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

In: Somatechnics: journal of bodies, technologies, power, Volume 6, Issue 2, p. 249-261

Abstract

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.