Quotes from this essay:
The history of an oppressive medical model for homosexuality and disability and the threat of eugenic extermination (by selective abortion, isolations of genes for specific disabilities or a “gay” gene) offer additional areas of potential common ground between queer activism and disability activism.
An ableist society is one that constructs itself (in infrastructure such as buildings, curricula, media representations) as if disability does not exist, is repugnant, or needs to be modified in order to fit in the existing order. Heteronormative societies, similarly, structure themselves as if heterosexuality is not only preferred, but indeed the only mode of living, desiring, and being with others. It is important to emphasize that ableism and heteronormativity are not just analogous but also intersecting. Not realizing how they work as interlocking oppressions would deny the lived reality of disabled queers who feel marginalized, at times in both communities. One explanation for the exclusion of disability from queer theory and existence, as well as the lack of any effective coalition politics, could be the similar history of medicalization. Queer theory takes back a negative term and articulates gender as a social construction, while understanding the complexity of individual sexual desires. Science and the medical world identified those who are gay or lesbian as disabled and as having a smaller brain, and attempted to prove this through eugenics and other pseudoscientific theories.
The lengthy campaign to remove homosexuality as a psychiatric illness was finally successful in 1973, with homosexuality being removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Many LGBTQ folks today may want to distance themselves from any community that has been medicalized in similar ways, in order to cut off the historical ties to notions of pathology and abnormality. This process has been well described by Baynton, who demonstrates how, throughout history, disability has been used not only as a justification for excluding disabled people but also to exclude other marginal groups (people of color, immigrants) by attributing disability to them. The marked groups usually do not question the assumption that underpin disability as inferior, but instead try to distance themselves from the disability label, by scientific means if possible.
This resistance to allying queer communities with disabled ones is not only cumbersome to the realization of shared ideals and coalition politics, but it is also detrimental to the lives of disabled queers. Because disabled people are perceived as asexual and/or sexually inferior to nondisabled (except in fetishized communities, like amputee-devotee or dwarf fetish), being queer may seem like a logical step, since being gay is also regarded as an inferior sexual form by heterosexual people and heteronormative cultures.
For instance, heterosexuality is not assumed for disabled/crip folks as they are often perceived as asexual. In the same token, queerness is perceived as a disability from a heteronormative framework. Such an analysis goes beyond understanding the connections between queerness and disability as identities (i.e., the lived experience of queer crips) in a move that both de-essentializes these identities (as “queering” and “cripping” are used as verbs, not mere identities) and tries to grapple with their full existence, materially and imaginarily.
At its very core, disability destabilizes identity and escapes any neat categorizations. Disability is fluid and contextual rather than biological. This does not mean that biology does not play out on our minds and bodies, but that the definition of disability is imposed upon certain kinds of minds and bodies. Those of you who are reading this chapter with your glasses on perhaps do not identify with disability (or crip) culture, but you would be quite disabled without your visual aids. It is also a truism that we will all experience some kind of disability if we live long enough. But more than that, disability, if understood as constructed through historical and cultural processes, should be seen not as a binary but as a continuum. One is always dis/abled in relation to the context in which one is put. A person has a learning disability if put in a scholarly setting; using a wheelchair becomes a disability and a disadvantage when the environment is inaccessible; someone who wears glasses may be disabled without them when attempting to read written language or see far away, but this can change depending on the context that they are seeing and being seen within. The definition of dis/ability shifts depending on what the needs of those at the top of hierarchical structures dictate. The state commonly defines disability loosely when that definition is used to marginalize people, and more rigidly when it is used to determine access to resources.
As a fluid state, disability, much like queerness, should be perceived as a normal state of affairs. Imagining the world through a crip-queer lens then, aids in challenges to forms of hierarchy and domination by challenging the very idea of normalcy. A queer-cripped anarchism would resist the hierarchies that permit the imposition of disabled identities on minds and bodies that are considered deviant as an integral component to resisting domination and achieving autonomy. This differs from Marxist thought, which is centered more on resistance to exploitation and appropriation.
