Sharon L. Snyder

Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment

ing the Body The authority the biological sciences have wielded over cultural constructions of the body in the late-twentieth-century West—instantiated in the United States by the hegemony of the medical-professional and rehabilitation-sciences establishRe-engaging

The Eugenic Atlantic: race, disability, and the making of an international Eugenic science, 1800–1945

In this analysis the authors fold disability into a cross-national equation by including disabled people as part of a trans-Atlantic discussion of otherness. In naming this new cultural space the ‘Eugenic Atlantic’, we take up Paul Gilroys analysis of cultural crossings in order to recognise the social construction of marginalised populations designated by virtue of their presumed biologically-based inferiorities. The analysis of a ‘Eugenic Atlantic’ seeks to analyse disability and race as mutual projects of human exclusion, based upon scientific management systems, successively developed within modernity. From the end of the eighteenth century to the conclusion of World War II, bodies designated as defective became the focal point of violent European and American efforts to engineer a ‘healthy’ body politic. While fears of racial, sexual and gender-based ‘contamination’ served as the spokes of this belief system, disability, used as a synonym for biological (or in-built) inferiority, functioned as the hub that gave the entire edifice its cross-national utility.

The Visual Foucauldian: Institutional Coercion and Surveillance in Frederick Wiseman's Multi-handicapped Documentary Series

During the mid 1980s, the renowned American documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman produced a four-part series of films that sought to record the operations of institutions in Talladega, Alabama, devoted to the care and training of people with disabilities. These films—designated as the Multi-handicapped Series—have received much less attention than Wisemans earlier work, as if films about disability mark a drastic departure from his previous award-winning productions, such as Titicut Follies (1965) and Hospital (1970). The Multi-handicapped Series takes up general categories of disabled populations as discrete documentary topics, Deaf (1986), Blind (1986), Multi-handicapped (1986) and Adjustment & Work (1986) as opposed to a specific location as in his earlier films. As a result, the latter series of films identify social and interpersonal structures developed in the name of specific conditions. Like Foucaults research on disciplinary tactics, Wisemans films seek out many of the segregated social spaces typically occupied by persons classified as deviant: prisons, hospitals, charity networks, sheltered workshops, resident facilities, and vocational training structures. The Multi-handicapped Series focuses on the activities of professions and practitioners in education, administration, and therapy, as well as the institutional roles designed for bodies marked as disabled. Unlike its 19th century predecessor classification, feebleminded, the latter twentieth century U.S. policy answer has been waged as a matter of dividing disabilities into a binary structure of orthopedic or cognitive categories. Such a development has left many crossover bodies in a diagnostic no-bodys-land. To analyze the history of these developments, this essay recognizes the formation of todays disability category as an effect of new regimes of power; a form of domination based upon the application of particularized diagnostic pathologies that provide the basis for cordoning off bodies which fail to fit neatly within the cognitive/orthopedic binary. As documents of the social spaces that are occupied by disabled people, Wisemans films offer a rare contemplation of institutional practices and their application to populations viewed as nonnormative.

Eugenics and the racial genome: politics at the molecular level

ABSTRACT Snyder and Mitchells essay charts parallels between the historical marginalization of disabled populations and that of racialized populations, including the overlap in experiences of disability. It then assesses ways in which the history of the US eugenics movement can serve as a predictor of outcomes for projects like the Genomic Research of the African Diaspora biobank (GRAD) at Howard University, which attempt to trace genetic markers for disability prevalent in African-American communities. Diagnostic practices at the population level have previously threatened to entrench forms of pathology at the biological level without delivering promised relief through the discovery of cures. Specifically, the eugenics movement undertook restrictive measures to manage those deemed ‘genetically inferior’. While it promised that widespread diagnostic labels would lead to the end of severe disabilities—particularly mental ‘subnormality’—the movement failed to lessen levels of disability at the same time as it deflected needed social support away from disabled people. As a result, disabled peoples’ historical devaluation resulted in the loss of key citizenship privileges, such as freedom to move about the country, reproductive participation and the right to live in the community. While diagnostic initiatives might begin with a seemingly benign intention to alleviate disability as ‘suffering’, medical labels often result in a further level of social disenfranchisement for members of the target population. Despite historical differences between genetics and eugenics, Snyder and Mitchell argue that similar outcomes are likely to result from racialized genomic research undertaken in minority communities in the United States.

Memorializing Disability: Contemplating Less Capacitated Alternative Citizenries

At base, disability studies, queer studies, and critical race studies all attempt to usher in what Alexander Weheliye, drawing on Sylvia Wynter, refers to as ‘different genres of the human’. Such alternative recognitions involve an enunciation of ways of being human that are not based on qualities advocated in classical liberalism’s hierarchical human-centred models of rationality, able-bodiedness, European/American exceptionalism, and the agency of a politically capacitated citizenship. Alternative genres of the human are grounded in a more active recognition of materiality’s agency that is not discursively overdetermined by postmodernism’s social constructivist claims. Consequently, those in non-normative embodiments find potential for a relative comfort of inclusive (mis)fit beneath the elastic category of posthumanist methodologies.