The Biopolitics of Disability Quotes

“The challenge of the politics of atypicality becomes particularly pressing within neoliberal biopolitics, particularly in that much of disability’s social oppression is based on medical classifications that overindividuate bodies within categories of pathology while turning labeled subjects into generic representations of their medicalized condition group.”
― David T. Mitchell, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment

“As a pedagogical approach, disability studies provides ways of legitimating the lives of those occupying peripheral embodiments as offering insightful alternative modes of nonnormative being-in-the-world. These two disability-centered approaches dovetail into what we call curricular cripistemologies. SONG”
― David T. Mitchell, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment

“Can we keep ourselves open to the experience of nonnormativity as something other than inferiority, deviancy, and intolerable aberrancy (a mere ableist projection of the pathologizing fantasies of normativity)?”
― David T. Mitchell, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment

“Doing so, however, reinforces a problematic “we” that discounts those with disabilities by suggesting all of us occupy failed embodiments in some way without an ability to attend to crip/queer materiality’s nuances of experience.”
― David T. Mitchell, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment

“After all, if disability brings nothing but likeness to others into the world as its primary contribution to questions of lived embodiment, what value will it have to help us reimagine ways of artfully living less productive, less consumptive, and less exploitative lives?”
― David T. Mitchell, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment