Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the thirty-second installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
My guest today is Kit Connor. Kit is a first-year doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Oregon. A feminist philosopher, Kit works on the intersections between trauma theories, philosophy of disability, and philosophy of body. In her spare time, Kit enjoys baking (anything sweet!), running, playing music, reading novels, and taking long walks in the outdoors with her service dog Seth.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Kit! You grew up in a religious, middle-class household in a suburb close to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Please explain how your identity as disabled and queer was shaped in this environment.
Yes, I grew up in a white middle-class Christian household whose logics worked to maintain scaffoldings of normative linear happiness (to borrow an expression from Sara Ahmed) and racist, classist, sexist, ableist, homophobic privileges, a household of “good white liberalism”. When I was three years old, I was diagnosed with “moderate hearing loss.” After I was fitted with hearing aids, I continued to struggle with a significant lisp and stutter.
Due to the nature of my hearing, my auditory system does not process the beginnings and endings of words. So, any form of linguistic communication became about guesswork for me: the uncertainty of whether I would be understood with my lisp, guessing what someone else was saying, understanding the affects embedded and inherited in linguistic communication; it always felt (and still feels) like reaching towards obscured unpredictable space—or, as María Lugones would describe it, an experience of “tantear”.
At a young age, I, in some worlds, became attentive to the constructions of grammar in which I was situated, where certain aspects of my identity were only dominantly legible. At home, I was only intelligible in certain ways, that is, ways that either dismantled my experiences of being disabled or subsumed my being to ableist logics—most often narratives of “overcoming” that intersected with methods of containment. At times, when my body was acutely unable to pass as able-bodied, I was met with experiences of disengagement.
As I grew older, my hearing fluctuated. Eventually, that is, by my teenage years, I had an oscillating classification of “profound hearing loss." Around this time, I became extensively involved with an equestrian trainer, a mentor in a context in which sexual abuse was, in paradoxical ways, anticipated. Due to previous experiences of sexual violence from my earlier childhood, I found myself in difficult, but familiar, worlds.
With the unpredictability of my mentor’s comportments of unhappiness, sadness, joy, violence, and anger, I was situated in grammars that I knew how to navigate, but that simultaneously re-oriented me towards different horizons. My relationship with my mentor and his friends and co-workers led to experiences of child sex-trafficking, in which my assaults were filmed with video equipment for the production of child pornography. Over a long stretch of time, I came to experience my assailants in multiple ways. It was, in part, these complex heterogeneous understandings of them that worked to perpetuate experiences of abuse.
I grew up a pretty imaginative kid, playing outside, always dirty and up to something. As I became involved with my assailants, I found the outdoors open to me in different ways. We traveled and camped frequently on weekends in obscure or back-hills towns and campgrounds in either the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Sand Hills coast, riding horses during the day and staying in RV camper trailers at night.
It was a landscape of alcoves—communities were often hidden from each other by the rural back hills. When traveling, my assailants would often declare: “In the mountains, see we just never know what kind of town we are going to come up on next!” A curious statement: these communities were often monotonous in their workings of maintenance. In their western white logics of the land and labors of home as renewable, these towns were renewed.
I was ambitious. I wanted to keep up the same pace as the well-experienced horse trainers, cowboys, and trail draggers with whom I found myself. Much of this company was made up of either mid-aged white cowboys and horse trainers or peers my age, like myself, trying to get a handle on, or make a go in, the western equestrian world—peers often both with and deeply in need of a home.
It was a world that functioned because of white privilege, ascendency, racism, and ignorance, ingrained in the traditions and inheritance of Appalachia. “I’m not a redneck,” my assailant would tell me. “That’s not where we are at—I cleaned myself out of that. Around here, we wear ourselves collared shirts.” Little happened within the realms of rationality. The paradoxes of the exploitation of marginalized groups whose labor supported the sport—racism, ableism, classism, and homophobia—were both subtle and blatant.
