The Post‐Raciality and Post‐Spatiality of Calls for LGBTQ and Disability Visibility

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carly Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Rural Studies ◽  
Virtual Spaces ◽  
Lgbtq Rights ◽  
Material Bodies ◽  
Sexuality And Disability ◽  
Visibility Politics

In this article, I consider the ideologies that emerge when disability and LGBTQ rights advocates' ubiquitous calls for visibility collide. I argue that contemporary visibility politics encourage the production of post‐racial and post‐spatial ideologies. In demanding visibility, disability and LGBTQ rights advocates ignore, ironically, visible markers of (racial) difference and assume that being “out, loud, and proud” is desirable trans‐geographically. I bring together disability studies and queer rural studies—fields that have engaged in remarkably little dialogue—to analyze activist calls for LGBTQ and disability visibility. The discourses evident in such calls transcend movements and virtual spaces and emerge as some of the LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest whom I interviewed discuss their relations to (their own and others') LGBTQ sexuality and disability. I analyze several cases to illustrate how visibility discourses compel the erasure of material bodies, and in the process, render certain (spatialized and racialized) experiences obsolete. I close by considering how my critique of visibility discourses might influence critical discussions of identity politics more broadly.

Identity Politics, Consciousness-Raising, and Visibility Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Whittier
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Specific Experience ◽  
Identity Group ◽  
Visibility Politics

This chapter describes the emergence of consciousness-raising, including differences among women. It then discusses collective identity, explaining the concept and describing activists’ attempts to reconstruct collective identity as women and to determine how to practice their collective identity in daily life. Next, it discusses coming out and other forms of visibility politics, which aim to display collective identity and change conceptualizations of the group and its issues. Finally, the chapter explains the controversies and debates over identity politics and describes some of its contemporary manifestations. “Identity politics” refers to organizing around the specific experience or perspective of a given group and to organizing that has identity visibility as a goal. Identity politics has, from its beginning, grappled with the question of differences within each identity group. For women’s movements, questions of the intersections between gender and race, class, sexuality, and other dimensions have been fundamental.

scholarly journals Thinking With Disability Studies

2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nirmala Erevelles
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Relational Analysis ◽  
Historical Moment

<p>In this essay, I offer tentative ruminations about the possibilities/challenges of theory and praxis in the field of disability studies. I begin the essay by thinking through my own positionality as a non-disabled woman of color scholar/ally in the field. Cautiously situating myself in a location of outsider-within (Hill-Collins,1998), I explore how disability studies is disruptive of any boundaries that claim to police distinctions between disabled/non-disabled subject positions. Noting the dangers of claiming that everyone is disabled at some historical moment, I propose instead a relational analysis to engage the materiality of disability at the intersections of race, class, gender, nation, and sexual identity within specific historical contexts and discuss the complicated impasses that continue to plague disability studies at these intersections. I conclude the essay by recognizing the labor of scholar/activists in the field who call for a committed politics of accountability and access via disability justice.&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong>&nbsp;disability studies, historical materialism, identity politics and intersectionality, disability justice, politics of accountability/allyship</p>

(The promise of) Monstrous Kinship? Queer Reproduction and the Somatechnics of Sexual and Racial Difference

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-211
Author(s):  
Ulrika Dahl
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Donor Insemination ◽  
Monster Theory ◽  
Lgbtq Rights

This article considers the figure of the monster and monstrosity as a phenomenon as an entangled effect of kinship and reproduction, and thus as conveying specific understandings of gender, sexuality and race. While non-heterosexual reproduction and family-making has long been viewed as monstrous, increasing LGBTQ rights and recognition has instead insisted on its normality. Engaging with feminist and queer monster theory, and building on ethnographic research in Stockholm, Sweden, this article considers the monstrous remains within contemporary queer kinship. In particular, it proposes that when choice and intent rather than biological ‘facts’ constitute the foundation of (queer) family, sexual and racial difference does not cease to exist, but rather, re-emerges as monstrous attachments and embodiments. To sketch a larger argument about the potential limits of ideas about social construction, the article hones in on two examples. First, it shows that gestation and childbirth, as monstrous embodiments, can pose problems for families that insist on parental equality through the perceived sameness of shared intent. Secondly it proposes that in the context of Sweden, reproduction through donor-insemination is built on a cultural idea of white sperm as both neutral and desirable. These examples, the article suggest, point to some remaining irreconcilable dimensions embedded in the fantasy of queer kinship that, like monsters, haunt its queer normative forms. In closing, it argues for a reconsideration of hopeful monstrosities by considering both queer reproduction and the sexual and racial differences with which it inevitably engages can instead be understood as somatechnical, as kinship technologies that are inevitably entangled in the biopolitics of (queer) nation-making and its natrualised whiteness.

scholarly journals Disabled Women, Care Regimes, and Institutionalised Homophobia: a Case Study From Poland

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Wołowicz ◽  
Agnieszka Król ◽  
Justyna Struzik
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Heterosexual Women ◽  
Disability Support ◽  
Disabled Women ◽  
Sexuality And Disability ◽  
Care Regimes ◽  
Social Support Systems ◽  
Cultural Constraints