In the nineteenth century the concept of the norm entered European culture, as related to the concept of the average. Normalcy began with the creation of measurements and statistics. Qualities are represented on a bell curve, and the extremes of the curve are abnormal. Statistics were created as state tools (hence their etymology as state-istics) with the advent of modernity, as “political arithmetic.” It is hard to imagine that before 1820, political bodies did not make decisions solely based on crime, poverty, birth, death, and unemployment rates. This new form of governance is what Foucault characterized as biopolitics, the newfound ability to measure performances of individuals and groups that makes them governable.
The key argument Davis makes is that ableism and normalization are not unusual practices that we must denounce but are part of the modernist project by definition (the creation of modern nation-states, democracy, measurement and science, capitalism). There are several paradoxes associated with modernism: representational democracy vs. individual representation, capitalism vs. equality, etc. Normalcy as an ideology seemingly resolves these conflicts. In regards to wealth—on a curve it is clear that not all can be wealthy. Some have to be in the margins of the curve for capitalism to be sustained. Equality under these parameters is not morally or ethically defined, but rather scientifically. So, many people fight for equality, but what we should be fighting for is diversity and respect of differences.
The concept of the norm, unlike the ideal, implies that the majority of the population must somehow be around the mean. Everyone has to work hard to conform to norms but people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups, are scapegoated for not being able to fit these standards, while in fact they are needed to create these standards and maintain them. There is a need for people at the margin, but they are punished for being placed there. As an example for such punitive ideology, Davis analyzes the interesting fact that almost all the early statisticians (Galton, Pearson, and others) were also known eugenicists. It is not surprising perhaps since the notion of the norm and the average divided the populace into standard and substandard populations. Difference is thus projected onto stigmatized populations so all others can strive for the illusive normalcy.
The definition of unemployment itself historically excludes disabled people, undocumented immigrants, retired people (who often wish to work), and women (who do unpaid labor).
Mutual aid is a core tenet of anarchism. Much of the anarchist tradition rejects the ideology of individualism and focuses on mutual aid, or, in queer-crip language, interdependence.
If disability studies and activism could offer a corrective to the anarchist practice of mutual reliance, it will be to the concept of DIY, including anarcho-primivitism, which is DIY culture taken to an extreme. There seems to be a growing literature, especially in what has become to be called “green anarchism,” which focuses on self-reliance and a “return to nature.” This politic requires a non-disabled body for its ideal society. Chellis Glendinning writes of “lean hunter-gatherer women” who endure “strenuous demands of walking long distances while carrying equipment, mounds of plant food, and children—physical conditions that are reproduced among today’s female athletes.” Such calls will have devastating effects on the lives of disabled people who truly embody a spirit of mutual aid everyday by relying on personal assistants, friends, and family members to achieve independence and autonomy, which are also core practices of anarchism. Through a queer-crip lens we should perhaps focus more on DIT—do it together. The focus on independence, we would argue, is an adoption of capitalist values. Capitalism asserts an ideology of independence and emphasizes relationships and interactions for which there are economic transactions. This ideology, however, is a lie as all of us are interdependent and rely on each other not only for our food, shelter, and clothing, but also for our emotional, physical, and intellectual needs. Shifting focus from DIY to DIT reasserts our collectivity and interdependence and rejects the focus on rugged individualism, a value that negates many people’s needs for care.
Engaging in prefigurative politics in relation to a queer-crip existence entails (re)thinking inclusivity. The knee-jerk types of anarchist organizing and activism are often quite exclusive spaces and enterprises. For instance, many radical conferences and actions lack attention to basic accessibility such as interpreters, note-takers, and accessible bathrooms and entranceways. For example, one Anarchist Bookfair in Toronto was held up a long narrow flight of stairs. The argument for it being inaccessible was that it had to be in an “anarchist friendly space”; their definition of anarchist friendly excluded people who could not scale a flight of stairs. It is also becoming a kind of ironic truism that whenever there is resistance, there is a march. Although a march or an organized protest may yield some visibility to the cause and create solidarity amongst its participants, it is also a quite exclusionary resistance strategy for many disabled activists. As such it can be as polarizing as it is galvanizing around a particular issue.
