Critical Divides: Judith Butler's Body Theory and the Question of Disability

Disability as a New Frontier for Feminist Intersectionality Research

“…Lesbian feminism, transgender theory, as well as postmodern theory have challenged feminism on these assumptions to some degree, raising the question of what "woman" means, of who "counts" as a woman, and the potential oppressiveness of the boundaries of identity. But even these feminists have excluded disability from the categories in need of inclusion (Samuels 2002). And feminists have even used disability as a pejorative term to describe what patriarchy has done to women, "crippling" our abilities and imaginations (Young 1980).…”

A lame argument: profoundly disabled embodiment as critical gender politics

“…If, as Butler suggests, 'one way of "managing" [or erasing] a population is to constitute them as less than human and without entitlement to rights, as the humanely unrecognisable ' (2004a, 98), then this certainly seems to be the case for people with disabilities. Medical, legal and social structures combine to deny our basic humanity, and to continually reinvent a plethora of means to maintain our (in)visibility genetically, surgically and culturally (Garland-Thomson 2002;Samuels 2002;Wendell 1996a).…”

“…In posing these questions, Butler extends queer ethics beyond their commonplace reference points of gender and sexuality and into the politics of 'ethnic' Othering in ways that are pertinent, but unexplored, facets of disabled embodiment (Samuels 2002). Notwithstanding the absence of disability within their work, both Rich and Butler speak powerfully to my disabled embodiment.…”

“…So that 'paraplegics and quadriplegics have revolutionary [and queer] things to teach about the possibilities of sexuality which contradict patriarchal culture's obsession with genitals' (Wendell 1996, 274), alongside 'extensive possibilities of human sexualities that depart from heterocentric and phallocentric norms' (Wilkerson 2002, 51). But this is not to merely add disability on to pre-conceived conceptual analyses (Garland-Thomson 2002) or to read disability into pre-existing theory (Samuels 2002), as this merely reiterates the marginalised status of disabled embodiment. It is, rather, to bring disabled embodiment and the knowledges it produces centre-stage, to expand 'and confront the limits of the ways we understand human diversity' (Garland- Thomas 2002, 3).…”

Tensions, perspectives and themes in disability studies

“…Much of the discussion about the body within disability studies seems to be less occupied by the poststructuralist ambition of transcending the distinction between the biological and the social. When it has been referred to it has, according to Samuels (2002), been so in a rather naïve and uncritical way.…”