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population growth was on the horizon, particularly in the developing world. It wasnt
that people were having more babies but that breakthroughs in science and
medicine were allowing everyone to live longer than ever before . Advances in public
health meant fewer died of diseases like malaria and tuberculosis and more survived to a
healthy old age. 6 But while death rates had fallen in many countries, birth rates had not
caught up, and women had the same number of children they always had. The world now
had what Western population activists dubbed death control . 7 It needed birth
control. It was true that unfettered population growth would almost certainly strain
developing countries resources and deepen poverty. Privately, however, Western
donors worried less about poverty than they did about the global balance
of power and specifically about what they believed to be one of povertys
effects: communism. The population control movement arose at the
precise moment that Western powers were losing their grip over Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. Around the world, colonies were gaining independence, with
Cold War tensions replacing imperialism. Many early population activists thus
belonged to the U.S. business and political elite . Big names included Hugh Moore, the
millionaire inventor of the Dixie Cup; John D. Rockefeller III, heir to the Rockefeller family
fortune; Lewis Strauss, head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission; and Will Clayton, former
undersecretary of state. Rising birth rates, as this group saw it, would make countries more
susceptible to communism at a time when the United States urgently needed allies in Asia
and Latin America. We are not primarily interested in the sociological or
humanitarian aspects of birth control, Moore and Clayton once confided to Rockefeller.
because of their large, young populations were prime targets for Western organizations, and
particularly on China and India. Almost everybody who spoke this morning talked about
India, Lubin said. What is there about India that makes this situation so acute? And I think
unconsciously we are scared, and I think we have a right to be. 10 On the heels of the
meeting Rockefeller founded the Population Council. Moore went on to found the Population
Crisis Committee. These two organizations, together with the Ford Foundation, the
World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID), and the International Planned Parenthood
Federation (IPPF), helped sell Asian nations on population control, primarily by
spreading the logic that lower birth rates lead to richer people. 11 Between 1965
and 1976, money spent on research and development for contraceptive methods
around the world more than doubled. Developing countries received the lions share
of that money while contributing less than 3 percent of it. 12 The most funding
came from the United States. At times, Western donors made the link between
wealth and small families strikingly explicit by making other types of aid contingent
on the adoption of population control targets. In 1966 President Johnson signed the
Food for Peace Act, which required USAID officers to exert the maximum leverage
and influence to guarantee that famine-stricken areas accepting food aid also take
steps to control their populations. 13 In 1969 World Bank president and former U.S.
secretary of defense Robert McNamara explained to his advisory council that he
didnt want to fund public health work unless it was very strictly related to
population control, because usually health facilities contributed to the decline of the
death rate, and thereby to the population explosion. 14 According to a history of
the World Banks population program, the mood in Washington at the time was that
no organization concerned with economic development could ignore the
implications of accelerating rates of population growth. 15
for missing girls in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. The three small countries
sandwiched between the Black and Caspian seas have far more in common with
Europe, after all, than with China or South Korea. Guilmoto takes our interview into
CEPEDs kitchen, where he makes himself a double espresso as he explains that the
Caucasus countries also have very little in common with each other: One is Muslim,
one is Orthodox Christian, and one is Armenian Christian. They have three different
religious groups, and they are at war with each other on a regular basis. Geography, he
adds, is about all they share. Then one day Guilmotos friend France Mesl, who works down
the street from him at the National Institute of Demographic Studies, was ana lyzing birth
and death statistics in former Soviet countries when she noticed a striking gap between the
numbers of male and female infants born in the Caucasus region. Mesl was initially
skeptical that sex selection could have caused the gap. The number of female births had
begun dropping after the fall of the Soviet Union , as bureaucracy weakened and the
quality of government records deteriorated, and like scholars confronted with large
imbalances in China and India in the 1990s, she reasoned that maybe families in the three
countries had simply stopped bothering to register their daughters. 31 There are a lot of
problems with data quality now, she told me. And I was very surprised by the Caucasus
figures. To double-check the figures, she enlisted two other scholars, and together contacted
every county in the region to collect records at the level. When they compared these
numbers against countrywide for sex ratio at birth, the national data turned out to
disturbingly accurate with the exception of Armenia, where the actual sex ratio at birth
was even more extreme than national records had indicated. All told, the Caucasus
countries gender imbalance rivaled that of China and India. The sex ratio at birth in
Azerbaijan was 115. In Georgia it was 118. In Armenia, it was a whopping 120 . 32 To
they district totals Mesls research, which Guilmoto included in Watering the Neighbours
Garden, an edited volume he and a colleague recently compiled on sex ratio imbalance, was
important to his own work. It meant that sex selection defied geographic as well as
religious and ethnic stereo - typing: it happened in Central, South, and East Asia. And it
meant that the masculinization that had struck him, back in India, as a revolution
was spreading around the globe. But even with Mesls study to point to, he has
encountered stiff resistance in trying to convince policymakers that the sex ratio at birth in
the Caucasus countries is truly askew. He recalls meeting an Armenian statistician working
for the Armenian UNFPA office at a conference in New York several years after the
incriminating data had been published. When Guilmoto brought up Armenias skewed sex
ratio at birth, the man gave him a blank look. The guy had no clue about it! the French
demographer recalls. He said, Thats very interesting, what youre saying. How do you
know? I said, Well, Armenian data. He said, Oh really, is that so? Then he said something
stupid like, Maybe we should work on it. And I said, Yeah, I think its high time! We return
to his office, where we are interrupted from time to time by the hum of a vacuum cleaner
coming from the hall. Guilmoto simply talks over it. The newest area to show a sex ratio
imbalance, he says, is Europe. He ticks off a list of suspected candidates in the Balkans:
There is definitely something in Albania. Might be something in Bosnia, might be something
in Serbia not very clear. Probably something in Montenegro, in Kosovo, and in Macedonia.
up, the silent biological discrimination that is sex selection has been exacerbated by
more visible threats to women, including sex trafficking, bride buying, and forced
marriages. In South Korea and Taiwan, surplus men obtain wives on one-week
marriage tours of Vietnam. In wealthy parts of China and India, men buy women
from poorer regions, working through shady brokers who may or may not bother to
secure the womens consent. In poorer parts of China and India, they visit brothels
staffed by prostitutes who have often been forced into sex work . As Generation XY
matures in other parts of the gender-imbalanced world, moreover, even such crude tactics
will not be an option. Men in western China, eastern India, Vietnam, Georgia, Albania, and
other countries with recent or looming sex ratio imbalances will not be able to import women
because at some point in the near future the supply of women will dry up. The idea of
importing brides to solve the shortage in women may work in countries with lower
populations, but in a huge country like China they are just a drop in the ocean,
China Population Association deputy director Tian Xueyuan recently told the China Daily, as
if diminishing numbers were the only problem with bringing in boatloads of bought foreign
women. Its not a realistic solution. 33 Lately, Guilmoto has dedicated himself to
calculating precisely how bad the male surplus will be by, as he puts it, trying to marry
these guys off. The outlook, he says, is grim. Its not sustainable. Its not such a great idea
to have children of only one gender. At the beginning its a dream I call it a male utopia.
He smiles slightly. But if you start imagining that the neighbors are going to do the same,
then these good-looking boys will face trouble in the marriage market . The surplus will pile
up. And it wont just be forlorn single men who will suffer in 2020s Asia and 2030s Eastern
Europe. Other scholars have begun to calculate the impact tens of millions of surplus
men will have on everything from health care to crime. Historically, societies in
which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live. Often they
are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.
<INSERT EV ABOUT POPULATION CONTROL AND DISABILITY
The two child policy will cause forced abortions, high rates of
female suicide, and gendercide- only complete rejection of all
population control policies will solve
ERTELT , 15 (Steven Ertelt, China Not Ending Human Rights Abuses, Forced
Abortions Will Continue Under Two-Child Policy, Lifenews.com, October 29, 2015,
http://www.lifenews.com/2015/10/29/china-not-ending-human-rights-abuses-forcedabortions-will-continue-under-two-child-policy/) ET
Dont get too excited over the news that China is ending its one-child
policy that prohibits couples from having more than one child. Although the Asian
nation is moving to a two child policy for everyone in China, rather than only
allowing two children per couple for rural families, a top human rights activist tells
LifeNews that the massive abuses such as forced abortions will continue.
According to Chinas official news service run by the Communist government, China
is reportedly abolishing the draconian pro-abortion one child policy. Started in 1980,
the policy, which is the most severe in the world, has resulted in severe human
rights abuses. Family planning officials frequently jail couples who refuse to comply,
sentence them to house arrest or labor camps, revoke jobs or governmental
support, use physical harassment or violence and often target other family
members. There are more than 13 million abortions a year, or 1,500 an hour, in
China, according to government researchers. Thats thanks in large part to the onechild policy which encourages abortions and results in forced abortions and sexselection abortions. Despite the apparent good news that China is moving to a twochild policy, Reggie Littlejohn, one of the top human rights activists exposing the
gendercide that takes place in China, tells LifeNews.com that people are celebrating
too soon. Littlejohn says the move to a two-child limit comes as no surprise, given
the demographic disaster China now faces as a result of its One Child Policy.
However, instituting a two-child policy will not end forced abortion,
gendercide or family planning regulations in China. Couples will still have to
have a birth permit for the first and the second child, or they may be subject to
forced abortion, Littlejohn said. The core of the One Child Policy is not whether the
number of children the government allows. Its the fact that the government is
setting a limit on children, and enforcing this limit coercively. That will not change
under a two-child policy. The One Child Policy does not need to be modified.
It needs to be abolished. Women will still be forcibly aborted under a
universal 2-child policy. We need to keep up the pressure until China
abandons all coercive population control, Littlejohn added. Meanwhile, Bill
Donohue of the Catholic League said that China has been forced to modify the
policy from one to two children because the one-child policy has decimated its
population. Since 1979, most parts of China, and most married couples, have been
subjected to a one-child policy, but now the Communist government is dropping it.
Ironically, it is doing so for the same reason it adopted it in the first place:
demographic concerns. The policy was initiated because of the fear that
unrestrained population growth would impair economic wellbeing. Now it is being
nixed because of fear that low fertility rates threaten a labor shortage, which, in
turn, impairs economic wellbeing, he explained. Keep up with the latest pro-life
and human rights activists monitoring the situation. The violence of the one-child
policy is absolutely ongoing. This year there are reliable reports of large scale and
violent abortion enforcement campaigns in Guangdong, Fujian, Yunnan, Zhejiang,
and Jiangxi provinces, he said.
A
disproportionate number of the children aborted have been girls, leaving China with
the worlds worst gender imbalance. Because of sex-selective abortions, men now outnumber
women in China by nearly 35 million, creating a situation of desperation for many men of marriage age
the dearth of
marriageable women has spawned a human trafficking industry that smuggles
young girls across the border from Vietnam into China to be sold as child brides. The villages on the
who simply cannot find any eligible women to marry. As Breitbart News has reported,
border between Vietnam and China have become a veritable hunting ground for human traffickers,
where girls as young as 13 are trapped, drugged, or lured under false pretenses and then transported
across the border. Chinese men are willing to pay upwards of $3,000 for a Vietnamese bride because
the cultural similarities between the two countries make the women especially desirable. In its 2015
Chinas coercive
population-control program, now known as the two-child policy, continues to
employ torture methods, such as forced abortion and sterilization, despite a
widespread public outcry. Many provincial laws in China explicitly instruct officials to
forcibly carry out abortions for illegal pregnancies, with no requirement for
consent.
report, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) said that
said there was disagreement among staff members over the procedure. During one meeting in late 2005, a few
correctional officers differed with Longs medical team over adding tubal ligations to a local hospitals contract,
Kelsey, 57, said. The officers viewed the surgeries as nonessential medical care and questioned whether the state
should pay. They were just fed up, Kelsey said. They didnt think criminals and inmates had a right to the care we
were providing them and they let their personal opinions be heard. The service was included, however, and Kelsey
said the grumbling subsided. Federal and state laws ban inmate sterilizations if federal funds are used, reflecting
concerns that prisoners might feel pressured to comply. California used state funds instead, but since 1994, the
procedure has required approval from top medical officials in Sacramento on a case-by-case basis. Yet no tubal
ligation requests have come before the health care committee responsible for approving such restricted surgeries,
said Dr. Ricki Barnett, who tracks medical services and costs for the California Prison Health Care Receivership Corp.
Barnett, 65, has led the Health Care Review Committee since joining the prison receivers office in 2008. When we
heard about the tubal ligations, it made us all feel slightly queasy, Barnett said. It wasnt so much that people
were conspiratorial or coercive or sloppy. It concerns me that people never took a step back to project what they
would feel if they were in the inmates shoes and what the inmates future might hold should they do this. Jeffrey
Callison, spokesman for the state corrections department, said the department couldnt comment because it no
longer has access to inmate medical files. All medical care for inmates, and all medical files, past and present, are
under the control of the Receivers Office, Callison wrote in an email. The receiver has overseen medical care in all
33 of the states prisons since 2006, when U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of the Northern District of
California ruled that the systems health care was so poor that it violated the constitutional ban on cruel and
unusual punishment. The receivers office was aware that sterilizations were happening, records show. In
September 2008, the prisoner rights group Justice Now received a written response to questions about the
treatment of pregnant inmates from Tim Rougeux, then the receivers chief operating officer. The letter
acknowledged that the two prisons offered sterilization surgery to women. But nothing changed until 2010, after the
Oakland-based organization filed a public records request and complained to the office of state Sen. Carol Liu, DGlendale. Liu was the chairwoman of the Select Committee on Women and Children in the Criminal Justice System.
Prompted by a phone call from Lius staff, Barnett said the receivers top medical officer asked her to research the
matter. After analyzing medical and cost records, Barnett met in 2010 with officials at both womens prisons and
contract health professionals affiliated with nearby hospitals. During those meetings, Barnett told them to halt
inmate sterilizations. In response, she said, she got an earful. The 16-year-old restriction on tubal ligations seemed
to be news to prison health administrators, doctors, nurses and the contracting physicians, Barnett recalled. And,
Everybody
was operating on the fact that this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, she said.
she said, none of the doctors thought they needed permission to perform the surgery on inmates.
Risk factors Martin, the Valley State Prison medical manager, said she and her staff had discovered the procedure
was restricted five years earlier. Someone had complained about the sterilization of an inmate who had at least six
children, Martin recalled. That prompted Martin to research the prisons medical rules. After learning of the
the rules
were unfair to women, she said. Im sure that on a couple of occasions, (Heinrich) brought an issue to me
restrictions, Martin told CIR that she and Heinrich began to look for ways around them. Both believed
saying, Mary Smith is having a medical emergency kind of thing, and we ought to have a tubal ligation. Shes got
six kids. Can we do it? Martin said. And I said, Well, if you document it as a medical emergency, perhaps.
Heinrich said he offered tubal ligations only to pregnant inmates with a history of at least three C-sections.
Additional pregnancies would be dangerous for these women, Heinrich said, because scar tissue inside the uterus
could tear, resulting in massive blood loss and possible death. It was a medical problem that we had to make them
aware of, Heinrich said. Its up to the doctor whos delivering (your baby) to make you aware of whats going
just what happens in prison that thats the best kind of doctor youre going get, Montano said. He never told me
nothing about nothing. Montano eagerly agreed to the surgery and said she still considers it a positive in her life.
Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an OB-GYN at San Francisco General Hospital who teaches at UC San Francisco ,
said it is not
common practice to offer tubal ligations to women whove had one C-section. She
confirmed that having multiple C-sections increases the risk of complications, but even then, she said, its more
appropriate to offer women reversible means of birth control, like intrauterine devices or implants. Every C-section,
every situation is different, Sufrin said. Some people with more prior C-sections have absolutely no problems and
no risks. History in eugenics To be sure, tubal ligations represented a small portion of the medical care provided to
pregnant inmates. Statistics and a report from the prison receivers office show that from 2000 to 2010, 2,423
women gave birth while imprisoned in California, costing the state $2.7 million. Fewer than 1 in 10 were surgically
sterilized. But the numbers dont tell the full story. California still grapples with an ugly past :
Under
compulsory sterilization laws here and in 31 other states, minority groups,
the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill and criminals were singled out as
inferior and sterilized to prevent them from spreading their genes. It was
known as eugenics. Between 1909 and 1964, about 20,000 women and men in California were stripped of the
ability to reproduce making the state the nations most prolific sterilizer. Historians say
Nazi Germany
California sterilizers, Stern told the committee, consistently viewed their work
as humane and cost saving. One of the goals and this is critical to understanding the history of
eugenics in California was to save money: how to limit welfare and relief, Stern told them,
official numbers.
according to a transcript of her presentation. And sterilization is very much tied up in this. Lawsuits, a U.S.
Supreme Court ruling and public outrage over eugenics and similar sterilization abuses in Alabama and New York
spawned new requirements in the 1970s for doctors to fully inform patients. Since then, its been illegal to pressure
she said, and resisted. He said, So were going to be doing this tubal ligation, right? Jeffrey said. Im like, Tubal
ligation? What are you talking about? I dont want any procedure. I just want to have my baby.
I went into a
straight panic. Jeffrey provided copies of her official prison and hospital medical files to CIR. Those records
show Jeffrey rejected a tubal ligation offer during a December 2009 prenatal checkup at Heinrichs office. A medical
report from Jeffreys C-section a month later noted that she again refused a tubal ligation request made after she
San Francisco with her 3-year-old son, Noel. She speaks to groups seeking to improve conditions for female
prisoners and has lobbied legislators in Sacramento. Jeffrey recently completed her ACT college-entrance test and
be illegal, Roberts said. There are specific situations where you cannot say its informed consent, and one of them
is during childbirth or labor. No woman should give consent on the operating table.
characters in two texts, Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day (1980) and Fatima Gallaire-Bourega's You Have Come Back
(1988), to argue that the disabled characters in each text serve critical political and ideological purposes during a
particular postcolonial moment in their respective nations. It has become a theoretical commonplace to argue, as
buttocks, circulated in the freak shows of Victorian England, marked her as savagely sensuous and measurably
between colonizer and colonized and into the transaction of the post-colonial world? From a Bakhtinian perspective,
"A Cyborg Manifesto," where she claims that the cyborg has the ability to transcend, transgress, and destroy
boundaries (1998). And often, reading disability in terms of transgressive power provides a useful means for
deconstructing the traditional paradigm of disability as tragedy.4 But in most literary texts which incorporate
characters with disabilities, that liberatory and transformative potential is written in the margins and difficult to
dimension" outlined in The Location of Culture (1994) in my readings of Desai's novel and Gallaire-Bourega's
play. The third dimension, as Bhabha describes it, exists in the moment of recognition that
Self cannot be wholly contained within a Self/Other binary, a binary dependent upon
fixed and static boundaries. In other words, as soon as we recognize that the chasm
which divides us from them is artificial and reductionist, we move into a place where
identity is ambivalent and mutable. As Bhabha notes, the very struggle to maintain that
Self/Other binary articulates the possibility of slippage between the two categories
and reminds us that "identity is never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only
ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality" (511. In contemplating
moments of potential slippage between identity categories, Bhahba develops the idea of the "evil eye," that
figure which reminds us of what is missing or invisible in a text, those figures whose
gaze "alienates both the narratorial I of the slave and the surveillant eye of the
master" (53). The evil eye is the outside, the margin, that "structure of difference" which blurs the gap between
slave and master by making both objects of observation and judgment. In this capacity, the evil eye has
power because it unsettles the simplistic polarities of Self/Other, because it resists
that image of totality so important in myths both of imperial and postcolonial
worlds. I want to use this image of totality to turn now to an examination of the
disabled body which, almost universally perceived in terms of lack, comes to symbolize
the impossibility of totality, acting then as a sort of evil eye which reminds us of
what is absent. Harlan Hahn reads the crosscultural and ahistorical recoil from those with disabilities as an
expression of what he calls "existential angst" (1988). In considering the segregation of those with disabilities in
most cultures are and have been ableist 5-Hahn suggests that
we seek to distinguish ourselves from disabled bodies because we understand the
very real possibility that those bodies can become our own . At the most basic level, then, we
Other those with physical and mental disabilities in order to shore up our own very
temporal sense of able-bodiedness. After all, "No one is immune from becoming disabled" (Boyle 1991,
1). Given this, I want to suggest that the disabled body informs Bhabha's third dimension, that
site where identity is negotiated, in critical ways. If, as Bhabha suggests, "the very
question of identification only emerges in -between disavowal and designation" (1994,
50), then the disabled body multiplies the possible terms of disavowal for both the
colonizer and the colonized; because disability can be a more evident signifier even than the color of
one's skin, it becomes a visual means by which to define normalcy and, by extension,
nation. And though Bhabha suggests that interstitial (in-between) spaces can foster those
moments of recognition and of connectedness essential to the creation of a
heterogeneous nation (because difference itself is temporal and co-exists with similarity), such
moments are largely absent in the texts of Desai and Gallaire-Bourega who, in a post-modern move,
negate the hope of such synthesis. Disability and the Dialectics of Nation-Building Acknowledging the
prevalence of differentiation rather than synthesis in nation-building, Jean-Paul Sartre
writes in his "Preface" to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that " the European has only been able to
become a man through creating slaves and monsters " (1963, 26). Similarly, I will suggest, the
colonized are only able to "become men," to establish a national identity in the
historical moment of decolonization, through the reification of a new category of
monsters-the disabled, the deformed, the mad. To that end, disability designates a
docile body upon which nationalist tensions can be arbitrated and against which a
rationalist ideology can pull "a collection of disparate peoples into a self-identified
nation" (Heng 1997, 31). A second category which emerges in this moment of nationbuilding is woman. This is especially true in many Middle Eastern countries, where women's roles grow
ableist cultures-and he argues that
increasingly constricted as sharp gendered boundaries evolve in the chaos created by the colonizer's departure. As
the
woman who resists culturally sanctioned behaviors in a postcolonial world comes to
be understood as undermining the project of nationalism (1991, 5-8). Women become,
as Amrita Chhachhi puts it, "the symbols and repositories of communal/ group/national
identity . . . [so that] [t]hreats to or the loss of control over their women ... are seen
as direct threats to manhood/community/ family. It therefore becomes essential to
ensure patriarchal controls over the labour, fertility, and sexuality of women " (1991,
163-5).6 In the two texts to which I now turn my attention, I argue that the disabled body defines and
delimits transformative possibilities and becomes a kind of repository for the
anxiety that arises from mediation between old and new cultural norms . I also consider
Deniz Kandiyoti notes, many Muslims draw a correlation between feminism and cultural imperialism, so that
the meanings of a convergence between disabled and woman as identity categories. Though Fanon has been
critiqued for a too-simplistic understanding of the colonizer/colonized dynamic, his conception of the processes of
decolonization and nation building is useful here. He argues that " Decolonization
have seen the emergence of a growing body of critical works on diverse aspects of inter- or transcultural
communication. Interestingly enough, however, we still lack substantial insights as to which social conditions are
of postcolonial studies. Yet such disregard is not feasible because postcolonial studies have attained global signifi
cance as a body of critical works that helps us to come to terms with various notions of power relations as well as
inter- or transcultural modes of being in postcolonial societies all over the world. Although a few critics have
suggested that this is indeed an increasing problem in inter- or transcultural communication, the majority of these
approaches are still written in the tradition of the grounding father, Edward T. Hall. In other words, the question of
how to communicate across cultures is primarily approached from an interpersonal point-of-view. Hardly any credit
is given to the social and political circumstances in which that communication occurs. An interdisciplinary approach
that combines insights from both postcolonial theory and from studies on inter- or transcultural communication
could help to correct these shortcomings in the contemporary critical debate. That is where this critical collection
Communicating in the Third Space comes in. It takes postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabhas thoughts as a starting
point because he has fore-grounded the concept of Third Space in his book The Location of Culture. Largely, Bhabha
the encounter of two social groups with different cultural traditions and
potentials of power as a special kind of negotiation or translation that takes place in
a Third Space of enunciation. This negotiation is not only expected to produce a
dissemination of both cultural traditions that leads to a displacement of the members of both groups
from their origins. It is also supposed to bring about a common identity, one that is new
in its hybridity; it is thus neither the one nor the other. Bhabhas critical refl ections on
conceives
power relations in negotiations enable us to take into account the displacement and/or replacement of powerfully
ascribed identities. The problem with Bhabha, however, is that his language style and wording is so complex and
highly sophisticated that scholars dealing with inter- or trans-cultural communication usually do not apply his
concept of negotiation. As the overall notion of third space has gained immense popularity beyond its origin in
postcolonial studies in recent years nonetheless, it is high time to launch a critical debate on both its theoretical
premises as well as its empirical implications. The volume Communicating in the Third Space aims to do exactly
this. It clarifi es Bhabhas theory by reconstructing its logical, philosophical, psychological, sociological,
geographical, and not to forgetpolitical meaning. Then, it compares it with related concepts such as contact
zone or Thirdspace: Communicating (in) the Third Space. Afterwards, Bhabhas theory is used as a tool to analyze
encounters in which intercultural communication takes place and succeeds from time to time: Communicating in
the Third Space. Subsequently, it throws light on the scientifi c reconstruction of concrete processes of inter- or
transcultural communication between members of different cultures as well as on the artistic (re-)construction of
All these things blur in some way.... To develop a genealogy of the way colours and
noncolours function is interesting to me. Beyond signifies spatial distance, marks
progress, promises the future, but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or
boundary- the very act of going beyond- are unknowable, unrepresentable, without
a return to the 'present' which, in the process of repetition, becomes distinct and
displaced. The imaginary of spatial distance - to live somehow beyond the border of
our times- throws into relief the temporal, social differences that interrupt our
collusive sense of cultural contemporaneity. The present can no longer be simply
envisaged as a break or a bonding with the past and the future, no longer a synchronic
presence: our proximate self-presence, our public image, comes to be revealed for
its discontinuities, its inequalities, its minorities. Unlike the dead hand of history that
tells the beads of sequential-time like a rosary, seeking to establish serial, causal
connections, we are now confronted with what Walter Benjamin describes as the blasting of'
a monadic moment from the homogenous course of history, establishing a conception of
the present as the time of the now'.
we may be tempted to
see the disabled as victims of nature or accident. Feminists should be, and many
are, profoundly suspicious of this answer. We are used to countering claims that
insofar as women are oppressed they are oppressed by nature, which puts them at
a disadvantage in the competition for power and resources. We know that if being
biologically female is a disadvantage, it is because a social context makes it a
disadvantage. From the standpoint of a disabled person, one can see how society could
minimize the disadvantages of most disabilities, and, in some instances, turn them
into advantages. Consider an extreme case: the situation of physicist Stephen Hawking, who has had
why do able-bodied people ridicule, avoid, pity, stereotype and patronize them?,
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) for more than 26 years. Professor Hawking can no longer
speak and is capable of only the smallest muscle movements. Yet, in his context of social and technologi- cal
support, he is able to function as a professor of physics at Cambridge Uni- versity; indeed he says his disability has
given him the advantage of having more time to think, and he is one of the foremost theoretical physicists of our
time. He is a courageous and talented man, but he is able to live the creative life he has only because of the help
of his family, three nurses, a graduate stu- dent who travels with him to maintain his computer-communications
sys- tems, and the fact that his talent had been developed and recognized before he fell seriously ill (Newsweek
many of the "special" resources the disabled need merely compensate for bad
social planning that is based on the illusion that everyone is young, strong, healthy
(and, often, male). Disability is also frequently regarded as a personal or family
problem rather than a matter for social responsibility. Disabled people are often
expected to overcome obstacles to participation by their own extraordinary efforts,
or their families are expected to provide what they need (sometimes at great per- sonal
sacrifice). Helping in personal or family matters is seen as superogatory for people who are not members of the
family. Many factors contribute to determining whether providing a particular re- source is regarded as a social or
a personal (or family) responsibility.7 One such factor is whether the majority can identify with people who need
the re- source. Most North Americans feel that society should be organized to pro- vide short-term medical care
made necessary by illness or accident, I think because they can imagine themselves needing it. Relatively few
people can identify with those who cannot be "repaired" by medical intervention. Sue Halpem makes the following
observation: Physical health is contingent and often short-lived. But this truth eludes us as long as we are able to
bodied saw the disabled as potentially themselves or as their future selves, they would be more inclined to feel
that society should be organized to provide the resources that would make disabled people fully integrated and
conditions, or accommodate them so that we can participate fully, or support our struggles and integrate us into
the community and our struggles into the cultural concept of life as it is ordinarily lived. Feminists have shown
who works outside the home for wages, has to breast-feed a baby or look after a sick child. Common colds can be
AFF
Academic Activism
Academic activism through education is key- the educational
sphere of debate is the start of a grass roots movement that
shapes views
Garland-Thomson, 11 (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of English at Emory
University with a focus on disability studies and feminist theory. i n t e g r a t i n g disabi l ity, t r a n s
f o rmi n g f eminist t h e o r y Feminist Disability Studies, Indiana University Press, 2011) ET
The concluding version of activism I offer is less controversial and subtler than glitzy
fashion spreads. It is what I call academic activism, the activism of integrating
education, in the very broadest sense of that term. The academy is no ivory
tower, but rather it is the grass roots of the educational enterprise.
