Skyer (2019) Bodies In Dependence A Focauldian Genealogy of the Americans with Disabilities Acts DSQ 39(2) (original) (raw)
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Bodies in Dependence: A Foucauldian Genealogy of the Americans with Disabilities Acts
Disability Studies Quarterly, 2019
The Americans with Disabilities Acts (ADA) of 1990 and 2008 are laws imagined as enacting two goals: enhancing civil rights and reducing sociopolitical discrimination for Americans with disabilities; however, findings from this study strongly contrast with popular assumptions about the ADA. Key findings show how the ADA legitimizes governmental control of disability through discourse to consolidate economic power. The study employs the genealogical method, derived from Foucault, which is used to identify destructive and productive operations of power and identify ambiguities in discursive regimes. The ADA constructs a discursive category of "disability," the results of which are contradictory and problematic, evincing an asymmetrical power distribution between governmentality and people with disabilities. In the ADA, disabled people are conflated with abnormal bodies. The ADA's rhetorical construction of disability suggests that constructing a unified "disabled body" allows for individuals with disabilities to be defined and then controlled en masse. Events and rhetoric surrounding the ADA's passage illuminate how it regulates disabled individuals, described as untapped sources of economic potential. This genealogy uncovers findings indicating disturbing facts. For instance, the ADA articulates disabled bodies in service of capitalistic exploitation rather than human liberation. Similarly, the ADA generates a unique form of discursive hegemony that aims to control the bodies, minds, and perhaps the souls of Americans with disabilities. This study is concerned with how power and disability interact in the ADA. To interpret my findings, my theoretical framework leverages disability studies' (DS) focus on redefining disability in terms of self-determination and post-structural theories of discourse and subjectivity. While disabled people and disability scholars are increasingly demanding theoretical autonomy to define themselves (Anderson, 2008; Kucklick, 2003), genealogy is "concerned with the consequences of actions and operations" (Perhamus, 2005). Together, this study takes up Kudlick's (2003) assertion that "disability should sit squarely at the center of historical inquiry" (p. 765). This manuscript organizes evidence showing how the ADA's discourse negates the contemporary pluralist epistemology of disabilities as represented in contemporary DS scholarship (Davis, 2013). Read through the analytic framework of Foucault's theories of power, and interpreted via two theoretical lenses, the ADA's consequences are: 1) to generate broad discursive powers for the government to move through and control the bodies of disabled people for its own purposes; and 2) to exert hegemonic, economic control over disability, to the exclusion of social and political autonomy that rightly belong to persons with disabilities. Methods and Analytic Framework Genealogical methods are analytic tools 2 used to trace discursive ambiguities and to map articulations of power within and surrounding historical events. Foucault's genealogy is "a history of the present" (Kearins & Hooper, 2002, p. 735). Genealogy rejects linear historicizing and Entities") receive 64 pages of regulation.
The rights of disabled people are defined as medical care, employment opportunity, transportation equality and access to government-funded broadcasting. 6 This distinction, between "rights" and "needs" was informed by feminist scholarship, primarily Peggy McIntosh, in the Curriculum Studies Reader, 2009 by Eds. Flinders and Thornton. 7 The needs of disabled people include, but not limited to educational, cultural, linguistic, physical, emotional, civic needs. 8 A more extended discussion is in the Theoretical Framework section.
The present thesis is a demographic and socio-economic study of disability in the United States of America (U.S.), where data is analyzed to understand if disabled people occupy a better structural position in twenty-first-century America than they did in the twentieth century. This thesis consists of three parts. First, a theoretical discussion of disability as an object of research, as well as disability’s social construction and cultural production. Second, a brief contextualization of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), Pub. L. 101-336, 104 Stat. 327, the most important piece of legislation for disabled people in American history. Lastly, a quantitative analysis of pre-COVID-19 demographic and socio-economic data (2008- 2018) to better understand the current position of disabled people in the U.S. three decades after the passage of the ADA. Can it be said that the approval of the ADA changed the structural position of disabled people in the U.S., or has the Act failed to live up to its expectations and purpose? Despite some significant advancements, mainly in the areas of accessibility and transportation, reviewed data in the last section of this study shows that disabled people in the U.S. continue to be disproportionally overrepresented at the bottom of most statistical indicators, much as they were before the Americans with Disabilities Act’s enactment in 1990.
