It is well established that violence and oppression towards vulnerable and marginalised communities are intensified and compounded during times of social upheaval, and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated disablist and ableist violence against disabled people. During the first year of the pandemic, we have been confronted with instances of violence meted out to disabled subjects. In this article, we provide a theorisation of such violence. Based on an assemblage of our collective readings of Butler, Campbell and Young, as well as our own observations and experiences, we suggest that added anxieties currently confronting people’s fragile corporeal embodiment are licensing abled subjects to violate disabled subjects to put them back in their place. Through an excavation of ‘Norms, Binaries, and Anxieties’, ‘Abjection, Substitutability, and Disavowal’, and ‘Ableism and (Un)grievability’, we trace the social contours of disablist and ableist violence, both within and beyond the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide a way of imagining otherwise to resist this violence.
The position of disabled people within criminal justice frameworks and scholarship is one of ambivalence, which leaves disabled people in the simultaneous and contradictory position of centrality and marginality. While disabled people are over-represented within the criminal justice system (as offenders, victims, and witnesses), their voices are often marginalized or silenced. So too, while disabled people are over-represented within the criminal justice system, they remain under-explored in policy, practice, research, and scholarship. Aligning with the shift to queer and queering criminology, in this article we deploy the lens of ‘crip’ and ‘cripping’ to facilitate a more critical engagement with the concerns of disabled people, along with the mechanisms by which abledness informs criminal justice encounters.
The experiences of crip and mad people—as well as the disciplinary homes of crip theory and mad studies—have rarely been brought together in any synthesised manner. In this article, I bring crip theory and mad studies together to explore the similarities, intersections, and points of departure. The article starts by exploring the similar life experiences between crip and mad bodies, including: familial isolation; shame, guilt, and essentialism; stereotypes and discrimination; experiences and rates of violence; the power of diagnostic labels; and, passing and ‘coming out’. The discussion then moves to explore the theoretical overlaps between crip theory and mad studies, including: (strategic) essentialism vs constructionism; opposition to norms; subversion and transgression as political tools; and, the problematisation of binaries. The article then meditates on the question of combining these two schools of thought to help forge a collective politics, and speculates about the political methodologies of cripping and maddening dialogues.
In this article, I ask the question: when does research end? I am motivated to engage with this question because I still labour over my doctoral research that I completed a few years ago. Feelings of guilt, shame, and above all, abjection, continue to haunt my subject position of researcher and academic. I seek to trouble the idea that research has clear beginning, middle, and end points, and I reflect on the politics, labour and emotion involved in conducting research, particularly when it involves understandings and experiences of violence. I expose how theoretical and pragmatic decisions, as well as incidents and accidents, leave mnemic traces on our bodies. I demonstrate how personal, theoretical and methodological decisions are complexly intertwined in research, and I argue that it is incumbent upon researchers to think through what they research, why they do it, its effects, and consequences – for researcher, researched, and society.
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