Reimagining Disablist and Ableist Violence as Abjection

Ryan Thorneycroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000097368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Drawing upon vivid and harrowing life history narratives of people labelled intellectually disabled, this book examines the ways in which disabled subjects are constituted, regulated, governed, and violated through an account of abjection.

Extending interdisciplinary dialogues and approaches, it abandons a construct of violence (which by law requires a stable notion of a victim and a perpetrator) and moves to a theorisation of abjection to explore the ways in which disabled subjects are (re)produced, constituted, and treated through time. Deploying a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches, this book sits at the intersections of criminology and sociology, re-thinks notions of dis/ability, violence, and subjectivity, and utilises crip and queer theory to imagine dis/ability differently.

It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sociology and criminology, and specifically those working the areas of life history work, post-structuralism, hate crime, and post-modern criminology.

1 Beginnings

Disabled bodies and subjects are ubiquitously constituted as ‘other’. They are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, over-victimised and under-recognised. In this book, I interrogate and reimagine disablist and ableist violence as abjection. I specifically resist the medicalisation and pathologisation of disabled bodies and lives, and work with an account of abjection as simultaneously psychic and social in order to articulate sites, practices, and possibilities for resistance. The basis for this account is built upon thirteen life history narratives I conducted with people labelled intellectually disabled in Australia in 2015–2016. My arrival to abjection was not a straightforward or linear process. In what follows, I give an account of the ways in which both the research topic and my position as researcher changed from inception to conclusion.

Originally a hate crime researcher within the field of criminology, I set out to research intellectually disabled people’s experiences of disablist violence. Prior to and during the data collection periods, however, I developed several uncertainties with the topic that eventually impacted the project. These uncertainties emerged from both pragmatic issues such as methodological dilemmas, and the revision of my own theoretical trajectory. This ultimately led me to change the topic of my research. What was originally titled ‘Disablist Violence, Victimisation and the Regulation of Prejudice’ has become ‘Reimagining Disablist and Ableist Violence as Abjection’. What was previously a structuralist account of hate crime experience with a criminological focus turned into a post-structuralist account of abjection, disability, and subjectivity within a critical disability studies framework. Below, I briefly document some of the aforementioned uncertainties that led to this shift in topic. I do this to position the book in a particular way, and to highlight to the reader that research, including my own, is never a linear journey from one point to another. Rather, research is messy, non-linear, and reiterative, and this is inherently the case when complex objects constitute the object of inquiry (Law 2004; Law and Singleton 2005).

A key uncertainty emerged from my ongoing and complicated relationship with the conceptual definition of hate crime. Definitions of hate crime have varied over time, though original conceptualisations took a literal approach to hate crime, meaning they were crimes motivated by hatred. While it has been increasingly recognised that hate crimes are motivated by bias and prejudice, I felt that there was an uneasy distance between my understanding of it and that of other hate crime scholars. For instance, in my thinking, hate crime did not require hatred or criminal conduct to be enacted; hate crime as I have come to understand it involves both physical and non-physical, legal and illegal practices against oppressed minorities. Hence, I became more interested in the micro-practices, or normative violence (Butler 1990, 2004), that oppress minority populations.

At a broader level, I was concerned with the politics of the hate crime movement. While it is certainly laudable that the victimisation of minorities is adequately punished, hate crime as a construct is tied to identity politics. According to Jacobs and Potter (1998: 13–14), identity politics refers to

a politics whereby individuals relate to one another as members of competing groups based upon characteristics like race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. According to the logic of identity politics, it is strategically advantageous to be recognized as disadvantaged and victimized. The greater a group’s victimization, the stronger its moral claim on the larger society.

As inferred from this quote, there is a ‘competition of suffering’ (Mason-Bish 2013: 20) where each collective must lay claim for remedial action. Fraser (2003) suggests this does little to address the underlying structures that perpetuate oppression. Another flaw I perceived is the way in which identity and its politics are constructed. According to Crenshaw (1991: 1242), identity politics ‘conflates or ignores intragroup differences’, and it elides issues of class (Fraser 2003). More importantly, however, is that identity politics seems to presuppose that identities are fixed. This mobilised yet another uncertainty, leading me to question the extent to which identities are stable or fixed. As Butler (1990: 142) argues,

[t]he foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed.

