Robert McRuer

As Good As It Gets: Queer Theory and Critical Disability

In queer studies it is at this point a well-established critical practice to remark on heterosexuality’s supposed invisibility.1 As the heterosexual norm congealed during the twentieth century, it was the “homosexual menace” that was specified and embodied; the subsequent policing and containment of that menace allowed the new heterosexual normalcy to remain unspecified and disembodied.2 Although as early as 1915 Sigmund Freud, in his revised “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,” declared that “the exclusive sexual interest of the man for the woman is also a problem requiring an explanation, and is not something that is self-evident and explainable on the basis of chemical attraction,” such observations remained— indeed, as Freud’s comments literally were—mere footnotes in the project of excavating deviance.3 Heterosexuality, never speaking—as Michel Foucault famously said of homosexuality—“in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged,” thereby passed as universal love and intimacy, coextensive not with a specific form of opposite-sex eros but with humanity itself.4 Heterosexuality’s partners in this masquerade have been largely identified; an important body of feminist and antiracist work considers how heteronormativity reinforces dominant ideologies of gender and race.5 However, despite the fact that homosexuality and disability clearly share a pathologized past, and despite a growing awareness of the intersections between queer theory and disability studies, little notice has been taken of the connection between heterosexuality and able-bodied identity, perhaps because able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things. In what follows I lay the groundwork for understanding how able-bodiedness and heterosexuality are intertwined. Bringing together queer theory and what I will call “critical disability,” this essay challenges how our culture continues to accommodate, despite and indeed through the shifting crises surrounding them,

Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis: A Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable was conducted by email from June 2009 to August 2010. We divided participants into three groups, with each group responding in staggered fashion to the prompts. In this way, group 2 was able to see group 1’s responses before they sent in their own. Group 3 was able to see the responses of groups 1 and 2. Through this process, we were able to not only include a remarkably large cluster of participants but also allow for the possibility of dialogue between groups. Group 1 consisted of Roderick Ferguson, Kevin Floyd, and Lisa Rofel. Group 2 included Heather Love, Robert McRuer, Fred Moten, and Tavia Nyong’o. Group 3 was Christina Crosby, Lisa Duggan, Miranda Joseph, Gayle Salamon, and Dean Spade. — Jordana Rosenberg and Amy Villarejo.

Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies

In his contribution, “Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies,” Robert McRuer calls for the recognition of the points of convergence between AIDS theory, queer theory, and disability theory. McRuer points out ways in which minority identity groups such as people with AIDS, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, and those with so-called disabilities, whose status has been described by others as “impaired,” have resisted this judgment by calling its ideological underpinnings into question. He contends that a critical alliance between AIDS theory, queer theory, and disability theory will ultimately help us to realize the full range of different kinds of bodies and corporeal experiences, while also combating the application of normativizing judgments.

Crip Excess, Art, and Politics: A Conversation with Robert McRuer

A book, article, or theory might be judged not only by the insightfulness of the claims it makes, but also by the connections, possibilities, and politics that it fosters. By these criteria, Robert McRuer’s publications, of which the most widely known is Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006), are crucial. He weaves together an array of theories, cultural productions, and socio-historical contexts with great care, wit, and generosity. The result is a complex analysis of the role of compulsory able-bodiedness in the context of globalized neoliberal capitalism. McRuer’s work is as generative as it is insightful, and as creative as it is political. He provokes his audiences to foster new crip connections, and to explore new crip possibilities and practices, whether academic, artistic, activist, or otherwise. It was with great pleasure that we, Danielle Peers (DP) and Melisa Brittain (MB), met up with Robert McRuer (RM) for a video interview at the Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture Conference at McMaster University in November 2011. The conversation has been transcribed and expanded on here.

Epilogue: Disability, Inc.

While this anthology was being completed, one of the most famous disabled people in the world, for a very short time, went to jail. Charged with the February 14, 2013 murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, Oscar Pistorius—who is a double amputee also known as “The Blade Runner” due to the carbon fiber prosthetic blades he uses as a sprinter—spent eight days in the Brooklyn Police Station holing cell in Pretoria, South Africa, before being released on bond. He was indicted for the murder on August 19, 2013, and will face trial on March 3, 2014. Although Oscar Pistorius’s story is not on the surface about what the subtitle to this volume terms “Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada,” the editors make clear in their introduction that “incarceration is not just normative in North America, but … worldwide, due to ongoing legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism.” The Pistorius story, moreover (although in perhaps unexpected ways that I detail), also allows for a consideration of what the editors identify as “the neoliberal policies” (or, more broadly, the cultural politics of neoliberalism) that sustai: “the growth of the [globalized] prison system, the reduction of affordable housing and the lack of financial support for disabled people to live viably in the community.” (Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey, this volume). As essays such as those by Geoffrey Reaume, Shaista Patel, and Mansha Mirza make clear, the modes of identification, surveillance, securitization, and incarceration explored in Disability Incarcerated are certainly not contained to the North American continent.

Afterword: The End of Contested Corporealities

As the title suggests, Tanya Titchkosky’s article, which opens this special issue, is all about ‘‘The Ends of the Body.’’ More specifically, the article critiques the ways in which disability, in particular, is always and everywhere made to figure ‘‘the end.’’ ‘‘An array of cultural processes,’’ Titchkosky insists, ‘‘make ‘disability’ represent limit without possibility. Disability is made to serve as a signifier of an end without appreciable difference and without future’’ (Titchkosky this issue, 82). Titchkosky brings forward the ‘‘eugenicist orientation’’ (87) of Peter Singer to exemplify these cultural processes, not only as that orientation is legible in Singer’s well-known, highly-public questioning of the value of disabled lives (especially the lives of disabled infants, whom he suggests might be better off dead), but also in his 2008 New York Times obituary for Harriet McBryde Johnson, the disability activist and disability rights lawyer who repeatedly challenged his views, sometimes in an open debate. Titchkosky notes that Singer’s obituary for Johnson focuses on an incident about which he ‘‘thought nothing’’—a moment when Johnson asked for assistance at a dinner because her elbow had slipped out from under her and she needed help bringing it back to the table. Titchkosky argues that to ‘‘think nothing’’ of the moment was, for Singer, to do little more than reaffirm the ‘‘functionalist reduction’’ (87) that animates his oeuvre in general: disability signifies, conclusively, the end of ‘‘normal’’ or appropriate functionality; given that conclusion, disabled lives (or at least the lives of disabled infants) should perhaps be brought to an end; and that, for Singer, is the end of the issue. Given his consent to the myriad of cultural forces that mark the end of disability and disability as end, Singer is free—or, rather, able—to think nothing of what Titchkosky calls ‘‘differing conceptions of disability’’ (87), conceptions that might value intersubjectivity or trans-corporeality. Of course, via Audre Lorde and an array of other critical and theoretical commitments, Titchkosky writes beyond the end of disability or the end of the body marked by Singer, and I will return to her generative insights momentarily. Here, however, at the beginning of the end of this special issue, I want to flag Titchkosky’s central, twinned critique: disability is made to figure the end (limit The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 34:208–211, 2012 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2012.687301