In 2014, Microsoft advertised that their Microsoft Band wearable helps us monitor our activities, get to know ourselves, improve our abilities, and, hence, 'be a better human.' The ad illustrates vividly what scholars from sociology, dis/ability studies, fat studies, and related disciplines have pointed to in recent years. Today, the challenge to endlessly pursue the improvement of our abilities has become the human condition, pivoting on the body but also demanding a particular mindset (Rose 2007; Pausé 2015; Metzl and Kirkland 2010). The systemic, normative, and exclusionary power of the call for self-improvement and ability has been captured by the concept of 'ableism.' 'Ableism,' as Fiona Kumari Campbell (2009, 5) points out, 'produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human.' Aberrations from this normative ideal (Davis 1995, 35) emerge 'as a diminished state of being human,' (Campbell 2009, 5) as something to be either treated, cured, and worked on, or marginalized and excluded. In an early landmark article, Robert McRuer (2002, 2006) has captured the normative power of abilityand particularly of able-bodiednessby calling it 'compulsory.' In McRuer's concept, the character of compulsion is less one of coercion, but rather one of obligation, with the danger of rendering abject those who are not striving for ability. Fittingly, the Microsoft ad promises to help us navigate this path more successfully, yet, at the same time, is couched as an imperative. Research questions critically addressing ability and ableism in contemporary culture and society have lately been thriving in various sociological and cultural studies fields. They build on the work done by the interdisciplinary dis/ability studies, which for a number of years have explored the sociology and politics of various kinds of disabilities, yet have also underlined the systemic character of a culture and politics of difference between 'normal' and 'disabled' (Tremain 2001; Goodley 2014; Waldschmidt 2017). 1 Just think of the slash commonly used in 'dis/ability' in order to indicate that disability and ability are CONTACT Jürgen Martschukat