Scholars and teachers shape the communal knowledge and the pedagogical
archive that is disseminated from kindergarten to the university. Academic activism
is most self-consciously vibrant in the aggregate of interdisciplinary identity studies
of which womens studies is exemplarythat strive to expose the workings of
oppression, examine subject formation, and offer counter-narratives for subjugated
groups. Their cultural work is building an archive through historical and textual
retrieval, canon reformation, role modeling, mentoring, curricular reform, and
course and program development.
When you are forced to realize that other people have more social author- ity than
you do to describe your experience of your own body, your confi- dence in yourself
and your relationship to reality is radically undermined. What can you know if you cannot
know that you are experiencing suffering or joy; what can you communicate to people who don't believe you
Most people will censor what they tell or say nothing rather than
expose themselves repeatedly to such deeply felt invalidation. They are si-
lenced by fear and confusion. The process is familiar from our
understanding of how women are silenced in and by patriarchal culture.
know even this?16
One final caution: As with women's "special knowledge," there is a danger of sentimentalizing disabled people's
intellectual and political issues that are raised by experiences of physical disability. Confront- ing these issues has
increased my appreciation of the insights that feminist theory already offers into cultural attitudes about the body
and the many forms of social oppression. Feminists have been challenging medicine's au- thority for many years
now, but not, I think, as radically as we would if we knew what disabled people have to tell. I look forward to the
Dichotomy S.
Paradigms of health and ideas about appropriate kinds and
levels of performance are culturally-dependent and the idea
that there is some universal paradigm of human physical
disability is an illusion because disability is socially
constructed from biological reality. We need a new paradigm
that understands this and that breaks down the self-other
dichotomy and liberates handicapped bodies. //////////////
Definitions of impairment, disability, and handicap
ignore the distinction between the physical and social aspects
of disability and imply that women cannot be handicapped.
Wendell, 89
Susan, Summer 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability, Hypatia, Vol. 4, No. 4, Feminist Ethics
& Medicine, pp. 104-124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3809809.pdf DOA: 6/28/16 //KD
WHO IS PHYSICALLY DISABLED? The United Nations offers the following definitions of and distinctions among
impairment, disability and handicap: "Impairment: Any loss or abnormality of psychological, physio- logical, or
anatomical structure or function. Disability: Any re- striction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to
perform an activity in the manner or within the range consid- ered normal for a human being. Handicap: A
disadvantage for a given individual, resulting from an impairment or disability, that limits or prevents the
fulfillment of a role that is normal, depending on age, sex, social and cultural factors, for that in- dividual."
Handicap is therefore a function of the relationship be- tween disabled persons and their environment. It occurs
when they encounter cultural, physical or social barriers which pre- vent their access to the various systems of
society that are available to other citizens. Thus, handicap is the loss or limi- tation of opportunities to take part in
include many conditions that are not always recognized by the general public as disabling, for example, de-
bilitating chronic illnesses that limit people's activities but do not necessarily cause any visible disability, such as
Crohn's Disease. Second, the definition of "handicap" explicitly recognizes the possibility that the primary cause of
a disabled person's inability to do certain things may be social-denial of op- portunities, lack of accessibility, lack
We
need an under- standing of disability that does not support a paradigm of humanity
as young and healthy. Encouraging everyone to acknowledge, accommodate and
iden- tify with a wide range of physical conditions is ultimately the road to self-ac-
ceptance as well as the road to liberating those who are disabled now.
we once took for granted or that others take for granted, bodies that make daily life a physical struggle.
Discussion S.
Idealizing the body and wanting to control and wanting to
control it go hand-in-hand, causing those who cannot control
their bodies to be seen as failures. Integrating disabled
peoples experiences and recognizing what it is like to be far
from the cultural ideal of the body would decrease societys
fear of the negative body.
Wendell, 89
Susan, Summer 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability, Hypatia, Vol. 4, No. 4, Feminist Ethics
& Medicine, pp. 104-124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3809809.pdf DOA: 6/28/16 //KD
Feminist theorists have probed the causes of our patriarchal culture's desire for
control of the body-fear of death, fear of the strong impulses and feelings the body
gives us, fear of nature, fear and resentment of the mother's power over the infant
(de Beauvoir 1949; Dinnerstein 1976; Griffin 1981). Idealiz- ing the body and wanting to
control it go hand-in-hand; it is impossible to say whether one causes the other. A physical ideal
gives us the goal of our efforts to control the body, and the myth that total control is possible deceives us into
in a disabled body, you hear how often health and physical vigour are talked about as if they were moral virtues.
Peo- ple constantly praise others for their "energy," their stamina, their ability to work long hours. Of course, acting
on behalf of one's health can be a virtue, and undermining one's health can be a vice, but "success" at being
healthy, like beauty, is always partly a matter of luck and therefore beyond our con- trol. When health is spoken of
as a virtue, people who lack it are made to feel inadequate. I am not suggesting that it is always wrong to praise
people's physical strength or accomplishments, any more than it is always wrong to praise their physical beauty.
But just as treating cultural standards of beauty as essential virtues for women harms most women, treating health
and vigour as moral virtues for everyone harms people with disabilities and illnesses. The myth that the body can
be controlled is not easily dispelled, because it is not very vulnerable to evidence against it. When I became ill,
several peo- ple wanted to discuss with me what I thought I had done to "make myself" ill or "allow myself" to
become sick. At first I fell in with this, generating theo- ries about what I had done wrong; even though I had
always taken good care of my health, I was able to find some (rather far-fetched) accounts of my re- sponsibility
for my illness. When a few close friends offered hypotheses as to how they might be responsible for my being ill, I
began to suspect that some- thing was wrong. Gradually, I realized that we were all trying to believe that nothing
this important is beyond our control. Of course, there are sometimes controllable social and psychological forces
accident and disability is often a harmful expression of this insistence on control (see Sontag 1977). Modern
Western medicine plays into and conforms to our cultural myth that the body can be controlled. Collectively,
doctors and medical research- ers exhibit very little modesty about their knowledge. They focus their (and our)
attention on cures and imminent cures, on successful medical interven- tions. Research, funding and medical care
are more directed toward life- threatening conditions than toward chronic illnesses and disabilities. Even pain was
relatively neglected as a medical problem until the second half of this century. Surgery and saving lives bolster the
illusion of control much bet- ter than does the long, patient process of rehabilitation or the management of longterm illness. These latter, less visible functions of medicine tend to be performed by nurses, physiotherapists and
other low-prestige members of the profession. Doctors are trained to do something to control the body, to "make
it better" (Kleinman 1988); they are the heroes of medicine. They may like being in the role of hero, but we also
like them in that role and try to keep them there, because we want to believe that someone can always "make it
better."ll As long as we cling to this belief, the patients who cannot be "re- paired"-the chronically ill, the disabled
and the dying-will symbolize the failure of medicine and more, the failure of the Western scientific project to
control nature. They will carry this stigma in medicine and in the culture as a whole. When philosophers of
medical ethics confine themselves to discussing life- and-death issues of medicine, they help perpetuate the idea
little or nothing about how to live with long-term or life-threatening illness, how to communicate with doctors and
nurses and medical bureaucrats about these matters, how to live with limitation, uncertainty, pain, nausea, and
other symptoms when doctors cannot make them go away. Recently, patients' sup- port groups have arisen to fill
this gap for people with nearly every type of ill- ness and disability. They are vitally important sources of
knowledge and en- couragement for many of us, but they do not fill the cultural gulf between the able-bodied and
with prolonged or recurring pain to understand the benefits of accepting it. Yet some people who live with chronic
pain speak of "making friends" with it as the road to feeling better and enjoying life. How do they picture their
pain and think about it; what kind of attention do they give it and when; how do they live around and through it,
and what do they learn from it? We all need to know this as part of our education. Some of the fear of
experiencing pain is a consequence of ignorance and lack of guidance. The effort to avoid pain contributes to such
widespread problems as drug and alcohol addiction, eating disorders, and sedentary lives. People with painful
disabilities can teach us about pain, because they can't avoid it and have had to learn how to face it and live with
it. The pernicious myth that it is possible to avoid almost all pain by controlling the body gives the fear of pain
disabled people have experiences which are not available to the able-bodied, they
are in a better position to transcend cul- tural mythologies about the body, because
they cannot do things that the able-bodied feel they must do in order to be happy,
"normal" and sane. For example, paraplegics and quadriplegics have revolutionary
things to teach about the possibilities of sexuality which contradict patriarchal
culture's ob- session with the genitals (Bullard and Knight 1981). Some people can have orgasms in
any part of their bodies where they feel touch. One man said he never knew how good sex could be until he lost
given the power to describe and validate everyone's ex- perience of the body. If you go to doctors with symptoms
they cannot observe directly or verify independently of what you tell them, such as pain or weak- ness or
numbness or dizziness or difficulty concentrating, and if they cannot find an objectively observable cause of those
symptoms, you are likely to be told that there is "nothing wrong with you," no matter how you feel. Unless you are
very lucky in your doctors, no matter how trustworthy and responsi- ble you were considered to be before you
experience is recognized by medicine, it is often re-de- scribed in ways that are inaccurate from your standpoint.
The objectively ob- servable condition of your body may be used to determine the
severity of your pain, for instance, regardless of your own reports of it. For example, until re-
cently, relatively few doctors were willing to acknowledge that severe phan- tom limb pain can persist for months
or even years after an amputation. The accumulated experience of doctors who were themselves amputees has
society so that everyone can receive and make use of it, so that it can be fully
integrated, along with disabled people, into a shared social life.
Female = Disability
Being female is considered a disability in western thought- this
notion leads to leads to things like infanticide and other
human rights violations that are intertwined with gender and
race
Garland-Thomson, 11 (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of English at Emory
University with a focus on disability studies and feminist theory. i n t e g r a t i n g disabi l ity, t r a n s
f o rmi n g f eminist t h e o r y Feminist Disability Studies, Indiana University Press, 2011) ET
The first domain of feminist theory that can be deepened by a disability analysis is
representation. Western thought has long conflated femaleness and
disability, understanding both as defective departures from a valued standard.
Aristotle, for example, defined women as mutilated males. Women, for Aristotle,
have improper form; we are monstrosit[ies] (1944, 2728, 89). As what Nancy
Tuana calls misbegotten men, women thus become the primal freaks in
Western history, envisioned as what we might now call congenitally deformed as
a result of what we might now term genetic disability (1993, 18). More recently,
feminist theorists have argued that female embodiment is a disabling condition in
sexist culture. Iris Marion Young, for instance, examines how enforced feminine
comportment delimits womens sense of embodied agency, restricting them to
throwing like a girl (1990b, 141). Young concludes, Women in a sexist society
are physically handicapped (153). Even the general American public associates
femininity with disability. A recent study on stereotyping showed that housewives,
disabled people, blind people, so-called retarded people, and the elderly were all
judged as being similarly incompetent. Such a study suggests that intensely
normatively feminine positions such as a housewifeare aligned with negative
attitudes about people with disabilities (Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick 2001).1 Recognizing
how the concept of disability has been used to cast the form and functioning of
female bodies as nonnormative can extend feminist critiques. Take, for example, the
exploitation of Saartjie Baartman, the African woman exhibited as a freak in
nineteenth-century Europe (Fausto- Sterling 1995; Gilman 1985). Known as the
Hottentot Venus, Baartmans treatment has come to represent the most egregious
form of racial and gendered degradation. What goes unremarked in studies of her
display, however, are the ways that the language and assumptions of the ability/
disability system were implemented to pathologize and exoticize Baartman. Her
display invoked disability by presenting as deformities or abnormalities the
characteristics that marked her as raced and gendered. I am not suggesting that
Baartman was disabled, but rather that the concepts of disability discourse framed
her presentation to the Western eye. Using disability as a category of analysis
allows us to see that what was normative embodiment in her native context
became abnormal to the Western mind. More important, rather than simply
supposing that being labeled as a freak is a slander, a disability analysis presses our
critique further by challenging the premise that unusual embodiment is inherently
inferior. The feminist interrogation of gender since Simone de Beauvoir (1974) has
revealed how women are assigned a cluster of ascriptions, like Aristotles, that mark
us as Other. What is less widely recognized, however, is that this collection of
actual bodies of people with disabilities. Erasing real disabled bodies from the
history of these terms compromises the very critique they intend to launch and
misses an opportunity to use disability as a feminist critical category. Such
representations ultimately portray subjugated bodies not only as inadequate or
unrestrained but at the same time as redundant and expendable. Bodies marked
and selected by such systems are targeted for elimination by varying historical and
cross-cultural practices. Women, people with disabilities or appearance
impairments, ethnic Others, gays and lesbians, and people of color are
variously the objects of infanticide, selective abortion , eugenic programs,
hate crimes, mercy killing, assisted suicide, lynching, bride burning, honor
killings, forced conversion, coercive rehabilitation, domestic violence,
genocide, normalizing surgical procedures, racial profiling, and neglect. All
of these discriminatory practices are legitimated by systems of
representation, by collective cultural stories that shape the material world,
underwrite exclusionary attitudes, inform human relations, and mold our senses of
who we are. Understanding how disability functions along with other
systems of representation clarifies how all the systems intersect and
mutually constitute one another.
FDT Key
We need a social and political feminist theory of disability
because disability is socially constructed. The specific
intersection between being a woman and being disabled is
important to examine because the same attitudes that
contribute to womens oppression also contribute to the social
and psychological disablement of people who have physical
disabilities.
Wendell, 89
Susan, Summer 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability, Hypatia, Vol. 4, No. 4, Feminist Ethics
& Medicine, pp. 104-124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3809809.pdf DOA: 6/28/16 //KD
In 1985, I fell ill overnight with what turned out to be a disabling chronic disease. In the long struggle to come to
terms with it, I had to learn to live with a body that felt entirely different to me-weak, tired, painful, nause- ated,
dizzy, unpredictable. I learned at first by listening to other people with chronic illnesses or disabilities; suddenly
able-bodied people seemed to me profoundly ignorant of everything I most needed to know. Although doctors told
me there was a good chance I would eventually recover completely, I re- alized after a year that waiting to get
well, hoping to recover my healthy body, was a dangerous strategy. I began slowly to identify with my new, disa-
bled body and to lear to work with it. As I moved back into the world, I also began to experience the world as
structured for people who have no weak- nesses. 1 The process of encountering the able-bodied world led me
gradually to identify myself as a disabled person, and to reflect on the nature of disabil- ity. Some time ago, I
decided to delve into what I assumed would be a substan- tial philosophical literature in medical ethics on the
nature and experience of disability. I consulted The Philosopher's Index, looking under "Disability," "Handicap,"
"Illness," and "Disease." This was a depressing experience. At least 90% of philosophical articles on these topics
are concerned with two questions: Under what conditions is it morally permissible/right to kill/let die a disabled
person and how potentially disabled does a fetus have to be before it is permissible/right to prevent its being born?
Thus, what I have to say here about disability is not a response to philosophical literature on the subject. Instead, it
reflects what I have learned from the writings of other disabled people (especially disabled women), from talking
with disabled people who have shared their insights and experiences with me, and from my own experi- ence of
disability. It also reflects my commitment to feminist theory, which offers perspectives and categories of analysis
that help to illuminate the per- sonal and social realities of disability, and which would, in turn, be enriched by a
this essay is to persuade feminist theorists, especially femi- nist philosophers, to turn more attention to
constructing a theory of disability and to integrating the experiences and knowledge of disabled people into
feminist theory as a whole. Toward this end I will discuss physical disability4 from a theoretical perspective,
including: some problems of defining it (here I will criticize the most widely-used definitions-those of the United
Nations); the social construction of disability from biological reality on analogy with the social construction of
gender; cultural attitudes toward the body which oppress disabled people while also alienating the able-bodied
from their own experiences of embodiment; the "othemess" of disabled people; the knowl- edge that disabled
people could contribute to culture from our diverse experi- ences and some of the ways this knowledge is silenced
and invalidated. Along the way, I will describe briefly three issues discussed in disability theory that have been
taken up in different contexts by feminist theory: sameness vs. dif- ference, independence vs. dependency and
I do not presume to speak for disabled women. Like everyone
who is disa- bled, I have a particular standpoint determined in part by both my
physical condition and my social situation. My own disability may be temporary, it could get better
or worse. My disability is usually invisible (except when I use a walking stick). I am a white university professor who
has adequate medical and long-term disability insurance; that makes me very privileged among the disabled. I
write what I can see from my standpoint. Because I do not want simply to describe my own experience but to
understand it in a much larger context, I must venture beyond what I know first-hand. I rely on others to correct
my mistakes and fill in those parts of the picture I cannot see.
Imperialism/Disability
The violence of Imperialism creates the disability
Erevelles, 11 (Nirmala erevelles, Associate Professor of Social Foundations of
Education and Instructional Leadership at the University of Alabama. Her research
and publications are in the areas of disability studies, multicultural education,
feminism, and sociology of educatio t h e c o l o r o f v i o l e n c e Reflecting on
Gender, Race, and Disability in Wartime, Feminist Disability Studies, Indiana
University Press, 2011) ET
It is not just the missing reports about disability that are troubling in this time of
war. What is more troubling are the missing analyses of disability and war in the
otherwise radical scholarship of both feminist disability studies and third world
feminism, especially given the relevance of this topic for both analytical
frameworks.1 War is one of the largest producers of disability in a world still
inhospitable to disabled people and their predominantly female caregivers (Russell
1998; Charlton 1998; Nakano-Glenn 1992; Parker 1993; Chang 2000). While
upperand middle-class disabled people may enjoy a certain level of social and
economic accessibility in advanced industrialized nations in Europe and the
Americas, poor disabled people, particularly poor disabled people of color,
experience both social and economic oppression. This oppression is exacerbated in
the third world. Thus, while disabled U.S. war veterans may be able to anticipate at
least a minimal level of services and social support when they return from war,
disabled veterans and civilians in war-torn areas of the third world face an
inadequate, overburdened, and/or nonexistent infrastructure in service provision for
disabled people. In contexts where subsistence is a struggle, third world disabled
people in general, and third world women who are themselves disabled and/or
caregivers for disabled family members/clients, face the social, political, and
economic consequences of invisibility (Erevelles 1996; Chang 2000; Ghai 2003). In
this essay I explore an often ignored area in both feminist disability studies and
third world feminismthe intersection of war, disability, and gender in the third
world. In the first section I identify both feminist disability studies and third
world feminism as radical perspectives within feminist theory that are
nevertheless analytically limited regarding gender and disability in
post/neocolonial contexts. Drawing on the contemporary political context of the
war on terror, I argue that the violence of imperialism is instrumental not
only in the creation of disability but also in the absence of public
recognition of the impact of disability in the third world. Furthermore, I
contend it is possible to map historical continuities and discontinuities
between racism, sexism, and ableism in the eugenics practices in both the
early twentieth century and in contemporary neocolonialist wars in the third world. I
aim to foreground the repercussions of the invisibility of disability in radical
analyses and to outline the theory and practice of what I term a transnational
feminist disability studies perspective.
Intersectionality
Discussions about feminist disabilities studies allow us to
explore the ways in which intersectional oppressions create
distinct individual experiences.
Knoll 9 [Kristina R. doctoral candidate in the Women Studies Department at the University of Washington, Seattle. Feminist
Disability Studies Pedagogy Feminist Teacher Vol. 19, No. 2 University of Illinois Press 2009, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40546086?
seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents] JH
The goal of this paper is to raise aware- ness about systems of oppression and privilege, as related to ability and
Feminist
analyses of privi- lege, oppression, and intersectionality provide a framework for
looking at the diverse experiences of people with disabil- ities and our access to education.
disabil- ity in the classroom, and to provide tools to create instructional and institutional transformation.
Many disability studies theorists argue for a model of "universal design," which seeks to create architecture and
instruction for the widest group of people possible.1 1 argue, however, that although we should strive for
disability discrimination. Disability studies reveals and deconstructs the social manifestation of disability. Simi
Linton highlights this perspective, and critical movement, in her foundational text, Claiming Disability: We are
everywhere these days, wheel- ing and loping down the street, tapping our canes, sucking on our breathing tubes,
following our guide dogs, puff- ing and sipping on the mouth sticks that propel our motorized chairs. We may drool,
hear voices, speak in stac- cato syllables, wear catheters to collect our urine, or live with a compromised immune
system. We are all bound together, not by the list of our collective symptoms but by the social and politi- cal
circumstances that have forged us as a group. We have found one another and found a voice to express not despair
"medical model of disability," which describes people with disabilities as "deviance from the norm" (Linton 11) and
as medical, psychologi- cal, and pathological problems that reside in individual bodies. Interdisciplinary disability
studies scholars like Rosema- rie Garland-Thomson, Susan Schweik, and Paul Longmore, identify the ways in which
disabilities are socially and cultur- ally designated- and provide a space for persons with disabilities to reassess
what they have been told about them- selves (their medical, psychological, and/ or general cultural experiences,
and their rights).2 This recognition and awareness has propelled thousands to reclaim their disability identity with
another person. Due in part, I believe, to the fear of resituating the dis- ability experience as an individual issue or
problem, there has been a strong move- ment toward universalizing access .
white privilege prompts us to start thinking about all the things that are physically created, like the staircase. All
physical objects are manufactured for a certain type of body, mind, and/or emotion. These are physi- cal, or object,
privileges. There are also social privileges we grant certain types of people, such as recommendations for jobs,
To demonstrate
how physi- cal/object privileges and social privileges designate certain people as
deviant, we can explore the ways in which society has or has not been constructed
physically and socially for particular bodies, minds, and emotions. Here are a few examples
invitations to parties, and positive representation in movies, newspapers, and textbooks.
of what able-bodied privilege might look like: Physical-Object-Privileges 1. 1 can walk up the stairs to an apartment
and not have them be barriers to my liv- ing or visiting friends there. 2. 1 can be at work or school, because I do not
have to worry about whether or not people are wearing perfume. Social-Privileges 1. People think of me as a sexual
being, and they believe that I could be a good partner and parent. 2. I will do well on the SAT or GRE, because I was
not routinely pulled out of a por- tion of my classes for speech, physical, or psychological therapy or testing.
feminist disability studies is academic cultural work with a sharp political edge
and a vigorous critical punch. Feminist disability studies wants to unsettle tired
stereotypes about people with disabilities. It seeks to challenge our dominant
assumptions about living with a disability. It situates the disability experience in the
context of rights and exclusions. It aspires to retrieve dismissed voices and
misrepresented experiences. It helps us understand the intricate relation between
bodies and selves. It illuminates the social processes of identity formation. It aims to
denaturalize disability. In short, feminist disability studies reimagines disability.
itself,
Feminism challenges the belief that femaleness is a natural form of physical and mental deficiency or constitutional
uses two critical practices that might seem counterintuitive. First, it tends to avoid impairment-specific or med- ical
bodies rather than specific forms, functions, and behaviors. Fem- inist disability studies scrutinizes how people with
a wide range of physical, mental, and emotional differences are collectively imagined as defective and excluded
from an equal place in the social order. Social categories parallel to disabled, such as people of color or
queer, also embrace a wide range of varying physical characteristics, identities, and subjective experiences, even
such as birthmarks or fatness, traumatic injuries, congenital impairments or anomalies, sensory impairments, latent
conditions such as HIV or hereditary conditions, learning disabilities, and mental, developmental, or emotional
illnesses are grouped together under the medical-scientific rubric of abnormality and its accompanying cultural
sentence of inferiority.
the major critical concerns of feminist disability studies. Second, feminist disability
studies questions our assumptions by using precise language that may seem
convoluted when talking about disability. I use phrases such as the traits we think of as
disability, for example, rather than words like deformities or abnormalities. We
say things like bodies that violate the normative standards and expectations of bodily form and function not
to obfuscate but rather to clarify by insisting that readers do not fall back on
essentialist definitions of disability as inferior embodiment . Sometimes it is important to
say people who identify as disabled or people who identify as nondisabled or even people who are considered
to make clear the important difference between bodies themselves and the
ascribed or achieved identities attached to them in social relations and cultural
representations. This language calls atten- tion to the hidden norm that lurks behind
our understandings of disability, one that makes some bodies seem naturally
deficient or excessive and others seem superior . In addition, language about figuring and repdisabled
resenting or narratives can dislodge the pervasive negative notions we all learn about disability and shake up
our assumptions about what con- stitutes happiness, attractiveness, suffering, dignity, or a livable existence.
Feminist disability studies thus reveals both the cultural work and the limits of
language. Disability proves to be an especially useful critical category in three
particular concerns of current feminist theory. First is probing identity; second is
theorizing intersectionality; third is investigating embodiment. Feminism questioned the
coherence, boundaries, and exclusions of the term womanthe very category on which it seemed to depend. Consequently, it expanded its lexicon beyond gender differences to include the many inflections of identity that
produce multiple subjectivities and subject positions. Our most sophisticated feminist analyses illuminate how
gender interlocks with the race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class systems. This focus on how identity operates
femininity and embodiment, the commercialization of health and fitness, issues of caretaking and caregiv- ing, the
varied as sick, deformed, crazy, ugly, old, maimed, afflicted, mad, abnormal, or
debilitatedall of which disadvantage people by devaluing bodies that do not
conform to cultural standards. Thus, the disability system functions to preserve and
validate such privileged designations as beautiful, healthy, normal, fit, competent,
intelligentall of which provide cultural capital to those who can claim such status,
who can reside within these subject positions. It is, then, the various interactions
between bodies and world that materialize disability from the stuff of human
variation and precariousness. A feminist disability theory denaturalizes disability by
unseating the dominant assumption that disability is something that is wrong with
someone. By this I mean, of course, that it mobilizes feminisms highly developed
and complex critique of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality as exclusionary
and oppressive systems rather than as the natural and appropriate order of things.
To do this, feminist disability theory engages several of the fundamental premises of
critical theory: (1) that representation structures reality, (2) that the margins
define the center, (3) that gender (or disability) is a way of signifying
relationships of power, (4) that human identity is multiple and unstable, and (5)
that all analysis and evaluation has political implications. In order to
elaborate on these premises, I discuss here four fundamental and interpenetrating
domains of feminist theory and suggest some of the kinds of critical inquiries that
considering disability can generate within these theoretical arenas. These domains
are representation, the body, identity, and activism. While I have disentangled these
domains here for the purposes of setting up a schematic organization for my
analysis, they are, of course, not discrete in either concept or practice, but rather
tend to be synchronic.
as Womens Studies
expands the lexicon of what we imagine as womanly and seeks to understand and destigmatize
the identity woman, so has Disability Studies examined the identity disability in the
service of integrating disabled people more fully into our society. Feminist Disability
Studies brings the two together to argue that cultural expectations, received attitudes,
social institutions, and their attendant material conditions create a situation in
which bodies that are categorized as both female and disabled are disadvantaged
doubly and in parallel ways. Feminist Disability Studies interprets disability as a
cultural rather than an individual or medical issue and insists on examining power relations
rather than assigning deviance when analyzing cultural representations of oppressed groups. Feminist
Disability Studies emphasizes changing public policy and cultural institutions rather
than viewing the problems of disabled women as residing in their own supposedly inferior bodies. Within the
critical framework of Feminist Disability Studies, disability becomes a
representational system rather than a medical problem, a social construction instead of a
personal misfortune or bodily flaw, and a subject appropriate for wide- ranging
intellectual inquiry rather than a specialized field within medicine, rehabilitation, or
social work. Feminist Disability Studies also seeks to augment and correct traditional
feminism, which sometimes ignores, misrepresents, or conflicts with the concerns of
women with disabilities. For example, disabled women must sometimes defend against the assessment of
their bodies as unfit for motherhood or of themselves as childlike objects who occasion other peoples virtue.
One of
the most pervasive feminist assumptions that undermines some disabled womens
struggle is the liberal ideology of autonomy and independence that fuels the
broader impulse toward womens empowerment. By tacitly incorporating the liberal
premise that levels individual characteristics to posit an abstract, disembodied
subject of democracy, feminist practice often leaves no space for the needs and
accommodations that disabled Prominent disability rights and feminist activist Judy
Heumanns angry and disappointed words reflect the alienation that results: When
I come into a room full of feminists, all they see is a wheelchair.
substituting the ethics of caring for the ethics of equality threatens an even more oppressive paternalism.
