Cripping the Decolonial and Decolonizing Disability Studies

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“Cripping the Decolonial and Decolonizing Disability Studies, or The Universal Design of Colonial Metaphors” Prof. Lydia McDermott, Whitman College

Before I begin, I need to make a few important acknowledgements: 1. First, the land on which my house is sitting and the land on which Whitman college rests is Native land and first belonged to the Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Umatilla peoples. In 1855, a treaty council was held by U.S. government representatives , and against tribal arguments and interests, tribal leaders were coerced into signing treaties that lost them 6.4 million acres of land, and they were relocated to what is now the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Reservation, south of us, in Oregon (access “Walla Walla Treaty Council 1855” n.d.) .

2. I need to acknowledge that I am a white visibly able-bodied cis-woman living in the US. I am

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honored to participate in this roundtable on a topic that is newer to my research, which centers on reproductive justice. Though I have lived a life palpably affec ted by disability, my perspective is not the perspective I am advocating for in this talk. In fact, my perspective, as a white academic in the US is a perspective that needs to be deemphasized in an effort to decolonize disability studies. That being said, I hope that the scholars I draw on here and that I list in my references can lead you to new perspectives.

3. As a scholar working within Disability Rhetoric, I am dedicated to attempting to make my scholarship and teaching as accessible to as many people as possible. Therefore, I will be choosing whenever possible to use the plainest most straightforward language I can. The script for this presentation is available here, online, and uploaded to the chat box.

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My title already seems to be disobeying the prin ciple of plain language I just laid out, so I will now unpack a few terms: Disability Studies (DS) “DS is a trans-disciplinary intellectual and activist project that takes as its starting point the idea that the experience of disability, rather than an in dividual medical affliction and irredeemable tragedy, is both a marginalized cultural identity and an epistemic perspective with disruptive analytical potential” (Dirth and Adams 2019, 260) . So, disability provides a standpoint from which to make knowledge and to critique the status quo. DS scholars usually adhere to a “social model” of disability that suggests the social and physical environment i n which a person with an impairment exists disables them. This is in opposition to a “medical model” which locates the source of disability in the individual and seeks to cure the individual of the disability.

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Like many activist ideas that are turned into academic fields in the US, there are problems with DS. Hence new areas of study have emerged: Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and Global Disability Studies (GDS) , both of which I will explain further later. Each intervenes in order to account for a critical absence of perspective.

Universal Design is a principle grown out of architecture and applied to various fields, including the classroom in Universal Design for Instruction (UDI). The design principle suggests that a full variety of body -minds should be anticipated users in the initial construction of a site and that design features that take disabled body -minds into account benefit all body -minds. This is in opposition to the more general move to “retro -fit� by adding accessible features to older sites, like ramps at the back of a building, or accommodations in a classroom.

Cripping as a verb is borrowed from theorists, Robert McRuer, Alison Kafer, and Carrie Santhal. In turn

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“crip theory” draws on queer theory to suggest that our culture functi ons under a compulsory able bodiedness and able -mindedness. Cripping is meant to purposefully draw attention to and disrupt these ableist systems. As Kafer has noted, the word is supposed to make you cringe (Kafer 2013, 13) .

Decolonial is a term you are hearing about from all of us and around which this whole panel is organized.

For now, I’ll forward this definition, which I like, but which is also limited: “decoloniality refers to efforts at rehumanizing the world, to breaking hierarchies of difference that dehumanize subjects and communities and that destroy nature, and to the p roduction of counter-discourses, counter -knowledges, counter creative acts, and counter -practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and to open up multiple other forms of being in the world.” (Maldanado-Torres, qtd. in Bell 2018, 252) . I’ll add to this that to do decolonial work is to actively work to redress colonial violences.

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Okay, so now that those terms have been covered, I want to discuss the claims my title is making: 1. The decolonial needs to be “cripped.”

2. Disability Studies need s to be decolonized.

3. The third claim is a bit tongue -in-cheek, since Universal Design is meant to anticipate accessibility by a variety of bodies. By attaching “universal design” to colonial metaphors, I am highlighting the insidious pervasiveness of colonial thinking. Colonial metaphors are designed to be universally applicable to a variety of marginalized groups and bodies no t to increase access, but to strategically limit access.

4. To support these claims, first I’d like to illustrate the ways in which “di sability” and the “colonial” are already interlocked, and thus to further argue that to approach either without the other is ignoring this mutually-reinforcing relationship.

