Suchergebnisse

Challenging the undesirability of disability is a shared responsibility that requires us to imagine disability differently. In order to imagine disability differently, we need to understand how the neoliberal hegemonic social imagination—key to processes that create good disabled and able-bodied neoliberal subjects—works to curtail who is perceived to have a desirable body. In order to desire disability differently, we must begin with marginal, heterotopic imaginations whereby disability is not something to overcome, but rather is part of a life worth living. In this article, I build on Foucault's concepts of heterotopia (1998), milieu, and the government of things (2007), and Karen Barad's agential realism (2007), as well as draw on the work of Mel Chen (2012) and Rod Michalko (1999) in order to argue that the heterotopic imagination reconfigures how we consider disability to emerge, with whom, and where. By mobilising the heterotopic imagination, we can come to recognise that disability does not emerge as an individualised human body, but rather is an intracorporeal, non-anthropocentric multiplicity. To desire disability differently through the heterotopic imagination is not simply to allow the current formulation of disability to become desirable, but rather to radically alter how we desire disability, in addition to altering what disability is, how it is practised, and what it can be.

Attendant care provides an opening to consider the social and political implications of a relational ethics of intercorporeality and exposes the problematic foundation of independent living models that assert a normative encounter between autonomous and sovereign selves. In relation, both the disabled person and the attendant experience a leaking of their identities, a mingling of their sexualities, and multiple intimate slippages of selves as the attendant participates in the daily work of feeding, bathing, shopping, facilitating sex, and numerous other activities. The assemblages formed in such interactions have ethical implications for how we come to understand bodies, labour, and care. This article explores some aspects of the disabled- abled intimate care assemblage to discern its inventive and productive contributions to how we think through and with care. I argue that such an approach to the care assemblage complicates the usual ways in which the attendant is considered an employee. Drawing from the life experiences of disabled lesbian Connie Panzarino and through the example of attendant facilitated sex, I argue that independent living models, in their push for autonomy and independence, and in their formal approaches to employment and care, cannot lead to substantive emancipation for disabled people or others. Instead, I posit that it is through a relational ethics of intercorporeality that we can conceptualize care in a way that benefits disabled people and their attendants. Finally, I draw out the tensions involved in this assemblage to tend to the contradictions and quandaries that the desiring and labouring body faces when intimate care is put to work. Keywords: disability, assemblage, attendant care, labour, intercorporeality ; Le travail des soignants fournit une façon d'aborder les implications sociales et politiques des éthiques relationnelles de l'intercorporéalité, soit la condition humaine de « vivre via le corps d'un autre », et souligne les bases problématiques des modèles de la vie ...

Across Canada, thousands of drug users are dying from a toxic illicit drug supply resulting from oppressive drug policies and regulations that reinforce the prohibition and criminalization of drug use and the pathologization and rehabilitation of drug users. Bringing together critical drug studies and critical disability studies, the article contributes cripistemologies of drug use to unpack some of the ways transinstitutional carceral ableism conjoins control strategies of punishment-therapy-abandonment to unite both medical and carceral approaches to disability and drug use that have debilitating and deadly consequences. Against transinstitutional carceral ableism, the article mobilizes cripistemologies of drug use to trouble and reject the disposability of non-rehabilitated drug users central to medical and carceral approaches and instead favour consensual and pleasurable drug use via care practices grounded in interdependence, mutual aid, and solidarity.

Drawing on the institutional history of the sperm bank and legacies of eugenics, we consider how spectrums of risk simultaneously constrain and expand possibilities for disability justice. We do so by examining the discourses surrounding US-based Xytex Corporation sperm bank Donor 9623, described as the 'perfect' donor but later discovered to have a criminal record and a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Haunted by the dread of disability, we examine how parents mark the fate of their donor-conceived child on a graded spectrum of genetic and psychiatric risk, in need of perpetual monitoring and intervention. Using this case to understand the contemporary reorganization of disability via spectral risk, we advocate for a critical engagement with how disability haunting can enable us to better attend to the effects of the past and present in such a way that provokes a more collectively just future.