Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability by Robert McRuer
Voting ended onJun 6
Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, edited by Alice Wong
One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.
From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability by Robert McRuer
Endorsement from submitter: "Really phenomenal (and foundational!) work about the intersections of queer theory and disability studies."
Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.
Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.
In some very important ways, we are in fact not all queer/disabled. The fact that some of us get beaten and left for dead tied to deer fences or that others of us die virtually unnoticed in underfunded and unsanitary group homes should be enough to highlight that the heterosexual/queer and able-bodied/disabled binaries produce real and material distinctions.
Everyone is virtually disabled, both in the sense that able-bodied norms are "intrinsically impossible to embody" fully and in the sense that able-bodied status is always temporary, disability being the one identity category that all people will embody if they live long enough. What we might call a critically disabled position, however, would differ from such a virtually disabled position; it would call attention to the ways in which the disability rights movement and disability studies have resisted the demands of compulsory able-bodiedness and have demanded access to a newly imagined and newly configured public sphere where full participation is not contingent on an able body.
This research observed [...] the world of seventeen adults labeled intellectually disabled who were engaged in rehabilitation programs based on the principles of normalization, designed to initiate them to normal life and to integrate them within global society. The world of these individuals presented four main characteristics: despite their integration into the urban fabric, they were still living in a parallel community made up of the users of the rehabilitation center; the adapted places within which they lived were small-scale replicas of common places; within these enclaves they mimicked, as best they could, the ways and customs of the majority of the population; and their transition from otherness to normality, within the confines of these veiled margins, will never end. Taken in their entirety, these simulcra and mimicries form a "palace of signs" that hides the otherness of these individuals and their exclusion from society behind the signifiers of normality. In other words, these individuals are enclosed in the margins where they are taught not to become regular members of society, as declared in the official discourse, but rather "shadows" or "doubles," that is, stylized images of "ordinary people."
The Sexualized Body of the Child: Parents and the Politics of "Voluntary" Sterilization of People Labeled Intellectually Disabled by Michel Desjardins, from Sex and Disability ed. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow
A crip eye for the normate guy, I propose, would not just be a disability version of the Bravo hit, no matter how much pleasure imagining such a show has given me: “Sweetie, your university is an accessibility nightmare! Don’t worry, honey, it is your lucky day that disabled folks are here to tell you just what’s wrong with this place!” Rather, a crip eye for the normate guy (and because we’re talking about not a real person but a subject position, somehow “normate guy” seems appropriate, regardless of whether he rears his able-bodied head in men or women) would mark a critically disabled capacity for recognizing and withstanding the vicissitudes of compulsory able-bodiedness.
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
Berube's excavation of this subtext pinpoints an important common experience that links all people with disabilities under a system of compulsory able-bodiedness--the experience of the able-bodied need for an agreed-on common ground. I can imagine that answers might be incredibly varied to similar questions: "In the end, wouldn't you rather be hearing?" and "In the end, wouldn't you rather not be HIV positive?" would seem, after all, to be very different questions, the first (with its thinly veiled desire for Deafness not to exist) more obviously genocidal than the second. But they are not really different questions, in that their constant repetition (or their presence as ongoing subtexts) reveals more about the able-bodied culture doing the asking than about the bodies being interrogated. The culture asking such questions assumes in advance that we all agree: able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for. A system of compulsory able-bodiedness repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, "Yes, but in the end, wouldn't you rather be more like me?"
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
The OED defines able-bodied redundantly and negatively as “having an able body, i.e. one free from physical disability, and capable of the physical exertions required of it; in bodily health; robust.” Able-bodiedness, in turn, is defined vaguely as “soundness of health; ability to work; robustness.” The parallel structure of the definitions of ability and sexuality is quite striking: first, to be able-bodied is to be “free from physical disability,” just as to be heterosexual is to be “the opposite of homosexual.”
Second, even though the language of “the normal relations” expected of human beings is not present in the definition of able-bodied, the sense of “normal relations” is, especially with the emphasis on work: being able-bodied means being capable of the normal physical exertions required in a particular system of labor. It is here, in fact, that both able-bodied identity and the Oxford English Dictionary betray their origins in the nineteenth century and the rise of industrial capitalism. It is here as well that we can begin to understand the compulsory nature of able-bodiedness: in the emergent industrial capitalist system, free to sell one’s labor but not free to do any- thing else effectively meant free to have an able body but not particularly free to have anything else.
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability [paragraph breaks added for accessibility]
One could easily conclude [...] that we are all disabled/queer, since all of us [...] inhabit composing bodies that exist prior to the successful alignment of all these features. [...] I believe it is important to resist such assertions, recognizing them as able-bodied/heterosexual containments: an able-bodied/heterosexual society doesn't have to take seriously disabled/queer claims to rights and recognition if it can diffuse or universalize what activists and scholars are saying as really nothing new and as really about all of us. In other words, the question ‘aren't we all queer/disabled?’ can be an indirect way of saying, ‘you don't need to be taken seriously, do you?’
