The Matter of Disability

Co rporealities: Discourses of Disability

Series editors: David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder

Recent Titles
The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect
by David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder, editors
Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability
by Elizabeth B. Bearden
Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe
by Julia Miele Rodas
Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability
by Shelley L. Tremain
Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education
by Jay Timothy Dolmage
Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education
by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, and James M. Jones, editors
Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement
by Suzannah Biernoff
Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature
by Maren Tova Linett
War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence
by Anne McGuire
The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment
by David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder
Foucault and the Government of Disability, Enlarged and Revised Edition
by Shelley Tremain, editor
The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel
by Karen Bourrier
American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History
by Jenell Johnson
Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability
by George McKay
The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing
by David Bolt
Disabled Veterans in History
by David A. Gerber, editor
Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life
by Margaret Price
Disability Aesthetics
by Tobin Siebers
Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability
by Edward Wheatley
Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing
by G. Thomas Couser

A complete list of titles in the series can be found at www.press.umich.edu

The Matter of Disability
Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect

David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi,

and Sharon L. Snyder, Editors

University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor
Copyright © 2019 by David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder
All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond
that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

Published in the United States of America by the

University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-­free paper
First published May 2019

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names:  Mitchell, David T., 1962–­editor.  |  Antebi, Susan, editor.  |  Snyder, Sharon L., 1963–­
editor.
Title:  The matter of disability : materiality, biopolitics, crip affect / David T. Mitchell, Susan
Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder, editors.
Description:  Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2019.  |  Includes bibliographical
references and index.  |
Identifiers:  lccn 2018052340 (print) | lccn 2019007453 (ebook)  |  isbn 9780472125098
(E-­book)  |  isbn 9780472074112 (hardcover : alk. paper)  |  isbn 9780472054114 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
Subjects:  LCSH: People with disabilities in mass media.  |  People with disabilities.  | 
Disabilities—­Social aspects.
Classification: LCC p94.5.p46 (ebook) | LCC p94.5.p46 m38  2019 | DDC 302.23087—­ dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052340

Cover image: Tom Lieber, Red Loop, 2012, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Dolby Chadwick Gallery.

Cover description: A frame of gold, maroon, and black square off a rectangular abstract image with
white skeletal digits hanging over the edge of a round horizon with a jungle-tangle of warm, lively
forms below. Centered in the upper plane is the title of the book in white lettering; the lower plane
contains the names of the volume editors in smaller white type.
Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction1
David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder

Part I: The Matter of Subjectivity

Returning the Social to the Social Model 39
Tobin Siebers
Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary
Disability Studies 48
Joshua Kupetz
Unique Mattering: A New Materialist Approach to
William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition 67
Olga Tarapata

Part II: The Matter of Meaning

Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics: Collaboration, Disability,
and Clairvoyance 89
Patrick Durgin
Dis-­affection: Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies 118
Angela M. Smith

Part III: The Matter of Mortality

Spider-­Man’s Designer Genes: Hypercapacity and Transhumanism
in a “DIY World” 143
Samuel Yates
vi | Contents

An Arm Up or a Leg Down? Grounding the Prosthesis

and Other Instabilities 160
Chris Ewart
Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS: Male Pregnancy, Disability,
and Viral Materialism in “Bloodchild” 182
Matt Franks
Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks: Reading for Idiocy,
Caninity, and Tropological Confusion in Of Mice and Men 204
David Oswald

Part IV: The Matter of Memory

Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit:
The Matter of Disappearance 229
Susan Antebi
Posthumanist T4 Memory 249
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder
Contributors273
Index277

Digital materials related to this title can be found on

the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL:
https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9365129
Preface and Acknowledgments

Every act of creating a new theory involves a process of deliberate overcor-

rection. To actively fashion theory otherwise requires one to privilege
some mode of investigation that has been artificially underprivileged thus
far, while more well-­traveled routes are intentionally underutilized. In this
way alternative theorizations help to expose how theory is a living, breath-
ing agentive organism operating fully within the limits and possibilities of
its own historical moment.
This volume is no different, as the editors and contributors attempt to
think disability materiality more agentially. Such an effort works counter
to prevailing disability methodologies in that the social model of disability
set aside impairment on behalf of the more pressing matter of policy and
politics to live in the world. Inevitably, working self-­consciously in this
manner involved us in actively suppressing some of the interpretive and
methodological moves so characteristic of our prior work within social
model, deconstructive, and cultural studies contexts. Not that the con-
tributors to this volume did not continue to have a stake in exposing the
political coordinates of disability, such as the exposé of barriers and forms
of exclusion, the formation of expendable populations, and those bodies
that could be rationally sacrificed as instances of homo sacer. Rather, we
attempted to think through disabled bodies (human, nonhuman, organic,
inorganic, and environmental) to as great an extent as possible.
Consequently, this project involved us in a radical application of post-
humanism to disability in its most phenomenological orientations. And it
is in this pursuit of a deeper level of engagement with how disabled bodies
respond to and actively reshape worlds that the contributors are most in
debt to forebears largely not involved with questions of disability—­or, at
least not explicitly as a subject of their study. In their approach to this vol-
ume, the editors believe that no employment of disability as a diagnostic
measure of discrimination can unravel that foundational devaluation of
viii | Preface and Acknowledgments

disability from its culturally wrought stigmas, sexual prohibitions, or de-

viance. Such an approach forces us, we believe, to exceed scripts of aber-
rancy based on the assessment of distance placed between disability and
desirable embodiments of normative capacity.
To front-­load this shared approach, our work begins in an acknowledg-
ment of the foundational work of mid-­20th-­century French philosopher
Maurice Merleau-­Ponty. Phenomenology at its most basic level fashions
ways of approaching our alternative models of engagement with the mate-
rial vibrancy of disability. Yet Merleau-­Ponty’s work makes few explicit ap-
pearances in this volume, and, in some ways we must recognize that later
generations of phenomenological investigation exceed approaches that
merely situate phenomena as separate from the nature of being—­
particularly those of neomaterialists such as Diana Coole, Samantha Frost,
Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Rey Chow, Sara Ahmed, William E. Connolly,
Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Pheng Cheah—­so-­often cited in this vol-
ume. The work of the neomaterialists (also known as new materialism and
nonnormative positivism) serves as a second-­or third-­generation approach
to phenomenological traditions before us. Specifically, wherein Merleau-­
Ponty’s work tends to end at the intersections of human bodies and envi-
ronments, this volume also follows key works in animal studies, environ-
mental studies, animacy studies, critical race studies, queer theory, and
body studies, to name just a few. Perhaps, most importantly the volume
pursues some of the ramifications in disability studies that follow on the
heels of Carol Thomas and Margrit Shildrick in their key investigations of
“impairment-­effects” and “leaky bodies.” These disabled body-­based ap-
proaches sat dormant for too long as productive sites where disability stud-
ies and other cultural studies scholarship have left experiences of impair-
ment behind almost as an embarrassment in order to pursue a more radical
politics of disability. While we all believe in the importance of this radical
political potentiality of disability, we also argue that not engaging with
what Canadian disability studies writer Rod Michalko called “the differ-
ence that disability makes” left scholars in the field incapable of engaging
with the materiality of difference in more meaningful ways.
Perhaps most pointedly, and contemporaneous to our interests, all the
contributors in this volume owe a debt to the disability studies theorist
Tobin Siebers, who, in many of the essays he wrote before he died in 2015,
took up the concept of “critical embodiment” as a key tool for develop-
ment. Siebers’s interest in pursuing this methodological innovation sprang
from his close relationship to work on the “cultural model of disability,” as
he once commented to one of us while eating lunch in a café in downtown
 Preface and Acknowledgments  |  ix

Ann Arbor. In many ways, what he said at that time drives this volume, as
Siebers extended his observation into the following argument: “The prob-
lem in disability studies is not that it engages identity as a foundational
tool in its investigations of difference, but rather that is has not done so
with respect to the alternative knowledge disabled people bring to our
shared cultural experiences.” What he meant in making this comment is
that disability can only contest its consignment to the “dustbin of history”
by showing that experiences of the nonnormative body are more than just
degrees of what the novelist Stanley Elkins calls “falling away from true.”
In other words, Siebers believed as a disabled man who used a wheelchair
that he knew things about the world that others could not. His words help
to explicate the standpoint position of Nancy Mairs’s famous disability-­
phenomenological phrase “waist-­high in the world” as a key form of
knowing that is not available to most walkies and other upright citizens.
This comment was not an overvaluing of the importance of his own point
of view so much as it was a means by which to argue that disability had its
own laws and potentialities of insight that would be lost without cultural
forums such as disability studies to create space for this uniquely embod-
ied worldview.
Thus, the editors want to acknowledge our unique debts in this regard
while also intending to push what Siebers and others delineated as “the
embodied turn” in disability studies to further posthumanist ends. The
alternative agential materiality of disability on display in this volume re-
mains in transition to a significant extent in that one can still feel the pull
of social model expositions and explorations running throughout these
essays; they do not “break away” from the methodologies and domains of
insight so critical to disability studies formulations since the early 1970s.
Disability studies sociologist Harlan Hahn once argued that “Disability
Studies was nothing other than the surprising encounter with the alter-
nate world-­making view of disabled people as their perspectives have
been suppressed for so long and so dramatically.” We believe in many ways
that this contention is a helpful gloss on how to think about the content of
the essays in this volume and their cross-­disciplinary shaking approaches
to the articulation of alternative knowledge bases. However, what has
most struck us in the creation of this volume is the degree to which Dis-
ability Studies has postponed that encounter with the visceral, material
basis of Hahn’s insightful gloss on disability as an absented way of know-
ing and the unique innovations evolved by non-­normative embodiments
as they navigate environments built for others.
As we worked on this volume over the course of several years (2014–­
x | Preface and Acknowledgments

2017), another group held bimonthly meetings in Washington, DC: the

Disability Studies Reading Group. While none of this volume was vetted
for comment directly with this group, their insightful observations on
other work relevant to the questions addressed in this one and on the es-
say about posthumanist T4 memory that concludes this volume make this
collective an important influence. Thus, we want to acknowledge our great
friends and colleagues at George Washington University, Georgetown
University, Gallaudet University, and Loyola Maryland University: Robert
McRuer, Jeff Brune, Jonathan Hsy, Julia Watts Belser, Sara Scalenghe. This
collective has exerted an enormous amount of influence on our thinking
and played a more instrumental role in how this collection came to take
shape than they will ever know.
Further, we would like to acknowledge the graduate students in the
George Washington Fall 2015 seminar Disability New Materialisms who
read and actively commented on the theory, fiction, journalism, and films
that play such a central role in the essays that follow: Fawwaz Alfares, Vic-
toria Aloupis, Grace Bailey, Raymond Budelman, Jamie Cohn-­Stacey,
Chelsea Faloona, Fowzia Farah, Brady Forest, Leah Grisham-­Webber,
Erik Hollis, Lilit Makaryan, Alan Montroso, Elizabeth Moser, Sarai Reed,
and Samuel Yates (one of the contributors to this collection). Additionally,
graduate students in the GW Fall 2017 seminar Globalization of Necro­
politics also contributed to some of final thinking that went into this vol-
ume as it finally came to fruition. Those individuals include Alexandra
Anastasia, Emma Cassabaum, Turni Chakrabarti, Nancy Chung, Oni
Crawford, Jennifer Henderson, Michaela Kleppinger, Soo-­ Jin Kweon,
Ling Liu, Rachel Lynch, Shawn Meddock, Ashley Miller, and Zahari Rich-
ter. Their enthusiasm for thinking alternatively about disability materiality
made them some of the ideal readers for whom this volume is intended.
The development of this volume has also benefited from the dynamic
community of disability studies scholars at the University of Toronto.
Thanks are due in particular to Tanya Titchkosky and Anne McGuire,
founders of the Unsettling Normalcy working group, and their students and
collaborators. Their dynamic engagement with disability as a way of being
in the world, and their ongoing facilitation of new spaces to approach the
shifting questions of our discipline, have impacted the shaping of this proj-
ect. Our colleague at the University of Rochester, Beth Jörgensen, coeditor
of a previous project, has been an invaluable interlocutor over a number of
years; her energy, generosity, and transdisciplinary approach to disability in
the global South have contributed to many aspects of this project.
We also wish to acknowledge Ximena Berecochea and Salvador Alanis,
 Preface and Acknowledgments  |  xi

codirectors of the Toronto Institute for Creative Exchange, and their col-
laborators Mario Bellatin and Daniel Canty, coleaders of the January 2017
workshop Art and Orthopaedics. The opportunity to collaboratively con-
duct this unique workshop with academics and artists, including Emily
Hind, Eva-­Lynn Jagoe, and Jeannine Pitas, was key in the reflective pro-
cess through which this work developed. Graduate students from the fall
2017 University of Toronto seminar Disability, Biopolitics and Eugenic
Futures in Latin America, including Catia Corriveau-­Dignard, Petre Ene,
Nae Hanashiro Avila, Daniela Maldonado Castañeda, Carlos Antonio Pa-
juelo, Jesús Porras Vielma, Josette Rosenzweig Espinal, Alejandro Soifer,
and Ross Swanson, offered surprising and challenging insight on the theo-
ries that informed this volume. This research was supported by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Finally, we thank the artist Tom Lieber for permission to use his art-
work on the cover of this volume. The abstract painting, “Red Loop”
(2012), captures the focus on shifting content in the essays collected in The
Matter of Disability by exploring the interfolding of human, nature, envi-
ronment, toxicities, and blood as an ever-­merging mutation of intersect-
ing agents. As the artist explains his objective, “My work is centered on
human energy . . . experiencing, feeling, receiving, expressing,” and this
capture of entangling libidinal forces erupts here as a not completely un-
perilous mixture. The work might be characterized in Sharon Snyder’s
words as an amalgam of bamboo, wheat grass, sage, skeletal forms, and
ghostly remnants nourished with the blood of ancients who leave behind
whips, questions, and more brambles, bodies besotted and humming to
the milky surface. This being in and among things—­a world imprinted by
bodies as well as forces which press themselves on embodiments—­swirls
in a more agential interaction than Disability Studies and deconstructionist-­
based criticism has been able to adequately capture and which this volume
seeks to address. The painting came at the end of Lieber’s experience of
caregiving for his partner who had terminal illness and later died after
great struggle. For the editors this work captures the irresolution of that
engagement with dynamic forces and the ways in which their meanings,
identities, shapes, expressions, and forms cannot be adequately separated
from each other. Lieber’s work is widely collected and featured in the per-
manent collections of the Guggenheim and Modern Art Museums in New
York City, the San Francisco Modern Art Museum, and the Tate Gallery in
London among many others. Lieber now splits his time between Kauai
and Los Angeles and his paintings are significantly influenced by the envi-
ronments of the Hawaiian islands.
xii | Preface and Acknowledgments

In closing, we want to return to the matter of theory-­making and over-

correction with which we began. This volume explicitly foregrounded two
things that all contributors were asked to address: first, an unabashed
commitment to thinking disability and crip/queer materialities in the
most lively manner possible—­essentially a foregrounding of impairment
but without the pathologizing baggage of diagnostic and normative deter-
minations of deviance; second, a visceral engagement with embodiment
as it marks the world and is, in turn, marked by it. In other words, we
asked to our contributors to engage readers in the task of thinking the
world through disability rather than the more customary way of thinking
disability through the world. This dual task was no simple request, and all
of the essays in this volume went through multiple vettings with editors
and our most helpful anonymous, outside readers. While multiauthored
collections are highly devalued in the academic publishing world, this vol-
ume took years to develop and cultivate as interactive series of engage-
ments and iterations that each contribution made to the larger work as a
whole. Thus, as each essay stands on its own and will interest readers with
specific interests and particular investment in more singular objects of
study, we hope many will read the entirety, as we believe the argument
unfolds most forcefully at the level of the whole.
Of course, both tactics identified above are on display, and the collec-
tion can only hope to situate itself as a transitional one at best—­straddling
yawning gaps that exist somewhere between thought systems—­but one
that ultimately actively privileges the agency of materiality rather than the
inscriptive forces of culture. Thus, we join Brian Massumi, Jeffrey Cohen,
Mel Chen, and others in finding out whether or not disability can assist in
locating an agency not entirely eclipsed by language and the workings of
culture while, nonetheless, using words as our only route to the agentive
materiality we seek. We believe overcorrecting in this direction will orient
us toward ways in which materialities recognized as disabilities might re-
configure worlds rather than primarily serve as failures of capacitation
demanded by neoliberal orders.

David T. Mitchell, Washington, DC

Susan Antebi, Toronto, Canada
Sharon L. Snyder, Washington, DC
Introduction
David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder

Giving (Disability) Materiality Its Due

Over the past two decades, theorizations of posthumanism and neomate-

rialist philosophy have begun to radically reshape our understanding of
what counts as materiality. Matter itself begins to take on a complex, inter-
active role in the configuration of knowledge and the world, and is in turn
shaped by that universe of interactions. According to the posthumanist
philosopher of agential realism Karen Barad, “Matter is a dynamic intra-­
active becoming that is implicated and enfolded in its iterative becom-
ing. . . . In other words, materiality is discursive . . . just as discursive prac-
tices are always already material” (151–­52). For this reason, it is “matter(ing)”
rather than matter that most effectively defines the scenes of posthuman-
ist philosophical intervention. And it is this “matter(ing),” too, that occu-
pies our attention in the present volume, as we seek to elucidate the key
role of disability’s ongoing potentiality in the reshaping of the world.
For many readers, the notion of matter will still tend to conjure exam-
ples with more clearly delimited boundaries, from the primacy of the
atom, to the fleshiness of human and nonhuman bodies, to broader con-
figurations of environment and world. Within this more familiar terrain,
matter appears either to promise greater solidity to its discursive counter-
part, or to serve as a purely overdetermined product of discourse, as in the
tradition of social constructivism.
The urgency of posthumanist attention to materiality thus lies in its
challenge to the boundaries that have traditionally posited matter as either
given and separate from historical, cultural, and discursive processes, or
as the constructed end-­product of such processes. This bounded and lin-
ear reading of matter that is integral to social constructivism continues to
2 | The Matter of Disability

permeate disability studies, thanks in large part to the significance and

longevity of the social model. The result is that disability is construed pri-
marily through a discursive fate as synonymous with consignment to bio-
logical classifications of undesirable embodiment. Therefore disability
studies now must encounter something amiss in social constructivism it-
self. This edited collection, titled The Matter of Disability, contends that
such a critique opens up space for an alternative, neomaterialist, posthu-
manist basis to encounter disability more viscerally.
Posthumanist disability theory offers an opportunity to provide a sub-
stantive theoretical reworking of the repetitive employment of impaired—­
read: socially marked and biologically determined as undesirable—­bodies
as diagnostic tools of things gone awry in their social and environmental
contexts. As Tobin Siebers points out in his essay on rebuilding the social
model of disability in this volume, it is within the terrain of diagnosis that
the medical and social models share a common objective in fixing things
gone awry.1 Within the scope of the medical model, disability is diagnosed
as dysfunction and the impaired individual as incapacitated, thus, in need
of fixing through supplementation, surgical intervention, therapy, and
training. Alternatively, the social model of disability engages the social
difficulties encountered by nonnormative bodies as opportunities to diag-
nose barriers in the environment forged around narrow norms of aesthet-
ics, capacity, and functionality. While these two diagnostic approaches
have profound differences when it comes to their findings (one diagnoses
deviant embodiment, the other diagnoses exclusionary social and built
environments) they both tend to empty disability materiality of its active
participation in fashioning alternative biologies, alternative subjectivities,
and viable nonnormative modes of life (human, animal, organic, inor-
ganic). Social model thought also tends to keep in place the barrier be-
tween human and nonhuman animals, as the latter continues to resonate
as a slander on the former. A posthumanist disability approach provides
an opportunity to encounter disability more viscerally as an active par-
ticipant in the transhistorical, intraspecies, and cross-­cultural interactions
of materiality, sociality, structures, and environments.
If, as posthumanist neomaterialism proposes, there is an interrela-
tionship between matter and discursive meaning, we need to more tan-
gibly recognize the materiality of disability’s active participation in the
processes of meaning-­making itself.2 This is not simply because disabil-
ity must be resignified in more positive, affirming ways; but rather that
disability provides the evidence of embodiment’s shifting, kaleidoscopic,
dynamically unfolding agency. If materiality’s excess agency beyond the
 Introduction | 3

discursive proves incredibly difficult to capture, disability, with its un-

characteristic morphing rearrangements of matter, makes that task a bit
more tangible than it might prove otherwise. Bodies matter, but more
than in the influential “citationally iterative” sense that Judith Butler
theorizes in Bodies That Matter (6). For Butler both sex and gender are
culturally constructed (there is no material essence to their meaning),
and this production of the discursive realm opens their meanings up for
reinscription. The ability of sex/gender norms to pass as “natural” serves
as the product of cultural repetitions that deeply ingrain social meaning
in materialities. Gender performativity (i.e., the “gender trouble” created
by the defining instability of sexual identity), then, helps destabilize the
cultural status of these “ostensibl[e] categories of ontology” (xxvii).
Their discursive overdetermination offers up opportunities for the de-
stabilizing play of resignification: the citationality of sameness can be
used against itself to make the sex/gender terrain of meaning more elas-
tic. However, such formulas of citationality (even in their most radical
subversive applications) rely upon a passive substrate subject rather than
a more fully agentive corporeality. Such a practice essentially subordi-
nates materiality’s agency to the whims of cultural iterations that func-
tion as law. In contrast, posthumanist approaches are bound up in the
material, discursive interplay that continually reconfigures the world.
One does not precede or eclipse the other.
The posthumanist approaches undertaken by the contributors to this
collection recognize that matter itself exerts influence and agency that ul-
timately outstrips any human ability to deterministically channel its sub-
stantiality into false discursive singularities. It makes the diagnostic im-
perative that reduces disability to a mere barometer of cultural
insufficiencies less determinative. It returns disability to its proper place as
an ongoing historical process of materiality’s dynamic interactionism. It
situates disability not as deviant, but rather as evidence for the “excess”
that marks materiality’s agency and reaches beyond the realm of the cul-
tural while shaping its formulations. The Matter of Disability, in other
words, does not pursue representational, rehabilitative meanings for dis-
ability, but rather takes as a starting point the fact that disability is already
a part of the process of materiality’s active, unfolding participation in the
world. It is “world-­making” in the cultural sense that queer theory intends
(Berlant and Warner 558), but it is also the world-­making of difference
through matter as neomaterialist posthumanism contends. Elizabeth
Grosz puts this process in Darwinistic terms as “life as the ever more com-
plex elaboration of difference” (66–­67).
4 | The Matter of Disability

No Mere Prosthetic Relation

Disability participates in this “complex elaboration of difference” rather

than solidifies something gone awry in an otherwise stable process. Em-
bodiment’s defining precarity and surprising unfoldings turn disabilities
into productive, proactive expressive capacities within matter itself. This
alternative approach to materiality intends to “give materiality its due”
by avoiding the purely inscription-­based models of most social con-
structivist theory (Coole and Frost 7). Bodies are not “dumb material”
upon which sociality simply writes; rather they actively participate in
their own shapings and the shaping of the world of which they are a part
(Massumi 1). Yet, at the same time, posthumanist disability theory is not
to be confused with transhumanism. Transhumanism effectively ex-
tends the most dangerous inclinations within humanism in that propo-
nents invest in the capacity of a human-­directed escape from disability
and other late eugenical dreams of an exceptionally capacitated human-
ity beyond our current one.3 Posthumanism is an opposition to this be-
lief, perhaps, even, as Cary Wolfe argues it, the “opposite of transhuman-
ism” (What Is Posthumanism? xv).
This foundational distinction exists at the heart of what theorists in
this volume refer to variously as neomaterialism, nonnormative positiv-
ism, or posthumanist disability theory. The attempt is to think more
deeply about materiality’s agential capacities without continuing to con-
sign disability to a reductively pathologized and thus wholly human dis-
cursive fate. In part our collective attempt is to dislodge the human-­centric
foundation upon which humanist, liberal philosophy rests; in the next
section of the introduction we expand on the destabilization of the foun-
dations of this figure of hypercapacitated, homogenizing Western man. At
this juncture, the roles of materiality in general, and disability materiality
in particular, have reached their limit within liberal humanist philosophi-
cal formulas of material differences.
Disability therefore must be rescued as the more active, dynamic, and
substantive materialization that it is. Or, rather, posthumanist disability
theory assists the social model in surrendering its inability to give an ever-­
mutating materiality its due.
While social constructivism has largely consigned materiality to a
minimalist-­made product of discourse, posthumanism seeks to decenter
this human-­centric understanding by recognizing matter “not as iterative
citationality [Butler] but as iterative intra-­activity” (Barad 184). Matter
makes new worlds of possibility surface even as it often seems statistically
 Introduction | 5

deterministic in its evident-­ness. Disability, which the social model of dis-

ability has tasked as social disadvantage “constructed on top of impair-
ment” (Corker 8), provides one of the best examples of an overdetermined,
constructed, and socially sequestered materiality upon which normative
social orders inscribe pathology, undesirability, even nonviability. Whereas
difference has now been significantly refashioned as the potentiality of
alternative modes of being, social constructivism continues to resist in-
cluding disability as an alternate becoming. The majority of our extant
critical theories have continued to ignore disability in their theories of
queer, gender, racialized, classed, sexualized, environmentalist, and inter-
sectionalist approaches to questions of embodiment. This tendency has
continued despite active attempts to reverse this telling omission from so-
cial justice approaches, such as those of Robert McRuer (queer theory),
Carol Thomas (feminist theory), Nirmala Erevelles (critical race theory),
Jim Charlton (neo-­Marxist theory), and Alison Kafer (sexuality studies),
among many others.
We think that we know disability when we see it and that seeing, itself
a privileging of an ableist capacity of a singular form of interactionism,
involves encountering a limit with which most disciplines about material-
ist embodiment would rather not associate. Even the social model’s cul-
turally constructivist emphasis puts aside the question of direct encoun-
ters with the substantiality of nonnormative embodiment. As the authors
of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) put
it in their 1972 white paper on disability: “It is only the actual impairment
which we must accept, the additional and totally unnecessary problems
caused by the way we are treated are essentially to be overcome and not
accepted” (UPIAS). While it may at first appear that UPIAS anticipates a
material encounter with disability (“It is only the impairment we must ac-
cept”), the admission dispenses with the need and moves immediately to
an analysis of the sources of cultural oppression: “the additional and to-
tally unnecessary boundaries” of socially constructed exclusions. The ap-
plication of disability as the product of oppression situates nonnormative
materiality as somehow inappropriate for, even threatening to, and cer-
tainly beside the point of, political discourse.4 It must be accepted and
immediately set aside as a private matter in order to deal with the exposé
of the public forces of oppression. Within this formulation and its many
offspring, disability, then, could be argued to serve as a holdover from
antiquity. Impaired bodies continue to provide the illusion of ways to reli-
ably anticipate less viable forms of embodiment and thus determine in the
language of contemporary cost/risk analyses those bodies in which soci-
6 | The Matter of Disability

ety should not invest. The payoff appears too meager, and, thus, the inves-
tors likely unrequited.
Yet, as studies in the sociology of medicine recently show, what appears
to be a body’s discordant sidestepping of a more stable program—­one or-
ganisms only possess as an illusory investment in their own nonmorphing
capacitation into the future—­is actually the historical unfolding of a mu-
tating, adaptive materiality responding to alterations in environmental
conditions, internal stresses, inorganic/organic entanglements, fluctuat-
ing stimuli, and historical conditions of cultural practice. While mutations
recognized as impairments might appear undesirable and “incapacitat-
ing,” the conditions to which they respond are often far more deleterious.
Examples of this insufficiency of predictive capacities abound: from the
iron overloads of hemachromatosis to counteract bubonic plague (Mos-
lem 18), to red blood cell mutations that render malarial infestations less
effective (Neese and Williams 6), to esophageal atresia in order to protect
the fetus from ingestion of high iron or mercury content (Mitchell and
Snyder, “The Matter of Disability” 488), to name just three. Thus, many
contemporary societies continue to treat the alternative responses of non-
normative materiality as discordant, while, in fact, our understanding of
these alternative routings remains inexact at best, and deleteriously dehu-
manizing at worst.
This practice of using disability as predictive of life-­forms in which we
should not invest allows a certain confidence in the slippery concept of
difference as undesirable to creep back into our social justice investments.
Within this scenario of deviant matter, disability has little to offer beyond
functioning as a vehicle for exposing certain arrays of disadvantageous
material expressions, or at most, an embodiment through which to know
the world’s exclusions, intolerances, and inhumane discriminations. This
is disability’s dual diagnostic function in the medical and social models
that many essays in this collection expose, reconnoiter, and rewrite. Dis-
ability, within these limited formulas, has nothing to tell us about the al-
ternative agencies of becoming. It offers no ethical map to productive di-
vergences of being-­in-­the-­world from which we may learn, adopt, and
adapt. It refuses crossings of the species barrier, where, for instance, Dawn
Prince-­Hughes argues gorillas helped her become more human (4), or
where Temple Grandin argues her participation on the autistic spectrum
enables her to go when imagining the perspective of cattle (20).5 For both
Prince-­Hughes and Grandin, this “freedom” to cross species boundaries
provides an opportunity in posthumanist disability studies to pursue al-
ternative applications of ethical behaviors that may have nothing to do
 Introduction | 7

with a more typical normative exchange quotient where everything is un-

dertaken in order to receive some form of reciprocity. These are human/
nonhuman relations that do not depend on an exchange of the nonhuman
animal’s return of feeling for the experience of connectedness.
Consequently, through a variety of animal crossings and intra-­agential
encounters with organic and even inorganic life, this collection participates
in what Cary Wolfe describes as a view of matter that is not “posthuman”
in the sense of being “after embodiment,” but rather is critical of the “fanta-
sies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself ”
(What Is Posthumanism?). In the first instance, impairment surfaces as a
serious question that feminist disability studies originally introduced to
disability studies’ own fantasies of disembodiment through the concept of
“impairment-­ effects” (Thomas 42). According to Carol Thomas,
impairment-­effects are those aspects of disability embodiments that cause
disabled people to struggle with incapacity and often prohibit them from
pursuing lives of robust political citizenry as the result of being what Asma
Abbas refers to as “agency-­impaired” (133). To be “agency-­impaired” is to
fall short of a leftist political investment in bodies actively pursuing their
rights as a display of the agency-­fetishizing signs of fully capacitated, even
while marginalized, citizens. As Spike Lee memorably put it in his film of
racial unrest, Do the Right Thing: “Fight the powers that be.” Yet what Abbas
points out is that such an idealization of citizenry neglects the lives of those
who must labor to scrape out their basic needs on a daily basis, those bod-
ies who, by definition, do not promise transcendence to a transhumanist
overcoming, but rather are fully posthumanist in their composition, be-
haviors, and tactical alternatives of living. Many disabled lives can be found
beneath this category and, in ignoring it by idealizing the rights-­slinging
alternative, we miss what these lives that matter have to teach us. Disability
artist Micah Bizant creates portraits of those killed by police violence in the
Black Lives Matter movement by emphasizing their deaths as an outcome
of the compounding intersections of race, gender, and disability.
Consequently, the posthuman turn participates in the decentering of
liberal classical man from the equation of the demands of materiality as in
the above examples of Abbas’s “low-­level agency” participants and Bizant’s
intersecting identity portraits. Posthumanist approaches provide alterna-
tive pathways for investigating nonnormative and nonhuman embodi-
ments as a source of insight and the alternative agential participation of
materiality in knowledge production. It is no longer possible in this for-
mulation to see disability as a deviance from able-­bodiedness. Instead,
posthumanist disability theory actively avoids thinking about disability as
8 | The Matter of Disability