In having only linguistic grammars of a scripted sense of sexual abuse available to me—an experience in which sexual abuse/assault is experienced and recognized as trauma by the victim at the time of its occurrence—I felt myself fall disparately to the affects and meanings that I, in some sense, knew that I was supposed to bear. “All this hurting, it’s too far from the heart to hurt you,” my assailant would say. It was hurt—sheer, raw, unfathomable, pain, and grief—but, yet, such ache, so familiar. My experiences of rape, day in, were not experiences of shattering. It was sweet ache—pain, hatred, disgust, desire—it was made to make sense in my skin.
When with my family, I watched contrasting dominant logics come to intermesh, where different worlds worked together in ways to maintain the workings of oppression. With family, there were no words for rape, queer, miscarriage, pregnancy—these things weren’t allowed to be part of our home, even when they happened within it. When with my assailant, these logics were normalized—"I’m being real good to you, Lemon,” he’d say through a cigarette. “Lemon”—like a car engine that wouldn’t turn over—his personal nickname for my crip, lisping self. He’d finish, and then send me back outside, back out to play.
In thinking about this part of my life, I am often struck by how happy I was during these years. Despite frequent experiences of disturbance, tension, anger, or fear, I was happy in the ways in which I was able to maintain conditional structures of happiness for others. Through and between the well-worn scripts in which my body was pushed, I felt that I was holding and bearing a scaffolded weight—it lent a sense of purpose.
After an untreated head injury from an incident of assault, I began to experience periods of time during which I would forget short-term events. These experiences led to a sharp sense of a dis-ordering of temporality for me. I fell out of rhythm, out of sync with what was working and already moving on its way. I shifted from felt joy, to a deep sense of unhappiness, coming to recognize that there is often little difference in the logics that maintain such affects.
In early adulthood, I developed epilepsy in conjunction with a “rare” or “specialty” diagnosis of a mitochondrial disorder. Soon after, my seizures became progressive and non-retractable, even with medication. I am thus extremely photosensitive to most kinds of light. I often experience seizures several times a day—I fall often. I am not what is anticipated in the able-bodied academic constructs and spaces in which I am attempting to move. I am normatively regarded as disruptive: in their unpredictability and dis-synchrony, in my convulsions, my seizures interrupt.
Queer people, at first glance, don’t live in the back-jaw alcove towns and counties between which my assailants and I wandered. They don’t live in the neat, plain-to-sight, square houses and yards that my parents tended with such vigor—the polite invisibility given by middle-class liberal heterosexuals. There was always queerness for me in my lisp, my hearing aids, the friend that I liked a little too much. But it came to my attention with my assailant, his succession of failed marriages, his careful presentation of heterosexuality, and his sentimental reminders: “You and I are so much alike, Lemon; it’s why we are such good company.”
Queer, crip, spaz, dyke, disabled—intersect indelibly for me. Queerness speaks immeasurably to who I am, how I have lived, my sexuality and sexual desires, with whom I share company, and my relationship to dominant culture. It works with what these oppressive ableist worlds do to bodies both like and different from my own. From entertainment to hospital, intrigue to pity, passion to disengagement, queerness works in ways to capture and intersect with the racist, ableist, capitalist, imperialist treatment often imparted on non-normative subjects and groups. Queerness has always belonged to me; in its vast definitions of abnormality, in its dis-sychrony, it’s a word that points disparately towards my home in the outskirts.
Kit, you have evidently done a considerable amount of critical reflection on the ways in which your upbringing, childhood, and adolescent experiences have shaped your identity. In what ways has your identity motivated you to study philosophy?
For me, philosophy has in part been an activity of cultivating my own strangeness. I came to philosophy late in my undergraduate career with a feminist philosophy course taught by Ann Cahill. The course was an intense process of articulation, frustration, and re-orientation for me. By the time that the end of term grew near—though I was not at the time perhaps ready to admit it!—philosophy, as a living methodology of critical inquiry, had become ingrained in the ways in which I made sense of my worlds.
Regardless of whether I continued to pursue philosophy in an academic setting, I couldn’t leave it behind any more than I could refuse to take it with me. The pursuit of feminist philosophies had a willfulness to itself, for me; in its pull away from happiness, it was disparate, complex, complicated. It remains this way, for me. Philosophy often does not make me happy, but it is one of many ways in which different horizons, imaginaries, and material spaces of possibility are opened. It, in part, lends to me the attentiveness, company, and streets to abandon happiness for life. I study philosophy both as an inheritance and as a disruption. I study philosophy while knowing the tentativeness of my own body and thinking within it, without knowing if it is a space in which I should aspire to be included.
