Guest Post
by
Jennifer Scuro[2]
People with disabilities have forgotten how to suffer and be still.
----Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (2008, 35)[1]
In my forthcoming book, Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies,[3] my goal was to tentatively map out the scale and scope of ableism. There was one major (but, I hope, at least more than one), important outcome: that the primary latent, but pervasive, operation of ableism is in its institutional and intergenerational forms of dismemberment. This dismemberment (as I refer to it) operates literally and figuratively, isolating and alienating, devaluing and dehumanizing lives based on a preference for the normative, able-bodied, and neurotypical. By describing some of what I found to be the more problematic cases and by inverting affective assumptions that are sedimented into the more familiar social and cultural (and particularly bureaucratic) institutions, I wanted to undermine everyday ways of “being in the world” as they naturalize an ableist system of dismemberment. The "everyday, par for the course" and "business as usual" modes of worlded expectation and belonging are not benign; rather, they amplify ableism, while conserving and recollecting the normate.[4]
Important for me in addressing ableism, as Siebers indicates, was to account for how it is that the lives of people with disabilities are precariously preconditioned upon these dismembering operations and can no longer existentially afford unacknowledged ableist indifference.[5] I would like to offer a working case by which we might better disclose how physical and environmental conditions predispose some people to greater vulnerability and dependencies than others, viciously and arbitrarily. That stated, I would also caution that in addressing ableism, a suspension of paternalistic attitudes of pity and charity is required.[6]
Rosa Moreno is a single parent living in Reynosa, Mexico and had been working in a factory making LG flatscreen televisions. In The Guardian, in an article titled, “When I lost my hands making flatscreens I can’t afford, nobody would help me” (Jun 11, 2015), she described the effects of no longer being able to work after a dismembering injury: “Injured workers like me don’t ask for much of the billions these companies make off of our work. We just want enough to take care of our families.” Systematic and well-established institutional dismemberments can mean life or death for people with disabilities, rendered as lives deficient, undesirable, disposable.
Following Fiona Kumari Campbell (2009, 196):
Ableism is a map of a simulated territory that denotes the homelands of humanness, the dispensable beasts and changelings existing on the perimeter. Ableist landscapes communicate the values of culture, its characterological objects, and secure the transmission of the “memory” of a body of people. In these landscapes rest a form of anamnesis that orients between the past, the present and the future.[7]
As ableism intersects with other complex, deadly and harmful biases like trans-misogyny, misogynoir, anti-black racism, then those lives deemed (or even suspected[8]) deficient like Moreno’s are further rendered precarious, which is to say, they are not grievable lives.[9] I want to suggest that there is further work to be done not just in identifying ableism, but in the resistance and confrontation to it. Ableism becomes a functional currency in the internalized attitudes and externalized phobias of individuals; it is also discreetly exacted and inherited institutionally, globally—in neoliberal market systems as well as locally in the daily business of educational administration or between service providers and their patients and clients. To move in the direction of anti-ableist ethical address—in that we attend to the matter of ableism with due urgency and even emergency—I suggest a kind of en-membering as an anamnesis (closer to what Campbell suggests rather than an anamnesis as a re-membering or recollecting exercise). What would it mean to reinvigorate the fabric that binds each to the other? To reinvest in new systems of fabrication, in the making of tools and prosthetics that are anti-ableist,[10] while divesting in the dismembering operations of what is now predominantly ableist terrains, and to do so, as I argue in my book, “radically and whole cloth”?
Morena’s situation highlights the kind of harms an ableist system exacts: the precariousness of an accident renders an already vulnerable worker and parent into a situation of full emergency. A call for help needed to be issued in a way that lays bare her dependence on anonymous strangers. It is this existential precariousness—that each of us depends on anonymous strangers for our existence—that manifests as material, socio-economic precarities in which some lives are rendered more expendable and disposable than others, less desirable than others. Already economically and politically vulnerable, she is rendered expendable, dispossessed of employment and income, harmed without redress. It is worth noting an additional aspect of this operation: this “disablement” will be handed down as a dismemberment to her children in a form of generated and generational precarity.
Addressing ableism comes with an urgent ethical and political demand, and therefore, I would also argue that those of us in the profession of philosophy need to give this greater sustained attention;[11] insofar as lives are made precarious because of the dominance of ableist ideology and its unchecked institutional operations and affections, each one of us is more morally culpable than we might have previously imagined. This is what, in my book, I describe as the “sticky” character of inherited ableism, especially as it continues to have its most sticky features attached and transferable without contest. I should add that even if we might free up and unstick one area of ableist inheritance—say, making the language we use less unreflectively ableist or making common spaces more accessible and inclusive—even with these efforts, the need for due diligence in resisting and confronting ableism, often with a corresponding urgency, remains. Even successful efforts to undo and address ableism do not or will not necessarily translate as applicable to some other, equally problematic aspect of ableism’s “stickiness.”[12]
Another interesting aspect of what I have found to be the strange stickiness of ableism, that it can be defended or operate despite good intention, is described well by Sunaura Taylor:[13]
The ways in which romantic and conservative notions of self-sufficiency, productivity and independence are entangled in contemporary discussions of animal welfare and sustainability is troubling … [and the] idea that some dependent individuals are less valuable and more justifiably exploitable because they are understood as burdens who offer nothing of value back to their communities . . . has had a long and troubling history for disabled humans as well (2014, 117–118).