Fig. 1.  Justice for Mario Woods by Micah Bazant and Sins Invalid (watercolor, 2015).
According to the joint creators: “On Dec. 2 2015, San Francisco police executed Mario
Woods, a young Black disabled man, in the SF Bayview neighborhood. Over 50% of
police killings in SF and nationally are of people with disabilities, especially Black and
Brown people with psych impairments (often referred to as ‘mentally ill’.)” Image avail-
able at https://www.micahbazant.com/mario-woods/

some preexisting, external force that throws instability into a stable pat-
tern or code. Rather, mutation (particularly when characterized as dis-
ability) names “the randomness which is always already immanent in the
processes by which both material bodies and cultural patterns replicate
themselves” (Rutsky 111).
Disability, then, is matter in motion and the exposure of the lie through
which we think materiality as a stable baseline of limited plenitude. Bor-
rowing from these recent traditions that feed into posthumanist neomate-
 Introduction | 9

rialisms, the contributors in this volume seek to explore how the matter of
disability matters beyond its diagnostic positioning since at least the fif-
teenth century as a depreciated socially inscribed deviant surface. As Fou-
cault points out, the concept of man is rather recent (386). Rather than
continue to accept the assumption of disability studies that disability pri-
marily organizes our exposés of oppression, contributors to this volume
argue that bodily variations discursively mapped as “impairments” do not
merely mirror prejudicial interpretations of contra-­aesthetic, dysfunc-
tional, unexamined lessons of those living in undercapacitated bodies.
Instead we collectively take as a starting point the idea that matter is nei-
ther inert nor simply inscribed by cultural forces against its interests. In
order to derive this alternative approach we pursue disability as the space
of possibilities opened up by the “indeterminacies entailed by exclusions”
(Barad 230). In other words, the alternative modes of becoming that even
the most severe impairments offer involve the promise of an alternative
agency that reshapes the world and opens it up to other modes of (non-
normative) being.
Thus, we begin to return full circle from our starting point in contest-
ing the notion that disability is only capable of being resignified, as this
would be the constructivist end point. Even more significantly, we insist
on the ways in which the materiality of impairment opens up new worlds
of potentiality. Materiality’s mattering is an active participant in the resig-
nification process, as knowledge has to keep shifting in order to keep up
with mutating matter and vice versa. As Lynn Huffer argues for queer
lives, disability alternatives make available “an ethical frame that can actu-
ally be used as a map for living” (48). Able-­bodiedness is a boundary-­
making process that relies on pejorative concepts of disability to see itself
as privileged and desirably capacitated (Diedrich 219). In this sense, able-­
bodiedness needs disability to embody devalued states of existence in
which to showcase its own capacitated desirability. Robert McRuer refers
to this centrality of disability to ability as the latter’s provision of a “mutu-
ally constitutive” inside for heteronormative able-­bodiedness (4). Within
able-­bodiedness’s parasitism exists a disability host. One cannot exist
without the other, but to yield only to exposés of this interdependency of
binaries further erodes disability’s material promise. This is a primary de-
generative relationship promoted by social constructivist thought that The
Matter of Disability intends to throw into question.
What might a posthumanist disability theory tangibly offer to our un-
derstanding of materiality’s agential participation in the world? This is a
key question addressed by all of the essays to follow. However, here let us
10 | The Matter of Disability

explore how disability has played a key role in the critique of Newtonian-
ism by quantum physics based on a sequence of disability insights. Karen
Barad points out that Newtonian physics argues one cannot both gauge
the materiality of the measuring instrument and, at the same time, use the
instrument to gauge the properties of the object/field to be measured. This
separation helps Newtonian physicists in arguing that a “cut” (a distinct
separation exists) between measurer and measurement device that makes
neutral observation of the properties of another possible. In order to cri-
tique this reigning distinction of faith in scientific neutrality, Barad takes
up the formulations of quantum physics (particularly those of Niels Bohr),
who critiqued Newtonianism through an elaboration of the inextricability
of matter and measurement. One of Bohr’s nodal points of entry for ar-
ticulating a critique of Newtonianism is a man holding a cane and stand-
ing in a dark room—­first sensing its “weightiness” and then employing the
cane to sense the immediate environment around him. In this arrange-
ment, as Newtonian physics premises, a cut between observer and ob-
served erupts as the experimenter is consigned to either paying attention
to the materiality of the instrument of measurement or engaging in the act
of measuring an external materiality. This either/or partition creates the
Newtonian foundation for claims that the observer can be separated out
from that which is observed. This subtraction of the observer from the
observed produces the prized product of neutrality.6
Many disability studies scholars will recognize (as did the philosopher
of phenomenology Maurice Merleau-­Ponty) Bohr’s description above as
one akin to the use of a blind cane by those with visual impairments (144).
“Travel caning” involves the arc-­like swings of a white cane with a ball on
the end of it to “feel” out the terrain before one. It also involves holding the
rubberized handle in one’s hand with a slackened grip to produce the most
sensitive read of the topography ahead. In fact, the feel of the materiality
of the cane and its interaction with the environment are simultaneously
pivotal to a successful blind navigation of the world. In contrast, Newton’s
formulation erects a separateness in that one is either sensing the weight
of the stick, the stickiness of the handgrip, the bounce of the ball, the flex-
ing weight of the cane, or taking a reading of the surface of a sidewalk, for
instance, in order to pick the least barrier-­ridden route. The latter activity
involves the displacement of the former and vice versa.
But through Bohr’s alternative argumentative pathway that explains
materiality as an active participate in measurement, posthumanist disabil-
ity theory allows us to recognize that impairment is not separable from
interaction with the environment in the ways Newtonianism posits; this
 Introduction | 11

contention exists at the heart of agential realism. Attention shifts back and
forth between materiality and measurement, and neither can be held in a
distinct partition as definitively separable from the other. To extend this
disability insight at the heart of her book, Barad draws from the disability
studies analysis of Lisa Diedrich to argue that late disability memoirist
Nancy Mairs’s intra-­agential relationship to her Quickie P100 power
wheelchair shows that the machine cannot be separated from the person
(158). When the machine goes down, so does Mairs’s body, and thus one is
not simply the conveyance vehicle of the other (fleshy) occupant. This is
no mere prosthetic relation.
Additionally, we would argue that the assertion made by Donna Har-
away in her eponymous “Cyborg Manifesto” helps critique Newton’s ei-
ther/or argument in this regard: when one uses prosthetic equipment, one
has to both sense its materiality and navigate an environment, as the lack
of ease of detachable parts makes the difficult merger of materiality and
machine chronically enmeshed. When a wheelchair user, for example, sits
on a cushion placed on top of a metal platform, one will, at first, sense the
cushion, the feel of its surface—­hard, soft, narrow, ripped, ribbed, and
then, not long in the future, increasingly come to sense the unforgiving
materiality of the metal platform mattering beneath the foam. Over the
course of use, through the daily positioning in a power wheelchair, one
realizes that the wheelchair’s navigation of surfaces—­ its measuring
function—­certainly coexists with some sense of the materiality of the
metal platform on top of which one sits; the joystick that one manipulates
to navigate the environment; the whir of the wheels and motors as they
canvas various surfaces; screen readouts on the control pad that interact
with the visual and audio inputs of cognition; the pressing of the plastic
arm rests into the fleshy arms that create an indent in the foam cushion
beneath and wear a groove in the bone above; the movement of one’s body
based on a pace set by the machine to which one is connected and other
machines to which one is not, and so on. Awarenesses of the device, one’s
body, and the surface traversed by all occur simultaneously and do not
exist in a Newtonian “cut” as separable from each other. This is one of the
alternative ways that disability materiality holds a heightened sense of ma-
teriality’s intra-­agency with various forms of what is often euphemistically
called “human enhancement.”
Further, at the core of the neomaterialist argument is the interrogation
of an assumption about the “vital, self-­organizing, and non-­naturalistic
structure of living matter itself ” (Braidotti 2). Posthumanism’s alternative
enjambment of “naturalcultural” is gradually replacing the stricter binary
12 | The Matter of Disability

partitioning model of a nature-­culture divide that has so dominated our

conversations about materiality in general (King 2).7 Stacy Alaimo’s influ-
ential concept of transcorporeality, with its emphasis on the intermeshed
qualities of human and “more-­than-­human nature” also resonates here
(Bodily Natures 2). A critique of the assumed “cut” between the binary
terms of disability and ability enables a further movement into encounters
with multiplicity as the “diffraction pattern” they represent. An opposition
to normative ability no longer proves tenable as a simple dualism. Those
results that fall outside of the norm and, therefore, cannot be explained (or
normed) and thus, discounted as mistakes, now provide an opportunity to
focus on variance as a way to read the noncompliance of matter with mea-
surement’s standardization within disciplines of alternative embodiment,
including quantum physics, posthumanism, black feminist materialisms,
disability studies, and queer theory.
Nonnormative ability can no longer reliably operate as an expression
of mere deviance from baseline normativity. As Jane Bennett puts it in
her analysis of Lucretius’s imaginings of bodies falling in a void: “Bod-
ies . . . are not lifeless stuff but matter on the go, entering and leaving
assemblages, swerving into each other” (18). Deviations in all measuring
systems exist, yet posthumanist disability theory recognizes these wa-
verings from a fictional normative baseline as, in fact, the activity of
materiality’s continuous reconfiguration, or materialization, of the world
itself. The rearrangement of these concepts becomes one of the critical
means by which we tailor more suitable schemes for scrutinizing the
present and its historical relations with, for instance, the now crumbling
project of Western man.

Western Man: A Productive Failure

The colonized subject cannot experience her or his nonbeing outside

the particular ideology of western Man as synonymous with human.
(Weheliye 26)

To fashion the collective alternative methodological approaches that

comprise this volume, posthumanist disability theory draws upon the
insights of neomaterialism as a way to imagine materiality as enacting
its own demands upon the social and discursively overdetermined world
of poststructuralism. This is not to dispense with the semiotic slippage
so central to post-­Derridean analytical techniques, but rather to depriv-
 Introduction | 13

ilege the role of discursivity in relation to material agencies. As explained

in the previous section, posthumanist methodologies foreground dis-
ability’s “strange agencies of natural-­cultural processes” as offering mul-
tiple pathways for reimagining the alternative flows of dynamic embodi-
ment (Alaimo, Exposed 107). This approach allows us to analyze what we
refer to as the fundamental instability of the post-­Enlightenment project
of classical man.
First, posthumanist disability theory positions the Western humanist
project, classically represented in Leonardo da Vinci’s model “Vitruvian
Man” (1487–­90; see figure 2), as incommensurate with contemporary ap-
proaches to materiality and embodiment. In The Biopolitics of Disability,
Mitchell and Snyder refigure classical man by offering an alternative dis-
ability vision of “Vitruvian Man with CP” on their book’s cover (see figure
3). This figuration further exposes the privileged contours of Leonardo’s
classical ideal as one that is thoroughly racialized (white), gendered
(male), sexualized (heteronormative), aesthetic (symmetrically propor-
tioned), and capacitated (hyperable). The classical “Vitruvian Man” fea-
tures standards of capacitation that distance him from other embodiments
as they are hypermarked by difference and denigrated based on the ab-
sence of the unmarked qualities attributed to any historical period’s spe-
cific universalized concepts of normativity (Mitchell with Snyder, Biopoli-
tics of Disability iii). Posthumanist disability theory, then, exposes the
historically and socially particular constellation of embodied properties
that have gone into the making of Western man as a culturally centric,
time-­bound, and now failing product of the post-­Enlightenment. Its
quantitative and qualitative proportions have accompanied the ongoing
upsurge of territorial and cultural expansions informing the realization of
a European world system of global imperialism over other(ed) bodies
since the eruption of the “Age of Discovery.”
For instance, in Christopher Columbus’s “Letter to the Sovereigns” of
March 4, 1493, he describes his New World anthropological encounters
through a series of embodied displacements of racialized, gendered fanta-
sies onto the indigenous islanders of what is now mapped as the Carib-
bean Islands (Zamora 3). One island (Matenino) has a population of all
women “without a single man” who “use military weapons and other mas-
culine practices” (Zamora 8); another island (Caribo) is populated by
“those who eat human flesh” and grow their “hair very full, like women”
and are willing to copulate with Matenino women, while other men fear
bodily mutilation from such encounters; there is an island (Jamaica) with
all bald inhabitants; and an island (Cuba) of people “who are born with
Fig. 2.  “Vitruvian Man” by Leonardo da Vinci (pen and ink on paper, circa 1490).
Leonardo daVinci developed his image of a classically proportioned man based on the
calculations of Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of De Architectura. The image is
identified as representing the ideal human proportions of a body that is eight heads tall
or twenty-­four palms high and serves as the standard for deriving the classical orders
of all architecture.
 Introduction | 15

Fig. 3.  “Vitruvian Man with CP” realization by Selene dePackh based on a design by
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (mixed digital media, 2015). As the cover art
on The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodi-
ment, the image is described as follows: “disabled bodies . . . have been traditionally
narrated as divisive, pathological, and in need of a heavily enforced grid of surveillance
to limit their alternative flourishings. Their mere inclusion is not enough . . . without
an active encounter with the alternative materialities such bodies and minds bring into
being.”

tails” (Zamora 8). The description arrives despite the fact that Columbus
explains he has had little commerce with the indigenous peoples because
they run away when his Spanish caravels approach. In Carnal Inscriptions,
Susan Antebi argues that Columbus’s lack of actual contact with indige-
nous people bearing the traits he describes allows for a European notion
of monstrosity to function as a metaphor for indigenous alterity that is
always projected and displaced. Corporeal otherness thus becomes a jus-
16 | The Matter of Disability

tification for exploitation and conquest, but also a site of absence—­a flight
from a more intra-­ agential encounter with the materiality of those
encountered—­that will continue to impact the network of material and
discursive relations between imperial and colonial locales (26–­28).8
In the same letter containing these demographic fantasies of nonnor-
matively embodied islanders, Columbus argues that the discovery holds
particular promise for the Spanish king and queen who financed the en-
deavor because a militarized force could dominate such multiplicitous
embodiments with its own superior regularity in a matter of weeks. Once
colonized, the island resources and slave labor could be extracted and sent
back to Spain to boost its coffers. Another key goal of this imperial project
was to begin the expansion of a “world system” of colonialism that had the
reconquest of Jerusalem from its Muslim inhabitants as the penultimate
future objective (Zamora 7). As Aníbal Quijano argues, the colonization
of the Americas produces the modern notion of racial difference and
global capitalism as intertwined, mutually dependent processes. The re-
sulting and ongoing “coloniality of power” is thus defined through labor
exploitation as continuous with racialization, or differentiated and deni-
grated embodiment (536–­40).9
Thus, colonialism, projected fantasies of nonnormative embodiment,
Christian crusading, the rise of capitalism, and global conquest form the
support pillars of European imperial fantasies from 1493 onward. The fig-
ure of classical man in relation to which this imperialist project is imag-
ined situates Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man” as the instantiation of a biologi-
cally superior basis for a justification of conquest. The project of Western
man, as black materialist feminist theorists such as Alex Weheliye (2014)
and Sylvia Wynter (2014) point out, is eroding in Ozymandias-­like ways
because of the slow historical decay of properties that have proven in-
creasingly biased based on their emphasis on the deficiency of some bod-
ies. Both Weheliye and Wynters argue that the articulation of the project
of Western man can be nothing but incomplete, as it excludes the histori-
cal, cultural, and material particularity of people of color from its colorless
presentation. In Weheliye’s terms, the principal goal of black studies is “to
disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with West-
ern Man” (5). Likewise, according to Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wyn-
ters notes that the “correlations in this image [“Vitruvian Man”] between
the Human body and the universe hide the fact that the body depicted and
the experience upon which Leonardo was relying was a Greco-­Roman
concept of the human figure” (109). Such a project proves inherently dis-
qualifying for most, and for crip/queer/racialized people in particular as
 Introduction | 17

their radically diverse and evolving embodiments challenge the static vi-
sion of desirability that Vitruvian Man imposes. Alternatively, posthu-
manist disability theory positions the spastic, racially hybrid, polymor-
phously sexualized, androgynous, arms-­and-­legs-­akimbo multiplicity of
“Vitruvian Man with CP” in its place.
Consequently, in the incomplete and now increasingly abandoned
project of Western man, disability can claim some contribution to bring-
ing about this “productive failure.” Halberstam points out in The Queer
Art of Failure that what has been historically understood as queer people’s
inability to achieve a heteronormative baseline of adulthood in fact repre-
sents the unfolding of their alternative cultural and material agencies (31).
Such divergent expressions of adulthood are based in the productive erup-
tive potential of queerness itself. Likewise, Rosi Braidotti points out that
“the allegedly abstract ideal of Man as a symbol of Classical Humanity is
very much a male of the species; it is a he. Moreover, he is white, Euro-
pean, handsome, and able-­bodied” (24). To counter monistic celebrations
of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man as the basis of the project of imagining West-
ern Man, Braidotti offers up the image of “New Vitruvian Woman” (see
figure 4) as an alternative to the representation of male embodiment.
While whiteness and maleness have long dominated critiques of classi-
cal humanism, “handsomeness” and “able-­bodiedness” arrive as a star-
tling eruption in Braidotti’s philosophical formulation. This twining of
aesthetic with able-­bodiedness augments the racialized and engendered
coordinates in the realization of Western man’s classical contours. We
rarely think of masculine appearance and bodily capacity as qualities of
Enlightenment embodiment; likewise, disability, both aesthetic and func-
tional, rarely impresses itself as necessary to exclude so specifically.
What is the meaning behind this inclusion of ability in the classical
formula of “the human” that Braidotti so tellingly cites without further
elaboration? Why might disability prove central to alternative formula-
tions of “the posthuman”? First, in addition to heteronormative masculin-
ity, the creature that Braidotti cites also comes with its class privileges in-
tact. Her analysis borrows from Cary Wolfe’s description of the “Cartesian
subject of the cogito” defined as the “subject as citizen, rights-­holder,
property holder and so on” (“Posthumanities”). As a product of the con-
vergence of gendered, racialized, sexualized, and class characteristics, the
classical body of humanism has grown necessarily endangered as a unit of
common belonging for the human (and, Wolf would add, nonhuman)
species. Braidotti’s calling out of the figure as a “he” brings attention to the
fact that the Vitruvian is also excessively able-­bodied in presentation.
18 | The Matter of Disability

Fig. 4.  “New Vitruvian Woman” by Jim Dowdalls (digital photograph, 2012). Accord-
ing to the artist: “This illustration pays homage to the famous drawing ‘Vitruvian Man’
by Leonardo Da Vinci . . . In this illustration, the figure of a man is replaced by that of
a woman and the major organs of the female body are shown.” Image credit, Jim
Dowdalls/Science Source, used by permission.

Seven and a half heads tall, four-­limbed (if we allow for its display of range
of motion that creates an appearance of eight limbs), a fully flexible range
of motion in each appendage, sculptured musculature, symmetrically pro-
portioned, and well balanced on one or two legs, the Vitruvian Man defies
all specificity of corporeal variation.
Such impossible coordination of parts conceals any apparent embod-
ied idiosyncrasy, and thus proves a “pure product” of the kind of human
 Introduction | 19

exceptionalism that posthumanist disability theory critiques. Particularly

as the world grows increasingly toxic, as medical science harbors the ca-
pacity to keep more kinds of bodies alive, and as disabled bodies expand
their material presence as participatory subjects in exclusionary human-­
made environments, posthumanist disability theory asks how variation
might serve as the foundation for modes of reconfiguring, reimagining,
and renavigating the world.
Posthumanist disability theory thus attempts to reverse this Eurocentric
foundational insight by joining in an outpouring of racial/gendered/trans/
classed/disability critiques of the classical humanistic concept of Western
man as based on a form of domination over othered bodies that deviate
from its zero-­degree game of sameness. As Wynter’s philosophy explains,
“Once the universality of the Human has been postulated—­and we en-
counter this formulation in many official documents telling us that humans
are ‘are all born equal’—­hierarchies are needed and put into place to estab-
lish differences between all who were ‘born equal’” (McKittrick 109). Spe-
cifically for disability, the formula of Western man treats cognitive, physi-
cal, sensory, and psychiatric differences as faults localized in individual
bodies rather than as revelatory of materiality’s defining multiplicity.
Posthumanist philosophers commonly cite “human enhancement” as
one cornerstone of this pursuit to seriously decenter the individual figure
of Western man as self-­contained and biologically intact. Much of this
discussion is based on a contemporary technological fetishism of prod-
ucts (or potential products) that take disabled people as their test market
in the hopes of moving adaptive devices out into the wider consumer mar-
ket. As a formidable test market, disabled people are commonly consid-
ered to possess materiality in “obvious” need of supplementation, and
thus, the direction of “human enhancement” takes on a “helping aura”
formerly associated almost exclusively with the rehabilitation therapies
(physical, occupational, speech, and others). Donna Haraway famously
identifies “paraplegics and severely handicapped people” as having “the
most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communi-
cation devices” (“Cyborg Manifesto” 315–­16).
Many disabled individuals we know describe their relationship to their
assistive devices (communication or otherwise) in terms that resonate
with “complex hybridization,” but nevertheless Haraway’s definition sug-
gests a relationship of human and machine that comes off as a bit too
breezy. These interactions between material bodies and machines gener-
ally prove anything but comfort ridden and usually signal the degree to
which one arrives, at best, in a détente with supplementary equipment.10
20 | The Matter of Disability

Vitruvian Man has no adaptive technology on his person, and, thus, any
prosthetic encumbrance draws crip/queer figures outside the lines of the
enfolding circle of symmetrical normalcy in which he finds himself buff-
ered from harm.
Like its new materialist predecessors, posthumanist disability theory
certainly emerges from recognitions that the Anthropocene has engen-
dered the agency of humanity to such a degree that the human now func-
tions as akin to a geological force capable of affecting all life on the planet
(Braidotti 5; Alaimo, Exposed 1). This force has marshaled significant de-
structive impact on what we know as the material world from the fifteenth
century to the present day. Because the dominating figure of Western man
has been key to the consolidation of this destructive and anthropocentric
framework, posthumanist disability theory has to participate in collapsing
the stability of fantasies of embodied normative power. A key challenge is
to contest the imposition of a stable mode of desirability and functioning
over forms of materiality that are devalued because of their excessive dif-
ferentiation. The essays included in The Matter of Disability all participate
in towing the chain that bends the figure of classical European normative
masculinity at the ankles and drags it to the ground.
Posthumanist disability theory elaborates on the specific modes of dif-
ferentiated embodiment materialized and impacted through relations be-
tween human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic bodies and environ-
ments, and in particular through agricultural and military forms of
toxicity that give rise to biopolitical notions of sacrificial subjects such as
Mbembe’s “necropolitics” and Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life.” Both of these
consciously pursued devaluation schemes are defined as the state-­
sanctioned material destruction and intentional disablement of human
bodies and populations deemed expendable (14, 6). Alexander Weheliye
champions Mbembe’s approach and depreciates that of Agamben, based
on the former’s inclusion of targeted colonized subjects and the latter’s
emphasis on a universalized, abstracted concept of subjection to power-­
knowledge as in the Foucauldian tradition of European philosophy (63).
Yet, to be fair, Agamben deals directly with disability populations in his
analysis of Nazi eugenic formulations of “life unworthy of life,” while
Mbembe and Weheliye leave disablement as a material imposition of vio-
lence on bodies. Posthumanist disability theory straddles each of these
terrains, as it neither avoids a Marxist tradition of employing disability as
proof of industrial capitalism’s destructive power nor eschews attention to
materiality’s morphing corporeal rearrangements.
Further, part of the reformulation of Western man involves a radical
 Introduction | 21

reassessment of the relationality between animal and human bodies (that

which Wolfe refers to as “the animal turn” [What Is Posthumanism?]).
Whereas humanism has aggressively promoted the controlled breeding of
animal and plant bodies in order to increase yield, deny decay, and expand
profits, such schemes of genetic direction have produced enormous
disability-­relevant alterations in human, nonhuman, organic, and inor-
ganic environmental conditions. Pesticide development, for instance, not
only alters the nature of what one ingests, but also threatens the migrant,
lower-­class bodies that clear, maintain, prune, and harvest the fields. In
these agrarian locales capacitated labor power is extracted and worn into
disabled bodies as a nearly inevitable outcome of the ways in which repeti-
tious movements ultimately deny the very capacities on which they are
initially valued. They are also those bodies that get “dusted” by pesticides
sprayed across environments by “crop dusters” circling above (Rich 3).
Thus, racialized, devalued embodiments become excessively open to
exposures that presumably keep the post-­Enlightenment body safe. Privi-
lege operates as an ability to seal off one’s body from deleterious encoun-
ters with toxicity. Falsely buffered from his own carcinogenic products,
Western man gradually ingests a productive portion of the “slow death” he
sows and can only fantasize an escape hatch from such hazardous expo-
sures (Berlant 754). His positioning at appropriate distances from the site
of production for safekeeping does not prevent the animacies of such tox-
ins from incorporation into his own bodily domain (Chen 218). Addition-
ally, industrial farming has erased the presence of farmers and farmwork-
ers across northern and southern hemispheres and, in moves reminiscent
of the dust bowl 1930s, keep extended families adrift, and without access
to the education, affiliation, health care, employment tenure, or organiza-
tion requisite for empowering allies.
To a significant extent, this inability to buffer the farmer’s or migrant
worker’s exposure to materiality’s rewriting at the core of all being drifts
from zones of agricultural production to necropolitical zones of conflict
where expendable bodies are defined by forms of state-­imposed immobil-
ity. The techno-­military proliferation of microconflicts on a global scale
has given way (largely via drone strikes and the arresting of refugee and
immigrant movements) to new levels of administered violence. These new
geographical displacements of populations result in a physical dislocation
on the outskirts of a more bounded and desirable humanity. Mbembe re-
fers to this placement across a long dureé in abjected physical space as a
key characteristic of “the postcolony” (103). The material locations of such
bodies position them as targets and thus their expendable peripherality
22 | The Matter of Disability

coincides with their immobilizations in various fenced-­off elsewheres.

Aerial thanatic delivery systems merge artificial intelligence, cybernetic
gaming, and human operators in a new formula of death with distance
(Braidotti 44–­45). As Jasbir Puar points out, the Gaza Strip can be recog-
nized as a physical collection point that defines all bodies within it as ex-
pendable with respect to their peripheral location outside and within the
borders of Israel (2). Their excessive exposure to death and disability are
justified as a result of their immobilized, extreme localization in the oc-
cupied territories.
While militarized militias use civilian populations as their cover and as
governments consciously place those defined as expendable at a physical
distance in temporal, makeshift detention camps for the excessively dia-
sporic, those same peripheral citizenries find themselves increasingly sub-
ject to what Elaine Scarry describes as the two primary products of war:
death and disability (12). Thus, posthumanist disability theory encom-
passes an extraordinarily complex nexus of mutating bodies, including
semipermeable interactions between human, nonhuman, and inorganic
animacies; environmental toxicities and the mutating bodies they pro-
duce; quantitative and qualitative measurements of capacities, functional-
ities, and aesthetics; pharmaceutical and cybernetic trafficking in ways of
rewriting material subjectivities; a preponderance of blind vendors in a
Mexico City subway as the engine of an embodied, affective informal
economy; eugenic lineups that take cognitively, psychiatrically, sensorily,
and physically disabled bodies to psychiatric killing centers; the advent of
tactile poetry that expresses the visceral nature of schizophrenic mind-­
sets; the economic unfoldings of profit where products cause disease and
then the same corporate producers provide the therapies to treat the im-
paired bodies their runoffs produce; amputee fantasies of incapacitated
bodies performed by able-­bodied actors that retain all but the material
specificity of the bodies in question; “tropological confusions” between
nonhuman and human animals cross-­referenced as mutually devalued
and, therefore, euthanasia-­worthy; militarized productions of maimed
human and nonhuman bodies in fabulations of sexualized hypercapacity;
forms of mobility and environmental sensitivity that preclude a more ro-
bust participation in “natural” landscapes; as well as the targeting of dis-
abled racialized bodies as unarmed threats to an excessively militarized
police force. All of these topics posit the “unique mattering” of posthu-
manist disability embodiments that reveal uncanny capacities where only
unproductive incapacity was imagined to reign.
All of these mutated locations can be found and plumbed in the essays that
 Introduction | 23

comprise this volume. There is no end to the exhaustive requirements placed

upon developing posthumanist disability theory to engage more meaningful
global encounters with the intra-­ active material-­ discursive agencies un-
leashed by such developments at the fall of the project of Western man.

The Posthumanist Disability to Come

Part I, “The Matter of Subjectivity,” organizes contributions around the

growing suspicion of posthumanist disability theory with the overdeter-
mined constructivist bent of the social model of disability. The opening
essay by Tobin Siebers critiques the social model for its overemphasis on
diagnosing shortcomings in the environment. In order to nuance the in-
sights of disability studies further Siebers proposes that any reformulation
of the social model must include disabled people’s subjective knowledge of
their own experience of embodiment as a key part of their productive
participation in the world. Disability as a phenomenon that delivers its
own particular understanding and demands on subjectivity formation in
and of itself involves an adaptation. Siebers calls the fruits of this interac-
tion between body, mind, and environment: “complex embodiment.”
Siebers bases his approach to disability as “complex embodiment” on
the argument that disabled bodies incorporate their environments and in-
ternalize their discriminatory effects. This common insight in disability
studies situates the body as a relatively passive recipient of inaccessibility
with little ability to change it. Posthumanist disability theory, in Siebers’s
terms, has to reverse this course of assumptions by first undoing the ten-
dency to position the relationship between embodiment and environment
as a one-­way street and also in refusing to explore the ways disabled peo-
ple possess valuable knowledge about embodiment itself. The transforma-
tion of these two assumptions provides the basis for a rebuilding of the
social model. To exemplify his point of what posthumanist theory has to
offer, Siebers offers a close reading of Shakespeare’s hefty, gout-­impaired
Falstaff in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, as a characterization based on embodi-
ment that produces an alternative relationship of materiality to subjectiv-
ity. Falstaff ’s methodical negotiation of mobility establishes his materiality
as the foreground of his disability subjectivity in ways that others might
overlook or take for granted. Thus, complex embodiment sets a more
intra-­active circuit of relations between body and environment into mo-
tion. This is why we begin with this essay as a starting point for the articu-
lation of the posthumanist disability theory to come.
24 | The Matter of Disability

Following on the heels of Siebers’s articulation of complex embodi-

ment, Joshua Kupetz probes the intra-­active processes at work in what he
terms “disability ecologies.” Kupetz’s essay explores how disability materi-
ality reacts back and shapes—­as well as being shaped by—­social, environ-
mental, and economic forces. There is something more to be sought after
in the co-­constitutive relationships of human subjects and material ob-
jects/actors. As a result, all of the essays in this volume seek to take various
posthuman pathways to breaking apart the boundedness of impairment.
For instance, Kupetz’s analysis of Richard Powers’s novel Gain explores
how personal impairment and corporate personhood intersect as exem-
plary of transnational flows of chemicals, medical practices, and capital.
Whereas medical model approaches to disability might seem to operate
closer to questions of materiality and embodiment, Gain demonstrates
how a history of capitalist production interflows with forms of toxicity to
which bodies respond and reformulate themselves.
As with all forms of adaptation these mutating responses do not
prove fully advantageous to the organism undertaking the effort. Muta-
tion is partial, ongoing, and inevitably flawed in its own productive al-
ternative manifestations. Rather than position chemical production as
an incursion into otherwise normative, stabile matter, Kupetz’s analysis
foregrounds how the runoff from product development at corporate
headquarters proves anything but an inscription on the passive surface
of its protagonist’s body. When Laura Bodey, a real estate agent on her
way up the corporate chain, is suddenly diagnosed with uterine cancer,
her terminal condition becomes a means by which her experience is rei-
magined. As the corporation responsible for rising cancer rates in Lace-
wood, Illinois, Clare International’s toxic environmental despoliation
over the course of a morphing corporate history of soap maker, candle-
maker, and household cleanser manufacturer, becomes a doorway re-
vealing the complex interdependencies of persons and products. For
example, the corporation contributes charitable donations to the local
hospital at which Laura is treated and also supplies many of the ineffec-
tive treatment products used on cancer patients. Thus, Kupetz analyzes
Powers’s novelistic rendition of Clare International as first producing
disability and then profiting from its treatment.
As with the rewiring of Laura Bodey’s subjectivity through her experi-
ence of altered materiality as a cancer survivor, this model of fluid intra-­
action between disability materiality and organic/inorganic environmen-
tal forces has a significant impact on the formation of human subjectivities
and on sensory experience. Olga Tarapata terms this emergence of the self
 Introduction | 25

