Durbin 1 Tyler Durbin Professor Cheesewright Communicating Gender and Sexuality 11 May 2017 TODO’s: add narrative personal experiences - Before I had surgery, limping, staying on couch - When I was in wheelchair, school stuff, etc. dorm - After surgery, leg brace, working - Post-leg brace; random knee slips, constant fear The Crip Killjoy: Deconstructing Ableist Epistemologies The personal is political - the privileges and oppressions one encounters shape the way a body can exist within a social space; citizen, criminal, patriot, degenerate. Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life explores how feminism is not simply a political theory, but a way of being within the world. Similarly, other oppressions also translate into a coded mode of existence, such as how racism controls the way bodies of different colors interact with each other, and classism controls the ability to access necessities and luxuries. The personal is political - how our own body is situated in social space provides a standpoint of political being in the world. Recently, I suffered a knee injury; I tore my meniscus, the muscle that holds the kneecap in place, and fractured the bottom of my femur. For the first time in my life, I have had to experience the world from a position of disability.1 I have been primarily confined to a wheelchair, and have been unable to continue the more active For the purposes of this paper, my discussion of disability will not be about something permanent necessarily, but of being non-able bodied in temporal space. Ahmed agrees bodies who experienced disability but recover back to able-bodiness don’t engage in the world from the same position of able-normativity as they did previously, due to their encounter with disability (Ahmed 182). 1 Durbin 2 pace of my life. Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy conceptualizes that a feminist can be a figure that destroys the happiness of others, especially those who do not have to experience the oppressions a woman may feel, but this ‘killing’ of joy in others may provide an avenue for spotlighting injustices. A body that experiences disability can also assume a similar position - a crip killjoy - and carries the ability to rupture the epistemology of the ableist standpoint and radically change the way bodies interact within socially constructed space.2 Sara Ahmed’s discussion of how bodies are fragile and breakable brought upon her a reflection of her own able-bodiedness and her mother’s disability. Able-bodiedness is a privilege almost all take for granted and hardly reflect on, including Ahmed and myself before we had our own encounters with disability. Confronting our own able-bodiedness is important because “the experiences you are protected from having; the thoughts you do not have to think” transform the way bodies interact in social space (Ahmed 181). Furthermore, the repetition of engaging in the world through the assumption of able-bodiedness materially creates a world accessible only for those who are abled bodies. Ahmed speaks of encountering ‘bumps and walls’ - the points in which people break under the pressure of a society constructed with some bodies on the margin. She describes that ableism operates similarly: “Clumsiness: when a world is what you bump into” (Ahmed 183). The positionality of the crip is at a crossing with the accessibility to the world itself. My confinement to a wheelchair had barred my independent access to almost every aspect of my life that existed previous to my injury. I could no longer continue to live in my second-story room, because there was no elevator. I could no longer drive my car, because of the decreased state of awareness caused by my pain medication. I could no longer go to the bathroom by myself, because I couldn’t push my way through weighted doors. A crip killjoy: angry that the world was not made for their access. While crip is a word that retains a history of violence, such as the term queer, Ahmed explores how its reclamation is important for intellectual work “because they keep alive that history: negation [acts] as a political sensation” (Ahmed 185). 2 Durbin 3 In his journal article, Lennard Davis argues that norms are at the core of social life; either you follow them or defy them, but nonetheless they control your being. Able-bodiedness is seen as a norm, an assumption for how bodies encounter social space; able-normativity, how bodies are assumed to be able to perform as expected (Davis 1). In order to understand the normalcy behind ableism, we have to depart away from examining the crip body alone, but also investigate how ablebodiedness became normative in the first place. Davis explores that the idea of the average person developed from 19th century statistics, where the norm for height weight, gender, and other phenotypic features became public knowledge through France’s medical data. These statistical findings carried sentiment over to the rise of industrialization and the creation of the bourgeois class. The bourgeois man had to distinguish himself from the lesser peasants via the adoption of luxuries that were inaccessible to the peasants. As a result, the bourgeois man had a certain style, demeanor, and character, that was unique to his economic standing After industrialization eliminated the agricultural peasant (and instead created the working proletariat), the bourgeois created delineations between those who could and could not produce: women and crips (3-4). In the postindustrial world, where infrastructure, transportation, and social life are created for able-bodied consumers, able-bodiedness became the normalcy of civil society. But while it seems that norms will continue to exist despite those who defy them, an antagonism to the normalcy of able-bodiedness can disrupt the epistemology of ableism. The bigger the wall you hit, the louder your impact will be: when