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Intersectionality: Queered, cripped, sexed, gendered and raced - for
tomorrow we ride
Part of this paper is taken from Goodley, D. (fc). Dis/Ability Studies.
London: Routledge.
Why might it be helpful to examine the ways in which disability and ability are coconstituted? In what ways do the processes of disablism and ableism differ from
but also feed into one another? How can activists, researchers, allies and
practitioners associated with what we might loosely define as the disability field
address the contemporary concerns facing disabled and non-disabled people in a
time of austerity? To what extent does an analysis of disability immediately evoke
an analysis of ability?
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What might be gained by articulately the notion that we are entering a time of
‘dis/ability studies’ - when both categories of disability and ability are expanded
upon as a response to the global politics of neoliberalism and hyper-capitalism?
When does disability become a moment of celebration and desire that radically
challenges the preferred desire to be non-disabled? How can queer and crip
politics be combined with materialist theories of oppression? How can we write
dis/ability theory in ways that are accessible and challenging for one another? To
what extent are practitioners of health, social care and educational settings already
involved in radical and enabling dis/ability practices? How can these practices
feed into and dialogue with the politics of disabled people?
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In my forthcoming book, I pose and repose these questions. Along the way I
tackle, address, play with and seek to answer these questions. One of the reasons
that I came to write this book lay in a sense I had that (certain kinds of) disability
studies (at least in Britain) were in danger of backing themselves into a theoretical
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and political cul de sac. While disability is, of course, the master signifier for many
disability studies activists, scholars and researchers, we have witnessed the
occlusion of issues emerging from equally important politicised identities and
transformative political movements. Race, gender, age, sexuality, class intersect
with dis/ability in many complex ways but, too often, they are sidelined in pursuit
of trying to understand the master signifier of disability. The Marxist geographer
David Harvey (1996: 116) acknowledged about his beloved Marx that ‘there is
much that is lacking (or only lightly touched upon) in Marx’s schema, including
the sexual and erotic, the gendering and racing of bodies, the psychoanalytic and
representational, the linguistic and the rhetorical, the imaginary and the mythical’.
At times, working in the British and to some extents European context, I have
found similar deficiencies in the schema of disability theory and disability theorists.
Because politics and theory are so deeply rooted and connected with one other
then the very act of theorising the disabling society – or the ableist world – evokes
a moment of political reflection. Harvey (2011: 102) draws on the work of Jacques
Ranciere to remark that ‘politics is the sphere of a community that can only ever
be contentious’. The same observation can be about studies of disablism and
ableism. There is much more to just thinking about dis/ablism: many of us also
want to change and disrupt these processes. Consequently, following Harvey
(2011: 103) we are left with a simple decision to make ‘whose side are you on and
which and whose interests do you seek to protect?’ (Harvey, 2011: 103).
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In this text my alliances are with disabled people, non-normative, queer, crip and
marginalized Others and their allies who contest and challenge the conditions of
dis/ablism. This is not to suggest that I am unproblematically located on the nonnormative side of the binary. That I have the priviledged position to be able to
find time to write a book would suggest that I occupy an academic position that
gives me the time and space to, well, think and write. Many people in Britain and
across the globe do not share this rich position. One could argue that there is
nothing more ableist in character than a sole academic, reading, writing and
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banging on about the world. Whilst accepting this contrary role my text seeks to
be politicised: to engage with the lives and ambitions of the non-normative; to
expose the inherent contradictions of dominant positions of ableism; to critique
the conditions of disablism and to illuminate the possibilities of the nonnormative, the non-ableist, the crip and the queer. Paraphrasing Johnston (2009)
when dis/ability studies succeed they do so when they open up frameworks for
exploring how ableist assumptions mediate and disability experiences complicate
claims to culture. This joint project of what Campbell (2012) terms stalking
ableism whilst contesting disablism is key to this text. I am also interested, though,
in the meaning making associated with each side of the disability-ability binary and
the messy stuff in the middle. As I acknowledge in chapter 5, much of what is
written here has emerged from debate and collaboration with others. One of the
key lessons I have learnt from working with, for example, disabled children and
their families is that disability (and its opposite) is not simply a signifier of sociopolitical suffering. Dis/ability is also a moment of contemplation: a moment to
think again not only about what it means to be dis/abled but also, more
profoundly, what it means to be human. There is something deeply empirical
about disability studies: especially in finding evidential material about what it
might mean to be human.