Iris
stereotyping showed that housewives, disabled people, blind people, so-called retarded people, and the elderly
intensely normatively
feminine positions-such as a housewife- are aligned with negative attitudes about
people with disabilities (Fiske, Cuddy,and Glick 2001).1 Recognizing how the
concept of disability has been used to cast the form and functioning of female
bodies as non-normative can extend feminist critiques. Take, for example, the exploitation of
were all judged as being similarly incompetent. Such a study suggests that
Saartje Bartmann, the African woman exhibited as a freak in nineteenth-century Europe (Fausto-Sterling 1995;
Gilman 1985). Known as the Hottentot Venus, Bartmann's treatment has come to represent the most egregious
form of racial and gendered degradation. What goes unremarked in studies of Bartmann's display, however, are the
ways that the language and assumptions of the ability/disability system were implemented to pathologize and
exoticize Bartmann. Her display invoked disability by presenting as deformities or abnormalities the characteristics
that marked her as raced and gendered. I am not suggesting that Bartmann was disabled, but rather that the
concepts of disability discourse framed her presentation to the Western eye. Using
disability as a category of analysis allows us to see that what was normative
embodiment in her native context became abnormal to the Western mind. More important,
rather than simply supposing that being labeled as a freak is a slander, a disability analysis presses our
critique further by challenging the premise that unusual embodiment is inherently
inferior. The feminist interrogation of gender since Simone de Beauvoir (1974)has revealed how women are
assigned a cluster of ascriptions, like Aristotle's, that mark us as Other. What is less widely recognized, however, is
that this collection of interrelated characterizations is precisely the same set of supposed attributes affixed to
people with disabilities.
telethons. For example, an 1885 medical illustration of a pathologically "love deficient" woman, who fits the cultural
stereotype of the ugly woman or perhaps the lesbian, suggests how sexuality and appearance slide into the terms
historical figure of the monster as well, invokes disability, often to serve racism and sexism. Although the term has
expanded to encompass all forms of social and corporeal aberration, monster originally described people with
congenital impairments. As departures from the normatively human, monsters were seen as category violations or
grotesque hybrids. The semantics of mon- strosity are recruited to explain gender violations such as Julia Pastrana,
for example, the Mexican Indian "bearded woman," whose body was dis- played in nineteenth-century freak shows
both during her lifetime and after her death. Pastrana's live and later her embalmed body spectacularly confused
and transgressed established cultural categories. Race, gender, disability, and sexuality augmented one another in
Pastrana's display to produce a spectacle of embodied otherness that is simultaneously sensational, sentimental,
and pathological (Thomson 1999). Furthermore, much current feminist work theorizes figures of hybridity and
excess such as monsters, grotesques, and cyborgs to suggest their transgressive potential for a feminist politics
(Haraway 1991; Braidotti 1994; Russo 1994).However, this metaphorical invocation seldom acknowledges that
these figures often refer to the actual bodies of people with disabilities. Erasing real disabled bodies from the
history of these terms compromises the very critique they intend to launch and misses an opportunity to use
Whereas Kirk and Okazawa-Rey (2004) describe identity politics from more of a stereotypical view (which often has
negative connotations because of the strong boundaries around identities that can restrain and oppress the
when identities do
confront each other, it provides an opportunity to see the disguised systems of
power, privilege and oppression that help create boundaries around our identities
and identity-based theories. Kirk and Okazawa- Rey outline identity-based politics as the space in which
people do make connections across identities. I want to make a stronger claim: it is not just when
connections are allowed to be made across identities, but we must shift or refine the
definition toward emphasizing a process that recognizes this work as critical (albeit
also containing a labyrinth of contentious identity politics within it), as a process that we can
continually refine together by piecing together our identity-based theories . These
distinctions are rarely made. I believe that it is important to create and use more refined
definitions around identity issues in order to clarify the lived experiences, processes,
and barriers present when doing identity-based work. There is a strong feeling among the
participants that feminist disability studies recognizes the importance of difference and
the need for intersectional and identity-based politics, where individuals and groups
intersecting, overlapping, and many nuances of identities from surfacing), I argue that
recognize critical issues across various oppressions, privileges, and identities . Too
often, as raised within the interviews, identity politics slow the progress of a movement, or the movement fails
being ignored and people feeling ostracized from disability studies groups) because one form of identity (in this
case, a social constructionist view of impairment) takes rank over another identity perspective (in this case,
how far one can take the socially constructed aspects of disability and impairment,
Solidarity
Unity of disabled women and through emphasizing social and
political similarities as well as the shared physical,
psychological and social experiences of disability are key to
foster solidarity among the disabled and challenge the ablebodied paradigm of humanity, creating the possibility to more
deeply challenge the idealization of the body.
Wendell, 89
Susan, Summer 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability, Hypatia, Vol. 4, No. 4, Feminist Ethics
& Medicine, pp. 104-124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3809809.pdf DOA: 6/28/16 //KD
The reasons in favour of the alternative solution to "otherness"-emphasiz-
ing difference from the ablebodied-are also reasons for emphasizing similari- ties among the disabled,
especially social and political similarities. Disabled people share positions of social
oppression that separate us from the able-bod- ied, and we share physical,
psychological and social experiences of disability. Emphasizing differences from the
able-bodied demands that those differences be acknowledged and respected and
fosters solidarity among the disabled. It challenges the able-bodied paradigm of
humanity and creates the possibility of a deeper challenge to the idealization of the
body and the demand for its control. Invisibly disabled people tend to be drawn to
solutions that empha- size difference, because our need to have our struggles
acknowledged is great, and we have far less experience than those who are visibly
disabled of being symbolic to the able-bodied. Whether one wants to emphasize sameness or difference
in dealing with the problem of being "the other" depends in part on how radically one wants to challenge the value-structure of
A very important is- sue in this category for both women and disabled people is the value
of inde- pendence from the help of others , so highly esteemed in our patriarchal
cul- ture and now being questioned in feminist ethics (see, for example, Sherwin 1984, 1987; Kittay
and Meyers 1987) and discussed in the writings of disabled women (see, for example, Fisher and Galler
the dominant group.
1981; Davis 1984; Frank 1988). Many disabled people who can see the possibility of living as independently as any able-bodied
Dependence on
the help of oth- ers is humiliating in a society which prizes independence. In addition,
this is- sue holds special complications for disabled women ; reading the stories of women who
became disabled as adults, I was struck by their struggle with shame and loss of self-esteem
at being transformed from people who took physical care of others (husbands and children)
to people who were physically dependent. All this suggests that disabled people need every bit of
person, or who have achieved this goal after long struggle, value their independence above everything.
independ- ence we can get. Yet there are disabled people who will always need a lot of help from other individuals just to survive
that might be considered trivial in a cul- ture less insistent on self-reliance; if our culture valued interdependence more highly,
they could use that energy for more satisfying activities. In her excellent discussion of the issue of dependency and independence,
women with disabilities and those who care for them can work
out a model of reciprocity for all of us, if we are willing to learn from them .
"Reciprocity involves the difficulty of recognizing each other's needs, relying on the
other, asking and receiving help, delegating re- sponsibility, giving and receiving
empathy, respecting boundaries" (Davis 1984, 4). I hope that disabled and ablebodied feminists will join in question- ing our cultural obsession with
Barbara Hillyer Davis argues that
Disabled
people do have both knowledge and ways of knowing that are not available to the
able-bodied. Although ultimately I hope that disa- bled people's knowledge will be
integrated into the culture as a whole , I sus- pect that a culture which fears and
denigrates the real body would rather si- lence this knowledge than make the
changes necessary to absorb it. It may have to be nurtured and cultivated
separately while the able-bodied culture is transformed enough to receive and
integrate it.
recognition and preser- vation, as well as for their right to continue making their own culture (Sacks 1988).
A very important
is- sue in this category for both women and disabled people is the value of inde- pendence from
the help of others, so highly esteemed in our patriarchal cul- ture and now being
questioned in feminist ethics (see, for example, Sherwin 1984, 1987; Kittay and Meyers 1987) and
discussed in the writings of disabled women (see, for example, Fisher and Galler 1981; Davis
in part on how radically one wants to challenge the value-structure of the dominant group.
1984; Frank 1988). Many disabled people who can see the possibility of living as independently as any ablebodied person, or who have achieved this goal after long struggle, value their independence above everything.
addition, some disabled people spend tremendous energy being independent in ways that might be considered
trivial in a cul- ture less insistent on self-reliance; if our culture valued interdependence more highly, they could
use that energy for more satisfying activities. In her excellent discussion of the issue of dependency and
special culture of the oppressed group or the seeds of a special culture which could be developed in a supportive
context of solidarity? Do members of the oppressed group have accumulated knowledge or ways of knowing which
might be lost if assimila- tion takes place without the dominant culture being transformed? It would be hard to
claim that disabled people as a whole have an alterna- tive culture or even the seeds of one. One sub-group, the
deaf, has a separate culture from the hearing, and they are fighting for its recognition and preser- vation, as well
Western Academics
Western academics must investigate our imposition of values
upon non-western cultures
Jarman, 05 (Michelle Jarman, Associate Professor of Disability Studies at the
Wyoming Institute for Disabilities. She is also adjunct faculty in Gender and
Womens Studies. RESISTING GOOD IMPERIALISM:READING DISABILITY AS
RADICAL VULNERABILITY Atenea 25.1 pg 107-116, 2005) ET
My intention is not to assert that all western medical interventions are inherently
wrong. Many of these children and families appreciate and benefit from the free
surgeries offered by Smile Train. However, I am arguing that western scholars
have a responsibility to interrogate the imposition of culturally specific
values upon non-western cultures, especially the exploitation of disabled
bodies in the marketing of good imperialism. Abby Wilkerson reminds us that
our well-resourced, western conception of illness, disability, or disease as elements
dwelling outside the realm of the ordinary is actually a very privileged perspective,
and while western scholars often cite our own privilege, we must vigilantly guard
against subtle practices of perpetuating the very problems we critique. I want to
suggest that disability studies scholars, in particular, might reach across cultural
boundaries to gain more insight about the different meanings of disability in specific
locations in order to provide a counter-narrative to the potentially monolithic
western discourse of medical (social) rehabilitation. As the child in the Smile Train
advertisement clearly illustrates, the disabled body functions as a powerful
discursive site upon which various anxieties are projected and where
wider cultural, social and political interests battle for hegemony. The
radical vulnerability of disabled bodies has the potential to be read in
two directionsacross the surface of the image into the reflected desires
and motivations behind the broader hegemonic projects. In this small
example, we have seen hegemonic concerns over such wide-ranging issues
as aesthetics, embodiment, medical and technological progress, cultural
differences, the personal and political, economic development, and
globalization. Such anxieties and projections demonstrate the importance of a
fuller engagement between disability studies and postcolonial theory in order to
challenge the continued production of Third World disability for First World
consumption.
A2 Who is disabled
Disability functions in many different ways, leaving social
oppression as the only thing that disabled bodies have in
common. This point of unity is key in undermining the way that
society defines disability and whom it recognizes as disabled
because these societal ideas are of huge psychological,
economic and social importance to people who are experiences
themselves as disabled.
Wendell, 89
Susan, Summer 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability, Hypatia, Vol. 4, No. 4, Feminist Ethics
& Medicine, pp. 104-124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3809809.pdf DOA: 6/28/16 //KD
Ultimately, we might eliminate the category of "the disabled" altogether, and simply talk about individuals'
expect them to perform as healthy people when they cannot and refuses to acknowledge and support their
struggles.6 Of course, no one wants the social stigma associated with disability, but social recognition of disability
deter- mines the practical help a person receives from doctors, government agen- cies, insurance companies,
condition is disabling changes with time and place, depending on such factors as social expectations, the state of
technology and its availability to people in that condition, the educational system, architecture, attitudes towards
physical appearance, and the pace of life. (If, for example, the pace of life increases without changes in other
factors, more people become disa- bled simply because fewer people can keep up the "normal" pace.)
and physical struggles that are partly consequences of the conditions of our bodies and partly consequences of the
structures and ex- pectations of our societies, but they are struggles which only people with bod- ies like ours
experience. The positive side of the term "differently-abled" is that it might remind the able-bodied that to be
disabled in some respects is not to be disabled in all re- spects. It also suggests that a disabled person may have
the term
"differently-abled" should be abandoned, because it reinforces the able- bodied
paradigm of humanity and fails to acknowledge the struggles disabled people
face. The problems of being "the other" to a dominant group are always politi- cally
complex. One solution is to emphasize similarities to the dominant group in the hope that they will identify with
abilities that the able- bodied lack in virtue of being able-bodied. Nevertheless, on the whole,
the oppressed, recognize their rights, gradually give them equal opportunities, and eventually assimilate them.
disabled people are tired of being symbols to the able-bodied, visible only or
primarily for their disabilities, and they want nothing more than to be seen as
individuals rather than as members of the group, "the disa- bled." Emphasizing similarities
Many
to the able-bodied, making their disabilities unnoticeable in comparison to their other human qualities may bring
about assimilation one-by-one. It does not directly challenge the able-bodied para- digm of humanity, just as
women moving into traditionally male arenas of power does not directly challenge the male paradigm of humanity,
although both may produce a gradual change in the paradigms. In addition, assimila- tion may be very difficult for
the disabled to achieve. Although the able-bod- ied like disabled tokens who do not seem very different from
themselves, they may need someone to carry the burden of the negative body as long as they continue to idealize
and try to control the body. They may therefore resist the assimilation of most disabled people.
Third Dimension
The third space disrupts Western nationhood
Frank Schulze-Engler 8 [chapter transcultural negotiations Third Spaces in Modern
times IN Communicating in the third space by Gerhard Wagner ] P. 149-153 MEL
Transcultural Negotiations Third Spaces in Modern Times Frank Schulze-Engler In the wake of Homi K. Bhabhas The
the fi gure of third space has become one of the main pillars of
contemporary postcolonial theory: it has been taken up in a vast array of scholarship in literary and
Location of Culture,
cultural studies as well as in the social sciences, but it has also become the focus point of heated debates on the
alleged privileging of the migrant condition in Bhabhas work or on the displacement of other forms of critical theory
(such as Marxism) in his writings.1 This chapter is neither concerned with a detailed exegesis of Bhabhas notions of
third space nor with an elaborate account of the manifold theoretical responses they have given rise to. Instead, it
seeks to highlight a peculiar presupposition that underlies both Bhabhas own account of third space and much of
LIMITED SPACE: POSTCOLONIALISM, MODERNITY AND THE WESTERN NATION STATE How, then, is third space
constructed in Bhabhas The Location of Culture, and why does his exploration of this space inevitably land itself in
the solitary confi nement of the Western nation state? This question is best addressed by a brief reconstruction of
the argument put forward in The Commitment to Theory, where the most extensive discussion of third space in
The Location of Culture is to be found. In this essay, third space is introduced via the problem of enunciation,
which is set out in classical poststructuralist terms as a general problem of the ambivalence of language: The
reason a cultural text or system cannot be suffi cient unto itself is that the act of cultural enunciationthe place of
utteranceis crossed by the diffrance of writing. [ . . . ] It is this difference in the process of language that is
crucial to the production of meaning and ensures, at the same time, that meaning is never simply mimetic and
transparent.2 From this general poststructuralist account of the inherent instability of meaning in language, the
argument then moves on to a more specifi c consideration of the role of enunciation in the context of cultural
dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (nonc) and
the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgment of its
discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specifi c
relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation.3 Third space is thus introduced in terms of a
peculiar relationship between the general conditions of language and the specifi c implication of the utterance in
revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges
our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force,
authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. In other words,
the disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of the Western nation which Benedict Anderson so
perceptively describes as being written in homogeneous, serial time.4 How do we account for this sudden narrowing
of focus in Bhabhas account of third space and what are its consequences for theorizing the postcolonial? Since the
text itself simply enunciates this contraction without providing further arguments, possible answers have to be
sought in their own discursive embeddedness and address, their own cultural positionality. An obvious major
determinant of this positionality is the postmodern critique of Western modernity on which Bhabha rests his own
case for the postcolonial disruption of that modernity. In his essay on The Postcolonial and the Postmodern
Bhabha situates his own usage of poststructuralist theory in the context of a postcolonial prerogative based on
experiences of a postcolonial contramodernity: [M]y use of poststructuralist theory emerges from this postcolonial
contramodernity. I attempt to represent a certain defeat, or even an impossibility, of the West in its authorization
of the idea of colonization. Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of modernity rather than by the
failures of logocentrismI have tried, in some small measure, to revise the known, to rename the postmodern from
the position of the postcolonial5 . While one trajectory of this postcolonial critique of Western modernity has led
Bhabha towards the history of colonialism and an analysis of the ambivalence of colonial discourse,6 of the sly
civility7 of the colonized and of the subversive features of colonial mimicry as an immanent threat to both
normalized knowledges and disciplinary powers,8 another important facet of this critique has focused on the
contemporary world and the unsettling presence of the postcolonial within the West. In his introduction to The
Location of Culture, Bhabha notes the potential Eurocentricity of the postmodern critique of Western modernity,
which could turn postmodernism into a profoundly parochial exercise if it remained limited to a celebration of the
fragmentation of the grand narratives of postenlightenment rationalism,9 and sets out his perspective on the
history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of
peasant and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees.10 This
identifi cation of the contemporary postcolonial with migration, exile and diaspora sets up a peculiar relationship
people of the paguscolonials, postcolonials, migrants, minoritieswandering peoples who will not be contained
within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks of a shifting
interstitial challenge to the cultural fi xity of the Western nation state: It is signifi cant that the productive capacities
Fading identity can be a direct result of hybridity in culture. Fading identity may lead
to identity crisis both in the colonizing and colonized cultures. The fact that
hybridity threatens the authority which is based on categorizations of difference
is among the most dramatic aspects of Bhabhaesque hybridity. Hybridity confuses
the signs of difference as signs of authority (Rothenburger 2001, p. 3-4).
Many of
Bhabhaesque definitions of the notion of hybridity locate in The Location of Culture. In this
study, it plays the role of the main point of reference. Although Hans Bertens (2001)
provides a thorough account of the dramatic factors concerning the formation of cultural
hybridity in Literary Theory: The Basics, the researcher should deal with Paul Jays more
comprehensive description: the necessity of cultural conversion led to the creation of
indigenous subjects who, forced to absorb Western cultural practices and religious
beliefs, subtly transformed them to accord with the vestiges of their own. Colonizing
forces, while seeking to wipe out indigenous or slave cultures, sometimes missed but
often tolerated and even exploited this phenomenon, since it served to ease the
transformation of both indigenous peoples and transported slaves into Western
subjects. The result was a mixed one for both colonizer and colonized. For the colonizer,
this kind of syncretism helped smooth the cultural conquest of indigenous and slave
populations, but it at the same time gave some measure of control over that culture to these
populations, a control which often transformed the colonizers own culture. This kind of
syncretism had mixed results for the colonized as well, who found their cultures virtually
wiped out but were nevertheless able to incorporate vestiges of it into the one forced upon
them.
Yazdiha 10
labels in a society set on fixing bodies in racial space by binding them to labels,
which are understood to contain fixed truths. I argue that utilizing the conceptual tool
of hybridity to deconstruct these labels allows a means by which hybrid individuals
can come together in powerful solidarity, rather than allowing their ambiguous
place in racial space to render them invisible. Harnessing racial hybridity to project
the simultaneously unique but common experience of hybridity can be a means by
which the individual subject can join to a marginal community through stories and
partial memories (Ahmed 1999). Furthermore, racial hybridity must harness the dualistic
experience of passing, or being mistaken for a race other than ones own. All identities
involve passing to some extent, in that a subjects self can never truly match its
image, but racial passing implicitly deconstructs the boundaries of Black and White.
In passing, hybridity might function not as a conflict or struggle between two racial
identities, but instead as constant movement between spaces, passing through and
between identity itself without origin or arrival (Ahmed 1999). The freedom to move
between identities carries its own power in defying the claims of essentialized racial identity.
Furthermore, the bounded labels of race do not account for the historical and geographic
narratives that lie behind each body and inform their identity. In Black Africans and Native
Americans, Jack Forbes explores the disconnect between racial labels and the
consciousness of the bodies behind them using Native Americans and Africans as
examples by which groups are forced into arbitrary categories render their ethnic
heritage simple rather than complex (1988: 271). As a result, hybridity calls into
question the boundaries of racial consciousness as a hybrid consciousness defies
the imposed limits of race. The management of these identities becomes its own sort of
performance, as the body negotiates each consciousness in different spaces. Again, the
ability to play multiple roles, to pass in different arenas, carries significant power. In
embodying the inability to bind identities to race, racial hybridity both in the
China
Chinese government will continue to brutally control family life as it does most other
aspects of Chinese life, said Smith. The one-child policy may possibly become a
two-child policy but Chinas police state population control policies will not end
anytime soon. The Chinese government retains the power to tell couples what their
families must look like and the power to punish those who disobey birth quotas . For
the past 35 years the Chinese government has wasted precious human potential
and sanctioned state-sponsored violence against women and childrenenabled by
pro-abortion groups globally and the United Nations Population Fund. No one should applaud Chinas
announced two-child policy, instead we should be insisting they abolish intrusive and abusive
birth restrictions forever. Click here to read Chairman Smiths testimony. The hearing, entitled
Chinas Announced Two-Child Policy & the Continuation of Massive Crimes Against
Women and Children was held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), which
Congressman Smith chairs with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida (click here for Co-Chairman Rubios statement). The
sign up for pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com The hearing included expert witnesses including Nicholas
Eberstadt from the American Enterprise Institute, Reggie Littlejohn, founder of Womens Rights Without Frontiers,
Eberstadt. Click here to read Eberstadts testimony. I saw tears. I felt their fears, said Li. I held their hands and I
hold their stories in my heart. I want the world to see the reality of the heartbreak population control has brought.
Click here to read Lis testimony. A
is the core of the policy, said Littlejohn. A two- child policy will
not end any of the human rights abuses caused by the One-Child Policy, including
forced abortions, involuntary sterilization or sex-selective abortions of baby girls.
Click here to read Littlejohns testimony. Xi Jinping has not suddenly developed a conscience, said Mosher. The
underlying policy has not, and probably will not, change. What will happen if the Chinese
people dont procreate according to plan? A government bent on regulating its population will
do whatever is necessary to produce the number of children it has ordered
reproduced. Click here to read Moshers testimony. Smith also announced at the hearing that he was sending
a letter to President Obama, asking that he implement the Admiral Nance and Meg Donovan Act, authored by
Smith, and deny U.S. entry visas to Chinese officials responsible for implementing Chinas population control
policies. It has been a gross failure for the Obama Administration to fail to enforce existing law. We already have a
law in place that will bar visas to Chinese officials, but unfortunately, it is not being used. Text of letter can be
found here. In
population control policies created a sex ratio imbalance resulting in the birth of
significantly more males, millions of whom will be unable to find wives. The severe
imbalance drives regional human trafficking throughout Asia for the purposes of
forced marriage and sexual exploitation. The CECC Annual Report can be found at www.cecc.gov.
The CECC consists of nine bi-partisan Senators, eight bi-partisan Members of the House of Representatives, and five
senior Administration officials appointed by the President. The Annual Report was approved unanimously by all of
the CECCs members.
The two child policy will not fix human rights problems- forced
abortions and gendecide will continue, while the government
makes no attempt to stop it
Hadro, 16 (Matt Hadro, Why Chinas two-child policy wont alter its human
rights horrors, The Washington Times, January 25, 2016,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/25/why-chinas-two-child-policywont-alter-its-human-r/) ET
The dark nature of abortion and choice come into sharp relief when considering the
human rights abuses which result from forced abortions in mainland China,
according to one pro-life activist. The issues regarding choice really come into
pretty stark relief when you consider forced abortion under the one-child policy, and
also gendercide, the sex-selective abortion of baby girls, Reggie Littlejohn,
president of Womens Rights Without Frontiers, told CNA in an interview last week
about Chinas decades-long one-child-per-family policy now a two-child policy. Ms.
Littlejohn, whose work includes exposing the widespread human rights abuses in
China under the states family planning policy and helping pregnant mothers keep
their children, was selected to deliver the keynote address at the annual Cardinal
OConnor Conference on Life on Jan. 23 at Georgetown University, but the
conference was canceled due to weather concerns. The theme of the conference
was to have been Whose Choice? exploring the false notion of choice in the
matter of abortion. In an interview before the scheduled conference, Ms. Littlejohn
explained how Chinas repressive family planning policy has resulted in
forced abortions and sterilizations. Forced abortion is clearly not a
choice, she told CNA. For decades in China, women would be forced to have
an abortion and sterilization if they were found by the state to have had
more than one child, as a form of coercive population control. So you say
whose choice are these abortions? Theyre the choice of the Chinese
Communist party, theyre the choice of the state, she said. The womans body
remains in the domain of the state. Chinas recent announcement that the
one-child policy would be expanded so that married couples could have two
children has still not fixed the human rights abuses of forced abortions
and sterilizations, and gendercide will continue, Ms. Littlejohn insisted,
because of the population cap. Third children in families will be routinely
aborted, she said. Additionally, the state will still forcibly sterilize women to
comply with the policy. These sterilizations are brutal and permanently
damage a womans body, Ms. Littlejohn explained. One woman who was
forcibly sterilized without anesthesia reported to Ms. Littlejohn that it felt
like a blowtorch to the inside of her body. The woman became infected and
suffered chronic back and abdominal pain and migraine headaches.
Theyre conducted by people who have very little training, and women
end up being butchered, and really end up losing not only their
reproductive health but their general health after these sterilizations, Ms.
Littlejohn said. In rural areas where it is the womens task to carry water to the
family from aquifers, those who have undergone sterilizations will be too weak to
carry the necessary amount. Thus many women will avoid undergoing these
sterilizations by just not having a second child. The policy has also spurred
gendercide throughout the country. Mothers would have ultrasounds of their
babies to find out its sex if the baby were a girl, they would abort the
child, just to be able to later have a boy to carry on the family name. This
has created a demographic disaster in China, as there are an estimated 117 men
per 100 women in the country. I believe that gendercide will continue at the
same pace under the two-child policy, because of the issue of forced
sterilization, Ms. Littlejohn continued. If families already have one daughter and the
mother is pregnant with a girl, they may abort the second child, until they have a
boy. Second daughters are extremely vulnerable in China, and they will remain
vulnerable, she said. While the government regrets this consequence
because of the countrys demographic problems, they have done nothing
to really stop it, Ms. Littlejohn said. So she has been conducting the Save a Girl
campaign, woman-to-woman, to persuade one mother at a time to keep her baby
girl. If a woman is scheduled for an abortion at a local hospital, the network will go
to the mothers door and plead with her to keep the child, giving her a monthly
stipend to care for the child. Our motto is for the mother to keep her own daughter,
to keep the family intact, she explained. These women are so grateful for us to
come to their door. Its like the voice of truth and love and mercy and help coming
from the United States to their very door and saying Youre right, you dont want to
abort your daughter. She is precious to you. And so were going to give you practical
help.
The two child policy was not implemented for human rightschina will continue to violate reproductive rights
Tai, 16 (Stephanie Tai is a final year LLB student at the London School of
Economics. She has previously interned at the Chambers of Alan Leong SC, Party
Leader of the Hong Kong Civic Party, chinas Two-Child Policy: An Assault on Human
Rights, Oxford Human Rights Hub, January 19 th, 2016, http://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/thetwo-child-policy-an-assault-on-human-rights/) ET
At the end of October 2015, the Chinese government announced that it would end
its one-child policy by replacing it with the two-child policy. Chinas two-child
policy is a false triumph for human rights. Whilst some have greeted this as a
step in the right direction, the mere existence of a policy controlling the
number of children one can have is a violation of the right to selfdetermination and reproductive autonomy. The current one-child policys
human rights violation has been further exacerbated by a lack of remedies for
abuses relating to the enforcement of the policy and this exact issue will continue
when the two-child policy is implemented (Image Credit: kattebelletje via Flickr).
The reason behind the implementation of the two-child policy is not to
ensure the fulfillment of basic rights. Instead, it is a response to the onechild policys negative impact on the economy as the old age dependency ratio
has increased. Implemented in the late 1970s, the one-child policy was a
development project intended to maximise quality of life by preventing a boom in
population growth. The motive behind the implementation of the two-child policy
demonstrates the ever-present draconian grasp of the government and its principal
concern: it will only act to boost its economic agenda. This is evident in Xinhuas
report, which states the aim was in fact to foster a balanced growth of population.
Human rights were never at the forefront of the new policy. Increasing the
number of children a couple may have does not alleviate the suppression of human
rights any restriction on reproductive rights is an assault on human
rights. Paragraph 7.3 of the International Conference on Population and
Development states that couples have the right to decide whether and when to
have children as well as the number of children, and the right to attain the highest
standard of sexual and reproductive health. The right to decide the number and
the spacing of children is reaffirmed by Article 16(1)(e) of the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Further, Article 12(1) of
the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognises the
right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical
and mental health. Health includes the right to the control ones body and
reproductive health. The two-child policy violates all of the above-mentioned rights.
Couples are prohibited to decide the number of children they wish to have, and such
restriction on reproduction is not the highest attainable standard of mental health.
What is equally worrying are the measures used to enforce the two-child policy.
Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) have reported countless cases of
pressured insertions of intrauterine devices (IUD), forced abortions, sterilisations
under duress, arbitrary detention and physical punishment such as beatings.