Early on, I developed this habit of fleeing my body—smiles, sex, greetings, conversation, all mechanical actions. I learned to reel through scripts, select the right one, turn it on, turn me on, and then had this feeling of euphoria, this happiness in feeling like I’ve given nothing—in my engagement, I’ve disengaged. And then, seizures: in the moments in which a dominant world most seeks to make me absent, regards me as unconscious, inactive, subjugated—I am present. My body knows and feels everything; in the disordering of time, space, memory, I know different. My scripts can turn inside out. They work only in mine and others’ felt engagement to them.
My experiences with sexual violence, as well as my identity as a queer disabled woman, have often been rooted in shame, cloaked in disengagement. I come to these experiences in a legacy of containment and isolation, in complex interweavings of personal and collective histories. In my time in philosophy, I have been working to take down the self of mine that wants to be normal—in the words of one physician, “an uncertain spastic woman”—a woman still embarrassed by her seizures, a woman who attempts to pass as able-bodied, the queer who apologizes for, begs forgiveness for, her disruption to others’ normative constructs that bodily straighten.
To the person who flinches when my joints dislocate, who turns away when my body hits the floor: in your turn away, can I turn against? Turn you sideways? To these “willing parts” (as Ahmed puts it) of myself of shame, embarrassment, scripts, disbelief. I despise these parts most in the moments that I know them to be useful. I know that I store your smiles, your gawking, your disengagement, your light reciprocity, your anxious stares, and your pity somewhere in my being. I know that they make my scaffolding.
Feminist philosophies give me tools and company in which to begin to ask and articulate the questions: what could it mean to subvert, transform, make different these kinds of scaffoldings within the material worlds and workings of oppression in which they are maintained? To bear weight? To hold grief differently? What could it look like to celebrate unpredictability in the outskirts? I look to philosophy—in, within, and outside the academic institution—as a mode in which to collide personal histories of my hatred for my willing parts and their usefulness without reducing this collision to a story only about subjugation, resistance, subversion, or celebration, as a mode to recognize this hatred within collective intersecting histories and realities of containment.
Kit, although you are a first-year Ph.D. student, you have already delivered several conference presentations. In one presentation, you advance claims about the production of a certain sexuality through normalization of, and desire for, sexual violence. Please explain this research.
Yes! Contemporary theories of rape—such as Susan Brison’s Aftermath and Ann Cahill’s Rethinking Rape—have described rape as a destructive experience, where the subjectivity of the victim is annihilated during the time of the assault. Theories of childhood sexual abuse—such as Linda Alcoff’s article “Dangerous Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Pedophilia”—have intersected with such claims to depict rape as a necessarily traumatic experience, causing the child to incur lasting physical and emotional harms due to the sexual assaults. If subjectivity is not destroyed during acts of abuse, the experience of rape is nevertheless thought to disrupt the child’s subjectivity and sense of self, producing a sexuality that is “inauthentic,” insofar as it is a subjectivity that was developed within the context of manipulation and coercion.
In contrast, in my work, I have utilized a notion of trauma as productive to argue that a sexuality that is produced in the context of “manipulation and coercion,” in cases of long-term childhood sexual abuse, is no less “potent” a sexuality—interrupting the proposed authentic/inauthentic dichotomy of any subjectivity—than a sexuality produced within different constructed configurations of power, desire, and discourse. I’ve chosen to use the language of potency to draw attention to the active subjectivity of children who experience sexual abuse and the adults that they become.
The shift in language is important because to argue that subjectivity is “destroyed” or “inauthentic” in its production fundamentally discounts the selves of children and adults who have a history of childhood sexual abuse. I argue that the harm of these cases lies not in a subjectivity that is “inauthentic” or that “inauthentically” consents to sexual abuse, but rather in the production of a potent subjectivity that in some cases aligns with the sexual desires of the assailant/s, normalizing the sexual abuse, making the abuse more likely to continue.
