Disability and Deleuze

Abstract

Building on Deleuze's theories of the becoming of bodies, and notions of the geographic maturity of the disabled body we formulate an emplaced model of disability wherein bodies, social expectations and built form intersect in embodied experiences in specific environments to increase or decrease the capacity of disabled children to act in those environments. We join a growing effort to generate a more comprehensive model of disability, which moves beyond a binary between the individual and the social. Drawing on in-depth case studies conducted with 13 physically disabled children, we consider the intersections between their primary environments (homes, schools and neighbourhoods) and the multiple subjectivities they embody. Ultimately we make a case about the importance of responsive, situated models of subjectivity for the development of adaptations, and that physical and social adaptations must respond to these children's complex and varied needs and desires.

Disability, hostility and everyday geographies of un/safety

“…Writers in the sub-discipline of geographies of disability have sought to challenge medicalized, paternalistic understandings of disability, by recognizing disability as an embodied experience co-produced in and through space at the confluence of individual experiences of impairment, and social relations and attitudes (Chouinard et al, 2010;Hall & Wilton, 2017;Imrie & Edwards, 2007;Stephens et al, 2015). In conceptualizing the body as both a material, biological entity and a social and cultural construct upon which societal norms and values are inscribed and enacted, geographies of disability have demonstrated how diverse bodies exist in, experience, and create lived knowledges about the environment and space, and how socio-political relations serve to create spaces which exclude bodies deemed to be less than normal (Bell et al, 2019;Chouinard et al, 2010;Edwards & Imrie, 2003).…”

The understated turn: Emerging interests and themes in Canadian posthumanist geography

“…In doing so, their work carries "important opportunities to think differently about how all bodies become dis/abled in and through their everyday geographies and how such becomings might be made otherwise" (Hall and Wilton 2016, 3). In this vein, Stephens et al (2015) explore the flexible becoming of children with disability, and show how assemblages enable and constrain the emergence of subjects and capacities in children's everyday spaces, so that "subjective experiences of both disability and non-disability emerge through shifting relations with other bodies, objects and spaces" (Hall and Wilton 2016, 6). In posthumanist geographies of disability, asking "what can a body do?"…”

“…Indeed, by paying attention to more-than-human agencies and material forces, posthumanism emphasizes the ways that humans are continually produced in relation to them (Ginn 2017), and where the "capacity to create meaning and to affect and be affected extends beyond the human subject" (Blue 2016, 46). Notably, posthumanism challenges fundamental ontological understandings of the categories of space, place, time, and subject, in order to extend and trouble conceptualizations of social productions such as health (Andrews 2018a), the (human) body (Mathews 2018), and dis/ability (Stephens et al 2015;Hall and Wilton 2016), to name but a few. Importantly, as indicated by the quotation that opened this section, and as will be explored in greater detail later, posthumanist geography focuses on and animates the vitality, energy, movement, and "push" of life.…”

“…Cockayne, Ruez, et al (2017) and Cockayne et al (2019) work with Deleuzian philosophy of "difference-in-itself" to offer a way of thinking about space and difference that resonates with political and ethical challenges located in embodiment and encounter. Elsewhere, scholars have evoked the ethical nature of assemblage to question what the body can do, and the capacities that are enhanced or diminished in relation to the dis/abling assemblage (Stephens et al 2015).…”

“…is an ethical question that does not close down possibilities for becoming limited by a priori assumptions about bodily capacities deriving from social or biological models of disability, but instead seeks to uncover the ways individuals are constituted and emerge through negotiations in and with their everyday geographies. For example, Stephens et al (2015) focus on the contexts of disabled children's geographies of falling and crawling, the adaptations that are employed, and the ways the children individually negotiate these.…”