Foucault, Governmentality, and Critical Disability Theory: An Introduction
Foucault and the Government of …, 2005
Twenty years after Michel Foucault died of complications from AIDS, the scope of his intellectual endeavors and the tremendous impetus to social change which that body of work offers are only beginning to be appreciated. Across the disciplines, including history, philosophy, the social sciences, medicine, semiotics, and psychology, Foucault's work has provoked scholars to question what had previously been considered self-evident, timeless, unchanging, and necessary. In various writings, lectures, and public statements, Foucault urged critical re›ections on the current situation, and on the historical conditions that led to these formations and how they might be differently perceived. To assist people in ‹nding new ways to conceive of their relationships to themselves and with each other, and their imbrication in relations of power, he provided the analytical tools of archaeology and genealogy; and he elaborated groundbreaking analyses of punishment, psychiatry, and sexuality to show how these tools could be employed.
Foucault Studies, 2008
The essays that comprise Foucault and the Government of Disability represent a crossdisciplinary approach to writing Michel Foucault into the burgeoning cross-disciplinary field of "disability studies." The book is divided into four sections: Epistemologies and Ontologies, Histories, Governmentalities, and Ethics and Politics. While "no one model, doctrine, or vocabulary with respect to disability governs the essays," two major themes from Foucault's work run more or less constantly throughout the book. 1 First, the essays offer a critique, implicitly or explicitly, of the governmentality of disability, specifically its neo-liberal modalities, and the legal and political distinction made in the U.K. between "disability" and "impairment." Second, following Foucault's Discipline and Punish, the essays explore the related theme of power in late-capitalist societies, examining, with varying degrees of success, the ways in which the individual subject becomes complicit in the functioning of power-implicating the individual in the very processes of power that serve to control and delimit acts and behaviors, as well as the very possibilities of agency, identity, and perceived reality. At their best, these articles convince by uncovering and describing specific circumstances whereby individuals submit to and/or resist forms of disciplinary control within concrete practices of subjectification. Just as often, however, these articles fail to substantiate their initial claims made along the lines of this most important of Foucault's themes, and the arguments devolve into crypto-Marxian critiques that push the limits of Foucault's conceptualization of power and resistance. Given that Foucault himself dealt directly with the histories of "feeblemindedness" and "idiocy," as well as medical, psychological, and biological deviation in general, some might be surprised that Foucauldian analyses of this kind are not already firmly entrenched in the study of disability. Yet, with a handful notable 1
Foucault Studies, 2008
The essays that comprise Foucault and the Government of Disability represent a crossdisciplinary approach to writing Michel Foucault into the burgeoning cross-disciplinary field of "disability studies." The book is divided into four sections: Epistemologies and Ontologies, Histories, Governmentalities, and Ethics and Politics. While "no one model, doctrine, or vocabulary with respect to disability governs the essays," two major themes from Foucault's work run more or less constantly throughout the book. 1 First, the essays offer a critique, implicitly or explicitly, of the governmentality of disability, specifically its neo-liberal modalities, and the legal and political distinction made in the U.K. between "disability" and "impairment." Second, following Foucault's Discipline and Punish, the essays explore the related theme of power in late-capitalist societies, examining, with varying degrees of success, the ways in which the individual subject becomes complicit in the functioning of power-implicating the individual in the very processes of power that serve to control and delimit acts and behaviors, as well as the very possibilities of agency, identity, and perceived reality. At their best, these articles convince by uncovering and describing specific circumstances whereby individuals submit to and/or resist forms of disciplinary control within concrete practices of subjectification. Just as often, however, these articles fail to substantiate their initial claims made along the lines of this most important of Foucault's themes, and the arguments devolve into crypto-Marxian critiques that push the limits of Foucault's conceptualization of power and resistance. Given that Foucault himself dealt directly with the histories of "feeblemindedness" and "idiocy," as well as medical, psychological, and biological deviation in general, some might be surprised that Foucauldian analyses of this kind are not already firmly entrenched in the study of disability. Yet, with a handful notable 1
The construction of access: the eugenic precedent of the Americans with Disabilities Act
Continuum, 2017
