genderoid

[genderoid]

Not all the powers of a visionary space through which doctors and patients, physiologists and practitioners communicated (stretched and twisted nerves, burning dryness, hardened or burnt organs, the new birth of the body in the beneficent element of cool waters) have disappeared; it is, rather, as if they had been displaced, enclosed within the singularity of the patient, in that region of ‘subjective symptoms’ that—for the doctor—defines not the mode of knowledge, but the world of objects to be known. Far from being broken, the fantasy link between knowledge and pain is reinforced by a more complex means than the mere permeability of the imagination; the presence of disease in the body, with its tensions and its burnings, the silent world of the entrails, the whole dark underside of the body lined with endless unseeing dreams, are challenged as to their objectivity by the reductive discourse of the doctor, as well as established as multiple objects meeting his positive gaze.

The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault

[genderoid]

What the WHO definition leaves implied but unstated is that the concept of the social model requires not merely social "action" but social analysis as well. The importance of the social model as a core concept of disability studies is not only that disability is more than individual pathology and deficit but also that its meaning is more than a personal problem. Disability must be studied in its social, cultural. and historical context as much as the personal conditions of impairment and functioning must be studied in their medical and educational contexts. This does not have to be an either-or proposition. Most scholars in disability studies readily acknowledge the personal reality of impairments. Studying the social history of intellectual disability does not mean that the personal experience is irrelevant. Indeed, much recent writing has urged renewed attention to the "embodiment" of disability (Finger. 2006; Shakespeare, 2006; Siebers, 2(08). Nor does the emphasis on the social model negate the importance of medical and educational research on diagnostics, assessments, treatments, and interventions. Even with these more traditional approaches to the health and education of individuals with specific impairments, however, disability studies can contribute a social perspective from which to view and interpret scientific findings. Indeed, for most disability studies scholars, this is not really a choice. All research, all knowledge exists unavoidably in a cultural and historical context. The only choice is in how openly that context is acknowledged and explored.

Philip M. Ferguson and Emily Nusbaum, Disability Studies: What Is It and What Difference Does It Make? (2012)

[genderoid]

Disability is not a fixed state or attribute but exists in relation to assemblages of capacity and debility, modulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes. The globalization of disability as an identity through human rights discourses contributes to a standardization of bodily usefulness and uselessness that discounts not only the specificity of location but also the ways bodies exceed or defy identities and subjects. The non-disabled/disabled binary traverses social, geographic, and political spaces. The distinctions or parameters between disabled and non-disabled bodies shift historically, as designations between productivity, vagrancy, deviancy, illness, and labor market relations have undergone transformations from subsistence work to waged labor to hypercapitalist modes of surplus accumulation and neoliberal subject formation. They shift geographically, as varied cultural, regional, and national conceptualizations of bodily habitations and metaphysics inhabit corporeal relations differently and sometimes irreconcilably, and issues of environmental racism are prominent. They shift infrastructurally, as a wheelchair-accessible elevator becomes a completely altered vehicle of mobility, one that masks various capacities to climb stairs, in many parts of the world where power outages are a daily, if not hourly, occurrence. They shift legally, administratively, and legislatively, as rights-bearing subjects are formed and dismantled in response to health care and insurance regimes, human rights discourses, economic opportunism, and the uneven distribution of resources, medical supplies, and basic care. They shift scientifically, as prosthetic technologies of capacity, from wheelchairs to cell phones to dna testing to steroids, script and rescript what a body can, could, or should do. And they shift representationally, as discourses of multicultural diversity and plurality absorb “difference” into regimes of visibility that then reorganize sites of marginalization into subjects of privilege, indeed privileged disabled subjects.