“unique mattering,” in her reading of William Gibson’s science fiction

novel Pattern Recognition. Tarapata reads disability in Gibson’s work in a
posthumanist key, as a process of evolving, symmetrical relations between
bodies and environments. Turning specifically to examples of embodi-
ment in Gibson’s novel, Tarapata addresses the nonnormative corporeality
and subjectivities of the two heroines, Cayce Pollard and Nora Volkova.
Cayce’s allergy to particular commercial logos or brands manifests through
painful symptoms, but at the same time allows for her unusual skill in
identifying market tendencies. Unique mattering, in this case, marks the
character as embedded in her environment, in a complex corporeal and
interdependent sensory relationship.
Nora, a paraplegic character, has a piece of shrapnel lodged in her
brain, both dividing and connecting the two lobes. This unusual condition
causes the character pain, but also makes possible her creative production
of a series of reedited film clips, which are central to the development of
the novelistic plot. Nora’s existence and subjectivity is defined by this cre-
ative activity, and by its international dissemination through complex, in-
tersubjective networks. “Unique mattering,” in Tarapata’s reading of Gib-
son’s novel and of contemporary neomaterialist and posthumanist
theories, emphasizes the dynamic and changing processes through which
nonnormative bodies exist and interact, moving not toward wholeness or
resolution, but rather toward new understandings and expressions of sen-
sory experience.
The essays in Part II, “The Matter of Meaning,” address questions of
representation and the tactics of integrating materiality into the produc-
tion of meaning-­making itself. Patrick Durgin’s essay, “Hannah Weiner’s
Transversal Poetics,” further explores new materialist modes of inter-
subjectivity as a way to explain how Deleuze and Guattari’s controversial
concept of “schizo” upsets the binary relation between discordant iden-
tities. The essay employs the concept of “transversality” as that which
entails “intersubjectivity” insofar as it is “engaged by non-­subjective ar-
rangements, extra-­human and nonorganic components not necessarily
available for interpretation” (Genosko 48). Consequently, Durgin pro-
poses a critical rethinking of diagnosis as a compound object that has
lost several of the relational properties that created such material impo-
sitions in the first place. In other words, all that’s left in a diagnosis is the
oppressive ableism of the reductive object it references. Here is some of
the serious potential of posthumanist disability theory in that it can con-
tinue with the social model’s exposé of prejudicial impositions while si-
multaneously showing how the materiality of the subject exists in the
26 | The Matter of Disability

location of its displacement. In other words, posthumanist disability

theory can show the workings of nonnormative materiality itself as the
action of relational interactions. That which is repressed from its iden-
tity in social relations of diagnosis is, actually, the operations of the
agency of alternative materiality.
To concretize this insight Durgin moves to an analysis of fashion
designer-­ turned-­wordsmith Hannah Weiner. Weiner’s schizophrenia
(that which she refers to as clairvoyance) resulted in the creation of a tac-
tile language poetry that sought to attend to the materiality of words
themselves. Weiner’s primary intention was to create poetry with words
that ought to be looked at as well as read—­that is, their materiality should
command attention as well as their conceptuality. In addition to experi-
menting in various sound and visual media, she wrote her poetry and
prose in experimental typefaces. As a creative means by which to describe
the material process of “schizophrenic” embodiment that Weiner’s art
captures, Durgin shows how the poet’s mind was layered with each pa-
limpsestic activity creating its own environment. Thus, in one of the most
ethereal and seemingly nonembodied intersections of expression—­poetry
and clairvoyance—­Weiner invents an art that exposes rather than ex-
presses her alternative cognitive mind-­set and material interactions with
the world. This is not a confusion, as Durgin explains in his application of
Guattari and Deleuze to the work in question, but rather an embodiment
of the material nature of her mind in art.
The complex and interactive agency of disability materiality emerges
through Durgin’s reading of this moment of exposure of the mind in its
poetic process. Such instances of disability exposure or recognition are
key throughout the essays in this volume for the way they reconfigure the
notion of impairment as fluid, shifting and expansive. This is the case, for
example, in Angela Smith’s interpretation of the popular phenomenon of
amputee bodies in film. As she notes, despite the use of special effects to
simulate disability in able-­bodied actors on screen, continuity errors leave
a residue or trace of the immateriality of disability on the screen, as when
an unedited shadow betrays the presence of an actor’s complete leg even
after the character has experienced a fictionalized amputation. Such visual
exposures demonstrate the incapacity of film to invent a seamless disabil-
ity embodiment; they also betray filmmakers’ and viewers’ overinvest-
ment in the simulacra of disability by nondisabled bodies. Alternatively,
the failure of special effects to fully cover over the able-­bodiedness of such
portrayals opens up the nonnormative materiality of disability agency.
As the vast majority of amputee bodies are adjudged insufficient by
 Introduction | 27

casting directors to star in the role of amputee, otherwise able-­bodies are

staged as incapacitated with all of the revelry of mainstream special effects
and prosthetic add-­ons and takeaways. Thus, a “disability drag” is at stake
according to Smith, and these media vehicles allow a certain material
proximity to disabled bodies that, in fact, only solidifies a distance already
instantiated in our public relations with amputees. The point is not a call
for an impossible alignment of essentialisms between roles and bodies,
but rather the ways in which disability materiality cultivates certain forms
of identification that cannot be simulated (or are radically altered) through
special effects-­based artifice. Yet, as Smith argues, even the portrayal of
these fictive amputee agencies results in a more flexible encounter with
nonnormative embodiment and such encounters expand the range of cul-
tural imaginaries and the subjectivities they might inhabit.
The essays in Part III, “The Matter of Mortality,” take up questions of
genetic hypercapacitation, militarization, reproductive futurity, and eu-
thanasia as ways to approach questions of the relationship of disability to
determinations of expendability. In “Spider-­Man’s Designer Genes: Hy-
percapacity and Transhumanism in a ‘DIY World,’” Samuel Yates argues
that while the notorious Broadway theatrical production by Julie Taymor
resulted in disablement to multiple actors in the high-­flying production,
the play insists on a posthumanist utopianism as its explanatory frame-
work. Yates takes up the distinction between transhumanism and posthu-
manism in order to mediate between two competing models of human
adaptation. Spider-­Man: Turn Off the Dark takes up its central argument
about the possibility of designer genes as evidence of the potential for a
successful human-­directed escape from materiality’s miscoding errors
and thus places itself squarely in the tradition of transhumanism. While
the lyrics ring out with references to posthumanism, Yates shows how
such an interpretive contextualization would, in fact, materialize an op-
position to the production’s very premise.
The essay ultimately sets up a new materialist-­based argument about
the productive combinatory contingency and haphazard nature of human
evolution to which the theatrical adaptation cannot adhere. Thus, posthu-
man is not a harnessing of nonhuman capacities (ownership), but rather a
dynamic interplay of genetic development that cannot be consciously cul-
turally harnessed, as that would kill the creative agency of materiality
rather than improve it. By showing how the production can integrate one
genetic mutation—­Peter Parker’s morphing genetic composition due to a
spider bite—­it fails to accommodate his mutated evil alter ego, the Green
Goblin. Yates argues that Goblin’s lack of integration is replete with dis-
28 | The Matter of Disability

ability, racialized, and queer meanings that cause a celebration of hetero-

normative white masculinity’s hypercapacitation while denigrating the
other’s more “freakish” nonnormative aesthetic presentation. By con-
structing a stage set that violated practices of workplace safety, the pro-
duction disabled its laborers while simultaneously promoting a vision of a
world in which they would ultimately be scapegoated and stigmatized.
In addition to theatrical productions such as Spider-­Man: Turn Off the
Dark, the contemporary cinematic turn toward amputee bodies—­
appendages flying off into space—­and the techno rejuvenation of impaired
materialities displayed for audience consumption, discussed previously in
Angela Smith’s chapter, also finds an echo in Chris Ewart’s approach to
prosthetized female characters in disability avenger films. Yet while Smith
emphasizes special effects that allow able-­bodied actors to play amputees,
Ewart focuses specifically on a campy fetishization of militarized violence
in the grindhouse genre film. In this case, special effects exaggerate the
on-­screen presence of prosthetic limbs, which serve as both weapons and
human appendages, converting the hypersexualized, Japanese and Latina
disabled female characters into human war machines. For Ewart, these
disability-­avenger narratives represent a kind of “overwriting” of disabil-
ity, with reference to the work of Sarah Jain, in which embodied weapon-
ization projects an ableist idealization of disability without any effort to
capture the complexity of lived cyborgian experiences.
Consequently, through the pop-­cultural use of violent prostheses in
the Japanese Machine Girl and the US Latino Planet Terror, the materiality
of weaponized disability emerges as specific to the geopolitics of posta-
tomic Japan and of the US-­ Mexican borderlands. Posthumanist ap-
proaches to disability materiality, as in Ewart’s reading, reveal a great deal
about the cultural anxiety underpinning representations of human en-
hancement, violence, injury, and disease. Moreover, such scenes, and their
proliferation in literature and film, transcend a merely symptomatic role,
emerging as continuous with the regional and global biopolitical networks
they illustrate. As Ewart argues, such fetishistic spectacles of violence by
disabled women are almost entirely absent in the contemporary cultures
to which they refer (Japan and the US-­Mexico borderlands). The risk of
these prosthetic fantasies is further escalated in that they claim to “em-
power” their disabled female characters with the props of masculine mili-
tary weaponry. Thus, a false feminist agency of resistance buttresses their
plotlines with the technological gimmickry common in popular narra-
tives of prostheticized disabled bodies.
In a similar sense, Matt Frank’s chapter, “Breeding Aliens, Breeding
 Introduction | 29

AIDS: Male Pregnancy, Disability, and Viral Materialism in ‘Bloodchild,’”

approaches the African American writer Octavia Butler’s short story as an
allegory of HIV/AIDS biopolitics, but also as a literal evocation of state-­
controlled population management. In the story, an alien species known
as the Tlic use human males as reproductive hosts, impregnating them
and caring for their health in order to insure the survival of subsequent
Tlic generations. Franks focuses on the materiality of male pregnancy as a
representation of HIV/AIDS biopolitics from the 1980s to the present. The
compulsory impregnation of black male hosts in Butler’s narrative mirrors
coercive state practices of population management, through which “crip/
queer/black” bodies are unequally exposed to viral infection and subse-
quently compelled to function as debilitated health-­care consumers, de-
pending on antiretroviral pharmaceuticals for their survival, while at once
offering their lives and bodies in the service of the health-­care and phar-
maceutical industries.
Male pregnancy in Butler’s story, like the circulation of HIV/AIDS and
its prevention and treatment, functions as a form of disability materialism
because the aliens materially produce dependency and ensure their own
survival through interspecies insemination. Similarly, the state and health-­
care industries materially produce docile, medicalized populations, in
particular through discourses and practices surrounding the prevention
and treatment of HIV/AIDS. Crucially, in the biopolitics of HIV/AIDS as
in other areas of public health, people of color are overrepresented as dis-
abled and stigmatized for failing to access methods of prevention and
treatment. Franks reads the racialization of disability in the HIV/AIDS
crisis and in Butler’s story as a version of the “biopolitical afterlife of slav-
ery,” since in each case, the material production of disability—­whether
through forced insemination, rape, violent abuse, or coercive, unequally
distributed health-­care risk management—­creates or exacerbates eco-
nomic dependency, while generating ongoing supplies of labor and con-
sumption. Franks’s analysis thus offers a posthumanist reading of the bio-
politics of HIV/AIDS, in which racialized disability materialism circulates
through the metaphor of interspecies reproduction, and is made literal
through compulsory economic and corporeal dependency on state and
market forces.
If interspecies dependency, collaboration, and reproduction are famil-
iar themes to readers of science fiction, critical focus on the crossover or
blur between conventional categories of human and nonhuman animals
has also emerged in the fields of posthumanist disability studies and ani-
mal studies in recent years. As David Oswald argues in his essay, “Why
30 | The Matter of Disability

Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks: Reading for Idiocy, Caninity, and Tro-
pological Confusion in Of Mice and Men,” attention to the instability and
interweaving of species’ categories, along with the “unstable matters of
dis/ability, sex/gender, and race” requires closer conversation between dis-
ability studies and animal studies. Oswald reads links between Lennie’s
mental disability and his “caninity,” or doglike characteristics and narra-
tive role, as producing “tropological confusion,” suggesting that the no-
vella produces both associations and distinctions between human and
nonhuman categories. The result is an “interdependent contingency,” as
well as the creation of “affective relationships that cross the species line.”
As Oswald notes, with reference to Donna Haraway, in the eugenic-­era
context in which the novella was written, practices of dog breeding and
human reproductive politics underpin racist fears of contamination or
impure populations. Although both dogs and idiots may be said to func-
tion in binary opposition to normative and desirable human subjectivity,
instability remains, thanks in large part to the novella’s construction of a
humanitarian sentimentalism, one dependent on interspecies affect.
In Steinbeck’s classic text, Lennie, a mentally disabled character who
accidentally kills a young woman, is euthanized by his friend George in a
kind of “mercy killing” that parallels the prior killing of an old, infirm dog.
As familiar literary figure, Lennie has also made his appearance in the
Texas courts, in which capital punishment sentencing against cognitively
disabled people of color has directly referenced Steinbeck’s character as a
test case for whether convicts should meet the criteria of mental disability
as exemption. Most of these cases of execution, in which, as Oswald de-
scribes, convicts did not meet the criteria for exemption, involved African
American men. Lennie’s legal afterlife thus reveals the extent to which
sovereign state power employs a racialized biopolitics to justify killing
some bodies, even while paradoxically conceiving of itself as humanely
positioned, via a complex literary affect that mixes idiot and canine tropes.
Oswald’s analysis insists on the fantasy underpinning the construction of
the human, as well as the uncertainty of the human as moral category,
while at once paying close attention to the inscriptions of animality, dis/
ability, sex/gender, and racialization within the ongoing workings of US
biopower.
Most of the essays in this volume take up forms of Anglo-­American
cultural production as their primary subject matter, with reference to
works of literature and film that may be familiar to US-­based readers. Yet
as the posthumanist disability methodology of these essays suggests,
material-­discursive categories of region or nation, like those of human
 Introduction | 31

subjectivity or corporeality, are difficult to isolate from the fluidity of their

contexts, the processes through which they come to matter. This is also,
paradoxically the case in readings emphasizing state-­centered biopower,
as Oswald’s analysis of Steinbeck’s text argues, in which discourses of eu-
genics and racialized fears of population contamination point both to na-
tionalist identification and to its multiple ruptures and boundaries.
In the final part of the volume, “The Matter of Memory,” the coeditors
contribute analyses that address questions of historical erasure and the
material traces of forgotten global disability populations operating below
the radar of cultural consciousness. A contemporary geopolitics of dis-
ability in a posthumanist key cannot fail to consider the complex transna-
tional pathways through which disability materiality emerges on a global
scale, strongly inflected by economic and political disparities that produce
higher levels of environmental contamination, poverty, and war in global
South regions, as well as among specific racialized populations in the
North. Susan Antebi addresses one instance of the biopolitical framework
of global and local inequalities in her reading of the Mexico City subway
as a space of informal economic transactions strongly associated with the
presence and participation of disabled people.
In Guadalupe Nettel’s novel El huésped, the Mexico City subway is
home to a community of disabled people, who operate as vendors, beg-
gars, and political activists. Disability materiality in the novel emerges
through the structure of “hosting,” an activity that implies receiving an-
other within oneself, in a relationship of economic dependency, but also,
paradoxically, due to the double meaning of the term in Spanish, being a
guest, parasite, or intruder in the space or body of another. This structure
reflects the protagonist’s experience as she develops a sense of her inter-
nalized disability as new subjectivity, and at the same time reflects the
economic and affective relationships between disabled and able-­bodied
people in the Mexico City transit system within Nettel’s novel.
The political and economic contexts of public transit, disability and the
informal sector to which this novel refers have been marked in recent
years by conflicts regarding the regulation of commercial activity, cost of
transit, and the desirability of diverse, nonnormative bodies in public
spaces. An increase in transit cost was accompanied by an ad campaign
featuring the slogan “Don’t buy from them and they will disappear,” with
the image of a music CD vendor with dark sunglasses. This campaign
evokes both a charged national political climate in which numerous, ra-
cialized disappeared bodies are unaccounted for, and the notably high
percentage of disabled, particularly blind, vendors, among those selling
32 | The Matter of Disability

music on the subway. Antebi’s reading of the subway as intercorporeal

space of material and affective exchange emphasizes the fluid demarca-
tions between transit and financial transaction, as well as between physi-
cal embodiment and economic survival. The framework of intercorpore-
ality structuring this reading of disability materialism also suggests an
unmooring of the clearly demarcated, individual subject, and an opening
towards embodiment as affective exchange.
One of the key contributions of posthumanist materialism to our work
in disability studies is in fact precisely its willingness to relinquish strict
adherence to the figure of the coherently defined subject of political resis-
tance. In their concluding chapter to this volume, “Posthumanist T4
Memory,” David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder take up the concept of “low-­
level agency” as central to their reading of disabled lives, with specific ref-
erence to psychiatric patients and other disabled people murdered by the
Nazis during World War II, in what is known as Operation T4. Key to this
analysis, and with reference to the work of Asma Abbas and Alex Wehe-
liye, is a questioning of the liberal model of exclusive attention to resistant
subjects or “politically sturdy citizens” as those who display full agency
and coherent opposition to oppression. Because this liberal model tends
to operate at the expense of lives and bodies that are not necessarily recog-
nizable within its definitions of agency and personhood, the task of post-
humanist disability theory, as undertaken here by Mitchell and Snyder, is
to emphasize material, visceral encounters with nonnormative embodi-
ment, and thus to move toward a more expansive terrain of recognition
and valorization of crip/queer lives.
As Mitchell and Snyder reveal, a central issue at stake in the study of T4
is the continuity between T4 and the Holocaust. Despite clearly estab-
lished evidence linking the murders of disabled people under T4 to the
murders of Jewish people and those of other groups targeted by the Final
Solution, contemporary German euthanasia memorial centers have
tended to avoid exploring this connection. Alternatively, insistence on
reading these genocides through a common framework means insistence
on the inclusion of those with low-­level agency, at the risk of exposing a
mainstream discomfort with a revised version of the history, and the blur-
ring of familiar categories of victimization. Documentation of contempo-
rary memorialization practices at the euthanasia memorial centers also
demonstrates the expanding role of posthumanist disability theoretical
approaches to materiality and memory. Examples include displays of vic-
tims’ names and personal keepsakes—­in contrast to cases where names
are kept secret, based on an association with stigma of genetic lineage—­
 Introduction | 33

and the use of interactive digital media to increase access to historical

documents. Attention to these practices allows for a closer engagement
with the materiality of loss, and of broadly conceived nonnormative em-
bodiment, without reliance on exemplary subjects of individual political
agency.
Mitchell and Snyder’s project of engaging the material, historical
weight and meanings of lives of low-­level agency finds echoes throughout
the essays comprising this volume. Disability, as an intra-­active, material,
and discursive matter, shapes and is reshaped by the world, in an ongoing
process of “mattering,” though which human and nonhuman embodi-
ments navigate their histories, vulnerabilities, and inequalities. This pro-
cess is frequently constituted by the risk or reality of suffering or annihila-
tion. The posthumanist inflection in our work emerges in part as
recognition of the long oversaturated social model, which has left little
room for consideration of disability materiality as active, transformative,
agential, and in many instances, under threat. As the stories and histories
explored in our essays make clear, this urgent attention to disability as
matter is not simply intended to signpost a more celebratory materialist
reading, though this may at times be the case. Instead, the exposure of
material agency and interactivity in its multiple forms suggests the need
for more nuanced understandings of what constitutes materiality, com-
plexly imbricated in organic, inorganic, material, and discursive terrain,
and of nonnormative embodiment as transformative, yet still vulnerable
to the many worlds through which it comes to matter.

NOTES

1. Tobin Siebers died in 2015 from complications due to cancer. His essay in this
volume is an unfinished composition that we’re honored to include as one of his final
contributions to the field of disability studies. Siebers’s transitional efforts to theorize his
notion of “complex embodiment” exemplifies the ways in which disability studies schol-
ars are moving toward a more materialist encounter with disability and impairment.
2. “The neologism ‘intra-­action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agen-
cies. That is, in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate
individual agencies that precede their relationship, the notion of intra-­action recognizes
that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-­action”
(Barad 33).
3. The 2013 documentary film Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement
offers an excellent elaboration of debates surrounding transhumanism, disability, and
ableism.
4. In The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral
Embodiment, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call this neomaterialist methodology
34 | The Matter of Disability

within disability studies “nonnormative positivisms.” The definition offered of this alter-
native approach to imagining disability runs as follows: “Disability Studies scholars are
caught in their lives and their theories between two zones of negativity without some-
thing akin to ‘nonnormative posivitisms.’ Without alternative materialist approaches
there exist few ways to identify the creative interdependencies at the foundations of
disability alternatives for living addressed in our existing traditions of thought. Disabil-
ity studies, in the years to come, must be able to address what crip/queer bodies bring to
the table of imagining the value of alternative lives, particularly lives that exist at the
fraught intersections of marginalized identities such as disability, race, gender, sexuality,
and class.  .  .  . There is a great need for an ethical methodology from which disabled
people can articulate how their lives bring something new into the world that may oth-
erwise go unrecognized. Nonnormative positivisms provide alternative spaces from
which to discuss options for living within alternative embodiments (those designated
here by lives lived in peripheral embodiments) as a critical third rail of disability experi-
ence” (5–­6).
5. There have been a number of disability memoir-­related works published within
the last few years wherein disabled narrators (particularly those on the autistic spec-
trum) argue that their “oversensitivity” to touch and lowered reliance on vision allow
them to cross the species barrier and enter into the worlds of animals with a greater
degree of sensitivity and identification. One of the most significant examples of this
claim occurs in Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-­Time.
The novel explores the narrator, Christopher Boone’s, uncanny transspecies crossings
with the neighbor’s dead dog and his own hamster.
6. Other new materialist scholars in addition to Barad have emphasized the signifi-
cant impact of quantum physics on philosophical approaches to materiality. For exam-
ple, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write in their indispensable introduction to
New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, “Theoretical physics’ understanding of
matter is now a long way from the material world we inhabit in our everyday lives,
and . . . it is no longer tenable to rely on the obsolete certainties of classical physics as
earlier materialists did” (12).
7. Katie King argues that one way to evaluate the effectiveness of a feminist transdis-
ciplinary practice is to index how “well it opens up unexpected elements of one’s own
elements in lively and re-­sensitizing worlds.” The essays in this volume all attempt to
approach disability materiality in “ways of participating in multispecies learning or self-­
organization across ecologies, mattering without owning the action” (2).
8. Also see Palencia-­Roth for further discussion of monstrosity as a trope within the
project of European conquest.
9. Shaun Grech’s work on disability in the global South effectively contextualizes
Quijano’s discussion of coloniality in relation to disability and contemporary global
capitalism (94).
10. Vivian Sobchack’s discussion of her experience of embodiment with a prosthetic
leg offers detailed and complex insight on the lived materiality of human enhancement
and disability. See her chapter “A Leg to Stand on” (205–­25).
 Introduction | 35

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Part I
The Matter of Subjectivity
Returning the Social to the Social Model
Tobin Siebers

Introduction: A Diagnostic Impasse

Despite the criticisms of the social model—­and there are many—­it is hard
to imagine the field of disability studies without it. For one thing, its elim-
ination would leave us without a strong sense of context and history. I
propose to rebuild the social model by reconsidering it in terms of the
theory of complex embodiment, with four consequences: (1) return of the
body to the social model where the body and environment are seen as
mutually transformative; (2) the social model no longer uses disabled peo-
ple to diagnose aspects of a disabling environment; disabled people em-
body knowledge of the environment; (3) disabled people identify them-
selves and others as disabled, not based on mental and physical difference,
or environmental incapacity, but based on the possession and use of em-
bodied knowledge; (4) the social model is an epistemological model—­it
not only incorporates agency; it cannot exist without active subjects who

Siebers, one of the early influencers of disability studies in the humanities and author of
two key works in the field, Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics, was working on
this essay before his death from cancer in 2015. He had been working to more fully elu-
cidate his theory of “complex embodiment,” locating disability identity at the crossroads
of aesthetic, attitudinal, environmental, and material interactions. Shakespeare’s Falstaff
provided Siebers a literary example of his theory: the gout-­ridden, hobbled, and over-
large figure focuses on the factors of girth, mobility impairment, geography, and the
abuse he takes about his body from others, as he explicitly calculates his moves. “Com-
plex embodiment” argues for a mode of standpoint knowledge that disability brings to
the world and helps to exemplify how Siebers was moving toward an engagement with
neomaterialist, posthumanist disability theory. We include this unfinished work as evi-
dence of that philosophical development and also as a textual memorial to Tobin’s influ-
ential contributions to the field of disability studies. We miss him greatly.

39
40 | The Matter of Disability

are defined by their ability to produce and share knowledge. The “social”
in the social model refers to what disabled people know about society as a
consequence of embodying it.
There are two antithetical models at the heart of disability studies.
The medical model changes people with disabilities into objects, steals
their agency, and channels any findings into diagnosis. Here physical
or mental impairments identify disabled people. The medical model
views the cause of disability as lodged in the body, and only the re-
moval of disability restores the person to health. The social model be-
gan as a tactic to remove barriers, but it became identified rather
quickly with disability studies itself. The social model is supposed to
save disabled people from medicalization with its almost exclusive em-
phasis on the environment. Here disabled people are identified by
their inability to fit into the environment. The social model becomes
in effect the theoretical model, but it sows confusion because no one
knows what the theoretical properties of the social model actually are.
Three problems soon become apparent:

A. The social model ignores the body for the environment.

B. The social model continues to objectify disabled people because
they are targets of disabling environments, discovered by diag-
nosis.
C. The social model does not allow agency because the environ-
ment is everything. Consider the definition of social construc-
tion in the humanities. Here the strong emphasis on structural
linguistics makes it easy to understand that determinism in
languages equals lack of agency in society.

By the way, you can see how well certain characters work with these
two models. The medical model, of which there is no better example than
Freud, represents people with disabilities as biologically inferior to non-
disabled people, and it assigns to medical experts the job of curing or
eliminating disability. The principal method of the medical model is a di-
agnosis in which the doctor examines the disabled person, looking for
“abnormalities,” causes for symptoms, and signs of illness. The social
model opposes the medical model by defining disability as the product of
disabling social and built environments. Disabilities, according to the so-
cial model, do not require medical treatments but social justice.
The dependence of the medical model on diagnosis is obvious, but
diagnosis supposedly has no place in the social model because it takes as
its focus the environments in which people live. However, there is no
 Returning the Social to the Social Model  |  41

way to uncover what is wrong in the environment without a diagnosis of

people’s bodies and minds. My point is not that the social model is the
same as the medical model. The social model has reversed many years of
medical interpretation and negative social beliefs in which disabled peo-
ple are viewed as different, dangerous, inhuman, and without value. My
point is that current methods of interpreting disability, of which the
medical and social models are pillars, almost always diagnose symptoms
of disability in the person: features attributed to disability are not seen,
defined, criticized, claimed, or cured, unless there is a person to repre-
sent them.

Rebuilding the Social Model?

Do we throw out the social model or rebuild it? It is clear to me that we

must rebuild it. Otherwise, we risk theorizing disability without any atten-
tion to either the environment or to history. Social constructionism in the
humanities and occasionally strains of the social model in disability stud-
ies see the effect of the environment in terms of embodiment. According to
these theories, the body is influenced by environmental factors in a way
that changes what the body is. The body incorporates the outside environ-
ment, language effects, and so on, however you define the “outside.” This
is perhaps easiest to see in the case of negative attitudes. The person of
color living in racist society internalizes racism, becoming his or her own
victim. Most theories of internalized racism understand that negative at-
titudes change the body.
What disability studies makes clear, with its emphasis on the built
environment, is that the body incorporates its environment, becoming
a different body. In the strong versions of social construction, what
becomes very evident is that this embodiment takes place beyond the
realm of consciousness or self-­consciousness. While environmental
factors affect subjectivity, subjects for the most part do not understand
how, why, or when. The “social” in the social model refers to what dis-
abled people know about society as a consequence of embodying it.
The other point worth stressing is that the body itself, while changed
by the environment, has little power to influence the environment.
This is why social constructionism is often thought to be apolitical—­or
adverse to politics. Both of these trends—­that embodiment is a one-­
way street in which the environment impacts the body and that sub-
jects have no self-­consciousness of embodiment—­have to change if the
social model is to be rebuilt.
42 | The Matter of Disability

Complex Embodiment

This theory considers the influence of the environment and the body to be
reciprocal. Since the body is the place where the environment is read, the
body bears the markers of the environment, but the variety of bodies has
the power to change these markers. The identity of people with disabilities
presents itself as an awareness of a complex embodiment involving the
reciprocal transformation between the body and its environment—­a reci-
procity that provides for change in each term within an otherwise con-
stant equation, the content of which is embodied and thus known in and
as the body.
In effect, complex embodiment, because it occurs under conditions of
persons having lived for a long time in an environment, has self-­
consciousness as one of its most critical dimensions. Being made to em-
body what others hate and seeing what others love give one both self-­
consciousness and the ability to embody diverse positions in society. The
social model is an epistemological model—­ it not only incorporates
agency; it cannot exist without active subjects who are defined by their
ability to produce and share knowledge.
Complex embodiment thus changes the identity of people with dis-
abilities. They are no longer identified by physical differences or by envi-
ronmental unfitness. Rather, they are recognized by the use of knowledge
acquired by embodiment. Disability is a body of knowledge. Here the “so-
cial” in the social model refers to what disabled people know about society
as a consequence of embodying it. Let me sum up where we are before
turning to how we might understand the relationship of people with dis-
abilities to the knowledge base. How does complex embodiment help to
return the social to the social model?

A. The social model no longer ignores the body for the environ-
ment. Complex embodiment theorizes the body and environ-
ment as mutually transformative.
B. People with disabilities are no longer objectified by the social
model. Diagnosis is of no use in identifying them; they are not
only targets of the environment; they actively transform it.
C. The social model, under the influence of complex embodiment,
is an epistemological model. It not only incorporates agency;
it cannot exist without active subjects who are defined by their
ability to produce and share knowledge.
 Returning the Social to the Social Model  |  43

If people with disabilities know themselves and others as disabled,

based on the possession and use of embodied knowledge, we should be
able to find evidence of the fact. Here is where Shakespeare solved the
problem for me of seeing the presence of disability as knowledge. I claimed
for many years that we needed to argue the merits of minority disability
identity epistemologically. I developed a limited conception of complex
embodiment to account for the changing interaction between disabled
bodies, environments, and individual consciousness. But I had not yet fig-
ured out the connection between knowledge and complex embodiment—­
for one thing because I really had no concrete examples of complex em-
bodiment, and I did not know where to look for them, that is, until
Shakespeare entered the picture. Then two things happened. First, I recog-
nized disability for the first time based on the knowledge being gathered
and exercised by disabled people. This knowledge was synonymous nei-
ther with gaps in the social model nor with advances in the medical model.
Second, I figured out where to look for complex embodiment. Moreover,
I discovered practices, known to most people, though greatly misunder-
stood by them, that were in fact forms of complex embodiment.
Let me cite and interpret a few passages from Shakespeare’s Henry IV,
Parts 1 and 2 to show what I mean. Here Prince Hal and Poins steal Fal-
staff ’s horse:

FALSTAFF: The rascal hath removed my horse, and tied him I know
not where. If I travel but four foot by the square further afoot, I
shall break my wind. . . .
Eight yards of uneven ground is threescore-­and-­ten miles afoot
with me, and the stony-­hearted villains know it well enough. . . .
Whew! A plague upon you all! Give me my horse, you rogues, give
me my horse, and be hanged! (2.2.10–­28)

Old age? No! This is the kind of behavior learned over a long time—­an
indicator of disability. With more looking, I found this other passage in
Henry IV, Part 2:

FALSTAFF: A pox of this gout, or a gout of this pox, for the one or the
other plays the rogue with my great toe. ’Tis no matter if I do halt;
I have the wars for my colour, and my pension shall seem the
more reasonable. A good wit will make use of anything. I will turn
diseases to commodity. (1.2.238–­43)
44 | The Matter of Disability

Falstaff limps. He seems to have gout affecting his big toe, and this disabil-
ity explains why the theft of his horse injures him. But in many ways Fal-
staff ’s disability is immaterial. We cannot name gout as Falstaff ’s disability
any more than we can say that it is the cause of his pretend death at the
Battle of Shrewsbury.
In fact, critics have largely ignored gout as a factor in Falstaff ’s ac-
tions. The point, however, is not to assign a correct diagnosis but to re-
veal its inutility. There is no need for diagnosis. Those of us who notice
that Falstaff is disabled know it, and know it instantly, not because he
shows biological signs of a disability or withdraws from a disabling en-
vironment. We know it because he embodies the knowledge of what it
means to be a disabled person. He calculates walking distances relative
to an awareness of the ground: “Eight yards of uneven ground is
threescore-­and-­ten miles afoot with me.” Disabled embodiment holds a
different knowledge of society, and this knowledge, not his “great toe,”
identifies Falstaff as disabled. Disability for Falstaff appears not in the
body or even in a disabling environment but as another form of embodi-
ment—­a complex embodiment, the experience of which teaches that
disability is both affected by environments and changed by the diversity
of bodies, resulting in specific knowledge about the ways that environ-
ment and bodies mutually transform one another.
My second discovery came through the tendency in the critical litera-
ture to see Falstaff as “theatrical.” Referring to “unfixed subjectivity,” the
characteristic that led some critics to name Falstaff as the first modern
subject, Hugh Grady states that this “playfulness, this ability to subvert
ideological interpellation through theatricality, is Falstaff ’s crucial charac-
teristic, both as foil to Prince Hal and as thematic embodiment of resis-
tance to power in all the plays of the Prince Hal trilogy” (611).
The ability of Falstaff to pass as nondisabled and disabled compels
critics to define him as theatrical—­theatricality has only this meaning
with reference to him. People with a disability understand better than
others the relation between disability and ability in any given situation.
These two facets are not the frozen binaries of complex embodiment;
nor is passing as nondisabled superior to passing as disabled. The desire
to pass is central to how disabled people think about their identity. Pass-
ing, not coming out, defines the breathless moment when disabled per-
sons first come to consciousness as disabled. In fact, they first recognize
themselves as disabled when they know to pass. Those who pass treat
social situations that others consider natural and normal as calculated,
artificial, and subject to manipulation, thereby demonstrating their
 Returning the Social to the Social Model  |  45

knowledge about the relation of human difference to social organization

and human perception. Passing as disabled may involve playing roles,
but its essential character is less a matter of deception than a knowledge
of human ability and its everyday definition. Passing exhibits and exem-
plifies complex embodiment.
The usual definition of passing does not comprehend passing as dis-
abled. Passing as disabled—­or what I call masquerading—­represents an
alternative mode of managing disability through disguise. The masquer-
ade depends not on the enactment of able-­bodiedness but on claiming an
identity marked as stigmatized, marginal, or inferior. People who mas-
querade display either an exaggerated image of their disability or conceal
their disability with another one. These two sides of passing represent nei-
ther a frozen binary, nor do they somehow match a superior practice
against an inferior one. The masquerade is not a negative version of pass-
ing. Rather, the desire to pass in all its fullness is central to how disabled
people think about their identity.
Falstaff is, of course, an exquisite masquerader, and his skill explains
one reason why he embodies opposition to Henry IV’s murderous regime.
Overstating or performing difference, when that difference is a stigma,
makes one into a target, but it also exposes and resists the prejudices of
society. The masquerade satisfies the desire to recount a story steeped in
disability, often the very story that society does not want to hear, by refus-
ing to embrace images of power and ability. Masquerading may stress un-
dercompensation, when overcompensation is required, or present a com-
ing out of disability when invisibility is mandatory. Exaggerated differences
and feigned disabilities serve as small conspiracies against oppression and
inequality. They subvert existing social conventions, and they contribute
to the solidarity of marginal people by seizing control of stereotypes and
resisting the pressure to embrace norms of behavior and appearance.
Before concluding I will provide two examples of passing by Falstaff.
One shows conventional passing as a form of complex embodiment. The
other shows masquerading. Please note that neither behavior could exist
in absence of the longtime study of the society from which Falstaff and
other disabled people are excluded. Here Falstaff gathers as recruits for
the Battle of Shrewsbury a pack of ragged individuals from the bottom
of society.
When Westmorland and Prince Hal ask for a defense of these recruits,
Falstaff passes by imitating their idea of war, but he also exposes the atti-
tudes of his superiors to the audience:
46 | The Matter of Disability

PRINCE HENRY: I did never see such pitiful rascals.