This thinking has also served to interrupt a notion whereby it is assumed that for trauma to be harmful it must be experienced and recognized as trauma by the victim at the time in which it occurs. For example, Alcoff poses the example of “asymptomization,” where if a victim is asymptomatic of scripted experiences of trauma—grief, fear, anger, feelings of shattering and devastation—the victim then has experienced no or lesser harm.
In considering these concerns in relation to Ahmed’s work on happiness, I have argued that the notion according to which the harm of sexual violence is located exclusively in the experiences of feeling one’s subjectivity shattered has worked to become “script” on one of the meanings anticipated when interpreting stories of sexual abuse.
In part, I find these theories difficult because of their insistence that subjectivity is “whole” before acts of trauma and needs to be “remade” as a different whole after its conclusion. In contrast, I’ve posed reciprocity in lack—recognition of self and others always in lack in the movements of becoming, as never complete, as recognizing, but not prescribing, meanings—as one route to interpretation of stories of sexual violence that recognizes the complexity and disparity of such experiences that will away from a promise of happiness, insisting that someone be made/re-made as “complete.” Reciprocity in lack also works to decenter the privileging of speech in interpreting stories—it works towards somatic attentiveness to silence, parts, and their willfulness.
Fascinating work, Kit. Let me ask you now about your experiences of disability in academia. An array of infrastructural, physical, social, and discursive barriers produces the widespread discrimination and bias that disabled students and staff confront in academia. How have forms of institutional bias and exclusion conditioned your experiences in the classroom, at conferences, in feminist venues, and so on?
Even within spaces of academic feminist communities, which may be at work to make themselves permeable, to interrupt the constructs and barriers that prevent inclusion and movement of certain bodies in them, I often find that I am usually not what is expected.
I moved to Oregon recently: a world of tall cedars, of pines, straw grass, intense green, bustling, too many people on bikes—with bike lights that flash, light up. It’s like living in a beacon zone. A stunning mountain landscape, but different from my home-skirts of travel in the Blue Ridge. The mountains are gentler back home, more distant from a way of life in the heart of Eugene. From certain streets with open ends you see them. They mark a horizon here in the valley. But you must travel to get to them. Drive, bike, or take the bus.
[Description of photo below: A smiling Kit, who has curly hair and is wearing a patterned dress, sits in the sunlight on a stone bench with her dog Seth who is wearing a harness. Kit is looking directly into the camera, while Seth looks down to his left. Kit’s left arm is embracing Seth around the neck and her right hand is holding his collar. Trees, flowers, and other plant life, and a patch of sky fill the background of the shot.]
I came here from a small rural college town in Ohio, where the corn creeps on the sides of everything and the year and change of seasons are marked by various shades of grey and gold. The landscape appears flat; but as soon as you start to travel, your stomach churns. Amidst all that straightness, roller-coaster hills are hidden.
Since I’ve moved here, I’ve heard a lot about how I’m a “first,” as in, “Well, that’s another first with Kit!” or “We never have before, but we want to.” Our department hallways here are lined with wall scones. They were specially installed, with the permission of the historic society, before my arrival. They make it so that I can walk the halls most days with only a tremor. Instead of the block strip fluorescent lights with the blunt edges that line the walls and ceilings in so many institutional buildings, our lighting here is dim. We’ve put signs up to remind folks not to turn them on or off while I’m passing through.
Before I moved, I spent the summer designing seizure response protocols. I ordered and re-ordered scripts, trying at the edges of my memory to imagine every possible scenario that my unpredictable body may cross. My joints still ache at the thought. Which others will you be with when you seize? How? “How?” was the most prevalent question asked. How, during class? When you teach? How, during the shifting patterns of the day? How will you be here? How can you be?
“There’s a first time for everything,” as someone stands or steps over me on the floor, holding my disjointing shoulder, timing the length of my convulsions. I smile loosely in response. I’ve been told that I am a “first” in logics and grammars at every institution that I’ve trespassed. Wherever I’ve entered, in the places, spaces, and ways that my disabilities pull bodies to—in engagement, I collapsed distance. I respond perhaps with humor; willingly, I try to make light. “You’re funny!” people say in response, always with a hint of surprise, bemusement. They stroke my wiggling service dog, whining in anxiety. “This isn’t so bad after all!”