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What could it mean to take an intersectional approach to the analysis of the
parallel processes of disablism and ableism? In a time of austerity, economic
recession, rising unemployment and an ever-growing divide between rich and
poor across the globe, to what extent could it be argued that comprehending
disablism and ableism requires entangled engagements with processes of racism,
homophobia and sexism? When one evokes the image of ‘the able’ to what extent
are other processes associated with 'the white', 'the straight', 'the Anglo-Saxon' and
'the male'? And, crucially, what strategies for subversion emerge at the nexus of
these intersections? In chapter 3 of my book I argue that modes of ableist cultural
reproduction and disabling material conditions can never be divorced from other
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ideologies of hetero/sexism, racism, homophobia, colonialism, imperialism,
patriarchy and capitalism. I attend to some intersections of disablism with other
forms of oppression and, simultaneously, demonstrate the ways in which ableism
is linked to white, Western and European, Global North, male, straight, working,
mentally healthy capitalist preoccupations.
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I seek to bestow a shadowy background to the conceptual category of 'dis/ability'
developed in more detail in the book. And it want to do this, in part, through
reference to intersectionality.
The phrase intersectionality came from the work of African American feminists
such as Patricia Hill Collins who foregrounded the need to conceptualise
overlapping political agendas around feminism and black civil rights. The key
question I want to ask is
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What we do mean when we adopt an intersectionalist approach to studies of
disablism and ableism?
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The first response to this question touches the body and specifically those ‘bodies
that
buck
the
normative
sexual
aesthetic
(black/brown
bodies,
gay/lesbian/transsexual/intersex bodies, disabled bodies, poor bodies, and so on)’
(Erevelles, 2011: 2168). Our bodies are vital sites for the playing out of
psychological, neurological and physiological ableist fantasies. Autonomy,
independence and rationality are virtues desired by neoliberal capitalism, its
institutions of family, school, workplace, promulgated through popular culture. As
soon as we begin to unsettle these ideals – uprooting them from neutral,
naturalised origins and exposing their phantasmagorical character – we quickly
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find that they ‘co-exist alongside those associated with race, sexuality and gender’
(Erevelles, 2011: 2169). In short, the normate citizen as Garland Thomson termed
it (read: ideal, responsible and autonomous citizen) is ‘resplendent in his masculine,
heterosexual, able-bodied, and propertied existence, and of course, always
magnanimous in his relationships to Otherness’ (Erevelles, 2002b: 9). Body
politics are inscribed upon our fleshy selves in a time of receeding public sector
services, welfare state support and increased privatization of progress. For
Erevelles, patriarchy, heteronormativity, compulsory able-bodiedness, and
institutional racism are mutually constitutive discourses. The embodied
consequences of these discourses can be found in those ableist, white, straight
men that, ironically, were responsible for markets crashing, unregulated capital
and unethical commerce: the Merchant or city banker. When Micheal Moore
ridiculed these cultural clowns – dismissing them as Stupid White Men – he
perhaps unknowingly foregrounded the need to maintain an intersectional analysis
of the idealized citizen of contemporary capitalism. We should also remember that
‘merchant banker’ is cockney rhyming slang (Google it).
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The second response to an intersectional analysis relates to the outskirts of
disability and ableist studies. As McRuer (2006: 154) asks ‘who haunts the margins
of the work that we do, the margins of the feminist, queer, and disabled worlds?
What would an ongoing commitment to those spectral presences entail?’. Too
often the work of disability studies takes place in the cosy bourgeious confines of
university settings. These are also places of performativity: where academic careers
are made or lost on measures of research income generation, publishing in peer
review journals and the ever expanding globalization of educational provision in
the name of institutional status. Academia is in danger of losing its civic duties to
those members of society who occupy the most marginalized and disenfranchised
locations. Intersectionality yearns to reach out to those at the periphery. Any
theoretical engagement with dis/ability that is also an encounter with race,
sexuality, gender, class, nation state will inevitably invite a consideration of some
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of society’s most oppressed. Intersectionality, then, has a political motif: reaching
out to those on the periphery.
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The third response relates to what Erevelles (1996: 52) terms the process of
revision. As she puts it, ‘in what ways can we, from the vantage point of disability,
(re)write the theoretical terrain occupied by the other axes of difference such as
race, class and gender?’. She recommends creating a space of contestation and a
point of departure; ‘to (re)theorise both disability and gender as well as to draw
out its implications for race, class and caste’. Something new happens when we
connect disability and other transformative political categories. This is not to
argue that marginalised positions of disabled, queer, raced, classed or gendered all
share the same histories of oppression nor exactly the same fights for political
recognition. Accruing a label of psychiatric disorder because one is gay or lesbian
should be refused as an act of psychiatric violence. On the other hand, gaining a
label of psychiatric illness might, for someone whom hears voices for example,
provide access to services that may help them live their day-to-day lives. In both
cases, when psychiatry becomes the dominant story to speak of an individual’s
difference then it is likely that there will be similar experiences of pathologisation
and, no doubt, shared resources when it comes to political agitation and resistance.
