Accommodation as a General Ethic

Accommodation designates the institutional and material adjustments that allow bodies and minds to participate within environments structured against them. It emerged as a practical response to exclusion, but it also carries a philosophical weight that exceeds its bureaucratic register. To accommodate is to recognize that the world is neither neutral nor self-sufficient but a contingent arrangement of affordances and obstacles—an ecology of relations that privileges certain forms of life and marginalizes others. When understood in this light, accommodation ceases to be a discrete policy measure and becomes an ethic of relational attunement, a mode of being that acknowledges the unfinished, interdependent character of existence itself.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes that misfitting is not a failure of the body but “an encounter between bodies and environments.” This insight destabilizes the assumption that difficulty arises from individual deviation. It exposes the violence of normativity—the way “fit” becomes a proxy for belonging. Yet misfitting, as Garland-Thomson suggests, is also generative: it reveals the mutable boundary between organism and world. Accommodation can be reinterpreted as an ontological and ethical necessity—the process through which all beings negotiate the partial fit between their capacities and their worlds.

Judith Butler’s work on precarity and recognition provides a further lens. For Butler, the social field is structured by differential exposure to injury, and ethics begins when we apprehend our shared vulnerability. Accommodation, in this expanded sense, becomes a practice of recognizing the other’s untranslatability without demanding its resolution. It aligns with Butler’s call for a “non-violent ethics of cohabitation,” where the terms of recognition are never complete but continually revised in response to the other’s persistence.

To generalize accommodation, then, is to invert the logic of universality itself. It means understanding that no form of life stands outside dependency, that every system—conceptual, architectural, social—is provisional, corrigible, and in need of adjustment. It also resists the liberal moralism that casts accommodation as benevolent inclusion. Following Alison Kafer, inclusion often presupposes a preexisting norm to which others are invited; accommodation as an ethic refuses that premise. It begins instead from reciprocal vulnerability, from the recognition that living together requires ongoing reconfiguration on all sides.

Donna Haraway’s notion of response-ability resonates here: to be ethical is not to comply with a code but to cultivate the capacity to respond within situated networks of relation. To accommodate is to enact response-ability at every scale—interpersonal, institutional, ecological. It is a practice of slowing down, of refusing the smooth temporality of optimization in favor of attentiveness to the friction where worlds meet.

In the end, a general ethic of accommodation is neither sentimental nor reformist. It is an ontological realism: the admission that life proceeds only through continual adjustment, that nothing—body, language, law—ever fits without remainder. Rather than striving for the seamless world promised by design or ideology, such an ethic invites us to inhabit the world’s awkwardness, to treat dissonance as the very texture of relation. Such an ethic resists the ideology of universal design—the belief that perfect neutrality or total accessibility is achievable. As Puar notes in her critique of “right to maim,” inclusion often conceals new forms of exclusion, reinscribing normativity through the language of benevolence. A general ethic of accommodation thus refuses the promise of smoothness. It insists instead on friction, partiality, and situated repair as the texture of ethical life. It acknowledges that every accommodation displaces something else.

Extending this general ethic of accommodation to the ecological and planetary scale reframes environmental ethics not as stewardship or management, but as co-habitation within misfit worlds. The human relationship to the Earth, like the relationship between body and environment, is one of ongoing maladjustment and reciprocal dependency. Climate adaptation, often framed in technocratic or managerial terms, can instead be understood as a practice of accommodation: the collective effort to reattune life within shifting conditions rather than impose mastery over them. Haraway’s call to “make kin” and Stengers’ plea to “slow down reasoning” converge on this same ethos—a recognition that living ethically on a damaged planet requires learning to inhabit discomfort, to reconfigure the terms of coexistence without the promise of equilibrium. A planetary ethics of accommodation thus invites a mode of response that is neither redemptive nor despairing but responsive: an acknowledgment that both the human and the more-than-human are continually remaking one another in fragile, uneven, and necessary ways.

The Right to Maim

If accommodation reveals the contingency and co-constitutive nature of bodies and worlds, its refusal exposes the violence latent in the fantasy of self-sufficiency. A world that rejects accommodation seeks coherence through exclusion. It denies interdependence and substitutes it with ideals of independence, mastery, and optimization. This is not merely an ethical error but an ontological distortion: it attempts to secure life by erasing the conditions that make life possible.

The normative order that presumes perfect fit—between body and environment, human and world—renders misfit a kind of failure. As Garland-Thomson observes, the “seamlessness” of social and material design conceals its political nature. When bodies or minds cannot conform to this seamlessness, they are treated as errors to be corrected rather than as signals that the world itself requires reconfiguration. The result is a continuous reproduction of harm for anyone whose rhythms or vulnerabilities deviate from the dominant template of productivity and coherence.

