embrace their sexual identity in ways that many heteronormative individuals with disabilities might not experience, while simultaneously navigating their sexuality as disabled individuals who identify as Queer. One participant in particular articulates the individual pleasures of collectively exploring their Queer disabled identity with others who live at this intersection:
/…/ this summer we’re going to have a summer camp where we’re going to do drag and burlesque. What we all have in common is that everyone has a disability and is queer. And there it’s positive, with lots of mastery and an arena with an understanding of something that is completely unique. That my way of being queer will always be closely tied to my disability, and that my way of being disabled will also always be tied to the fact that I am queer.
Such an opportunity to explore one’s own sexuality, as highlighted in the above quotation, cannot be taken for granted by people with disabilities more generally. As disabled people are largely perceived as non-sexual beings and thus desexualised (Bahner, Johansson and Swanelöv 2024), they do not have readily available access to appropriate, accessible and inclusive sex and relationship education on core areas of intimacy, such as love, sex, sexual health and reproduction. As Shah (2017) stated, a consistent theme for disabled people is that they are being denied sexual citizenship.
Moreover, the above quotes illustrate how people with disabilities anchor their identities beyond that of a singular dominant narrative through an active sense of belonging in multiple communities (Soldatic & Johnson 2019). Thus, identifying as more than just disabled creates greater opportunities to challenge and transcend the social expectations often imposed on disabled individuals. It also allows them to push back against constraints that limit their rights to gather collectively, form networks and socialise. In particular, identifying as both Queer and/or Gender-Diverse and disabled or belonging to a diaspora community enables them to gather in collective contexts that are safe for them to develop their sense of who they are more fully.
System level: Transforming ableist assumptions through society
When it comes to efforts to challenge society’s existing narratives and understanding of disability, participants depicted quite different strategies. A main strategy highlighted by several was involvement in various organisations that were not anchored in disability (e.g., political or queer/LGBT organisations). Through these organisations, they had meetings with the prime minister, other politicians and authorities and different minority organisations to increase their knowledge about diverse social backgrounds and how to secure these groups’ human rights. Some participants also saw a need for organisational innovation. For example, one participant had founded an organisation for disabled people with complex social backgrounds, and another had established a subgroup for queer individuals within the disability movement.
Another important part of several of the participants’ efforts to challenge the public disability narrative was being active in public discourse, fronting identity issues in social media, such as TV, radio, newspapers, Facebook, etc. One of these participants, who is an artist, outlines the importance of this:
And because I am working a lot with humor and stuff like that, I think that these kinds of identities have given me opportunities.
I did a series of work that was named “The hyperwhites”. It was a series of works which were related to albinism. This work was not talking about albinism, but more against racial theories and stuff like that. This gave me the opportunity to make a clever comment and do a sort of very problematic imagery to make it more provocative, without being perceived as a completely racist /…/ But what I am interested in now, is to develop new narratives through different presentations of identities and different ways of seeing.
Engaging in public spaces, including the media, to raise a profile of issues faced by diverse disabled people does, however, create both opportunities for change and numerous risks. This is best exemplified by the media activism of the participant who has been consciously utilising various media platforms in his efforts to change Norwegian social attitudes. He describes the forms of risks and opportunities that have resulted from his different levels of public activism when out on the street and in an array of media platforms as a man who identifies as both disabled and Muslim. ‘Once I was spat on in the street by a guy /…/ Maybe because I am disabled, maybe because I am Muslim. I don’t know /…/ I reported the situation and got coverage in the capital’s newspapers!’
It is unclear if the example above is about fighting racism vs fighting ableism and whether living at this intersection itself poses unique risks and threats to personal safety, as this participant outlines. There were, however, other examples from the participants who lived at this intersection where fighting against racism and Norwegian ethno-nationalism was a key feature of their struggle for socially just transformation. For example, one participant described how she has actively participated in the public fight for diversity and against racism, particularly within the disability community. This includes writing about the topic in an article for a prominent feminist Norwegian journal to advance broader dialogue on the issue.
Interestingly, direct public naming of racism within Norwegian society was not necessarily a specific area of activism for systemic change across the research participants. Some of the participants described the way that they engaged indirectly with promoting an anti-racist narrative through their art and music. For example, one participant stated that he does not consciously work to change attitudes but nevertheless contributes to this through his job as a professional musician. He describes how being Sámi and disabled makes him unique by being ‘[a] blind Sámi who wants to make his way in the world’. Performing, he experiences that the focus is solely on him as a Sámi musician and not on his disability.
Another strategy used by several participants to challenge society’s existing perception of disabled people was to exercise various types of activism in their everyday life. For example, one of the participants insisted on using traditional train services rather than disability coaches especially designed for disability accessibility. Another participant instructed their disability assistants not to answer when people addressed the assistant instead of the disabled people themselves. Some of the participants interviewed stated that they challenged dominant practices of forcing disabled people to self-identify at the point of registering for social events, such as buying ‘regular’ tickets to concerts and other events and refusing to sit in separate areas designated specifically for disabled people.
