Eugenics, institutionalization, and other forms of exclusion and oppression conditioned the lives of disabled people throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in most, if not all, European countries and in North America. 

Within disability studies and among disability advocates and disabled activists, there is broad support for initiatives to remember this history to dignify the victims and to make sure that we learn from history. However, commemorations of past atrocities committed against disabled people come with certain dangers. In popular understandings of disability history, there is a recurring narrative of progression, where a dark past of exclusion gives way to inclusion, rights, and citizenship. The oppression of disabled people is thereby associated with a bygone era, whereas it is presumed that our own time is morally superior and enlightened. This narrative structure disguises how institutionalization lingers and how it has been complemented by new technologies of power. Therefore, there is a risk that traditional and popular forms of documentation of historical treatments constitute a past that both conceals and legitimizes the current government of disabled people. 

In this presentation we discuss how it is possible to attend to the history of oppression without locating oppression squarely in a past that we presumably have left behind.