Humanity as a Contested Concept: Relations between Disability and ‘Being Human’ (original) (raw)
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This paper explores the human through critical disability studies and the theories of Rosi Braidotti. We ask: what does it mean to be human in the 21st Century and in what ways does disability enhance these meanings? In addressing this question we seek to work through entangled connections of nature, society, technology, medicine, biopower and culture to consider the extent to which the human might be an outdated phenomenon, replaced by Braidotti’s posthuman condition. We then introduce disability as a political category, an identity and a moment of relational ethics. Critical disability studies, we argue, are perfectly at ease with the posthuman because disability has always contravened the traditional classical humanist conception of what it means to be human. Disability also invites a critical analysis of the posthuman. We examine the ways in which disability and posthuman work together, enhancing and complicating one another in ways that raise important questions about the kinds of life and death we value. We consider three of Braidotti’s themes in relation to disability: I. Life beyond the self: Rethinking enhancement; II. Life beyond the species: Rethinking animal; III. Life beyond death: Rethinking death. We conclude by advocating a posthuman disability studies that responds directly to contemporary complexities around the human whilst celebrating moments of difference and disruption
The Question of Disability in the Post-Human Debate. Critical Remarks
Cuadernos de bioetica : revista oficial de la Asociacion Espanola de Bioetica y Etica Medica
The issue of disability represents a test case for the sustainability, practical and theoretical, of transhumanist theories that lead to the advent of a posthuman era. In fact, dealing with mankind implies also the possibility that man has a disability. So, seeing whether, in the posthuman debate, persons with disability are respected, will show us if every man is respected. In this paper we start by analyzing the definition of disability given by the posthuman theorists. As we will see, this definition is deficient because it is strictly linked with the transhumanists' refusal of the distinction between therapeutic treatment and enhancement. The field of enhancement is very wide, and the moral judgment on it cannot be generalized. Nowadays, many developments made possible by human enhancement theories remain only speculated upon. However, those theories are already influential in the field of studying the beginning of life. Indeed, the possibility ″to choose children″ is real: ...
This paper examines the transhumanist approach to disability focusing on its defining feature: human enhancement. The study of what underlies the philosophy of enhancement allows to connect original humanism (lying at the foundations of modern human rights theory) with the transhumanist discourse. Both humanists and transhumanists, but particularly transhumanists, understand human nature in a way that discriminates against persons with disabilities. Diversity-based humanism comes in response to this, allowing to address the role of emerging technologies vis-à-vis disability.
In this paper, we seek to develop an understanding of the human driven by a commitment to the politics of disability, especially those of people with intellectual disabilities. Our position as family members and allies to people associated with this phenomenon of intellectual disability influences our philosophical conceptions and political responses. This has led us recently to develop a theory of dis/human studies which, we contend, simultaneously acknowledges the possibilities offered by disability to trouble, reshape and re-fashion the human (crip ambitions) while at the same time asserting disabled people’s humanity (normative desires). We sketch out four dis/human considerations: (1) dis/autonomy, voice and evacuating the human individual; (2) dis/independence, assemblage and collective humanness; (3) dis/ability politics, self-advocacy and repositioning the human; and (4) dis/family: desiring the normal, embracing the non-normative. We argue that this feeds into the wider project of dis/ability studies, and we conclude that we desire a time when we view life through the prism of the dishuman (note, without the slash).
Subjectivity, 2014
This article explores the human through critical disability studies and the theories of Rosi Braidotti. We ask: What does it mean to be human in the twenty-first century and in what ways does disability enhance these meanings? In addressing this question we seek to work through entangled connections of nature, society, technology, medicine, biopower and culture to consider the extent to which the human might be an outdated phenomenon, replaced by Braidotti's posthuman condition. We then introduce disability as a political category, an identity and a moment of relational ethics. Critical disability studies, we argue, are perfectly at ease with the posthuman because disability has always contravened the traditional classical humanist conception of what it means to be human. Disability also invites a critical analysis of the posthuman. We examine the ways in which disability and posthuman work together, enhancing and complicating one another in ways that raise important questions about the kinds of life and death we value. We consider three of Braidotti's themes in relation to disability: (i) Life beyond the self: Rethinking enhancement; (ii) Life beyond the species: Rethinking animal; (iii) Life beyond death: Rethinking death. We conclude by advocating a posthuman disability studies that responds directly to contemporary complexities around the human while celebrating moments of difference and disruption.
Desiring and critiquing humanity/ability/personhood: disrupting the ability/disability binary
Disability & Society
The authors take up the challenge of Goodley and Runswick-Cole's call to dismantle the ability/disability binary such that those now called 'disabled' can unproblematically join the ranks of those who will be counted as human. Using the methodology of collective biography, the six authors explore their own memories of becoming abled, and find in those memories a similar pattern of desire for, and critique of, humanness that Goodley and Runswick-Cole found in the participants in their own study, participants who were categorised as intellectually disabled. We turn to post philosophies to further develop the vocabularies through which the meaning of human can be expanded to include those who are currently viewed as less-than-human or other-to-human in their difference from the norm.
In this analysis the authors fold disability into a cross-national equation by including disabled people as part of a transAtlantic discussion of otherness. In naming this new cultural space the 'Eugenic Atlantic', we take up Paul Gilroy's 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.
given me much support and encouragement along the way to here, for which I am very grateful. I am indebted to the active student members of the seminar courses and voluntary reading groups with whom various aspects of this book have been put through the discussion wringer. I am especially grateful to Terri Pitts and Barbara Barker, who helped proof-read. Dan and Annette Ahem encouraged me throughout the writing of the book and offered me an unwavering belief that the project would come to fmition. Their sensitivity and humour were invaluable sources of support to me. xiv Acknowledgments Lindsay MeVicar responded to much of this work, offering many thought-provoking comments. Dan and Judy Macinnes contributed many good thoughts and shared many good times with me when I most needed them. Judy treated both my writing of the manuscript and its potential publication as an unquestionable matter of fact. I am especially grateful to Dan Macinnes, who was the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology while I was writing this book. Against many odds, Dan treated me as a bona fide and valuable colleague, supported the continuation of my teaching, and encouraged me to teach courses that would enhance my writing. My deepest respect and gratitude I give to Rod Michalko. A life with him in blindness has made for much reading and many wonderful conversations, and has filled them, as well as this book, with vigour and life. I thank him also for maintaining a faith in me that I could not develop or maintain on my own. The provocation of his life, work, and wisdom has taught me the importance of developing a sociological stance that can speak to embodiment and to the moral implications behind being-in-the-world as disabled people.