FALSTAFF: Tut, tut, good enough to toss; food for powder, food for
powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men,
mortal men.
WESTMORLAND: Ay, but, Sir John, methinks they are exceeding poor
and bare, too beggarly.
FALSTAFF: Faith, for their poverty I know not where they had that,
and for their bareness, I am sure they never learned that of me.
(4.2.61–­69)

As another example of passing, Falstaff ’s words may seem exaggerated,

but if they did not capture the beliefs of Prince Hal and Westmorland, they
would immediately object to them, and they do not. Westmorland’s use of
the words “poor” and “bare” shows no conception of the recruits’ real ex-
istence. For Westmorland, ‘poor’ refers to inferior military quality, not to
poverty. He sees not hungry men before him but men in threadbare cloth-
ing. Falstaff ’s punning on “poverty” and “bareness” has comic effect, but
its scope goes beyond humor to clarify that the king makes his people
poor and hungry. Finally, when Falstaff calls his conscripts “food for pow-
der,” it seems unfeeling, and so it is, but his words prompt the audience to
think about the cost of war to common people. If not for Falstaff, the audi-
ence might be tempted to believe that the Battle of Shrewsbury shows only
Prince Hal killing Hotspur.
Later at Shrewsbury Falstaff masquerades. The use of the term “coun-
terfeit” deserves an extended analysis, but I will focus only on Falstaff ’s
application and defense of it. When Douglas attacks him, Falstaff falls
down as if dead, and Douglas, duped, eventually leaves. Falstaff shows that
he understands not only battle but also the survival techniques of the dis-
possessed. Falstaff is part of a disability collective. Despite his knighthood,
he dwells among disabled and impoverished people, and he knows how
they live and how they die, or, rather, his body knows these things, and it
does what it must.
If Falstaff were to obey the ideology of ability underlying warfare, he
would die in battle almost immediately. Instead, he masquerades, just as
he passes as nondisabled elsewhere in the drama as a device to escape the
violence around him. There is no sin in disguising oneself, Falstaff sug-
gests, unless that disguise be in preference to death: “To die is to be a
counterfeit,” he reminds, “but to counterfeit dying . . . is to be no counter-
feit, but the true and perfect image of life” (5.4.112–­19). Falstaff embodies
 Returning the Social to the Social Model  |  47

disability in the face of power, at once exposing and evading it. He chooses
life in the counterfeit of death—­at least for a little while.

Conclusion: Disability Is a Body of Knowledge

Let me conclude by showing again the proximity of the medical to the

social models and demanding why we need to return the social to the
social model. First, on the medical and social models, the usual methods
of identifying disabled people by diagnosing a biological defect or an
environmental incapacity show themselves to be not only ineffective but
also discriminatory. They objectify people with disabilities and give no
place to their agency, knowledge, and self-­discovery. They may consider
the roles of the body and the environment, but they do not theorize how
they interact.
The theory of complex embodiment returns the social to the social
model, but this theory does not conceal disabled subjectivity. Instead, it
places a premium on the disabled subject as a knowledge producer—­and
to such an extent that people with disabilities are identified as such by
their possession and use of the knowledge gathered and created by them
as longtime inhabitants of nondisabled society. Passing as nondisabled
and masquerading as more disabled, in addition to actions and statements
of social critique, are practices where disabled people consistently self-­
identify as disabled, where they use the knowledge of society unique to
them. My concluding point is that the awareness of complex embodiment
reveals that disability is a body of knowledge.

WORKS CITED

Grady, Hugh. “Falstaff: Subjectivity between the Carnival and the Aesthetic.” Modern
Language Review, vol. 96, no. 3. 2001, pp. 609–­23.
Shakespeare, William. Henry IV, Part One. Edited by Stanley Wells. Oxford UP, 1987.
Shakespeare, William. Henry IV, Part Two. Edited by René Weiss Jowett. Oxford UP,
1987.
Siebers, Tobin. “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment: For Identity Poli-
tics in a New Register.” The Disability Studies Reader, 4th edition, edited by Lennard
Davis, Routledge, 2014, pp. 278–­97.
Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization
of Literary Disability Studies
Joshua Kupetz

That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I

should be of my body.
—­Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

Introduction: Disability as Material-­Semiotic Ecology

In this essay, I offer a new conceptual model of disability and a method of

doing literary disability studies called disability ecology. Disability ecology
is part of the broader rediscovery of the body as site, critical lens, and sen-
suous experience already occurring throughout the social sciences and
humanities. Grounded in the belief that “the material self cannot be disen-
tangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cul-
tural, scientific, and substantial” (Alaimo, “New Materialisms, Old Hu-
manisms” 282), this new materialist conception of disability reentwines
embodiment with nonhuman actors such as biomedical practices, assis-
tive technologies, human and nonhuman environments, and dominant
beliefs and attitudes. Through such interactional relationships, these hu-
man and nonhuman actors constitute disability ecologies that shape social
identities and structure the subjectivities of disabled people.
I apply this framework to literary disability studies through a reading
of Richard Powers’s novel Gain (1998) that interrogates the semantic, syn-
tactic, and symbolic textual networks that produce literary disability and
imbue it with meaning. Powers’s novel serves as an exemplary site for the
investigation of human-­nonhuman entanglement particularly in its figu-
rations of transnational flows of chemicals, medical practices, and capital.

48
 Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies  |  49

Gain traces the ontological slippages between human and nonhuman sub-
jects by linking the life stories of a human protagonist, Laura Bodey, and a
corporate one, Clare International. One strand of the narrative fore-
grounds Laura Bodey, a successful real estate agent and single mother of
two who is diagnosed with uterine cancer and dies in a matter of months.
The other strand focuses on Clare International, a multinational corpora-
tion that achieves legal personhood over the course of a century and
whose products—­and industrial by-­products—­are linked to a cluster of
cancer diagnoses in the fictional Lacewood, Illinois, that Laura and Clare’s
Agricultural Products Division call home. Laura and Clare, whose anthro-
pomorphic and presumptively feminine corporate name emphasizes its
agentic equivalence, restlessly traverse one another throughout the text.
They meet under the kitchen sink when hands grasp bottles of dish soap;
along the Midwestern horizon where the “black boxes” (Powers 2) of
chemical plants achieve a paradoxical invisibility through their very ubiq-
uity; and in the chemotherapy clinic where Clare’s chemicals pass through
PICC lines to scour Bodey’s body for the tumors other Clare chemicals
have urged into being.
In the sections that follow, I examine these crossing subjects—­as sub-
stantive bodies, locations of meanings, and frames of reference—­to recon-
sider how disability reveals the ontological precarity of so-­called bounded
humans and inert substances. First, I break the convention of writing tex-
tual analysis in the literary present by summarizing the salient points of
Laura’s narrative in the past tense. Laura is the principal figure that orga-
nizes the novel’s examination of disability subjectivity and embodies its
critique of the deleterious effects of environmental injustice produced by
global capitalism particular to the end of the twentieth century. By break-
ing with the literary present, I acknowledge the slippage between sup-
posed animate and inanimate materiality on which this novel and the con-
cept of disability ecology depend. In addition, this rhetorical choice stages
a common scenario in which a presumably normative audience demands,
and becomes enthralled by, disability narrative. An unconventional use of
the past tense, I hope, makes these conventions and expectations more
available to critique in the present.
Subsequent sections situate the concept of disability ecology among
other new materialist theories in contemporary critical disability studies
that “rediscover” the body in ways that exceed the limitations of social
construction theories. Disability ecology is a framework that can coordi-
nate these already circulating and otherwise salient, yet differing models
of disability. Disability ecology extends models such as Tobin Siebers’s
50 | The Matter of Disability

“complex embodiment” (22) and Alison Kafer’s “political/relational

model” (6) by elaborating affinities with other discourses, particularly STS
(science and technology studies) and queer phenomenology. Using an
STS approach, disability appears as a “boundary object,” meaning a con-
cept shared by multiple stakeholders that is loosely defined in common
usage and strongly defined in specific community contexts. Sara Ahmed’s
work in queer phenomenology establishes a problematic that can help ex-
plain how disability ecologies orientate disabled people toward (and away
from) objects, spaces, and ideas that are typically overlooked by a norma-
tive gaze. These approaches help expose types of entanglements com-
monly experienced by disabled people, draw new textual locations into
critical focus, and provide points of access for the reimagination of dis-
ability as a material-­semiotic artifact and social identity—­one that is
structured by systems of interactional relationships, is capable of exerting
transformative pressure on those systems, and is fully embodied.

A Story of “When We Lived Wrong”

Laura Bodey was the newest member of the Million Dollar Movers Club
for Next Millennium Realty in Lacewood, Illinois, when she developed
ovarian cancer, underwent an unsuccessful regimen of chemotherapy, and
died. She left behind a teenaged daughter, Ellen, and a twelve-­year-­old
son, Tim. While the causes of ovarian cancer remain indeterminate, Laura
belonged to an uncharacteristic “cluster” of women newly diagnosed in
Lacewood. Weeks before her death in Mercy Foundation Hospital, Laura
learned that she had been awarded a sizable settlement due to her partici-
pation in a class-­action lawsuit against Clare International. According to
Environmental Protection Agency findings, the multinational corpora-
tion’s Lacewood-­based Agricultural Products Division had been releasing
significant yet legal amounts of carcinogenic by-­products into the air and
water. Additionally, several of the company’s consumer products, includ-
ing a common pesticide that Laura used on her flower garden, were also
being studied for possible carcinogenic contaminants. Don Bodey, Laura’s
ex-­husband, saw the settlement both as Clare’s acceptance of responsibil-
ity and its tacit acknowledgment of liability, but Laura viewed the settle-
ment in more pragmatic terms: due to the scandal surrounding the EPA
findings, Clare common stock had dropped precipitously, and the settle-
ment simply presented the most cost-­effective maneuver to protect the
financial positions of the corporation and its shareholders.
 Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies  |  51

The object of a grave yet legal environmental injustice, Laura was ex-
pected to produce an individualistic solution to an interlocking set of sys-
temic problems organized by their concern for profit. Upon her diagnosis
and assignment to a course of treatment, Laura was inserted into a neolib-
eral medical industry that expects care receivers to act as managers of
their own treatment, to make recovery their business, and to be their own
best advocates even as agents of that system determine the very pathways
toward “health” that any given person might choose. Reflecting on her
positionality as a newly diagnosed cancer patient, she recognized these
new responsibilities, claiming that “all the magazines agree: health care is
the patient’s business” (Powers 80). Far from exercising agency, Laura was
shipped through medical offices as if she were a raw material being pro-
cessed through Clare’s network of labs, plants, and distribution centers.
Laura moved between a general surgeon, a remote oncologist in India-
napolis, a surgical oncologist, a radiologist, and other medical profession-
als whose various labors attempted to shape her into the value-­added
product known as a “survivor.” Through her experiences of diagnosis and
treatment, Laura learned to view her specialist’s office as a “giant, state-­of-­
the-­art cancer-­fixing factory that enjoys a regional monopoly” and a site
where she passes through “the medical equivalent of one of those assem-
bly lines” (112). For this macroeconomics of cure to function, Laura—­like
all patients—­was expected to perform a particular form of labor, meaning
the active pursuit of cure or rehabilitation. The autonomous action de-
manded by the medical-­industrial complex, however, merely disguised
her translation into a commodity for the use of various actors in health-­
care networks. The modern medical-­industrial complex had transformed
the hospital into a for-­profit business similar to Clare, she believed, only
“not the kind that cares what its customers think” (82). Powers drives this
double-­edged reduction home in an instance of dark irony: the narrator
divulges that many of the chemicals in her ineffective course of chemo-
therapy are Clare products and that Mercy Foundation Hospital, where
she undergoes treatment, owes its modern facilities to philanthropic gifts
from the company.
Her sociochemical baptism into neoliberal medical practice created an
emergent moral uncertainty regarding her own role in her cancer’s devel-
opment. Prior to her diagnosis, Laura had accepted the authority of clini-
cal recommendations for healthy living—­even if she often ignored them—­
and believed that any occurrence of illness was a “holdover from when we
lived wrong” (Powers 13). The persuasive rhetoric of the neoliberal medi-
cal industry conditioned her to believe that cancer was her fault, her diag-
52 | The Matter of Disability

nosis appearing as a sign of a personal failure, of her somehow having

“lived wrong,” despite an abundance of troubling evidence pointing to
toxic pollution and environmental injustice. The imposition of corpora-
tized techniques of self-­care, including the injunction to think posi-
tively—­a pseudotherapeutic technique offered by medical professionals
and peers alike—­recalibrated Laura’s sense of identity by initiating an es-
trangement from the social identities that had previously organized her
life through their overlapping interactions. Cancer now refracted each
facet of her social self—­ real estate agent, mother, gardener, ex-­ wife,
lover—­and roughened each edge where those disparate selves adjoined.
Laura was prescribed narrative as a therapeutic tool to shore up this
rapidly disarticulating sense of self, and these rehabilitative hermeneutics
demonstrate how storytelling buttresses the ideological junction of opti-
mal health and personal responsibility. From her first postoperative con-
sultation with Dr. Jenkins, who presided over Laura’s initial cyst-­removal-­
turned-­hysterectomy, Laura was introduced to narrative as a technology
of care. She was given pamphlets like Diet and Cancer and Chemotherapy
and You as a technology of recovery and as a source of embodied knowl-
edge. Although narrative has been a component of palliative care since the
beginning of the hospice movement, Laura did not learn anything action-
ably useful from Cheer: Your First Line of Defense.
Instead of relying on informational pamphlets and their optimistic
rhetoric of overcoming, Laura reflected on nonclinical modalities of nar-
rative across a range of popular media as sources of lay expertise. These
narratives proved equally unsatisfactory. When Laura awoke to learn that
her scheduled cyst removal had become a complete hysterectomy, she ini-
tially identified with the protagonists in “amputation stories” who dis-
cover, during post-­op recovery, that the surgeon had removed the wrong
limb. As she convalesced, she puzzled over not having witnessed the por-
tentous signs of impending illness common in “midnight reruns.” When
Hollywood films allowed young, nondisabled actors to consistently beat
medical odds that she herself could not, she became aware instead of the
ableist logic of filmic narratives that focus on sick or disabled characters as
tropes to buttress the nondisabled. When she realized that neither clinical
nor popular narratives could map onto her experiences of disabled em-
bodiment, narrative became a form of oppression. Also oppressive: the
expectation shared by friends and colleagues that she should narrate her
diagnosis and treatment in an aesthetically satisfying way. She quickly
learned to resent the expectation that she should craft a coherent narrative
from an arbitrary event, for Laura’s friends relied on her to provide a
 Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies  |  53

causal narrative that allowed her cancer to be bracketed, contained, and

set aside. For these friends, for whom “the requests for details” elicit
“vaguely excited show[s] of distress” (Powers 93), narrative rendered her
cancer safe, a contained problem localized in her body.
For Laura, the disabling effects of cancer and its treatment were not
simply the dialectical detritus of optimal health, nor were they merely
inverse functions of failed techniques of self-­care. Disability, she real-
ized, provided a new standpoint from which she might see her life anew,
a social relocation that shifted her orientation away from normative
spaces, cultural practices, and interpretive methods. Although Laura
had made a living by selling homeowners the greatest amount of square
footage they could finance, Laura began to see the expectation of vast
living space and the aesthetic division of rooms in a home as ideological
forms, not inevitable givens. Likewise, when she helped Tim, her son,
with an English assignment that required an explication of Walt Whit-
man’s lyric-­narrative poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” she realized that
she could draw on her own life as a resource for interpretation. Consid-
ering the speaker’s projected speech first fifty and then one hundred
years into the future, Laura concluded that Whitman could not have
been ill when he wrote, “It avails not, time nor place—­distance avails
not.” For Laura, time availed quite a bit.

Embodying Literary Disability Studies

The rhetorical gambit of introducing Laura’s story as nonfiction helps

foreground two issues at the center of this essay. First, I hope the framing
of Laura’s story as a bit of biography creates the conditions for readerly
self-­reflexivity, meaning that readers might find themselves complicit as
eager consumers of disability narrative. Such awareness transforms Lau-
ra’s increasing internal resistance to the social expectation that a disabled
person “must narrate one’s disability for others” (Mitchell and Snyder,
Prosthesis xii), for her resistance to narrative itself is narrated to a reading
audience hungry for stories about difference. Despite invoking issues of
privacy and offering disability as a critique of mandatory causal logic,
Laura’s acts of denial also deny the novel its own opportunity to contest
the “undergirding authorization to interpret that disability invites” (Mitch-
ell and Snyder, Prosthesis 59).
Second, this gesture aims to reproduce the slippage between human
and nonhuman subjects that preoccupies the novel and to contextualize
54 | The Matter of Disability

the interventions disability ecology makes in disability theory and literary

disability studies. Pulling back the curtain on the biographical mode in
this way reveals a foundational contradiction in one of the central meth-
ods of literary disability studies: the explication of textual features that
signify disability—­that is to say, what makes disability textually remark-
able—­in the context of a broader political project that asserts disability’s
ultimate unremarkability. As nonfiction, the narrative sustains the natu-
ralization of the heterogeneous ecology of actors that assail Laura’s nor-
mative subjectivity, a group that includes medical professionals, private
and public spaces like her home and the library, family members, chemo-
therapy drugs, and cultural attitudes. As fictional textualizations, however,
these actors appear as contingent objects open to critique, and this cri-
tique works recursively to disrupt this naturalization in nonliterary life.
Caroline Levine argues that “literary forms and social formations are
equally real in their capacity to organize materials, and equally unreal in
being artificial, contingent constraints” (14), and Gain affords an opportu-
nity to explore the points of contact between literary disability thematics
and nonliterary forms of disability subjectivity.
If disability is a material-­semiotic practice, it follows that representa-
tions of disability in literary fiction can produce knowledge about disabil-
ity subjectivities. Because there is no Archimedean point from which to
perceive one’s own disability ecology, one can turn to the limited sets of
signifiers in literary texts as sources of knowledge production, self-­
reflection, and systemic critique of the orientating relationships that
structure disabled people’s lives. In Reassembling the Social (2005), Bruno
Latour grants “the resource of fiction” the capacity to “bring . . . the solid
objects of today into the fluid states where their connections with humans
may make sense” (Reassembling 82). Here Latour echoes Herbert Marcuse,
who claims that an aesthetic form, which is “the result of the transforma-
tion of a given content . . . into a self-­contained whole,” can be “recognized
as a reality which is suppressed and distorted in the given reality” because
it is “‘taken out’ of the constant process” of daily life (Marcuse 8, 6). Grant-
ing form to fluid experience, Marcuse argues, allows relationships be-
tween actors to become visible when they would otherwise be plowed un-
der by the unrelenting movement of experience’s furrow.
By demonstrating Clare’s personhood as a textual effect, meaning the
accumulated product of federal laws and court interpretations, the novel
invites readers to consider the role of texts and other sign systems, objects,
and practices in the elaboration of human subjectivities. Given that the
novel establishes Clare as Laura’s inverse image, its achievement of per-
 Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies  |  55

sonhood runs counter to her process of disabled subjectification. Clare

relies on a network of social practices and emergent technologies to power
its growth from a family partnership in Boston into its final multinational
form, a trajectory that takes the company from immateriality to substance
through the semiotic effect of incorporation. For example, Clare benefits
from early technological advances in candlemaking equipment and prac-
tices; horizontal growth into soap making; the transcontinental railroad’s
capacity to collapse distance and transform once-­remote towns into viable
markets; a boom due to shrewd government contracts during the Civil
War; and deft marketing practices in order to generate ever increasing
profits. An official charter of incorporation grants Clare protection from
risk and constitutes the company as one “composite body” through legal
language, including the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution
that extends due process to it (Powers 175, 179–­80). Clare’s lack of a con-
ventional body does not foreclose its capacity for personhood; instead,
mutable partiality is the precondition through which the narrative reveals
the distributed networks of actors required to establish personhood as
such.

Rematerializing Disability

Disability ecology builds on the new materialist belief that all human be-
ing is “substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of sub-
stances and agencies of environments” (Alaimo, “States of Suspension”
476). Disability is a material-­semiotic effect of the social relationships be-
tween embodied individuals and a range of nonhuman actors, including
cultural practices, institutions, and technologies. Given that disability is
also relational, recursively inflecting those bodies, actors, and networks
with new meanings that disability itself makes available, disability appears
as a dynamic state of perpetual becoming, not a fixed condition with a
stable meaning.1 As a theory of disability and an analytic, disability ecol-
ogy takes seriously David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s call for a
“definition of disability [that] must incorporate both the outer and inner
reaches of culture and experience as a combination of . . . social and bio-
logical forces” (7). Presuming that “the flesh and blood givenness of the
physical body is not a passive surface, but . . . in continuous interaction
with textual practices” (Shildrick 178), disability ecology exposes the ma-
trix in which any given nonnormatively embodied subject exists. Such
subjects find themselves embedded in networks of co-constitutive rela-
56 | The Matter of Disability

tionships with human and nonhuman actors, such as built infrastructures,

technologies, social institutions, and other discursive formations.
By connecting the material conditions of nonnormative embodiment
with the cultural meanings attached to them in one model, disability ecol-
ogy offers a new materialist solution to the essentialism-­constructionism
debate that has long attended disability studies. In this way, the study joins
critical disability theorists like Tobin Siebers and Alison Kafer whose
works seek to unite both positions by offering new materialist ways of
thinking about disability. Siebers’s concept of “complex embodiment” (22)
is a theoretical framework in which identity is always both a representa-
tional and a material site of knowledge production. A “theory that de-
scribes reality as a mediation, no less real for being such, between repre-
sentation and its social objects,” complex embodiment offers the possibility
that subjects can transform the social representation of their body or re-
align their social location through agential, embodied practice that
achieves political ends (30, 26). While Siebers begins to map a new mate-
rialist terrain, Alison Kafer populates it with a range of intersectional
bodies—­texts, subjects, and social locations—­that add granular specificity
to Siebers’s broad outlines. In Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013), Kafer proposes
a “political/relational model” of disability that situates disability “in built
environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular
kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being” (6). The political/relational
model breaks from the dominant social model of disability by “pluraliz[ing]
the ways we understand bodily instability” (7), particularly through a re-
newed attention to nonnormative embodiment and by acknowledging the
value many disabled people find in medical intervention while also expos-
ing the ableist underpinnings of many medical practices.
Moves like these that break apart the concepts of boundedness of im-
pairment and the autonomy of an unrealistically discrete nonnormative
body are vital for rendering disability legible as a material-­semiotic phe-
nomenon. Instead of affirming a Cartesian formulation of matter as inert,
theories of new materialisms hold in common that “materiality is always
something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality,
or difference that renders matter active, self-­creative, productive, unpre-
dictable” (Coole and Frost 9). Disability ecology locates this “something
more” in the co-constituting relationships between human subjects and
the material actors, human and nonhuman, that produce the effects that
generate disablement and structure disability and its subjectivities. Such a
view counters the essentializing assumption that disability is located in
material nonnormative physical or neurochemical characteristics that de-
 Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies  |  57

termine disabled subjects, and it furthers disability’s productive move-

ment away from inert matter or disembodied sociality and toward a
material-­semiotic disability that structures subjectivities defined by cre-
ative interdependencies.
In order to build a model that can accommodate such a range of simul-
taneous usages of disability, I use the conceptual vocabulary of ecology.
Three definitions of ecology impart a flexible granularity that honors the
differences of individual disabled people yet addresses disability as such.
Conceptual flexibility is necessary to account for the movements of indi-
vidual actors and systems into positions of greater or lesser salience in the
ecology—­as well as into and out of it—­over time and depending on con-
text. First, this model references ecology as the study of interactional rela-
tionships between organisms and their environments; second, it refer-
ences ecology as the pattern or aggregate of these relationships, or what is
typically called an ecosystem; and third, it references ecology as human
ecology, a branch of sociology that studies the spatiotemporal interrela-
tionships between human actors and their economic, social, and political
organization.
The actor-­network theory (ANT) imperative to “follow the actors
themselves” (Latour, Reassembling 12) provides a useful framework for the
discovery of the actors that constitute disability ecologies. ANT is a
material-­semiotic method that extends agency to nonhuman actors as it
maps and describes the relationships between things (material) and con-
cepts (semiotics) in transient, heterogeneous networks. Reframing ANT
as an “ecological” approach, Bruno Latour argues that all disruptions of
the “collective,” his term for acts of “collecting associations of humans and
non-­humans” (Politics of Nature 238), appear as ecological “crises” to be
resolved by allowing the disruptive actors to reconfigure the collective.
Within this framework, the resistance of disabled people to their own dis-
qualification or exclusion ought to lead to the reconstitution of normalcy,
not the normalization of difference on offer through contemporary forms
of tepid “inclusionism,” Mitchell and Snyder’s term for the “embrace of
some forms of difference through making them unapparent” (Biopolitics
of Disability 4).
Disability ecology differs from Latour’s approach in two ways: first, it
emphasizes the human subject as the epicenter of such networks, and sec-
ond, it actively intervenes in the disability ecologies it reveals through acts
of interpretation. For Latour, networks themselves, not individual human
actors, take center stage. Drawing on a sense of methodological disinter-
est, Latour claims that a good ANT account of a network does not critique
58 | The Matter of Disability

or explain the actors and networks it perceives; instead, ANT relies upon
purely descriptive writing to “deploy actors as networks” (Reassembling
136–­40). In this light, an application of ANT to disability would concern
disabled people, but not directly involve them. Scott Kirsch and Don
Mitchell challenge the supposed neutrality of a typical ANT approach that
does not pursue “the search for causes of, and thus accountability for, the
effects of power which it traces” (692). Instead, they argue that the net-
worked power ANT reveals may be “relational,” distributed among “nu-
merous points of contact, application[s], or effect[s]” and at the same time
“‘centered’—­centered in institutions, in individuals, or in structured social
relations” (691). Disability ecology insists on no such prohibition and ac-
tively reconstitutes the collective through acts of interpretation. Intended
as a tool in the service of disability justice, disability ecology strives to in-
tervene in, not just account for, the systems of oppression discovered
through its deployment. As Gary Albrecht rightly argues, after all, “It is
the person that has the social position and relationships with others” (71).
Gain illustrates this model of disability by embedding Laura’s cancer in
an ecological network of actors that runs from industrial by-­products to
the decision-­making of Clare executives to the body’s own genetic im-
peratives to the well-­meaning-­yet-­ableist gestures of employers. The de-
velopment of Laura’s disability ecology disrupts the strong definition of
disability—­meaning the broad consensual understanding of disability as
an individuating and embodied pathology in need of rehabilitation or
cure—­by narrating the development of Laura’s narrow, material-­semiotic
usage that acknowledges disability as an embodied source of knowledge-­
production and creativity. In this way, disability appears as a kind of
“boundary object,” Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker’s term for
“those objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and sat-
isfy the informational [and work] requirements of each” (297). Such ob-
jects occur on the edges between social worlds or communities of
practice—­health-­care providers and disabled people, for example—­and
act as objects because entities act toward or with them, not because they
are necessarily composed of “prefabricated stuff ” or demonstrate “‘thing’-­
ness” (Star 603). By framing disability as a boundary object, one can prize
open the monolithic, durable category of “disability” and reveal a complex
and fluid network of relationships between the disabled subject and other
actors, including nonhuman ones.
Powers’s novel explores this material-­semiotic complexity through the
competing interests in cancer as well as the communicative misfirings be-
tween Laura and other stakeholders in her diagnosis and cure. Each actor
 Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies  |  59

who encounters Laura attempts to classify or define Laura’s cancer but

does so in a way that obscures it through the multiplication of local uses.
Her surgeon, Dr. Jenkins, defines that cancer by stage, although the clas-
sification is indeterminate given the need for subsequent tests that in and
of themselves have large margins of error. However, her radiologist, who
is concerned with the likelihood of the cancer’s spread to other systems,
defines the cancer by grade, meaning the size and shape of the tumor’s
margins. Don Bodey translates each classification into a numeric variable
for use in calculating Laura’s five-­year survival rates, and Ellen, her daugh-
ter, only wants to know if the classifications portend her mother’s recov-
ery. Laura’s “specialist” in Indianapolis, an unspecified physician who is
likely an oncologist given that he arranges her course of chemotherapy,
seems incapable of communicating effectively with her because their indi-
vidual definitions of cancer—­and its meanings relevant to treatment,
quality of life, and personhood—­diverge so greatly. When the specialist
describes her tumor as “Grade Three,” Laura asks a simple follow-­up ques-
tion: “How can you tell it’s a Grade Three[?]” (Powers 110). He misinter-
prets the query as a challenge to his diagnostic authority, and his immedi-
ate response, “Well, I’ll grant you that the measurement is somewhat
subjective” (110), suggests that cancer, for him, is an opportunity to vali-
date his professional capabilities even as it undermines the facticity of em-
pirical measurement itself. Later in the same conversation, he recom-
mends a second-­ look surgery after she completes her course of
chemotherapy, and she asks, “What will that tell?” Her query is meant to
help her understand what new information such a procedure will reveal,
yet he again misinterprets, replying “Well, you may be right. There’s some
debate about whether invasive second-­look surgery is reliable enough to
merit the possible complications” (110–­11). Apart from being an instance
of gross “mansplaining,” the specialist’s miscomprehension of Laura’s
questions suggests that their distinct social locations structure specific,
divergent understandings of cancer that come into uneasy contact under
the strong definition of disability and must be accounted for in any broad
analysis of “cancer” as such.
Focus on Laura’s diagnosis risks reasserting disability as an individuat-
ing condition of embodiment, but Powers guards against this impulse by
introducing Laura into a community of people with cancer, most notably
Ruthie Tapelewsky, whose chemotherapy schedule coincides with Laura’s.
Laura’s interactions with Ruthie promote an ideology of interdependence
while at the same time critiquing the system of overdetermined depen-
dence on offer from the medical-­industrial complex. As they undergo
60 | The Matter of Disability

their monthly treatments, Ruthie and Laura create community by sharing

embodied experiences and knowledge about them. They discuss wigs and
hats, their children, their exasperation at current and former spouses, and
the best strategies for managing the effects of chemotherapy, including
what medicines produce the worst effects and what folk remedies actually
help. Through such scenes, the novel establishes a disabled community,
however small, without losing the particularities that belong to each indi-
vidual, while Ruthie’s occasional confusion about whose life relates to par-
ticular details paradoxically affirms their individuality. This experience of
community reveals to Laura the extent to which self-­willed autonomy is a
fiction. When Ruthie declines further treatment, her absence in the che-
motherapy ward registers for Laura as an act of embodied resistance
against the medical industrial complex and the precedent for her own re-
jection of a second round of chemotherapy.