According to CHRD, monetary bonuses and job promotions are used as incentives to
encourage local authorities to implement family planning policies. For instance,
local authorities are divided into teams and pitched against each other to meet
certain targets for the number of abortive surgeries they can perform, with the most
accomplished team receiving rewards. These incentives promote the blatant
disregard for reproductive freedom. The current one-child policys human rights
violation has been further exacerbated by a lack of remedies for abuses relating to
the enforcement of the policy and this exact issue will continue when the two-child
policy is implemented. Complications such as infertility and health impediments
have occurred after forced abortions and women have suffered from a lack of
redress. Attempts to sue the local authorities are often futile as the courts are
hesitant to challenge the authority of local government. This lack of independence
leaves couples in a lacuna with no means to hold authorities accountable. There is
no suggestion that this lack of accountability will end with the introduction of the
two-child policy. A mere change in the number of children a couple can have will not
alleviate Chinas violation of reproductive freedoms. Until the Chinese
government develops a conscience, China will continue its assault on
human rights.
to have two kids, many parents will stick to one. The policy, meanwhile, has created
a population swollen with tens of million surplus men from sex-selective abortions
pregnant women used ultrasound to scan the sex of the fetus and aborted if it
was female. (In most parts of the world, data suggest that parents still prefer boys over
girls; in China, a major reason is that men carry forward the ancestral line.) That
demographic mess will take decades to clean up. The one-child policy was based on a mid20th century Western promise: Slashing the birth rate would yield a demographic dividend
of abundant working-age people with few dependents to support. People around the world
were already living longer than ever before, thanks to advances in public health, and
concern about global population growth had reached a feverish pitch. By the early 1970s,
when Chinese leaders began instituting policies directed at reducing births, Western
aid organizations and governments were backing population control schemes in
developing nations throughout Asia. In South Korea in 1965, for example, the U.S.
Agency for International Development delivered eleven U.S. Army ambulances,
reconditioned as mobile contraceptive clinics for use in rural villages. Poorly trained health
workers were paid piecemeal for performing sterilizations and inserting intrauterine devices.
In 1972, meanwhile, a group of scientists called the Club of Rome released a controversial
report on population size and world resources, called The Limits to Growth, that caught on
among Chinas elite. A few years later, Chinese leaders began deliberating tightening their
birth directives into a one-child policy, which they formally unveiled in 1980. According to
Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences economist Liang Zhongtang, who participated in
debates about the policys adoption, the findings of The Limits to Growththough
widely criticized elsewhereswayed some of the decisions in China. Indeed, one
influential proponent of the policy, Soviet-trained missile scientist Song Jian, applied
theoretical methods borrowed from European mathematicians to generate wild population
growth projections for China that helped sway leaders to adopt the birth limit. Today, 12
percent of Chinas population is over age 60, with a paucity of young people to provide
economic and social support. Chinas working-age adults are unlikely to spark the
hoped-for baby boom, because they include tens of millions of men who cannot find
women to marry. There are 62 million missing women and girls in China from sexselective abortion and neglect, according to one recent estimate. The gender and age
imbalance are often portrayed as surprising after-effects of the policy. But they were
foreseen from the start. China has a history of female infanticide, and in 1975, medical
researchers at Tietung Hospital in Liaoning showed that sex-selective abortion could be
another way to achieve the same ends. The scientists wrote in the Chinese Medical
Journal that they had successfully determined fetal sex in ninety-three pregnant
women using a crude form of a chorionic villus sampling, a procedure that involves
taking a biopsy of the thin membrane that separates a fetus from its mother in the
womb. Nearly one-third of the women chose to abort after learning they would have
girls, the researchers dryly observed. A much larger experiment on abortion and sex
selectionthis time performed with amniocentesiswas conducted that same year
in India, with similar results.
later, fewer policy an emphasis on late marriage, small families, and spaced
births in the early 1970s. Social life in China was so highly regulated that state
administration of womens reproductive cycles was not much of a stretch, and the
policy yielded quick results: the birth rate plummeted . 23 But then cadres began
worrying about the increasingly bleak projections coming from Europe and the United States,
and in the late 1970s they pushed for China to take its birth policy one step further.
Developed countries spread Club of Rome thinking to the developing world, Liang
Zhongtang, an economist at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences who participated in
deliberations over the one-child policy, told me. 24 That thinking did not spread on its own,
however. It had an ambassador in a state military scientist who had been spending time in
Europe.
Forced Abortions
Forced abortions
Ren, 15 (Yuan Ren grew up in China and the UK and is currently based in Beijing
as a journalist., Forcing a woman to have an abortion at eight months: Welcome to
21st century China, The Telegraph, September 11, 2015,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11858723/China-Forced-abortionlate-term-to-avoid-one-child-policy.html) ET
This week, a series of panicked text messages was published by an online
newspaper. They were sent by an eight months pregnant woman in southwest
China and spoke of her being pressured into an illegal late-term abortion so
that her husband would not lose his job. The woman in question, known only
by her surname Chen, already has an 11-year-old daughter. Under China's current
version of the one child policy, she and her husband do not meet the criteria to
have a second baby (both parents have to be only children themselves). If their
second child is born, Chen's police officer husband would be sacked, in line with
rules that specifically apply to public servants as upholders of Chinese law. The
news report revealed that Mrs Chen had found out that she was pregnant earlier
this year and wanted to keep the baby. The screenshots of her text messages begin
by saying that her husband's work unit had found out about her pregnancy and that
his boss had visited their home to convince her to abort the baby so that his
husband could keep his job. "I can't resist any more, his unit gives [us] pressure and
then let us self-willingly go and have an induced birth", one message read. The
induced birth in question refers to a late-stage abortion, followed by a medically
induced still birth. Later messages expressed fears that she would give in and be
"taken to the hospital to have the procedure" in the afternoon of the next day.
Chinese company is to punish unplanned pregnancies Chinese company is to punish
unplanned pregnancies Photo: Alamy Unsurprisingly, the case has garnered much
attention on Weibo, China's popular social media platform. It highlights the
ongoing conflict between home and state in China with private family
decisions decided by officials, some 36 years after the one child policy was
introduced. Many online users were sympathetic towards the plight of the couple,
condemning those who were pressuring the mother into a late-term abortion as
murderers. Others criticised the one child policy itself, calling it "inhumane". One
post read: "Are two kids a lot? Is it over the top? [Why] does it have to be a decision
between life and death... is a [policy] that persisted over 30 years still suitable?" For
some, the case has evoked memories of what the policy once meant for
women who stubbornly refused to consent extreme cases of forced
abortion. It's hard to imagine in today's China, where such practices are illegal
under human rights laws, that forced abortions were regularly practiced in the 80s
and early 90s. These were the earlier decades of the policy's enforcement, when it
was at its most strict. Couples who already had one child but found themselves
pregnant again would be required to have an abortion in most cases, particularly if
you worked for the state. Family planning bureaus hired local monitors, often older
local women, to watch over communities for any signs of growing bellies, or anyone
trying to hide their pregnancy. Four pregnant women relax in a coffee shop during a
child in accordance with the law. On Weibo, many comments displayed a lack of
sympathy towards their case, rebuking the family for trying to become the
exception to the rule. As a public servant he should not be above the law", said
one. Another read: "They clearly knew the law and consequences yet still chose to
disregard them ". Some expressed anger that the police officer was not willing to
put his job above his baby. Whatever academics might say, the one child policy still
holds sway over swathes of the country. Its impact over the last 36 years has been
immensely complex. Some see it as a clear success, with all the heartache worth it
for economic growth. Others think it dictatorial. The jury may still be out, but this
case has shown many in China that the time has come for a new chapter one
where mothers and fathers can determine for themselves what their family should
look like.
choose when, whether and how to actually enforce those policies. If those mid-level
officials want to do things differently -- say, in the above case, by continuing to use
forced abortions to control birthrates, even though Beijing banned that
years ago -- they often do. This is probably the thing that Americans most
misunderstand about China: It may be run by a giant authoritarian
bureaucracy, but the system can get really messy. The people at the top have
a lot less control over mid-level officials than outsiders often assume. Local officials
will sometimes go their own way. So the question for Beijing becomes, How do you
steer all those local officials to do what you want? The one-child policy is a study in
how that can go wrong. Here's the contradiction in the one-child policy: Chinese
officials want to keep down the birthrate, which is why they enacted the policy in
1979 and have kept it ever since. They hand out birthrate targets to provincial and
local officials, telling them they'll be judged on how well they meet the goals. But
they also want to forbid state officials to enforce the policy with forced abortions
and sterilizations, which are rightly loathed as horrific human rights abuses. These
two policies force the hundreds of mid-level officials who run China into a dilemma:
If they conclude that they can't keep down the birthrate without using forced
abortions and sterilizations, which of their two orders do they disobey? Do they let
the birthrate slip above target, or do they resort to officially prohibited forced
abortions? Inevitably, some officials, particularly those who believe they need to hit
their birthrate targets to win a promotion, will decide it's better to break the rules
against forced abortions and sterilizations. This contradiction is why human rights
groups have been arguing for years that the only real way for China to end forced
abortions and sterilizations is by ending the one-child policy. And they're probably
right.
have disappeared from Asia and Eastern Europe. A nd that is why if you have heard
about the gender imbalance it probably came in the form of a short international
news item. Gender imbalance has been treated as a local problem, as something
that happens to other countries. It is not a local problem. China and India together
account for one third of the global population. 11 Their lopsided birth totals have
already skewed the sex ratio at birth of the entire world , which has risen from 105
to the biologically impossible 107. 12 Sex selection defies culture, nationality, and
creed. Gender imbalance has hit Vietnam, which wasnt supposed to be patriarchal
enough to avoid having girls. It has hit the Caucasus countries Azerbaijan, Georgia, and
Armenia which no one had even contemplated as possible trouble zones. And it has hit the
Balkans, that war-torn region a quick boat ride from Italy. Added up, these figures yield a gap
in male and female births unrivaled in human history. 13 The gender imbalance is a local
problem in the way a superpowers financial crisis is a local problem, in the way a
neighboring countrys war is a local problem. Sooner or later, it affects you. If todays
disproportionately male generation of young people call them Generation XY were small,
the sex ratio imbalance would be easy to dismiss. We might make up for the lack of women
later on. But because the reduction in the number of females in the population has
paralleled a reduction in the global birth rate, this generation is the largest that will hit many
developing countries for decades to come. 14 There are fewer potential mothers in China
and India today, and tomorrow there will be even fewer daughters. Wang Feng, a
demographer at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinas sex ratio imbalance, calls it a
double whammy. 15 Guilmoto, meanwhile, now disseminates a bleak set of predictions in
an attempt to jolt the world to action. Even using the conservative UN population
projections, which assume that couples soon start having boys and girls in equal
numbers a change that is highly unlikely restoring the global balance of males
and females will take until 2050. 16 R Development was not supposed to look like
this. For as long as they have speculated about the status of women, social
scientists have taken for granted that womens position improves as countries get
richer. Economic growth means that more girls go to school, and that those girls have
access to a broader array of job opportunities when they grow up. It means that health
care improves, leading to a drop in the number of mothers who die during childbirth. And it
means, in most cases, that women gain access to contraception, allowing them to have
fewer children and in turn spend more time working outside the home. The relationship
between womens empowerment and development is so sacred that it clouded the
perception of scholars in developing countries as sex selection spread throughout Asia. Even
economic progress that had swept Asia, at the level of raw numbers women and
girls were worse off than ever before . Economic development, he stated, is quite
often accompanied by a relative worsening in the rate of survival of womena fact
that constituted one of the more momentous, and neglected, problems facing the
world today. 18
U.S.
Sterilization US
Women in the U.S. have been severely affected by compulsory
sterilization, but not just historicallyincarcerated women are
disproportionately coerced into sterilization
Krase 14 (Kathryn, social worker and lawyer with an undergraduate
education in Policy Analysis at Cornell Universitys College of Human
Ecology, History of Forced Sterilization and Current U.S. Abuses
http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/health-info/forcedsterilization/)//meb
dozens of female inmates
in California had been illegally sterilized in recent years. The story was a salient reminder that
forced sterilization, an issue that tends to be viewed as a tragic-but-past
occurrence, continues today. Sterilization abuse includes situations in which a
woman does not know she is being sterilized as well as when she is coerced or
deceived in order to obtain her consent to the procedure. Misinformation is a
common tool; women are often told that their status related to immigration,
housing, government benefits, or parenting will be negatively impacted if they do
not consent to the procedure. Many women are told that the procedure is temporary
or reversible. Women in the United States and beyond have historically
been subjected to coordinated efforts to control their fertility, including
sterilization abuse. The burgeoning womens movement in the 1960s, and growing concerns over limits
In 2013, thanks to the Center for Investigative Reporting, it came to light that
to womens reproductive rights at that time, helped focus concerns over sterilization abuse into action. THE PUERTO
RICAN EXPERIENCE A 1965 survey of Puerto Rican residents found that about one-third of all Puerto Rican mothers,
ages 20-49, were sterilized. To put this figure in context, women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico in the 1960s
were more than 10 times more likely to be sterilized than women from the United States. These shocking findings
suggested that systematic bias influenced the practice of sterilization, not just in Puerto Rico, but in the United
States as well. Since the United States assumed governance of Puerto Rico in 1898, population control had been a
major effort. The United States, citing concerns that overpopulation of the island would lead to disastrous social and
economic conditions, instituted public policies aimed at controlling the rapid growth of the population. The passage
of Law 116 in 1937 signified the institutionalization of the population control program. This program, designed by
the Eugenics Board, was intended to catalyze economic growth, and respond to depression-era unemployment.
Both U.S. government funds and contributions from private individuals supported the initiative. Instead of providing
Puerto Rican women with access to alternative forms of safe, legal and reversible contraception, U.S. policy
promoted the use of permanent sterilization. The procedure was so common in Puerto Rico at the time that it was
simply referred to as la operacion. Institutionalized encouragement of sterilization through the use of door-to-door
visits by health workers, financial subsidy of the operation, and industrial employer favoritism toward sterilized
women pushed women towards having a hysterectomy or tubal ligation (i.e., tying the tubes). The coercive
strategies used by these institutions denied women access to informed consent. More than one-third of the women
in the 1968 study did not know that sterilization through tubal ligation was a permanent form of contraception. The
euphemism tying the tubes made women think the procedure was easily reversible. The practice of sterilization
abuse was challenged by local coalitions. Puerto Rican womens groups, along with the movement for Puerto Rican
independence, took up the fight against the injustices of the campaign. The economically disadvantaged women of
Puerto Rico lacked access to information that would make contraceptive alternatives available to them. By denying
access to reproductive health services for the women who were most in need of them, U.S. policy exerted its control
over the growth of the Puerto Rican population, as well as over the lives of many Puerto Rican women. A warrior in
the fight for womens reproductive rights, Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias, summarized the situation in Puerto Rico:
Women make choices based on alternatives, and there havent been many alternatives in Puerto Rico. THE
the right to sterilize unwilling and unwitting people. Laws, similar to Law 116, were passed in
30 states. These policies listed the insane, the feeble-minded, the dependent, and
the diseased as incapable of regulating their own reproductive abilities, therefore
justifying government-forced sterilizations. Legitimizing sterilization for certain
groups led to further exploitation, as group divisions were made along race and class lines. Some
states, notably including North Carolina, set up Eugenics Boards in the early 20th century. These boards reviewed
petitions from government and private agencies to impose sterilization on poor, unwed, and/or mentally disabled
women, children and men. North Carolina alone sterilized over 7,600 individuals between the 1930 and 1970s. In
the early 1970s, Rodriguez-Trias was invited by a New York University Law School student organization to give a
short talk about Puerto Rican sterilization abuse after viewing a related film. After her talk, Rodriguez-Trias was
had been coerced into giving up their reproductive rights, Rodriguez-Trias and a handful of other New Yorkers
formed CESA, the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse. As awareness of abuses increased, the call for action
became stronger. In 1974, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) now the Department of
Health and Human Services published guidelines for sterilization procedures. These guidelines established a
moratorium on sterilization of women under the age of 21 and on others without the legal ability to provide
consent. A 72-hour waiting period between the signing of a consent form and the procedure was mandated. A
written statement that women would not lose their welfare benefits if they refused the sterilization procedure and
reserved a womans right to change her mind and refuse the procedure anytime up until the surgery, even after
granting original consent, served as informed consent. However, studies conducted by the ACLU and the Center for
Disease Control in 1975 showed that noncompliance with the guidelines was widespread. In the 1970s, New York
City public hospitals were bearing the brunt of regional complaints. These hospitals were the major source of health
care for the citys economically disadvantaged, and consequently provided reproductive services for many of the
citys poor women. The Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), the group that oversees the Citys hospitals,
became an important tool in the study, identification, and monitoring of sterilization abuse practices. In early 1975,
the HHC called on members of CESA, including Rodriguez-Trias, and members of other reproductive rights
organizations, to serve on an ad hoc Advisory Committee on Sterilization Guidelines. The goal of the advisory
committee was to set guidelines, like the HEW guidelines, for the public hospitals of New York City. These local
guidelines hoped to promote the successful monitoring of sterilization practices. By identifying the weaknesses of
the HEW guidelines, the advisory committee drafted a more effective set of regulations that were aimed at
protecting the rights of women who were mistreated in the past. The committees guidelines required a 30-day
waiting period between the signing of the consent and the procedure. During this time, HHC hospitals were required
to offer counseling services. These services were to be provided in the language that the woman spoke, and would
not be given by the doctors themselves, but by a counselor removed from the clinical experience. As part of the
consent, the patient described her understanding of the procedure and the alternatives available, so that there was
no doubt that she understood the permanence of the procedure. The guidelines suggested by the advisory
committee became effective HHC rules on Nov. 1, 1975. The guidelines set forth by the HHC could only be applied
to the citys public hospitals. In response, Public Law #37 was passed by the New York City Council in April of 1977,
making the HHC guidelines the law of the city, applicable to both public and private facilities. Failure to comply with
these regulations would result in a penalty. Public Law #37 was unique in that past guidelines were expanded to
include the regulation of the practice of sterilization on men as well as women. Beyond New York City, groups in
other regions were pursuing similar goals. In Los Angeles, a group of 10 Mexican-American women successfully
sued the County Hospital for denying them informed consent. These women, who only spoke Spanish, were coerced
into signing consent forms in English; some were in labor and others were under anesthesia at the time of providing
consent. After successful settlement of this case, L.A. County became more militant about following informed
consent guidelines for sterilization. In response to regional action, HEW redesigned its national guidelines for
sterilization practices to embody the provisions of New Yorks Public Law #37 in 1978. The national guidelines
received widespread support from CESA as well as over 100 other regional and national organizations but also faced
opposition from organizations that saw the guidelines as limiting womens access to sterilization as a choice for
contraception. In response to recognition of past government abuse in North Carolina, the state set up the Office of
Justice for Sterilization Abuse in 2011. This government entity seeks to identify victims of forced sterilization at the
hands of the States Eugenics Board, and compensate them for the states actions against them. ETHNICITY, RACE
Latina women in Puerto Rico, New York City, and California were
specifically targeted by the government for sterilization throughout the 20th
century. Black women have also long been the targets of population control and
have been disproportionately affected by sterilization abuse. In North Carolina, a state noted
AND STERILIZATION ABUSE
for its discriminatory sterilization practices in the 20th century, 65 percent of sterilization procedures were
performed on black women, even though only 25 percent of the states female population is black. An often-cited
1973 case example of racism and sterilization abuse involves the Relf sisters. Katie, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf,
ages 17, 14 and 12 respectively, were the victims of discriminatory policies and programs funded by the U.S.
government. Since they were receiving government benefits, the Relf family was determined to be ideal candidates
for the Montgomery Community Action Committees Family Planning Service. Katie, under the age of consent in
Alabama at the time, was offered and given a series of Depo-Provera contraceptive shots. At that time, the shots
were still in the investigational phase and not yet approved for administration on adult women, let alone
adolescents. Katie was also scheduled for insertion of an IUD (intrauterine device). All forms of contraception were
provided to Katie without parental permission, which was required in Alabama at the time. Minnie Lee and Mary
Alice received tubal ligations; their mother was under the impression they were being seen for routine i The Relf
through threats of loss of government benefits, for failure to participate in these programs. THE EXPERIENCES OF
NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN Similar to the experiences of Puerto Rican women and Black women in the United
control of HEW and the United States Public Health Service, began providing family planning services to Native
American families in 1965. Instituting similar practices to those experienced in Puerto Rico, as many as 25% of
Native American women between 15-44 years old were sterilized by the 1970s. In the early 1970s, two Cheyenne
girls in Montana entered an IHS hospital, on two separate occasions, for emergency appendectomies. While sedated
the physicians sterilized both girls, without consent from the patients themselves, nor from their parents. In many
Native American cultures children are important for tribal survival. A womans ability to procreate is often seen as
discussed with women during childbirth, or other medical procedures, when they were most vulnerable. Federal law,
from the HEW guidelines of the 1970s, prohibits the use of federal funds for sterilization of any incarcerated
woman.
only with raised consciousness, informed consent, and the existence and accessibility to real
alternatives, can freedom of choice become a reality for all women.
makers,
other witnesses will be describing here this morningup to and including criminalizing out-of-quota pregnancies
and forcibly compelling abortions against the will of the mother will
One might think the obvious solution here should be to relax these hukou restrictionsor to scrap them altogether.
Despite considerable talk about hukou reform over the past two decades, Chinese
authorities have shown extreme reluctance to do away with hukou system in
practice. Though more intrusive and arguably abusive than pre-Communist instruments of social control, these
instruments do have antecedents in Chinese dynastic history. Indeed, in his classic study of the vast and oppressive
bureaucratic edifice for maintaining social control over rural China under the Qing dynasty, Kung-chuan Hsiao
describes a number of techniques (such as the baojia neighborhood surveillance system) that would have an eerily
familiar ring in China today. Over the course of two thousand years, observed Hsiao, Chinas rulers strove to
develop and perfect an administrative apparatus which helped emperors to assure obedience and forestall
Given both the nature of current Chinese rule and the tradition that
predates it, we should not be surprised if authorities in Beijing prove themselves
surprisingly attached to coercive population policy precisely because of the social
control it affords the rulers over the ruled.
rebellions.5
Eugenics
Reproductive Control
The notion of reproductive control is central to the politics of
eugenicsits rooted in the goal to prevent imperfect
populations from recreating their imperfections and
threatening society
Curthoys 89 (Ann, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia
and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Eugenics, Feminism and
Birth Control: The Case of Marion Piddington
http://search.proquest.com/docview/210923563?pq-origsite=gscholar)//meb
The 1920s saw an upsurge of interest in the relationship between sexuality,
marriage, and human reproduction. In the aftermath of the First World War, there was increased public
discussion of sexuality, especially female sexuality. This is evident both in the increased interest in works of sexual
advice, such as Marie Stopes' bestselling work, Married Love (1918), and in the immensely popular literature and
film of sexual fantasy, directed at women, such as the Valentino movies of the early and mid 1920s. This increased
public interest in female sexuality posed challenges and problems for the lively feminist movement of the period.
There
was also an increased interest in the politics of human reproduction from another
quarter -- the `science' of eugenics. Eugenics was the view that human
societies could be improved by increased social control over human
reproduction, while the `unfit' should be actively discouraged. In this way a
What were the rights, benefits, risks, and duties of women in the sexual -- the heterosexual -- domain?
healthier and happier human population would be brought into being, and social life consequently improved.
There were strong links between eugenics and feminism , exemplified in the ideas, writings,
and campaigns of the Australian woman, Marion Piddington, whom I will be discussing here . Yet the links are
not self-evident to modern eyes. Eugenics, especially after its attraction for Nazi Germany in the 1930s,
is associated today very often with fascist ideologies of the subordination of women to the needs of the state, with
political uses of human sterilisation, and with racist beliefs in the superiority of the white or Aryan or European
races. How, then, could such a view of the world have been held by feminists? Why did feminists in the 1920s
embrace so often a theory which valued women largely for their role as breeders of the future race -- a theory, one
would think, better suited to the forces of anti-feminism, the purveyors of ideologies of biological destiny? This
article attempts to make the connections between feminism and eugenics clearer, especially through looking at
Marion Piddington's ideas and work. Marion Piddington is an enigmatic figure, at once a sexual puritan (so opposed
to little boys' masturbating and having erections that she recommended their pants not have pockets) and a sexual
radical arguing for the importance of female sexual satisfaction -- though this was only envisaged as occurring
within monogamous marriage. One commentator, Michael Roe, has described her as "confused". This paper aims to
show that the more we understand the intellectual climate of the interwar period, the less do her ideas seem
contradictory and confused, and the less puzzling does her particular combination of ideas and interests become. I
don't wish to argue that she was an innovator or creative thinker, just that an understanding of her ideas provides
an insight into earlier feminist controversies and debates. In looking at Piddington we can see yet another example
feminist ideas and movements have been intertwined with other strands of
thought.(1)
of how
but the subject was virtually taboo.(5) After spending eight years and hundreds of pounds on her campaign to have
her idea accepted, Marion eventually gave up. She commented in 1926: "My earlier work for Celibate Motherhood
failed here and those who did not and would not understand it would never listen to me on anything."(6) Sex
Education Yet while the idea of "celibate motherhood" brought Marion notoriety, it was not her main life's work. That
Eugenists had been arguing since before the War that sex
education was vital: control and regulation of human reproduction required
knowledge of the reproductive process itself. In particular, sex education was thought to be a
was probably sex education.
necessary weapon in the fight against venereal disease. The War, with its consequent increasing of the incidence of
veneral disease, gave added impetus to the campaign for sex education. In reply to those who suggested that
venereal disease was best checked through the issue of prophylactic kits to all soldiers, and early treatment,(7)
women's organisations and eugenists argued that this would condone and encourage promiscuity and therefore, in
the long term, only exacerbate the problem. The only way to prevent the spread of VD, they argued, was for men to
cease sexual activity outside marriage. They would only learn to do this through proper sex education, through
being morally trained when children by their mothers to seek sexual intercourse only within a healthy, disease-free
marriage.(8)
There
was also an increased interest in the politics of human reproduction from another
quarter -- the `science' of eugenics. Eugenics was the view that human
societies could be improved by increased social control over human
reproduction, while the `unfit' should be actively discouraged. In this way a
healthier and happier human population would be brought into being, and social life consequently improved.
