#bassam sidiki

[teledisco]

"And yet capitalism also wants to cure disability. In Ma’s novel, severance from employment and from the present is a disease, but in Erickson’s show it is a form of cure or what theorist Jasbir K. Puar would call “capacitation.” In her important book The Right to Maim, Puar disrupts the easy binary between disabled and nondisabled by operationalizing the terms “debility” and “capacity,” suggesting that capitalism and wage labor have put us all on a spectrum of debilitation and capacitation.[7] Debility therefore resembles what other disability theorists have called “cripness,” a term that reflects how disabled people have taken back the slur “crip” to destabilize easy binaries between abled and disabled.[8] In Puar’s theory, capitalism’s continuation depends on debilitating some bodies while capacitating others. In Erickson’s show, Mark Scout’s neurobiological severance is just such a capacitation. If memory or nostalgia is a form of disability that capitalism both produces and shuns, then Mark’s traumatic memory of his dying wife is a problem that must be rectified."

— Bassam Sidiki, "Severances: Memory as Disability in Late Capitalism"

referencing Jasbir K. Puar's The Right To Maim, (Durham: Duke UP, 2017), Robert McRuer's Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: NYU Press, 2006), and Severance by Ling Ma.

[familyabolisher]

August 2023 reading

Books:

Langston Hughes, Selected Poems

T. H. White, The Sword In The Stone

T. H. White, The Witch In The Woods

T. H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

T. H. White, The Candle In The Wind

Articles:

Lisa Borst, Ari M. Brostoff, Cecilia Corrigan, Jon Dieringer, A. S. Hamrah, Arielle Isack, Mark Krotov, Jasmine Sanders, Christine Smallwood, Who Was Barbie?

Lev Grossman, The gay Nabokov

Yasha Levine, Immigrants as a Weapon: Global Nationalism and American Power

Sophie Lewis, Cthulhu plays no role for me

Gail Omvedt, The doubly marginalised

John Semley, Oppenheimer and the Dharma of Death

Bassam Sidiki, Severances: Memory as Disability in Late Capitalism

towardrecomp, Fidelidad En La Tormenta: Part 1

Eyal Weizman, The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord and the Israeli Defense Force

Short stories:

Tamsyn Muir, Chew

Tamsyn Muir, The Unwanted Guest

Rebecca Fraimow, Further Arguments In Support Of Yudah Cohen's Proposal To Bluma Zilberman

Rebecca Fraimow, Gitl Schneiderman Learns To Live With Her In-Laws

[kitchensunflowers]

Because disabled bodies are not as exploitable to capitalism as nondisabled ones, they are shunned, segregated, and isolated from the workforce. Thus, ableism or discrimination against people with disabilities is not some “natural” inclination of the “normal,” but an attitude conditioned by the labor market: we fear disablement because we fear unemployment. This fear is then further perpetuated by the medical profession. “By placing the focus on curing the so-called abnormality and segregating the incurables into the administrative category of disabled,” Russell writes, “medicine bolstered the capitalist business interest to shove less exploitable workers with impairments out of the workforce.”

Bassam Sidiki, Severances: Memory as Disability in Late Capitalism

referencing Marta Russell, Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell, edited by Keith Rosenthal (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 17-18.

[olreid]

severances: memory as disability in late capitalism by bassam sidiki