Disability and Neoliberal State Formations

Karen Soldatic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317150398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

Disability and Neoliberal State Formations explores the trajectory of neoliberalism in Australia and its impact on the lives of Australians living with disability, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It examines the emergence, intensification and normalisation of neoliberalism across a 20-year period, distilling the radical changes to disability social security and labour-market law, policy and programming, and the enduring effects of the incremental tightening of disability eligibility carried out by Australian governments since the early 2000s.

Incorporating qualitative interviews with disabled people, disability advocates, services and the policy elite, alongside extensive documentary material, this book brings to the fore the compounding effects of neoliberal reforms for disabled people's wellbeing and participation. The work is of international significance as it illustrates the importance of looking beyond the UK, EU and the USA to critically understand the historical development and policy mobility of disability neoliberal retraction from smaller economies, such as Australia, to the global economic centre.

1 Introduction

Disability and Australian state formations

Societal notions of the body are located in time and space, and the socio-political environment of the day. Stone’s (1981) seminal work on the Disabled State reveals the extent to which the emergence of the modern capitalist nation relies on the reclassification of the human body. In seeking out the mechanisms that classify and mark out bodies as disabled within state formations, this book examines disability as a socially constitutive collective class and identity with the emergence of the postmodern, neoliberal nation state. It builds on spatial–temporal, socio-relational arguments to identify disability and disablement as socially produced and reproduced oppression. In this book I explore those mechanisms that are integral to the consensus-building project occurring as neoliberalism grows in power and the strategies drawn upon to build popular support for the reconstitution of ‘disability’ under the neoliberal workfare state.

Disability has always been an integral part of the making of the Australian nation (Jakubowicz and Meekosha 2002). As disability scholars have theorised, the relationship between ethnicity, race and disability has underpinned the nation-building strategies of white settler societies, such as Australia (Jakubowicz and Meekosha 2002; Meekosha 2005). The formation of a White Australia, as a national ‘body’ politic, was the ‘confluence of border controls and public health measures, underpinned by medical science’ (Jakubowicz and Meekosha 2003, p. 180) and supported by the international hygiene movement, more commonly known as eugenics (Bashford 2004; Wyndham 2003). At the turn of the 20th century, eugenics, as science, medicine and social regulation, was a governing rationality (Baker 2002) and of strategic importance to the imperial colonial project (Bashford 2004). Promoting a range of mechanisms ‘based upon scientific management systems’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2003, p. 844) was central to excluding those bodies seen as inferior, unfit and impure in achieving ‘national fitness’ (Wyndham 2003). The Immigration Restriction Act (1901), well known for its racialisation of border controls, also marked out ‘any idiot or insane person’ or ‘any person suffering from an infectious or contagious disease of a loathsome or dangerous character’. The impaired immigrant, represented as a burden to the state (Gothard 1998), was a focus of powerful moral discourses and practices situating whiteness as moral biological purity, free from contagion (Soldatic and Fiske 2009).

Many second- and third-generation Australians like myself bear the stamp of these racialised and disabling ideologies and practices. My maternal grandmother was placed in institutional care during the height of the eugenics period in the 1940s and remained incarcerated until her death almost 40 years later. With my grandmother deemed unable to care for her children, my mother and her siblings were removed to an institution and then permanently placed in foster care with a white working class Australian family in the suburbs of western Sydney. As a result, my mother’s existence has been a site of relentless negotiation. In addition to the institutionalisation of her childhood, the constant emotional upheavals of attempting to reconcile my maternal grandmother’s ‘madness’ has shaped my mother’s existence in both her cultural community and the broader community of White Australia. The internalisation of having to constantly defend one’s integrity in these racialised and disabling environments has been mutually constitutive (Yuval-Davis 2007, p. 565), having a profound effect on my mother’s subjectivity, her sense of self and, of course, her own parental practices of care.¹

As a child, I never really understood the significance of these practices of subjectivity and identity formation. I realised at school that I was ‘different’ but assumed this was associated with my parents’ class and ethnic identity. It was not until more recently that I understood more clearly the relationship between my grandmother’s disabled identity and my family’s significant difference in both the Croatian migrant community and her new White-Australian family. The deep anguish associated with attempts to self-regulate the constant emotional barrage of love and shame shrouded not only my mother’s being but how we were socialised, and thought of, by others.

