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This paper explores the embodied experience of three women living with an episodic or fluctuating disability within the context of relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis. I argue that this shifting embodiment is subjectively, performatively, and interpretively experienced in discrediting ways across social, organizational, and local contexts in women's lives. Drawing on findings from my doctoral thesis, three interpretive themes inform the analysis: not looking disabled, more than meets the eye, and institutional bafflement. Respectively, these themes pertain to a woman's physical appearance, cultural assumptions about disabled embodiment, and the contestation of social, organizational, and local institutional practices shaping women's lives. These themes hold implications for an ‘embodied politics' in rethinking the manner in which episodic disability is experientially, conceptually, and socio-politically recognized as a legitimate tier of the experience of disability.

Persons living with episodic disabilities who apply for long-term income assistance in Ontario, Canada are often denied eligibility because of the questionable legitimacy of their shifting medical conditions. Since there are no official categories for persons with episodic disabilities to fit in because they are not entirely well (and employable) nor entirely sick (and unemployable), they are judged as ‘not disabled enough’ within the existing parameters of assistance. Drawing on a series of longitudinal, semi-structured interviews with eight respondents in Toronto, all of whom applied for, but were denied, long-term assistance, we examine the tension between how episodic disabilities are embodied versus the manner in which ‘disability status’ is legislatively constructed. Implications reconsidering the logistics of fixed categories and strategies addressing the wider spectrum of the experience of disability for policy are addressed. Keywords: disability, episodic, Ontario Disability Support Program, ODSP, definitions, embodiment, legitimate

The organization of contemporary labour markets has radically altered the nature of work and its embodied or bodily performance. Changes from standard, permanent jobs to non-standard or precarious work arrangements have increasingly become the normative template for many workers, including persons with disabilities. Drawing on findings from 13 qualitative interviews associated with ‘Project EDGE,’ Episodic Disabilities in the Global Economy, I describe how Canadian workers with “episodic” or fluctuating disabilities experience and negotiate barriers to work within precarious work environments in Toronto, Ontario. Implications that consider the episodic dimension of disability for workforce participation and employment policy are considered.