Fiona Kumari Anne Campbell

Exploring internalized ableism using critical race theory

This paper is an attempt to theorize about the way disabled people live with ableism, in particular internalized ableism. Typically literature within disability studies has concentrated on the practices and production of disablism, examining attitudes and barriers that contribute to the subordination of people with disabilities in society. My exploration occurs through examining the insights of critical race theory (CRT) and the contribution that CRT can further make to thinking through the processes, formation and consequences of ableism. A focal concern is the possible ways that the concept of internalized racism, its deployment in CRT and application to critical disability studies. The paper is interested in working through points of difference between the way internalized racism/ableism are mediated in the processes of subjectification and identifying points of convergence that can benefit dialogue across varied sites of scholarship. The author concludes that the study of ableism instead of disability/disablement may produce different research questions and sites of study.

Medical Education and Disability Studies

The biomedicalist conceptualization of disablement as a personal medical tragedy has been criticized by disability studies scholars for discounting the difference between disability and impairment and the ways disability is produced by socio-environmental factors. This paper discusses prospects for partnerships between disability studies teaching/research and medical education; addresses some of the themes around the necessity of critical disability studies training for medical students; and examines a selection of issues and themes that have arisen from disability education courses within medical schools globally. The paper concludes that providing there is a commitment from senior management, universities are well positioned to apply both vertical and horizontal approaches to teaching disability studies to medical students.

Having a career in disability studies without even becoming disabled! The strains of the disabled teaching body

Does it matter who teaches disability studies, whether that teacher has a disability or not? Maybe this might strike the reader as a peculiar question – to focus on the teacher’s body or knowledge standpoint. There are certain theoretical and ontological implications in asking such questions. This article is an attempt to theorise about the way the bodies of teachers with disabilities are transmuted within the arena of teaching critical disability studies at colleges and universities. In particular, it explores the ways disabled teachers’ bodies can contribute to experiencing alterity outside of the frame of ‘other’ and the ways that the disabled teaching body can displace the objectification of disability through pedagogical enactments of the lived experiences of disablement. In this way, this article refutes the assertion made by McWilliam and Taylor in 1998 that the pedagogical inspiration of bodies should not be celebrated. Instead, the focus is on working through points of difference between the way normative teacher’s bodies and the disabled teaching body is mediated in the processes of subjectification, identifying points of convergence that can benefit dialogue across varied sites of scholarship.

Stalking Ableism: Using Disability to Expose ‘Abled’ Narcissism

One may wonder what museums and classification systems have in common. They share a feature of working with the systematisation and reification of relics and objects. For too long there has been an almost indecent preoccupation with measuring and quantifying the existence of disabled people with the grand and commendable objective to know ‘us’ more. Despite these obsessions with disability, the sociocultural relations of impairment and disabled people have remained an afterthought in civic consciousness and at best peripheral in sociologies of the body. The aberrant, the anomalous, the monster or the disabled have formed ‘the background noise, as it were, the endless murmur of nature’, where disability is nonetheless always present in its absence (Foucault, 1970: 155). An act of speaking otherwise, this chapter shifts to a focus on abled(ness) to think about the production of ableism. We all live and breathe ableist logic, our bodies and minds daily become aesthetic sculptures for the projection of how we wish to be known in our attempt to exercise competency, sexiness, wholeness and an atomistic existence. It is harder to find the language and space to examine the implications of a failure to meet the standard or any ambivalence we might have about the grounds of the perfectibility project. This chapter first will outline an approach to expressing ableism (its theoretical features and character) and secondly it will provide an example of how ableism works globally in the knowledge production of disability. Finally I will discuss the possibility of disabled people turning their backs on emulating abledness as a strategy for disengagement both ontological and theoretical.

Geodisability Knowledge Production and International Norms: a Sri Lankan case study

Abstract Disability is a representational system and its denotation is a result of how communities make sense of and mark corporeal differences. In this paper I argue that the UN norm standard setting, a form of geodisability knowledge, determines the kinds of bodies known as disabled and acts as a technology of disability governmentality. The institutional strategic gaze, sited in the UN, examines, normalises and conditions nation-states. Without consensual international disability norms it would not be possible to disclose and make visible the dynamics of disability at a country level and for the World Health Organisation (WHO) to map disability globally. An alternate reading of international norms is to figure the functioning of geodisability knowledge to naturalise it through codifying hegemonic ways of seeing, citing and situating disability and thus colonise different cultural approaches to disability. A discussion of geodisability knowledge production is pursued within the context of a Sri Lankan case study.

