Critical Disability Discourses (CDD - E-Journal) / Discours critiques dans le champ du handicap (DCCH)
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Affective (Dis)Ability: Ian Brown’s Search for “Inner Life” in The Boy in the Moon
Get PDFThis essay examines a father’s quest to find proof of the “inner life” of his physically and cognitively disabled son in Ian Brown’s memoir The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son. Through literary analysis and close attention to relevant theories of affect and disability, this paper explores the influence of dominant social and cultural narratives about normalcy and emotion on understandings of disabled lives as well as the limitations of current theories when it comes to recognizing the affective potential of those who fall outside what is considered the zone of normal physical, mental, and emotional experience and expression. I argue here that Brown’s quest to understand his son’s affectivity leads him toward a greater recognition of possibilities for human relationship beyond the intellectual or verbal. I find that the trajectory of Brown’s personal quest has important repercussions for the ways that theories of affect and disability studies can be productively brought together to formulate understandings of intersubjective and interdependent affective relationships for people with cognitive disabilities.
Keywords: disability, affect, emotion, memoir, Canad
Disabling the Rhetoric of Prenatal Genetic Testing: A Critical Analysis of Online Pregnancy Self-Help Literature
Get PDFDrawing on literature about the disability rights critique of prenatal genetic testing, this article consists of a critical analysis of a type of text in which socially-constructed negative attitudes about disability may be present: online pregnancy self-help literature about prenatal testing. The critique incorporates scholarship on the intersection of genetics and rhetoric in order to clarify rhetorical strategies used by writers of these online articles. The analysis shows that disability is rhetorically constructed as part of a tragedy narrative through negatively-connoted word choices and reductionist descriptions in the writing. Furthermore, the benefits of testing are construed as the ability of parents to treat or emotionally prepare for their child’s condition, as well as consider abortion, though the success of treatment and the possibility of abortion are masked or glossed over, giving parents an inaccurate picture of prenatal testing’s purpose and benefits.
Keywords: pregnancy, genetics, prenatal testing, rhetorical analysis, disability rights critiqu
Mapping Difference: Critical Connections between Crip and Diaspora Communities
Get PDFThis paper explores connections between crip and diaspora communities. I begin by discussing how the cultural production of racialized and disabled people are not analogous, but, rather, entangled. Following this, I reflect on a monologue by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha that articulates the knot between the production of land and the production of disability. I then discuss how our understanding of geography is related to our understanding of the people who are placed or place themselves in particular geographic sites. I use Jasbir Puar’s concept of “debility” (2011) to unpack how the material and discursive production of people and land as disposable are also knotted. This paper ends by reflecting on how “unworking” (Walcott, 2003) our understandings of community and disability, the relationship between place and people, is one way of recognizing the “different stories of differences,” stories that challenges the mainstream disability right movement’s understanding of disability.
Keywords: community; geography; diaspora; debility; environmental racism; biopolitics; neoliberalis
Managerial Editor’s Introduction: Critical Disability Discourse/Discours Critiques dans le Champ du Handicap, Volume 5
Get PDFEditorial Board and Reviewers, Introduction, Overview, Acknowledgement
“For Them, Not Us”: How Ableist Interpretations of the International Symbol of Access Make Disability
Get PDFThis paper uses a cultural studies lens to suggest that the ISA confers a semiotic imposition of “otherness” upon people with disabilities by signaling dominant, ableist cultural ideologies. Considering disability as representative of the culture in which it appears, the ISA’s sometimes troubling manifestations emerge at certain intersections of our cultural landscapes where us and them meet and separate. This paper focuses on the disabled and non-disabled experiences through the author’s self-reflexivity, and through the work of Liat Ben-Moshe and Justin Powell, as it queries the social spaces which inhabit and exclude the ISA as a cultural object tied to disability-related mythologies. The manifestations of this symbol in the author’s cultural landscape hold political and social meanings that lead her to think about disability as a way of being in relation to others. The ISA can be read by spectators as sponsoring a highly problematic message about embodiment, binaries, and boundaries stemming from interpretations of the body in an ableist, Western culture.