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On the one hand, disability itself is often treated as a frontier to be conquered , thus it is subject to colonial metaphors: Tanya Titchkosky argues, “the mapping of disability is an imparting of some version of what disability is and, thus, contains implicit directions for how to move around, through or with it. . . . disability has a long history of being mapped as if it is a foreign land, and a distanced curiosity remains one of the most repetitive, debilitating, yet ‘normal’ ways of regarding the life and work of disabled people . (qtd. in Dolmage 2017, 43) On the other hand, disability has been used as a framework for Othering colonized peoples: Thus the colonized were always already figured and constituted as disabled, whether because of their perceived unproductivity as laborers; embodied racial -sexual differences; ‘unchaste’ proclivities of their women; susceptibilit y to moral contagion and infectious diseases; or inability to learn. In the undulating colonial hall of mirrors,

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the inversion of these qualities —too much learnedness and the adoption of European manners, for example —could mean colonized people had failed to maintain the vigor of their ‘race.’ Thus we begin to see how disability operated as a flexible and capacious concept and a very useful weapon during the incarceration, elimination, and removal of colonial Others. (Imada 2017, 1) Yet, both fields of inquiry and activism elide each other. As Grech and Soldatic note, “The omission of disability from (post)colonial scholarship is particularly curious, given that disability has been and remains one of the most significant and ever present human conditions in human history, transcending space, time and geopolitics, while cross cutting the confines of the discursive an d the material” (Grech and Soldatic 2015, 2) . And further, “Unfortunately, the hegemonic global North disability studies has not done much to improve this situation . . . As a field of inquiry grounded within the

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epistemologies of the global North, it has rarely engaged with the ‘colonial’ beyond the realm of descriptive metaphor” (Grech and Soldatic 2015, 2) .

These uses of metaphor are important rhetorically because they structure how we th ink about the world, but we need to be very careful when exploring the metaphorical connections between disability and coloniality so that the particularity of material conditions and lived experiences is not subsumed by abstract language.

So let’s get particular: Colonialism functions through bodily violence, maiming, killing, raping, and the slow violence of environmental degradation and cultural erasure .

Colonial and neocolonial violence causes material impairments to actual bodies, not just metaphorical disabilities on abstract populations.

Additionally, the lived experience of disablement positions actual people under a violent medical gaze,

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often institutionalizing them and profiting from studies about them. This lived experience reinforces power structures instituted by settler -colonialism and furthered by neo-colonialism.

In the recent BLM movement, it often goes unnoted that several of the black men and women who have been killed through police violence, s uch as Freddie Grey, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland, were also people with impairments, reported by media as “underlying conditions” (Carmel 2020) . In fact, terms such as “underlying conditions” serve to not only mask disability, but also mask the working of colonial power that may have led to disablement ; as if the underlying condi tions are not intimately related to the violence that finally ended the lives in question ; as if the power structures in which we live did not already violently disable these black men and women before the final crushing blow of police violence ended their lives.

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What would it mean to crip the decolonial and to decolonize disability studies?

To crip the decolonial, first we recognize the interrelationship of disability and coloniality in the metaphorical register that shapes our thinking and in the material register that shapes our bodyminds . To say, for instance, that to rely on an accommodation for learning is a “crutch,� is to simultaneously devalue the lives of folks with mobility impairments and to insist on a model of productivity that relies on individual responsibility that upholds a neoliberal value system, which is an outgrowth and continuat ion of coloniality. To be truly decolonial, we cannot accept such thinking.

To decolonize disability studies, we must engage a broader view than the narrow understanding of disability offered by a Euro -American-centric academia or activist struggle. I mentioned earlier Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and Global Disability Studies (GDS), both of which are newer academic

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fields responding to this need for a broader view in Disability Studies scholarship. Critical Disability Studies grows from Critical Race Theory and engages with the presumed whiteness of mainstream Disability Studies. Global Disability Studies also accounts for race but from an explicitly decolonial position that centers perspectives from the global South.

In the realm of activism, disab ility activists have begun social media campaigns such as #DisabilityTooWhite, which draws attention to the lack of perspectives from Black and Indigenous People of Color in disability activism. Less has been accomplished to move away from an “individual rights� model and toward a more decolonial perspective.

In my last slide, I am sharing a useful table from Dirth and Adams, in the field of psychology. This table highlights some decolonial strategies for approaching Disability Studies and activism. I’ll highlight a few:

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• “Relocating pathology from inside individuals to the cultural and ecological context” (Dirth and Adams 2019, 261) . Understanding sickness and disability as a product of cultural and physical environment.

• “Reconceptualizing disability as a historically oppressed minority group identity rather than an individual aberration” (Dirth and Adams 2019, 261). Understanding disability as a marginalized group identity with a history .

• “Turning the lens back on taken -for-granted understandings that underpin hegemonic individualist epistemology” (Dirth and Adams 2019, 261). Questioning seemingly common -sense understandings of well-being that actually are produced by and reinforce power structures that leave us struggling alone.

• “Problematizing seemingly natural arrangements that produce impairment [and] disable majority world communities” (Dirth and Adams 2019, 261) .

Questioning, disrupting, and changing social and physical arrangements that not only impair

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individuals, but also disable entire communities and cultures in the global South.

Thank you for listening and/or watching and reading along. I hope that thinking through these intersections might give us all new avenues for activism and daily living.

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