Disability Subjectivities and Nonnormative Orientations

These contingent networks of human and nonhuman actors produce dis-

ability subjectivities, meaning embodied experiences of “consciousness,
knowing, thinking, or feeling” (Moser 377) conditioned by the interaction
of nonnormative embodiments and disabling actors. Such subjectivities
structure the physical standpoints and ideological points of view that ap-
pear as natural and given. If disabled and nondisabled subjects alike are
“sedimentation[s] of established habits” (Braidotti 212), the contingencies
that structure disability subjectivities differ in part because the shared so-
cial field—­from built environments to the rights-­granting institutions of
biopolitical certification to aesthetics and taste—­orients normative sub-
jects as it dislocates nonnormative ones. Mitchell and Snyder refer to this
phenomenon as the “life of hidden negotiations” (Prosthesis x) that shape
disabled people’s lives in ableist social locations.
Although the actors in disability ecologies structure disability subjec-
tivities, they do not determine them, nor does the dominant ableist orien-
tation of the public sphere consign disability to a subordinate position as
normalcy’s perpetually inferior remainder. Far from it: disability is also a
technique for living differently through nonnormative embodiment.2 The
lived experience of a disability ecology appears as such a technique in that
the marginalization of the disabled person creates a standpoint from
which the naturalized, and therefore seemingly invisible, rules of ableist
normalcy become apparent as exclusionary rather than natural, allowing
the disabled person to choose whether or not to attempt their perfor-
 Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies  |  61

mance. Rejection of those dominant conventions leads the disabled per-

son to create new idiosyncratic rules for living—­or perhaps to live an elec-
tive absence of rules—­that manifest as an embodied aesthetics or crip
style that in part answers Alison Kafer’s call to “begin thinking disability,
and disability futures, otherwise” (7).
While disability activists have long drawn attention to the ways that
the built environment directs and denies disabled people’s lives through
varying degrees of accessibility, disability ecology extends this awareness
to the social and ideational environment, investigating how attitudes, be-
liefs, and practices direct disabled people toward or away from possible
futures. “To be orientated,” Sara Ahmed argues in Queer Phenomenology
(2006), “is also to be turned to certain objects, those that help us find our
way” (1). Of course, a turn toward one object is likely a turn away from
another, perhaps many others. When social protocols direct disabled lives
toward ableist objects or goals and away from objects and experiences that
validate nonnormative embodiments as benign human variation, disabled
people may become alienated from their own best interests as nonnorma-
tively embodied subjects. Just as Ahmed’s project involves “redirecting
our attention to different objects” than those used to produce and propa-
gate heteronormative standards (3), disability ecology emphasizes those
objects that matter to disabled people and that ableist culture typically
discounts or overlooks.
Gain speaks to the phenomenological power of disability subjectivity
by narrating Laura’s postoperative and postdiagnosis experiences of spa-
tial defamiliarization in her own home as well as her estrangement from
her own sense of embodiment. Her newly acquired embodied knowledge
reveals the ways that the logic of consumption has shaped her prediagno-
sis sense of her home both spatially and affectively. Because she moves
more slowly during her recovery from the hysterectomy than she had be-
fore, her house becomes “much bigger than it was”; sedated, she no longer
remembers which rooms connect, and the house seems a tenuous, contin-
gent assemblage of components (Powers 93). As her sense of the quantities
of time and distance change, so does her sense of their affective values. She
thinks that her formerly pride-­inducing square footage is “massively ir-
relevant,” that the designation of particular rooms for particular functions
has less to do with their use value—­“Utility room, laundry room, rec
room, study, den. How many things must one person do? How many
rooms does anyone need to do them in?”—­and everything to do with the
expectation to furnish them through acts of consumption (93). The home
that had buffered her from thoughts of mortality before her diagnosis, she
realizes, has “never been anything more than an obligation” to be filled
62 | The Matter of Disability

with “her carefully coordinated furniture” (93). Laura’s home, like the
multination Clare International, operates as a composite body that disag-
gregates into fragments when seen through the lens of disability. Initially
disorienting, this disarticulation offers a kind of freedom.
Gain represents Laura’s specific disability subjectivity as a process of
becoming aware of the materiality of embodiment that the figure of the
liberal subject typically represses. This treatment allows disability subjec-
tivity in general to appear as a more democratic model of human subjec-
tivity itself. Contemporary notions of the liberal individual emphasize
autonomy and self-­reliance, what Ingunn Moser refers to as “centred con-
trol,” meaning a subject’s capacity to act from a position of “competence
that implies that the person knows, has an overview of the situation, can
control it, and is in a position to act” (Moser 381). As a recipe for a norma-
tive subject, “centred control” masks the network of “embodied relations
and arrangements” that human subjects have with sets of “ordered rela-
tions” and other nonhuman actors such as infrastructural networks, social
institutions, and technologies (Moser 382, 381). While normative charac-
terizations underwritten by the ideology of ability typically privilege the
trope of autonomy over the complex, networked relationships that shape
human experience (Garland-­Thomson 22), Powers’s novel adopts an ap-
proach to disability that allows it to critique the idea of normative health.
Disabled by her cancer and the chemotherapy drugs meant to treat it,
Laura learns that so-­called healthy human subjects only temporarily in-
habit states of nondisability that are naturalized through cultural practices
and discourse. After her first three-­day chemotherapy treatment, Laura
realizes that “no one really knows their real body” and that “well-­being is
nothing but an impostor, a beautiful girl who turns into a hag at neap tide
when the spell breaks and reason at last sees through her” (Powers 129).
Instead of affirming the autonomous subject on which normativity de-
pends, Laura’s experience suggests that all human subjects are perma-
nently partial, aggregate beings who undergo ceaseless transformation
through a variety of incapacitations. This awareness evokes Tobin Siebers’s
reframing of disability as “a form of diversity, and . . . as a critical concept
for thinking about human identity in general” (3).

Subjects Unbound: “Mutable Substance Had No Final Shape”

Gain frames Laura’s disability as an ecology constructed from an ever-­

changing network of social relationships between other human and non-
 Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies  |  63

human actors, such as the biomedical industry, the built environment,

and the ideology of expressive individualism. Powers grants center-­stage
positions to the affective capacities of specific nonhuman actors such as
medical protocols, chemotherapy drugs, corporate brand management
methods, built environments, and abstract ideological structures like
work, motherhood, and romantic partnership. The narrative connects
each actor to Laura and explores how the interactions of their particular
agentic forces structure her embodied experience of disability. Through
these representations of human and nonhuman entanglements, particu-
larly those of Laura and Clare International, Gain complicates conven-
tional expectations about the experience of nonnormative embodiments
by engaging issues of environmental justice; the effects of capitalist logic
on disability subjectivities; the arbitrary natures of disability and ability as
categories of disqualification and social inclusion, respectively; and the
porosity of the no-­border between human and nonhuman actors.
The contrapuntal motion of the novel foregrounds the ways in which
Clare and Laura mutually constitute one another, a transportable reci-
procity that becomes applicable to nonliterary contexts. The story suggests
an environment where both corporate and human subjects shape and are
shaped by their networked relationships to a symbolic order that is itself
shaped by the spread of late capitalism. Clare, a person under law, seems
to function as the antagonist, the embodiment of the malign force of late
capitalism that both causes Laura’s cancer and monetizes her death by of-
fering a cash settlement as a substitute for continued life. Through this
formation, the novel critiques conceptions of the post-­Enlightenment
subject who is an autonomous, free, and rational agent and who develops
through various encounters with a nature that remains resolutely separate
(Mansfield 11).
But Gain does not figure the new, hybrid, and distributed subject as a
fall from grace in need of cure or salvation. According to the logic of the
narrative world that Powers creates, any barrier between the human agent
and the social world is semipermeable at most. Together, the two stories
annealed within one narrative represent a contemporary human agent
whose subjectivity cannot be rendered legible outside the network of mu-
tually constituting relationships that he or she shares with other human
and nonhuman actors.3 Both the human and the corporation in Gain ap-
pear as material-­semiotic entities, effects of physical qualities and pro-
cesses as well as products of language and semiotic systems. Both Laura
and Clare appear in states of perpetual becoming, two nonteleological
subjects who, like the chemical by-­products that Clare’s chemists continu-
64 | The Matter of Disability

ously repurpose, appear as “mutable substance” that has “no final shape”
(Powers 164). Collapsing the distinctions between the human and the
nonhuman at their most fundamental level, the novel interrogates the
meaning of being itself and productively disaggregates the bounded lib-
eral subject.
Powers denies any attempt to read the novel as an outright indictment
of incorporation, however, through an ambivalent conclusion that ties the
cure for cancer to the conditions that produced it in Laura. At the novel’s
conclusion, an adult Tim Bodey, Laura’s son, works as a computer devel-
oper for a biotech start-­up and develops a “Janus-­faced” algorithm capable
of working in “two directions” (Powers 405) on human proteins. While
the narrative implies that a normative (single-­faced?) algorithm works in
only one direction, this productively disabled algorithm allows Tim’s pro-
gram to interact with a “score of other machines” to create a “universal
chemical assembly plant at the level of the cell” capable of producing “any-
thing the damaged cell called out for” (Powers 405). It is implied that the
first use for this new network of technologies will be in search of a cure for
cancer. Moreover, this use of “Janus-­faced” recalls an earlier description of
the initial soap-­making efforts of the original Clare brothers, who perceive
soap as a “Janus-­face intermediary between [the] seeming incompatibles”
of soluble and insoluble materials (405, 50). As the two-­faced god of Ro-
man mythology, Janus links soap—­the product that guaranteed Clare’s
success and enabled the eventual release of the carcinogenic by-­products
that caused Laura’s cancer—­with computer code that promises cancer’s
imminent cure. In a similarly ambivalent sense, Tim suggests that “it
might be time for the little group of them to incorporate” (405), closing
the novel with a recuperation of the institution that has been linked to the
unfolding tragedy of the narrative. That the money to incorporate, an act
of amplification that could lead to cancer’s cure, will come from Tim’s in-
herited portion of the class-­action settlement adds yet another instance of
tragic irony to the novel’s argument. To repurpose Mel Y. Chen’s profound
phrasing, Gain seems to argue that the toxic logic of capitalism is “already
‘here,’ already a truth of nearly every body” (Chen 218). Now Tim, like
Laura, must embrace nonnormativity to make something meaningful and
new from it.

NOTES

1. Stephanie Kerschbaum succinctly summarizes this set of interrelationships by

claiming that disability is always “dynamic, relational, and emergent” (57), a phrase I
 Disability Ecology and the Rematerialization of Literary Disability Studies  |  65

take as meaning that disability is itself an ongoing elaboration forever being shaped
through embodied social practice.
2. Michel Foucault defines “techniques of the self ” as “reflective and voluntary prac-
tices by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but seek to transform
themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make of their life into
an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (10–­
11).
3. Many of these alternating chapters are connected by representations of Clare’s
marketing copy, suggesting that as one moves away from productive labor, one remains
bound to economic modes of production through the practices of affective labor.

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Unique Mattering
A New Materialist Approach to William Gibson’s
Pattern Recognition

Olga Tarapata

It is something about the footage. The feel of it. . . . it matters, matters

in some unique way.
—­William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

William Gibson’s fiction is fundamentally concerned with extraordinary

bodies. From his early short stories to The Peripheral (2014) and Archangel
(2016), Gibson portrays bodies that are damaged, deformed, and de-
stroyed as well as sutured, restored, and healed, bodies that are techno-
logically enhanced, or prostheticized. These overt corporeal exceptionali-
ties elude normative classifications and instead of ossifying the characters’
relations as “deviant” or “special,” Gibson opens up novel ways to frame
extraordinary embodiment. This chapter sets out to conceptualize the
figurations of disability in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) giving the
acclaimed novel about globalization a new spin. Against the backdrop of
recent debates within disability studies,1 this essay focuses on the complex
negotiation of nonnormative corporeality. In a close reading of the two
protagonists, Cayce Pollard and Nora Volkova, I highlight the dynamism
and unpredictability of nonnormative embodiment as expressed in the
oscillating depictions of pain and pleasure. Negotiations of painful and
pleasurable sensory experience in relation to disability, as found in Tobin
Siebers’s and Margrit Shildrick’s theorizations, present a point of depar-
ture for my notion of unique mattering. While they diverge in focus, both
ground their positions in the messy (Shildrick) or gritty (Siebers) materi-
ality of the body. Rather than pain and pleasure as such, it is the potential

67
68 | The Matter of Disability

for their experience that both scholars trace back to the material relation-
ships within and without the body. To provide a potent account of the
materiality of extraordinary corporeality that I find in the depictions of
Cayce and Nora, I will revert to the theoretical framework of new materi-
alism and specifically political scientist Jane Bennett’s theorizations of the
vibrancy of matter. While the concept of disability is not directly addressed
by Bennett, this essay brings her ideas on materiality into dialogue with
current negotiations of disability.

Gritty Corporeality

Within disability scholarship, it was Tobin Siebers who in 2006 reclaimed

attention to the materiality of the body. Against decades of social and lin-
guistic constructivism, largely influential within disability studies in the
1980s and 1990s, Siebers’s essay invokes a “new realism of the body” (179).
It is in the “gritty accounts of . . . pain and daily humiliations” that he iden-
tifies “the rhetoric of realism” (179). While Siebers articulates a concern
for a particular ‘rhetoric,’ he is equally (if not more) interested in the on-
tology of disability. An embrace of “not . . . what we think it is but . . . what
it really is” (180) marks his interrogation as less constructivist than essen-
tialist. Neglected in semiotic discussions of the body, the “realism” Siebers
insinuates points at the explicit physical reality and daily living conditions
of people with disabilities, which, as he notes, may help to establish a “re-
newed acceptance of bodily reality” (179).
Siebers’s criticism is directed against an overly shadowy, theoretical ne-
gotiation of pain in current body theory where “pain . . . is rarely physical”
(177). Conceptualizations of suffering and disability that celebrate an
“opening up [of] new possibilities of pleasure” cannot be integrated into
Siebers’s vision of pain as “an enemy” (177). According to his uncompro-
mising position,

Pain is not a friend to humanity. It is not a secret resource for po-

litical change. It is not a well of delight for the individual. Theories
that encourage these interpretations are not only unrealistic about
pain; they contribute to an ideology of ability that marginalizes
people with disabilities and makes their stories of suffering and vic-
timization both politically impotent and difficult to believe. (178)

This account refrains from any differentiation of pain, envisioning it as a

universal corporeal condition. However, while Siebers concedes that
 Unique Mattering | 69

“physical pain is highly individualistic, unpredictable” (178), he still pre-

fers to keep it a clear and common enemy, and a unifying element for
people with disabilities. When addressing the sources and triggers, Siebers
emphasizes that it is not exclusively the disability in itself but the “innu-
merable daily actions” and “the difficulty of navigating one’s environment”
(177) that cause pain. People with disabilities face a “hundred daily obsta-
cles that are not merely inconveniences but occasions for physical suffer-
ing” (177). In other words, pain is not by default an inherent quality of the
disabled body but results rather from the interplay between body and en-
vironment granting them mutually constitutive power. Siebers, I argue,
attempts to shed light on the transformative relationships that emerge in
the enmeshment of body-­material and environment-­material. The “gritti-
ness” that Siebers finds in “realistic” accounts of disability is nothing but
an explicit negotiation of the body’s materiality, of bodily fluids, excre-
tions, orifices, tubes penetrating and bags attached to the body. He enu-
merates the material objects “that people with disabilities are forced to live
with—­prostheses, wheelchairs, braces, and other devices” that he consid-
ers “potential sources of pain” rather than “marvelous examples of the
plasticity of the human form or . . . devices of empowerment” (177).
Therefore, pain is not viewed as an inherent quality but results from
the interaction between person and environment. It is this interaction that
holds the potential for sensory experiences, which are thus relational in
nature. From this continuous gritty interaction within the individual net-
work of interrelations the self emerges. With an eye on materiality, I clas-
sify this process of becoming as unique mattering when discussing Gib-
son’s figurations on nonnormative corporeality. When Siebers asks “what
would it mean to esteem the disabled body for what it really is” (181), my
provisional answer to this ontologically driven interrogation suggests that
by means of the discernment of the disabled body’s unique material inter-
relations its appreciation can be approached.
While Siebers stresses the importance of “resisting the temptation to
describe the disabled body as either power laden or as a weapon of resis-
tance” (180) in his struggle for “a realistic conception of the disabled body,”
I suggest that it is equally important to resist any overdeterministic tie
between disability and suffering. Siebers states,

I am claiming that the body has its own forces and that we need to
recognize them if we are to get a less one-­sided picture of how bod-
ies and their representations affect each other for good and for bad.
The body is, first and foremost, a biological agent teeming with vital
and chaotic forces. It is not inert matter subject to easy manipula-
70 | The Matter of Disability

tion by social representation. The body is alive, which means that it

is as capable of influencing and transforming social languages as
they are capable of influencing and transforming it. (180)

He characterizes the relationship between immaterial representation and

material body as mutually transformative and foregrounds the physicality
and capabilities of the body. Yet the physical transformations involved in
complex embodiment remain nebulous in his account. Only implicitly does
Siebers bear testimony to the material relationship between body and envi-
ronment. In his attempt to carve out the vitality and capabilities of the hu-
man body, he resorts to defining it against inert and passive matter, thereby
reiterating a long-­held ontological opposition between life and matter.
Particular attention to the inscription of pain in the body’s materiality can
be found in the introduction of Keith Alan Blackwell, a character from Gib-
son’s novel Idoru (1996). The scrutinizing look of protagonist Colin Laney dis-
cerns how the “exposed flesh [is] tracked and crossed by an atlas of scars,
baffling in their variety of shape and texture” (6). Concealing his identity dur-
ing their initial encounter, Blackwell’s outward appearance, characterized by
heavily scarred hands, a scarred face and head, a dental prosthesis, and a “bro-
ken nose, never repaired” (7), is all that is primarily available to Laney. How-
ever, Blackwell is not Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson’s freak who is simply and
passively stared at. Instead, communicative control is balanced between
“starer” and “staree” (77). Staring at the remains of Blackwell’s left ear, Laney
wonders “why there had been no attempt at reconstruction” (5). The role of
the staree in such encounter is essential; and ideally, according Garland-­
Thomson’s “ethics of looking” (194), both parties engage in a transitive action.
Recognizing Laney’s interested look as an act of communication, Blackwell
replies, “‘So I’ll remember,’ . . . reading Laney’s eyes. ‘Remember what?’ ‘Not to
forget’” (5). When Blackwell touches his scar tissue or squeezes his “lobe-­
stump,” he does it “without hesitation or embarrassment” (27). Instead of the
depiction of a disabled body in need of repair or reconstruction, Gibson fore-
grounds how experience, be it painful or other, informs corporeality as well as
subjectivity. This blatant display of scarred skin and nonnormative physique is
presented in a manner that recognizes realistic corporeality and in this sense
values a person’s unique biography.

Dynamic Corporeality

Rather than pain, it is creativity, pleasure, and plasticity that feminist and
critical disability studies scholar Margrit Shildrick is concerned with in
 Unique Mattering | 71

her negotiation of the concept of disability. While she parts ways with
Siebers with regard to the ramifications of unstable corporeality, Shildrick,
in a similar vein, bespeaks the fundamentally messy nature of embodi-
ment, pleading that “all corporeality is inherently leaky, uncontained, and
uncontainable” (“Beyond the Body” 7). With recourse to the works of
Jacques Derrida as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Shildrick
provides a vantage point that focuses on the body’s “plasticity . . . and the
capacity of disparate parts to constitute hybrid assemblages” (“Border
Crossings” 148). Her account moves far beyond an “endeavour to restore
the clean and proper body” (138). The incorporation of nonself matter
cannot restore any “originary wholeness,” since the body has “never been
self-­sufficient” (141) and, according to Shildrick, a “‘natural’ self-­complete
and singular embodiment is an illusion” (140). Prostheses can thus be un-
derstood to “contest the illusion of an originary unified and singular body,
exposing instead the fluidity of categorical boundaries” (142). In search of
adequate conceptions and terminologies to describe the conditions of
what is considered “disability,” Shildrick advocates “open[ing] the field to
a nexus of unexpected but constitutive assemblages that disorder the very
idea of normative corporeality” (140). Shildrick manages to capture this
“fluidity” by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of “desire,”
according to which the “embodied self—­rather than being goal-­driven
and singular as it would be in a modernist model—­becomes a network of
flows, energies, and capacities that are always open to transformation”
(143). Adopting this notion of the embodied self enables Shildrick—­even
more forcefully—­to move away from what the (disabled) body is and to-
ward what the (disabled) body can become. She holds,

In shifting the emphasis from the integrity and co-­ordination of the

whole body to the provisional imbrication of disparate parts, it is
no longer appropriate to think of bodies as either whole or broken,
able-­bodied or disabled. Embodiment is simply a provisional man-
ifestation in a process of becoming driven by the circulation of de-
sire. For Deleuze and Guattari, such flows of energy extend em-
bodiment beyond the merely human. (145)

In “the dynamic and always unfinished processes of assemblage [that]

point to the unlimited potential of becoming” (146), Shildrick identifies
value for contemporary discussions of the disabled body.
I find that these productive becomings of disability in Shildrick and
Siebers work analogously to the progressive development in the depiction
of extraordinary bodies that populate the work of William Gibson. There
72 | The Matter of Disability

is a humanist undercurrent in Gibson’s early fiction in that conceptualiza-

tions of the disabled body ground in a notion of a coherent, rational, au-
tonomous self contained in the visceral tissues of the body. Yet these con-
ceptualizations evolve toward an extended notion of embodiment notably
from the Bridge trilogy onward. The days of repair as the answer to corpo-
real deficiency or damage are long gone, since the illusion of the norm has
been exposed. In accordance with Mitchell and Snyder’s argument in Nar-
rative Prosthesis, one recognizes that the “prostheticized body is the rule
not the exception” (7). Corporeality, rather than static or enclosed, is now
considered dynamic and fluid. Moving through a field of diverse forces,
the body is constituted by its possibilities of entering into relations with
other bodies. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “assemblage” aids in orga-
nizing the incessant change and reconstruction of the embodied self that
exists in a condition of perpetual becoming. After all, why should we read
the disabled or nonnormative body as any less dynamic than other corpo-
real expressions?

The Matter of Agency

In order to account for the potentiality of an ever-­shifting nexus between

bodies and their material environment rather than a more deterministic
expression in the binary relation of pain or pleasure, this essay will turn to
a theoretical approach that is devoted to the negotiation of materiality.
Her endorsement of “thing-­power” made Jane Bennett a prominent figure
in the revival of materialism. New materialist approaches have already
found their way into disability studies, for instance, in the works cited
above via Siebers, Shildrick, and Mitchell and Snyder, and as the founda-
tional organizing logic of this collection, The Matter of Disability.
In a recent publication The Biopolitics of Disability (2015), David Mitch-
ell and Sharon Snyder turn to what they call “antinormative novels of em-
bodiment” in which they identify narratives that “employ disability’s radi-
cal potential to unseat traditional understandings of normalcy” (182) and
“explore disability as revelatory of variation’s potential for innovation”
(181). Mitchell and Snyder refer to alternative modes of representing non-
normative corporeality in contemporary novels by, among others, Richard
Powers and Stanley Elkins to develop the notion of the “capacities of inca-
pacity.” Their analyses draw on new materialist discourses and thereby
embrace a vocabulary that allows for a recognition of the agency of matter.
The power of alternative representation resides in the novels’ foreground-
 Unique Mattering | 73

ing of “imperfection as a creative, biological force” (182), which echoes

Siebers’s emphasis on a “biological agent teeming with vital and chaotic
forces” (180). While nonnormative corporeality is crucial to all three ap-
proaches, for Siebers it is mainly associated with the experience of pain.
Mitchell and Snyder, by contrast, conceptualize the vital, chaotic, biologi-
cal forces of the body in terms of capacities for creativity and innovation;
here we can observe Siebers’s impulse toward a “new realism of the body”
converge with what Mitchell and Snyder call “new disability materialism”
(182). By incorporating “materiality” into their analytical vocabulary,
Mitchell and Snyder put renewed emphasis on the agentive and dynamic
nature of the nonnormative material body and depart further from no-
tions of passivity and deviance rooted in the medical parlance of pathol-
ogy and dysfunctionality. Their process-­oriented notion of biological mul-
tiplicity is read against the backdrop of neoliberalism, in particular its
“unethical profiteering practices” (189) and a value system mainly based
on economic productivity.

Vibrant Materiality

I will read Gibson’s literary figurations against the backdrop of the field of
new materialism, which updates a problematization of the life (vital,
active)—­matter (inert, passive) binary. In their volume New Materialisms,
Diane Coole and Samantha Frost aim for a return to “the most fundamen-
tal questions about the nature of matter and the place of embodied hu-
mans within a material world” (3). Along similar lines, political theorist
Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) presents a twofold undertaking in
that it is a philosophical as much as a political intervention.2 In the philo-
sophical strand, Bennett concentrates on “thinking beyond the life-­matter
binary” (20) in order to “theorize a materiality that is as much force as
entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension” (20).
Methodologically, by means of developing “a vocabulary and syntax for,
and thus a better discernment of, the active powers issuing from nonsub-
jects” (ix) and “cultivat[ing] the ability to discern nonhuman vitality” (14),
Bennett ultimately intends “to promote greener forms of human culture”
(x)—­a project that involves “the ethical aim . . . to distribute value more
generously, to bodies as such” (13). How could Bennett’s appeal for the
revaluation of bodies in general, which seems to resonate well with the
new realist demand for an explicit appreciation of the disabled body, in-
form the conceptualization of nonnormative corporeality?
74 | The Matter of Disability

In her new ontology of matter, she develops the concept of “thing-­

power” with recourse to atomists like Lucretius and Epicurus as well as
natural sciences like complexity and chaos theory. In acknowledging the
vitality of matter, defined as “the capacity of things—­edibles, commodi-
ties, storms, metals—­not only to impede or block the will and designs of
humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propen-
sities, or tendencies of their own” (viii), she decidedly sides against the
paradigms of social and linguistic constructivism that take matter primar-
ily as the carrier of meaning, the passive product of discourse. Through
applying Bennett to Gibson’s fiction, I will argue that his figurations raise
awareness of “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to
produce effects dramatic and subtle” (6). Reading Gibson against the
backdrop of Bennett’s vital materialist approach will allow me to discern
and esteem not only “humans and their (social, legal, linguistic) construc-
tions” as actors but also “some very active and powerful nonhumans: elec-
trons, trees, wind, fire, electromagnetic fields” (24). From such a perspec-
tive, the interactions with prostheses, wheelchairs, braces, and other
devices come into a different light; the relationship is one of symmetrical,
rather than hierarchical, interrelation between human and nonhuman ac-
tors; and disability becomes one of many various forms of agential em-
bodiment rather than the categorical other to normative embodiment.

The Power of Relations

Received as a novel about capitalism, global corporate culture, and perva-

sive commodification, Gibson’s Pattern Recognition depicts a globalized
world to the point of saturation, prompting critics to suggest that while
the novel depicts processes and mechanisms of the present moment, this
present is ultimately characterized by what science fiction scholar Veron-
ica Hollinger calls “process-­without-­progress” (467). As much as Hol-
linger’s observation applies to the general temporality of the novel, it can
be equally useful in a discussion of the representation of nonnormative
corporeality. In contrast, I am interested in Gibson’s figurations of humans
and specifically the depiction of the two heroines’ extraordinary corpore-
ality as dynamic, embedded, and semisovereign.
Against the general trend in traditional works of literature in which
“disabled characters were either extolled or defeated according to their
disability to adjust to or overcome their tragic situation” (Mitchell and
Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis 19), Pattern Recognition neither simply fol-
 Unique Mattering | 75

lows this “kill-­or-­cure” formula nor merely utilizes nonnormative charac-

ters to tell a story in the sense that Mitchell and Snyder present as “narra-
tive prosthesis.” By providing readings of, for instance, Melville’s Ahab and
Sophocles’s Oedipus, Mitchell and Snyder expose narratives that treat dis-
ability in its own right. Their criticism is thus directed against the fact that
“while disability often marks a protagonist’s difference and is the impetus
to narrate a story in the first place, a complex disability subjectivity is not
developed in the ensuing narrative” (10). In a similar vein, I will argue for
the complexity inherent in the depictions of the nonnormative corporeal-
ity and subjectivities’ of the two protagonists of Pattern Recognition, Cayce
Pollard and Nora Volkova.
Pattern Recognition centers on Cayce Pollard, a freelance “coolhunter”
who works for international marketing companies until commissioned by
Hubertus Bigend, a marketing guru and the head of Blue Ant Agency, to
track down “the maker” (6) of a collection of film clips, enigmatically
known as “the footage,” whose underground proliferation can be consid-
ered viral. Described as “a ‘sensitive’ of some kind, a dowser in the world
of global marketing” (2), Cayce has a talent for spotting consumer pat-
terns and predicting trends—­she anticipates markets before they surface.
However, “the truth . . . is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes vio-
lent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace” (2). The sheer density
of product information, or in Frederic Jameson’s words “noisy commodi-
ties” (114), that suffuses Gibson’s fiction fuels Cayce’s allergy and explains
her enthusiasm for the minimalist aesthetics of “the footage.” The footage,
a collection of 135 individual all black-­and-­white video clips without audio
or linear sequence, is anonymously distributed over the internet. Cayce
fathoms that “there is a lack of evidence, an absence of stylistic cues, that
[she] understands to be utterly masterful” (23). Bigend admires the foot-
age as “the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever” (67), and
due to her private passion for the footage, “[her] talents, [her] allergies,
[her] tame pathologies” (67), Cayce becomes a valuable asset. Despite
fearing the footage becoming marketed by Bigend, she agrees to the mis-
sion out of personal curiosity for the origin of the segments.
Cayce’s sensitivity produces a violent reaction that makes her “literally,
allergic to fashion” (8). What this depiction foregrounds is the interplay
between acting and suffering action between person and material envi-
ronment. On the one hand, overtly and severely affected by her globalized
context and the semiotics of logos and, on the other hand, actively shaping
them in her function as coolhunter, Cayce navigates through her world in
continuous affective feedback loops. For her, catching sight of certain
76 | The Matter of Disability

trademarks has incapacitating consequences in the form of swellings,

panic, nausea, and vomiting: “She’s gone to Harvey Nichols and gotten
sick. . . . Tommy Hilfiger does it every time. . . . When it starts, it’s pure
reaction, like biting down hard on a piece of foil. A glance to the right and
the avalanche lets go” (17–­18). Each individual interaction holds the po-
tential for a painful allergic reaction. The unpredictability associated with
the image of an avalanche mirrors Cayce’s inability to predict what reac-
tion will spring from the first sight of a new logo.
This potential of diverse experience that falls under the category of tal-
ent or allergy, knack or pathology we can consider a sort of phenotypic
plasticity. This means that the quality of her reaction—­as painful or
joyful—­and its material context emerge in mutual interdependence. The
reaction therefore does not depend exclusively on the internal properties
of a thing, body, or person (alone). In an insightful self-­description, Cayce
explains that she hunts “cool,” which is not an inherent quality but instead
“a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object” (88). On the
watch for the “cool,” Cayce thus draws on intuition rather than cognition
when factoring in the various actors and their interactions. In depicting
Cayce’s nonnormative sensitivity to complex, singular configurations of
interrelations, Gibson acknowledges the capacity of materiality to act
upon and to affect the observer as well as to be acted upon and affected by
those who share a cultural circumference. Cayce navigates through her
environment so as to avoid her known painful triggers, since a confronta-
tion with, for instance, figurines or drawings of the Michelin Man entail
paralyzing and painful consequences. These painful reactions to brands
mark “the downside of [her] ability to judge the market’s response to new
logo designs” (169). This extraordinary sensitivity frames Cayce less as a
subject in full control of her body and environment than as an actor code-
pendent on other actors. In the depictions of his protagonists, Gibson pro-
vides a commentary on the semisovereign status of what it means to be a
full participant in a variably embodied humanity.3 In Pattern Recognition
nonnormative corporeality is the rule, not the exception. Bodies are vul-
nerable and efficacious, interdependent and dynamic as is their material-
ity (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis 7).
This observation does not only apply to nonnormative corporeality in
Pattern Recognition but the acute attention on the interdependencies be-
tween human materialities and nonhuman materialities is always already
a general characteristic of Gibson’s work. An exemplary scene from Vir-
tual Light (1993) shows how in his negotiation of interfaces and interrela-
 Unique Mattering | 77

tions Gibson develops a form of collective agency. Chevette Washington,

the protagonist of Virtual Light, lives in an off-­grid squatters’ community
on the San Francisco–­Oakland Bay Bridge and works as a bicycle messen-
ger in the city. Chevette’s experience as messenger is described as follows:

Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Che-
vette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time. That was
the messenger’s high, she knew, and though it felt like freedom, it
was really the melding-­with, the clicking-­in, that did it. The bike
between her legs was like some hyper-­evolved alien tail she’d some-
how extruded, as though over patient centuries; a sweet and intri-
cate bone-­machine, grown Lexan-­armored tires, near frictionless
bearings, and gas-­filled shocks. She was certainly part of the city,
then, one wild-­ass little dot of energy and matter, and she made her
thousand choices, instant to instant, according to how the traffic
flowed, how rain glinted on the streetcar tracks, how a secretary’s
mahogany hair fell like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of
her loden coat. (131)

In the accelerated activity of cycling, interdependencies between the hu-

man actor that is Chevette and nonhuman actors such as the bike, the
street, and the city become apparent. Their fundamentally entwined na-
ture reveals a fluid entity, which as such makes decisions and is indivisible
into either energy or matter. The performed action is collaborative and her
rush, her bodily pleasure does not emerge from any false sense of auton-
omy or independence but instead from the action of “melding-­with, the
clicking-­in.”
Rather than defining agency in terms of a subject’s free will, Bennett
proposes a material and distributive agency and thereby advocates an al-
ternative to regarding humanity as the “ultimate wellspring of agency”
(Vibrant Matter 30). Her notion of distributive agency “does not posit a
subject as the root cause of an effect” (31) and draws on a Latourian sym-
metry between actors. This approach not only allows accounting for Che-
vette’s relationship with her bike outside traditional notions that strictly
conceive the messenger as a subject operating on an object, but moreover
sheds new light on the interdependencies of nondisabled embodiment.
Coincidentally, Bennett’s prime example for the relationship between “the
kind of striving that may be exercised by a human within the assemblage”
and distributive agency is cycling. She states, “One can throw one’s weight
78 | The Matter of Disability

this way or that, inflect the bike in one direction or toward one trajectory
of motion. But the rider is but one actant operative in the moving whole”
(38, emphasis added) and “an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or
agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive
interference of many bodies and forces” (21). Brought into the context of
nonnormative corporeality Bennett’s approach might effectively facilitate
the dissolution of the dominant conjunction of disability with deviance,
dependency, and passivity for future disability studies scholars. In turn
such an emphasis could extend a common insight of the field in debunk-
ing notions of normative bodies as autonomous, coherent, and active.