Keywords: International Symbol of Access (ISA), accessibility, disability semiotics, disability mythologie
“I’ve still got a lot of living left to do”: The Experience of Being Young and Living in Geriatric Residential Care
Get PDFThis article explores the perceptions of a 57-year-old woman with a physical disability who faces unique challenges while living in a residential care facility designed for a geriatric population. This pilot study used an exploratory, qualitative research methodology. The objectives of the study sought to answer the following question: How do working-age adults with physical disabilities experience living in a residential care facility designed for a geriatric population? The key themes arising from this study that will be discussed in this article include coping and adjustment, autonomy and choice, institutional culture and environment, relationships, and hope.
Keywords: advocacy, coping, health care, hope, institutional care, relationship
Disability policies and politics: A new perspective for Brazilian disability citizenship?
Get PDFPublic policies aimed at assisting disabled citizens are a fairly recent development in Brazil. Prior to the advent of the nation’s relatively new rights-based policies, the politics of “assistencialism”— policies aimed at addressing the symptoms and not the causes of social ills—served as a rationale for such support as was provided to the nation’s disabled population. Civil society organizations have been fundamental in Brazil to advance the rights of disabled people. This article argues that civil society organizations and the state must act vigorously and jointly if assistencialism ultimately is to be overcome and full citizenship for disabled Brazilians is to be attained.
The analysis is organized into three parts. First, it briefly describes the evolution of the struggle for rights for disabled Brazilians during the past three decades. Second, the article examines the government’s recent rights-based policies and advocacy organizations’ claims. The article concludes by offering a brief analysis of how the contemporary policy initiatives have contributed to the development of Brazilian citizenship and democracy.
Keywords: disability policy, democracy, civil society, citizenship, Brazil
‘There is no place for you here’: a phenomenological study of exclusion
Get PDFOn the 19th of July, 2008, a group of young disabled visitors (wheelchair users) were expelled from the Troyan Monastery in Bulgaria by the hegumen of the monastery with the stipulation that ‘obviously you pay for others’ sins, since you are like this’. Two years later the Bulgarian Commission for the Protection against Discrimination found the hegumen guilty of harassment on the basis of disability. In this paper I analyse the Commission’s decision from a phenomenological perspective. I draw on Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and also on concepts borrowed from the domain of Science and Technology Studies. I explore the existential-ontological patterns that are implicitly at work in the event as recounted in the Commission’s decision. Thus, a spatio-temporal distribution of human beings according to a rigid interiority/exteriority logic is identified. This spatio-temporal pattern is informed by an understanding of space that prioritizes proximity, and by an understanding of time that prioritizes permanence. The interiority/exteriority division, on its behalf, is sustained by a highly contested ‘boundary-work’, in which different non-human entities are recruited as mediators.
Keywords: disability, discrimination, phenomenology, boundary-work, science and technology Studie
Not Welcome A Critical Analysis of Ableism in Canadian Immigration Policy from 1869 to 2011
Get PDFA Foucauldian discourse analysis of Canadian immigration policies and state practices reveals the ableist foundations of the Canadian nation-state. Throughout much of Canadian history, people with disabilities have been excluded through the immigration system. People with disabilities are often times prohibited from obtaining legal status, and even when status is obtained, it is often marked with precariousness. In order to contextualize ableism in the immigration system, I argue that borders are socially constructed, serving to segregate the labour market and to create precarious circumstances for workers in the contexts of capitalism and neoliberalism. These foundations of the Canadian immigration system, which have existed throughout Canada’s history and can be seen in today’s policies, serve to pathologize, playing a major role in the marking of bodies as disabled. Furthermore, immigration policies construct people with disabilities as societal burdens who are unable to contribute to the community.
Keywords: Ableism, immigration, racism, deportation, excessive demand, pathologizatio
(Where) Are Disabled Girls in Virtual Space? Representation of disability and gender in Google Images
Get PDFIn this paper I explore virtual space as a specific location in which representation and meaning-making take place. Virtual space is a space in which modern girls spend much of their time. It is the space in which social interactions, identity formations and re/presentation occur for many girls. This space is portable, changeable, and is touted as accessible to those with impairments (although this assertion is not uncontested, Ellis & Kent, 2011); as such it is valuable to examine if and how disabled girls are represented within this space. Virtual space is vast and in order to narrow the scope of this paper, I used the search engine Google Images to pull from virtual space a selection of images that I interrogated using a mixed methods approach to ask: Are disabled girls present in virtual space? If so, where are they in that space and how are they represented there