Refusing Able(ness): A Preliminary Conversation about Ableism

Feminist Rosemary Tong long ago alluded to the profound possibilities of using critical disability studies theory to recomprehend and respatialize the landscape of thinking about race and gender as sites of signification. This piece presents a preliminary conversation in the emergent field of studies in ableism and desires to not only problematize but refuse the notion of able(ness). Our attention is on Ableism’s production and performance. Such an exploratory work is indebted to conversations already commenced by Campbell, Hughes and Overboe. My approach is three pronged. Firstly I explore the problem of speaking/thinking/feeling – about the Other (in this case persons referred to as ‘disabled people’) and the ‘extraordinary’ Other, the ‘Abled’. This conversation is captured under the banner of “The Ableist Project”. Here I argue it is necessary to shift the gaze of contemporary scholarship away from the spotlight on disability to a more nuanced exploration of epistemologies and ontologies of ableism. As part of this project of exposure my second task then will be to tease out the strands of what can be called “Ableist Relations”, including the effects of the compulsion to emulate ableist regulatory norms. Finally, as part of a commitment to make the necessary connections between theory and practice, I look at the tasks ahead in the refusal of Ability and the commitment to a disability/not-abled imaginary. I. Shifting the Gaze – “The Ableist Project” Typically literature within disability and cultural studies has concentrated on the practices and production of disablism, specifically by examining those attitudes and barriers that contribute to the subordination of people with disabilities in liberal society. Disablism is a set of assumptions (conscious or unconscious) and practices that promote the differential or unequal treatment of people because of actual or presumed disabilities. On this basis the strategic positions adopted to facilitate emancipatory social change whilst diverse, essentially relate to reforming those negative attitudes, assimilating people with disabilities into normative civil society and providing compensatory initiatives and safety nets in cases of enduring vulnerability. In other words, the site of reformation has been at the intermediate level of function, structure and institution in civil society and shifting values in the cultural arena. Such an emphasis produces scholarship that contains serious distortions, gaps and omissions regarding the production of disability and re-inscribes an able-bodied voice/lens towards disability. Disability, often quite unconsciously, continues to be examined and taught from the perspective of the Other (Marks; Solis). The challenge then is to reverse, to invert this traditional approach, to shift our gaze and concentrate on what the study of disability tells us about the production, operation and maintenance of ableism. The earlier work of Tom Shakespeare concludes, “… perhaps the maintenance of a non-disabled identity … is a more useful problem with which to be concerned; rather than interrogating the other, let us de-construct the normality-which-is-to-be-assumed” (28). Hughes captures this project forcefully by calling for a study of the “pathologies of non-disablement” (683). An Abled imaginary relies upon the existence of an hitherto unacknowledged imagined shared community of able-bodied/minded people (c.f. Butler & Parr) held together by a common ableist homosocial world view that asserts the preferability and compulsoriness of the norms of ableism. Overboe and Campbell point to the compulsion to emulate the norm through the internalisation of ableism. Ableistnormativity results in compulsive passing, wherein there is a failure to ask about difference, to imagine human be-ingness differently. Compulsory ableness and its conviction to and seduction of sameness as the basis to equality, claims results in a resistance to consider ontologically peripheral lives as distinct ways of being human least they produce a heightened devaluation. Ontological reframing poses different preoccupations: what does the study of the politics of ‘deafness’ tell us about what it means to be ‘hearing’? Indeed how is the very conceptualisation of ‘hearing’ framed in the light of discourses of ‘deafness’? By decentring Abledness, it is possible to “to look at the world from the inside out)” (Linton 13) and unveil the ‘non-disabled/ableist’ stance. In a different context Haraway (152) exclaims “… [this] cannot be said quite out loud, or it loses its crucial position as a pre-condition of vision and becomes the object of scrutiny”. So what is meant by the concept of ‘ableism’? A survey of the literature suggests that the term is often referred to in a fleeting way with limited definitional or conceptual specificity (Clear; Iwasaki & Mactavish: Watts & Erevelles). When there is commentary, ableism is described as denoting an attitude that devalues or differentiates disability through the valuation of able-bodiedness equated to normalcy. For some, the term ableism is used interchangeably with the term disablism. I argue however that these two words render quite radically different understandings of the status of disability to the norm. Furthermore, as a conceptual tool, ableism transcends the procedures, structures, for governing civil society and locates itself clearly in the arena of genealogies of knowledge. There is little consensus as to what practices and behaviours constitute ableism. We can nevertheless say that a chief feature of an ableist viewpoint is a belief that impairment or disability (irrespective of ‘type’) is inherently negative and should the opportunity present itself, be ameliorated, cured or indeed eliminated. Ableism refers to … a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human. Disability then, is cast as a diminished state of being human (Campbell 44). In a similar vein, Veronica Chouinard defines ableism as “ideas, practices, institutions and social relations that presume ablebodiedness, and by so doing, construct persons with disabilities as marginalised … and largely invisible ‘others’” (380). In contrast, Amundson & Taira attribute a doctrinal posture to ableism in their suggestion that “Ableism is a doctrine that falsely treats impairments as inherently and naturally horrible and blames the impairments themselves for the problems experienced by the people who have them” (54). Whilst there is little argument with this presupposition, what is absent from the definition is any mention of ableism’s function in inaugurating the norm. Campbell and Chouinard’s approach is less about the coherency and intentionalities of ableism; rather their emphasis is on a conception of ableism as a hub network functioning around shifting interest convergences. Linton defines ableism as “includ[ing] the idea that a person’s abilities or characteristics are determined by disability or that people with disabilities as a group are inferior to non-disabled people” (9). There are problems with simply endorsing a schema that posits a particular worldview that either favours or disfavours dis/able-bodied people as if each category is discrete, self-evident and fixed. As I will argue later, Ableism sets up a binary dynamic which is not simply comparative but rather co-relationally constitutive. Campbell’s formulation of ableism not only problematises the signifier disability but points to the fact that the essential core of ableism is the formation of a naturalised understanding of being fully human and this as Chouinard notes, is articulated on a basis of an enforced presumption that erases difference. Whether it be the ‘species typical body’ (in science), the ‘normative citizen’ (in political theory), the ‘reasonable man’ (in law), all these signifiers point to a fabrication that reaches into the very soul that sweeps us into life and as such is the outcome and instrument of a political constitution: a hostage of the body (Foucault). The creation of such regimes of ontological separation appears disassociated from power. Bodies in this way become elements that may be moved, used, transformed, demarcated, improved and articulated with others. Daily the identities of disabled and abled are performed repeatedly. An ethos of compulsory abled-bodiedness as McRuer puts it, “showcase[d] for able-bodied performance” (93) pursuant to the incessant consuming of objects of health, beauty, strength and capability. In the next section, the dividing practices of ableism are considered in more detail. II. “Ableist Relations” Central to regimes of ableism are two core elements that feature irrespective of its localised enactment, namely the notion of the normative (and normate individual) and the enforcement of a constitutional divide between perfected naturalized humanity and the aberrant, the unthinkable, quasi-human hybrid and therefore non-human. This constitution provides the layout, the blueprint for the scaling and marking of bodies and the ordering of their terms of relation. It is not possible to have a concept of difference without Ableism. Let’s take each of these two elements separately and explore them more closely. The Able/Not-Able Divide It is necessary to establish and enforce a constitutional divide. The divide is at the levels of ontology, materiality and sentiency. I wish to focus on the constitutionality of that divide between the normal and the pathological and mechanisms of ordering. This analysis is influenced by the proposals advanced by Bruno Latour in We Have Never been Modern. Latour speaks of the practices of translation and purification: … ‘translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of being