“Scenes of Subjection” in Public Education: Thinking Intersectionally as If Disability Matters

In this presentation I trouble the ways that critical scholars of difference turn away from the spectral presence of disability in search of more empowering narratives. The alternative narratives they support recreate limiting theorizations of the human/posthuman that continue to support ableist representations of disability. Refusing this disavowal of disability, I insist on looking (not straight but queerly) at disability in a defiant refusal of ableism to argue that disability, rather than being an additive to the discourses of intersectionality, is constitutive of other categories of difference within the historical materialist conditions of transnational capitalism. Drawing on the work of African American literary scholar Saidiya Hartman, Indigenous scholar, Eve Tuck, and award winning fiction writer Jesmyn Ward, I discuss the implications for re-envisioning futures as if disability as a historical materialist category really matters in educational contexts at the intersections of social difference.