The Right to Maim, Jasbir K. Puar

[genderoid]

I contend that the term “debilitation” is distinct from the term “disablement” because it foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled. While the latter concept creates and hinges on a narrative of before and after for individuals who will eventually be identified as disabled, the former comprehends those bodies that are sustained in a perpetual state of debilitation precisely through foreclosing the social, cultural, and political translation to disability. It is this tension, the tension between targeting the disabled and targeting to debilitate, the tension between being and becoming, this is the understated alliance that I push in this project. The first presumes a legitimate identification with disability that is manifest through state, market, and institutional recognition, if not subjective position: I call myself disabled. But this cannot be the end of the story, because what counts as a disability is already overdetermined by “white fragility” on one side and the racialization of bodies that are expected to endure pain, suffering, and injury on the other. As such, the latter is an understanding of biopolitical risk: to extrapolate a bit from Claudia Rankine’s prose: “I am in death’s position.” And to expand: I am in debility’s position.

The biopolitics of debilitation is not intended to advocate a facile democratization of disability, as if to rehash the familiar cant that tells us we will all be disabled if we live long enough. In fact, depending on where we live, what resources we have, what traumas we have endured, what color our skin is, what access we have to clean water, air, and decent food, what type of health care we have, what kind of work we do...we will not all be disabled. Some of us will simply not live long enough, embedded in a distribution of risk already factored into the calculus of debilitation. Death’s position. Others, at risk because of seeming risky, may encounter disability in ways that compound the debilitating effects of biopolitics.

The Right to Maim, Jasbir K. Puar

[genderoid]

"Illness is a matter of testimony. You tell somebody else — generally, somebody who has more degrees than you — how you feel, and they, ideally, have the ability to recognize in your testimony something you lack the expertise to identify. And often the body itself testifies: a doctor runs a scan or tests your blood and gets an answer. You have information, and the doctors have understanding. But this dynamic, in practice, is rarely so simple. Illness is also a social negotiation between what you have to say and what your doctor is willing to hear — and the diagnosis that results from this dynamic isn’t exactly your illness, but a mutually agreed-upon fiction."

The Bad Patient, B.D. McClay

[genderoid]

Disability studies diagnoses the social condition of disabled people as situated between these two cultural extremes—medical specimen and supernatural vision. There is no reference to physical or cognitive difference without a conscious or unconscious materialization of its historical meanings. Thus, like all material objects, disability comes to be constructed in a cathedral-like manner, in which competing cultural aesthetics leave their impression upon its surface. The project of re-engaging the body requires efforts to resignify a multitude of stigmatizing meanings assigned to disability throughout history.

Sharon L. Snyder & David T. Mitchell, Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment (2001)

[genderoid]

But the disabled body does not serve only as the faulty body that prompts compensatory invention schemes. Disability also promises a longed-for access to the otherworldly, because bodily aberrancy has been historically interpreted as the material signature of a divine order. Throughout European history, the extreme physical marking inscribed by bodily excess or lack seemed to demand an explanation for its "unnatural" origins. Monsters and madness threatened the maintenance of an earthly order, but also bespoke a fraternization with the otherworldly; religion's "cures" of "demoniacs" and "cripples" reaffirmed the Church's contact with the Divine.

Sharon L. Snyder & David T. Mitchell, Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment (2001)

[genderoid]

In fact, disability studies scholars largely refused to define those bodies or conditions that were disabling, opting in favor of an understanding of disability as: That in the body which exceeds deterministic efforts to predict a life trajectory. Following the work of Julia Epstein, we point out in the introduction to The Body and Physical Difference that the ill body and the disabled body are culturally distinct entities because “diseases ‘follow a course’ and therefore prove familiar and domesticated by virtue of a belief in their determinate status (i.e., the ability to confidently narrate their future). Disability might be characterized as that which exceeds a culture’s predictive capabilities and effective interventions” (Mitchell and Snyder 1997: 3). The goal was to disrupt the seemingly objective knowledge of aberrant bodies, not through alternative readings of their material meanings— that would merely replace one interpretive system with another—but by re-invoking disability’s resistant qualities. This disruption came by way of unearthing disability’s long-standing historical associations with the grotesque or supernatural as a form of theoretical resistance.