I hold many of these people so dear. I try to hold back. The histories that have for so long held many bodies like and different from my own in front of audiences, on stage—who have made us example, a pull towards that holds away—curiosity, intrigue, examination, containment, isolation built these school walls. Walls with liminal spaces, thick with bodies like my own, sustaining, chipping apart your outskirts.
“First time.” Your comments enrage me. How is it that I am “first”? First to tremor? First to fail? First to be visible to you amongst the bodies that give shape to your rooms?
“You cannot control it.” Clunk, tremor, spaz. “It’s okay, because there is nothing to be done about it.” A long pause.
“But it would be better if….”
And then the sentence drifts. The words unfinished because they don’t need to be spoken. I inherit what fits. These are the institutional logics that prevail in philosophy, in academia, in feminist communities, in company. Overcoming is a curious concept: a conquering of what makes me curious. It is a disavowal, a transcendence, a rising above, or a coming over to what is tolerable, to what we can hold.
I live in spaces of resistance and resilience. I believe in these things. I try to grasp and bear witness to them. I know about the humdrum of stubborn insistence, of pull, of the refusal to be pushed out. The hurt of low expectations, the joy of completing some mundane task successfully.
Spaz, twitch, tremor—you cannot control. I labor for or with you because you can’t not.
Sometimes, I feel that I overcome moments of ableism. I live through the incessant flickering of a Powerpoint slide—a monotonous seizure trigger. I teach a class. I give care to those whom I love. I cease to cushion your comfort.
But what would it mean for me to overcome my tremors, my seizures, my willful disjointed limbs? What would it mean to house the kind of disability how and where you want it? To hold the affects on cue that you demand? These questions are non-sensical. But yet…
“It would be better if you didn’t have seizures.” I’ll finish the sentence for you. Better—a future horizon—a linear pull towards normative hope. In uncountable and disparate collective and personal histories, disabled people have put forward sustained critiques and arguments against the logics of cure.
Cure is slippery, ambiguous. I flinch at the epilepsy research foundation’s phone call requesting donations. They aren’t requesting funds for institutional and structural changes or changes to accessibility policies. They aren’t seeking to make places permeable for bodies like my own. These funds are about eradication of epilepsy in all cases. They are about accuracy, erasure.
I hold the language of cure closer for a relation with heart disease, with cancer. Yet, even in doing so, I do not mean that there is no value, nothing to be preserved, celebrated, sustained, in these experiences of living with, dying of. Cure is paradoxical—a reach between what we live with, but cannot bear.
Overcoming, disorder, diagnosis, and cure form the walls and walks of our institutions; they give it shape, hold together the spaces in which academic philosophy flourishes. I stand tentatively on the sidelines of such spaces—hesitant, unsure. What could it mean to live within the institutional walls of academic philosophy in ways that do not seek to make example, eradicate, transform and obscure disabled bodies? What would it look like to celebrate disability without restoration?
In moving through the landscapes of institutional horizons, these questions cling to me as an inheritance, an echo of the silence, anger, outcries of the bodies pushed and moving differently to the sides. These questions are asked within and outside the feminist philosophy community, but sometimes receive only certain kinds of uptake.
We ask again.
Often only to be dominantly interpreted as a first time. First.
First is the grammar of ableism, of isolation, of a disavowal of how these walls are kept straight. “First” is the ways in which historically, materially, in living, experience of disability is obscured, only made tangible in controlling images of dominant imaginaries.
Screw this. I am no one’s first.
In your last remarks, you intimate that faculty can serve a crucial role in the production of accessible and welcoming learning contexts for disabled students. Have faculty provided such contexts for you? Have other students? Can you give some examples of how they did so? How they failed to do so?
I answer this question carefully.
I have found that accessibility practices between particular subjects—intersecting with, but also distinct from, accessibility practice, say, as universal design—are not about what happens within; rather, they are about what happens between the moving parts and selves of others and the resources and imaginaries in which these parts can and do take shape. By this, I mean that accessibility is an activity that often cannot be dismantled from the interpersonal complexities of a particular relationship and the worlds in which it shifts, requiring recognition of subjects as unpredictable, contradicting, moving. These relationships necessitate spaces for ambiguity.