There were strong links between eugenics and feminism , exemplified in the ideas, writings,
and campaigns of the Australian woman, Marion Piddington, whom I will be discussing here . Yet the links are
not self-evident to modern eyes. Eugenics, especially after its attraction for Nazi Germany in the 1930s,
is associated today very often with fascist ideologies of the subordination of women to the needs of the state, with
political uses of human sterilisation, and with racist beliefs in the superiority of the white or Aryan or European
races. How, then, could such a view of the world have been held by feminists? Why did feminists in the 1920s
embrace so often a theory which valued women largely for their role as breeders of the future race -- a theory, one
would think, better suited to the forces of anti-feminism, the purveyors of ideologies of biological destiny? This
article attempts to make the connections between feminism and eugenics clearer, especially through looking at
Marion Piddington's ideas and work. Marion Piddington is an enigmatic figure, at once a sexual puritan (so opposed
to little boys' masturbating and having erections that she recommended their pants not have pockets) and a sexual
radical arguing for the importance of female sexual satisfaction -- though this was only envisaged as occurring
within monogamous marriage. One commentator, Michael Roe, has described her as "confused". This paper aims to
show that the more we understand the intellectual climate of the interwar period, the less do her ideas seem
contradictory and confused, and the less puzzling does her particular combination of ideas and interests become. I
don't wish to argue that she was an innovator or creative thinker, just that an understanding of her ideas provides
an insight into earlier feminist controversies and debates. In looking at Piddington we can see yet another example
feminist ideas and movements have been intertwined with other strands of
thought.(1)
of how
but the subject was virtually taboo.(5) After spending eight years and hundreds of pounds on her campaign to have
her idea accepted, Marion eventually gave up. She commented in 1926: "My earlier work for Celibate Motherhood
failed here and those who did not and would not understand it would never listen to me on anything."(6) Sex
Education Yet while the idea of "celibate motherhood" brought Marion notoriety, it was not her main life's work. That
Eugenists had been arguing since before the War that sex
education was vital: control and regulation of human reproduction required
knowledge of the reproductive process itself. In particular, sex education was thought to be a
was probably sex education.
necessary weapon in the fight against venereal disease. The War, with its consequent increasing of the incidence of
veneral disease, gave added impetus to the campaign for sex education. In reply to those who suggested that
venereal disease was best checked through the issue of prophylactic kits to all soldiers, and early treatment,(7)
women's organisations and eugenists argued that this would condone and encourage promiscuity and therefore, in
the long term, only exacerbate the problem. The only way to prevent the spread of VD, they argued, was for men to
cease sexual activity outside marriage. They would only learn to do this through proper sex education, through
being morally trained when children by their mothers to seek sexual intercourse only within a healthy, disease-free
marriage.(8)
subordination of racial minorities and other socially disadvantaged groups in the context of the eugenics movement
Movement and Subordination of Powerless Groups A. Introduction Eugenics arose out of burgeoning understanding
of genetics in the late nineteenth century. A common definition of eugenics is the "study of human improvement by
genetic means."3 However, the "study" has often been only superficially academic, and "genetic means" have often
discourage births among certain groups, attempts to encourage "fit" people to reproduce6 or to alter survival
patterns, for exam- pie through euthanasia programs, are included in the definition above.7 Eugenicists believed
that most social problems were caused by hereditary faults of those afflicted by the problem, and they sought to
eventually eliminate these problems from society through selective breeding. The eugenics move- ment quickly
gained popularity and was widely supported by physicians, scien- tific eugenicists, and lawyers.8 At one point, basic
eugenic teachings were so widely accepted that they were commonly incorporated into high school curric- ula.9
Some supporters pushed eugenic teachings with religious fervor. For ex- ample, eugenicists stressed the "urgent
States
began attempting to stem reproduction among the "unfit" by segre- gating them
into asylums or prisons or enacted laws forbidding certain catego- ries of people to
marry,11 but the policy focus quickly shifted toward steriliza- tion , which
proved less expensive and more effective .12 In 1899, the vasectomy was developed for eugenic
need for a Messiah of the human germ plasm" to save civilization from otherwise inevitable decline.10
purposes, suggested for "inebriates, imbeciles, per- verts and paupers,"13 and later perfected on forty-two inmates
of the Indiana Reformatory.14 By the 1930s, more than thirty states had passed involuntary eugenic sterilization
laws,15 typically applied to the insane, "idiots and imbe- ciles," and criminals.16 Although
seven state laws were invalidated as uncon- stitutional in state or lower federal courts,17 the Supreme Court upheld
Vir- ginia's eugenic sterilization law in Buck v. Bell in 1927,18 a decision that has never been overturned. Between
1900 and 1963, at least 60,000 Americans were sterilized pursuant to eugenic sterilization laws.19 In response to a
lawsuit, in 1974 the federal government adopted regulations banning sterilization with- out consent in hospitals that
receive federal funds,20 but reports of violations surface periodically.21 B. Eugenics as Subordination This Part
Examining
the connections between eugenic policies and subordination is important
to understanding why equal protection jurisprudence that ignores
subordination inadequately protects pow- erless groups . Additionally, the
discussion of subordination highlights some of the parallels between the historic
eugenics movement and current implicitly eugenic policies. With the goal of eliminating or
examines the use of eugenic policies to subordinate unpopular groups, especially racial minorities.
reducing the population of certain groups in the future, eugenics definitionally subordinates the groups regulated.
definition of subordination - the idea that some groups are so much less valuable than others that the world would
submission to authority,
supplies the foundation for government eugenic policy. Eugenic policies are
premised on the theory that the state may justifiably coerce or compel these
"inferior" groups to limit or forgo reproduc- tion, the most basic human instinct. 23
Thus, eugenic policy embodies both of the ideas central to subordination be better off if their numbers were reduced or eliminated. The second definition,
Additionally, the United States' s eugenic policies often have been subordinating in the sense that they have been used to harm unpopular groups and to reinforce the existing social
hierarchy. The rhetoric promoting eugenics was steeped in derogatory and paranoid images of the "unfit."24
Members of a vari- ety of groups, including racial minorities, the poor, criminals, people with
mental illnesses, or virtually any socially unpopular group, were deemed ge- netically defective
and doomed to reproduce their circumstances in their chil- dren. A prominent eugenicist
even opined that prostitutes were motivated by "innate eroticism" rather than economic or social circumstances.25
Government action was necessary to control these "anti-social propagators of unnecessary human beings"26 so
they would not destroy society by their prolific breeding.27 Some eugenicists completely devalued the lives of
those deemed unfit: "It is the acme of stupidity ... to talk in such cases of individual liberty. . . . Such indi- viduals
have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to
propagate their kind."28 Eugenics provided a convenient rationale to oppose or dismantle social protections for
disadvantaged groups. Social protections such as the minimum wage, the eight-hour work day, and public medical
services were said to lead to increases in "unemployables, degenerates, and physical and mental weaklings" by
certain social
programs, such as the traditional welfare pro- gram Aid to Dependent Children, later Aid to Families with
Dependent Chil- dren, were deliberately designed to give states the flexibility to deny
benefits to those deemed unworthy, in part for fear of supporting their
"irresponsible" re- production.29 For example, many states' welfare programs excluded African
encouraging people to irresponsibly have children that they could not sup- port. As a result,
Americans and some excluded women having "improper" relationships with a man.30
scientist would openly advance eugenic theories62 and most politicians are too savvy say the word "eugenics."
Ameri- can values have undergone significant change over the past century, but the
transformation may be as much one of language as it is a transformation of attitudes and practices.63 Although eugenic sterilization may have largely disap- peared in the United States,64
eugenics, like racism, remains as a prominent strand in political rhetoric and
an influence in American social policy. Much as speakers use coded language to evoke racial
sympathies today, eugenics is dis- cussed with coded words. Policy makers today invoke similar imagery and use
similar reasoning for efforts to discourage reproduction among certain groups, but they never call it eugenics and
rarely admit that race is a factor. Instead,
conservative activists
policies, measures discouraging welfare recipi- ents from having children and the prosecution of women who use
cocaine while pregnant, are extensions of the earlier eugenics movement. Finally, I pro- vide a very brief overview
of other American social policies that may have been influenced by eugenic concerns. A. Of Welfare Queens and
an extension of the dark history of the eugenics movement in the United States. Most importantly, the 1996 law,
although it never mentions "eugenics," contains provisions explicitly designed to discour- age childbirth among
Discouraging
Reproduction Sterilizing or otherwise discouraging childbirth among the poor was a
prominent theme of the eugenics movement, and it became a theme of the de- bate
around welfare reform when eugenics became an unacceptable topic of political
discourse. Much of the rhetoric around welfare reform centers on the idea of irresponsible "welfare queens"
welfare recipients. These provisions fit squarely into the definition of "eugenic."67 1 .
being paid by the government to have more children.68 In particular, the language and imagery surrounding
welfare reform debates often center on the concern that African-American women are having too many children "on
Additionally, in the 1960s, at least seven Southern and Midwestern states considered proposals to order the
sterilization of single mothers.71 Similarly, numerous states have considered mandating that women on welfare
receive Norplant implants, and several states require that women on welfare receive information on Norplant or
offer welfare recipients incentives to use Norplant.72
Framework Answers
Disability studies discussions about the extent to which impairment is socially constructed, in
comparison to disability, reveal some of our distorted realities around how we view and
address our world and each other, including within minority groups (i.e. oppressed people can oppress
those within their own group with their own distorted ideologies around identity). These conflicted,
relational spaces create a spark that helps us see various theoretical paths that may or may not
hold more potential for political action to address a social injustice. It provides an
insight and opportunity for activism . It is exciting because such contested spaces hold
unlimited amounts of potential, depending on how we engage with this political process around our
identities. Such debates around impairment among feminist disability studies scholars helps address internalized
sexism and compulsory able- bodiedness in feminist, disability studies, and feminist disability studies circles, for
(e.g. identity politics and identity-based politics), many of my participants discussed the dialectical nature of
identity-based politics. Several participants named to one degree or another that we have to risk the negative
responses, such as exclusion and isolation, when we bring up identity theories that may challenge concepts already
established by a group, because of the potential that it holds to create further liberation. At the same time ,
we
must work to figure out how to make such spaces better able to sustain contentious
positions and keep people included and engaged. This process, although often
difficult and dialectical in nature, makes it possible for us to see potential ways to
address oppression and then to take action to change our world. Although relatively new to
the minority studies scene, feminist disability studies is a ripe arena for identity-based politics. Feminist disability
studies, and likely additional identity studies and identity-based politics as a whole, rely upon a variety of (or
mosaic) of theories that get at what it takes to work together (e.g. various kinds and processes of trust), which is
This gets at the heart of, or helps create the space for us to deconstruct, construct, claim,
and reclaim, identities. Minority identities typically do not have or are not allowed to
have a voice in how they are socially situated . Sandra Harding writes in Rethinking Standpoint
Epistemology: What is Strong Objectivity? (2004), Standpoint theories simply disagree with the further
ahistorical and incoherent claim that the content of modern and Western scientific thought is also, paradoxically,
not shaped by its historical location (p. 133). Standpoint theories and critical hermeneutics (which is discussed in
my research methods section) insist that we be reflective in our practice about the ways that we may recapitulate
privilege and oppression in our language and our actions. They make historical location and societal influences (e.g.
14
privilege, oppression, and ones entire cultural horizon) central in their considerations.
Standpoint theory
15
perspective. Harding discusses this when reflecting on Bettina Apthekers perspectives on this matter:
Bettina Aptheker has argued that starting thought from the everyday lives of
women who are holocaust survivors, Chicana cannery workers, older lesbians, African- American
women in slavery, Japanese-American concentration camp survivors, and others who have
had lives different from hers increases our ability to understand a great deal about
the distorted way the dominant groups conceptualize politics, resistance,
community, and other key history and social science notions. (p. 129-130) Starting from
the perspective of marginalized voices not only supports exploring disability
oppression, but also explores disability issues from multiple perspectives. This
includes not only perspectives from people with disabilities who are facing sexism,
classism, homophobia, racism, xenophobia, and so forth, but also multiple
perspectives from people who have varying disability and chronic health
experiences. Using feminist ideas, such as feminist standpoint epistemologies and those of Sandra
Harding in The Science Question in Feminism (1986), helps us address how identities are socially
constructed within particular historical and cultural locations, and how such socially constructed
identities, situated as subordinate, can also be identified and evaluated in and through
oppressive functions and systems (institutional, symbolic, and individual levels). Such theories and
methods encourage us to trace disability oppression , according to Harding. Unknowingly,
knowingly, implicitly, or explicitly, feminist thought influences disability studies scholars in
their work of understanding disability from a social-cultural or minority group model
framework. Patricia Hill-Collins provides a great summary and analysis of institutional, symbolic, and individual
systems of oppression in her article, Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and
Connection (2001). Both she and Harding acknowledge that oppression operates on many levels throughout
society. Consider who controls most social institutions and who has the ability to climb the ladder toward success.
This is one way to analyze who is dominated and subordinated and who is privileged by the system: Systemic
relationships of domination and subordination structured through social institutions such as schools, businesses,
hospitals, the work place, and government agencies represent the institutional dimension of oppression (HillCollins, 2001, p. 59). As I will discuss further, medical institutions (e.g. the medical model) play a central role in
creating stigma and discrimination against people with disabilities and influence other institutional attitudes toward
people with disabilities. Regarding symbolic systems of oppression in relation to disability, disability images often
invoke pity. What symbols or stereotypes come to mind when one thinks of disability, or particular disabilities?
Some common stereotypes of disability, aside from pity, are weakness/helplessness, evilness/possession, nonsexual, not parents (or should not be), less intelligent and/or child-like, and as having qualities we want to cure or
eradicate. As Hill- Collins explains, Central to this process is the use of stereotypical or controlling images of
diverse race, class and gender groups (pp. 59-60). Unfortunately, she neglects to recognize disability. There are
many disability stereotypes that contribute to the pervasive system that prevents people with disabilities from
oppression
can also occur on an individual level. Negative images and symbols of disability
(stereotypes, or lack of representation) are everywhere , and we all encounter the institutions
that subordinate certain groups of people, while privileging others. This impacts us on the individual
level, regardless of whether they are conscious or subconscious beliefs and actions.
We externalize these beliefs onto Others, and also turn it inward on ourselves (e.g.
internalized oppression). The pervasiveness of discrimination alerts us to where and how
oppression is occurring, and this highlights where we need to break down barriers .
climbing institutional and social ladders (such as finding a partner and having children). Finally,
with some groups of people situated as the norm, and some as the Other, rather than looking at disability in the
stereotypical medical-model view of disability as deficit (which portrays disability as inherent and static, and a
problem residing in the individual body). The latter model demonstrates how disability is culturally created and
maintained and how we could address and erase oppression through how we socially and physically structure our
environments. The social-cultural model of disability resists the idea that disability and disability oppression stem
from individual bodies, but rather identifies and places responsibility on societal structures and systems. Systems of
oppression influence one another at different levels from the individual to the institutional. The symbolic, such as
the lack of positive disability representation in media and the portrayal of people with disabilities as being needy
and pitiful, influences able-bodied people to treat people with disabilities as such. Similarly, institutional entities,
such as the medical establishment, influence both symbolic and individual forms of oppression. Therefore, it is
perspectives and use them to challenge and change the institutional level that
operates from the medical model of disability perspective . Simi Linton notes that the
17
medical model of disability describes disabilities as deviance from the norm (Linton, 1998, p. 11)
and as
pathological problems that reside in and must be addressed through individual bodies, instead of recognizing and
addressing how people with disabilities are limited by socially and physically constructed barriers.
Feminist disability studies and disability studies are also providing a safe space from
which to work on some of these complex and sometimes very sensitive issues . Where
we might feel as if we were working in total isolation, disability studies and feminist disability
studies provide a unique space that is accessible. We work to make our physical
spaces accessible, and we are employing multiple theories that help us unravel the
ways in which sexism and ableism are used to oppress certain people. This was
mentioned by both Licia Carlson and Susan Burch: Licia Carlson: Yeah, absolutely. (...) The first time I went
to SDS [Society for Disability Studies] was in ninety-five. And I was in graduate school, and
actually that is another pivotal moment...I felt like I had been working in total isolation
on this topic. The University of Torontos philosophy department is huge. Its like eighty- five faculty, two
hundred graduate students, and I knew of only one person working on anything remotely related to disability. And
I went to this conference, and it was amazing. So, the whole experience for me was
really reinforced by these glimmers of the connection between feminist theory and
disability theory. Susan Burch: Absolutely. In very practical ways, as well as theoretical
ways. I can no longer tolerate [academic] conferences that are not accessible, and
feminist conferences that are not accessible ...[this] draw[s] my very vocal and immediate
response...So, making things accessible for any variety of people with disabilities , Feminist
Disability Studies 46 but also any variety of feminists. Im finding that assumptions about
peoples feminisms can also produce exclusionary dynamics that I dont find
comfortable. Now thats really idealistic, and I have to own that I have some very set ideas about feminism that
may clash with other people, and I may not really want to embrace another perspective on things. But that said...I
Disability studies, being a new and emergent identity among identity studies and identity politics, enters into
ideas around
what a good feminist is, are being challenged by
this political interaction between those who are combining and exploring these two
identity-based politics and reveals identity politics within, for example, women studies. Dogmatic
not only what constitutes a normal body, but
identities, and the theories built from that exploration . In Chapter 6 I discuss, for example, how
Susan Wendell challenges the common practice within Womens Studies Departments of having all day retreats,
and the pressure to engage in activities that require a lot of physical energy to be considered a good feminist.
As demonstrated by the convergence of ideas from feminist and disability studies, and by participant quotes in the
therefore remaining open to all identities and identity-based theories. A persistent openness does not mean
acceptance of any theory or treatment by a person (e.g. any potential negative or oppressive implications), but
rather a willingness by those working on anti-oppression issues to work together to look at and analyze if and how a
political identity or identity-based theory reflects power imbalances through various systems in our physical and
The literature, theories, and participant interviews support or reflect my argument that the tensions between
we should be
concerned with how to maintain political spaces that remain open to the revelations
of power imbalances in identity work that can silence and oppress. This makes our
personal narratives critical in order for us to begin unraveling the political nature
that is woven into our identities and to deconstruct, reclaim, and even to create a
whole new mosaic of identity theories to address imbalances of power in the politics
between groups of people. This is what feminist disability studies is in the process of
developing. Narratives that begin to introduce new theoretical perspectives about
identities are a critical part of the political process for naming and addressing forms
of power, privilege and oppression. They often spur additional people with
intersecting or overlapping and perhaps subversive identities to emerge. Participant
interviews and feminist disability studies literature reveal and discuss the
importance of emergent, marginalized, and intersecting voices. Several earlier texts by
identities and identity theories reveal a political process that is transformable, and that
women with disabilities that bring the oppressive and liberating narratives of the lives of women with disabilities to
Susan E. Browne, Debra Connors, and Nanci Sterns With the Power of Each
Harilyn Rousso, Susan Gushee OMalley, and
Mary Severances Disabled, Female, and Proud!: Stories of Ten Women with Disabilities (1988). These are
just two of many examples of women with disabilities who reflect upon their personal
experiences from positions of pride and seek new ways to think, theorize, and act
collectively against the unique intersections of ableism and sexism. The liberation
the surface include
process often starts with bold, brave, and sometimes awkward reflections about our
personal experiences, as well as alternative perspectives on key historical events and people. We begin
claiming a different idea about ourselves from that which we have been told, and
we resist oppressive forces by claiming, resisting, and reshaping our identities and
the theories, practices, and power imbalances that shaped them . As Rosemarie GarlandThomson explains, we begin to reimagine our identities and the politics that have
shaped them (including using standpoint epistemologies) and how they might be thought of in a
different way by using social constructionist perspectives . The tension between identity
theories can provide us with information about the political process of our identities. Our language can also show us
where we are, as scholars, (at the time of our writing) on the disability and impairment continuum. I believe,
studies: Feminist disability studies...tends to avoid impairment-specific or medical diagnostic categories to think
about disability. Certainly, feminist disability studies acknowledges communities of people based on
shared disability experience, and it recognizes the differences among the wide variety of stigmatized forms of
embodiment that constitute disability in its broadest conceptualizationfrom blindness to intersex to dyslexia, for
instance. Nevertheless, it focuses on examining the patterns of meaning attributed to those bodies rather than
based theories, which helps us to continually piece experiences and theories together in new ways, with the goal of
social change and social justice. In the following sections of my dissertation ,
Public/Private Divide
Both women and disabled bodies are relegated to the private
spheres, for when they come into the public world, they
encounter resistance to the mixing of the two worlds and their
experiences are silenced. The fear of disability is so deeply
embedded into our culture that there is no socially acceptable
way of expressing these personal experiences.
Wendell, 89
Susan, Summer 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability, Hypatia, Vol. 4, No. 4, Feminist Ethics
& Medicine, pp. 104-124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3809809.pdf DOA: 6/28/16 //KD
"How are you?" became a difficult, conflict-ridden business. I don't want to alienate my friends from my
experience, but I don't want to risk their discomfort and rejection by telling them what they don't want to know.8
Disabled people learn that many, perhaps most,
suffering caused by the body. Visibly disabled women re- port that curiosity about medical diagnoses,
physical appearance and the sex- ual and other intimate aspects of disability is more common than willingness to
listen and try to understand the experience of disability (Matthews 1983). It is not unusual for people with invisible
disabilities to keep them entirely se- cret from everyone but their closest friends. Contrary to what Sue Halpem
Ablebodied people can often make the imaginative leap into the skins of people physi-
cally unlike themselves; women can identify with a male protagonist in a story, for example, and adults
says, it is not simply because they are in able bodies that the able-bodied fail to identify with the disabled.
can identify with children or with people much older than themselves. Something more powerful than being in a
the next fifty years that this country and China are going to face. If youre going to
wipe out 20 percent of your population, nature is not going to sit by and watch. But
hospitals have little incentive to do anything about the problem because maternity
wards bring in substantial business . At Apollo, a deluxe delivery suite outfitted with a
bathtub, track lighting, a flat screen television, and a large window looking out onto
landscaped grounds runs to $200 a night. Although India outlawed fetal sex
determination and sex selective abortion in 1994, the law is poorly enforced, and as
sex selection is an easy procedure in high demand, doctors continue to openly
perform it. Bedi says he makes less money than many Delhi gynecologists simply because
he refuses to abort female fetuses. Some of his patients, he says, are extremely
disappointed when I do ultrasounds. They think its just a waste of time and money
if you dont even know whether its a boy or a girl. **Dr. Puneet Bedi, is a
gynecologist at the intensive care unit in Apollo Hospitals In Delhi India.
abnormalities. But for many parents the fetal anatomy survey, which is typically done at
twenty weeks of gestation, also imbues a pregnancy with newfound magic. The survey
struck me, the two times I observed one, as akin to snorkeling in a still lake at night. As the
wet transducer passes over the mothers belly, first you see an expanse of black, cloudy and
indeterminably deep. Then, out of nowhere shapes pop into view, amazingly clear. More
sophisticated machines can detect a remarkable range of characteristics, zeroing in
one by one on the fetuss forearm and hand, its stomach and umbilical cord, its lips and
nose. The machines introduce you to each individual toe and each individual finger, to two
small but defined ears, to a tiny button nose. You see the diaphragm, the kidneys, the brain.
A beating heart pops on screen, slippery and quivering gently. Zooming in, the transducer
can detect the atria, the ventricles, and the valves. But most ultrasound technicians in
Asia learn only to identify sex, which is one of the easier characteristics to find. With
some training, even people with no medical background can locate fetal genitalia,
which typically show up white against the gray backdrop of the monitor screen. Perhaps this
is why when it comes to sex determination ultrasound technicians use terms that are almost
comically informal. Around the world, the small sprout of a penis peeking out from between
the testes of a male fetus on the ultrasound monitor is known as the turtle, and indeed it
does look like a turtles head emerging from its shell. In Asia and Europe, the three tiny
parallel lines that form the fetal labia and clitoris are called the sandwich. If you are
American, you may hear them called the hamburger. 13 After a basic introduction to the
turtle and the sandwich, technicians know enough to determine sex anywhere and
many test the limits of acceptable clinical settings. Some administer the exam out
of the back of their cars. Mindray, the Chinese company, manufactures a handheld
ultrasound machine that makes drive-by sex determination tests pos - sible. 14 Sex
determination is not entirely foolproof, though. Penises, in particular, can hide during
examinations, and technicians sometimes mistake boys for girls. Christophe Guilmoto
remembers meeting an Indian woman who was livid because she had accidentally aborted a
boy after a doctor misdiagnosed the fetuss sex. It stands to reason that the technician who
administers examinations in the daytime glare of a parking lot is especially prone to
mistakes. But for the most part, as Asias lopsided sex ratio at birth attests, the technology
works. Fetal sex determination is not just illegal in India. China and South Korea also
outlawed it early on, and governments in all three countries have launched sporadic sting
operations. As a result, technicians often avoid announcing a fetuss sex outright in an
effort to protect themselves from possible hidden recorders. And yet the behaviors
they substitute are only legal in the most literal interpretation of the law. They make
pointed remarks: Time to decorate the baby room in pink or Youre going to have
a fine footballer. 15 Or they complete the exam professionally, with no references to girls
or boys, vaginas or penises, pink or blue and then hand the departing mother an
image of the fetuss genitalia, circled and annotated for easy comprehension.
The feminist movement and women studies provide many useful tools to help us understand how society constructs
people with disabilities as different, as Other, and as a minority group. As participants discussed, many disability
studies ideas around the minority group model stem from feminist work. As Audre Lorde wrote in The Masters
Disability Studies benefits from the interdisciplinary and foundational work that Women Studies and American
Aff = Material
Feminist disability theory solves because of both material
experiences with the body: disabled and feminine bodies are
viewed as pliable to be made beautiful
Garland-Thomson 2 (Rosemarie, Associate Professor in the Womens
Studies Department at Emory University whose studies focus on
disability, American literature and culture, feminist theory and
bioethics, Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory NWSA
Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3, Feminist Disability Studies,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316922)//meb
The second domain of feminist theory that a disability analysis can illuminate is the investigation of the body: its
materiality, its politics, its lived experience, and its relation to subjectivity and identity. Confronting issues of
representation is certainly crucial to the cultural critique of feminist disability theory. But we should not focus
the disabled have been imagined as medically abnormal-as the quintessential sick ones. Sickness is gendered
feminine. This gendering of illness has entailed distinct consequences in everything from epidemiology and
diagnosis to prophylaxis and therapeutics. Perhaps feminist disability theory's most incisive critique is revealing the
intersections between the politics of appearance and the medicalization of subjugated bodies .
Appearance
system's mandated standard of the female body has become a goal to be achieved through self-regulation and
consumerism (Wolf 1991; Haiken 1997). Feminist disability theory suggests that appearance and health norms often
both devices normalize bodies, the brace is part of medical discourse while the corset is cast as a fashion practice.
Similarly, a feminist disability theory calls into question the separation of reconstructive and cosmetic surgery,
recognizing their essentially normalizing function as what Sander L. Gilman calls "aesthetic surgery" (1998).
Cosmetic surgery, driven by gender ideology and market demand, now enforces feminine body ideals and
standardizes female bodies toward what I have called the "normate"-the corporeal incarnation of culture's
collective, unmarked, normative characteristics (1997,8). Cosmetic surgery's twin, reconstructive surgery,
cosmetic
and reconstructive procedures commodify the body and parade mutilations as
enhancements that correct flaws to improve the psychological well-being of the
patient. The conception of the body as what Susan Bordo terms "cultural plastic" (1993, 246) through surgical
eliminates disability and enforces the ideals of what might be thought of as the normalcy system. Both
and medical interventions increasingly pressures people with disabilities or appearance impairments to become
what Michel Foucault calls "docile bodies" (1979, 135).
posit female and disabled bodies, particularly, as not only spectacles to be looked
at, but as pliable bodies to be shaped infinitely so as to conform to a set of
standards called normal and beautiful. Normal has inflected beautiful in
modernity. What is imagined as excess body fat, the effects of aging, marks of
ethnicity such as supposedly Jewish noses, bodily particularities thought of as
blemishes or deformities, and marks of history such as scarring and impairments
are now expected to be surgically erased to produce an unmarked body. This
visually unobtrusive body may then pass unnoticed within the milieu of anonymity
that is the hallmark of social relations beyond the personal in modernity. The purpose of aesthetic surgery, as well
as the costuming of power, is not to appear unique-or to "be yourself," as the ads endlessly promise-but rather
not
to be conspicuous, not to look different. This flight from the nonconforming body translates into
individual efforts to look normal, neutral, unmarked, to not look disabled, queer,
ugly, fat, ethnic, or raced. Beauty, then, dictates corporeal standards that create not distinction but utter
conformity to a bland look that is at the same time unachievable, so as to leash us to consumer practices that
promise to deliver such sameness. In the language of contemporary cosmetic surgery, the unreconstructed female
body is persistently cast as having abnormalities that can be corrected by surgical procedures which supposedly
improve one's appearance by producing ostensibly natural-looking noses, thighs, breasts, chins, and so on .
Thus,
our unmodified bodies are presented as unnatural and abnormal while the surgically
altered bodies are portrayed as normal and natural. The beautiful woman of the
twenty-first century is sculpted surgically from top to bottom, generically neutral, all irregularities
regularized, all particularities expunged. She is thus nondisabled, de racialized, and deethnicized.
Aff = Activism
Incorporating disability studies in the classroom is a form of
activism.
Knoll 12 [Kristina R. doctoral candidate in the Women Studies Department at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Feminist Disability Studies:Theoretical Debates, Activism, Identity Politics, & Coalition Building , University of Washington
dissertation, 2012] JH
Insightful reflections by participants demonstrate tensions over whether or not they do enough traditional activism.
leading and critical component of feminist disability studies. Addressing ableism within activism and making
identity-based politics central to every project are central components of feminist disability studies activism. In
response to the following question: Interview Question #7: Do you have activist components to your teaching,
Words and theories can create a radical new framework with which one can counter
oppression. Simply standing and speaking about feminist disability studies is a form
of activism, as is even the simple act of wearing a disability pride T-shirt. Such actions spur
questions and conversations. Some forms of activism take more time and/or
physical effort, from conducting research and/or writing a book to planning a protest
at the capitol steps. All are extremely critical and worthy of pride and honor . With all of
the activist-guilt I heard in some of the discussions with the participants in mind, I subconsciously started feeling
defensive about the work they were doing and wanted to uplift it and celebrate all of their work as activism.
Discussions with a couple of the participants also revealed how there are often
ableistic underpinnings to traditional activism. Thus I argue that all of the elements that
contribute to social justice are a form of activism . There can be limits as to what one can do each
day and even within a lifetime. Extrapolating from Susan Wendells thoughts about chronic health issues and
come to a place where she could recognize and appreciate herself as an activist: And, yes, we admired older
feminists, but the terms of admiration were, Shes still so energetic. Shes still so active. She is still at every
very...shocked (...) at how ignorant...my own conception of the female body [was]. And even though the analysis is
very complex, and deals with many issues...how left out women with disabilities (and illness is) from feminism. Now
the other side of that, and even more practical one, and that is that the image of a good
feminist. In my mind, and I think in minds of most feminists I knew, was of a very energetic
woman, and...and ironically, a very extroverted woman. And I say ironically because I am not
an extrovert. I am quite introverted. And so this is always a clash with my own nature, and something I beat myself
up about, was that I hate meetings. I hate phone calls. I hate demonstrations. I hate [laughter] (...) contact. I want
to be quiet, thinking, reading, writing. It took many years to give myself any permission to do that as a feminist.
clearly that also clashes with the life of any woman who has
to accommodate a disability or a chronic illness. Wendells response was in reaction to the
And it was a painful journey. But
interview questions about whether or not disability studies had informed her feminist thinking, and it helps us
thread together how internalized sexist and ableistic beliefs have made many feminists want to counter the sexist
female perspective that women are weak (in hand with the ableistic belief that weakness is bad). To counter this
sexist and ableistic stereotype there have been feminist responses that squelch stereotypes, which includes all of
us who are fatigued, in pain, and so forth. This helped spur on the iconic radical feminist activists, who contribute to
this day toward ableistic and internalized ableistic beliefs that being a good feminist requires being a physically
conception of what activism is, of what feminist progress is. Its very extroverted. Despite the fact that it is perfectly
obvious that feminist theory has an enormous (reader)ship, and an enormous effect [sic] on many, many womens
Whereas I would argue, Of course it is. I mean even teaching women studies, you are teaching the future
professionals of your society, the social workers, the psychologists, the doctors and nurses, the teachers at every
You are teaching the future of professionals of your society to have a feminist
outlook. And frankly I have my doubts about whether marching in the streets can
have as much effect [sic] on a group of thirty of people, as teaching over a
semester. There seems to be a tension here, which Eunjung Kim and I touched upon in our discussion as well:
level.