The Power of the Cut

On her investigative mission, the protagonist of Pattern Recognition fol-

lows the actors of a complex network that take her to a contact person in
Moscow by means of the watermark of a video clip. She meets Stella
Volkova, who tells Cayce of her twin sister Nora, a former student film-
maker who is later unveiled as the creator of the footage. Echoing the nar-
rative structure of Gibson’s previous novels,4 Pattern Recognition hinges
on a character who at the novel’s grand finale is revealed to have a signifi-
cant physical disability. Without any material appearance or information
about her identity, the maker prevails as an empty signifier until the final
pages of the novel. Information about her can only be drawn from the
footage itself, from the watermarking it exhibits, or at another remove
from other characters’ speculations, which uniformly convey that “the
footage is a work of a proven genius” (69), that it is utterly masterful.
Rather than merely suffusing the narrative with her absent presence, the
mysterious creator of the footage appears as an actual driving force of the
narrative. While Nora’s introduction in the form of a surprise revelation as
a paraplegic genius could be read in terms of a “narrative prosthesis,” I
argue that this figuration offers insight beyond a mere narrative function
into the complexities of extraordinary corporeality as dynamic, extended,
interrelated, and semisovereign.
Nora Volkova is the daughter of a Russian oligarch and was severely
injured during a bomb attack directed at her family. As a result of a piece
of shrapnel lodged between her cerebral hemispheres, Nora is paraplegic
and is presented as mostly unresponsive. What dramatically changed the
life of Stella’s twin sister is a piece of metal whose biography is described
as follows:
 Unique Mattering | 79

Something stamped out, once, in its thousands, by an automated

press in some armory in America. Perhaps the workers who’d made
that part, if they’d thought at all in terms of end-­use, had imagined
it being used to kill Russians. . . . And somehow this one specific
piece of ordnance, adrift perhaps since the days of the Soviets’ failed
war with the new enemies, and this one small part, only slightly
damaged by the explosion of the ruthlessly simple device, had been
flung into the very center of Nora’s brain. And from it, and from her
other wounds, there now emerged, accompanied by the patient and
regular clicking of her mouse, the footage. (315–­16)

It is through the stark focus on the material thing that both forks and con-
nects Nora’s brain that the significance and power of materiality is fore-
grounded in the narrative’s intricate course of events. This particular piece
of metal irrevocably changes her in forms that entail paralysis and pain. At
the same time, it becomes an essential part of the organism, one without
which she cannot survive. Material specificity plays a crucial role since it
is only due to the metallic object’s conductive quality that the communica-
tion between the hemispheres is possible, which opens up entirely new
pathways of connectivity. A particular material thing, therefore, plays a
significant role in the emergence of the footage. The hemispheres are con-
nected through a piece of electrically conductive material allowing for a
discharge that expresses itself in the form of digital video clips.
At the end of Pattern Recognition, Gibson displays complex narrative
modalities in his depiction of nonnormative bodies. Much in Siebers’s
vein, the representation of Nora’s disability negotiates pain without pro-
viding any easy solution. The gritty reality becomes visible through its ac-
knowledgment and requirement of an active negotiation, as does a non-
linear process of recovery that could be described as “process-­without
progress” in my appropriation of Hollinger’s words. In a scene depicting
Nora’s hospitalization we see the nonlinear process of her recovery:

Then she was shown her film from Cannes. That she saw, but it
seemed to cause her great pain. Soon she began to use the equip-
ment. To edit. Recut. . . . Five operations in that time, and still she
worked. . . . She ceased to speak, then to react. To eat. Again they
fed her with tubes. I was crazy. . . . In the end they said they could
do nothing. It could not be removed. . . . The last fragment. It rests
between the lobes, in some terrible way. It cannot be moved. Risk is
too great. . . . But then she notices the screen. (298)
80 | The Matter of Disability

The confrontation with a former film project causes Nora great pain while
at the same time prompts a process of reediting.

The most clever of the doctors, he was from Stuttgart. He had them
put a line from that camera into her editing suite. When she looked
at those images, she focused. When the images were taken away,
she began to die again. He taped two hours of this, and ran it on the
editing deck. She began to cut it. To manipulate. . . . That was the
beginning. (299)

The cut Gibson develops in the figuration of Nora operates on three levels.
First, there is the cut through Nora’s hemispheres. The concomitant avail-
ability of new channels of interrelation informs her desire to continuously
recut video material, which in turn gives the resulting footage a quality of
“cutting across boundaries, transgressing the accustomed order of things”
(20). Acutely affected by this transgressive quality, Cayce can only point to
“the feel of it” (78) and stresses that the footage “matters, matters in some
unique way” (78). Whereas the footage uniquely matters to Cayce in sym-
bolic terms, I would like to use the notion of unique mattering in a more
general sense to conceptualize Gibson’s figurations of nonnormative cor-
poreality. Unique mattering is meant to capture the process of becoming of
a singular network of interdependencies and foreground the vibrant ma-
teriality involved.
In her working process, Nora’s activity and pleasure come to the fore.
Drawing on Mitchell and Snyder’s notion of the “capacities of incapacity”
(187), we see that Nora’s nonnormative corporeality effervesces with cre-
ativity. Its efficacy shows in the ways the footage is understood as utterly
innovative, as “somehow entirely new” (Pattern Recognition 67), also
deeply affecting the lives of others, and even changing international socio-
cultural structures. However, what simultaneously becomes clear is that
she is not the epitome of a creative genius in any strong sense, but rather,
intricately enmeshed in a material production network that as a whole
brings forth the footage.
In the figuration of Nora Volkova, Gibson develops a complex non-
normative corporeality that both expresses pain and pleasure, stasis and
transformation as contingent modalities of becoming bodies—­including
paraplegic corporealities. Besides the fact that the shrapnel in Nora’s brain
cannot be removed, and according to medical rubrics her “wholeness”
cannot be restored, all other implications are much more ambiguous.
Criticism regarding literary depictions of disability often focuses on the
 Unique Mattering | 81

frequently depicted overcompensation of the superhuman on the one

hand and the subhuman on the other. Gibson’s representation addresses a
problematic condition without denying its painful reality that, however,
does not become the single defining criterion. In the attempt to conceptu-
alize extraordinary bodies, Gibson circumvents unambiguous and defini-
tive attributions of pity, tragedy, or deficit. “It is here, in the languid yet
precise moves of a woman’s pale hand. In the faint click of image-­capture.
In the eyes only truly present when focused on this screen. Only the
wound, speaking wordlessly in the dark” (316). When Cayce is granted
permission to watch Nora work, the description of Nora oscillates be-
tween fascination and pathologization, admiration and empathy, and
eventually the recognition of potential without any conclusive deflation
into common categories.
Upon their first meeting, Cayce finds Nora’s gestures condensed to the
movement of a single finger; the rest of her body is motionless. As Cayce
watches pixel after pixel being assembled into the magical stills, she finds
a first confirmation of the work-­in-­progress hypothesis advocated by one
subgroup of self-­proclaimed “footageheads.” Observing how the “visual
information, the grain of that imagery” (110), is manually generated con-
firms the entirely computer-­generated nature that footageheads have al-
ready assumed exists on the basis of the identical resolution in each of the
segments. What seemed to make this hypothesis unconvincing is the
sheer intensity of labor it requires. Following this procedure of produc-
tion, each segment needs to undergo a rendering process at so-­called

rendering farms. . . . Big room, lots of stations, Tenderers working

through your footage a frame at a time. Labor intensive. . . . Render-
ing is expensive, human-­intensive, involves a lot of people. . . . These
people sit there and massage your imagery a pixel at a time. (110)

This insight into the labor-­intensive demands on the production of the

footage offers a first glimpse at the immense density of the network in
which Nora is interwoven. Her uncle Andrei Volkov is able to contribute
the facilities, the high-­end technology as well as the manpower and the
financial assets that enable Nora to produce the footage. In order to get
Nora’s clips rendered, Cayce learns, “One of Volkov’s corporations
decide[d] to set up a test operation, where healthy, motivated prisoners
can lead healthy, motivated lives, plus receive training and career direc-
tion” (340). Thus, the inmates of an entire prison work in the service of
the production of the anonymously distributed collage of film stills. The
82 | The Matter of Disability

gigantic amount and diversity of actors involved in the generation of the

footage becomes visible. Located at a derelict cinema that is adapted to
Nora’s purposes, the maker is looked after by her twin sister, who fulfills
as much of a constitutive function as the computer technology that al-
lows her uninterrupted act of editing. The subsequent rendering and fi-
nal watermarking by different organizations further expand Nora’s net-
work. Her agency is radically distributed and suspended across a
multiplicity of human and technological nodes. As if to highlight the
hybridity of Nora’s subjectivity, the email address that ultimately leads
Cayce onto her tracks, [email protected], fuses Nora with her sister,
technology, and the internet.
The footage, as Nora’s creative discharge, requires the shrapnel as well
as the individual prisoner, the editing programs as well as Stella’s voice.
With awareness of the artist’s immersion into these interrelations, “The
creative process is,” as Bigend prophetically proclaims, “no longer con-
tained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was” (Pattern Recogni-
tion 70). The individual skull, similar to Andy Clark’s notion of “the skin-­
bag,” is not regarded as the singular seat of subjectivity. Clark, philosopher
and cognitive scientist, advocates the fundamental embeddedness of an
organism within its context and holds that

what matters are the complex feedback loops that connect action-­
commands, bodily motions, environmental effects, and multisen-
sory perceptual inputs. It is the two-­way flow of influence between
the brain, body, and world that matters, and on the basis of which
we construct (and constantly re-­construct) our sense of self, poten-
tial, and presence. The biological skin-­bag [alone] has no special
significance here. It is the flow that counts. (114)

The flow of the network facilitates a creative process that shapes the identi-
ties of its actors as well as brings forth the footage. When Stella explains,
Nora “is here, when she is working. . . . When she is not working, she is not
here” (313), this foregrounds how Nora only exists in process. Without the
interconnection with, for instance, the editing equipment, her subjectivity
lacks all expression. In the continuous process of “mouse-­click. Zoom.
Into image-­grain. Some quick adjustments. Clicks. Out of zoom” (314),
Nora is in a state of unique mattering.
Moreover, disability—­when understood as a fixed and unchanging
state—­is no longer a productive category to assess Nora’s mode of non-
normative embodiment. Shildrick and Price go against the general as-
 Unique Mattering | 83

sumption that “disability is a fixed and unchanging state which pre-­exists

its observation” in stating that “not only is disability a fluid set of condi-
tions but . . . the body itself is always in process” (102). The disabled body
is a “material site of possibility where de-­formations, ‘missing’ parts and
prosthesis are enablers of new channels of desiring production uncon-
strained by predetermined—­or at least normative—­organization” (Shil-
drick, “Prosthetic Performativity” 122). In Nora’s case, the shrapnel creates
a universe. “A universe comes into being,” mathematician and philosopher
George Spencer-­Brown explains in Laws of Form, “when a space is sev-
ered” (v). The cut, however, somewhat paradoxically, does not separate
her lobes but enables novel ways of mediation between them initiating the
extensive relations and facilitating the connections that become the very
fabric of her subjectivity. The insertion of the T-­shaped piece of metal sig-
nificantly contributes to the emergence of something “entirely new.” The
footage creates, as Cayce explains, “that sense of . . . I don’t know. Of an
opening into something. Universe? Narrative?” (112).

On Productivity

If we consider Cayce’s allergies as a form of nonnormative embodiment,

then both main characters in Pattern Recognition appear as disabled fig-
ures that sometimes complement one another, and sometimes serve as
counterparts. While Cayce’s reactivity is congenital and proof of pheno-
typic plasticity, Nora’s paraplegia is acquired and a condition strongly as-
sociated with stasis and passivity. Cayce travels all over the globe, con-
stantly on the move, whereas Nora is stationed in, and never leaves, Russia.
As the entire narrative is presented from Cayce’s point of view, it is her
subjectivity that is actively explored, meanwhile rendering Nora, who is
only introduced in the final chapters, invisible. Regarding Cayce’s extraor-
dinary talent it is worth noting that it is her economic success that allows
her integration into society despite her pathologies. Through the success-
ful commodification of her disposition, she is consistently reduced to her
economic function as “human litmus paper”: “Cayce, with her marketable
allergy, has been brought over to do in person the thing that she does best”
(10). What Cayce does is pattern recognition, and whatever she spots as
cool gets “produced. Turned into units. Marketed” (88) As a result, her
work informs the globalized landscape to an extent similar to how far the
latter affects her. Cayce’s success founded on the vacillation between al-
lergy and talent makes her “a secret legend in the world of marketing”
84 | The Matter of Disability

(67). Nora, on the other hand, herself a secret legend, is completely un-
coupled from the process of commodification. Her productivity is under-
stood as purely artistic.
While the commodification of bodies serves as the ultimate escape
from or compensation for disability in Gibson’s early novels and is still
present in the depiction of Cayce, this pattern changes with regard to
Nora. Here the turn from disability to talent is not fulfilled on the basis of
economic success. If it were not for her twin sister, the world would not
know about Nora’s video clips: “My sister, she is the artist. I, I am what?
The distributer. The one who finds an audience. It is not so great a talent, I
know” (296). While Nora produces the clips, the footage would not exist
without Stella.
Even more poignantly and explicitly than in any of Gibson’s previous
novels, disability in Pattern Recognition presents itself affirmatively, less
than ever before in need of resolution via rehabilitation or enhancement.
Corporeal wholeness is unmasked as an illusion. As if in explicit recogni-
tion of this shift Neil Easterbrook comments: “In the recent work Gibson
has refused all evasive alibis and instead confronted both characters and
readers with authentic, because unresolved, problematic[s]” (57). Prob-
lematized but unresolved, Gibson’s nonnormative bodies disclose their
dynamic and complex materiality and can be understood in a constant
process of unique mattering.

NOTES

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues Eleana Vaja and Moritz Ingwersen for
their invaluable feedback on this essay.
1. See, for instance, Mitchell and Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability or Wald-
schmidt, Berressem, and Ingwersen, Culture—­Theory—­Disability.
2. Bennett draws on a plethora of philosophers to develop the idea of “vibrant mat-
ter” in a politico-­philosophical take on materiality. Indebted to the critical vitalists Hans
Driesch and Henri Bergson, who provide a vocabulary to address the power and drive,
productivity and creativity inherent to matter, Bennett develops her own, more radical,
conceptualization. She explains: “While Driesch does not go as far as I do toward a ma-
terialist ontology, he does insist that the ‘vital principle’ has absolutely no existence in-
dependent of ‘physio-­chemical’ matter. He makes the relationship between matter and
life as close as it possibly can be while still retaining the distinction. . . . he pushes the
life-­matter binary to the limit, even though at the very last minute, he draws back from
taking the plunge into a materiality that is itself vibrant or active” (“Vitalist Stopover”
49).
3. Having only partial control over one’s body and surroundings can be described,
in the words of Karin Harrasser, as being “semi-­sovereign” (Körper 112). In Körper 2.0,
 Unique Mattering | 85

Harrasser’s criticism of the neoliberal ideology of the continuous improvement of the

body builds on Latour’s actor-­network theory. The “semisovereign body” serves as an
alternative concept to the neoliberal myth that all bodies are principally equal and dif-
ferentiated by individual performance depending on individual willpower. The empha-
sis on how bodies are embedded in an infinite meshwork of supraindividual processes
and power relations is central to her argument. (117). Nobody and nothing decides self-­
determinately for their exact enmeshment in a particular network. It is always partially
active and partially passive processes that interlock when somebody or something acts
(125). See also Harrasser, “Superhumans.”
4. In Idoru (1996), for instance, it is only at the end of the novel that by a sudden
revelation protagonist Chia McKenzie learns about the identity of her virtual friend,
Zona Rosa. Whereas Zona, the avatar of Mexican girl Mercedes Purissima, has all along
codetermined the action, her identity through a form of narrative repression remains
hidden until the sudden revelation of her deformities and reclusive life at the end of the
novel.

WORKS CITED

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.
Bennett, Jane. “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism.” New Materialisms:
Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke
UP, 2010, pp. 47–­69.
Clark, Andy. Natural-­Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intel-
ligence. Oxford UP, 2004.
Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost, editors. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and
Politics. Duke UP, 2010.
Davis, Lennard J., editor. The Disability Studies Reader. Routledge, 2006.
Easterbrook, Neil. “Recognizing Patterns: Gibson’s Hermeneutics from the Bridge Tril-
ogy to ‘Pattern Recognition.’” Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives, edited
by Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint, Routledge, 2010, pp. 46–­64.
Garland-­Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford UP, 2009.
Gibson, William. Idoru. Viking, 1996.
Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. Putnam, 2003.
Gibson, William. Virtual Light. Bantam Books, 1993.
Harrasser, Karin. Körper 2.0: Über die Technische Erweiterbarkeit des Menschen. Tran-
script, 2013.
Harrasser, Karin. “Superhumans—­Parahumans: Disability and Hightech in Competitive
Sports.” Culture—­Theory—­Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and
Cultural Studies, edited by Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ing­
wersen, Transcript, 2017, pp. 171–­84.
Hollinger, Veronica. “Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern
Recognition.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2006, pp. 452–­72.
Jameson, Fredric. “Fear and Loathing in Globalization.” New Left Review, vol. 23, Sept.–­
Oct. 2003, pp. 105–­14.
Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Depen-
dencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2001.
86 | The Matter of Disability

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism,
Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. U of Michigan P, 2015.
Nigianni, Chrysanthi, and Merl Storr. Deleuze and Queer Theory. Edinburgh UP, 2009.
Shildrick, Margrit. “Beyond the Body of Bioethics.” Ethics of the Body: Postconventional
Challenges, edited by Margrit Shildrick and Roxanne Mykitiuk. MIT P, 2005, pp. 1–­
28.
Shildrick, Margrit. “Border Crossings: The Technologies of Disability and Desire.”
Culture—­Theory—­Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural
Studies, edited by Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ingwersen,
Transcript, 2017, pp. 137–­51.
Shildrick, Margrit. “Prosthetic Performativity: Deleuzian Connections and Queer Cor-
porealities.” Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl
Storr, Edinburgh UP, 2005, pp. 115–­33.
Shildrick, Margrit, and Janet Price. “Breaking the Boundaries of the Broken Body.” Body
& Society, vol. 2, no. 4, 1996, pp. 93–­113.
Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructivism to the New Realism
of the Body.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard Davis, Routledge,
2006, pp. 173–­84.
Spencer-­Brown, George. Laws of Form. Allen & Unwin, 1969.
Waldschmidt, Anne, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ingwersen, editors. Culture—­
Theory—­ Disability: Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies.
Transcript, 2017.
Part II
The Matter of Meaning
Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics
Collaboration, Disability, and Clairvoyance

Patrick Durgin

I wanted to create the feeling that people all over the world were
doing a related thing at a related time, although they would be doing
it individually, without an audience and without knowledge of what
others were doing. It is an act of faith. We have unknown
collaborators.
—­Hannah Weiner, “World Works” (1970)

Hannah Weiner (1928–­1997) was an artist and poet whose best-­known work
was conditioned by and often directly about her experience of schizophre-
nia, or, as she put it, “clairvoyance,” which manifests mainly as hallucinated
or “seen words.” This essay is about her collaborations, which I read as “en-
counters.” Gilles Deleuze developed a theory of such encounters as “a tech-
nique of contriving, and yet improvising each detail. The opposite of a pla-
giarist, but also the opposite of a master.” He claimed that a collaborator
could be virtual or actual: “Having a bag into which I put everything I en-
counter, provided that I am also put in a bag” (Deleuze and Parnet 6–­8). As
a historian of philosophy whose most important articulations of his own
philosophy were written in collaboration, he had experience with both. As
did Weiner. In reading these encounters, I shall make claims about ways in
which disability studies can gain from new materialism, and develop an un-
derstanding of new materialism informed by the concept of transversality.
However, in pairing the Deleuze-­Guattarian backstory of new materialist
theory with Weiner’s practice of experimental collaborative writing, I shall
not claim a transparent correspondence. I rather wish to elucidate the ob-
scurities involved, as essential features of Weiner’s self-­diagnosis. We cannot

89
90 | The Matter of Disability

expect to see Deleuze and Guattari’s version of the experience of schizo-

phrenia in her claims to clairvoyance because schizophrenia is for them a
product of the systemic concealment of experience itself, by a normative
“order of reasons” lodged like a command within subjectivity. We will see
how Weiner’s efforts to reveal and share her experience illustrate the dilem-
mas to which “schizoanalysis” responds.
Neurodiversity is increasingly, if often elliptically, evoked in both criti-
cal surveys and specific arguments currently defining posthumanist neo-
materialism. Steven Shaviro and Erin Manning point to autistic phenom-
enality, Manning to theorize Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of
minority-­becoming as an aesthetic practice, and Shaviro to argue that
only the aesthetic can operate in a milieu “unfit for cognition” (Shaviro
131–­33). For these writers, neurodiversity exemplifies the becomings of the
body as the sort of pure immanence first explored in schizoanalysis, a cri-
tique built on a theory of transversality. Object-­oriented ontologists like
Graham Harman critique such “relational metaphysics” by treating “rela-
tions adequately as new compound objects,” Harman’s objection to trans-
versal theories of matter being that “pure immanence cannot account for
change, and therefore lead[ing] to the notion that what is currently ex-
pressed in the world is all the world has to offer” (17, 33). In “Systems and
Things,” Jane Bennett shows how Harman still relies on a theory of rela-
tionality, “locat[ing] activity in the relationships themselves” (230). War-
ren Neidich, meanwhile, develops a notion of “neuropower” to extend the
critique of biopower as a detrimental imbalance between “machine intel-
ligence” and sites of “decisions . . . made for an active body projected into
the future” through emancipatory contingencies of avant-­garde artistic
practice (136). I wish to inform and extend these debates by reading Wein-
er’s clairvoyant collaborations as a nonnormative, positive form of social-
ity, though in all of her work she focused on the social mechanisms influ-
encing the distinctions made between looking and reading, and for this
and other reasons long associated with Language poets, her work was re-
moved from the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry when
the second edition appeared. Just as the consistency and richness of such
a project is vouchsafed to posterity, her purposiveness and continuity
must qualify the single best-­known “fact” about her: that she was schizo-
phrenic. This I will do to render that social fact a “critical concept that
reveals the structure of dependence inherent to all human societies”
(Siebers, unpaginated). In an inventory of the New York poetry and “hap-
penings” scene of the 1960s, Fluxus composer Philip Corner suggests that
Weiner’s primarily linguistic relationship to her body provided the
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  91

groundwork for Yvonne Rainer’s early work (Bergé). Yet her goal, in her
own words, was to “show the mind” by securing “a detail watch over [her]
body” (The Fast 36). Weiner presents clairvoyance as an impairment as
much as a mode of access. Disruptive neuroactive forces bear upon dex-
terity and mobility, while triggering heightened sensitivity to otherwise
materially withheld aspects of life, and experience is the nexus of these
mutually ramifying series of events. That clairvoyance is an exclusive,
though not individual, capacity allows her to portray it as a kind of visual-
ity without perpetuating ocularcentric assumptions, for instance, that
what you mean should be apparent to me. This does not preclude our suc-
cessful interdependence, however. Instead, it affirms it in and as differ-
ence. Insofar as her methods evoke the recently revived problem of the
status of embodied experience in speculative realist strains such as new
materialism and object-­oriented ontology, as well as critiques of “bio-
power” and neurotypicality in disability studies, I want to recall the Deleu-
zian backstory in this regard.

I.

Although notorious, the Deleuze-­Guattari method of schizoanalysis, de-

veloped in Anti-­Oedipus (1972), is poorly understood without the concep-
tual term “transversality,” developed in the clinical practice Guattari un-
dertook in the field of institutional psychotherapy. And without some
understanding of transversality, the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s
work to disability studies remains obscure. Schizoanalysis is the term De-
leuze and Guattari gave to a critical method aimed at the obscure yet effec-
tive collusion of psychoanalysis with capitalism. They described it as a
quality of attention to the mechanics of society rather than interpretative
dynamics of an individual, famously claiming that if you want to know
how a system works, look at where it breaks down.
As Guattari scholar Gary Genosko puts it, transversality entails “inter-
subjectivity” insofar as it is “engaged by non-­subjective arrangements,
extra-­human and non-­organic components not necessarily available for
interpretation” (48). Guattari realized that psychiatric institutions (and
psychiatry itself) required the persistence of psychological illness, and this
reinforced the hierarchy descending from doctors to staff to patients, even
at La Borde, the rural clinic and residence Guattari and Jean Oury di-
rected for most of their careers. This hierarchy, reinforced at the climax of
the talking cure by the moment of “transference,” systematized and re-
92 | The Matter of Disability

hearsed the relation of punishment to a lack that Freud described as the

Oedipus complex. So Guattari worked out a “grid” to reattribute and con-
stantly shift the tasks of everyone at the clinic, from the janitor to the ex-
ecutive director, to the patients themselves.
These aren’t reversals, but transversals in that the shifts don’t turn
things on their heads, merely playing the same hierarchy upside down.
Transversal relations have the benefit of disclosing habits as symptoms of
a larger, malignant order, a “group fantasy,” as Guattari called it, that was
historically determined rather than led by the economy of desires struc-
turing denizens’ lives. The concept contrasts against the articulatory prac-
tice of diagnosis, a minimal obligation of Guattari’s profession. Diagnosis
affects “incorporeal transformations,” those permutations of bodies by
civic discourse, by the “order word,” marking the body as lawfully wedded
to another, as criminal, as educated, and so on. When a language is ab-
sorbed, a whole “order of reasons” is inherited and is forever redundantly
announced in the disguise of thought or expression (A Thousand Plateaus
86–­88, 170). The grid is meant to open the psyche to its outside and make
power responsible to multiple subjective configurations, forces, and ob-
jects (the institution itself, ultimately). Neither an act of metaphoric sub-
stitution nor a performative reversal—­ much less a transgressive
appropriation—­transversality is a conceptual alternative to oppositions of
all kinds. Deleuze and Guattari even say transversality is a new “image of
thought” (What Is Philosophy? 37).
Contemporary writer and artist Emily Roysdon makes the point that
“those of us who [do] identity politics . . . [want] them to be unstable and
intersectional categories. But they’re not used that way against us” (272).
Deleuze would say, “We said the same thing about becomings: it is not one
term that encounters the other, but each encounters the other, a single
becoming [is] something between the two, outside the two, and which
flows in another direction” (Deleuze and Parnet 6–­7). A direction that is
neither nor both is transversal. The opening lines of A Thousand Plateaus
put it another way: “The two of us wrote Anti-­Oedipus together. Since each
of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. . . . We are no longer
ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multi-
plied” (3). The connective tissue between these two volumes of their Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia series thus extends their notion of schizoanaly-
sis, but it is also the point at which the “schizo” trope is dropped (the term
being used only a small handful of times in the second book) in favor of
less controversial tropes. Yet part of the problem in deriving useful models
from Deleuze and Guattari remains the way specific disciplinary differ-
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  93

ences between their contributions are obscured when projected onto a

more capacious tropic of “rhizomatic” difference. Another part of the
same problem is simply the perpetuation of these tropics.
Which brings me to another problem: the love/hate relationship that
disability studies seems to have with Deleuze-­Guattarian thought.1 One of
the best-­known critiques of schizoanalysis in disability studies is Cathe-
rine Prendergast’s participant-­observer-­style work “The Unexceptional
Schizophrenic,” wherein she entertains a comparative reading of Deleuze
and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and a passage from Avital Ronell’s The
Telephone Book, then with a passage in a letter from Barbara, “a friend
who’d been diagnosed and institutionalized as schizophrenic” (56). I say
entertains because Barbara and Catherine together decided not to offer
the comparison for the risk of reifying medical and legal dictates, that is to
avoid “selective appropriation” (56). The upshot, according to Prender-
gast, is that “to be disabled mentally is to be disabled rhetorically. [Barba-
ra’s] definition of disability she has phrased at times as ‘a life denied sig-
nificance’” (57). Prendergast marks the closing of a rhetorical “distance”
posited by minority “identity work” with “an increasingly public citizenry
of schizophrenics who  .  .  . claim the right to unexceptional instability,
which is not something postmodern theory has readily granted them” by
“metaphorizing schizophrenia” and thus taking “rhetorical ownership” of
it, rendering their own figures of liberation from the cogito a cliché (57).
Yet for Deleuze and Guattari, the “schizo” is by no means visible, cut off
from reality, or “subsumed by the rhizome.” All of Prendergast’s assump-
tions regarding their work are uninformed in this regard.
First, she misreads Deleuze and Guattari’s line, “We have never seen [a
schizophrenic]” (Anti-­Oedipus 380). Guattari, whom she barely acknowl-
edges lived with and cared for schizophrenic patients daily, elsewhere
clarified the matter: “Within the framework of repressive hospitalization,
you don’t have access to schizophrenia. You have access to mental patients
locked in a system that prevents them from expressing the very essence of
madness. They express only a reaction to the repression to which they are
subjected, which they are forced to endure” (Deleuze and Guattari, “Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia” 234). Deleuze adds that under this systemic
duress, one is “without any epistemological guarantee, [and so] sticks
closely to reality and this reality causes him to move . . . [so if] people in
the human sciences and in politics should, in a sense, go a little schizo,”
this would not mean “embrac[ing] that illusory image which the schizo-
phrenic gives us when he is trapped in repression” (236). He is describing
the illusory image Prendergast traces, inexplicably, back to Deleuze and
94 | The Matter of Disability

Guattari, rather than the system they were fighting from within. “I hear
the objection,” Deleuze writes elsewhere,

with your puny sympathy you make use of lunatics, you sing the
praises of madness, then you drop them, you only go so far. . . . This
is not true. We are trying to extract from love all possession, all
identification to become capable of loving. We are trying to extract
from madness the life which it contains, while hating the lunatics
who constantly kill life. (Deleuze and Parnet 53, 66)

So far from rhetorical ownership, in fact the schizoanalytic project is an

attack on ableists, eugenicists, and lobotomists—­not to mention bour-
geois psychotherapists. “No one has the right,” said Deleuze, “to deride or
treat with flippancy the fact that the tearing open, the breach [or schism,
schiz] slips into or coincides with a kind of collapse. This danger,” he
warns, “must be considered fundamental” (Deleuze and Guattari, “Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia” 240). Because it comes “at what price? The
price of a collapse that must be qualified as schizophrenic. The break-
through and the breakdown are two different moments. It would be irre-
sponsible to turn a blind eye to the danger” (240).2 And although Deleuze
suggests that despite the unknown cost, the risk is “worth it,” Guattari re-
sponds by calling the potential gain a sort of articulation normally denied
to madness. “The practice of institutional psychotherapy” aim[s] to place
“the schizophrenic . . . in a ‘clairvoyant’ situation with respect to those in-
dividuals who, crystallized in their logic, in their syntax, in their own in-
terests, are absolutely blind” (241).
There is neither claim to ownership nor romanticization here. And
though Deleuze will quip that “real and pretend schizophrenics are giving
me such a hard time that I’m starting to see the attractions of paranoia”
(Negotiations 3), the important thing here is acknowledging that transver-
sality of the “real and [the] pretend” is an a priori condition of rhetorical
power, rather than an abuse of it. “Transversal relations . . . ensure that any
effects produced in some particular way . . . can always be produced by
other means. . . . Who’s to say I can’t talk about medicine unless I’m a doc-
tor, if I talk about it like a dog? . . . why shouldn’t I invent some way, how-
ever fantastic and contrived, of talking about something, without some-
one having to ask whether I’m qualified to talk like that? . . . Arguments
from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.
My favorite sentence in Anti-­Oedipus is: ‘No, we’ve never seen a schizo-
phrenic’” Negotiations 11–­12).3
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  95

Guattari wrote the first drafts of what became Anti-­Oedipus while first
working on alternatives to the “bi-­univocalizing psychic causality” of psy-
choanalysis:

If you immerse schizos full time in the police-­like environment

produced by nurses and hospital institutions, you end up, obvi-
ously, with the kind of description of schizophrenia that we are
very accustomed to. . . . At La Borde . . . you have the production
of some group drive—­ group Eros. But for a singular—­
transversalized—­group. . . . The point is not to put the schizo can-
didate back into his body, but to produce an other subjectivity.
(Anti-­Œdipus Papers 145)

Deleuze scholar Aidan Tynan points out that, for his part, “Deleuze re-
gretted” the perception that they had “idealize[d] the schizophrenic,” “in-
sisting that he and Guattari ‘never stopped opposing the schizophrenic
process to the repressive hospital type’” when what they set out to do was
to “distinguish schizophrenia as a pathological product from schizophre-
nia as a nonpathological process” (51). Tynan emphasizes how reversible
the terms really are, hence the need for an alternate logic, when the going
routines “end up being unable to present the history of desire except as the
reproduction of the social or else as a pathology that refers us back to in-
fantile revolts against socialization” (55). Every dichotomy devolves upon
and restricts “the schizo candidate,” who can’t win because, basically, they
are not a subject at all, but an ideal object. In Angela Woods’s mercifully
even-­handed reading of Anti-­Oedipus, she calls the “hospital type  .  .  .
product” of psychoanalysis “the interruption of schizophrenia-­as-­process;
the outcome of trying and failing to break through social and psychic re-
pression” (149). Woods elucidates the distinction Deleuze and Guattari
develop between categories of paranoia, schizophrenia, and “schizo.” The
last of these is the equivalent of self-­determination, creative becoming,
and the “immediate” connection to “the political” that they will later claim
to characterize minority identity (Kafka). In Woods’s account, “‘the
schizophrenic’ is ‘the schizo’ who has been re-­absorbed or trapped in the
capitalist system” (149). At the same time, she questions whether their ex-
treme “micro-­politics” doesn’t necessarily hinder “collective and individ-
ual political action,” since it is left to the singularity of unmediated and
ultimately inscrutable madness to “reconstitute social, psychic, and orga-
nizational boundaries” (149).4
Like Woods, Ronald Bogue questions Deleuze-­Guattari models of in-
96 | The Matter of Disability

tersubjectivity for their ability to foster “collective political action” (98).

