The biopolitics of disability: neoliberalism, ablenationalism, and peripheral embodiments

As the title suggests, The Biopolitics of Disability is a dense theoretical book. It is not flashy and is sometimes difficult to follow, but the work this book does is necessary because few disability-studies scholars have seriously engaged with the new materialisms discussed by Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Considering disability in this context allows Mitchell and Snyder to distance themselves from the medical and social models that have become so central to disability studies and opens them to possibilities that may reveal new forms of resistance. However, they use the legal and philosophically grounded term ‘non-normative positivism’ to characterize their approach, which makes it appear that they are unnecessarily distancing themselves from work done by the mentioned scholars, until Chapter 7.

The foundation for Mitchell and Snyder’s argument – that there is no one way to experience disability – is nothing new, but the authors reveal political motivations for treating disability as a knowable entity and also the political potential of recognizing its multiplicity. For Mitchell and Snyder, disability is ‘an identity based on incoherence’ (98); yet such incoherence need not be limiting, as is typically assumed. By taking this perspective, they distinguish their argument from those made by Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson, Lennard Davis, and James Berger, which they characterize as ‘flattening’ (29).

Instead, Mitchell and Snyder look to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2004) Multitude in their afterword for a political theory that draws together the diverse cultural analyses they undertake in The Biopolitics of Disability. As such, readers would benefit from reading this chapter out of order to gain necessary theoretical grounding. For example, the discussion of disability film festivals in Chapter 4 presents one example of a space in which individuals and their products are ‘coordinated yet nonunified’ (208), forming the ‘productive singularities (material and affective bodies) that cannot be collapsed’ about which Hardt and Negri write (214). The same logic applies in Mitchell and Snyder’s chapter on rare disease populations and the patient expert groups organized around them.

Rather than charting one way in which disability operates within neoliberalism, Mitchell and Snyder pursue many, looking at films, novels, cultural histories, and political phenomena. This method can be disorienting, but it follows their theoretical approach. Mitchell and Snyder see it as making a different kind of freedom available based on the position of ‘disability and other nonconforming populations as actively resistant to the imperatives of consumptive living’ (27–28). Here begins their emphasis on the productive potential of failure that aligns with Judith Halberstam’s (2011) arguments in The Queer Art of Failure.

Mitchell and Snyder begin by establishing biopolitics in the introduction as a series of strategies for organizing and managing bodies. Under liberalism, deviant bodies were locked away from the populace – excluded – while under neoliberalism, all bodies can be improved in some way. Biopolitical strategies are used to make bodies as productive as possible of the commodities valued within the system. Because disabled bodies produce nothing of concrete value to neoliberalism, disabled individuals thus do a ‘national service’ by preserving the illusion of American exceptionalism (15).

Mitchell and Snyder characterize this phenomenon as ‘ablenationalism,’ a play on Jasbir Puar’s ‘homonationalism’ from Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Puar 2007). Puar’s term recognizes how tolerance of LGBTQs has served as ‘a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated’ (2013, 336). With their neologism, Mitchell and Snyder transfer this analytical frame from sexuality to disability while preserving a connection between the two contexts. The authors repeatedly use the term ‘crip/queer’ as another way to rhetorically cement this alliance, which is based on the material deviance of these bodies. They are united as ‘alternative forms of being-in-the-world’ (3), which Mitchell and Snyder specifically and repeatedly characterize as ‘peripheral embodiments.’ Yet a tension remains here because Mitchell and Snyder also value disability as a form of embodiment that cuts across races, sexes, genders, and classes.

As suggested earlier, Mitchell and Snyder argue that the attitude of American exceptionalism relies on the misguided belief that disabled individuals have been successfully integrated into postindustrial society. However, they see the tolerance of some disabled individuals as creating a smokescreen that conceals the exclusion of others. This ‘privileged minority’ (44) is labeled the ‘able-disabled,’ a term that is likely to gain popular traction. The authors locate Aimee Mullins and Oscar Pistorius as two examples of the able-disabled, and I can see individuals with autism spectrum disorders who are described as ‘high functioning’ serving as another.

The rehabilitative integration of the able-disabled requires little or no change to existing systems, while giving the appearance that they have become more flexible. Americans can thus congratulate themselves and transfer their attention to countries where persons with disabilities supposedly need more help. As such, disability presents ‘an opportunity for expansion’ under neoliberalism (11). Mitchell and Snyder provide three contemporary case studies that support this argument in Chapter 1, including the operations of the international charity Smile Train. Their second chapter, ‘Curricular Cripistemologies,’ takes a similar approach in its vital analysis of how this ‘false promise of inclusion’ has unfolded within the academy (63).

When striving to include non-normative bodies, we may not recognize the value of their experiences and forms of knowledge. Mitchell and Snyder work to counter this tendency in a series of diverse contexts. They demonstrate how forms of embodiment labeled as disabled present valuable alternatives to neoliberal norms. These potential contributions constitute the ‘capacities of incapacity,’ using Mitchell and Snyder’s language from Chapter 7. There, they analyze novels like Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991), Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom (1985), and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003). According to Mitchell and Snyder, these texts present disabled bodies challenging the value of able-bodied experiences and neoliberal assumptions that disabled individuals are responsible for seeking accommodations and also for regulating/causing their disability. Yet can the novel ever be truly ‘antinormative,’ as Mitchell and Snyder argue, given its bourgeois origin?

Claire Barber-Stetson
Department of English, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA
[email protected]
© 2016 Claire Barber-Stetson
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1214423