Kristina Knoll: ...Dare I say this...but is activism maybe more feminine? ...and...Ive never thought about this before,
but...I am starting to wonder...like the academic field is more masculine. It has more power. It has more respect.
And activism has often had this feminine... Eunjung Kim: ...informal...yeah...yeah...unstructured... Feminist Disability
In Korea, activism is
very, very militant. So, that would be a reason why disabled women werent
accepted. But disabled womens organization[s] ha[ve] to collaborate with other
organizations and their causes. Because they employ all kinds of militant and extreme tactics that push
Studies 104 KK: I dont know if it is true or not, but I think it is worth exploring. EK:
the body to its limit and are often met with militant suppression tactics by police, such as hunger strikes, going
down to the railroad to stop the traffic, protests can get very dangerous in Korea. Some women felt uncomfortable
about that. But a lot of women participated in protests anyway, and I was not in favor of it because of the safety
reason. A lot of disabled women wanted to do it. Because there were so many police, things got violent. The
protests were about transportation access in 2001. The protests lasted more than a year. And some people died
during the protests. The disabled womens movement was always a part of it. It is important to discuss the complex
do not mean tolerance in the more usual sense of tolerating each other-although that would be useful as well. What
system, it has not collapsed into chaos, but rather it has developed a methodology that tolerates internal conflict
and contradiction. This method asks difficult questions, but accepts provisional answers. This method
recognizes the power of identity, at the same time that it reveals identity as a
fiction. This method both seeks equality, and it claims difference. This method allows us to teach
with authority at the same time that we reject notions of pedagogical
To embrace
the supposedly flawed body of disability is to critique the normalizing phallic
fantasies of wholeness, unity, coherence, and completeness. The disabled body is
contradiction, ambiguity, and partiality incarnate.
enters potentially explosive territory by using disabled bodies as emblems of the catastrophe of war, her writing
A2 Ks
GENERAL
Layering Perm
New texts allow for overcoming the patriarchy
Mintz, 11 (Susannah b. mintz, Associate Professor of English at Skidmore College
in upstate New York. She is the author of Threshold Poetics: Milton and
Intersubjectivity (2003) and Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities
(2007), and the co-editor, with Merri Lisa Johnson, of On the Literary Nonfiction of
Nancy Mairs: A Critical Anthology (2011). Invisible disability Georgina Kleeges
Sight Unseen, Feminist Disability Studies, Indiana University Press, 2011) ET
The intersection of feminist and disability theory seems obvious here. Kleege
respells her name, and thus herself, both in braille and then in the pages of Sight
Unseen. Layering text on text, she claims multiple identities that depend
on particular languages she knows, some of which exclude her sighted readers;
she becomes mobile and elusive.9 But at the same time, her braille identity,
no less than the self she creates in her book, has no meaning apart from her
physical condition: the material reality of the body produces the discursive play.
Kleeges representation of herself in a language she must reclaim from the margins
of sighted culture effects a breach with what Leigh Gilmore has called a
patriarchal regime of names (2001, 124); but unlike writers whose selfrepresentational project indulges the ambiguity of signification at the expense of
bodily specificity, Kleeges act of naming and identifying herself (This is me in
braille) is rooted in the material condition of her eyes. Despite its origin in the
gradual loss of her sight, reading herself in braille is thus a form of gain for Kleege,
one further implement with which she can traverse, and thereby denaturalize,
the boundaries of disability and health, passivity and agency, patriarchal
authority and the silencing of women.
Perm = Recognition
Permutation: the permutation allows us to recognize unique
experiences of oppression but still come together in coalitions
to create liberation.
Knoll 12 [Kristina R. doctoral candidate in the Women Studies Department at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Feminist Disability Studies:Theoretical Debates, Activism, Identity Politics, & Coalition Building , University of Washington
dissertation, 2012] JH
Postmodernist theories reject the idea of universal or global concepts , especially in terms
of ideas and language that are applied to people or groups of people. Instead, postmodernism seeks to unravel the
such as men over women, white people over people of color, non-disabled people over people with disabilities, and
external, political forces exist to oppress certain groups of people, while sustaining the power of the privileged. In
addition, well-known feminist epistemologies include standpoint theory and situated knowledge, which argue
our experiences within our specific historical and cultural contexts directly
inform what we know and that this holds significant political meaning in terms of
understanding, naming, and fighting social injustices. Therefore, part of a feminist
model of disability studies is to resist the recapitulation of old terminology and
ideologies, and, rather, to identify as an oppressed group by naming the unique
experiences we have as a group that has been socially constructed as subordinate,
or less than, in some way. To come together as a coalition, we must name our
experiences on our own accord, create our own definitions, create language, claim
and reclaim language and identity, and engage in social justice to resist oppression
and create liberation. Together we recognize barriers within society and the ways in
which we have been designated as Other.
that
Omitting Disability DA
Omitting disability is very problematicErevelles, 11 (Nirmala erevelles, Associate Professor of Social Foundations of
Education and Instructional Leadership at the University of Alabama. Her research
and publications are in the areas of disability studies, multicultural education,
feminism, and sociology of educatio t h e c o l o r o f v i o l e n c e Reflecting on
Gender, Race, and Disability in Wartime, Feminist Disability Studies, Indiana
University Press, 2011) ET
Omitting disability in third world feminism is costly, especially given
(disabled) womens experiences in the patriarchal postcolonial state
(Mohanty 1991; Rai 1996; Kaplan, Alarcon and Moallem 1999). Third world feminists
argue that the postcolonial state is the central site of hegemonic
masculinity . . . [and is responsible for monitoring] the defining lines of citizenship
for women, racialized ethnicities, and sexualities in the construction of a socially
stratified society (Kaplan et al. 1999, 1). In fact, the state looms large in
womens lives only when women transgress the boundaries set by the
state in various areas of public and private life over which it has
jurisdiction (Rai 1996, 36; my emphasis). Because disabled women have been
characterized historically as dangerous, the patriarchal and ableist state
closely patrols the boundaries of female bodily difference (Morris 1991;
Garland-Thomson 1997; Thomas 1999; Ghai 2003). This policing of female
bodily variation is evident in state practices that seek to control (disabled)
womens reproduction (Ghai 2004; Molina 2006); (disabled) womens
immigration and citizenship rights (Molina 2006); and (disabled) womens economic
(in)dependence (Chang 2000; Livingston 2006; Erevelles 2006). Notwithstanding
different histories with respect to the particular inheritance of post-fifteenthcentury Euro-American hegemony: the inheritance of slavery, enforced migration,
plantation and indentured labor, colonialism, imperial conquest, and genocide
(Mohanty 1991a, 10), third world feminists should have common cause around the
issue of disability, an inevitable repercussion of the violence of oppressive practices
and structures. So in which spaces do disabled third women claim
sisterhood? How do they relate to their disabled sisters who derive certain
privileges from residing in the imperialist states that facilitated their
becoming disabled in the first place? More urgently, how do disabled third
world feminists challenge their invisibility among their third world sisters
who, while critiquing the imperialist state, leave unexamined the ableist
assumptions that ultimately work against all third world women?
K Binaries
Radical potential/binaries/k of category
Erevelles, 11 (Nirmala erevelles, Associate Professor of Social Foundations of
Education and Instructional Leadership at the University of Alabama. Her research
and publications are in the areas of disability studies, multicultural education,
feminism, and sociology of educatio t h e c o l o r o f v i o l e n c e Reflecting on
Gender, Race, and Disability in Wartime, Feminist Disability Studies, Indiana
University Press, 2011) ET
In an essay that makes the case for the inclusion of feminist disability studies
in mainstream feminist discourse, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson provocatively
describes such scholarship as academic cultural work with a sharp political
edge and a vigorous political punch (2005, 1557). Judy Rohrer echoes GarlandThomsons vision when she asks feminists to formulate a disability theory of
feminism, a theory that upsets old frameworks and allows new questions to be
asked (2005, 4041). According to both Garland-Thomson and Rohrer, disability
analysis deepens feminist analyses of the simultaneity of oppression, body politics,
interdependency and agency, and the possibility of transformation. As a feminist
who also works in disability studies, I agree that feminist disability studies has
radical potential, potential that has been unrealized in contemporary feminist
disability scholarship. Feminist disability studies has effectively critiqued the
category of woman upheld by mainstream feminism (notwithstanding critiques
from poor women, lesbians, women of color, and third world women). Nonetheless,
it falls prey to its own critique of normativity by failing to seriously engage
difference along the axes of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality. Thus,
although I agree with Garland-Thomson that the analytic category of disability is
useful in destabilizing static notions of identity, exploring intersectionality, and
investigating embodiment, I argue that the effectiveness of much of feminist
disability studies remains limited because of its overreliance on metaphor at the
expense of materiality. By materiality I mean the actual historical, social, and
economic conditions that influence (disabled) peoples lives, conditions further
mediated by race, ethnic, gender, class, and sexual politics. To a certain extent, I
concur with disability studies scholars who characterize disability as a
heterogeneous and fluid category that embodies the ultimate postmodern
subjectivity in a dismodern post-identity world (Davis 2002; Rohrer 2005, 41
42).2 However, I propose that this subjectivitys radical potential can be harnessed
only within certain privileged material contexts that many disability studies scholars
appear to take for granted. In order for feminist disability studies to realize its
transformational potential, it must move from mere discursive
intervention to deep interrogation of the material constraints that give
rise to the oppressive binaries of self/other, normal/abnormal ,
able/disabled, us/them. In her discussion of disabled identity from a feminist
disability studies perspective, Garland-Thomson explains that disability is often
presented as an exceptional and escapable calamity, rather than as what is
perhaps the most universal of human conditions (2005, 1568). Thus, she asserts
that disability should be presented as an integral part of ones embodiment,
character, life, and way of relating to the world . . . , as part of the spectrum of
human variation (1568). While Garland-Thomson fundamentally challenges feminist
concepts of the (ab)normal body, her argument relies on an unexamined
assumption that disabled identity always occurs outside of historical, social, and
economic contexts. This assumption is especially problematic given the intersection
of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and disability. How can
acquiring a disability be celebrated as the most universal of human conditions if it
is acquired under the oppressive conditions of poverty, economic exploitation,
police brutality, neocolonial violence, and lack of access to adequate health care
and education? What happens when human variation (e.g., race) is deployed in the
construction of disabled identities for purely oppressive purposes (e.g., slavery,
colonialism, and immigration law)? What does it mean to celebrate cyborg
subjectivities when the manufacture of prostheses and assistive technology is
dependent on an exploitative international division of labor? How does one value
interdependence within imperialist/neocolonial contexts that locate consumers and
producers of goods and services within a network of fundamentally unequal social
relationships (Erevelles 1996)?3 And finally, how do we build solidarity across
difference even while we negotiate the disstances that simultaneously separate and
divide us within the contemporary context of transnational capitalism?
Unfortunately, feminist disability studies has provided few responses to these
questions.
Many people consider providing resources for disabled people a form of charity,
superogatory in part because the disabled are perceived as unproduc- tive
members of society. Yet most disabled people are placed in a double- bind: they
have access to inadequate resources because they are unemployed or
underemployed, and they are unemployed or underemployed because
they lack the resources that would enable them to make their full
contribution to society (Matthews 1983; Hannaford 1985). Often governments and charity
organizations will spend far more money to keep disabled people in institu- tions where they have no chance to be
productive than they will spend to en- able the same people to live independently and productively. In addition,
many of the "special" resources the disabled need merely compensate for bad
social planning that is based on the illusion that everyone is young, strong, healthy
(and, often, male). Disability is also frequently regarded as a personal or family
problem rather than a matter for social responsibility. Disabled people are often
expected to overcome obstacles to participation by their own extraordinary efforts,
or their families are expected to provide what they need (sometimes at great per- sonal
sacrifice). Helping in personal or family matters is seen as superogatory for people who are not members of the
family. Many factors contribute to determining whether providing a particular re- source is regarded as a social or
a personal (or family) responsibility.7 One such factor is whether the majority can identify with people who need
the re- source. Most North Americans feel that society should be organized to pro- vide short-term medical care
made necessary by illness or accident, I think because they can imagine themselves needing it. Relatively few
people can identify with those who cannot be "repaired" by medical intervention. Sue Halpem makes the following
observation: Physical health is contingent and often short-lived. But this truth eludes us as long as we are able to
bodied saw the disabled as potentially themselves or as their future selves, they would be more inclined to feel
that society should be organized to provide the resources that would make disabled people fully integrated and
conditions, or accommodate them so that we can participate fully, or support our struggles and integrate us into
the community and our struggles into the cultural concept of life as it is ordinarily lived. Feminists have shown
who works outside the home for wages, has to breast-feed a baby or look after a sick child. Common colds can be
K of Differently Abled
The disabled body is constructed as the other to able-bodied
people, leading to social, economic, and psychological
oppression of the disabled as well as psychological oppression
of the able-bodied. The negatives construction of the
disabled hero recreates these impacts by creating a new
ideal that most disabled people cant meet.
Wendell, 89
Susan, Summer 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability, Hypatia, Vol. 4, No. 4, Feminist Ethics
& Medicine, pp. 104-124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3809809.pdf DOA: 6/28/16 //KD
are people with visible disabilities who receive public attention be- cause they accomplish things that are unusual
even for the able-bodied. It is revealing that, with few exceptions (Helen Keller and, very recently, Ste- phen
Hawking are among them), disabled heroes are recognized for perform- ing feats of physical strength and
disabled heroes can be inspiring and heartening to the disabled, they may give the
able-bodied the false impression that anyone can "overcome" a disability. Disabled
heroes usually have extraordinary social, economic and physical resources that are
not available to most people with those disabilities. In addition, many disa- bled people are not
endurance. While
capable of performing physical heroics, because many (perhaps most) disabilities reduce or consume the energy
and stamina of peo- ple who have them and do not just limit them in some particular kind of physical activity.
Amputee and wheelchair athletes are exceptional, not be- cause of their ambition, discipline and hard work, but
because they are in better health than most disabled people can be. Arthritis, Parkinsonism and stroke cause
The image of
the disabled hero may reduce the "otherness" of a few disabled people, but because it creates an
ideal which most disabled people cannot meet, it increases the "otherness" of the
majority of disabled people. One recent attempt to reduce the "otherness" of disabled people is the in-
severe disability in far more people than do spinal cord injuries and amputations (Bury 1979).
troduction of the term, "differently-abled." I assume the point of using this term is to suggest that there is nothing
the term
"differently-abled" should be abandoned, because it reinforces the able- bodied
paradigm of humanity and fails to acknowledge the struggles disabled people
face. The problems of being "the other" to a dominant group are always politi- cally
complex. One solution is to emphasize similarities to the dominant group in the hope that they will identify with
abilities that the able- bodied lack in virtue of being able-bodied. Nevertheless, on the whole,
the oppressed, recognize their rights, gradually give them equal opportunities, and eventually assimilate them.
disabled people are tired of being symbols to the able-bodied, visible only or
primarily for their disabilities, and they want nothing more than to be seen as
individuals rather than as members of the group, "the disa- bled." Emphasizing similarities
Many
to the able-bodied, making their disabilities unnoticeable in comparison to their other human qualities may bring
about assimilation one-by-one. It does not directly challenge the able-bodied para- digm of humanity, just as
women moving into traditionally male arenas of power does not directly challenge the male paradigm of humanity,
although both may produce a gradual change in the paradigms. In addition, assimila- tion may be very difficult for
the disabled to achieve. Although the able-bod- ied like disabled tokens who do not seem very different from
themselves, they may need someone to carry the burden of the negative body as long as they continue to idealize
and try to control the body. They may therefore resist the assimilation of most disabled people.
A2: Anti-Blackness
this
understanding of war, culled from the stuff of letters, as she writes in her autobiography (1972, 156), that
will shape her imagining of the soldiers body . While one might expect any socially conscious
literature about war to include realistic depictions of wrecked and altered bodies, Brookss will- ingness to
invoke what Daryl Michael Scott calls damage imagery (qtd. in Baynton 2001, 41) in
relation to the black male body is rare in the tradi- tion of African American war
literature. Part of the explanation for this omission, I will suggest, emerges from the
dominant cultures conflation of discourses of disability and racial otherness
within the United States; both are used to exclude bodies marked as
different, and therefore dam- aged, from participation in the national
body politic. Disability historian Douglas Baynton clarifies this relationship: Disability has
functioned his- torically to justify inequality for disabled people
themselves[; however,] the concept of disability has been used to justify
discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them. . . .
non-white races were rou- tinely connected to people with disabilities,
both of whom were depicted as evolutionary laggards or throwbacks (34,
46). The notion of the black body as congenitally disabledinherently defective,
afflicted by defor- mity and diseasewas merely compounded by the attribution of
another form of (acquired) disability: the black body as irreversibly impaired by the
violence of slavery.
remarks on the state of men returning from the front, crying he writes, trembling (Brooks 1987, 64).3 It is
writers hes- itance to represent the black body wounded by war becomes infinitely less mysterious: these images
might unintentionally evoke other concepts of damage that are routinely ascribed to African Americans. This
iety was exacerbated by the powerful cultural link between bodily and
anx
psychological injury. In postCivil War literature particularly, it became imperative that the
black body and the black mind be portrayed as unin- jured by the injuring
institution of slavery in order to disprove one of the main antiblack arguments that
surfaced after emancipationthat slavery had made blacks unfit for citizenship.
The desire to enact damage con- trol by policing and correcting politically detrimental representations of
blackness was generally shared within the African American writing community before Brookss era. Arguably,
damage control and issues of correct representation still affect black American literary and cultural production
as we enter the twenty-first century. In black war writing, however, the absence of injury becomes more
Although the purposes of those technologies might seem self-evident (i.e., to help the injured body regain its
bodily interven- tion necessary). Indeed, in A History of Disability French cultural critic Henri-Jacques Stiker
Western societies rush to fix bod- ies labeled disabled stems from a
growing unwillingness to acknowledge circumstances (e.g., poverty or unsafe industries) that
continue to create socially produced (i.e., non-accidental, non-congenital) forms of disabil- ity (1999,
concludes that
12189).
Locating the emergence of this new rehabilitative imperative within postWorld War I France, Stiker claims the
unprecedented numbers of soldiers returning with permanent injuries prompted a shift in attitude regarding the
French society and to reduce, even deny, human culpability in its mak- ing. According to Stiker, what would prove
an ultimately dangerous con- sensus began to take shape: the decision to view the injuries soldiers suf- fered as
Naturalizing
disability in this manner, he writes, required behaving as one would in the face of an
earthly catastrophe, such as a flood, an event for which no one can be held responsible and from which
inevitable, natural occurrences rather than as the results of an avoidable social calamity.
complete recovery can be imagined: we can and must repair . . . in other words, efface, expiate (12425). Thus,
the injured body was trans- formed into an object of repair, something
that could be returned to a prior, normal state (124). To be most effective, this return
also needed to be wholesale. Consequently, in 1916 the National Office of the War Maimed enacted a policy
The
compulsion to physi- cally repair the disabled body, to reverse corporeal
damage, was hence- forth intertwined with the impulse to redeem society . Modern
authorizing the general use of prostheses for all veterans who presumably could benefit from them (123).
technol- ogy became indispensable to this project; the advanced prosthetic, unlike its cruder and more apparent
predecessors, the crutch and wooden leg, could eradicate the physical signifiers of disaster, facilitating the
forgetting of a war that France wanted to purge from its collective memory (123).
Stikers description of this intermediate step between fixing and forget- ting is critical to understanding how
American war writers wished for African men to be considered normal rather than aberrant or damaged. In this
the specularity of a body marked different and the object of the condemning
gaze could be eluded. There would no longer be a reason to stare, to categorize, to
exclude. If the prospect of integration did in fact motivate textual modes of damage controlthe conspicuous
way,
body dis- appearing into samenessBrookss detailed depictions of decidedly un- rehabilitated black male bodies in
gay chaps at the bar, produced before the desegregation of the military, and in Maud Martha, written before the
larger desegregation of the nation, would seem to undermine this aim.
The appearance of injured bodies at the close of Maud Martha, a work exploring a black womans struggle to make
her domestic life conform to the heteronormative ideals of marriage and family, continues to per- plex the novels
readers. War is merely alluded to before this final chapter, seeming no more than a historical referent, and certainly
not as central to Maud Marthas life or the novels purpose. As many critics have noted, the semiautobiographical
Maud Martha stands as Brookss blunt response to blacks subscription to the second cult of true womanhood of
the 1950s. The cultemerged in part as a postwar backlash against women workers, who, after helping sustain the
American economy, were none- theless coerced, and sometimes forced, to relinquish their jobs to demo- bilized
male veterans. The government-led campaign to return women to the home was further fueled by the specter of
communism, that other, unnatural way of being, lending new urgency to constructing opposi- tional ideologies
1950s ran counter to African American familial configurations and labor patterns necessitated by economic
exigencies. In his insightful reading of James Baldwins rendition of the domestic space in his gay bildungsroman,
wounded by war becomes infinitely less mysterious: these images might unintentionally evoke other concepts of
correcting politically detrimental representations of blackness was generally shared within the African American
writing community before Brookss era. Arguably, damage control and issues of correct representation still
affect black American literary and cultural production as we enter the twenty-first century. In black war writing,
however, the absence of injury becomes more remarkable: in a literature about a violent enterprise,
bodily interven- tion necessary). Indeed, in A History of Disability French cultural critic Henri-Jacques Stiker
Western societies rush to fix bod- ies labeled disabled stems from a
growing unwillingness to acknowledge circumstances (e.g., poverty or unsafe industries) that
continue to create socially produced (i.e., non-accidental, non-congenital) forms of disabil- ity (1999,
concludes that
12189).
Locating the emergence of this new rehabilitative imperative within postWorld War I France, Stiker claims the
unprecedented numbers of soldiers returning with permanent injuries prompted a shift in attitude regarding the
proper treatment of disabled veterans.
toward the injured individual, whose wounds were viewed as lingering memorials to the epic disaster of
the war, was complicated by a competing desire to limit the impact of the conflict on
French society and to reduce, even deny, human culpability in its mak- ing. According to Stiker, what would prove
an ultimately dangerous con- sensus began to take shape: the decision to view the injuries soldiers suf- fered as
Naturalizing
disability in this manner, he writes, required behaving as one would in the face of an
inevitable, natural occurrences rather than as the results of an avoidable social calamity.
earthly catastrophe, such as a flood, an event for which no one can be held responsible and from which
complete recovery can be imagined: we can and must repair . . . in other words, efface, expiate (12425). Thus,
the injured body was trans- formed into an object of repair, something
that could be returned to a prior, normal state (124). To be most effective, this return
also needed to be wholesale. Consequently, in 1916 the National Office of the War Maimed enacted a policy
authorizing the general use of prostheses for all veterans who presumably could benefit from them (123).
The
American war writers wished for African men to be considered normal rather than aberrant or damaged. In this
the specularity of a body marked different and the object of the condemning
gaze could be eluded. There would no longer be a reason to stare, to categorize, to
exclude. If the prospect of integration did in fact motivate textual modes of damage controlthe conspicuous
way,
body dis- appearing into samenessBrookss detailed depictions of decidedly un- rehabilitated black male bodies in
gay chaps at the bar, produced before the desegregation of the military, and in Maud Martha, written before the
larger desegregation of the nation, would seem to undermine this aim.
The appearance of injured bodies at the close of Maud Martha, a work exploring a black womans struggle to make
her domestic life conform to the heteronormative ideals of marriage and family, continues to per- plex the novels
readers. War is merely alluded to before this final chapter, seeming no more than a historical referent, and certainly
not as central to Maud Marthas life or the novels purpose. As many critics have noted, the semiautobiographical
Maud Martha stands as Brookss blunt response to blacks subscription to the second cult of true womanhood of
the 1950s. The cultemerged in part as a postwar backlash against women workers, who, after helping sustain the
American economy, were none- theless coerced, and sometimes forced, to relinquish their jobs to demo- bilized
male veterans. The government-led campaign to return women to the home was further fueled by the specter of
communism, that other, unnatural way of being, lending new urgency to constructing opposi- tional ideologies
1950s ran counter to African American familial configurations and labor patterns necessitated by economic
exigencies. In his insightful reading of James Baldwins rendition of the domestic space in his gay bildungsroman,
The able-bodied criterion provided blacks with a more immediate and concrete
reason to rebut theories of black corporeal debility . For instance, before black men were
officially allowed to join the Union Army, Fred- erick Douglass published an editorial
asserting that the powerful bodies of black men were needed to win the war (1990,
478). Douglass deploys black arms and hands as ready signifiers of ability and, importantly, as an ability cultivated
Wentworpthagiggoinson, who commanded the first African Amer- ican regiment officially raised for the Civil War,
issued this progress report about his black subordinates: they were growing more like white men less grotesque
(Cullen 1992, 87). Another soldier marveled: Put a United States uniform on his back and the chattel is a man
century American military had yet to adopt the structure and rigor that would be its twentieth-century hall- mark,
the military was nevertheless thought to transform its members: it was a space where boys were made men and
men made more manly and, as Higginson declares, blacks could be made men. Documents of African American
military service abound with before and after photographs of black soldiers attesting to this radical reforma-
tion.7 Serving as observable evidence of a rigorous and disciplined body, these photographs suggest that the
reason many African American men joined the army was not to be transformed (as many understood they were
already men) or disciplined (for many did not accept the nation- alist ideologies that accompanied service), but
notions of the deficient and subhuman body still persisted: to explain why black men could not be aviators, white
soldiers circulated the preposterous myth that black soldiers had tails. In a sonnet titled the white troops had their
orders but the Negroes looked like men, Brooks exposes as absurd notions of black disability that rationalized
military segregation: They had supposed their formula was fixed. They had obeyed instructions to devise A type of
cold, a type of hooded gaze. But when the Negroes came they were perplexed. These Negroes looked like men.
Besides, it taxed Time and the temper to remember those Congenital inequities that cause Disfavor of the
darkness. Such as boxed Their feelings properly, complete to tags A box for dark men and a box for Other
Would often find the contents had been scrambled. Or even switched. Who really gave two figs? Neither the earth
nor heaven ever trembled. And there was nothing startling in the weather. In an image both ironic and disturbing,
black and white bodies are integrated as both are disabled, obliterated beyond recognition. Brookss poem points to
who preceded her, she also writes against visual military propaganda that used idealized constructions of the black
male body as a recruitment tool and as a means of appeasing African Americans incensed both by policies that
drafted blacks into seg- regated forces and by the scant acknowledgment they received for their services.
A2 Womanism
The black womanist politics of rehabilitation forces socially
produced disability into view although societal transformation
is impossible for the disabled body.