These notions—self-sufficiency, productivity and independence—I treat here as a point of linkage with a neoliberal ideology that negotiates precarity in relation to arbitrary privilege, diminishing precarity for some, while amplifying it for others: Who has become a “burden”? How might we efficiently relieve ourselves of this so-called burden?[14] In what is now a “Trump administration,” the ways in which the system of economic and political neoliberalism have come to “despise dependency as weakness” and as “intrinsically undignified,” must be addressed in their multiplication and “stickiness.”[15] In fact, I think this state of affairs is a situation of true emergency and is an affective assumption deeply engrained in American exceptionalism, shaping national debates on the use and distribution of resources, particularly economic and environmental ones.[16] As a Levinasian by training (and preference), I imagine that these systemic, unaccounted-for dismembering operations of ableism can best be described as “a first injustice before all justice.”[17]
Notes
[1] From Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory (MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
[2] Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of New Rochelle, NY. Author of The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (Rowman & Littlefield 2017) and Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lexington Books, forthcoming Oct 2017).
[3] Passages from this post are excerpted from this manuscript. A description of Addressing Ableism is online here.
[4] Defined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as: “the corporeal incarnation of cultures collective, unmarked, normative characteristics” in “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” published in Feminist Disability Studies, (Kim Q. Hall, ed., Indiana UP., 2011, p.23).
[5] For example, see “For Defeat of Trumpcare, Thank Disability Rights Activists, Not John McCain” by Jake Johnson for CommonDreams.org, (July 28, 2017), online here.
[6] A very good example of this paternalism is narrated by Eva Kittay in “The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield” in Metaphilosophy, July 2009 (Vol. 40, Nos. 3–4, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., pp. 607–627). See also Stella Young’s TED talk defining and arguing against ‘inspiration porn’ (April 2014. Online: https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much).
[7] Emphasis added. From The Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
[8] See Jay Dolmage’s Disability Rhetoric (Syracuse UP, 2014) on this point and what I think is a significant part of the emotive content of ableist ideology: “we have always worried about bodies.” The “we” that Dolmage is invoking here is what I argue is part of a greater membership and investment in Western somatophobia and the preoccupations of “fixing” disability, medically or genetically. As he states it, at the heart of truly ableist preoccupations, is “an obsession about who cannot learn, a cataloguing of deficiencies” (289).
[9] I utilized Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso Books, 2004) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Verso Books 2010) to make this case. As she states it: “If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense. … The precarity of life imposes an obligation upon us” (2010, 1, 2).
[10] In my chapter on prosthesis, I blur the distinction between tools and prosthetics arguing that the failures are always unthinkable. Specifically, I state:
When tools break as with when prosthetics no longer work, I want to argue that this is where any of us are vulnerable to the tragic. I do not find something phenomenally distinctive when a construction crane breaks—in that it is a tragic situation—than when a motorized wheelchair fails, to when someone dies of malaria because they do not have access to mosquito nets. What makes the construction crane related to the motorized wheelchair to the mosquito net? It is that each shows how dependent each person can be to tools, large or small; the precariousness of our existence is in how we might not have tools that we need for survival or that tools break down, particularly and tragically render vulnerable bodies precarious in their failure, and particularly when we need them most to work.
If we follow through with this philosophical insight—that all tools are prosthetics—then what follows becomes more open-ended: that tools created for mass market consumption also make for created dependencies.
[11] This is to argue alongside and in defense of Shelley Tremain’s body of work. See “Ableist Language and Philosophical Associations” (July 11, 2011) posted on New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science blog, “Introducing Feminist Philosophy of Disability” in Disability Studies Quarterly, (Vol. 33, No. 4), “Disabling Philosophy” for The Philosopher’s Magazine, (April Issue 65, 2014) and most recently, “Philosophy and the Use of Phineas Gage” posted on Discrimination and Disadvantage blog (Mar. 28, 2017).
[12] For instance, arguments in defense of disability pride through wellbeing narratives (that one can live well ‘despite’ disability) cannot fully confront or address the ableist connotations that might follow these narratives. One might have to still ‘explain’ oneself, one’s particular riveted situation to the precariousness of certain kinds of impairments (say, physical or mental), or, worse, can devolve into debates about who is ‘more disabled’ than whom. Without confronting ableism more fully, some of its ideological assumptions and affective inheritances will remain without notice.
[13] Sunaura Taylor, “Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care” in Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals & the Earth, (Carol Adams and Lori Gruen, eds. NY: Bloomsbury, 2014).
[14] Taylor goes on to argue against the binarization of dependence and independence and instead for a model of sustainable interdependence, questioning the assumptions embedded in the binary: “Disability asks us to question our assumptions about who counts as a ‘productive member of society’ and what sort of activities are seen as productive. It asks us to question the things we take for granted—our rationality, the way we move, the way we perceive the world. Animals ethics also requires critical engagement with our assumptions about who is valuable and who is exploitable and a reimagining of what it means to contribute to the world” (2014, 120).
[15] I want to thank Joel Michael Reynolds and Devonya Havis for their kind feedback.
[16] See, for example, Andrew Harnish’s “Ableism and the Trump phenomenon” in Disability & Society (Vol 32, Issue 3, published online: Feb 15, 2017, pp. 423-428).
[17] From Levinas’ Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. (New York, NY: Continuum, 1998), pp. 24–25.
posted by Shelley
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