Yet, while fights around the processes of disablism might differ to many extents
from those around racism, sexism, homophobia, we can find some shared ground
in relation to struggles with ableism. Indeed, one might argue that the arena of
ableism provides the theoretical terrain Erevelles talks about; broaching alliances
between categories of humanity. Meanwhile, studies of disablism continue
alongside these anti-ableist alliances but disablist battles are often more honed,
specific and potentially segregationist than ones associated with ableism. Not all of
us experience disablism. We are all plunged into the mire of ableism whether we
like it or not. Do ableist studies, then, provide a useful context for comradeship
and shared politicisation? Can the complex entangled practices of ableism be
contested in order to benefit all of us who fall into the category of negated other?
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This leads to a fourth response to our question that pitches analysis at the level of
the nation and the geopolitical. For Ramlow (2006: 172) we need to launch a
rejection of the heteronormative fantasy of a compulsorily ablebodied nation and
seek to describe the work of a multiply transformative consciousness. This,
Ramlow suggests, will involve connecting across fields of difference, rather than
being immobilized by the fantasy of normate physical and national unity (Ramlow,
2006: 180). As we saw in the last chapter on ableism: nation states are founded
upon the modernist neoliberal concept of the complete, civilised, responsible, able,
normative, self-serving individual citizen. One of our tasks might be to reject
these founding assumptions because of their defunct and exclusionary qualities.
Clearly, some of the more populist and stereotypical comparisons of nations are
made along the lines of development, progression and civilization. Some nations,
it is argued in more right-wing newspapers, lack the sophistication of the West.
The global soldier, according to Hardt and Negri (2000), is not simply one
involved in warfare in a foreign land: s/he is a biopolitical social worker spreading
the word of Western democracy across culturally baron lands. We might say, too,
that the contemporary soldier is a carrier of neoliberal philosophies. And ableism
is at the heart of such ideas.
The remaining arguments of my chapter, then, try to unpack some of the
contributions afforded in connecting – and perhaps to some extent
problematizing – queer, feminist and postcolonial theories with those emanating
from studies of ableism and disablism. For now, however, it is important to
recognize the disablist and ableist state of play.
Conclusions: For tomorrow we ride
Disability, crip, feminist and postcolonial studies are each motivated by, to
paraphrase Ramlow (2006: 169), a critique of binary discourses and social policies
that condition subjectivity and structure society. Critique feeds the building of
alternatives; ‘that dismantling the disciplinary entanglements of racism,
heteronormativity, and compulsory able-bodiedness (Ramlow, 2006: 169). It
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would seem that one of the recent populist moves within disability studies is the
call for raw empirical data. But what about building a theoretical responses to
disablsim, ableism in times of austerity? Part of building a new alternative is an
acknowledgement that human beings are interdependent (rather than autonomous
and independent) mutually dependent and desiring interconnections . We are, as
Ramlow would have it, alliance builders; bridging and border crossing. This feels
like a desirable place to be: bound across one another. For McRuer (2006) and
Erevelles (2011) coming out crip celebrates the transgressive act of recognising
what we are not. This involves outing what was once unsayable, invisible, that
which was actively silenced. We can be find hope and resource ‘in the ‘coming out’
narrative of Other students located at the interstices of race, class, gender and
sexuality’ (Erevelles, 2006: 2160). A critically disabled position that borders crip
and queer ideas invites for Erevelles a reimagining of normative conceptions of
what kinds of bodies/subjects are worthy. This is a commitment ‘to the end of
hegemonic conceptions of health, embodiment, visual culture, representation, and
spatiality and to the construction of what I’ve elsewhere termed convivial visual
rhetorics of embodiment (McRuer 2012, 234). Peers, Brittain, and I are focused
in this issue on a crip excess that is articulated through what Peers describes as
‘‘diverse, interrelated, and transnational resistance strategies that have emerged
and spilled over within and against common sites of containment’’ (McRuer,
2012b: 210). But conviviality can also breed resistance. Intersectional analyses
provide fertile grounds for such responses.
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