Disablement In and For Itself: Toward a 'Global' Idea of Disability. (September 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gorman, Rachel
• Is Part Of: Somatechnics. Volume 6:Number 2(2016)
• Page Start: 249
• Page End: 261
• Publication Date: 2016-09
• Subjects: Disablement -- ablenationalism -- relational/reflexive methodology -- anticolonial aesthetics; Human body -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; 306.4613
• DOI: 10.3366/soma.2016.0194
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2044-0138

Abstract

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.