Cartographies of Friendship, Desire, and Home; Notes on surviving neoliberal security regimes. (original) (raw)
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This article is a summary of one part of a larger project, which studied war and the resulting production of disabled bodies, analyzed in a dialectical (i.e., not linear, oppositional, binary, idealist, or mechanical) and historical materialist framework. This article comprises a summarized report of one aspect of a case study and a new conceptualization of disability theory from a transnational perspective. The case study examines the social relations behind the production of disabled bodies in the Iran-Iraq war, in which chemical weapons of mass destruction were used. The second part of the article, using the case study report, develops an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist, and non-ideological (according to Marx's Consciousness Theory) model for understanding disability. 1 This study uses the global context of capitalist economy and the imperialist politics of the United States and Europe in the Middle East to understand how disabled bodies are generated through armed conflicts sustained by imperialist and nationalist social relations (always gendered, raced, and classed). This study engages * Sona is final year Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Adult Education and Community Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. For the past several years, Sona has been researching the living conditions of people (both veteran and civilian) who have become disabled as a result of wars in the Middle East, especially Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. As well, she has conducted extensive research on the historical incarceration of intellectuals, political dissidents, journalists, and community organizers in the post-revolution Iran. Additionally, she has worked and organized with Iranian and Kurdish political prison survivors and their families as a trauma counselor and political ally for the past five years. Her research, praxis, and activism focus on imperialism, nationalism, and the acquisition of disability due to violence. Sona's research investigates the nationalist and imperialist politics of nation-building in the Middle East to understand how disabled bodies are generated through wars and degenerative public-spaces, such as prison, sustained by ideological, gendered, raced, and classed social-relations. Sona's academic research informs and is informed by eight years of community teaching experience, such as teaching English to and social-justice organizing with the newly-arrived (often traumatized) Iranian, Kurdish, and Cuban immigrant and refugee women with mental health concerns. Her scholarship and praxis engage the dialectics of geopolitics, examine them in the context of incarceration and armed conflict, and understand internalized oppression from her standpoint, a war-survivor Middle Eastern woman's standpoint.
This paper interrogates the ambiguity of disability identification for women living with HIV, drawing on a nine-month field research project where participants formed a book group, reading memoirs about chronic episodic conditions such as HIV, lupus, MS, and chronic depression, and discussed their relationships to disability. In investigating this ambiguity, this paper re-reads Social Contract Theory, primarily the work of John Locke, Mills, Pateman, and Winnubst, to introduce the Ability Contract. Social Contract Theory can provide us with an understanding of labor’s centrality in the construction of the liberal subject, which implicitly shapes construction of dis/ability. Several scholars have written about Social Contract Theory’s applicability to gendered subjects and racialized subjects, but few scholars have used dis/ability to interrogate Social Contract Theory. This project looks at John Locke to argue that his understanding of labor, utility and waste, and the predictability of what will be produced, is a result of understanding one’s bodily boundaries. The Ability Contract is this triad of labor-utility-predictability that is foundational to liberal subjectivity. Disability upsets this construction of liberal subjectivity, which in turn, enables an unstable negotiation of identity that extends Chicana feminist theorist Chela Sandoval’s theorization differential consciousness. For women living with HIV, disability identification is useful for accessing temporary assistance but ultimately, the women who participated in this nine-month book group, disidentified with disability through a negotiation of labor. Through the Ability Contract, and the centrality of labor-utility-predictability, we can understand that a stable identification with disability is a privilege dependent upon male-bodied whiteness.