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Disablement In and For Itself: Toward a ‘Global’ Idea of Disability

Disablement In and For Itself: Toward a ‘Global’ Idea of Disability <jats:p> The turn to ‘the global’ in disability studies has been necessitated by broader developments in social theory, including a thoroughgoing critique of the liberal rights-bearing subject; and sharp internal contradictions within disability movements. This essay raises questions about the ways in which disability subjectivity itself functions ideologically as a cover for other social relations, by functioning as a social-embodied characteristic that provides the self-determining ‘I’ with self-determination through accessing rights. I propose disablement as a theoretical/methodological tool that exposes da Silva's ‘horizon of death’ in contemporary disability theory and provides a way out of the collapsing of social relations that occurs in current formulations of disability identity. Further, I argue that the contradiction between disability-as-identity and disablement-that-is-disappeared flows from a fundamental contradiction in Western representations of the human in modernity – between the always/already racially constituted ‘transparent I’ and the ‘affectable other’ at the horizon of death; between Man and its human others. In answer to the crisis of disability representation and ethnographic entrapment, I advocate for an engagement with Pan-African, Indigenous, Third-Worldist and postcolonial literary and curatorial strategies as methods for moving past representations of disabled subjectivities and toward contextual social-political narratives. </jats:p> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Somatechnics Edinburgh University Press

Disablement In and For Itself: Toward a ‘Global’ Idea of Disability

Gorman, Rachel
Somatechnics , Volume 6 (2): 249 – Sep 1, 2016
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Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press
Subject
Open Forum; Film, Media and Cultural Studies
ISSN
2044-0138
eISSN
2044-0146
DOI
10.3366/soma.2016.0194
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

<jats:p> The turn to ‘the global’ in disability studies has been necessitated by broader developments in social theory, including a thoroughgoing critique of the liberal rights-bearing subject; and sharp internal contradictions within disability movements. This essay raises questions about the ways in which disability subjectivity itself functions ideologically as a cover for other social relations, by functioning as a social-embodied characteristic that provides the self-determining ‘I’ with self-determination through accessing rights. I propose disablement as a theoretical/methodological tool that exposes da Silva's ‘horizon of death’ in contemporary disability theory and provides a way out of the collapsing of social relations that occurs in current formulations of disability identity. Further, I argue that the contradiction between disability-as-identity and disablement-that-is-disappeared flows from a fundamental contradiction in Western representations of the human in modernity – between the always/already racially constituted ‘transparent I’ and the ‘affectable other’ at the horizon of death; between Man and its human others. In answer to the crisis of disability representation and ethnographic entrapment, I advocate for an engagement with Pan-African, Indigenous, Third-Worldist and postcolonial literary and curatorial strategies as methods for moving past representations of disabled subjectivities and toward contextual social-political narratives. </jats:p>

Journal

Somatechnics – Edinburgh University Press

Published: Sep 1, 2016

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