Identities, in Butler’s (1990) account, are constructed, contestable, contingent, and performed, rather than fixed and natural. Further, Butler (1990: 148) argues that identity politics ‘presumes, fixes, and constrains the very “subjects” that it hopes to represent and liberate’. My concern was/is that identity politics, in spite of its admirable cause, might work to re-instantiate the oppression that it paradoxically seeks to overcome.

Another uncertainty lay with my methodological approaches. As the objects of my inquiry were people labelled intellectually disabled and their experiences of hate crime, I needed to construct a method that would yield the sort of results I was setting out to achieve (that is, experiences of hate crime). As I was neither experienced nor particularly interested in using quantitative methods, it became clear that some sort of interviewing needed to occur. Instead of interviewing the parents, carers, or guardians of people labelled intellectually disabled—a disablist and ableist practice that is unfortunately too common—I wanted to privilege the stories of people labelled intellectually disabled. This presented a number of challenges: I did not want the interviews to be unnecessarily traumatic, and I recognised the range of possible communication barriers between disabled and abled people¹ inherent to ableist societies. I therefore decided to focus more broadly on the participants’ life experiences as evoked through life history interviews, which Plummer (2001: 18) describes as an ‘account of one person’s life in his or her own words’. Inevitably, the participants’ accounts of experience opened up possibilities and trajectories that I had not anticipated, and the topics under inquiry became increasingly broad. So, what was originally framed as ‘experiences of hate crime’ came to focus more generally on ‘life experiences’.

Recruitment strategies posed further challenges. Unlike the United Kingdom or the United States, there is no Australian data pool (such as complaints to police)—public or private—that documents victims of disablist hate crime. This meant that alternative strategies for locating possible participants needed to be adopted, and I approached advocacy organisations to assist in the recruitment of participants who had experienced hate crime. I was originally intending to employ purposive sampling (experiences of hate crime), but as I listened to the participants’ stories, I realised that the narrow framing of the interview was problematic. Some of the participants did not describe experiences that corresponded with hate crime, and this complicated the purpose and focus of my research. Moreover, while some of the participants narrated experiences that might be understood as acts of hate crime, they did not describe them in such terms. I therefore became increasingly reluctant to impose the construct of hate crime on their experiences, not only because they had not articulated it as such, but because I was becoming increasingly concerned with the field of hate crime itself.

During the stages of the research contained within this book I started to read queer theory for my own personal and political interest. This moved my thinking in significant ways. I became preoccupied with my own queer subjectivity, my own ab/normality, and my infuriation with normative standards. As Goodley (2014: 159) says—I think quite poetically—‘normative standards have the potential to feed some pretty fucked up responses to that which is deemed to be abnormal’. These ideas bled into my research and this book, and I started to read critical disability studies.

Critical disability studies is a transdisciplinary, relativist, and post-conventionalist school of thought. It works to disrupt and critique conventional, normative, and essentialist understandings of disability, and to interpret the lived experiences of disability and constructions of dis/ability (see Campbell 2009a; Goodley 2013; McRuer 2002; Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009; Shildrick 2009, 2012; Slater 2015). Dis/ability is a split term that denotes the ways in which ability and disability, ableism and disablism, are constituted in simultaneous relation to one another. Shildrick (2012: 37) suggests that critical disability studies is guided by the question of, ‘what it would mean, ontologically and ethically, to reimagine dis/ability as the very condition of human becoming’. I came to situate my project within this critical disability studies framework, because it became apparent to me that my structuralist/criminological/violence/hate crime paradigm was no longer compatible with my emergent thinking about the politics of non/normative lives, and that it needed to be abandoned in favour of a new focus on abjection.