Kafer’s critique of the “curative imaginary” is instructive here. The curative imaginary casts the future as a space of normalization: anything that stands in its way is framed as pathology to be overcome through technological or biomedical intervention. A world governed by this imaginary transforms difference into pathology and forecloses the possibility of mutual world-making. By demanding that everything be cured, it evacuates the political and ethical potential of misfit. The drive to eliminate friction becomes the drive to eliminate the relational.

Butler’s concept of precarity further clarifies the harm. When societies deny shared vulnerability, they produce hierarchies of grievability—determining whose suffering counts and whose exposure to harm is deemed acceptable. A non-accommodating world, then, is not only inattentive; it is structurally cruel. It treats interdependence as weakness, privatizes risk, and moralizes failure. The human subject that emerges under such conditions is the neoliberal ideal: autonomous, interchangeable, and endlessly self-correcting. Yet as Butler emphasizes, this is an ontological fiction sustained through systemic disavowal. The denial of dependency does not abolish vulnerability; it redistributes it unequally, rendering some lives disposable so that others may appear sovereign.

Puar pushes this analysis further by showing how biopolitical systems convert debility into a resource. In a world hostile to accommodation, debility is not simply neglected but actively produced—through economic precarity, environmental toxicity, and structural neglect. The state and market both thrive on populations that are kept in a perpetual state of half-functionality, just capable enough to sustain productivity but never secure enough to resist. The refusal of accommodation thus underwrites a necropolitical logic: life is managed through the calibration of exhaustion and repair.

Finally, Haraway’s ecological thought exposes the planetary dimension of this rejection. The refusal to accommodate—whether other species, ecosystems, or futures—extends the fantasy of human exceptionalism. It sustains extractive relations that render the Earth itself a maimed environment, stripped of its capacity to sustain complex forms of life. In such a world, non-accommodation becomes not only social or moral harm but planetary collapse—the exhaustion of relational possibility at every scale.

Taken together, these thinkers reveal that the rejection of accommodation is not simply a lack of attention but a coherent ideological formation: a metaphysics of separability. It sustains the illusion of autonomous subjects and self-sufficient systems, even as those systems depend upon hidden networks of dependency, maintenance, and sacrifice. The harm lies in the denial of this dependency—an ethical blindness that transforms the necessary work of relation into the stigma of failure. 

Psychological Accommodation: Affect, Cognition, and Relational Space

While disability discourse often foregrounds physical or material accommodations, the ethic of accommodation applies with equal force to psychological and affective life. Psychological accommodation involves the adjustments we make—individually, interpersonally, and institutionally—to allow for variation in cognition, emotion, perception, and memory. It recognizes that minds, like bodies, are situated within environments that can either amplify or diminish capacity, resilience, and participation. Just as a ramp or wider doorway allows a body to enter a room, affective and cognitive accommodations create space for minds to engage without coercion, judgment, or normative erasure.

From Garland-Thomson’s perspective on misfitting, psychological misfit is inseparable from social and material misfit. Individuals whose affective rhythms or cognitive patterns do not conform to dominant norms—whether due to neurodivergence, trauma, or mood variation—often encounter environments structured against their ways of perceiving and responding. The failure to accommodate psychologically produces isolation, stigma, and internalized failure. Here, Kafer’s critique of the curative imaginary resonates: the insistence on cognitive or emotional “correction” mirrors the insistence on bodily normalization. The ethical failure lies not in difference itself, but in the social expectation that difference must be erased for participation.

Butler’s notion of precarity illuminates the relational stakes of psychological accommodation. When affective variation is pathologized or ignored, individuals are rendered “less grievable,” their distress socially illegible. Non-accommodation of emotion, cognition, or trauma reproduces hierarchies of vulnerability, just as the absence of physical accommodations produces material disablement. Psychological accommodation, then, is a practice of affective recognition: it acknowledges and validates experience without demanding immediate alignment to normative expectations.

Haraway’s concept of response-ability extends naturally to psychological life. Ethical attentiveness requires a willingness to slow down, to listen, to make room for others’ modes of perception, memory, and sense-making. This entails structural and relational modifications: communication practices that allow for delayed or fragmented responses, social norms that tolerate affective unpredictability, and institutions that support mental rest, reflection, and repair. Psychological accommodation is thus inseparable from relationality: it depends upon mutual adjustment and responsiveness, and it cultivates resilience at the scale of the individual and the collective.

Puar’s analysis of debility underscores the stakes: failure to accommodate psychologically produces harm not only for individuals but also for social systems. Marginalized or neurodivergent minds are often pressured into overperformance, self-surveillance, or emotional labor to conform to inflexible norms. The psychological cost is exhaustion, burnout, and the internalization of the world’s misfit as personal deficiency. By contrast, an ethic of psychological accommodation recognizes misfit as structural, relational, and inevitable, and treats it as the basis for ethical and political intervention rather than moral judgment. In sum, psychological accommodation expands the general ethic beyond the body and the material to include the mind, affect, and relational cognition. It is an ongoing practice of creating space for difference, validating experience, and reconfiguring social, institutional, and interpersonal expectations.

 LLM