This paper interrogates the language of the legal precedents of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and their function, including the 1891 Immigration Law and the series of 'ugly laws' that spanned from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. Legislative language is used to construct and deploy static definitions of normalcy and disability, relying on 'objective' evidence couched in medical and scientific discourse. The purpose of this paper is to uncover the legislative precedents of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA) that were motivated by the eugenicist imperative to strengthen the image of a productive and robust nation. I begin by outlining eugenicist logic and demonstrate how it functions within a semiotic system. Then, I will introduce the process by which eugenicist logic works within legal semiotics. Lastly, I will provide three examples of how this process functions in the legislative language and implementation of the 1891 Immigration Act, the 'ugly laws' and the ADAAA. Ultimately, I will demonstrate how all three provide evidence of a pattern of semiotic systems that pathologize human difference and manages these differences so as to segregate and disenfranchise in the name of nationalism. With the current American election cycle upon us, the disdain for weakness, failure and outsiders has come to characterize the nativism that is driving the political divides. These appeals to strength and victory make it impossible not to hear echoes of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century: DenHoed (2016) succinctly points out that 'fears of procreation and infiltration still have force, although they're directed not at "hopelessly vicious protoplasm" but at "anchor babies"; instead of the pure blood of the Nordic races, we hear invocations of that other superior species, the Winners'. The imagined future of American identity is bound up in tirades against the unfit, often deploying scientific terminology to justify the hegemonic construction of spaces of belonging. In Disabled Upon Arrival: The Rhetorical Construction of Disability and Race at Ellis Island, Dolmage (2011, 55) argues that 'we see not just the ways that spaces and discourses work together to impose social order, creating spaces in which deviation is sequestered; we also see how spaces and discourses in part create deviation and difference'. This attention to deviation and difference reflects how much the foundational concepts regarding the legal usage of space has historically been bound up in medical and scientific discourse. Snyder and Mitchell's (2006, 3) examination of what they call the 'cultural locations of disability' demonstrate how spaces are characterized by the demarcation between normative and undesirable bodies. Consequently, they argue, disabled bodies in these spaces are often understood as undesirable and
The Vanishing Body of Disability Law: Power and the Making of the Impaired Subject
Canadian Journal of Family Law, 2018
The influence of disability studies on legal scholarship is most visible in the social model, which claims that people are not disabled because of their bodily impairments, but by society in its refusal to accommodate their impairments. However, a modest but growing discourse within disability studies argues that the notion of impairment, in addition to disability, is socially constructed. This article aims to bring this problematized conception of impairment, informed by Michel Foucault's conception of power, into contact with legal scholarship. Judith Mosoff's sensibility about the role of impairments in the legal treatment of disabled people illustrates this critical outlook, which has the potential to guide scholarship and legal reforms. For instance, in the context of family law, those reforms could affect the evaluation of a person's fitness to parent or her right to childcare support. The first part of this article makes a prima facie case for a critical ontology ...
Review of The Biopolitics of Disability by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder
ALH Online Review, 2018
The Biopolitics of Disability picks up where their previous book Cultural Locations of Disability (2006) left off: with the "feedback loops between disability and neoliberalism" (165). In Cultural Locations, they argued that eugenics-which views disability as a biological defect-underwrote the liberal state's disciplinary strategies (forced sterilization, institutionalization, and segregation) for turning populations into productive bodies. The replacement of liberal apparatuses of exclusion with neoliberal strategies of inclusion might seem, then, a story of progress. Not so. Set in the late twentieth-century shift from Fordist production to post-Fordist consumption, Biopolitics limns the perils that assimilation and integration pose for disabled people. Although meaningful, the hard-won recognition, access, and rights achieved since the 1970s tend to normalize and universalize disability, thereby effacing the varieties of disabled experience. But in addition to examining the transformation of disability from a medical condition into a site of conditional acceptance, Mitchell and Snyder make a powerful case for disability as a way of being and being-with that imagines and pursues "other worlds."
Disability & Society, 2002
Disability studies has shown how therapeutic professionals and people with disabilities occupy opposite sides of a deep cultural divide, one that arti cially bisects normalcy from 'abnormalcy'. The philosophy of political subjectivity provides an opportunity to analyse the fraught nexus that exists between institutions and those who navigate them as professionals and 'clients'. Our essay seeks to theorise the subject positions that emerge as a result of this often volatile intersection by offering up four critical vignettes: (1) an analysis of the systems and networks that characterise disabled transport within the Chicago Transit Authority; (2) speech therapy training and clinical practices designed for those whose articulation is diagnosed as inferior; (3) an African American clinician's analysis of disability taxonomies applied to minority wards of the state of Illinois; and (4) an analysis of scapegoating at the national level in a class-action law suit regarding the 'missed' diagnosis of disability prior to birth. These overlapping cross-disability accounts seek to enact boundary crossings as the foundation for a new Chicago Model of interdisciplinary disability studies. The essay concludes with a discussion of the need to broaden disability coalitions as the terrain of political struggle becomes increasingly diverse and complex.