'Heaven for disabled people': nationalism and international human rights imagery

This essay explores the production, dissemination and promotion of disability imagery by an international human rights organization mobilizing national shame and shock effect as well as nation states seeking to use disabled people to make political points about their societies. The essay analyzes and critiques the idealization of 'the developed world' and the disavowal of 'the developing world', and discusses human rights films in Eastern Europe; the discourse about the US as the world leader in disability rights; and Chinese and South Korean disabled activists' resistance against the governmental propaganda nearing their Paralympics. Resisting static and timeless generalizations about nation states is crucial to promoting a transnational communication on the human rights of disabled people and making connections among diverse, imaginative, conflicting, and ambiguous self-representations of disabled people around the world.