Abstract Introduction The intersection of non-heterosexuality, gender, and disability became a prolific field of research among both queer, crip, and disability studies scholars, though focusing mainly on Western regions. In the paper discusses how women narrate their experiences in relation to ableist and heteronormative regimes in the context of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The case study of Poland, a country characterized by institutionalization, lack of individualized disability support, and state homophobia contributes to a growing body of research on non-western sexuality and disability studies. Methods We conducted interviews with 11 non-heterosexual disabled women living in Poland. Results By tackling care regimes, our analysis explores women’s experiences in the context of discursive confusions resulting from being at the intersection of often-contradictory local narrations on gender, disability, and sexuality. We identified three intertwined processes to understand how care regimes work in Poland: (1) the separateness between queer and disabled policies and discourses, (2) the coopting/obscuring of homosexual relations between women by category of care, and (3) familiarisation of care and its consequences for non-heterosexuality. Policy Implication We suggest that social support systems must better address the needs of non-heterosexual women with disabilities which are profoundly impacted by structural, political, and cultural constraints and possibilities.

Racial Difference and the Colonial Wars of 19th Century Southeast Asia

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Malay Peninsula ◽  
Local Resistance ◽  
Difference Making ◽  
Military Campaigns

The colonisation of Southeast Asia was a long and often violent process where numerous military campaigns were waged by the colonial powers across the region. The notion of racial difference was crucial in many of these wars, as native Southeast Asian societies were often framed in negative terms as 'savage' and 'backward' communities that needed to be subdued and 'civilised'. This collection of critical essays focuses on the colonial construction of race and looks at how the colonial wars in 19th-century Southeast Asia were rationalised via recourse to theories of racial difference, making race a significant factor in the wars of Empire. Looking at the colonial wars in Java, Borneo, Siam, the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula and other parts of Southeast Asia, the essays examine the manner in which the idea of racial difference was weaponised by the colonising powers and how forms of local resistance often worked through such colonial structures of identity politics.

Disability Studies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Quirici
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mad Studies ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Brain

Abstract This chapter reviews major recent publications focused on madness and neurodiversity. It is organized into four sections that explore the boundaries of mad studies and disability studies. The first section, ‘Is Mad Studies Disability Studies?’, provides a brief introduction to mad studies and asks whether it should be considered a branch of disability studies or a separate field. The second section, ‘Voices’, reviews a special issue of the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health edited by Jijian Voronka and Lucy Costa to overview how various mad studies scholars are contesting and expanding the boundaries of the field. Who is the ‘us’ of ‘nothing about us without us’? Whose voices are included, and is inclusion enough? The third section, ‘Literatures’, reviews the anthology Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health, edited by Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and the monograph Black Madness :: Mad Blackness by Therí Alyce Pickens, calling for deeper attention to racial difference in mad studies and suggesting that real inclusion should be transformational. The fourth section, ‘Rhetorics’, goes outside the boundaries of mad and disability studies to review Jordynn Jack’s Raveling the Brain: Toward a Transdisciplinary Neurorhetoric. The chapter calls for future scholarship that is not only transdisciplinary but also attentive to the enmeshment of mind and body, madness and disability. I argue that, while the two fields should not be collapsed, disability studies should dialogue with mad studies wherever possible, and vice versa.

scholarly journals Of Non-Mice and Non-Men: Against Essentialism in Joshua Ferris's The Unnamed

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan D. Frank
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
Theoretical Synthesis

Noticing the recent trend in disability studies to entertain essentialism in an attempt to capture the efficacy of identity politics, this essay articulates the reductive implications of doing so. By way of a meta-theoretical synthesis that guides a reading of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris - a novel that defies categories precisely by defying the categorization of its protagonist's fictional disability in which he is unable to stop himself from walking - disability theory merges here with a range of speculative realisms to expose how the dangers of essentialism are reflected even in the very term "ableism."

scholarly journals Authentic Representation and Author Identity: Exploring Mental Illness in The Hobbit Fanfiction

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Jennifer Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Health Status ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Mental Health Status ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Perceived Credibility

This paper addresses concerns with authenticity claims that surround mental illness and author identity in fanfiction. I will apply the critiques surrounding representation in media (see Mitchell and Snyder, 2001; Couser 2003, 2009) found in disability studies and fandom studies (see Jenkins 2012) to fanfiction. In this paper, I analyze two pieces of fanfiction which focus on Thorin II also known as Thorin Oakenshield, a character from J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit novel and Peter Jackson’s film adaptations. I explore how in these texts the authors portray mental illness through their characterization of Thorin II. How the author’s actual or perceived personal mental health status may impact their writing, and readers’ responses to their writing, is explored through the lenses of identity politics (see Calhoun, 1994) and authenticity (Couser, 2009; van Dijk, 1989). In the context of disability and fandom studies, these fanfictions act as examples of a) combination fictional/ autobiographical writings which work to provide what the authors’ perceive as accurate portrayals of mental illness, and b) how the author’s mental health status impacts the perceived credibility of their work.

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