But unlike Woods, Bogue surveys the philosophical precedents of these
tropes (102–­3). Among the most important elucidations Bogue offers con-
cerns the trope of “molecular” politics, typically opposed to the “molar”
movement of a majority language, science, or geographical organization
(the “nomadic war-­machine” versus the “sedentary state”). Bogue explains
that the distinction is not “about actual physical scale but about qualita-
tively different processes that take place at all levels of social interaction,”
and that the term “molecular” modifies political becomings as “decen-
tered, multivalent” (103). This is a remnant of Georges Canguilhem’s oft-­
cited theory of the Normal and the Pathological: “There is no such thing as
abnormal, if by the term we mean merely the absence of a previous posi-
tive condition or state” (110). Every pathological state “has its norms,” and
so, as molar politics represent and reinforce these by definition and dem-
onstration, the normal state of affairs is as “pathological” as the biological
object is elastic, degenerative, creative, always in “sympathy . . . with” oth-
ers (110, 109).
Deleuze and Guattari, then, not only critique psychoanalytic institu-
tions on the level of precepts and methods, but critique capitalism for its
complicity with the outer reaches of psychiatric practice, its most “sub-
lime” (to use Woods’s term) objects. But they don’t stop there. One neces-
sary result of transversality is a way to approach seemingly inscrutable
aesthetic procedures, poetics or ways of making that are relatively imper-
ceptible because they follow a milieu logic that won’t respond to our habits
of attribution: attribution of skill, craft, invention, and style. In their chap-
ter “The Transversality of New Materialism,” Rick Dolphijn and Iris van
der Tuin make some headway in this direction by showing how “new ma-
terialism is itself . . . a device or tool for opening up theory formation”
(100–­101). Dolphijn and Tuin argue that new materialism is properly
transversal only when it “emerges from a discipline” (101).
An exemplary effort of this kind is linguist Mel Y. Chen’s book Anima-
cies, which draws from disability studies and queer-­of-­color criticism, but
emerges from linguistics. Chen develops transversal concepts: “transob-
jectivity” and “transcorporeality” in the context of toxins and by analogy
with invisible disabilities like madness (200–­206). Chen writes an ontol-
ogy of “proximal relations” mediated by “how holistically you are inter-
preted and how dynamic you are perceived to be” (210). Yet she also wor-
ries that Deleuze and Guattari’s precedent is likely to devolve into “mere
metaphors” that obscure “a certain concrete reality” (206). Still, her proj-
ect remains to complicate such certainty. This is why and how “animacy”
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  97

means grammatical agency, critically, “purposefully suspend[ing]” the

materiality of “verbal particles” (7–­9, 206).5 When disability theory works
on issues of prosthesis, for example, it anticipates Chen’s recourse to iter-
ability in a mode that signals nonnormative positivism. Here we might
consider Vivian Sobchack’s critique of the “metaphorical (and, dare I say,
ethical) displacement of the prosthetic through a return to its premises in
live-­body experience” (18). A harsh critic of new materialism, Graham
Harman offers, as a figure for the displacement of disease onto diagnostic
regimes, “synecdoche,” a whole-­part relation of metonymic substitution
that expresses “symbiosis” rather than immanence (43, 50). For Sobchack,
in her account of using a prosthetic leg, there is both an “oppositional ten-
sion and a dynamic connection,” “a material but also a phenomenologi-
cally lived  .  .  . pragmatics” that governs these discursive practices. The
milieu, or “ensemble” logic of lived experience, she describes as “like the
turns and effects of language in use,” in other words contingent upon “the
nature of my engagements with others,” producing a “dynamic and situ-
ated but also ambiguous and graded” relationality (26–­27). A nonnorma-
tive positivism of madness would have to square iterative and positive
modes by, as Bradley Lewis has convincingly argued, “connect[ing] a rhe-
torical discussion of [the institution] with the literature on ‘models of
madness,’” something I have attempted elsewhere and will extend here
(107).6 Pathologies are treated as a site of “enhancement” rather than being
subjected to dualisms like “normality and pathology,” in a biopolitical
economy constantly buying and selling personhood on the marketplace
(Lewis 90). It is this reduction to the physical in tandem with psycho-
chemical alteration that demands a thoroughgoing aesthetics to offset the
phenomenological givens such market laws entail.
This is why seeking Weiner’s voice as an authoritative narrator of the
experience of schizophrenia would be a bit like disinterring Barbara’s
voice from Catherine Prendergast’s critique of metaphor—­both would
rely on metaphoric substitution. The theory of transversality lends con-
ceptual nuance to the act of substitution and allows us to reexamine ap-
propriation and transgressive appropriation alike, body/mind, relation/
object, the very binaries that the revival of materialism is now negotiating.
Countercultural reverse paradigms promise to overwhelm, overthrow,
and overcome. But, overturning’s turn was over by 1972—­the year of Anti-­
Oedipus and Unnatural Acts—­the first of the Weiner texts I will discuss
below—­so it is not enough to “deconstruct” these features of minoritarian,
critical theory formation. As early as 1964, Guattari presented “transver-
sality” as a question of appellation and rhetorical authority for a “political
98 | The Matter of Disability

group condemned by history” (16), which unfolds as a fraught, dramatic

collaboration with the material conditions of nominalization, every act
defying the nature of self-­expression, the nature of the medium, by finally
doing no more than staking a claim on the definition of the word.7 This act
of definition is not an act of substitution of signifiers nor a materialization
of the signified. And so we will not see Weiner’s minority experience
emerge in a Deleuze-­Guattarian fashion. Minority is that which cannot
take a state form, according to Deleuze and Guattari8—­just as we never
hear from Barbara, though in this case for a very different reason. Trans-
versality is less a bulwark against misidentification than it is an acknowl-
edgment of the generative potential of disidentification. Rather than “crip-
ping” poetics, these unnatural acts are, naturally enough, material
transversals.

II.

Elsewhere (Durgin 2006, 2009) I have argued that psychosocial disability

is the decisive factor when we talk about the body, an aboutness whose fis-
sures are lodged in questions of intentionality made only more obvious by
the case of Weiner’s clairvoyance. Clairvoyance is a trope with deep roots
in the myth of the mad genius of letters, yet with a singularly original and
influential potential to address questions of poetics. Clairvoyance is either
an extraordinary power gained through a struggle to overcome mental ill-
ness, or it is a poetic form, “clair style” writing (Durgin 2004, 2014). Either
way one tropes the phenomenon begs the question of language’s material-
ity. Like the burden and privilege of seeing words, clairvoyance mitigates
how one chooses to exert one’s will; it matters. Its conceptual purchase on
self-­determination is most vivid when obstructions present or capacities
withhold themselves. In Weiner’s case, this acute materiality of the signifier
appealed to and complicated Language poetry’s materialist project; Weiner
was long remembered primarily as a Language poet, but lately the ne-
glected affectivity of clairvoyance is being increasingly addressed. This shift
is in small part due to the renewed attention to her work caused by the
publication of Hannah Weiner’s Open House. Maria Damon’s review of that
book claims Weiner as “a spiritual ancestor—­a ‘page mother’—­of many
writers and aspiring creative women now, myself included, but there has
persisted a stigma or stain of craziness surrounding single women who are
creatively unorthodox, and in some ways underneath the admiration is a
kind of fear, as if she were a cautionary tale about disoriented-­because-­
unattached female vision-­creators” (unpaginated).
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  99

Fig. 1.  Clairvoyant Journal, 1974. Image courtesy of the Archive for New Poetry, Uni-
versity of California, San Diego.

After spending the greater part of the 1960s involved with experiments
in concrete, proprioceptive, and conceptualist writing, performance, and
intermedia art, Weiner became a regular at the St. Mark’s Church in the
Bowery, programmed by the new Poetry Project, meeting and impressing
important poets like John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Jackson Mac Low, and
Bernadette Mayer. From the mid-­1970s onward, Weiner referred to herself
100 | The Matter of Disability

as “clairvoyant” because she claimed to see words;9 and she is best known
for semiautobiographical works she also called “clairvoyant,” written in a
“clair-­style” that would capture the many voices (mostly seen but also
heard) in her mind or field of vision. Her best-­known work is entitled
Clairvoyant Journal, and it is prefaced as shown in figure 1.
In creating typescripts from her original notebooks, she would con-
tinue to see words and attempt to capture them on the page—­type them
into place—­and developed a format based on the options her typewriter
offered her: regular roman type for her “own,” nonseen voice, ALL CAPS
for seen words, and italics/underlines for the words of a third voice that
mediated between the other two during the typing process. The third
voice hectors her sometimes. Sometimes it is a voice of conscience. Often
it attempts to fill in for the gaps produced as new words arrived so rapidly
that a thought, phrase, or even a word had to be left as a fragment before
the next took over, as we will see shortly. Weiner understood by clairvoy-
ance as much an impairing disadvantage as a skill to be mastered. In trans-
forming the phenomenon of seeing words to her advantage, the advice of
Robert Creeley—­whom she met and heard speak at the Berkeley Poetry
Conference in 1965—­appears pivotal. She relays in a letter to Michael
Heller several “quotes” which are probably more paraphrases, from his
lecture there:

language as activity
engaged by the situation of your own needs
. . .
create your own environment
. . .
words have their own reality
everything is literal
activity as writing, not as writing can tell about it.
. . .
how shall we have that possibility of what we are (not a description)

The list can be read syllogistically, but then it ends with a paradox in that the
self and the “environment” are mutually referential and even mutually con-
stitutive of the “real” in the “literal” fact of “language.” Language offers itself
as material in two ways: iterative and positive. “Writing that can tell about”
things reiterates them in its capacity to possess its “own” thingness, its objec-
tive fact, which is none other than “activity.” Language might describe. But
then it could inscribe everything; Creeley’s example suggests it must.
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  101

The logic Creeley is using and the work he was already doing goes
like this: activity posits as it transposes itself in what we do with language:
“writing.” The inevitable motion and the motivating consciousness are
taken together to be the sole material “reality”—­in the virtual sense of
intension and the actual sense of extension. Here is transversality avant
la lettre: a new materialism of relationality that would present itself as so
many exceptions to collusion (hence the emphasis on “your own”), and
therefore as collaboration (hence the “possibility of what we are”). There
is a sense in which the polyvocality of clairvoyant writing depicts col-
laboration among “levels” of the mind, each with its “own” authorial “en-
vironment,” yet all under the sign of one proper name, “Hannah Weiner.”
The positive epistemological value implied by Weiner’s claim that these
ecstatic, hallucinatory textual conditions were a “power” of “awareness
and communication” (“Awareness and Communication”) permits her to
affirm the value of another lifeworld beyond the normate. For Weiner,
artistic collaboration was a non-­normative, positive form of sociality,
but an immanent position of discrepancy and difference rather than a
pageant of congruency. This is what Deleuze would call the “logic of
sensation,” according to which “sight discovers in itself a specific func-
tion of touch that is uniquely its own, distinct from its optical function”
(Bacon 125). I will critically contrast two such collaborations for the re-
mainder of this section.
Unnatural Acts was a short-­lived mimeograph magazine of collabora-
tive writing edited and published by Bernadette Mayer and Ed Friedman
between 1972 and 1973. Each issue gathered together poets involved with
the Poetry Project and students from Mayer’s ongoing workshops held
there. The second issue was written on November 11, 1972, by Joe Ceravalo,
Rosemary Ceravalo, Peggy de Coursey, Friedman, Yancy Gerber, John
Giorno, Kevin Kerr, Mayer, Ann Powell, Anne Waldman, and Hannah
Weiner. Friedman recalled that Unnatural Acts was intended “to compress
the collaboration process” and designed as “a present-­time document of
the writer’s mind while writing”; the eleven writers present for the second
issue wrote “in the same place for an extended time period [logged in
one-­, two-­, five-­, or ten-­minute increments in the magazine, as a running
tally between the texts]” (Kane 199). The process was narrated as taking
place in this manner by Friedman:

Everyone anonymously contributed a piece of writing, which some-

one else in the group used as the basis for composing a new work.
The “originals” were then discarded and the afternoon proceeded
102 | The Matter of Disability

with everyone continuing to write works inspired by the rework-

ings of reworkings of reworkings. (Kane 199)

Friedman’s scare quotes around originals signal the ambition to challenge

“the conventional view of writing as expression naturally unique to a soli-
tary individual,” and to “undermine normative and essentialist assump-
tions about what made a writer a writer and about what it meant to ‘own’
one’s own writing” (200). These are literary historian Daniel Kane’s
words—­and it should be appreciated that in assessing the results, Kane
also has recourse to scare quotes, not only because he concurs, nor neces-
sarily because the endeavor succeeds, but because the procedure sets up a
hall-­of-­mirrors effect whose cause is harder to specify. The editors’ logic in
staging the experiment and presenting its results is clarified by statements
on the cover of certain copies of the magazine. A “process” statement ex-
plains that each participant was to bring one “solid” piece of finished writ-
ing; these were placed in a stack and others would randomly pick one up
and rework or respond to it; these originals, the putatively “natural” origi-
nals, were then discarded; the responses then were responded to in like
fashion, saving only these proliferated, secondary documents, which were
compiled chronologically into the magazine. Another way they put it is
offered thus: “Whoever you are, that pushes me into the chaos of your own
invention.”
However, some copies of the magazine replaced these process statements
with photos of World War II soldiers trudging back from the front across a
barren battlefield, tanks in the distance, a clutch of captured enemy soldiers
with their hands upon their heads looking off at their captors out of frame.
And on the back cover is a wraparound shot of ecstatic civilians waving
from a roped-­off sidewalk, presumably to a parade, with the caption, “The
liberation of Paris was the most unforgettable day in the world.” The images
of defeat, desolation, liberation, and euphoria link Unnatural Acts to a lin-
eage of high-­modernist, avant-­garde collaboration, especially the technique
of “exquisite corpse,” reading the substitution of the images for an editorial
statement as the New York school’s liberation of surrealism from the dustbin
of history. Unlike in a collaboration whose authors are clearly attributed,10
Unnatural Acts’ deliberately organized version of partial anonymity grants
participants semi-­omniscience. In an exquisite corpse, no one knows what
everyone is in on. The work is paradoxically overdetermined and under-
mined, like the writing in Unnatural Acts.
Recently I had the opportunity to ask Mayer about Unnatural Acts. I
posited that, since the voices in Weiner’s visual field had very recently ar-
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  103

rived to complicate her compositional methods, she was already negotiat-

ing the terrain of the “writer’s mind” naturally enough before coming to
the church to write that day. I asked if that wouldn’t complicate Mayer’s
editorial procedure somehow. And Mayer replied that Weiner was unusu-
ally receptive to it among her cohort, that collaboration was “still a very
unpopular idea,” although “Hannah liked it.” You asked her along, I re-
sponded. Isn’t she collaborating already, whether or not she’s with others
when she does it? Mayer replied, “Things for Hannah were so complicated
already, that could never have complicated things further.” In September
of that year, she began writing Pictures and Early Words, a journal chroni-
cling her attempt to understand, control, and record in a literary form
what she called her “unfriendly spirits.” Rhys Chatham, a close friend in
these years, says he found the presence of these spirits “perfectly natural”
given the experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, intermedia, impro-
visation, and other new art forms in their milieu. “Being with Hannah,” he
says, “was to be with these words.”
Unnatural Acts number 2 ends up a mess of threads. Some of the con-
versations are contentiously gendered—­vague accusations of phallic over-
reach and claims of superior perspectives due to “an estrogen effect” suf-
fuse the text. The ostensible “impoverishment” of the project is personified
by “the detached and distracted beautiful woman” who is then pitted
against a “true metaphysical bridge” that is righteously owned by an “I”
with a “personal vision,” conditioned by the claim, “I’ve always felt dis-
tracted, always felt detached / from the true devil, the true child, the true
vision” (unpaginated, timestamp 235). This cannot then be, in the logic of
this passage, “a mistake, not / an unnatural act.” Crawling across the previ-
ous five minutes are several mentions of “colors cover[ing] the surface,
spreading in widening,” very much like the phenomena recounted in
Weiner’s “own” coterminous writing project (230). And this astonishing
passage, written in faux-­Girono “repetition style” (Kane 200):

People
are allowed
People are allowed
to break
down
to break down
People are allowed to break down;
they’re not
allowed
104 | The Matter of Disability

they’re not allowed

to put
themselves
to put themselves
back
together
back together
they’re not allowed
to put themselves back together
(234)

At 315, a thread begins that becomes characteristic of the whole by re-

sisting absorption into it. Anonymity, narcissism, the opacity of the me-
dium to accurately record the mind’s wanderings, the failure to wander
and will to focus—­as though, as will happen at a party, several private
conversations in tandem make up a generalized murmur—­identity in the
sense Gertrude Stein gave it (she is quoted twice near the end of the mag-
azine), as what others can know about you, that is, what a dog acknowl-
edges in its master. In short, Unnatural Acts 2 rejects the rational correla-
tive of subjectivity that is authorship, but it reclaims it in the name of
self-­determination rather than relinquishing it in a quest for radical com-
munity.

Does it bother you

yes you
that to be late like Anne
is not a transformation of reality
at all . . .
and Narcissus has nothing on any of us
when it comes to transformations of reality

Twelve minutes later: “Yes, it bothers me,”

Narcissus binds us
to our complete footprint.
And that soon
in the form of different spaces
I will not be able
to record a single thing
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  105

So why do I insist on searching for Weiner here? Because it seems that

at this pivotal moment in the development of clair-­style writing, her con-
tributions should stand out as the most appropriate and that, as such, they
should also fade indiscernibly into the group mind who is that putative
“act[or].” Perhaps she is in the above passage expressing doubt in her abil-
ity to replicate an unnatural act on her own. Perhaps I’ve found her here,
describing the flashes of light, the words, the bed she replaced in Pictures
and Early Words (the bedding, too, needed refreshing):

The moment
I was freed by light
I remember
the moment I was freed by light
Many words are moving around
in my bed
I remember many words in my bed
Many words were freed by light
Many lights are moving
in my bed (340)

The repetition is not atypical, but the coincidence of the imagery could be
merely that, if it is indeed a part of the game being played. As someone
(else?) writes five minutes later, picking up on the aforementioned “meta-
physical bridge,” “Temperament seeks confirmation, not bridges or stories
and where does that leave us. . . . Whether you identify this or not is the
measure of visions, which are never personal.” There is a consensus in dis-
sensus here, which is the balance required to effectuate an internal dia-
logue among eleven subjects, that any “objective occurrence in the field”
will result from “the predetermined plan” (346). Or is that Weiner holding
out hope, at 430, when we read

the measure of a vision is never personal

. . .

please don’t stop or give up

the powers are still before us

and we can speak them[?]

106 | The Matter of Disability

And again at 630, insisting that “if we can continue to struggle with the
absence of any order but our many, the own,” that “the secret poetry” they
“discover” will short-­circuit “the fascists” among us? And does the whole
change qualitatively when it changes in quantity? Otherwise, would it be
necessary to implore the others, even oneself, to adhere to the “plan”? It
must be both necessary to try and immaterial whether you succeed, if the
plan is “predetermined” and nothing else is. The very last text, written at
645, is a self-­contained lyric in a blues metric, the only section with its own
title, whose generic and prosodic formality makes it an oddity here. It also
seems to signal the lesson learned and the experiment, in a negative sort
of way, successful.

The Airport Blues

don’t go to the airport if you don’t want the airport blues

oh don’t go to the airport babe if you don’t want them airport blues
they’ll take you high up in the sky and feed you lotsa terrible foods

but before you get on they’ll search you high & low
yeah honey before you get on they’ll search you high and low
they’ll take away your camera and run their fingers through your
clothes

i think i’ll go take a train the next time i want to take a ride
i think i’ll take a train the next time the next time i want to take a ride
and leave my identity in the baggage car instead of way up in the sky

This lyric seems to depict the enforced milieu logic as not unnatural enough
but all too human. Transcending the ego is a private journey, a less ephem-
eral ambition, something best undertaken not by accretion and uplift but
by asceticism and tradition, traction rather than distraction. Or, put an-
other way, by knowing yourself by yourself, through the otherness that
introspection inevitably provides. Elaboration was all that was possible—­
“lotsa” invasive “search[ing]”—­by collaborating, as we say, in person.
Yet the sky is simple; there is only one. So when Ron Silliman uses the
plural “Skies” (1980–­81) as a proper name, and Weiner subsequently titles
her “reworkings” of this poem “Skies,” she renders literal what Silliman
presents as a figure, a grammatical figure. His title refers. Her title quotes.
Treating sky as a bounded expanse makes sense only by paying it intermit-
tent attention, the sky being a partitive object, and “sky” a mass noun.
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  107

What there is at any given moment is some sky. Demarcating its moments
is purely artificial, which is precisely the point. This is what Silliman’s
chapter of his epic poem The Alphabet does. “Every day for one year I
looked at the sky & noted what I saw,” he explains (1060). The result is a
long prose poem of “new sentence[s]”11 in four parts, one for each season.
As a topic fit for the juxtapositional, paratactic form of the new sen-
tence, “Skies” is suitably impersonal and indistinct. Part 1 begins, “The sky
is a grey plane tending toward white, without depth, without detail, barely
with light” (457). Surely not to be confused with just any sky, that particu-
lar sky is yet not at all a part. It is rather momentous, and it announces the
aesthetic logic of the whole, the spectral quality of skies. The sky and its
observer make do with the same paradox Weiner announced on the cover
of Code Poems: “When does it or you begin?” Sky is properly that which
keeps its distance, an uncertain critical distance.
Weiner published a sort of homage, response, or writing-­through of
“Skies” part 3 in the Ron Silliman issue of The Difficulties (1985) and a re-
vised version found in her archive appears in Hannah Weiner’s Open
House. I trust Weiner would appreciate the pun when I say that Silliman’s
title elevated the status of the common, mass noun “sky” to an improper
count noun “skies,” and then of course even higher, transforming it into a
proper noun. In reply, she elevated the status of collaboration by bringing
Silliman’s gaze down to earth, laying emphasis on the observer rather than
the “objective occurrence in the field.” This sky appears first under the aus-
pices of “Ron Silliman” (the man’s title and the magazine’s subtitle), and
second in revising the first, which removes any such attribute and is just,
finally, a poem by “Hannah Weiner.”
Comparing all three versions of “Skies” should begin with the frame-
work set out in The Difficulties’ version’s subtitle, which is written in clair-­
style’s third voice, the one playing a supervisory role. There is the proper
name in full and bibliographic reference to the proper name, THIS 11, the
magazine where Silliman’s poem first appeared. And then there is the di-
rective to “quote the page,” a phrase that could stand in for page numbers
upon which Silliman’s poem appears (i.e., cross-­reference) or as a signal to
the reader-­cum-­writer to report the text in whole or part, to carry it across,
translate it. Silliman’s poem is evidently appealing to Weiner for its own
emphasis on visuality. Like part 1, part 3 begins already involved with par-
tial transparence, and in a suitably pastoral mode.

Blood & glass: the sky is invisible (rain streaks windows already
distorted with age), only certain streets on the next hill can be seen
108 | The Matter of Disability

Fig. 2.  Poem by Hannah Weiner (“Skies”). Image courtesy of the Poetry Collection of
the University Libraries, University of Buffalo, the State University of New York.

(partly, barely, without color), I want to describe description, what

is always already there (sound, light, weather), an umbrella opens
the way some flowers bloom (metonymy is the problem of choice),
rain is also a sound. (468–­69)

The Open House version of the poem begins, “plurals describe multisquar-
relavoided brothertwo time he can / imagine this describes show his mis-
takes even smyname know” (97). In Difficulties, “mistakes” reads “errors,”
so Weiner softens the connotation from one of strictly fallacious logic to
one of miscreant views or, in a cinematic sense, different takes. This is one
way of teaching: interpolating comments and corrections. Both feature
the line, “made two comments whistfully OPEN I a m s / t e a c h i n g.”
The run-­together phrase concretely and lexically insists on familiarity in
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  109

nonidentity; “multisquarrelavoided brothertwo” effectively pacifies the

differences between competing versions, “plurals,” the teacher assuming
the role of sis to (“two”) a “brother.” “The problem of choice” Silliman
contemplates by way of describing description, that is, of getting what he
“want[s]” from his viewpoint. This is necessarily complicated by what for
Silliman is a product of the imagination but for Weiner is an image repro-
duced: “mybythesee . . . I see my words” (Difficulties).
There are just two moments of seen words beyond the page, two all
capitals, “OPEN” and most significantly “MYME THATS A VERY REAL
COMMENT.” Note the pun on “mime” and on “mimesis” (my me “sis”).
Fidelity to said page of THIS 11 means “not obliged speaking on quote the
page thethis Hannah, any carrots ‘Babytears & carrots’” (Difficulties). In
reported speech, direct quotes, the reporter is not obliged to mean what he
says, only to say it exactly as someone else meant it to be heard. That’s a
real obligation fulfilled, an actually cited passage that, in Silliman’s poem,
indicates where one day ends and another begins. The structure is a hinge
between skies. “Blood & glass:” and next “Muscle & Blood” and then
“Root & muscle,” and so on, the colon suggesting that each day is defini-
tive but also consequential. Another system or metric Silliman uses is the
parenthesis. For Silliman, these are spaces apt for clarification and com-
mentary or directives, a space Weiner’s underlines occupy. We’ve already
seen that desire—­“want” and “choice”—­are under surveillance there. And
as the days go by, the plot thickens: “(the definition of light)”; “(I prefer the
prepositional form of possession’s discreteness, adjectives are not aspects
(but projections))”; “(half-­blinded by my own breath which blows back
into my face), no such thing as eyes’ perfection (placement in the sky will
differ)”; “(I am not interested in description, but detail, transition, all the
nameless, half-­known tones reducible to blue)”; “(restricted vocabulary,
limitless world)”; “skies is eyes (words are)”; “under grey cloud (dimen-
sionless smear)” (469, 474, 475, 477).
There are many others, but these illustrate the motivation behind the
poem developing by the technique of embedding, grafting, and coinci-
dence, all of which are key to Weiner’s fixation on it. Weiner’s desire rela-
tive to vision (“eyes (words”) is reactive until clair-­style is mastered. SEEN
WORDS impose hermeneutic difficulties that depend on the “dimension-
less smear” between image and imagination: “projections.” Is it me? Or the
spirit? Are the words replying or implying? And what are they supplying,
useful information? The difficulty is reducible to telling the difference and
then representing that difference on the page, exactly, between interiority
and exteriority, subject and object. Introspection and extroversion must
110 | The Matter of Disability

be fused without becoming confused. And when this is taken up through

collaboration, the problem is lent a specifically psychosocial dimension.
Can collaboration occur without collaborators being entirely aware that
they are “teaching” each other, revising what each beholds in the other?
Can they operate with one being out of frame?
One technique Weiner uses to address these questions is to render
names for “all the nameless, half-­known tones” that are “already there” in
the field of vision, whether these are categorical (weather), sensible (vi-
sual, audible), or intelligible (“vocabulary”). Silliman’s interest in relation-
ships, prepositions over qualifiers, gives a signal of permission to revise.
Where Weiner sees her own words as “mistakes” of quotable obligation,
Silliman is half-­blinded by the immediate report of his speech (blowback);
the “perfection” imputed by possession, the authorial propriety here, is
relative to “placement in the skull” (the eyes, of course, but also the dis-
cerning mind and buried brain). If the problem of “Skies” is participatory
at the outset—­alignment of the faculties of vision—­Weiner’s further par-
ticipation precipitates from the positive difference of revision: “placement
in the skull will differ.” The problem remains “reducible to blue” (adjecti-
val) on one level—­across the sentences or between them—­hinging one
day to the next in common. But it is proper to the distinction, if there is
one, between introspection and extroversion. In Silliman’s poem, the
problem can be expressed by the hinges alone—­what William Carlos Wil-
liams called “cleavage” and Ezra Pound called “ply o’er ply”—­say, “Con-
ceived & sought . . . Considered & conceived . . . Caught & considered . . .
Overturned & caught” (472). A dialectical listing, where every conse-
quence makes a precedent, every textual condition more circumstantial
evidence, “(restricted vocabulary [leads to] limitless world).” But it can
also be contained in any one sentence.