There are many folks within philosophy whose relationships with me have intersected in significant ways through sharing worlds in which seizures are felt and experienced more acutely. These are often the relationships that I hold most dear, in knowing others differently, in feeling recognized in mine and others’ particularities, in moving through time and space with queer rhythms. The companies that I have found in philosophy, who in part celebrate and sustain unpredictability in the outskirts, are ones that I love very deeply.
Many of the most cherished and meaningful experiences with my mentors, colleagues, and friends within philosophy have been unscripted, unanticipated, where pre-scripted meanings have not been applied to or brought forth in the interpreting of the stories, experiences, and movements of the other. These relationships recognize and reciprocate lack; they do not presume or seek to make another whole, and simultaneously recognize that we are always in lack in our movements of becoming. Intersecting with disability, reciprocity in lack resists logics of overcoming, or pacifying, disability. Instead, it is a holding, and keeping company with. The relationships that sustain without scripts are the relationships found wanting.
Would you like to recommend some books, articles, or other resources on the topics you’ve discussed in this interview?
Yes! In this interview I have referenced Sara Ahmed’s work in Willful Subjects and The Promise of Happiness. Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride and Brilliant Imperfection are both books to which I am deeply indebted. They have made sense to me with respect to my experiences with disability and have moved me. María Lugones’s Pilgramages/ Peregrinajes—among many of her articles and works—is a book that has formatively shaped my philosophical thinking.
Dorothy Allison’s books Bastard Out of Carolina and Trash have greatly influenced my thinking on sexual violence theory. Finally, Margaux Fragoso’s memoir Tiger, Tiger tells stories in beautiful ways that deeply intersect with my own experiences of sexual abuse.
Kit, thank you for these wonderful recommendations and for your evocative remarks throughout this interview. It has been a pleasure to read them.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Kit Connor’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, December 20th at 8 a.m. EST, for the thirty-third installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.
Thank you so much for this interview, Kit and Shelley!
Posted by: Audrey Yap | 11/15/2017 at 02:29 PM
Hi Kit and Shelley,
Thank you so much, Kit, for sharing your history with us, and your enlightening view about the sexuality of those who have been sexually abused. I also appreciated your point about how charitable organizations for people with disabilities conceive their mission in terms of seeking out solutions of eradication, or what you refer to as "erasure," rather than seeking solutions that would help people with disabilities flourish in the world. I think this is a very significant point that needs to be recognized by society as a whole and not only by those who run these charitable organizations.
Your criticism also raises a question about boundaries--questions about at what point one would draw the line for "cures," erasure, eradication--which are very timely questions considering the current social, political, and technological context of our time. I think this kind of slippery slope argument might be one of the strongest arguments there is against efforts for "finding cures" and in favor of efforts for finding modes of acceptance that would allow everyone, including those with disabilities to flourish...that is, if one had to choose between the two. One reason for thinking this is because I think that regardless of how many "cures" humanity finds, there will always be something else that some people will find to be in need of being "cured," and I think there is a complex reason for why this is the case. I don't think it's a simple matter of ableism, hegemony, bigotry, etc. For example, the fact that human beings, like all other living creatures, undergo evolution. There will always be random mutations, and it may often be a matter of luck as to which mutations are thought to be in need of being "cured" and which ones are thought to be in need of being reproduced. Love, grief, and compassion are also factors that often motivate searches for "cures," and I think this is the most challenging counterargument against arguments that criticize efforts for "finding cures." Do you have any thoughts about how this kind of counterargument can be addressed?
Thank you again, and I wish you the best in all your endeavors!
Posted by: Cecilea Mun | 11/15/2017 at 11:57 PM
hi Audrey and Cecilea,
thanks very much for your appreciation of the interview.
Kit intends to respond to you later today.
Posted by: Shelley | 11/16/2017 at 10:06 AM
Hi Audrey and Cecilea,
Thanks so much for your appreciation and wonderful comments!