Motivation for change
The participants’ motivations to engage in social change differed. One participant justifies their engagement culturally as a central component of their Sápmi Indigenous identity by stating that ‘I do some work with accessibility in Sámi in the cultural life /…/ It’s my way of this tradition of also giving back to the community you learn from, to do it that way’. Other participants described how their positionality of whiteness alongside their socio-economic class privilege had motivated them to try to improve the lives of other disabled people. This is best described in the following quote:
There are many areas where I’m not privileged, but because, for example, my skin is white, and I come from a middle-class family, it cancels out some of the challenges that I see others in the movement are disabled by, who don’t have that. And then I feel a very great responsibility to contribute so that others can have it as good or better than I have had it. To have the same opportunities, and not to pull up the ladder after me …/ I am a very extremely privileged white man pushing 40 years.
Another example was presented by a participant who described how their motivation for being involved with different organisations for disabled and for queer people is to improve their own life outcomes and trajectories:
To be allowed to plan Pride 2020. I am very proud and grateful for having had the opportunity to plan it with people I today call my friends, and having a supportive queer “family” is nice /…/ To have a “chosen family” that I can confide in when I’m struggling with things, and we can be open and help each other in difficult situations.
/…/ That I sat on the council (for disabled people) made me ask for help to write that personal assistance application again, for example. Organizational life opens doors. Absolutely! I’m glad I did that. I have also learned a lot, like planning various courses, applying for different support schemes. Yes, it has broadened my horizon.
In all the examples offered, the participants stated clearly that such acts were designed to promote social change both in their own lives and in the lives of others, that is, the inter-relational level from beyond the micro of everyday life through to the macro of socio-structural change. Through anchoring their social identities within the array of identities to which they belonged, they recognised the resources for opportunities this provided for them as complex disabled subjects. Our participants were engaged in daily practices that actively elevated their diverse and rich positionalities to express themselves as an act of agency and, perhaps, a social act of defiance against dominating perceptions of disability within and across Norwegian society.
Concluding Remarks
Living at the intersection of multiple identities is well-documented as a risk factor for oppressed and marginalised community members, including members of the disability community. As a significant body of research has suggested that issues of violence, personal safety and wellbeing, along with access to necessary resources and support, become more precarious for community members who face multiple inequalities of power through interlocking systems of oppression. For many disabled people with complex intersectional social identities, this is a unique lived experience, often generating significant harms and injuries across the life course. However, as illustrated in this article, such rich intersectional diversity within one’s lifeworld can also create novel opportunities for the people and the social groups within which they belong and, more broadly, be mobilised to garner strategies to promote inclusive and accessible social transformation. The findings from this study underscore the transformative potential of intersectional agency as a framework for understanding the complex lifeworlds of people with disabilities who embody identity diversity across myriad social identities. By actively engaging with their multiple identities at different times and in different spaces and places, participants in this study demonstrate how intersectional agency can serve as a powerful tool for social change, challenging dominant narratives that often reduce people with disabilities to the dominant social identity of disability, denying them the opportunities to mobilise, express and sustain the entire self as embodied subjects.
Most importantly, the participants in this research demonstrated the ways in which they strategically mobilise their diverse identities to navigate social, cultural, and political landscapes, thereby creating new opportunities not only for themselves but also for others. This active anchoring of a particular social identity outside of disability highlights the importance of recognising the full spectrum of an individual’s identity in efforts to promote social justice and equity. At the individual level, participants consciously explored and displayed identities that transcended normative accounts of disability, reshaping perceptions and reducing stigma. On a group level, many found solidarity and empowerment in communities that shared aspects of their non-disabled identity, whether cultural, sexual, or otherwise. Moreover, their involvement in organisations and public discourse served to challenge and transform societal perceptions of disability, advocating for broader inclusion and representation. Their strategic mobilisation of their non-disabled social identities thus afforded them greater opportunities to build complex lifeworlds that resulted in impacts upon the self.
However, it is important to stress that living at the intersection of multiple identities does not ‘automatically’ provide all disabled people with positive opportunities for change, and that a lack of such positive opportunities is not caused by insufficient effort on their part. We acknowledge that our participants do not represent most disabled people in the sense that they have all distinguished themselves in society in various ways, for example, through music, sports, or politics. Among other things, it is evident how, for some, social class has been crucial in creating the opportunities they have experienced. This aligns with Shakespeare’s (1996) statement about class as a particularly powerful determinant of trajectories, experiences and outcomes for disabled people.
Finally, as the participants of this study have emphasised, their lived experiences and garnered expertise through their multiple identities contribute to the growing body of literature that views intersectionality not merely as a lens for identifying oppression but as a dynamic resource for empowerment and agency. It calls for disability scholars and activists to broaden their focus beyond disability-centric narratives and to embrace the complexity of intersecting agential identities. By doing so, research can better support the diverse motivations and rights of disabled people’s lifeworlds, fostering environments where all aspects of their identities are acknowledged and valued.
Data Accessibility Statement
The interview data is not available since they were collected with confidentiality and may contain sensitive information.
Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank the participants who shared their experiences living at the intersections of multiple identities and the organisations helping us in the recruitment process.
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
Author Contributions
Both authors were involved in the study’s conception, design, analysis, interpretation of results and discussion. The first author collected the data. Both authors have read and approved the final manuscript.