every aspect of life is inaccessible for the crip, almost every encounter they have with others is an opportunity to be a killjoy. The feminist killjoy is described by Ahmed as a woman who disrupts the ignorance and comfort of those who do not experience sexism and heteronormativity. What the killjoy says and does forces those with privilege to confront their dominant position. Even though those are only actions, the personal beliefs of the feminist killjoy chain her to a political being of negation; but, Durbin 4 negation can be used as an act of political sensation (Ahmed 185). Along with the feminist killjoy, I believe other marginalized groups, such as non-abled bodies, can also occupy this position as a killjoy. As referenced in her dialogue on disability, Ahmed explores the social rejection of Audre Lorde’s choice to not wear a prosthetic breast after the surgery from her growing cancer. Her coworkers policed her body by ignoring her socially due to the choice of her bodies presentation (184). Not only is the crip blocked from entering the accessibility of the world, but also the accessibility of social life. The crip killjoy is “the one who gets in the way of the happiness of others by the way” they block the accessibility for those whom its constant (184). In this sense, I too have been a crip killjoy: my presence in a wheelchair has slowed people down, has blocked the way people were walking, and has prevented able-bodied people from carrying out their normal routine and hobbies. While this seems to be a sole position of negation, I believe the killjoy possess an optimism fundamental to their existence. The killjoy’s “bod[y] need[s] to get in the way to open up a world to others” (184). This disruption to normalcy provides the killjoy with the possibility of changing the way others view the world, and by extension the possibility of deconstructing the epistemology of able-normativity. Similarly, ‘standpoint epistemology’ holds that a body's position in social space shapes the way in which they see and encounter the world. One’s positionality determines the ways in which they even come to think about it. Bodies who experience privileges and oppressions also manifest into standpoint epistemologies which translate into how society is organized writ large. They way one thinks about the world also informs the way they engage it. Furthermore, differing standpoints operate absent recognition of other standpoints; one can see from the perspective of their social location, but cannot get the same clarity about the position of others. Patricia Collins writes about black feminist epistemology as a standpoint, but notes that “a subordinate group not only experiences a different reality than a group that rules, but a subordinate group may interpret that Durbin 5 reality differently than a dominant group” (Collins 5). Everyone engages the world through their own standpoint, and the way they think about the world originates from their social location. As result, the standpoints of marginalized positions can disrupt the standpoints of dominant groups. Collins argues that a “key reason that standpoints of oppressed groups are discredited and suppressed by the more powerful is that self-defined standpoints can stimulate oppressed groups to resist their domination” (6). When bodies of privilege operate through their own standpoint, such as able-bodiedness, their way of thinking how bodies interact within social space materially creates a world accessible for those with able-bodiedness: able-normativity. The role of the crip killjoy is to disrupt the happiness and comfort of those who do not consider disability, and as result show how the crip cannot access the world as it is constructed. The crip killjoy forces others to confront how their bodies, their being, pushes other bodies to a state of inaccessibility, a state of social exile. In this way, the crip killjoy has the potential to rupture the ableist epistemology of civil society. They create cracks and fissures of hope for restructuring the way bodies can access and interact within social space. While Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life offers unique and important concepts of understanding intersectional feminism, she highlights the significance of how bodies are personally situated and provides avenues for political resistance. While I cannot experience what it means to be a woman in a world of sexist heteropatriarchy, I gained insight towards what it feels like to encounter disability. Even though my broken leg is only temporary, Ahmed highlights that “You fracture more than a bone when you fracture a bone… it is no longer as it was before; you are no longer as you were” (Ahmed 182). While I will eventually resume my able-bodiedness, I will still retain my contact with disability - I will still hold onto the time I spent as a crip killjoy. This is the power to disrupt the normalcy of ableist epistemology that the crip killjoy has. My radical shift in how my presently disabled body engages in social space will forever change the way I see the world Durbin 6 for others with disability. This is the power of the crip killjoy: through negation comes creation. The absence of able-bodied privilege allowed for the creation of a new political vision: one that carries the ability to rupture the epistemology of an ableist standpoint, and radically change the way bodies interact within socially constructed space. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017. Collins, Patricia. “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought”. Common Grounds and Crossroads: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Women's Lives, The University of Chicago Press, Illinois. Vol. 14, No. 4. Summer 1989. Davis, Lennard. “Constructing Normalcy”. The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd edition. New York: Ruotledge Press, 2006.