Cure is certainly complicated- at the center of cure is erasure, and the uncountable intersections of violence that come with it. It is a model of what is 'broken' that needs to be eradicated or 'made complete.' Yet cure is a paradox in the sense that many disabled lives, including my own, depend on technologies of cure for current sustainment. Because cure is argued to support and extend life (at first glance) it dominantly seems to be the opposite of eradication. Cure 'saves,' manipulates, and undoubtedly prioritizes some lives over others. Cure is given in all kinds of different guises, and intersects with erasure in a multitude of systematic ways.
The same medical complex that sustains me daily in my use of significant anti-convulsant medication to stay alive, and in 'emergency' (a moment of tipping, where there is potential to shift towards or away from way of life/way of being, to another) would, if it could, eliminate both my mitochondrial disorder and epilepsy from my individual body (thus eliminating me as a subject), and epilepsy/mitochondrial disorder from worlds at large. In this manner, uncountable differences would be erased. Some of these would include life threatening diseases and conditions (cancer, AIDS, so forth) and ways of being that are considered to be defective (in non-normativity, in the ways in which bodies are considered not to be 'normatively' useful) but aren't necessarily or immediately terminal- so what we live with, but decide we cannot bear. This kind of erasure historically, materially gives rise to violent oppressive logics of what we consider to be 'normal' or 'natural.'
There is a linear or 'future' focused notion at work behind cure- where future is changed, or kept straight, by changing, altering, or 'offering alternative' in the present.
It's interesting- in personal experience, I have posed and reposed the question of disability and sustainment many times to folks in my life, often to those who are most invested in accessibility practices. What I have found is that even amongst the logics that are working to alter material spaces to make them permeable to bodies like my own, the need to eradicate disability is 'intuitively obvious' to them.
This intuition often comes from affects of linear love, grief, and compassion. I will speak here to 'pain' in relation to these affects, though there are countless ways in which experiences of disability in relation to dominate erasure and feelings of 'empathy' can be configured.
I seize, dislocate a joint, cry in pain. "This is intolerable!" "This is not what you needed today." .... my memory holds the face of a loved one crying, flinching, regressing in response to my seizure. "How do you do this every day? If I was in pain all of the time I would be miserable, an unhappy person, I wouldn't be able to think, I would be cruel."
And then. "I don't want this for you. I want you to live a good life."
Every time I hear it, its a sharp slap. These are the echoes of the logics of cure. Precisely in the desire for sustainment, the pull towards 'happiness' 'well-being' 'good life' 'fulfilled' cut away, dismantle, and eradicate my life. What we often see in the affects of grief and compassion is conditional happiness at work- where I must maintain scripts of happiness in order to scaffold or support the happiness of another.
"In the face of your suffering, I suffer." Flinch- compelling disengagement.
In our philosophical work on torture, pain, and suffering (Scarry, Brison, Sontag to name a few), we have conceptualized pain as dis-sychnonic disruption, as what makes us come apart. 'Shatter' 'break' 'unusual' 'freak' 'cruel' 'kink'- how quickly fetishizing of pain comes to us. Paradoxically how fast we eliminate through mimicry. We have few resources for considering the complex ambiguity of pain- as a valid, disparate formative way of knowing and being in the world- as a re-orienting, as what may give horizons towards elsewhere.
I am offering neither a positive nor negative account of pain- I am pointing to pain as between the paradox. Of what we could keep unscripted company with- of the possibilities of affects that can hold with as a disruption of the conditional happiness logics of 'suffer.'
We treat others as if they only matter in relation to the use, service, comfort, compassion, empathy of our own. As if they exist for what we personally can conceptualize-
Bodies we can weather as worry stones.
Kit
Posted by: Kit Connor | 11/17/2017 at 03:23 PM
Shelley and Kit,
First and foremost, excellent interview whose emotion and depth of thought was palpable and made me look at the experiences of survivors of sexual abuse in a new light. To Kit personally, I want to thank you for your vulnerability in sharing your experiences of sexual abuse with us, and for sharing certain philosophical perspectives on the matter that before I had ill-considered. Minds like yours are why I love what I do and may you keep using that beauteous voice of yours as you have because all of us need to hear what it has to say. We see you, we hear you, and we love you. The disability community will one day dismantle ableism and its machinations, and with work like yours and Shelley's, that victory is most assured.
Posted by: John Altmann | 11/18/2017 at 01:37 PM