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Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Notes Chapter 3 1. A shorter version of this article was originally published in the Journal of Literary and Disability Studies 4, no. 2 (2010). The original article can be accessed at http://liverpool.metapress.com/content/121628/. Chapter 4 1 . Lennard Davis (2002) in his book Bending over Backwards, uses the term “dismodern” to distinguish it from the term “postmodern.” Davis argues that postmodernism is still based on humanist notions of the subject. According to Davis, the dismodern subject is a far more radical theoriza- tion of the subject that is “partial and incomplete . whose realization is not autonomy and independence but dependency and interdependence” (p. 30). Davis’s argument is a good example of a disability studies perspective that privileges the metaphorical without really examining the material condi- tions within which such metaphors gain prominence—an argument I will be making in this chapter. 2 . Here I am referring only to the emergency care that soldiers receive at the military bases and at hospitals such as Walter Reed in Bethesda, Maryland. Follow-up medical care and access to medical benefits that occurs in VA hospitals in the months following emergency care are reported by several news media sources to be far from satisfactory. 3 . Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (1995) define posthuman bodies as “the causes and effects of postmodern relations of power and pleasure, virtuality and reality, sex and its consequences. The posthuman body is a technology, a screen, a projected image; it is a body under the sign of AIDS, a contaminated body, a techno-body . a queer body.” (p. 3) 4 . Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) are economic restructuring pro- grams ordered by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and they are implemented in those countries that could not meet their debt obligations. This stabilization was also seen as a critical precondition for third world nations to qualify for loans needed in the future. SAPs requirements of deflation, devaluation, decontrol, and privatization (Elson, D. (1992). 200 Notes From survival strategies to transformation strategies: Women’s needs and structural adjustment. In L. Beneria, and S. Feldman (eds.) Unequal bur- den: economic crises, persistent poverty, and women’s work . Oxford: Westview Press) resulted in the following economic reforms in third world nation- states: trade liberalization, which required a more focused export policy on “cash crops” and other raw materials, and import substitution for all other goods that were not manufactured in the nation-state’s economy; increased dependence on international financial resources; and reductions in public spending, which included reduction in public sector employment, limita- tions on food and agricultural subsidies, denationalization of public sec- tor enterprises, and reduction in public expenditures in the areas of health, education, and social welfare (Feldman, (1992). Crisis, Islam and gender in Bangladesh: The social construction of a female labor force, in L. Benera, and S. Feldman (Eds.), Unequal burden: Economic crises, persistent poverty, and women’s work (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1992). In addition to these austerity measures, borrowing countries were encouraged to promote private investment, to support trade and tariff reforms that benefited the donor nations, and to construct export-processing zones (EPZs) for multi- national companies to produce goods tax-free using cheap labor from the host country—mostly third world women. Chapter 5 1 . I use the terminology “disabled people” rather than people with disabilities to foreground disability as a political category. However, at other times, I have used the terminology “people with cognitive severe/cognitive disabili- ties” to illustrate the social constructionist nature of these categories. Also, in the text of the essay, I included a discussion on the critical relationship between impairment and disability—and therefore refrain from pursuing the discussion in this footnote. 2 . According to Minow (1990) the “dilemma of difference” raises the fol- lowing question: “[W]hen does treating people differently emphasize their differences and stigmatize and hinder them on that basis and when does treating them the same become insensitive to their difference and likely to stigmatize or hinder them on that (emphasis in text) basis?” (p. 20). 3 . This number does not include the nearly 2 million disabled people, many of them with the most severe disabilities, who live in institutions. 4 . Martha Minow’s work is one notable exception. 