James-Hall 11
Kim Q. Hall and Jennifer C. James, 2011. Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender, Women's
Studies, and Sexuality Studies at Appalachian State University. Associate Professor of English;
Director, Africana Studies Program at George Washington University. Gwendolyn Brooks, World War
II, and the Politics of Rehabilitation, Feminist Disability Studies, Indiana University Press. DOA:
6/29/15 // KD
where black men could rehabilitate their bodies, the domestic served as space where black women could also
rehabilitate theirs. Indeed, Maud Martha, dismissed as an uncomely old black gal in the novel (Brooks 1993, 34),
believes her worthiness as a woman can be validated through procuring a husband and a home, the prizes
presumably offered only to those women consid- ered desirable enough to deserve them. Quite clearly, this model
of black rehabilitation required that African A mericans capitulate to a range of normalization processes espoused
by white America. For black women, the most evident and detrimental con- cessions were corporeal in nature (e g.,
skin lightening and hair relaxing). Noting that Maud Marthas mind turns to the pale female faces peer- ing off the
pages of the Negro Press just after she pictures the stream of wounded soldiers, Harry B Shaw rightly interprets
the novel as expressing the specific war that black women wage with beauty (1987, 264). However, this battle
addressing the sources of black wives domestic discon- tent, Why Negro Women Leave Home (1951). Her brief
but biting com- mentary suggests that the economic independence wage work provided black women during World
War II rendered them less equipped to submit to their husbands in household affairs. These newly empowered
women, she writes, could buy their child a new overcoat without planning an elab- orate strategic campaign, or
undergoing the smoke and tire of a semi-revo- lution (28). The language Brooks chooses here is revealing,
supporting an interpretation of Maud Martha as imagining black womens resistance to patriarchal norms as a form
domestic warfare. The war with beauty and the domestic war Brooks explores in Maud Martha and her editorial
are obviously metaphorical, while the war she refers to in her novel and sonnet sequence is actual. Still, the fact
that the two wars are elided within Maud Martha suggests Brooks is invit- ing her audience to forge some form of
comparison. Thus, rather than isolate Maud Martha as a novel about black women and the domestic, and gay
chaps at the bar as poems about black men and war, I argue that the two should be read coextensively, as texts
informing each other. More specifically, I suggest that Brooks uses both to explode the myth of racial
rehabilitation and, thus, exposes as false the allegedly redemptive prop- erties of the national and nationalist
institutions black women and men had come to see as their salvation. Interpreted in this way, gay chaps at the
bar and Maud Martha can be analyzed as an intervention into dis- courses that herald the military, warfare, and
the domestic as means of black normalization. Brookss distrust of normalization was well founded As Stiker
asserts, the most deleterious effects of positing social reintegration (or normal- ization) as the outcome of
Articulated through her deployment of damaged and imperfect figures in gay chaps at the bar and Maud
A2 Queerness
exposing the institution of marriage as an economic trans- action that permits men
to prey on women who aspire to its ostensible comforts and safety (168). Though Maud
Martha recognizes this, she nevertheless colludes in her mothers and fathers passive acceptance of her sisters
her insights do not lead to action; Brooks reveals that the good
Maud Martha is actually a very bad girl: complicit in another black womans
damage. The mothers faulty logic demonstrates how the performance of het- eronormativity is
given (falsely) rehabilitative powers. If Helen is a good girl (like Martha), her marriage must also be a
situation. Once more,
good one. The belief in the normality of Helens marriage depends upon creating the illusion of wholesomeness;
Any likely
emotional and psycho- logical problems are less important, it seems, than the
tantalizing prospect of black upward mobility. Marrying well, as it were, will miraculously remedy
in turn, the illusion of wholesomeness rests upon the delusion that Helen herself is whole.
any of Helens inner damage. Similarly, Marthas investment in donat[ing] to the world a good Maud Martha (22)
disabled doublethe woman she will not let anyone see . Whereas Maud Martha may
consider the repression of her disabled self a private gesture, her desire to hide her disfigured
altered ego parallels how disabled people were kept from public view (when not being
made profitable spectacles) or rehabili- tated into disappearing, normalized beyond
recognition. That Brooks con- ceives of this figure without eyes or the capacity to
smile underscores the social and political danger posed by visible disability. Maud
Marthas dis- abled self is incapable of donning the mask so necessary to her able
self s performance of the good, the wholesome, the normal. Moreover, Maud
Marthas physically and psychologically fragmented double can be read as a
representation of the fragmentation inherent to feminine subjectivity , a concept Lennard
Davis (1995) has provocatively interpreted within a disability studies framework . Following Lacan,
Davis reminds us that the mistaken belief in our bodily integrity is requisite for proper
socialization. This means we must first regulate ourselves, a process that begins by
denying the original experiences of our bodies as infants, of our flailing arms and
legs that feel disconnected from one another (Davis 1995, 134). Lacan theorizes that this correct
apprehension of our physical- ity is interrupted when we see ourselves in a mirror and identify these refracted
theorizes that this valua- tion may explain the unlikely appeal of the Venus de Milo. As a represen- tation of an
the
spectator consumes a rep- resentation of a woman fixed in the submissive state
that makes femininity both appealing and socially useful . At the same time, the viewer can
amputated figure and of our own tentative state, she should inspire repulsion; yet she arouses desire as
defer acknowledging the pleasure he feels in consuming a mutilated female body by reconstructing her as
whole, imaginatively retrieving the body parts that were once present, what Davis calls her phantom limbs
This reconstitution enables the cultural fantasy that women are not, in fact,
mutilated subjects and that society does not want them in this state. Female
objectification compounded by race; masculine debilities =/= female debilities The
fragmentation arising from female objectification is compounded by race; if women
are reduced to parts, black women are split even further as they are asked to pry
the signs of blackness from their bodies and as blackness is ripped from their bodies
and reshaped into a myriad of cul- tural signifiers . This leads me back to the images of disabled
(134).
soldiers in back from the wars! that have jarred critics. Brooks employs stream-of- consciousness to maneuver
Maud Marthas mind from the men with two arms off and two legs off, then men with the parts of faces to the
surface seemingly from nowhere and then quickly disappear can be explained in terms of Maud Marthas repression
of her own disabled double. Maud Marthas
identification that her conscious mind will notan identification that, if recognized,
would destabilize the social order. Thus, the conscious identification with disabled
bodies I referred to earlier (the untranslatable watching and somatic sympathy that pre- cipitates social action)
reveals its subversive potential. The somatic cor- respondence, both a sympathetic
response to their condition and a brief suggestion of hers, is nonetheless promptly
displaced by intellectualism. Although her body, like soldiers, is left in pieces, Maud Martha will not
loiter among the wreckage long enough to see. Another soldier from the sonnets, exhausted by the apparent
endless- ness of the war, describes its perpetuity: this morning men deliver wounds and death. They will deliver
death and wounds tomorrow (Brooks 1987, 73). Part of the reason Maud Martha diminishes the impact of war in
thoughts of natural regeneration is rooted, we learn, in her pregnancy. And in the meantime, she rhapsodizes,
capitulation to the ideologies attendant with gender inscription or as a simple need to tack on a happy ending to
convince us that another baby will finally replenish Maud Marthas malnourished insides. All prior textual evidence
points to the contrary. If Maud Martha romanticizes her first pregnancy, childbirth, and subse- quent relationship to
her daughter, Brooks does not offer Maud Martha a part within the cultural script her character fumblingly tries to
follow. Like the disabled soldiers minds and bodies in gay chaps in the bar, Brooks leaves Maud Marthas
consciousness split at the novels conclusion, a means of keeping matters open, unresolved. And like those poems,
Maud Martha is a fractured text. We think we have been given Maud Marthas whole story, but important parts are
missing: her nuptials, for example, and the fact that her brother, Harry, was sent to war. In spite of similarities, it
character, her gift of looking with an artists eye, is nonetheless lost within Maud Marthas instinct to beautify what
she apprehends. In spring landscape: a detail, she remarks upon the gray sky, but notes the sun was making
little silver promises up there; assess- ing the day as a rather bleak one for June; still she insists, there were
A2 Gender K
Omits Ability
Answer to other fem ks or talking about this in debate good
Garland-Thomson, 11 (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of English at Emory
University with a focus on disability studies and feminist theory. i n t e g r a t i n g disabi l ity, t r a n s
f o rmi n g f eminist t h e o r y Feminist Disability Studies, Indiana University Press, 2011) ET
that justify patriarchal, imperialist, and ableist interventions (Fine and Asch 1988;
Morris 1991; Garland-Thomson 1997; Thomas 1999; Ghai 2003). Yet, despite a
potentially common platform of resistance disability is conspicuously missing in
third world feminist analyses of difference. For example, disabled Indian feminist
Anita Ghai reports that although more than thirty-five million disabled women
inhabit India, the National Womens Commission testifies that disability is not an
issue which attracts the feminists (2003, 25). Omitting disability in third world
feminism is costly, especially given (disabled) womens experiences in the
patriarchal postcolonial state (Mohanty 1991; Rai 1996; Kaplan, Alarcon and
Moallem 1999). Third world feminists argue that the postcolonial state is
the central site of hegemonic masculinity . . . [and is responsible for
monitoring] the defining lines of citizenship for women, racialized ethnicities, and
sexualities in the construction of a socially stratified society (Kaplan et al. 1999, 1).
In fact, the state looms large in womens lives only when women
transgress the boundaries set by the state in various areas of public and
private life over which it has jurisdiction (Rai 1996, 36; my emphasis).
Because disabled women have been characterized historically as dangerous, the
patriarchal and ableist state closely patrols the boundaries of female bodily
difference (Morris 1991; Garland-Thomson 1997; Thomas 1999; Ghai 2003). This
policing of female bodily variation is evident in state practices that seek to control
(disabled) womens reproduction (Ghai 2004; Molina 2006); (disabled) womens
immigration and citizenship rights (Molina 2006); and (disabled) womens economic
(in)dependence (Chang 2000; Livingston 2006; Erevelles 2006). Notwithstanding
different histories with respect to the particular inheritance of post-fifteenthcentury Euro-American hegemony: the inheritance of slavery, enforced migration,
plantation and indentured labor, colonialism, imperial conquest, and genocide
(Mohanty 1991a, 10), third world feminists should have common cause around the
issue of disability, an inevitable repercussion of the violence of oppressive practices
and structures. So in which spaces do disabled third women claim sisterhood? How
do they relate to their disabled sisters who derive certain privileges from residing in
the imperialist states that facilitated their becoming disabled in the first place? More
urgently, how do disabled third world feminists challenge their invisibility among
their third world sisters who, while critiquing the imperialist state, leave
unexamined the ableist assumptions that ultimately work against all third world
women?
A2 Cap
*NEG*
CASE
SQ Solves
Squo solves the affmomentum is moving against population
control
Eberstadt, 15 (Nicholas, Ph.D.; Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Senior Adviser to the
National Bureau of Asian Research, a member of the visiting committee at the
Harvard School of Public Health, and a member of the Global Leadership Council at
the World Economic Forum, founding member of the U.S. Committee for Human
Rights in North Korea, and the Commissioner of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) Global Aging Initiative; Submitted Testimony for Hearing
on Chinas New Two-Child Policy and the Continuation of Massive Crimes against
Women and Children, U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China;
December 3, 2015)
Fourth: It is worth noting that some Chinese researchers and academics are already
calling for more aggressive measures to stimulate population growth, and the
Chinese government is at the very least granting such voices a hearing in the
state controlled media. Days before the announcement of the new Two-Child Policy,
for example, the official China Daily carried a story titled Need seen as urgent for
boosting population, in which a Peking University professor is quoted as
proclaiming two children are good, and three are even better.6 Is it possible
that Beijing might reverse course in the future, and veer from an antinatal policy to pro-natalism? If so, China would hardly be the first postwar
Asian government to conduct such an about-face. Japan, the Republic of
Korea, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore have all done exactly that
already. The distinction here, of course, is that none of these other governments
ever attempted to enforce involuntary birth control. A coercive population policy
forcing Chinese parents to have unwanted births is certainly hard to imagine
nowadaysbut that does not necessarily mean that such a program should be
dismissed out of hand as an absolute impossibility. As population and human rights
activist Steven Mosher warned shortly after the announcement of the new Two-Child
Policy, The same party officials who have been responsible for decades of forced
abortions and sterilizations would presumably have no qualms over enforcing
mandatory pregnancy on young women, if they were ordered to do so.7
Rights in North Korea, and the Commissioner of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) Global Aging Initiative; Submitted Testimony for Hearing
on Chinas New Two-Child Policy and the Continuation of Massive Crimes against
Women and Children, U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China;
December 3, 2015)
Finally: Among the many unanswered questions concerning coercive birth control in China, the most importantand
demographers and
population specialists have yet to offer a plausible and methodologically
defensible estimate of just how much this extraordinarily ambitious and ruthless
adventure in social engineering has actually altered the size and composition
of Chinas population. The problem is that we lack any clear idea of what Chinas
population trends over the past three and a half decades would have looked like in
the absence of coercion. Over the decade before the One-Child Policy, Chinas birth
rates were plummeting. [SEE FIGURE 2] At the advent of the One-Child Policy era, demographers
now estimate that fertility levels in the Chinese countryside were well under half
their level just ten years earlier, and that fertility was far below replacement in
Chinas cities. TIndeed, during the 1960s and 1970s, birth levels in urban China were
already apparently considerably lower than in Hong Kong or Taiwan. [SEE FIGURE 3]
Chinese population control authorities like to claim their efforts have averted a
cumulative total of over 400 million births .8 They apparently arrive at that figure by
tallying up abortion totals during the One-Child Policy era. But if so this would be a
fundamentally flawed approach to measuring the demographic impact of
coercive birth control policy. It fails to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary
abortions, while also ignoring the scope and scale of pregnancies averted altogether
in the first place under the glare of anti-natal pressure . As an approximation of demographic
impact, this figure cannot be taken seriously although admittedly it would be highly
perhaps also surprising is its ultimate demographic impact. Strange as this may sound,
meaningful to know just how many involuntary abortions Chinese authorities believe they are responsible for.
Perhaps the closest approximation to the true demographic impact of the One- Child Policy we could hope for might
come from tracking the gap between wanted family size and actual family size over time and by region or locality
Pritchett and
Larry Summers demonstrated that desired family size was the single best predictor of
achieved family size the world over, irrespective of a countrys culture or income
level.9 (That same study made a powerful case that voluntary family planning programs typically
had very little impact on overall national fertility levels .) Around the world today,
differences in wanted fertility can apparently account for over 90 percent of
intercountry differences in actual fertility. [SEE FIGURE 4] This is an extremely high
correlationbut it is not perfect. In other words: even if we possessed detailed time-series data on desired
for Chinaif such data were available. Over twenty years ago, a path-breaking study by Lant
family size for China in the One- Child Policy era, we could not be sure that any differences between real existing
fertility levels and reported wanted fertility were completely due to coercive pressures. Moreover: it is by no means
obvious that ordinary social science survey techniques are capable of eliciting reliable responses about desired
fertility in a setting where answers to these questions are as fraught and politicized as they obviously are in China
Chinas police state population control policy has most recently been underscored
by an important study by Dr. Daniel M. Goodkind, who has carefully re-examined the
relationship between Chinas population program and the countrys rising gender
imbalance at birth.10 Many observers (including me) take it as a given that the
One-Child Policy has been the cause and the driver of rising sex ratios at
birth in China over the past three and a half decades, but Goodkind
challenges us to take a second look. Among his many other points, sex ratios at
Intersectionality bad
The affirmative depoliticizes intersectionality and binds it to an
overly academic space so that it can never actually be used in
practice.
Bilge13[Sirma, associate professor in sociology at the Universtiy of MontrealDu Bois Review 10.2 405-424, Fall 2013,
http://media.proquest.com/media/pq/classic/doc/3172265981/fmt/pi/rep/NONE?hl=&cit%3Aauth=Bilge%2C+Sirma&cit
%3Atitle=INTERSECTIONALITY+UNDONE%3A+SAVING+INTERSECTIONALITY+FROM+FEMINIST+INTERSECTIONALITY+STUDIES&cit
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%3D] JH
Myowntakeonhowtoknowintersectionalityhasbeentodo
intersectionality;toassesswhatintersectionalitycanproduceistocanvasswhatscholars,activistsand
policymakershavedoneunderitsrubric. Thus,theinvitationtomeasureandevaluateintersectionalityas
theoryintheabstracthasnotdrawnmyengagementovertheyears.. . . Iveconsistentlylearnedmore
fromwhatscholarsandactivistshavedonewithintersectionalitythanfromwhatothershavespeculated
aboutitsappeal ~p. 222!. Iarguethatwidespreadincidenceofmetatheoreticalmusingsservestoundo
intersectionalitybydistractingfromitspotentialasatoolforsocialjustice.
my own sensibilities about intersectionality.
particularly acute in Europe ~Erel et al., 2008; Gutirrez Rodriguez 2010; Haritaworn 2012; Lewis 2009, 2013;
~privileged! standpoint from which White people view themselves, others, and society; and a set of cultural
practices that are considered unmarkedyet unmarked only if viewed from the perspective of normative
~2006! expands on Bourdieus notion to develop the concept of White habitus: a racialized, uninterrupted
socialization process that conditions and creates whites racial taste, perceptions, feelings and emotions and their
Intersectionality is the Brainchild of Feminism One of the most significant argumentative strategies to whitening
Claiming that
feminism is responsible for creating intersectionality has become a normative,
perfectly naturalized, taken-for-granted feminist practice, as evidenced by a
plethora of writings, symposiums, and course programs in feminist intersectionality
studies or intersectional gender studies, etc. Such reframing makes intersectionality
a property specifically of feminism and womens0gender studies erasing
intersectionalitys intersectional origins ~Luft and Ward, 2009, p. 19!. A serious consequence of
this appropriation is it downplays the centrality of race in the advent of
intersectional thought and activism, while concurrently obscuring the formative
tensions, both historical and contemporary, between feminism and women of color in the
shaping of intersectionality. The appropriation of a whitened intersectionality needs
to be countered by insistently emphasizing intersectionalitys constitutive ties with
critical race thinking and ~re!claiming a non-negotiable status for race and the
racializing processes in intersectional analysis and praxis. Recentering race in
intersectionality is vital in the face of widespread practices that decenter race in
tune with the heg- emonic postracial thinking . Indeed, the chronic avoidance of race in European
feminist debates on intersectionality is sobering. Barbara Tomlinson ~2013! argues that decentering race
facilitates dominant ~White! feminist appropriation of intersectionality: Many
European social scientists and philosophers concerned with feminist con- ceptions of
intersectionality appear to find valuable a purified intersectionality, quarantined
from its exposure to race. Establishing the Black feminist scholars who originated intersectionality as
intersectionality is the frequent casting of intersectionality as the brain child of feminism.
unworthyparochial, race-bound, inca- pable of theorizingjustifies extracting from them the valuable tool of
inter- sectionality ~p. 13!. Petzen ~2012! insightfully discusses the importance of recentering race in the inter-
critique in European work on intersectionality tends to suffer at the hands of some theorists who tend to favour the
other intersectional axes of ~white! gender and class, and recently sexuality @. . .# ~p. 296!. European
disciplinary feminism whitens intersectionality not only by making claims of property rights to the concept of
intersectionality, but also by minimizing the importance of race in intersectional thoughtfor instance by declaring
ebrating lntersectionality?, as Lewis ~2013! notes, there was an anxious debate about whether the category of race
Marxist Feminism
Intersectionality arose out of class-based movements
Mitchell 13 [Eve, I am a woman and a human: a Marxist feminist critique of intersectionality theory,
September 12, 2013 https://libcom.org/library/i-am-woman-human-marxist-feminist-critique-intersectionalitytheory-eve-mitchell] JH
The term intersectionality did not become commonplace until the early 1980s.
According to most feminist historians, Kimberl Williams Crenshaw was the first to
coin the term, in a series of articles written between roughly 1989 and 1991 (for
example, see Mapping the Margins). Intersectionality theory was then popularized
by many critical race and gender theorists. Despite where the term was coined,
intersectionality theory has its roots in the 1960s and 70s class struggle movements
in the US and Europe (roughly speaking). This period was generally characterized by
autonomous struggles based on the gendered and racialized division of labor. Black
folks were the vanguard of this form of struggle, developing and leading many types
of organizations from revolutionary parties like the Black Panther Party, to majority
black workplace organizations like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. These
forms of struggle influenced other groups, such as white women, latinos, gays and
lesbians, to form similar organizations along race, gender and sexuality lines (while
there were multi-ethnic projects in this time period, and many contradictions within
these organizations themselves, it can be said that in this specific time and place,
there was a general tendency to organize along these lines). This was due to the
gendered and racialized division of labor; black folks were relegated to certain
neighborhoods and certain forms of labor, the value of a black persons labor was
less than a white persons, and a socially constructed skin color hierarchy and
corresponding antagonisms within the class was fully developed and materially
enforced. To be black meant to be objectified, relegated into one form of labor:
producing and reproducing blackness. Black Power was therefore the struggle
against the alienation and one-sidedness of blackness, a struggle to liberate labor,
releasing its multi-sidedness, unifying labor with its conscious will. Similarly, women
organized in response to the gendered division of labor in effort to break free from
the alienation of womanhood. For example, women struggled for reproductive and
sexual freedom in effort to gain control over the means of production (their bodies).
Maria Mies describes how womens bodies are their means of production under
capitalism, stating, The first means of production with which human beings act
upon nature is their own body, and later, she writes, women can experience their
whole body, not only their hands or their heads. Out of their body they produce new
children as well as the first food for these children (Patriarchy and Accumulation on
a World Scale, 52 and 53). Since womens use of their bodies is a unique form of
alienated labor for women under capitalism, it is historically the site of struggle for
liberation. However, there was also a tendency within second wave feminism that
sought to reproduce capitalist relations, arguing for equal wages for equal work.
Both of these tendencies were acting in response to the gendered social relations
under capital, and both shared a methodology of identity politics, arguing that
women could unite on the basis of a shared woman experience, or womanhood.
From this development, intersectionality theory took hold. As the autonomous
struggles of the 60s and 70s began to recede, groups like the Combahee River
Collective responded to the material divisions within the movement. They argued
that the objectively white second wave feminist movement excluded women of
color by assuming the white womans experience could be extended to women of
color, and that white women were adequate spokespeople for women of color. In
contrast, they argued that a revolutionary praxis must be informed by the
experience of black lesbian women, stating, This focusing upon our own
oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most
profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,
as opposed to working to end somebody elses oppression. In the case of Black
women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore
revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political
movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than
ourselves (Combahee River Collective Statement).
Under capitalism, we are both the alienated worker and labor itself, except
the universal has not been actualized concretely. The identity politics of the 60s and
70s conflates a particular moment, or a determinant point, in the relations of
capitalism with the potential universal. Furthermore, it reproduces the schism between appearance
and essence. Under capitalism there is a contradiction between the particular and the
universal; appearance and essence. We appear to be alienated individuals (a bus driver,
a hair stylist, a woman, etc.), though in essence we are multi-sided individuals capable of
many forms of labor. Identity politics bolsters one side of this contradiction, arguing for collective struggle
universal.
on the basis of womanhood, or blackness, or black lesbianhood, etc. To borrow from Fanon, identity politics
states, I am a black man, I am a woman, or I am a black lesbian, etc. This is a key first step. As he writes in
his critical chapter, The Lived Experience of the Black Man: I finally made up my mind to shout my blackness
(101), On the other side of the white world there lies a magical black culture. Negro sculpture! I began to blush
with pride. Was this our salvation? (102), and So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, standing at the helm,
governing the world with his intuition, rediscovered, reappropriated, in demand, accepted; and its not a Negro, oh,
no, but the Negro, alerting the prolific antennae of the world, standing in the spotlight of the world, spraying the
world with his poetical power, porous to the every breath in the world. I embrace the world! I am the world! The
white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself.
He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of
appropriation. But there are values that can be served only with my sauce. As a magician I stole from the white
man a certain world, lost to him and his kind. When that happened the white man must have felt an aftershock he
neoliberal strategies (among others). Over time, capital is forced to invest in machines over workers in order to
keep up with the competitive production process.
production process. We can see this most clearly in a place like Detroit, where automation combined with
deindustrialization left hundreds of thousands jobless.. Goldner The effects of this contradiction of
capitalism is that workers are forced into precarious working situations, jumping
from gig to gig in order to make enough money to reproduce themselves refers to this
condition as the atomized individual worker. As Goldner has written elsewhere, this increased
individualism leads to a politics of difference, where women, queers, people of color,
etc., have nothing in common with one another . Intersectionality theorists correctly identified and
critiqued this problem with identity politics. For example, bell hooks, in a polemic against liberal feminist Betty
Friedan, writes, Friedan was a principal shaper of contemporary feminist thought. Significantly, the onedimensional perspective on womens reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the contemporary
feminist movement. Like Friedan before them, white women who dominate feminist discourse today rarely question
whether or not their perspective on womens reality is true to the lived experiences of women as a collective group.
hooks is
correct to say that basing an entire politics on one particular experience, or a set of
particular differences, under capitalism is problematic. However, intersectionality
theory replicates this problem by simply adding particular moments, or determinant
points; hooks goes on to argue for race and class inclusion in a feminist analysis. Similarly, theories of an
interlocking matrix of oppressions, simply create a list of naturalized identities,
abstracted from their material and historical context. This methodology is just as
ahistorical and antisocial as Betty Friedans. Again, patriarchy and white supremacy are not
objects or institutions that exist throughout history; they are particular
expressions of our labor, our life-activity, that are conditioned by (and in turn, condition)
our mode of production. In Capital, Marx describes labor as the metabolism between humans and the
Nor are they aware of the extent to which their perspectives reflect race and class biases (3).
external world; patriarchy and white supremacy, as products of our labor, are also the conditions in which we labor.
We are constantly interacting with the world, changing the world and changing ourselves through our metabolic
patriarchy and white supremacy, like all social relations of labor, change and
transform. Patriarchy under capitalism takes a specific form that is different from
gendered relations under feudalism, or tribalism , etc. There will be overlap and
labor. So
in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an herb garden; their domestic activities
were not devalued and did not involve different social relations from those of men, as they would later, in a money-
A historical understanding of
patriarchy needs to understand patriarchy from within a set of social relations based
on the form of labor. In other words, we cannot understand the form of appearance,
womanhood, apart from the essence, a universal human.
economy, when housework would cease to be viewed as real work (25).
Mitchell 13
searching for something more, stating, Without a black past, without a black
future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer
completely black, I was damned (117), and, When I opened my eyes yesterday I
saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged
toward me with paralyzed wings. Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads
between Nothingness and infinity, I began to weep (119). Fanon points to the
contradiction between the particular form of appearance (blackness) and the
essence, the universal (humanness). In the conclusion, as noted earlier, Fanon
resolves this contradiction, arguing for further movement toward the universal, the
total abolition of race. He writes, In no way does my basic vocation have to be
drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to
reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any
past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future
(201). For Fanon then, and for Marx, the struggle for liberation must include both
the particular and the universal, both the appearance and essence. We must build
upon and push on both sides of these contradictions.
Cap Links
Ableism is caused by oppression under the capitalist structure.
Patriarchy and the economy are intertwined to all forms of
oppression
SACZKOWSKI, 11 (THOMAS SACZKOWSKI , University of Toronto, Community
Development and Global Affairs Collaborative Program, Graduate Student
NARRATIVES OF VIOLENCE: THE RELATIONSHIP OF MASCULINITY AND ABLEISM,
November 20, 2011,
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/30054/1/Narratives_of_Violence_ts
pace.pdf) ET
The previous section described how masculinity-ableism acts as an oppressive
hegemonic ideology and in which social arenas this is displayed. This section will be
focusing on the structures of capitalism and the class relations that capitalism
creates and how they are both connected with masculinity-ableism. I am using a
Marxist-feminist framework to understand the history of disability in a capitalist
system and how ability (class, gender, race, sexuality, etc.) is organized
through social relations in the social and economic sphere (Gleeson, 1997;
Gorman, 2005). I have devoted a full section to class analysis, not only because of
the strong relationship between patriarchy and capitalism, but also because class
oppression explains much of how disability is perceived and treated within
an advanced capitalist state like Canada. I will be using the term systemic
violence to refer to how the structure of Canadas political economy enacts
violence and oppression on peoples daily lives (Smith, 2006). The systemic
violence of the state interlocks with all forms of oppression that impact
peoples daily experiences and create struggles for some and privileges for
others. Additionally, both the systemic violence of the state and the network of
oppression with which it intersects make some peoples experiences visible and
others invisible (Bannerji, 1993). I have chosen to articulate the oppression of a
capitalist state which creates systemic violence for marginalized groups .
For this section, many of the experiences I will describe come from my position as
an upper middle-class man from a wealthy community, but also as a witness of the
experiences that others have shared with me. Bannerji describes how systemic
violence operates on her own identity and how this affects her daily experiences.
My experiences very often spoke of violence and violation. They consisted of
humiliation in the institution called the university, fear of the peculiar closeness of
their manned bureaucracy, the fear of the state at visa offices, borders and at
home, of being judged an unfit parent. There were fears in the street for clothes I
wore, the body I carried with me, for my child in her present and future, and a
continual sense of non-belonging, a confused silence produced in places which
should have been also mine, because they politically proclaimed so in their posters
and publications. (Bannerji, 1995, p. 8) In analyzing the relationship between
patriarchal masculinity and political economy, Mohanty (2003) argues that we
need to rethink how these two influence each other so as to secure and
maximize patriarchy. If we focus on these relations then we will further
and subordinates them to menial labour jobs. This then has consequences for how
people with disabilities incur ableist perceptions and treatment because of this
organization and also because of their class status. Gleeson (1997) describes how
people with disabilities have been oppressed because of ableist perceptions, but
also because of how capitalism has exploited the lower class. The foundation of
capitalism is based on the exploitation and control of the poor and working class so
they produce the greatest amount of capital for the ruling class. Therefore, by
forcing people with disabilities into the lower class, capitalism takes away the social
responsibility of state structures to support people with disabilities in the labour
market and their home life, and also allows those individuals to be exploited in
inflexible and poorly paid positions. Sheldon (2005) reminds us that disability and
ableism cannot be dematerialised and explained only as a product of
discriminatory beliefs. She maintains that it is essential to address how
disablement relates to the capitalist mode of production. I briefly mentioned
before how demands of efficiency by capitalism have been adopted by oppressive
patriarchal forms of masculinity so as to maintain male dominance within the
market and the social sphere (Connell, 2005). Some of the characteristics of the
masculine identity include being strong, assertive, and individualistic. These are
characteristics typically used to describe not only a good capitalist but also an
oppressive masculinity. This allows for male dominance to exist within the economy,
while maintaining that dominance through the subjugation of women and people
with disabilities. The patriarchal foundations of the economy create a system
where higher positions within the social and economic hierarchy are
reserved for only able-bodies. The organization of capitalism rejects the body
that is not conducive to maximizing production and/or will incur costs for a
corporation; therefore the disabled body is rejected from this space (Albrecht,
2001). This economic structural organization dominates and controls people with
disabilities (Sheldon, 2005). The organization of a masculine identity seeks to
control the body and its norms and gestures so it can be commodified . All bodies
within the economy are commodified, and such bodies are valued differently
based on their exploitability and expendability (Fine & Asch, 1988). The disabled
body is seen as being deviant from the productive oppressive masculine
identity. The disabled body is labelled as inferior to the able-bodied norm because
it is viewed as less productive and may require accommodation (Albrecht, 2001).