Sharon L. Snyder & David T. Mitchell, Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment (2001)

[genderoid]

In this emergent field, the able body is no longer characterized as merely a false quantitative ideal, as it had been in body studies, but rather as an aesthetic product of cultural forces that oppress those categorized as disabled. This subtle shift in emphasis allows humanities scholars in disability studies to extend the discussion of bodily deviance from the context of rehabilitative institutions to that of wider ranging cultural locations. For instance, Lennard J. Davis (1995) analyzes the role of institutions for the Deaf in the historical development of disability activism and community in eighteenth-century Europe. Martin Pernick (1996) analyzes the influential role of public health films in the promotion of eugenics in Chicago prior to World War II. Through readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literary texts and cultural spectacles such as the freak show, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) argues that disabled people’s bodies have been represented as unassimilable within a normalizing biological ideology that marks the disabled body as the inferior contrast to an able-bodied, white, masculine citizenry. Paul K. Longmore (1997) assesses television genres, such as disease-of-the-week movies and telethons, to dissect mainstream representations of disability as tragedies in need of eradication or overcoming. In our own Narrative Prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2000), we theorize the pervasive utility of disability to literature in Europe and the United States by discussing the long-standing artistic recourse to disability as a staple feature of characterization. Disability studies scholars have also analyzed the opportunistic use of corporeal metaphors to emblematize societal weaknesses in literary and philosophical figurations of disability.

Sharon L. Snyder & David T. Mitchell, Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment (2001)

[genderoid]

Canguilhem’s emphasis on adaptation over deviation situated the body as a historically contingent phenomenon. Bodies were not the product of averages, but rather interdependent vessels that shaped and were shaped by their environments. Within this formulation, the proper medical study of the body would be a concise description of organismic adaptive strategies. The norm thus becomes little more than a hostile imposition upon necessarily fluctuating organisms. Canguilhem argued that anomaly offered medicine a more appropriate gauge than dysfunction because it surrendered the violence of evaluation that infused any notion of deviance. Rather than interpret bodily and cognitive differences in terms of their degree of deviation from a standardized norm, anomaly recognized difference as the neutral expression of a biologically diverse species adapting to the pressures of environmental and internal forces.

By the late 1960s, a profound reorientation of conceptions of the body was under way in the academy. The new field of body studies would critique the disciplinary penchant for evaluating deviance on a scale set by standards of civic and economic functionality. The “able body” had become a quantifiable ideal that provided for the subjection of all bodies to its fictional standards. Although the able body served as the quantifiable medical measure of functionality, its flawed mimesis of any specific, lived body unmoored its hold in corporeality. Consequently, Foucault’s influence on body studies came about primarily through his ability to provide a working methodology for historicizing the institutional production of embodied subjectivities. Body theorists began to follow his lead in inverting the traditional operations of medical empiricism by positioning the able body as a phantom materiality.

Sharon L. Snyder & David T. Mitchell, Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment (2001)

[genderoid]

Ronell's argument hinges on a recognition of empiricism's historical achievement in diminishing the power of disability's association with the occult in the social imaginary. Whereas the nineteenth-century freak show served to turn the prurient popular interest in things supernatural into a salable commodity, medicine's ascent to power was partially tied to its ability to abate such efforts. Scientists pitted themselves against supernatural beliefs by seeking to demystify disability and other phenomena and, in turn, place the inexplicable within their control—the control of man-made systems of knowledge. Yet, despite this project of containment, Ronell points out, "horror" would inevitably resurface—in the popular-culture guise of film monsters, for example—to challenge all efforts at keeping the demons at bay. Thus, science's attempt to domesticate disability fails, in an absolute sense, because disability's historical alignment with the grotesque (that is, the belief in the mysterious power of an "unassimilable" difference) continues to reverberate into modernity.

Sharon L. Snyder & David T. Mitchell, Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment (2001)

[genderoid]

Anything to do with gynae is, I think, liable to land you in peculiar territory. Prior to surgery, I had to take the first pregnancy test of my life despite arguing several times that there was absolutely no point in my doing this. A miracle, the nurse joked, after it came back negative. It can be alienating, trying to operate within a system which repeatedly seems surprised to look up and find you standing there. (It’s a sensation which, of course, speaks to the larger issue of ‘women’s healthcare’ being a frankly troubled term. On the one hand, issues of abortion, pregnancy and reproductive health are important facets of women’s liberation. On the other hand, I’m not hugely interested in talking about what happened to me as being in any way synonymous with being a woman, given the blindingly obvious fact that women do not all have ovaries, that ovarian cysts are not something that only happen to women and that it’s reductive to the point of laughable to yammer on about the fact of femininity as it pertains specifically to the reproductive system. I mean, did we not just come from there? Did we not all just agree that it was bad?)

