Category Archives: disability

Dis/Occupy the Olympics

Posted on by

Oscar Pistorius runs in his Olympic 400 metres heat

The orgy of nationalism and sentimentality known as the Olympics has been very much not in my mind. The notoriously awful NBC coverage reduces excitement to boredom–they even showed ads during the middle distance races. There was a moment today, though, for those of us dis/abled or otherwise differently embodied folks, when Oscar Pistorius of South Africa ran in a 400 metres heat. As most people surely know, Pistorius is a double amputee and runs on J-blades. He not only participated but finished second, putting him in the semi-finals.

His charming pleasure in this accomplishment contrasted with the usual Gold! obsession of the Anglophone media. It reminds me that different modes of embodiment  and body presentation continue to have to struggle for acceptance. One of the aspects of the Occupy movement that I love is its attachment and embrace of all forms of self-actualization. Pistorius’s lesson for us is that it’s not just an end to medical debt that we call for: we want everyone to be able to get what they need, whether that’s a signing school for the Deaf, gender reassignment surgery, prosthetics, insulin, whatever: regardless of income.

Pistorius has had to compete not only against his fellow athletes but the extraordinary assumption that running on prostheses might somehow be an advantage. The myth of the Terminator cyborg is perhaps to blame here. Vivian Sobchack long ago dismissed the enhancement fantasy from her own experience with a prosthetic limb. Pistorius himself put it like this:

I think often there’s a lot of debate about the advantages, but there’s not much said about the disadvantages. If this was such an amazing piece of equipment that’s been around for 14 years, then how come thousands of other Paralympic athletes aren’t breaking world records and challenging even a 45- or a 48- or a 49-second 400m?

Here then is the crux: in common with people of color, women and people of non-normative sexualities, the dis/abled are both assumed to be inferior but suspect for any effort that is made to make them/us equal. Pistorius cannot simply be a good runner who lacks lower limbs. He must be a “crippled” runner made into a superhero by his device.

I’m deaf, or technically hard-of-hearing because I can decipher sound using lip-reading and an electronic device. Being deaf is still assumed to be a personal failing by mainstream normative culture, who celebrate the occasional exception like the fabulous Marlee Matlin, but presume deafness to indicate stupidity as a rule.

Marlee Matlin in The L-Word

Consequently, the 50 million people with hearing loss in this country are a totally ineffective lobby because we are unwilling to identify ourselves. Signing Deaf people, who defend Deaf culture vigorously, are the exception we should learn from.

For example, an odd editorial in the New York Times presented hard-of-hearing people yesterday as being at a disadvantage in noisy spaces because their devices amplify all noise, making it unbearably loud. This was true for analog hearing aids, but digital devices all use a compression curve and most that cost as much those the article cited (about $3000) will have a setting for noisy spaces that eliminates background noise. So I find myself at an advantage compared to my “hearing” middle-aged friends in such spaces.

The issue here is in fact one of insurance. If you have good insurance, as I do through New York State (thanks to my partner Kathleen), devices are covered. If not, you have to pay for them, and for hearing tests, and they are very expensive. So although hearing is considered the indispensable attribute of the human, because of music and spoken language, hearing aids are part only of what is known sneeringly as “Cadillac” plans. All politicians now agree such luxuries must be dispensed with. Prosthetic devices like those used by Pistorius and myself will be for those who can afford them. Some have disparaged Occupy as being “medieval” but what could be more medieval than that? Free universal health care is not a demand. It’s a right.

 

Local Space, Local Bodies

Posted on by

Where and what is the local? We spend a good deal of time worrying about the global but the local seems obvious. Occupy is intriguingly showing that not to be the case.There are many ways in which physical localities can be configured, as we saw first with the encampments and more recently with anti-foreclosure and anti-school closings activism in the movement. Yet the concept perhaps begins with the most local space of all: our bodies.

At a meeting in New York today, Aaron Bady who has been active with Occupy Oakland discussed the clear differences between OWS and OO. In fact, locally Occupy Oakland is known as the Oakland Commune, not as Occupy. Most notable was his demonstration that OO operates in a media desert, where even the local “newspaper” the Oakland Tribune is simply assembled from press releases. So when OO activists participate in City Council meetings and tweet the proceedings, they are meeting a real journalistic need.

Bady further talked of his own personal experience and suggested that OO had made him feel like an Oakland resident for the first time, despite having lived there for four years. His account resonated with me. OWS has made me revise my psychogeography of New York in so many ways. In the interstices of a city that appears to be nothing but nail salons, banks and pharmacies, I have found my way to trade union halls, churches, artist-run spaces, and other spaces that are not usually imagined as being part of “New York.” It comes to seem as if the commercialized New York has been imposed on top of this other New York, sometimes squashing it altogether as in the transformation of the old CBGB’s into a fashion boutique.

At the same meeting, anthropologist Faye Ginsburg spoke of dis/ability activism, reminding us again of how central non-normative embodiment and self-actualization is to whatever it is that is Occupy. On March 17 at the re-occupation and re-eviction of Zuccotti Park, activists from the Disabilities Working Group were present throughout, some in chairs and one person using a ventilator apparatus. They were absolutely unintimidated by the cops.

Ginsburg showed a remarkable video made in 2007 by Amanda Baggs, in which she is shown first making movements and sounds characteristic of a person on the autism spectrum. Then the video moves to a “translation” into sub-titled and machine-generated English, in which Baggs explains that in her view she experiences the environment in a very different and  more extensive spectrum of feelings and connections. She scoffed at “expert” suggestions that other people “must” have made the video and reeled off a long list of software and equipment that she had used to a Wired journalist. The inevitable Internet sites that call her a “fraud” miss her whole point: it’s not that there are no differences but there are far more differences than is normally–and that’s the mot juste here–recognized.