Searching for Subjectivity: The Enigma of Devoteeism, Conjoinment and Transableism

Mentalities that shatter the illusion of the monster are particularly under fire as well as those scholars that have the audacity to propose the desirability of disability. Following the insights and shortcomings of postmodernist theorists, Elizabeth Grosz (1996) challenges researchers to raise the study of freakery beyond being an object of prurient speculation. This chapter explores the notion of disability as a state of ambivalence. It will look at the ways people with disability negotiate and experience internal ambivalence in their own lives as well as negotiate the ambivalence towards disability in society. How does the person with a disability negotiate the expectations and compulsions of ableism? In other words, do they choose to conform or hyperminic ableism or do they go it alone and explore alternative ways of being? People with impairments have impairment — mediated proprioceptive ways of experiencing being in the world. This draws upon the ideas developed in phenomenology of the animated or lived body and we can conclude then that people with disabilities and the development of self is remarkably and possibly radically different from people who have an ableist orientation. Is it possible to speak of a ‘disabilities’ orientation? What are the implications for the liberal project of inclusion rooted in sameness? Therefore this chapter explores the notion of a disability orientation — what are the different ways of seeing the world?

The Project of Ableism

Feminist Rosemary Tong (1999) long ago alluded to the profound possibilities of using critical disability studies theory to re-comprehend and re-spatialise the landscape of thinking about race and gender as sites of signification. This Chapter presents a preliminary conversation in the emergent field of studies in ableism and desires to not only problematise 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 (2008), Hughes (2007) and Overboe (1999, 2007).

Print Media Representations of the ‘Uncooperative’ Disabled Patient: The Case of Clint Hallam

‘The hegemonic location of biomedicalism among institutional formations has meant our present capacity to experience the body directly, or theorize it indirectly, [has become] extricably medicalized’ (Frank, 1990, p. 136). Freidson (1970) points out that this state of hegemonic biomedicalism has meant that doctors have had a sanctioned monopoly to be able to define the continuum of health and illness and approaches to the treatment of illness. As one commentator put it, biomedicalism has resulted in the patientisation of the population (Taylor, 1979). In the case of disablement, biomedical epistemologies and the assumption that so-called ‘abnormal’ conditions are the principle obstacle to disabled people’s integration into society have shaped social and technological practices as well as the formation of disabled subjectivities.

Afterword: From Disability Studies to Studies in Ableism

Today ambivalent survivors are charged with passing on knowledge and memories of how life was so that ‘we’ can dream of another way to be. Thus stories of disability and abledness are like maps providing safety so the traveller will not inadvertently turn off the road, go astray or navigate haphazardly into areas unknown or secured for the sole use of other, inhabitants. Like the map, stories provide clarity about the journey taken and the road ahead. The banter helps us make sense of the world and the way in which we interpret the ‘nature’ of things and interpolate ways of difference. Sometimes these stories are explicitly named and actively exchanged. Others are more mundane, somewhat insidious; passing on in a multitude of remnants, connected, disconnected, contrary and multiple, eventually taking on the status of a naturalised state of affairs. Even though the terrain may be winding and rocky, there is at least an illusion of certainty in the map which can be re-read and consulted again and again to ensure ordered spaces, corrected tracking, helping us re-cognise the signposts as we travel.

The Deaf Trade: Selling the Cochlear Implant

This chapter is about the power of rhetoric and representation, not only of marked bodies known to the hearing world as ‘the Deaf,’1 but about an artefact branded as a Cochlear Implant (CI). It is also a story — a story about the incubation and birth of an artefact that its designers argue creates or mimics ‘sound’. Narratives of persuasion enabled the transmogrification of an experimental and rather novel ‘hearing device’ into a bona fide curative solution to the ‘problem’ of profound deafness. The CI additionally invokes a story of culture (wars); ostensibly about ontologies — those that are privileged and those outlawed and the ways competing notions of being-ness and rhetorical positioning are fashioned through either etic or emic lens (Clifton, 1968; Freire, 1970).