 Critical disability theory is able to challenge traditional disability studies and engage in transformative, intersectional, and coalitional critical work (Ellis et al. 2018). This is thanks in part to its heritage in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and especially the influence of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Burghardt 2011: 3: Meekosha &amp; Shuttleworth 2009: 51–52). Broadly understood, critical theory identifies, describes, and analyzes the subsumed or hidden origins of social and political culture, discourses, and institutions. In these ways, critical theory also exposes the contingency of ideas or circumstances often presumed natural or unchangeable. Diverse critical theories unite in the sense that they target ideology, distrust appearances, and often point out false consciousness. Critical disability theory thus allies itself with Continental philosophical methods, including phenomenology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and neo-Marxist approaches (Kearney &amp; Rainwater 1996: 195). Continental philosophy involves a widespread rejection of meaning narrowly rooted in science, and it responds to the crisis of the collapse of meaning and temptation to nihilism in modernity generally (Kearney 1986: 2). Under this umbrella, critical theory finds that meaning has social origins, often from “historical strategies of domination and liberation”; therefore, critical theory is interested in “the social relation of the human subject to the historical conditions of production or alienation” (Kearney 1986: 2; see the entry on  critical theory).