Politics has been built on a series of defaults. The presumed subjects of political action have long been assumed to be a certain kind of person, whether of a specific legal category (citizens, for example) or of a more diffuse but no less powerful sort (such as whiteness or maleness). Scholarship truly attentive to the operations of power has long recognized the disempowerment of those individuals who do not match these criteria, as well as their location outside of questions of desert, rights, and even life itself.
One of those defaults still operative in liberal and individualist presuppositions of politics is ability. Just as the “unmarked” citizen is implicitly male, white, straight, and middle class, so too is he nondisabled. Physical disabilities can operate in the political imagination: Veterans’ injuries, the technologies of Braille or wheelchair ramps, and handicapped parking spaces are often considered issues for public decision making, even when (as happens often) efforts made to provide access prove halfhearted. Cognitive and emotional disabilities, especially those not immediately legible, fare far worse in the public consciousness. Such disabilities are often used to overtly deny people legal and political standing, from Hobbes’s refusal of law to “natural fools, children, or madmen” to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s justification of eugenics with the declaration that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Such a default can operate only so far as it remains unacknowledged, however. In Civil Disabilities, a range of authors from multiple disciplinary perspectives identify and attempt to recitify such invisible attitudes. Nancy Hirschmann and Beth Linker have compiled a set of arguments both impressive and accessible, each of which loosely addresses the history and conceptualization of disability in relation to the political questions of inclusion, representation, and identity. As a whole, the volume takes these questions seriously without falling into familiar debates about normative legal issues or simplifying all disabilities into the expected categories of wheelchair access. The editors and authors seize the opportunity to rethink issues of citizenship and collectivity in societies intrinsically based on concepts of normativity and admittance, which repeatedly disadvantage a sizable proportion of the population. Taking into account congenital disability, illness, age, and institutions, these approaches cover a wide and evocative set of antinormative political positions. This volume thus takes its place alongside similar treatments of the politics of disability emerging recently, such as Lennard Davis’s The End of Normal (2014), Margaret Price’s Mad at School (2011), and Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), (as well as the Barbara Arneil and Hirschmann edited volume Disability and Political Theory [2016]).
Many of the analyses in Civil Disabilities are based in history. Catherine Kudlick examines the complex traditions of blindness in French society, highlighting how nationalism reshaped the relationship of the blind to the sighted: first as outsiders, then as potential partners, and finally as alternative citizens, thanks to the technological literary work of Valentin Haüy and Louis Braille. Closer to home, Douglas Baynton explains the close connections between immigration law and modes of disability. Rather than being based on ideology, he shows, the historical practices of immigration acceptance and rejection operated mainly along lines of “defect,” with race operating as a component (though not necessarily a determinative one) of someone who is likely to be (or become) defective. Linker and Emily Abel show how differences between patients suffering from tuberculosis—namely, between bone tuberculars and pulmonary tuberculars—translated into profoundly disparate treatment and policy particulars, based entirely on visuality and presentation.
Other authors engage with the more formal aspects of political philosophy. Allison Carey addresses the potential rights conflicts between parents (whose care and concern for their disabled children can lead them to curtail autonomy) and the disability rights movement (whose focus on self-determination can lead to a dismissal of the importance of familial care). Lorella Terzi attempts to combine the focus on “human capabilities,” promoted by authors such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, with the complex set of needs and desires of the wide range of people with disabilities, ultimately concluding that such a perspective does more to inform capability theory than it does for the disabled as a group. Susan Schweik attends almost entirely to the complexities of representation, from Homer to 20th century novels and film.
Certain terminologies and concepts will prove particularly useful to those working in the intersection of politics and disability. Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner’s essay suggests “disremembering” to describe the conceptual isolation and affiliations of individuals, groups, and even policies in current conceptions of history. Every society has grappled with disability in legal and political institutions, yet we too often presume our own engagement to be a new achievement. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp understand “ocularity” as the highly mediated sets of “meanings, scripts, and images” that circulate among scientific, personal, and popular representations (p. 111), providing potential to political action and activism while simultaneously delimiting the imaginary spaces for differing disabilities. Hirschmann, in her own contribution, elegantly elucidates the threat that the constantly changing nature of corporeal existence poses to the ideal of pure rationality. What she calls the “undecidabilty of the body” (p. 208) points to our past and future contingency—what disability activists have referred to as those who are “temporarily able-bodied.”
As with any sets of essays that stretch across literature, history, and philosophy, many questions cannot be addressed. Left mostly unexamined in this volume, perhaps because of its ultimate undecidablity, is the question of temporality and remedy. The ways in which some disabilities are located in time, whether through disease onset or trauma, profoundly differentiates disability from many other political identity issues; similarly, the hope that a disability can be “overcome” with the help of technology, medicine, or individualist bootstrapping imbues certain lives with cruel optimism. The essay by Alex Lubet comes closest to raising these issues: He briefly describes the strange liminality that emerges between onset and diagnosis and then treatment, when disability may be considered potentially curable. Not only are institutions such as Lubet’s university’s Disability Services ill-equipped to categorize such experiences, but also the very conceptualization of normality reinforces the putative bright line identifying disability as a clear and clean category. This temporal dynamic—what Eli Clare refers to as the ambiguity of “cure” in Brilliant Imperfection (2017)—undercuts the dualism of disability, building connections between bodies and their pasts and futures.
Thus, it proves intriguing that Civil Disabilities ends with a call by the disability theorist Tobin Siebers to reclaim identity politics for political action. Against what he notes is a common tendency to “pathologize identity” (p. 225) though tropes of disability, Siebers insists on claiming a common presence. The great diversity of disability—the minds, bodies, histories, affective regimes, legal structures, and even relationships to time—contained in this important assemblage of essays shows both the potential impossibility and the political necessity of such a unified collectivity.