In 2007, Baggs wrote about wishing there were an equivalent to the queer liberation movement for people with autism. Her video was part of the accomplishment of that goal. She now writes as a “political” or “ethical” blogger and has expressed balanced support for the Occupy movement:

most people (and therefore most people involved in this movement) fundamentally don’t grasp that disabled people are people. They’ll deny it, and they may believe they think we’re people, but their actions treat us differently than their words do. Even people who are against capitalist greed in theory, have usually not worked out that part of capitalism is valuing people differently based on the kind and amount of work they do, and the creation of a system that figures that if it can’t manage to exploit disabled people then we’re basically trash….I absolutely support the general idea of the movement…. but I also know that without disabled people’s voices getting heard the outcomes could still be quite bad for us even if their goals are totally met otherwise.

So while it has become quite popular, even standard practice, to say that the movements for recognition distracted from the struggle against capitalism, it’s starting to seem like the opposite: that a set of localized distinctions and claims is precisely what is forming the possibility of imagining a world without capitalism, something that many had come to think impossible.

 

Civil Disability

Posted on by

If there is to be a new eugenics, it will return to a hierarchy of citizenship, in which some citizens are fully empowered members of the public and many others are not.  In English jurisprudence, this latter condition is known as “civil disability.” It has kept those perceived as not equal to the standards of citizenship from enjoying the right to vote or even the right to appear as a witness in a law case.  It has applied to the enslaved, Jews and women. It still applies to minors and those designated insane. In the current optic of power, civil disability permits corporations to have the standing of people, while individual people are the objects of kettling, spraying, scanning and other forms of classification.

The very diversity and dis/ability of Occupy—even if widely considered insufficient within the movement—appears to add to the vengeful force of the reassertion of authority. Such bodies are not supposed to be able to make political choices but only to be the grateful recipients of Lifetime made-for-TV movies and to supply “meaningful” roles for able-bodied actors to win Oscars. It is as if authority says, if you will not accept the ways we disable you once, then we will do it again. That is to say, disability is not a physical condition but a social one: it is the lack of accommodations that makes a person in a chair have difficulty negotiating space not an inherent incapacity. This disabling is now extended to all suspect bodies: which is often everyone.

I have not flown since Occupy began, unusually for someone who travels a lot. Today I had to submit to being kettled by the TSA at JFK airport in order to wait for the privilege of partially undressing and then being scanned while standing with my hands raised over my head by who knows what purportedly safe form of radiation. It was presumably designed to make people feel powerless and it does. While hygiene was the key to the original eugenics and still plays a significant role, the new eugenics takes its energy from the discourses of safety.

Later in the overcrowded container called “coach,” a fellow passenger was harangued by a flight attendant because the straps of his backpack, which he was forced to stow “under the seat in front” because no other space was available, intruded by a matter of two inches into our seating space. If we had to evacuate, we were told, we might get entangled. I rearranged my feet and the emergency was over because we had displayed sufficient passivity. As the Italian cruise ship disaster showed, actual safety has nothing to do with any of this—passengers were sent back to their cabins as the boat took on water.

In such situations, any challenge to the “move on” authority of the police results in immediate arrest, deportation or deplaning. (By the way, is there an uglier world than “deplane”? One candidate would the use of the term “designated receptacle” to mean bin.)  The demonstrators at Move In Day in Oakland were repeatedly hailed to “submit to arrest.” That is, it is not enough that you be arrested. You must submit to it, accept the authority by which you are arrested and reconfigure your own practice from civil disobedience to crime.

Traditional eugenics and civil disability were not at all interested in what the disabled citizen thought of themselves because by definition their thoughts were not important. If it matters so much to the new agents of civil disability that we submit to being “disabled” by them, it is because they have learned their trade from counterinsurgency.  Under the Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency, it was not enough for the occupying power to be able to dominate the population. That population must “actively and passively” consent to being ruled. So you must not only go through the security checkpoint, you must accept that the checkpoint is there for your security and is therefore right. It doesn’t work and what’s more it has never worked.

Interestingly, the military themselves have abandoned the counterinsurgent fantasy. They are withdrawing regular troops from Afghanistan, having abandoned Iraq to pick  things up where they left off in about 2007. Now ubiquitous anti-terrorism is the goal, with targeted missions being carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles or special operations troops. Just as the brief triumph of counterinsurgency rested on the apparent success of the “surge” in Iraq, so is this new paradigm clearly based on the bin Laden assassination. The administration is impervious to anxieties about the lack of due process of those targeted or even the “collateral damage” done to the by-standers. All of these people, whether by virtue of being insurgents or failing to remove themselves from proximity to insurgents, are under the prescription of civil disability.

Just so, a TSA agent said to us a while ago, “you have no rights here.” Just so, police launch a “surge” in the Wind City Reservation to reduce crime statistics. Just so, you may be evicted from public space because you are not considered part of the public or expelled from federal space because you are not a fully-fledged citizen. Buttressing the entire process is the longest-running process of civil disability in the United States, the mass incarceration of African-American and minority populations. Over two million people are part of the prison-industrial system that so patently discriminates by ethnicity that Michele Alexander has called it “the new Jim Crow.” More exactly, one might say it was the old Jim Crow. As Angela Davis has shown, the penitentiary and work-lease systems were devised as part of As “felons,” many of the released lose civil rights.