Disability’s Discontents - Vinay Suhalka and Tannistha Samanta

Social Analysis

This article places anthropology in dialogue with critical disability studies (CDS) in order to reassess historical and emerging ethnographic readings of difference. We argue that one unintended consequence of a lack of attention to disability in anthropology, generally, has been an impoverished conception of personhood and power. Building on insights from CDS and the ethnographic literature, we show how non-normative bodies and minds can play a critical role in relationships with non-human others and exemplary persons. Looking beyond hegemonic and secular ideas of disability as a form of misfortune or lack not only offers alternatives for being with disability, in keeping with the aims of CDS, but also shows new directions for comparative discussions of power and difference.

Current Anthropology, 2020

The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2015

In this article, I review seven books published in disability studies in 2013 and 2014. Two of the books deal exclusively with the North American context. The remaining five books focus primarily on areas outside North America, including Europe, Asia and Latin America. Two of the books are edited anthologies of new and original work. Four books are single-authored monographs and one book is co-authored. A search of new work published in 2013 and 2014 revealed more than twenty books. As a way of narrowing the focus and organizing the essay, I begin with a critique of key issues raised in Lennard J. Davis’ The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era (UMichiganP [2013]) and go on to show how authors living and/or working in other parts of the world are engaging with, building on and diverging from what could be called a white, Western global North disability studies. In the end, I argue that decentring North American and UK disability studies reveals significant field-changing insights that will no doubt have profound and lasting effects on the study of disability and disabled people in the humanities and social sciences.

2016

2020

As Slavoj Žižek observed, the interpretation of film must be approached "in the way one has to interpret a Chinese political poem: absences and surprising presences count" (125). The same is true of the "deviant" body and for the body out of place. Disability weaves its way through cinema and culture in multifarious, and often unexpected, forms. There have been various efforts to theorize disability and cinema-though, immediately, we must distinguish between theorizing disability in cinema and an attempt to produce a more general theory of disability and cinema. For the most part, these efforts have come from disability studies, rather than cinema studies, gender studies, semiotics, or sociology, although these areas of study inform them to greater or lesser degrees. This chapter will look at the narrative construction and deployment of three characters with disabilities from two films by exploitation moviemaker Russ Meyer: Mudhoney (1965) and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966), in order to explore the various ways in which different impairments link with gender, sexuality, and moral culpability, avoiding a simplistic assessment of these representations as one-dimensional, and revealing their complex semiotic structure. The ultimate purpose of this is to consider the vexed question of signification and the body, particularly the disabled body, building on the seminal contribution by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder of the concept of "narrative prosthesis" (Narrative Prosthesis 15), which has already been addressed in the chapter written by Dan Goodley and Marek Mackiewicz. This article takes disability studies as its starting point, though its purpose is not

This paper explores the human through critical disability studies and the theories of Rosi Braidotti. We ask: what does it mean to be human in the 21st Century and in what ways does disability enhance these meanings? In addressing this question we seek to work through entangled connections of nature, society, technology, medicine, biopower and culture to consider the extent to which the human might be an outdated phenomenon, replaced by Braidotti’s posthuman condition. We then introduce disability as a political category, an identity and a moment of relational ethics. Critical disability studies, we argue, are perfectly at ease with the posthuman because disability has always contravened the traditional classical humanist conception of what it means to be human. Disability also invites a critical analysis of the posthuman. We examine the ways in which disability and posthuman work together, enhancing and complicating one another in ways that raise important questions about the kinds of life and death we value. We consider three of Braidotti’s themes in relation to disability: I. Life beyond the self: Rethinking enhancement; II. Life beyond the species: Rethinking animal; III. Life beyond death: Rethinking death. We conclude by advocating a posthuman disability studies that responds directly to contemporary complexities around the human whilst celebrating moments of difference and disruption

In this paper, we seek to develop an understanding of the human driven by a commitment to the politics of disability, especially those of people with intellectual disabilities. Our position as family members and allies to people associated with this phenomenon of intellectual disability influences our philosophical conceptions and political responses. This has led us recently to develop a theory of dis/human studies which, we contend, simultaneously acknowledges the possibilities offered by disability to trouble, reshape and re-fashion the human (crip ambitions) while at the same time asserting disabled people’s humanity (normative desires). We sketch out four dis/human considerations: (1) dis/autonomy, voice and evacuating the human individual; (2) dis/independence, assemblage and collective humanness; (3) dis/ability politics, self-advocacy and repositioning the human; and (4) dis/family: desiring the normal, embracing the non-normative. We argue that this feeds into the wider project of dis/ability studies, and we conclude that we desire a time when we view life through the prism of the dishuman (note, without the slash).

2016

This paper explores how cultural models of disability enable an exploration of the all-important relationship between representation and social encounters. To establish this connection, Bolt’s two-tier cultural model and other cultural models will be discussed, alongside evaluations of biblical and scientific discourse. The overall aim is to accentuate the significance of cultural models of disability by illustrating ‘culture as pharmakon: both poison and remedy’. That is to say, to evidence how culture has the potential to validate cultural guidelines that promote meaningful inclusion, yet also has the ability to shape and entrench problematic social attitudes towards disability.

Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, 2019

Disability & Society, 2013