Guts, Julia Armfield (2022)

[genderoid]

It is well known that people dissociate when all of the person’s mind cannot bear facing what happened directly. Later, parts of the person that did not face the experience may be unable to integrate with the parts that did: each feels alien to the other.

It’s what happens next that may be crucial in separating those who will be recognized as having a dissociative disorder from those who will be seen as having a psychotic disorder.

If the person recognizes the “alien” parts of themselves as being just parts of themselves, even if they seem to be disturbing or even “different personalities,” then they have a good chance of seeing themselves, and of having professionals see them, as having PTSD or a dissociative disorder. But if they see the “alien” parts of themselves as being literally aliens, or demons, or CIA agents talking to them through a brain implant, then they will likely be diagnosed as psychotic.

It’s important to notice what’s happening here: it’s the person who feels more strongly alienated from parts of themselves who is likely to make the “psychotic” interpretation about what those parts are — and then it’s that person who will be seen by the mental health system as having a disorder that is understandable only as brain dysfunction.

Distinguishing Dissociative Disorders from Psychotic Disorders: Compounding Alienation, Ron Unger (2018)

[genderoid]

For too long, society turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of children. It was a taboo subject, kept quiet within families and covered up by institutions. Soon after states finally began providing adults who remembered such childhood abuse with the legal standing to sue, the FMSF began waging a vigorous public relations campaign that discredited their memories—in both courtrooms and, to a large degree, in the public mind.

Indeed, the false memory syndrome, which was said to be grounded in cutting-edge science, regularly produced a legal—and, one might say, an epistemological—stalemate: It was the delayed memory of the accuser against the denial of the accused, and without any corroborating evidence of the abuse, it was impossible for a jury or a judge to know what had really happened.

In addition, the false memory syndrome turned those accused of abuse into “victims.” These cases were no longer simply “he said/she said,” cases, but rather “he said/she was tricked into creating false memories” cases.

However, public understanding of this dynamic has perhaps entered a new phase. There is now increasing public awareness that the sexual abuse of children is all too common. And as society assesses the claims of adults who recall memories of child abuse, it should know this about the relevant science: The false memory research provides little evidence that memories of sexual abuse are often implanted by therapists. But there is a large body of research providing evidence that dissociative amnesia is a common response to childhood trauma.

The False Memory Syndrome at 30: How Flawed Science Turned into Conventional Wisdom, Joshua Kendall (2021)

[genderoid]

We who are blasted apart, de-person-ed, detached from “being,” if we are looking toward that throne of universality to consolidate and stabilize us as subjects, to make us whole as people, to bestow upon us, finally, a political agency that we can call our own, in that we can own it like a possession, then we are looking in the wrong direction. The place to begin is by turning our backs on that throne, and toward an agency that doesn’t depend on enlightenment humanism, on the universal, on the self-determined subject of a rational mind, on the hegemonic figure who has power over himself and others. Such an agency can only function by constructing against its human, the monster, the monstrosity of the Other. If our kind of agency depends on anything, it will depend on recognizing and honouring that we are all of us disordered, messy, incorrigible, that we are in relationship to others and interdependent on each other, as much as we are each of us different—and that is fine.

In Defense of De-Persons, Johanna Hedva

[genderoid]

I’d like to ask the APA: What about depersonalization when the state has made you that way, has removed your agency from yourself, has taken over the control of how you are identified and thus legitimized? What about derealization when the state has detached your environment from you, dispossessed you of your land, or turned your surroundings into something unbearable, something that cannot possibly be real?

In Defense of De-persona, Johanna Hedva

[genderoid]

The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.

Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.

Sick Woman Theory, Johanna Hedva