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Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality
This innovative and adventurous work, now in paperback, uses broadly feminist and postmodernist modes of analysis to explore what motivates damaging attitudes and practices towards disability. The book argues for the significance of the psycho-social imaginary and suggests a way forward in disability's queering of normative paradigms.
222 pages, Hardcover
First published August 28, 2009
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February 19, 2017
The author of this book attempts to apply Gilles Deleuze's postmodern ideas to disability theory. Her idea is that disabled sexuality is an excellent test case for disability theory, because it exposes widespread cultural disgust and discomfort (or I guess her word is "anxiety," but I'm never sure what critical theorists mean by anxiety.) All disabled sexuality is made "queer" by the weird feelings that people have about non-normative bodies and their need for outside assistance. It's a pretty compelling topic for a book, yet I was just so irritated with it the whole time I was reading. Why?
Schildrick perceives the "dominant discourse of rights, choice and self-determination" to be too limited. This had me squirming with discomfort for the entire time I was reading the book. I could not forget that she was, in the guise of introducing a more inclusive vision of an interconnected society, dismissing the primacy of the lived experiences of disabled people as the main source for disability theory. I don't think that is what she was trying to do. I'm not sure.
There were just so many sentences with the construction "this is not to say that" or "such and such a thing is imbricated in the whatever..." Do we ever need the word "bricolage" in English? I seem to recall a similar idea expressed as pastiche. Why do we need to borrow all these words that mean an argument is loosely organized? I can see that.
She did sometimes quote disabled writers describing their experiences, but there was a whole lot of exploration of psychological criticism whose relevance to some kind of argument or theme seemed only tenuously established.
In any case, I don't agree with her view of standpoint theory. I think it's possible to have standpoint theory that takes the position of the speaker into account without merely inverting the privilege to speak. But what if standpoint theory becomes only inverted privilege? On this subject, maybe we need that. Are disabled people now at a point in their movement where they no longer have to fight to speak for themselves? My impression is, no, not at all.
The thing is, I think I actually agreed with the main point of the book. It does make sense to me that all bodies fail to meet cultural demands for normativity. I also agree with the overall concept that everyone is part of a connected whole, this whole including assistance animals and prostheses and assistive technologies. It's not only people who have been labeled disabled who need or use these things. I like the theory of curb cuts. I appreciated the (too limited) discussion of how new social models of disability have affected the potential for sexual expression for people with disabilities. Probably my problem is that I loathe the conventions of this kind of writing.
Schildrick perceives the "dominant discourse of rights, choice and self-determination" to be too limited. This had me squirming with discomfort for the entire time I was reading the book. I could not forget that she was, in the guise of introducing a more inclusive vision of an interconnected society, dismissing the primacy of the lived experiences of disabled people as the main source for disability theory. I don't think that is what she was trying to do. I'm not sure.
There were just so many sentences with the construction "this is not to say that" or "such and such a thing is imbricated in the whatever..." Do we ever need the word "bricolage" in English? I seem to recall a similar idea expressed as pastiche. Why do we need to borrow all these words that mean an argument is loosely organized? I can see that.
She did sometimes quote disabled writers describing their experiences, but there was a whole lot of exploration of psychological criticism whose relevance to some kind of argument or theme seemed only tenuously established.
In any case, I don't agree with her view of standpoint theory. I think it's possible to have standpoint theory that takes the position of the speaker into account without merely inverting the privilege to speak. But what if standpoint theory becomes only inverted privilege? On this subject, maybe we need that. Are disabled people now at a point in their movement where they no longer have to fight to speak for themselves? My impression is, no, not at all.
The thing is, I think I actually agreed with the main point of the book. It does make sense to me that all bodies fail to meet cultural demands for normativity. I also agree with the overall concept that everyone is part of a connected whole, this whole including assistance animals and prostheses and assistive technologies. It's not only people who have been labeled disabled who need or use these things. I like the theory of curb cuts. I appreciated the (too limited) discussion of how new social models of disability have affected the potential for sexual expression for people with disabilities. Probably my problem is that I loathe the conventions of this kind of writing.
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