5 . On pages 123–124 of her book, Making all the difference , Minow locates the origin of liberal politics in the historical conceptual shift from notions of fixed and assigned status to notions of individual freedoms and rights. More importantly, Minow asserts that “[r]eciprocal—and non-hierarchi- cal—obligations, freely chosen by self-defining beings, became the central pattern underlying economic transactions and political action . [and were predicated on] the new economic order [that] rested on private property and Notes 201 the market.” This clearly foregrounds the commitment of liberal politics to capitalism. 6 . In a chapter entitled “Different histories” (pp. 121–145), Minow argues that though scholars have depicted Western intellectual and legal histories as making the radical shift from notions of fixed and assigned status to notions of individual freedom and rights, this shift has in fact been incomplete. This is because, Minow points out that, when legal theory supports what she calls the “abnormal-persons approach” (an approach that support restraints on the autonomy and rights of those populations considered “incompe- tent” and therefore “abnormal,” e.g., persons with cognitive/severe disabili- ties), then legal theory has acted on the basis of social status rather than on notions of individual rights. Thus, Minow writes, “Cast in this light, doctrines about incompetence reveal areas that a liberal legal order does not reach, area where an older notion of law continues to operate” (my emphasis) (p. 126). How much more feudal can we get! 7 . Here one can see how poststructuralist theory is also committed to some of the precepts of humanism even while critiquing that position. 8 . Paris Is Burning is a documentary on drag queens directed by Jenny Livingstone. Bibliography Abbasi, K. (1999). The world bank and world health: Under fire. British Medical Journal . Retrieved from http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7189/1003. Abramovitz, M. (1996). Regulating our lives: Social welfare policy from the colonial times to the present . Boston, MA: South End Press. Adams, R. (2001). Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American cultural imagination . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Addlakha, R. (2007). How young people with disabilities conceptualize the body, sex, and marriage in urban India: Four case studies. Sex and Disability, 25 : 111–123. Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer. Sovereign power and bare life . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ahmed, S. (1998). Animated borders: Skin, color, and tanning. In M. Shildrick & J. Price (Eds.), Vital signs: Feminist reconfigurations of the bio/logical body (pp. 45–65). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective economies. Social Text, 22 (2), 117–139. Al- Ali, N. (2005). Reconstructing gender: Iraqi women between dictatorship, war, sanctions, and occupation. Third World Quarterly, 26 (4–5), 739–748. Alexander, M. J., & Mohanty, C. T. (1997). Introduction: Geneaologies, legacies, movements. In M. J. A. Alexander & C. T. Mohanty (Eds.), Feminist geneaolo- gies, colonial legacies, democratic futures (pp. xiii–xlii). New York: Routledge. Allen, L. (2008). “They think you shouldn’t be having sex anyway”: Young peo- ple’s suggestions for improving sexuality education content. Sexualities, 11 (5), 573–594. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism . London: Verso. Anyon, J. (1997). Ghetto schooling: A political economy of urban educational reform . New York: Teachers College Press. Anzaldua, G. (1990). Making face, making soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and critical perspectives by women of color . San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Arondekar, A. (2005). Border/Line sex: Queer positionalities, or how race matters outside the United States. Interventions,7 (2), 236–250. Artiles, A. J. (1998). The dilemma of difference: Enriching the disproportionality discourse with theory and content. Journal of Special Education, 32 (1), 32–37. Artiles, A. J., Harry, B., Reschly, D. J., & Chinn, P. C. (2002). Over- identification of students of color in special education: A critical overview. Multicultural Perspectives, 4 (1), 3–10. 204 Bibliography Ashcraft, C. (2006). “Girl, you better go get you a condom”: Popular culture and teen sexuality as resources for critical multicultural curriculum. Teachers College Record, 108 (10), 2145–2186. Aunos, M., & Feldman, M. A. (2002). Attitudes towards sexuality, sterilization, and parenting rights of persons with intellectual disabilities. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, 15 : 285–296. Baldock, J., & Ungerson, C. (1990). “What d’ya want if you do want money?”: A feminist critique of “paid volunteering.” In M. Maclean & D. Groves (Eds.), Women’s issues in social policy (pp. 136–157). New York: Routledge. Baldwin, S., & Twigg, J. (1990). Women and community care: Reflections on a debate. In M. Maclean & D. Groves (Eds.), Women’s
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