Patriarchalcapitalism and ableism engenders a society where people with disabilities
have lower incomes and participate less in the work force (Fraser et al.; 2003).
Disabled people struggle in a society that has been designed for male
dominance and as if disability does not exist (Shakespeare, 2005; Fine & Asch,
1988). Peterson (2005) argues that in a capitalist economic system, the dominance
of the patriarchal capitalist male is held as the ideal with the intention of preserving
the productivity of industrial capitalism. The body of a disabled person marks both a
rejection of this masculine identity and an inadequacy in preserving the values and
production of capitalism. This unproductive disabled body is then marginalized and
forced to take up lower paying jobs that are characteristically occupied by working
class peoples (Serlin, 2003). Within these positions, there is less access to benefits
and support systems and, in most cases, disabled people must seek supplementary
income from welfare (Barnes et al., 1999). Subsequently, the disabled body is
MATERIALISM K MISFIT
Misfitting allows a reorientation toward changing the
structures
Garland-Thomson 11 (Rosemarie, Associate Professor in the
Womens Studies Department at Emory University whose studies focus
on disability, American literature and culture, feminist theory and
bioethics, Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.Hypatia,
Vol. 26, No. 3. http://www.ces.uc.pt/projectos/intimidade/media/Misfits_a
%20feminist%20materialist%20disability%20concept.pdf)//meb
A good enough fit produces material anonymity, a version of the visual ano- nymity I have elsewhere argued that
staring relationships interrupt.8 A reasonable fit in a reasonably sustaining environment allows a person to navigate the world in relative anonymity, in the sense of being suited to the circumstances and conditions of the
environment, of satisfying its requirements in a way so as not to stand out, make a scene, or disrupt through
countering expectations. Material anonymity describes a predominantly unmarked and unrecognized way of being
in the world, a way that Harvey Sacks calls doing being ordinary (1984). Such a phenomenology yields the
privilege or social capital conferred by accessing spaces, performing tasks, and establishing rela- tions that enable
one to exercise the rights of citizenship in democratic orders. Linda Mart n Alcoffs 2006 account of identity
formation, Visible Identities, corresponds with my concept of misfitting in that it is relational, experiential, and
contingent. How we look, and look at each other, Alcoff insists, deter- mines in large part how we make our way
through the world and how we treat one another.9 Like misfitting, Alcoff s version of identity formation as a perceptual habit (Alcoff 2006, 188) fuses a materialist with a constructivist theory of identity formation. As with fitting
dominant interpretations of visual markers on the body (6). This perception of identity is a learned ability that
is context dependent, complex, and fluid (187). Alcoff suggests that we are called into subjectivity through an
exchange of mutual recognition, which may of course often be misrecognition. Misfitting adds to this primarily
perceptual field stronger elements of materiality; our bodies move, meet, negotiate, and come into direct contact
with the built and natural worlds. The degree to which that shared material world sustains the particularities of our
embodied life at any given moment or place determines our fit or misfit. Our particular embodi- ments are as
particularity, the way we look and how we function. Frequently, we do not choose our particularities, but as Alcoff
reminds us, the meaning and the substance of our bodies can be reshaped to some degree. The concepts of fitting
and misfitting speak directly to the issue of reshaping body and world. One of the fundamental premises of
People with quadriplegia, for example, should be provided with sustaining environments that allow them to participate fully as equal citizens rather than urging them toward normalization through medical scientific cure. Deaf
people, similarly, should not be made into hearing people through technology such as cochlear implants and hightech hearing aids but rather should have access to communication with both the hearing and the deaf through sign
language and other forms of non- verbal communication that create a fit between them and their world. Alcoff aims
not to mute identity or reshape our bodies in order to achieve social jus- tice, but rather to make identities more
visible in order to transform their meanings so that they provide their bearers with a coherent and positive narrative of human particularity from which to launch subjective and political agency, a point to which I will return.
Similarly, the formative experience of slamming against an unsustaining environment can unsettle our and others
occurrences of fitting. Like the dominant subject positions such as male, white, or heterosexual, fitting is a
comfortable and unremarkable majority experience of material anonymity, an unmarked subject position that most
of us occupy at some points in life and that often goes unnoticed. When we fit harmoniously and properly into the
world, we forget the truth of contingency because the world sustains us.
and recognize that dis- juncture for its political potential, we expose the relational
component and the fragility of fitting. Any of us can fit here today and misfit there
tomorrow. In this sense, the experience of misfitting can produce subjugated knowledges from which an oppositional consciousness and politicized identity might
arise. So although misfitting can lead to segregation, exclusion from the rights of citizenship, and
alienation from a majority community, it can also foster in- tense awareness of social
injustice and the formation of a community of misfits that can collaborate
to achieve a more liberatory politics and praxis. Indeed, much of the
disability rights movement grew from solidarity born of misfitting. Even the
canonical protest practices of disability rights, such as groups of wheelchair users throwing themselves out of chairs
and crawling up the stairs of public buildings, act out a misfitting.10 So whereas the benefit of fitting is material and
visual anonymity, the cost of fitting is perhaps complacency about social justice and a desensitizing to material
experience. Misfitting, I would argue, ignites a vivid recognition of our fleshliness and the contingencies of human
embodiment. Misfitting, then, informs disability experience and is cru- cial to disability identity formation. The
dominant cultural story of proper human development is to fit into the world and depends upon a claim that our
shapes are stable, predictable, and manageable. One of the hallmarks of modernity is the effort to control and
standardize human bodies and to bestow status and value accordingly.11 Our bodies and our stories about them
reach toward tractable states called normal in medical-scientific discourses, average in consumer capitalism,
ordinary in colloquial idiom, and progressive in develop- mental accounts.12
We are square pegs forced into round holes. (Ill retag this if
we use it, it needs context)
Garland-Thomson 11 (Rosemarie, Associate Professor in the
Womens Studies Department at Emory University whose studies focus
on disability, American literature and culture, feminist theory and
bioethics, Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.Hypatia,
Vol. 26, No. 3. http://www.ces.uc.pt/projectos/intimidade/media/Misfits_a
%20feminist%20materialist%20disability%20concept.pdf)//meb
misfit as a new critical keyword that seeks to defamiliarize and to reframe
dominant understandings of disability.5 Fitting and misfitting denote an encounter in
which two things come together in either harmony or disjunction. When the shape and substance
of these two things correspond in their union, they fit. A misfit, conversely, describes an incongruent
relationship between two things: a square peg in a round hole. The problem with a
misfit, then, inheres not in either of the two things but rather in their juxtaposition, the awkward
attempt to fit them together. When the spatial and temporal context shifts, so does the fit, and with it
I propose the term
meanings and consequences. Misfit emphasizes context over essence, relation over isolation, mediation over
Misfits are inherently unstable rather than fixed, yet they are very real because
they are material rather than linguistic constructions. The discrepancy between body and world, between
origination.
that which is expected and that which is, produces fits and misfits. The utility of the concept of misfit is that it
defini- tively lodges injustice and discrimination in the materiality of the world more than in social attitudes or
The theoretical
misfitting comes from its semantic and grammatical flexibility.
utility of
fitting and
Similar to many critical terms, misfit offers layered rich- ness of meaning. According to the Oxford English
as to be well adapted, in harmony with, or sat- isfy[ing] the requirements of the specified situation. As an
adjective, fitting means agreeable to decorum, becoming, convenient, proper, right.
Fit as an adjective
also moves beyond simple suitability into a more value-laden conno- tation when it means possessing
the necessary qualifications, properly qualified, competent, deserving and in good form or
condition. In British slang, fit even means sexually attractive or good-looking. Fit, then, suggests a generally
positive way of being and positioning based on an absence of conflict and a state of correct synchronization with
verb misfit applies to both things and people, meaning to fail to fit, fit badly; to be unfitting or inappro- priate.
This condition of mis-fitting slides into the highly negative figure of a person unsuited or ill-suited to his or her
environment, work, etc.; spec. one set apart from or rejected by others for his or her conspicuously odd, unusual, or
antisocial behaviour and attitudes. Thus, to mis-fit renders one a misfit. More- over, ambiguity between fit and
misfit is intimated in a less prevalent meaning of fit as a seizure disorder or in a more traditional sense as what the
Oxford English Dictionary explains as a paroxysm, or one of the recurrent attacks, of a periodic or constitutional
ailment. In later use also with wider sense: a sudden and some- what severe but transitory attack (of illness, or of
some specified ailment).
environment,
A misfit
occurs when the environment does not sustain the shape and function of the body
that enters it. The dyn- amism between body and world that produces fits or misfits comes at the spatial and
temporal points of encounter between dynamic but relatively stable bodies and environments. The built and
arranged space through which we navigate our lives tends to offer fits to majority bodies and
functioning and create misfits with minority forms of embodiment, such as people with
disabilities. The point of civil rights legislation, and the resulting material practices such as universally
designed built spaces and implements, is to enlarge the range of fits by accom- modating the widest
between a particularly shaped and functioning body and an environment that sustains that body.
possible range of human variation. People with disabilities have historically occupied positions as outcasts or misfits
as, for example, in the roles of lepers, the mad, or cripples. One thinks of the iconic Oedipus: lame and blind, cast
material by attending to mutually constituting relationships among things in the world. Misfitting is a performance
in Barads and Judith Butlers sense, in that enacts agency and subjectivity. The performing agent in a misfit
Misfitting focuses on
the disjunctures that occur in the interactive dynamism of becoming. Perform- ativity
materializes not in herself but rather literally up against the thingness of the world.
theory would rightly suggest, of course, that no smooth fit between body and world ever exists. Nonetheless, fitting
and misfitting occur on a spectrum that creates consequences. To use the iconic disability access scene of misfitting
as one illustration of those consequences: when a wheelchair user encounters a flight of stairs, she does not get
into the building; when a wheelchair user en- counters a working elevator, she enters the space. The built-ness or
thing-ness of the space into which she either fits or misfits is the unyielding determinant of whether she enters, of
whether she joins the community of those who fit into the space. Another iconic example of misfitting occurs when
a deaf, sign- language user enters a hearing environment. Imagine, for instance, the extrav- agant full-body
gesturing of the deaf signer misfitting into a boardroom full of executives seated in contained comportment with
moving mouths and stilled bodies conferring on important decisions. Fitting and misfitting are aspects of
materialization, as Butler has used the term, that literally ground discursive constructivism in matter (Butler 1993).
Fitting occurs when a generic body enters a generic world, a world conceptu- alized, designed, and built in
anticipation of bodies considered in the dominant perspective as uniform, standard, majority bodies. In contrast ,
expresses an
inherent and mutually constitutive relationship between body and narrative, between
how we can maintain a continuous sense of self as our bodies change over time. Her response
nature and cul- ture: Shape carries story, Bynum concludes (1999).7 In this formulation, embodimentour
particular shape in the broadest senseis always dynamic as it interacts with world. As such, embodied life has a
narrative, storied qual- ity; the shifting of our shapes knits one moment to the next and one place to another.
Bynums concept of shape carrying story introduces temporality into encounters between body and world, in a
narrative that by definition connects moments in space into a coherent form we call story. The idea that shape car-
suggests, then, that material bodies are not only in the spaces of the world
but that they are entwined with temporality as well.
ries story
under the terms dependence and vulnerability. Such concepts allow us to put embodied life at the center of our
understanding of sociopolitical relations and structures, subject formation, felt and ascribed identities, interpersonal
The flux inherent in the fitting relation underscores that vulnerability lies not simply in our neediness and fragility
but in how and whether that vulnerable flesh is sustained.13 The elaboration of dependency and vulnerability
developed by Fineman can illuminate the misfitting relation- ship. In her 2005 book The Autonomy Myth and her
more recent work on vulnerability theory, Fineman argues that the fact of embodiment creates uni- versal
vulnerability and defines dependency as the need in all human beings for care. Although the ethics of care has been
a concern in feminist theory for a number of years, Fineman moves the conversation toward politics and law by
arguing for collective responsibility for dependency and mitigating the social injustice caused by the disavowal and
denial of dependency.14 The reciprocal nature of care and the denial of that truth by the dominant liberal order
leads Fineman to call for state responsibility for care and protection from inherent human vulnerability. What makes
us vulnerable to what Im calling misfitting is, according to Fineman, not only the fact of our embodiment but also
the stigmatization and devaluing of the care-giving relationship in traditional liberal orders.15 Finemans emphasis
on the fact of our need for care from others underscores the relational aspect of embodiment as a way to expose
the myth of autonomy. Butler, in her book Precarious Life (2004), also founds sociopolitical justice in the fact of
bodily vulnerability. Whereas Fineman emphasizes our shared need for reciprocal bodily care as the stress point
where vulnerability occurs, Butler finds human attachment to be the source of our fundamental vulnerability.
Although Butler acknowledges interdependency as crucial to our humanness, she sees the common condition of our
injurability as our bond to one another. A sustaining fit for Butler would consist of the emotional presence of beloved
others, which is always haunted by human mortality and the specter of our ev- anescence. That our body needs
resources and attending to is more Finemans concern, whereas Butler sees us as vulnerable to the loss of the
other, to grief in the sundering of emotive bonds inherent in our bodily fragility. Finemans vul- nerability lies in the
fact that we all need to eat, be sheltered, and be comforted; Butlers vulnerability lies in the fact that we must
grieve and die. Aloneness seems the ultimate misfit for Butler. Like Fineman and Butler, sociologist Brian S. Turner
understands embod- iment as the source of our common vulnerability. In his 2006 book Vulnerability and Human
Rights, Turner adds a focus on human rights and par- ticularity that corresponds with my theory of misfitting. The
inevitable contingency of human existence is the basis of human rights for Turner. The self is neither abstract nor
autonomous. It grows from a body in a particular social and material location. The abuse of human rights destroys
the con- ditions that make what Turner calls our embodiment, enselfment, and emplacement possible (Turner
2006, 27). Similar to Butler, Turner sees our bond as being our shared capacity for suffering. Like Butler, what
Turner un- derstands as ontological contingency is the fragility of the material body, its vulnerability to wounding,
injury, pain, suffering, dying. The concept of rights accorded equally to all humans regardless of their particularity
that Turner finds central to his theory is exemplified in the first comprehensive human rights treaty of the twentyfirst century, which is the United Nations Con- vention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its Optional
Protocol, adopted in December 2006. This wide-ranging treaty conceptualizes embod- iment as unstable and
disability as contextual and takes us some of the way to a theory of misfitting: Disability, the preamble to the
treaty states, is an evolving concept and disability results from the interaction between persons with impairments
and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal
basis with others. The treatys language implies that the misfit between persons with impairments and an
resources we possess or can com- mand depend upon our social position and determine in large part the particular
form in which our vulnerability is realized (Fineman 2008, 27). To fit and be fit, I have suggested, is to be ensconced
in an environment that sus- tains the particular form, function, and needs of ones body. Although resources and
privilege certainly mitigate misfits, the relationship between body and world is rangier than this .
A misfit
occurs when world fails flesh in the environment one encounterswhether
it is a flight of stairs, a boardroom full of misogynists, an illness or injury,
sustaining environment for a blind person to encounter a fit that accommodates the minority embod- iment of
blindness in an environment built for the sighted. Such prostheses ease the material divergences between bodies
essences. The utility of the concept of misfit is that it definitively lodges in- justice and discrimination in the
materiality of the world rather than predominantly in social attitudes. Misfitting operates independently of oppressive agents or even groups who might exercise active antipathy or discrim- ination. A wheelchair user, for
instance, might be socially accepted in a workplace, but if the only way to get to the office is via stairs, a wheelchair
user will not have access to the economic benefits a stair climber has. Similarly, a blind person is disadvantaged in
a world that demands reading printed text in order to fully participate in the public sphere. A person with dwarfism
is excluded primarily because she must navigate a world whose scale is wrong for her body. And someone whose
body does not fit the configuration of a key- board will not turn out text in the same way that ten nimble fingers
such as the European Holocaust, American lynching, the prison-industrial complex, and coercive heteronormativity.
This paradoxical but virulent cultural mandate to expunge disability has been countered over the last thirty years
by civil and human rights initiatives such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and other similar national legislation. The misfitting that would exclude
people with disabilities from the world is also countered by the kind of positive identity politics in a postpositive
realist theory of identity such as Alcoff formulates. By positive identity politics, I am not suggesting reductive or
essentialist dogma such as refusing to surgically treat cleft palates or mitigate pain, or holding candlelight vigils in
praise of breast cancer. Rather, I mean an identity politics that would reimagine disabil- ity as human variation, a
form of human biodiversity that we want to recognize and accept, even embrace, in a democratic order.17 In
arguing for a disability bioethics, Scully advocates what I would call an ethical fitting enabled by reconstructing
narratives that revalue the particularities we think of as impair- ment and deviance to bring forward information or
strategies that disabled people need to survive and flourish that are missing from existing accounts (Scully 2008,
dynamics of misfitting and fitting urges us to cultivate the rich particularity that makes up embodied human
diversity. Although modernity presses us relentlessly toward corporeal and other forms of standardization, the
born with the traits we call disabilities fosters an adaptability and resourcefulness that often is underdeveloped in
those whose bodies fit smoothly into the prevailing, sus- taining environment. This epistemic status fosters a
resourcefulness that can extend to the nondisabled and not yet disabled as they relate to and live with people with
disabilities.18 For example, people born without arms all learn to use their toes to accomplish tasks that those of us
with arms never are able to do. Blind people learn to navigate through the world without the aid of light, a skill
useful when sources of artificial light that seeing people depend upon fail. Deaf people develop modes of
communication that are silent. Such misfitting can be generative rather than necessarily catastrophic for human beings. For example, Claude Monet painted more impressionistically as he became blind. The artist Chuck Close
evolved a distinctive style of realism in response to paralysis. The philosopher Ju rgen Habermas recently wrote that
the experience of having a cleft palate and the accompanying multiple surgeries positively shaped his intellectual
development (Habermas 2004). The resourcefulness and adaptability that can emerge from the interactive
dynamism between world and body Ive named here as
that our politics should not focus on what we are but what we want (Brown 1993).
To get what we want, it is not necessary to sac- rifice identity or identity politics as
Brown suggests, to frame identity as a wounded attachment. The critical concept of
misfitting emphasizes location rather than being, the relational rather
than the essential. Understanding identity as a set of variable fits and
misfits, a potentially productive fusion of coincidence and disparity
between ones particularity and the material status quo, provides a way to
convert being to wanting without neutralizing identity. These instances of
resourcefulness arising from misfits are not wounded at- tachments nor is this a politics
of resentment; this is the productive power of misfitting.
Framework
political drama is much larger, involving individuals and groups at multiple levels of the social system, all with
interests in the outcome. The consequences of such contests for women and gender hierarchies are highly variable
conceal their reproductive secrets that are aimed at inverting gender hierarchies may end up reproducing them
gender disparities in the reproductive domain as well. In China two main sets of actors have been involved in the
struggle to shape reproductive outcomes, the party-state and peasant society.13 Both have vital interests at stake.
The Dengist regime that took over in the late 1970s promised economic progress to the Chinese people, staking its
legitimacy on its ability to achieve prosperity by century's end. Having seen rampant population growth eat up
economic gains in the past, China's leaders were convinced that their economic project would fail if it could not
stanch the growth of the population, especially the rural component of it, which made up over three-quarters of the
total.14 The one-child policy provided a drastic solution to this problem: radically curtailing population growth by
asking all couples to limit themselves to one child.15 Peasant society, the main target of the policy, was profoundly
cherished values and undermined the fami- ly's ability to reproduce itself. Reproductive politics and policy What
kinds of politics were involved? Working in the United States, where reproduction is heavily medicalized,
anthropologists such as Emily Martin (1987, 1991) and Rayna Rapp (1990, 1991) have shown that women resist the
medical model of pregnancy and birth, accepting im- ages, technologies, and practices that serve their interests
while rejecting those that do not.
Individual
and group
subordination of racial minorities and other socially disadvantaged groups in the context of the eugenics movement
policies such as welfare "family caps" and prosecutions of women who use co- caine while pregnant. Part III
Movement and Subordination of Powerless Groups A. Introduction Eugenics arose out of burgeoning understanding
of genetics in the late nineteenth century. A common definition of eugenics is the "study of human improvement by
genetic means."3 However, the "study" has often been only superficially academic, and "genetic means" have often
discourage births among certain groups, attempts to encourage "fit" people to reproduce6 or to alter survival
patterns, for exam- pie through euthanasia programs, are included in the definition above.7 Eugenicists believed
that most social problems were caused by hereditary faults of those afflicted by the problem, and they sought to
eventually eliminate these problems from society through selective breeding. The eugenics move- ment quickly
gained popularity and was widely supported by physicians, scien- tific eugenicists, and lawyers.8 At one point, basic
eugenic teachings were so widely accepted that they were commonly incorporated into high school curric- ula.9
Some supporters pushed eugenic teachings with religious fervor. For ex- ample, eugenicists stressed the "urgent
States
began attempting to stem reproduction among the "unfit" by segre- gating them
into asylums or prisons or enacted laws forbidding certain catego- ries of people to
marry,11 but the policy focus quickly shifted toward steriliza- tion , which
proved less expensive and more effective .12 In 1899, the vasectomy was developed for eugenic
need for a Messiah of the human germ plasm" to save civilization from otherwise inevitable decline.10
purposes, suggested for "inebriates, imbeciles, per- verts and paupers,"13 and later perfected on forty-two inmates
of the Indiana Reformatory.14 By the 1930s, more than thirty states had passed involuntary eugenic sterilization
laws,15 typically applied to the insane, "idiots and imbe- ciles," and criminals.16 Although
seven state laws were invalidated as uncon- stitutional in state or lower federal courts,17 the Supreme Court upheld
Vir- ginia's eugenic sterilization law in Buck v. Bell in 1927,18 a decision that has never been overturned. Between
1900 and 1963, at least 60,000 Americans were sterilized pursuant to eugenic sterilization laws.19 In response to a
lawsuit, in 1974 the federal government adopted regulations banning sterilization with- out consent in hospitals that
receive federal funds,20 but reports of violations surface periodically.21 B. Eugenics as Subordination This Part
Examining
the connections between eugenic policies and subordination is important
to understanding why equal protection jurisprudence that ignores
subordination inadequately protects pow- erless groups . Additionally, the
discussion of subordination highlights some of the parallels between the historic
eugenics movement and current implicitly eugenic policies. With the goal of eliminating or
examines the use of eugenic policies to subordinate unpopular groups, especially racial minorities.
reducing the population of certain groups in the future, eugenics definitionally subordinates the groups regulated.
definition of subordination - the idea that some groups are so much less valuable than others that the world would
submission to authority,
supplies the foundation for government eugenic policy. Eugenic policies are
premised on the theory that the state may justifiably coerce or compel these
"inferior" groups to limit or forgo reproduc- tion, the most basic human instinct. 23
Thus, eugenic policy embodies both of the ideas central to subordination inferiority, and submission. Additionally, the United States' s eugenic policies often have been subordibe better off if their numbers were reduced or eliminated. The second definition,
nating in the sense that they have been used to harm unpopular groups and to reinforce the existing social
hierarchy. The rhetoric promoting eugenics was steeped in derogatory and paranoid images of the "unfit."24
Members of a vari- ety of groups, including racial minorities, the poor, criminals, people with
mental illnesses, or virtually any socially unpopular group, were deemed ge- netically defective
and doomed to reproduce their circumstances in their chil- dren. A prominent eugenicist
even opined that prostitutes were motivated by "innate eroticism" rather than economic or social circumstances.25
Government action was necessary to control these "anti-social propagators of unnecessary human beings"26 so
they would not destroy society by their prolific breeding.27 Some eugenicists completely devalued the lives of
those deemed unfit: "It is the acme of stupidity ... to talk in such cases of individual liberty. . . . Such indi- viduals
have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to
propagate their kind."28 Eugenics provided a convenient rationale to oppose or dismantle social protections for
disadvantaged groups. Social protections such as the minimum wage, the eight-hour work day, and public medical
services were said to lead to increases in "unemployables, degenerates, and physical and mental weaklings" by
encouraging people to irresponsibly have children that they could not sup- port. As a result,
certain social
programs, such as the traditional welfare pro- gram Aid to Dependent Children, later Aid to Families with
Dependent Chil- dren, were deliberately designed to give states the flexibility to deny
benefits to those deemed unworthy, in part for fear of supporting their
"irresponsible" re- production.29 For example, many states' welfare programs excluded African
Americans and some excluded women having "improper" relationships with a man.30
scientist would openly advance eugenic theories62 and most politicians are too savvy say the word "eugenics."
Ameri- can values have undergone significant change over the past century, but the
transformation may be as much one of language as it is a transformation of attitudes and practices.63 Although eugenic sterilization may have largely disap- peared in the United States,64
eugenics, like racism, remains as a prominent strand in political rhetoric and
an influence in American social policy. Much as speakers use coded language to evoke racial
sympathies today, eugenics is dis- cussed with coded words. Policy makers today invoke similar imagery and use
similar reasoning for efforts to discourage reproduction among certain groups, but they never call it eugenics and
rarely admit that race is a factor. Instead,
conservative activists
policies, measures discouraging welfare recipi- ents from having children and the prosecution of women who use
cocaine while pregnant, are extensions of the earlier eugenics movement. Finally, I pro- vide a very brief overview
of other American social policies that may have been influenced by eugenic concerns. A. Of Welfare Queens and
an extension of the dark history of the eugenics movement in the United States. Most importantly, the 1996 law,
although it never mentions "eugenics," contains provisions explicitly designed to discour- age childbirth among
Discouraging
Reproduction Sterilizing or otherwise discouraging childbirth among the poor was a
prominent theme of the eugenics movement, and it became a theme of the de- bate
around welfare reform when eugenics became an unacceptable topic of political
discourse. Much of the rhetoric around welfare reform centers on the idea of irresponsible "welfare queens"
welfare recipients. These provisions fit squarely into the definition of "eugenic."67 1 .
being paid by the government to have more children.68 In particular, the language and imagery surrounding
welfare reform debates often center on the concern that African-American women are having too many children "on
Additionally, in the 1960s, at least seven Southern and Midwestern states considered proposals to order the
sterilization of single mothers.71 Similarly, numerous states have considered mandating that women on welfare
receive Norplant implants, and several states require that women on welfare receive information on Norplant or
offer welfare recipients incentives to use Norplant.72
Impact Calc
War T/ Aff
Their impacts are magnified by war
Erevelles, 11 (Nirmala erevelles, Associate Professor of Social Foundations of
Education and Instructional Leadership at the University of Alabama. Her research
and publications are in the areas of disability studies, multicultural education,
feminism, and sociology of educatio t h e c o l o r o f v i o l e n c e Reflecting on
Gender, Race, and Disability in Wartime, Feminist Disability Studies, Indiana
University Press, 2011) ET
Intersections of gender, disability, and race within the neocolonial state are
especially relevant in wars context because nationalist discourses use war to
rally support for a contradictory stance in which difference is simultaneously denied
and universalized (Kaplan et al. 1999). However, it is not only in times of war
that the gendered nature of the nation-state becomes apparent (Mohanty
1991b; Afshar 1996; Kaplan et al. 1999). Even in peacetime, women mediate their
relationship to the state through their role as biological reproducers (mothers of the
nation); as members of ethnic collectives; as participants in the ideological
reproduction of the national collectivity; as transmitters of culture; and as
participants in national, economic, political, and military struggles (Waylen 1996,
15). Seen as essential to the biological, social, and cultural reproduction of national
identity, women are often subject to the close scrutiny of the normalizing regime of
the nation-state The disciplinary and regulatory functions of this normalizing regime
are manifested in state policies that both feminist disability studies and third world
feminism would find familiar. Georgina Waylen (1996) separates these policies into
three categories: (1) so-called protective policies aimed at women (abortion
and maternity leave); (2) policies mediating relationships between men and
women (property rights, sexuality, family relations); and (3) policies assuming and
reinforcing a gendered distinction between public and private sphere
(policies pertaining to war, foreign policy, international trade, resource
extraction versus those pertaining to welfare and reproduction). Women
and children are both providers and recipients of state services, and often women
are forced to liaison with welfare services on behalf of their family members.
Women who fail to adhere to the ideological norms of the state face severe material
costs and are designated as deviant/abnormal citizens. I offer two examples to
illustrate this point.