At the age of eight, I was finally allowed to visit the institution where my grandmother lived. I often recall the car trip and the attendant pride I felt in learning that I had three grandmothers and not just two. The prospect of meeting another grandmother was completely exhilarating to me, and I recall running into her room to introduce myself – only to be told to ‘slow down’ and ‘be quiet’. Inevitably, my feelings of excitement gave way to confusion and bewilderment. By the end of the visit, I was overwhelmed with disappointment. My eight-year-old self was frustrated by her unwillingness to look at or even talk to me as well as angry that this was not the mysterious third grandmother I had hoped to brag about at school. I kept wondering why she could barely speak in any language, let alone English, and why she refused to look at me. It is this moment on which I always reflect.

I now understand that her behaviour was an outward manifestation of the toll that long-term incarceration had taken on her soul (Rose 1999), which was likely exacerbated by the extensive use of so-called therapeutic interventions (Jarman et al. 2002). I often wonder about the possibilities that may have awaited my grandmother as an individual had her circumstances been different, and also on imagining the different journey that could have been for all of us had there not been so much social stigma attached to her ‘mad’ existence. On reflection, I am now inclined to suggest that the subjectification of racialised and disabling practices passes from parents to their children (Garon 2004).² Moreover, while we accept in sociological inquiry the role of hegemonic national cultures in racialising identities in second-generation immigrants (Lappalainen 2009), it may be that the disabled subjectivity is similarly intergenerational, as other authors, such as Lennard Davis (1995), have previously suggested. This process of embodiment has shaped who I am, and it is this political subjectivity that determines the framing of this research.

This book, however, is not an auto-ethnographic one. My motivation here is different and emerges from my worker identity within the ‘disability industry’. The journey of this research began when the service provider I worked for participated in the first round of federally funded trials to move civil society providers from block funding to outcomes-based funding. Being part of this trial made me acutely aware of the kinds of practices that were emerging in the social field due to new funding restraints and of the resultant effects on social relations between workers and disabled jobseekers. As a worker, it appeared to me that ‘disability’ and who was defined as disabled were being reconstituted. The body appeared to be undergoing a new process of social stratification as I repeatedly observed service workers and management selectively divide, sort and classify individuals into those who could meet the trial’s funding outcomes and those who could not. Questions such as which bodies were worthy of social investment through publicly funded services and what types of service they should receive were disregarded in some instances but heavily contested in others.

In every attempt to answer these questions, I was aware that part of my own humanity and possibly my concern for other human beings was being slowly eroded. As a service worker and human being, I developed significant concerns about the role of publicly funded service provision and citizenship rights. If citizenship is underpinned by notions of rights and entitlements (Barbalet 1998; Stainton 2002) then, within the new funding regime, consideration of one’s right to treatment with dignity and respect becomes paramount (White 2004). In the new funding environment, however, it was precisely this right that appeared to be under greatest threat. As Nussbaum (2001, 2004) argues, social institutions play a vital role in our quest to reach our full capacity as human beings. It follows, then, that institutions also have the power to undermine and dismiss our human potential; disability employment services is one such institution. Governed by legal frameworks and funded publicly, disability employment providers purport to represent the interests of disabled people in reaching their full potential by supporting their participation in the labour market as a means to redress their severe levels of material disadvantage and dependent class status. It was this quest for exploring what it takes to be human (Archer 2000; Nussbaum 2001, 2004, 2007) that led me beyond the general policy debates on ‘welfare to work’ to what social theorists such as Sayer (2000a, 2001) have attempted to renew in the exploration of the moral economy of society. They suggest that processes of moralisation are deeply embedded in political representation and that these forms of representation move from macrostructures to shape and frame micro-social relations of everyday life. It is the link between macrostructural processes of moralisation in the development of one’s identity and the subjective experience of the ‘self’ within this context that this book seeks to explore.