From violence to abjection

In accordance with life history work, the interview technique I adopted was semi-structured. It is tempting to say parts of interviews were unstructured, as on multiple occasions the interviews were flexible, went down any path chosen by the participant, and were minimally guided by myself. Yet it would be misleading to suggest that I went into any interview without thoughts, ideas, or issues that influenced the interaction. The initial focus of the interviews was on experiences of hate crime, but as they progressed, the experiences the participants articulated pushed me towards other interests and topics. I started to see patterns in the ways they were talking about their experiences and themselves, and these initiated shifts in my thinking towards questions of pathologisation, ab/normality, dis/ability, dis/avowal, and so on. Rather than direct my attention to experiences of violence (or hate crime), I was moved to contextualise the participants’ experiences within broader discussions about prejudice, subjectivity, and normativity.

Violence, as a framing concept, became too reductive in my analysis, especially since by law, violence requires a perpetrator and a victim. My imperative became to abandon this paradigm and move from a construct of violence to a theorisation of abjection. I pursue abject/tion as a framing concept because it simultaneously incorporates and extends the notion of violence. As Tyler (2009: 87) writes, ‘[d]isgust reactions, hate speech, acts of physical violence and the dehumanizing effects of law are integral to processes of abjection’. The concept of abjection incorporates perpetration and victimisation at the same time as it blurs the boundaries between them (Kristeva 1982). Rather than use ableism as the central frame, I consider that ableism is actually structured by abjection (see Young 1990). By using abjection, I am able to explain (disablist and ableist) violence from multiple scales, sites, and perspectives (Tyler 2013). In this book I am using abjection to theorise disabled people’s experiences of disablist and ableist violence, not as an objective and totalising account of their experiences, but as an intellectual tool that enables me to reconsider dominant narratives about disability that pervade the field.

Abjection, which etymologically means to ‘cast out’, refers to the conditions in which subjects are rendered unintelligible according to regulatory norms, and it has increasingly been used to comprehend the oppression of various minority groups (see McClintock 1995; Tyler 2013; Warin 2010; Young 1990, for example). To be clear, I am not substituting violence for abjection. I argue that abjection—in contrast to stable notions of violence—opens up greater spaces of possibility and agency. Technologies of abjection are not stable practices; rather, abjection is produced and reproduced, and shapes the subject over time. There are also spaces in, and practices through which, abjection can be resisted. Because abject/ion refers to a subject position that is socially constituted, moving from a construct of violence to a theorisation of abjection demands that I engage with notions of subjectivation so I can interrogate violence as abjection. In the next section, I consider three concepts central to this book: the (disabled) body, the disabled subject, and abjection.

The (disabled) body

A large body of research is based on and reproduces objectivist understandings of (intellectual) disability, and this is also reflected among broader societal beliefs. These perspectives assume the external reality of things; whereby naturalised ontological facts can be objectively observed through our senses to discover reality. This viewpoint assumes that meaning is universal, and exists within objects of inquiry. Objectivism lays claim to a ‘reality’ that can be broken down and observed through scientific and objective methods to produce ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’. Within the context of disability, impairment is presumed to be a natural biological fact, and this presumption is widespread in society (Oliver 1996). Notwithstanding other epistemological viewpoints (such as constructionism or realism), I subscribe to a subjectivist epistemology and presume that reality and knowledge are interpretive rather than value-free. Whereas objectivist epistemology posits that the object (of inquiry) exists independent of the subject, subjectivist epistemology argues that the object is only ever produced and made intelligible by the individual or collective subject. Subjectivists argue that meaning is imposed, created, or produced by the subject and placed upon the object. Pratt (1998: 24) summarises the subjectivist position thus:

knowledge (and truth) is dependent upon what individuals bring to the moment of perception. Knowledge and truth are created, not discovered; the world is only knowable through people’s interpretations of it … knowledge is neither a copy nor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Formatting and other conventions
• Preface
• 1. Beginnings
• 2. Social abjection and reappropriation
• 3. Deb’s narrative: Exploring the multi-dimensional forms of abjection
• 4. Roger’s narrative: Abjection amidst chaos and fragmentation
• 5. Eleven lives
• 6. (Psychic) Self-abjection: Pathologisation and disavowal
• 7. Anne-Marie’s narrative: Abjection and resistance
• 8. Reflections, possibilities, and resistance
• Appendix: Research method(ology)
• Index