Jenny Slater

Stepping outside normative neoliberal discourse: youth and disability meet – the case of Jody McIntyre

In May 2010, amidst the ‘global financial crisis’ a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government succeeded a 12-year reign of New Labour in the United Kingdom, and ushered in massive welfare cuts. Although New Labour tabled major welfare and disability benefit reform, they arguably did not activate the harshest of these. This paper focuses on the backlash of youth and disability in the form of demonstrations; two groups that are being hit hard by the political shift to work-first welfare in an era of employment scarcity. The case of young disabled activist Jody McIntyre is used to explore parallels and divergences in neoliberal and ‘populist’ discourses of ‘risky’, ‘troubling’ youth and disability.

‘Like, pissing yourself is not a particularly attractive quality, let’s be honest’: Learning to contain through youth, adulthood, disability and sexuality:

In this article, the authors (re)conceptualize containment in the context of youth, gender, disability, crip sex/uality and pleasure. The article begins by exploring eugenic histories of containment and traces the ways in which the anomalous embodiment of disabled people remains vigorously policed within current neo-eugenic discourse. Drawing upon data from two corresponding research studies, the authors bring the lived experiences of disabled young people to the fore. They explore their stories of performing, enacting and realizing containment: containing the posited unruliness of the leaky impaired body; containment as a form of (gendered) labour; and containment as a marker of normalization and sexualization, and thus a necessary component for ableist adulthood. Thus, they theorize crip embodiment as permeable, porous and problematic in the context of the impossibly bound compulsory (sexually) able adult body. The authors suggest that the implicit learning of containment is therefore required of disabled young people, particularly women, to counter infantilizing and desexualizing discourse, cross the ‘border zone of youth’ and achieve normative neoliberal adulthood. Crucially, however, the article examines the meaning of what the authors argue are important moments of messiness: the precarious localities of leakage that disrupt containment and thus the ‘reality’ of the ‘able’, ‘adult’ body. The article concludes by considering the ways in which these bodily ways of being contour both material experiences of pleasure and the right(s) to obtain it.

School toilets : queer, disabled bodies and gendered lessons of embodiment

ABSTRACT In this paper we argue that school toilets function as one civilising site [Elias, 1978. The Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell] in which children learn that disabled and queer bodies are out of place. This paper is the first to offer queer and crip perspectives on school toilets. The small body of existing school toilet literature generally works from a normative position which implicitly perpetuates dominant and oppressive ideals. We draw on data from Around the Toilet, a collaborative research project with queer, trans and disabled people (aroundthetoilet.wordpress.com) to critically interrogate this work. In doing this we consider ‘toilet training’ as a form of ‘civilisation’, that teaches lessons around identity, embodiment and ab/normal ways of being in the world. Furthermore, we show that ‘toilet training’ continues into adulthood, albeit in ways that are less easily identifiable than in the early years. We therefore call for a more critical, inclusive, and transformative approach to school toilet research.

Research with Dis/abled Youth: Taking a Critical Disability, ‘Critically Young’ Positionality

Disability is too often side-lined, returned to, added on, or omitted altogether from research surrounding youth. In this chapter I want to argue for the productive potential of appreciating disability and disabled youth, not as entities to be considered separately from other research concerning young people, but as places to begin wider anti-oppressive theorizations of youth.

Book Review: Little vast rooms of undoing exploring identity and embodiment through public toilet spaces

Book review of - Little vast rooms of undoing exploring identity and embodiment through public toilet spaces, by Dara Blumenthal, London, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014, 248 pp. ISBN 978-1-78-348035-7

Little vast rooms of undoing exploring identity and embodiment through public toilet spaces

Book review of - Little vast rooms of undoing exploring identity and embodiment through public toilet spaces, by Dara Blumenthal, London, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014, 248 pp. ISBN 978-1-78-348035-7

X. Stresses and contradictions of trying to ‘do feminisms’ within the (neo)liberal academy

hooks (1994, p. 59) ‘came to theory because [she] was hurting’. As a child, she found comfort in theorising the world around her. Whilst frustrating and often uncomfortable, school for me was just what I had to do. I found the work easy enough and if I kept my mouth shut and head down, I could get along. At home putting the world to rights (‘doing critical theory’) was all around me. I came to understand the conversations, arguments and anger that I was allowed at home, but not at school, ‘as theory’ because I was born into a family where going to university was possible and considered ‘a good idea’. So, I went to university and through some particularly important pedagogical relationships, worked out that ‘theory’ meant trying to make some ‘sense out of what was happening’ (hooks, 1994, p. 61) in the world. It was a revelation that unlike at school, at university critical questioning was not only allowed but praised! I write this now with the conviction that we all do theory yet, as I will come onto, only some of us are rendered powerful enough to call it ‘theory’, speak it and be heard. Gibson-Graham (1999) uses the term queer(y)ing to describe questioning to seek out possibility and change. The disability and queer theory that I found at university was different from the class politics we talked about at home, and a world away from anything I was introduced to at school. This shook up the way I thought about things. I began to understand my own sexuality as queer, and recognise the disablist and homophobic violence in the lives of my family and friends as resulting from ableist and heteronormative systems. The relative privilege I was in receipt of,

Playing Grown-Up

I write this chapter 12 months into my PhD exploring intersections of youth and disability. Based within critical disability studies (CDS), I am using disability as a lens to rethink ‘youth’; exploring how discourses ‘youth’ play-out with those of ‘disability, ’ and visa-versa. My thoughts in this paper are not grounded in empirical fieldwork, but intertwine a year’s reading with my own thoughts as a 23-year-old, new-to-the-world-of-research definitely-not-grown-up.