Thinking through disability: theoretical framings

Although the disability studies field has a fairly recent history within sociological inquiry, it is already contested terrain. Critical disability studies emerged from the disability movement’s standpoint and response to Western medical models of disability. It can be broadly split into two main strands of theorising: idealist theories and materialist accounts of disability. Casting disability analysis within a social frame, idealist theories have been highly influential in theorising the relationship between the impaired body and society, hereby demonstrating the significance of power relations, particularly between institutions, professionals and disabled people (see Tremain 2005), and cultural representations of the impaired/disabled body (see Garland-Thomson 1996, 1997; Murray 2008; Riddell and Watson 2003; Siebers 2002). Drawing on the work of Goffman (1963), and more recently Butler (1993, 1999), Foucault (1970, 1973, 1977, 1989) and Rose (1996, 1999), this body of work emphasises the role of social attitudes, aesthetics, cultural discourses, discursive structures and representation in determining and conditioning the social experience of living with an impairment. While Foucault may have objected to being termed an idealist rather than a cultural materialist, the focus of his work in these idealist theoretical accounts is exclusively within the domain of discourses and the cultural realm. In nearly all these works, disability is viewed as a social construct that arises in line with modern medical discourses on body and minds and, in its most extreme form, the body is seen as a social text requiring deconstruction (see Galvin 2004b; Rapley 2001). Actively questioning the ‘master narrative of the body’ (Sennett 1994, p. 15), this work has sought to deconstruct and problematise the medical discourses and discursive structures that ‘come to be internalised by disabled people’ (Snyder and Mitchell 2006, p. 7). Idealist analysis is thus focussed on the making of the disabled subject, grounded in identity politics and the struggle for recognition (Lawson 2001).

Many disabled people, however, object to the extreme form of cultural constructivism of the body that underpins many idealist accounts of disablement (Abberley 1991), arguing that there is a ‘materiality to social practices’ (Gleeson 1999, p. 21). In line with the growing number of disabled people who have called for the recognition of impairment as a real ontological state, there is a need to theorise the material practices that disable impaired people in everyday life, in addition to those cultural discourses and discursive structures that constitute normate–disabled relations. Such an argument seeks to separate and ensure that the ontological reality of our bodies is not conflated with discursive epistemological construction of its meaning in everyday life and practice (Williams 1999). Materialist theorising on disability first emerged from the scholarship of disability activists in the UK (Abberley 1987, 1991, 1999, 2002; Barnes and Mercer 2003, 2005; Finkelstein 1980, 2001; Oliver 1986, 1990, 1996; Thomas 2002, 2004, 2007). In conceptualising what disability is, these activists/scholars have argued that impairment should be defined separately from disability in order to shift the focal point of analysis from the medical diagnosis of the body to those societal structures that disable, exclude and oppress people with impairments (Thomas 2004). Mike Oliver’s definition, probably the most cited in both activist and scholarly work, conceptualises the distinction between impairment and disability as:

Impairment, lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organism or mechanism of the body;

Disability, the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of social activities.

(Oliver 1990, p. 11)

Materialists conceptualise disability as produced through the social relations of society (Abberley 1999; Barnes 1997; Barnes and Mercer 2005; Clear and Gleeson 2001; Gleeson 1999; Oliver 1990; Russell 1998, 2001; Thomas 1999).

Materialist theorising on disability has illustrated the historical link between the capitalist mode of production, the commodification of labour and the management of impaired bodies within this context, and the relationship of those bodies to state-regulating regimes (Gleeson 1997, 1999; Oliver 1990). With the capitalist appropriation of surplus value from the production process, those who are not able to meet the production demands of society have been increasingly marginalised (Russell 2001). From a Marxist theory of surplus value, the exploitation of labour is achieved through the expropriation of surplus labour, that is, the differential value of wages paid to the value of the commodity sold in the market place (Wood 1995). The rise of industrial capitalism brought with it changing work practices and a restructuring of the production process, creating conditions for a pool of ‘uncompetitive workers who were eventually incarcerated in the new institutional system of workhouses, hospitals and asylums’ (Gleeson 1997, p. 195). Drawing on Marx’s conception of nature, Gleeson (1999, p. 53) defines impairment as first nature and disability as second nature in order to articulate the way societies produce and reproduce structures that condition and ‘transform impaired first nature as disablement’. For this group of theorists, the focus is on the politics of distribution to identify the necessary social and institutional measures of egalitarian redistribution required to redress those social injustices that disable impaired people in an unjust capitalist political economy. Within the capitalist political economy, work and the labour process represents the key area of struggle for social equality, citizenship and material well-being (Abberley 1996, 1999, 2002; Barnes 1999; Barnes and Mercer 2005; Grover and Piggott 2005; Roulstone and Barnes 2005; Thornton 2005).

Increasingly, however, divisions between materialist accounts of disablement and the struggles within the cultural realm are being contested (Butler and Parr 1999; Danermark and Coniavitis Gellerstedt 2004; Jakubowicz and Meekosha 2002; Mladenov 2017). Many disabled feminists have argued extensively that the insights offered by materialism cannot account for the gendered component of the disabled identity (see Crow 1996; Fine and Asch 1988; Ghai 2003; Meekosha 2002; Morris 1991; Wendell 1996, 2001). Challenging both materialist and idealist conceptualisations, it appears ever more plausible to argue that disability is a social collectivity of complexity, that the struggles for recognition and egalitarian redistribution are deeply intertwined and that representational politics is a central component of this regulating nexus which is often not captured in critical depth. Conceptualisations of disability need to account for the intertwining constitutive practices of the three Rs – the politics of representation, redistribution and recognition – in disabled people’s struggles for justice, rights and social affirmation. Importantly, this picture reveals that state-regulating regimes of disability anchored in Western normative notions of the body depict a dialectical relationship between the cultural symbolic role of disability and capitalist class relations that position disability as a dependent group, on the one hand, and those political representative processes that maintain state relations of power, on the other.

Fraser (1995, 2007) refers to social collectivities as bivalent, where the process of social oppression and subordination is structurally located in both the capitalist political economy, in forms of cultural valuation, and political representative structures of state institutional power. While Fraser’s work has focussed mostly on gender, sexuality, class and race, as Mladenov (2017) has argued in relation to disability in the former socialist states of Eastern Europe, this multilayered analysis of disability as a collectivity is pivotal in bringing forth the social struggles situated within neoliberal re-regulation of disability as a state population category and its transformative effects. As Mladenov (2017) has teased out, this approach enriches the historical analysis of the significance of disability to state-regulating regimes as it effectively challenges the analysis to explore the mutually constitutive processes and mechanisms that harness normative positionalities of the human body. Such positioning elucidates the dispossession of disabled people under the capitalist political economy with the emergence, intensification and normalisation of neoliberal re-regulating structures of state power.

Finally, as the recent work of scholars such as Tyler (2013) have illustrated, the role of emotions as normative judgements of value has been articulated as a politicised technology building popular consensus within the polity for neoliberal re-regulation. Emotions as normative evaluative judgements act as the moral public justification for the stigmatisation and debasement of different body types (Tyler 2013). Emotions emerge from our social existence, inseparable from their broader social and cultural locations, and are interconnected with our material conditionalities (Sayer 2005). By moving to the realm of normative evaluative judgements, we are, as Sayer (2003, 2005) has argued, expanding the material analysis to include the realm of moral economy. To reiterate Vike (1997, p. 197), ‘moral discourses are meta-discourses of power and legitimacy’. Therefore, this book hopes to illustrate the inter-relationship between the cultural–symbolic realm, the political economy and moral discourses with the emergence, intensification and normalisation of disability neoliberalisation, all of which operate conjointly in a complex interplay as regulating discourses and practices (Sayer 2003; Vike 1997). From here, we can begin to theorise on a range of emotions – such as disgust, shame and resentment – that operate as meta-discourses of power which normalise the worst excesses of neoliberal dispossession and structural violence.

I argue that by theorising the affective realm of neoliberal politics and its harnessing of processes of medicalisation to socially re-regulate impaired bodies, it becomes possible to reveal a neoliberal moral economy of disability. The participants of this research reveal that neoliberal affective politics is not reducible to either the idealist or materialist accounts (Vike 1997). We can clearly establish which emotions, as normative evaluative judgements, make the dispossession of some bodies acceptable within the public realm and begin to make the theoretical link between the moral economy of disability and social relational accounts of disablement. It becomes possible to meet Thomas’s (1999, 2002) call to expand the sociological accounts of disability to acknowledge the important role of emotions, as moral discourses of power, in transforming state regulations of disability with the hegemony of neoliberal restructuring.

Neoliberal workfare: the new state formation

Neoliberalism is often described as a system of governance, of economic reordering, that legitimises new forms of capitalist maldistribution from the poor to the rich, coupled with an ideological mapping that trumps the individual over collective concerns of the good, the just, inequality, poverty and deprivation. Its most transformative effect is the normalisation of new forms of citizen dispossession and abjection (Tyler 2015).

The global beg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 Introduction: disability and Australian state formations
• 2 Technologies of disability reclassification
• 3 Moralising the disabled subject: resentment, disgust and shame
• 4 Neoliberalising disability temporal relations
• 5 Indigenous disability in regional Australia
• 6 Conclusion: disability and the neoliberal state
• References
• Index