Caught & considered: for 15 seconds the candles’ flames in the (oth-
erwise) dark room flicker as I dropped my flannel shirt (how low is
the sky), outside newspapers in the rain dissolve into mush (in the
morning the canary shrills pleasure to the cleansed world), the
roses in their vase so slowly open. (472)

What constitutes “sky” in this interior “take” is strategically confused with

various strata of the mind’s eye, topped with an image of ink washed right
off the reflective surface of the page.
Weiner’s variations of Silliman’s poem constitute multiples. She nei-
ther erases nor compounds material. It is not a dialectical effulgence.
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  111

How could it be? Silliman’s poem is her field of vision. To quote is al-
ready to taste one’s own breath as though it were another’s; one is obliged
to reiterate. But it is always in excess of that obligation insofar as the first
iteration (the “original” in Unnatural Acts 2 and Weiner’s namesake in
THIS 11) is deemed insufficient. It was thought necessary to revisit the
statement: “one line per winter day assaid quote and said,” she says in
The Difficulties. Look again at the subtitle. It is not one unless we read
the proper name “HANNAH WEINER” as the title. Hence “multis”;
Weiner’s prose always exhibits her tendency to pluralize the copula
rather than its atomized elements, as in “I ams psychic.” There is nothing
redundant in that move, placing a letter s on the end of “multi. “I see my
words except carrots quotes thats the seen orthodox / plurals describe
multis not describing circumstances and period.” When she later writes
another “SKIES,” she alters it to say “describe variable description  .  .  .
Hannah  .  .  . you notice the differences because you are entirely con-
scious” (Open House 97).
Yet Weiner’s reworkings are not exegetical. As a “silent teacher,” she
prefers encouragement to didacticism, silhouetting, limning, or outlining
to defining by “complete abstinence.” Consider this, from Silliman’s poem:

Carrots & crips: gull sweeps low over the damp grass, under gusts
of a winter fog (headlights on a schoolbus shine thru), jays in the
plum tree, hummingbirds in the bush, fog feels like rain. Babytears
& carrots: the next hill shimmers in the sudden heat, the buzz of
flies fills the yard, cats stretch sleepily on the porch (steam coils
from a coffee cup). Bougainvillea & babytears: fogdrifts limit dis-
tance (microscopic rain), the greens deepen (predawn clouds back-
lit by the moon), skies is eyes (words are). (475)

In this densely layered landscape, childlike wonder at obscured vision is

catalyzed curiosity, stoked by diminished views contained by definite
shapes. Young people can’t resist looking through a peephole and figur-
ing out the whole of what lies behind, summing it all up. An effective
teacher knows this. So Weiner marks the difference between the words
on the page she’s reading (a magazine, THIS 11) and the scenario she
writes to describe. One is seen in the mind’s eye—­“describe the events
we know wearethe children eating thecarrots for vitamin”—­but it takes
two, “multi” diacritical marks, quotes and underlines together, to mark
seeing what one reads. Reading normally occludes the sight of a word;
noticing the visual properties of letterforms only obstructs the activity
112 | The Matter of Disability

of reading.12 Of course, skies are transparencies blown into proportion

by such project(ion)s.
I have suggested that the relation between Weiner and Silliman is one
of collaborator, sibling, or headmaster to schoolmistress, rather than to
say one poem inspired the next. I have also been suggesting that the simi-
larity of each version mirrors the slippage between authority that inheres
in the lexical values of language per se (connotation, denotation, pun),
“plural are working in the field.” But this relation is not ultimately a dual-
ity, nor a dialectical triplet. We have a trio of poems, yes, but the relation
is transversal insofar as, in Weiner’s second reworking, “the sheet is clear /
but isn’t two words . . . baby carrots and unend like me separate” (98). The
unending likeness (“limitless world”) is equivalent to the interchangeabil-
ity of the proper name when approached with the milieu logic of the
“quote.” The “secret poetry” Unnatural Acts 2 meant to discover was foiled
by the discrepancy between enforced intimacy and voluntary physical
proximity. The solution with the “Skies” series is to collaborate remotely
and just beneath the actual awareness of the author(s). If in 1972 Weiner’s
collaborators felt trapped, a decade on it became impossible to cheat and
unnecessary to work the trap. The logic of reversal becomes a milieu logic
instead. This is apparent when we analogize two transformations. There is
first an elevation of count noun to mass noun, then an elevation to proper
name that retains the bounded extent of a count noun: “Skies.” The second
transformation is inherent in the use of collaborating authors’ proper
names, themselves juxtaposed with the title(s) “Skies.” The latter is the
result of the lesson in nominal transversality learned from the failure of
Unnatural Acts.
Pairing a critique of the discourses around transversality with an ex-
amination of radical poetic collaboration suggests that disability, as a crit-
ical category, might function less as a set of stable centers—­less by recog-
nition and inclusion—­than like a wandering line that revises what matters
by metastablizing identity and its investments, what I have earlier called
the generative potential of disidentification. This challenges some givens
of disability theory and disability aesthetics that rely on the assumption of
independent, individual agency—­especially conceptual agency or inten-
tion. We saw this challenge in Unnatural Acts versus the “Skies” poems.
We saw this in the airplane that contains versus the diffuse environs of
unaccountable skies. But we also saw this in Prendergast’s attempt to re-
code Deleuze and Guattari’s tropics as metaphor, as a known quantity, a
single tenor for a diverse set of vehicles under the rubric of rhetorical au-
thority. We also saw this in new materialism’s imputing of objecthood to
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  113

the master set of all subject matters you can name, on one hand, or the
“vibrant” or animating act of naming that which will not conform to any
signifier. What we saw, in short, is that collaboration is between but on
neither side of collaborators. It is not a matter of distinct and stable centers
of creativity coming to a consensus, no matter how surprising the result. It
is rather a question of the contingent force of categorization itself—­the
way matter and ideal impart to one another a contour that never resolves
itself into allegiance, celebration, or the backdoor patriotism of certain
poetics of witness, in Neil Marcus’s term, a “Disabled Country.” Deleuze
and Guattari’s famous Heraclitan image of the river picking up and send-
ing its banks flowing, incessantly setting the map’s legend wandering with
it, is an image of transversal poetics. And it is also an image of disability.
I have claimed that what Weiner called clairvoyance challenged self-­
determination because it challenged the construction of the self, and in
ways that resonate with the turn to objects and matter in critical theory as
well as the turn to interdependence and psychosocial elasticity in disabil-
ity studies. But collaboration takes this challenge a step further and dis-
closes what is perhaps ultimately at stake for critical theory that takes up
disability as an operative concept. As an artist with a disability, Weiner’s
efforts to fuse experience with formal innovation illustrate the dilemmas
to which transversality responds, which I hope to have shown are the very
dilemmas to which new materialist thought has responded, but in ways
disability studies might specifically inflect, to the benefit of all concerned.

NOTES

1. Performativity and iterability have been the most frequent theoretical platforms
for disability theory’s transdisciplinary efforts. Drawing from a strain that runs from
Jacques Derrida through Judith Butler and others, scholars such as Robert McRuer and
Ellen Samuels have explored intersections between disability, gender, and queer theory.
For Butler, matter itself is transformed through “repetition” and “resignification” such
that performances of gender offer a way “to work the trap that one is inevitably in” (83).
Deleuzian feminists like Claire Colebrook have questioned the limits of iterative mate-
rialism by theorizing a non-­normative positivism; “we need to look at the positivity of
each encounter. How do bodies establish relations in each case, and what powers are
opened (or closed) to further encounters and modifications?” (21). Deleuze and Guat-
tari were wary of working the trap; the encounter is designed as a way out—­“The point
is to get out” (A Thousand Plateaus 207). See also Kuppers and Overboe.
2. Ableist idioms are not uncommon in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, yet this and
the following instance equating ignorance with being “absolutely blind” can be strategi-
cally paired with Weiner’s sense that visuality is immanent to “the mind.” So I deliber-
ately leave these idioms in play to preface the close readings below.
114 | The Matter of Disability

3. Deleuze and Guattari would claim that a successful collaboration makes the re-
spective collaborators “imperceptible” from moment to moment, so that they may
thieve from one another and thus take their concepts further than they would go if they
had individual ego investments in them, enjoying the impunity and solidarity of
“bandit[s]” (Deleuze and Parnet 67). Moreover, biographer Francois Dosse depicts the
duo as in some respects disabled. Guattari suffered from what might be diagnosed as
chronic major depression, where Deleuze suffered from addiction to alcohol and a de-
generative lung disease. The former impairment he at times used to exemplify transver-
sal processes of “evaluation” (see A Thousand Plateaus 438–­39 as well as the “B for Boire”
chapter in Gilles Deleuze from A to Z).
4. Indeed, in his interviews with Claire Parnet, Deleuze was almost arrogantly dis-
missive of party politics and denied that revolutions concern outcomes, insisting that we
can only bring about a pragmatic attention to pure events, a kind of “jurisprudence” (“G
for Gauche,” Gilles Deleuze from A to Z). He calls proponents of “rights” and “justice”
“weak intellectuals.” The “professors” and “chiefs”—­those who police the disciplines and
the citizens—­are “organs” of a body politic that expressly—­following Antonin Artaud’s
phrase—­seeks to become a body without organs.
5. Timothy Morton, by contrast, has argued that the animacy, relationality of things
is merely a “statistical performance”—­“there are no particles as such, no Matter as such,
only discretely quantized objects” at the scale of electrons through to the hyperobjects of
ecological thought (183–­84).
6. Lewis proposes and performs a history and close reading of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual. In a previous essay on Weiner and psychosocial disability, I offer a
reading of the DSM (see Durgin 2008), but here I take him to mean the mandates and
other structures of the institution of psychiatry, and psychosocial models at large.
7. Peter Osborne’s recent and important Anywhere or Not at All posits that nominal-
ization of this kind is precisely the goal of “contemporary art” insofar as it is inherently,
historically, and necessarily “post-­conceptual art.”
8. See Sibertin-­Blanc 222–­66, but also Deleuze’s claim, in his preface to Dialogues II,
that all subjects are like “states of affairs” rather than like citizens of a state.
9. The first scholarly article devoted to Weiner’s work rightfully focused on the chal-
lenge put to readers in negotiating this incredible claim, and it remains an important
introduction to her work (see Goldman).
10. Weiner’s undated collaborative poem “Narrative,” written with Abigail Child
(probably in the early 1990s), was written one stanza at a time, the poets handing the
page back and forth, building downward, and published without attribution of the re-
spective stanzas. When editing her selected works, I discovered in Weiner’s papers a
typescript version with the authors’ initials beside the respective stanzas, indicating
some ambivalence on Weiner’s part about the issue of authorial identification. See Han-
nah Weiner’s Open House.
11. Silliman’s 1977 essay “The New Sentence” describes features of prose poetry he
had noticed in contemporary experimental writing, including an especially paratactic
relationship between sentences that shifted the logical balance of the writing to the in-
ternal grammar of each sentence, mirrored in the nonnormative sum of its parts, which
may be otherwise systematically cohesive.
12. This is the premise of Silliman’s influential essay of 1976, “Disappearance of the
Word, Appearance of the World,” collected in The New Sentence.
 Hannah Weiner’s Transversal Poetics  |  115

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Dis-­affection
Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies

Angela M. Smith

In the fall 2012 TV season, several pop-­culture sites declared a surprising

“Hottest Trend”: amputation. Tvline, Vulture, and the Hollywood Reporter
noted bodily appendages “flying off the screen” in shows such as American
Horror Story, The Walking Dead, Grey’s Anatomy, and Criminal Minds.1 In
foregrounding flying limbs, the articles and shows sensationalize disabil-
ity, using the shocking spectacle of amputation to generate horrified
thrills. But American Horror Story and The Walking Dead also offer view-
ers extended encounters with recurring amputee characters, as do other
recent televisual texts such as Nikita, Arrested Development, Sons of Anar-
chy, Game of Thrones, and Once Upon a Time. Amputee figures have also
garnered significant movie-­screen time lately, in films such as The Man
with the Iron Fists and sequel Snowpiercer, Men in Black 3, Iron Man 3, The
Amazing Spider-­Man, Battleship, Dolphin Tale 2, The Fault in Our Stars,
Mad Max: Fury Road, and Kingsman: The Secret Service.
In describing this phenomenon as a “trend”—­a turning, bending, or
drifting in a certain direction—­these articles suggest we turn toward and
are moved by amputee bodies. Consider responses to the story of six-­year-­
old Alex Pring, born without most of his right arm. In July 2014, Alex re-
ceived a prosthetic arm designed and built from 3D-­printed parts. The
Huffington Post ran an emotional article: “6-­Year-­Old Boy Hugs His Mom
for the First Time Ever, Thanks to a 3D-­Printed Arm.” Commented pros-
thesis engineer Albert Manero, “[Alex] said it was their first real hug.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the room” (Bologna). In March 2015, Alex was
back in a viral video where actor Robert Downey Jr. presented him with
an Iron Man–­themed prosthetic arm. Canadian website The Loop averred

118
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  119

that the video “melts everyone’s heart” (Miranda) and the Pedestrian Daily
advised, “You might want to grab the tissues and get ready to feel, because
this [video] has got ugly happy crying embedded in its code” (“Watch
Robert Downey Jr”).
The popularity of Alex’s story and video suggests we have an affection
for disability, in the sense of being emotionally drawn to it. To experience
certain affects, we repeatedly produce, disseminate, and consume images
or stories featuring disabled figures, whose nonnormative forms or func-
tions seem to explicitly register human vulnerability or affectability. (The
“we” used here indicates the primarily nondisabled audience presumed
and constructed by these representations; as I suggest below, disabled
viewers are likely to read these representations more critically.) “Affection”
can also mean a bodily condition or abnormality, so that visibly impaired
bodies seem especially to connote a state of affectedness and in turn pow-
erfully affect their viewers.2 Thus, the arrival of disability images on our
newsfeed subliminally instructs us: “Get ready to feel.” But Alex’s video
also suggests mainstream visual texts use disability in carefully coded and
delimited ways, to produce only certain kinds of feelings.
Focusing particularly on amputee representations, this chapter ex-
plores the idea that disability images generate potent affective experiences.
They often do so through acts of “disability drag” and special-­effects simu-
lations that support ableist assumptions about disabled bodies’ inferiority.
But the omnipresence of disabled figures also reveals a persistent desire
and affection for disability, an attraction toward disability encounters that
also opens unexpected spaces for disabled performers and their nonnor-
mative moves.

Ableist Affect / Disability Drag

Perhaps nothing so literally conjures for us the concept of embodied sus-

pension and material intractability as the cinematic spectacle of amputa-
tion: it depicts bodies profoundly affected, shows characters immersed in
physical and psychological transformation, and produces an intense, vis-
ceral viewer response. Brian Massumi describes “affect” as “a prepersonal
intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the
body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that
body’s capacity to act” (“Notes on the Translation” viii). Massumi notes
that “body” should be “taken in its broadest possible sense to include
‘mental’ or ideal bodies” (viii). But a key example in his book Parables of
120 | The Matter of Disability

the Virtual suggests the suspensive experience of affect is most viscerally

grasped via the material experience of bodily injury or disabling. Massumi
cites the moment in the 1942 film King’s Row when Ronald Reagan’s char-
acter, Drake, wakes to find both his legs have been amputated and cries
out in anguish, “Where’s the rest of me?” Writing about this moment in his
autobiography, Reagan recalled, “In some weird way, I felt something hor-
rible had happened to my body.  .  .  . I opened my eyes dazedly, looked
around, slowly let my gaze travel downward. I can’t describe even now my
feeling as I tried to reach for where my legs should be.  .  .  . I asked the
question—­the words that had been haunting me for so many weeks—­
‘Where’s the rest of me?’” (quoted in Massumi 52–­53).
Massumi suggests Reagan convincingly emotes a traumatized response
to impairment because he had experienced a series of actual blockages,
frustrations, and disablings: exhausting and unsatisfying rehearsals of his
line, inconclusive research into amputee experience, and subjection to a
rigged hospital bed that made Reagan feel his body really ended at his
torso (53–­55). Massumi contends that Reagan’s performance thus enters a
space of intense affect and dislocation: “He is in an in-­between space com-
posed of accumulated movements bled into one another and folding in
upon the body. . . . He is in the space of the duration of an ungraspable
event” (57). But while Reagan briefly loses himself in this abject becoming,
he later plots the instant of amputee affect as merely motivation toward
self-­completion. As suggested by Reagan’s title for his autobiography—­The
Rest of Me—­this momentary undoing propels him into politics, where he
recovers a whole and capable self (55).
Massumi’s narrative of Reagan’s simulated amputation illustrates how
enacted moments of disabling can generate intensely felt affect that co-
alesces into despairing emotions; these can only be offset by a narrative of
eventual uplift and overcoming. The choreographing of disabled bodies
thus draws together the affective and the corporeal to impart certain “felt
truths” about disability embodiment. Samantha Frost and Diana Coole
draw on Althusser to explain a “new materialist” conception of the ways
ideology emerges in everyday bodily practices:

[Althusser] . . . draws attention to the way “ideas” are inscribed in

actions whose repetitive, ritualized performances are borne by con-
crete individuals who are thereby practically constituted as compli-
ant or agentic subjects. While such performances are institutional-
ized in rituals and ceremonies, they also become sedimented at a
corporeal level, where they are repeated as habits or taken for
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  121

granted know-­how. . . . It is indeed this nonreflexive habituality and

the way it imbues objects with familiarity that makes artifacts, com-
modities, and practices seem so natural that they are not ques-
tioned. (34)

The simulated disabled figure on-­screen constitutes one such familiar ob-
ject, whose moves are constrained so as to generate seemingly “natural”
depressive viewer responses and confirm the “obviously” degraded nature
of the disability experience.
Accordingly, fiction films usually choreograph the traumatic aftermath
of amputation as the beginning of an inevitable decline: they explicitly
construe the amputee body in terms of abjection and horror and confine
amputee expression to despairing (e)motions perceived as degraded or
incompetent, such as falling, dragging, and crawling. A salient example
appears in the 1994 film Forrest Gump, where digital special effects turn
nonamputee Gary Sinise into bilateral lower-­limb amputee Lieutenant
Dan. The film confirms amputation as a degrading experience: after his
injury, Dan plunges into misery, castigating Forrest for saving his life and
disgustedly declaring himself “a helpless cripple, a legless freak!” The
movie intuits the recent amputee’s suspended state, as Dan asks Forrest
wildly, “What am I going to do now? What am I going to do now?” But it
maps Dan’s trajectory thereafter as an inevitable and unwilled descent.
When Forrest reencounters Dan years later, the latter’s diminishment is
signaled by bodily changes conventionally read in terms of failure or loss:
his ragged and unshaven appearance, his alcohol dependence, his wheel-
chair use. Dan loses control of his chair and goes careening down an icy
ramp, a comic manifestation of the incapable, angry cripple, affirming that
disabled bodies have trouble acting in purposive or accomplished ways.
In a scene confirming the amputee experience as inevitable decline,
Dan rages at two sex workers who have mocked Forrest as “stupid.” Yelling
at them to get out of his room, Dan gesticulates fiercely and accidentally
falls from his wheelchair. The women laugh and insult Dan, leaving him
lying, panting, on the floor. As Forrest moves to help, Dan resentfully
waves him off and slowly hauls himself back up into his chair. Disability
registers as incapacity to extend intense affect into normative emotional
expression: Dan’s effort to express righteous anger leads only to his hu-
miliating toppling from and painful reascent into a chair already depicted
as the inadequate and uncontrolled extension of a damaged body.
This production of amputee affect through despairing emotion, clumsy
falls, and dragging moves was more recently elaborated in the 2012 French
122 | The Matter of Disability

movie Rust and Bone, in which whale-­trainer Stéphanie, played by Marion

Cotillard, wakes to discover her lower legs have been amputated. A long
shot shows Stéphanie slowly regaining consciousness in her hospital bed,
in an antiseptic and coldly lit room. Pushing herself up on her hands, she
moves her leg and, confused, pulls aside the sheet to reveal amputated and
bandaged limbs. Panicking, she flails her arms and tries to get out of bed.
Steph’s friend Louise hurries down the hall and enters the room to find
Stéph crawling across the floor, trailing tubes and IV bags. Cradled by
Louise, Stéph wails, repeatedly, “What have you done with my legs?” her
upper body arcing with grief, her mouth open and gasping, tears on her
face, until she falls asleep, exhausted. Here we see the understandable
shock of utter and unwilled transformation, but such intense affective sus-
pension swiftly morphs into prescribed disabled moves of falling, drag-
ging, and despairing: failed efforts at sovereign action.
The dragging element of these affective moves is closely related to the
phenomenon of nondisabled actors playing disabled characters that Tobin
Siebers labels “disability drag.” When nondisabled actors take on such
roles, Siebers argues, “disability appears as a façade overlaying able-­
bodiedness.” Accordingly, disability drag “renders disability invisible be-
cause able-­bodied people substitute for people with disabilities similar to
white performers who put on blackface at minstrel shows or to straight
actors who play ‘fag’ to bad comic effect.”3 Such caricatured performance
of marginalized identities serves to affirm the dominant group’s superior-
ity, since disability drag signifies first and foremost “the acting abilities of
the [nondisabled] performer.” Further, as actors cast off their disability
costumes, they receive plaudits for brave descents into stigmatized forms;
as they move on to disabled roles, disability appears to be overcome (116).4
I argue the term “disability drag” is also apt for these performances
because “to drag” means “to draw with force, effort, or difficulty; pull
heavily or slowly along; haul.”5 Some etymological investigations of “drag”
as a term for men donning women’s clothes suggest it originates in this
material and physical experience, specifically “the unfamiliar sensation to
men of long skirts dragging on the ground” (Quinion 103). Disability drag,
then, requires able-­bodied actors to carry out unfamiliar motions in ways
that caricature and confirm disability embodiment as a drag and only a
drag: a depressing, oppressive emotional and physical experience. The
ubiquity of disability drag excludes disabled actors from the scene of their
own representation and forecloses on alternative performances and read-
ings of disabled moves: as functional, purposive, ordinary, pleasurable, or
even beautiful.
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  123

Disability drag thus simulates disabled bodies to affirm the pleasures of

normal embodiment. This dynamic also describes the affective trajectory of
many films featuring amputee characters. First plunging viewers into de-
spair at these ostensibly diminished and descending bodies, these movies
then counter their depressive affect by uplifting their amputee characters,
making them more “normal” in form and movement. Late in Forrest Gump,
as Dan arrives at Forrest’s wedding, the groom is delighted to see his old
friend has cleaned up, appearing in a neat pressed suit; cheered up, beaming
as he approaches Forrest and Jenny; hooked up, proudly introducing his
shyly smiling fiancée; and stood up, thanks to new legs of titanium alloy. In
Rust and Bone, Stéphanie, too, cheers up, hooks up, and stands up on pros-
thetic legs. Both films swiftly channel the affective suspension of disabling
into pain and sadness, before elevating both their characters’ bodies and
viewers’ emotions by enhancing and/or “curing” the amputees, correlating
happiness with upright stature and conventional walking motion. In care-
fully managing their affective outcomes, these movies, like the Alex Pring
video, have “ugly happy crying embedded in [their] code.”

Dis-­FX

Movies relying on disability drag often also depend on disability special-­

effects—­or what I am calling “dis-­FX”—­to convincingly pass off able ac-
tors as disabled characters. The amputee body has long been a figure
through which cinema parades its technical capacity. Before digital special
effects, amputee characters were still presented in disability drag: the illu-
sion of an amputee body was produced through costume, prostheses,
props, in-­camera effects, and the amputative act of cutting film. When
Siebers writes, “The more disabled the character, the greater the ability of
the actor,” we might also add “and of the special-­effects technician” (116).
Take, for instance, a 1904 French short film titled The Automobile Ac-
cident, described by F. A. Talbot in his 1912 book Moving Pictures: How
They Are Made and Worked. A drunken man falls asleep in the street. A
passing cab runs over and severs his legs, and the man awakens in shock.
But a doctor in the cab miraculously reattaches the legs, and the man
walks away. The film offers a condensed version of disability drag: it shows
the shockingly amputated body, immobilized on the ground, and the
magical cure that restores happiness via an upright body that moves “nor-
mally.” To uncover the trick, Talbot presents a behind-­the-­scenes photo
from the film as his book’s frontispiece.
Fig. 1.  The frontispiece to Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (1912),
showing the actor and the amputee stunt performer.
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  125

An able-­bodied actor and a stunt amputee actor, identically costumed,

sit on the ground next to each other, legs outstretched, while a man leans
over them from behind, instructing their performance. The men’s parallel
positions contrast the able-­bodied actor’s legs with those of the amputee,
whose upper legs are separated by a gap from a prop set of lower legs. The
photo indicates how filming stopped to switch out the original actor for
the amputee actor and prop legs, giving the illusion that the man’s limbs
had been severed. Another image in Talbot’s book shows the amputee ac-
tor lying on the ground as the able-­bodied actor stands over him; its cap-
tion reads, “The actor being replaced by the legless cripple with the dummy
legs” (210–­11). Filming was then stopped again to reverse the switch, pro-
ducing the apparent cure.
Talbot views this deception as a wonder of trick cinematography, proof
of the new film medium’s superiority over theater. Theatrical disappear-
ances involved clumsy trap doors, while filmic “stop and substitution,” he
marvels, reveals “not the slightest trace of movement” (213, 215). This
trickery erases the disabled performer, since, the amputee body did move,
in and out of its allocated position: Talbot writes, “At this juncture, the
producer stepped forward with the legless cripple mounted on his self-­
propelled wheeled truck” (212). By stopping recording, the film avoids
showing the amputee actor’s self-­propulsion, a “trace of movement” that
might undermine views of disability as something that only drags down
and immobilizes. The disabled body instead becomes a vehicle for exhibit-
ing film’s newfound capacity to cut up reality, to amputate and reassemble
bodies, to prostheticize reality. The Automobile Accident nonetheless needs
the amputee body, even as it is concealed and controlled: Talbot states,
“The legless cripple is, of course, key to the whole situation” (212).
Contemporary films instead rely on digital wizardry for their dis-­FX.
Forrest Gump, one of the first mainstream films to use extensive digital
effects, has its trickery explicated on the movie’s 2006 DVD, in a featured
interview with visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston. Just as Talbot ap-
plauds film’s transcendence of awkward theatrical illusions, Ralston ex-
plains how digital effects surpass older devices like costumes, props, stunt
actors, and editing. Digital cinema can produce an even more seamless
illusion of an amputee body without needing a real amputee at all. As
Ralston explains:

The Lieutenant Dan leg scenes—­we had to take off Gary Sinise’s legs.
The one thing that I wanted to do, because it would add so much to
the audience believing this had occurred, was to have him passing
Fig. 2.  Scene from Forrest Gump. (Top) Gary Sinise’s lower legs, wrapped in blue, cross
the space where the table will be composited into the image; (bottom), the final shot,
with Sinise’s legs erased.
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  127

through the physical space of tables or whatever it is, with the stumps
of his legs, where if it was a fake, and you had your legs sticking
straight out, like he really did in a lot of these shots, he would hit the
table, he wouldn’t be able to pass through it. . . . Now if we didn’t do
that, you could have almost believed that he had his legs tucked un-
der. . . . You told the audience you weren’t hiding anything.

Ralston dwells on the moment after Lieutenant Dan falls from his chair
when he swings his residual legs close to a small table, positioning himself
to push back up into the chair. The DVD feature shows Sinise’s lower legs
wrapped in blue tape, moving through empty space, and then displays a
computer screen on which the shot is digitally composited with another
shot that displays the table but no actors.
Comments Ralston:

I think the more successful shots there which telegraphs [sic] the
idea that his legs are cut off, is when he falls out of the wheelchair in
that desperate scene in that crummy apartment. . . . We took the
table out of the scene, and then he swings with his real legs going
right through where that table is and comes forward to the audi-
ence, right before he forces himself back up into the wheelchair.
And once we got that shot, we put the table back into the scene. We
shot what’s called a blank plate, basically, no actors are in it, and
then that table and that area is put back into the scene with Gary,
digitally, basically composited in there. So, then, the legs are painted
out, and it just takes a little bit more away from the artificial quality
of it. He could never have done that with real legs anywhere.

Ralston locates the success of the disability effect in its exploitation of ap-
parent spatial and temporal continuity, enabled by the digital “amputa-
tion” of Sinise’s lower legs.
The convincing spectacle of an able-­bodied actor apparently missing
his lower legs thus exemplifies and anticipates a world of exceptional
human and technological effectiveness. A feature on the Rust and Bone
DVD similarly flaunts digital mastery, alternating between a series of
pre-­production shots, with Cotillard’s lower legs in green stockings, and
post-­production shots, in which her lower legs have vanished. In repeat-
edly conjuring and erasing Cotillard’s legs, the feature positions the ef-
fects artist as a magician and the amputee body as a vehicle for potent
digital wizardry.
128 | The Matter of Disability

William Brown has argued that such digitally manipulated continuity

may be called “posthuman,” because it provides credible visions of things
yet to be realized and propels us into a future where we’ve overcome cur-
rent human limitations (71). Interviews with filmmakers about digital cin-
ema in the documentary Side by Side explicitly associate digital FX with
extending potency and control. Director Lana Wachowski states: “We’re
free of the old technology of capturing those images . . . [Digital] gives you
more control, more choice, more ways to access what you’re imagining in
your head.” Jonathan Fawkner, video effects supervisor, concurs: “Com-
puters will only get better. We’ll be able to produce anything you want,
realistically.” And Jim Jannard, founder of Red Digital Company, com-
ments, “To me, everything in the world can and will be made better, and
the only question is when and by whom.”
DVD extras explaining digital amputation thus aggrandize filmmak-
ers’ accomplishments in and through constructed disabled bodies. These
illusions erase amputee bodies and performers from the cinematic scene,
for disability drag requires the absence of “actually” nonnormative bodies
and their disabled moves, which might interfere with the choreography of
disability drag. Further, with no legs to delete, there would be no impres-
sive trickery, and it is the fact that these are tricks that helps offset depres-
sive disability affect, delighting and uplifting audiences with proof of hu-
man and technological capacities. As Kenny Fries comments in the
documentary Vital Signs, the Dan effect construes disability as “a trick,”
“an illusion,” unreal. Visual effects render disability insubstantial, over-
writing disabled realities with spectacles of technology’s increasing capac-
ity to improve human bodies.6
The effect of such effects is exclusionary: disabled actors struggle to get
hired, while audition spaces and studio sets remain difficult for many dis-
abled actors to access.7 More broadly, these illusions effectively erase dis-
ability from the world and our imagined futures, assuming disability as
undesirable and pursuing technological fixes for amputee bodies. Alison
Kafer identifies such representations as part of a “curative imaginary” (27),
one that perhaps explains today’s cultural admiration for amputee stars:
athletes, models, pop singers whose prostheticized bodies appear as em-
blems of beauty and ever-­greater ability for future humans.8
And yet disability simulations always risk error or failure. For instance,
astute viewers note that after Dan falls from his chair, Sinise uses his ap-
parently nonexistent lower legs to push—­rather than haul—­himself back
up; this lack of realism means the digital trick falls short of its stated pur-
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  129

Fig. 3.  Scene from Rust and Bone. Dis-­FX error: the shadow of Marion Cotillard’s
erased legs is visible on the sand beneath the wheelchair.

pose.9 Similarly, the IMDB “Goofs” page for Rust and Bone notes, “When
Ali first carries Stéphanie to swim in the sea, as he lifts her . . . the actress’s
real legs cast a shadow” (“Rust and Bone: Goofs”).10
Such mistakes call into question the presumed capacity of “able” bod-
ies: both the capacity of able-­bodied actors to conceive and perform ap-
propriate actions and the capacity of FX practitioners to control the me-
chanics of disability illusion. They also call into question the presumed
incapacity of disabled bodies, since an actor with bilateral leg amputations
could have performed the maneuver more aptly than Sinise. As Sharon L.
Snyder and David Mitchell note, the action is somewhat unrealistic, since
“the capacity to move one’s body from the floor to a wheelchair solely with
one’s arms involves the execution of a substantial feat of strength” (180).
Thus, Dan’s maneuver fails to correspond to the realities of disabled em-
bodiment, instead projecting both hyperbolic disability drag/falling and
supercrip accomplishment/ascent. If an amputee actor had been used, and
had required personal assistance or conducted more complex maneuver-
ing, those disabled moves may have interfered with the scene’s generation
of ableist affect.
These dis-­FX errors interrupt the vision of ever-­increasing human ca-
pacity, pointing to nondisabled filmmakers’ incapacity to imagine or pro-
duce an array of nonnormative moves. New materialist theories, Coole
130 | The Matter of Disability

and Frost note, contest visions of human-­directed progression toward

complete control, instead foregrounding dynamics of emergence, impro-
visation, and contingency. New materialists visualize human agency as
enmeshed in a network of forces generated by agential entities not usually
seen as such, including machines, animals, and animate and inanimate
matter. Within this schema, bodily encounters remain irreducible to so-
cial scripts, and “History emerges . . . as the continuous transformation of
provisional forms by new, indecipherable and unanticipated events” (35).
In the encounter among Sinise’s legs, wheelchair, gravity, floor, the movie
camera, and digital effects, the unanticipated reemergence of deleted
limbs fractures filmmakers’ claims to absolute control, and redirects the
affective and material responses usually dictated by the encounter with
simulated disability.

Dis-­affection

If these errors of amputee representation uncover the compromised

agency of the filmmakers and nondisabled actors, they also glimpse as
agential the movements of disabled bodies within their environment.
Coole and Frost identify a key aspect of “the new biomaterialism” as “the
role played by the body as a visceral protagonist within political encoun-
ters” (19); they suggest we should perceive “bodies exhibiting agentic ca-
pacities in the way they structure or stylize their perceptual milieu, where
they discover, organize, and respond to patterns that are corporeally sig-
nificant” (20). As a result of these errors in disability drag, such disabled
agency may become visible: viewers may contemplate how disabled moves
would differ, would demonstrate the disabled individual’s capacity to ne-
gotiate matter and gravity in a nonnormative body.
For the viewer, then, the able-­bodied mistakes in disability drag and
dis-­FX produce “dis-­affection,” a term I use to encompass an affection for
and desire to be affected by disability, a disorienting distancing from able-
ist affects, and an opening toward alternative disability affects. It is some-
what akin to the literary affect Ato Quayson has called “aesthetic nervous-
ness,” which arises from encounters between disabled and nondisabled
characters, moments inflected with “the embarrassment, fear, and confu-
sion that attend the disabled in their everyday reality.” In such moments,
Quayson argues, a text’s reductive uses of disability may falter, as “the dis-
ability representation is seen predominantly from the perspective of the
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  131

disabled rather than from the normative position of the nondisabled.” At

this instant, the text’s and reader’s ableist views of disability fracture (19).
Dis-­affection thus encompasses attraction, affection, and unsettling
affective reorientation: viewers are drawn to and affected by disability
simulation, but when they apprehend an error and can no longer sus-
pend disbelief, they experience fragmentation or blockage. This block-
age compares to that experienced by Reagan in performing disability: it
is an instant of affective suspension and disorientation that may morph
into Reagan’s defensive reclaiming of normalcy but may also open up
nonableist affective experiences. Quayson’s emphasis on the perspective
of the disabled person reminds us that disabled viewers must often in-
habit a state of dis-­affection, of distance and disbelief, as they watch
ableist misrepresentation of bodies supposedly like their own.11 But
such blockages, especially if recognized as encounters with or affected-
ness by “actually” disabled bodies, might also reorient nondisabled
viewers and their affective relations to disabled people. As Elizabeth
Christie and Geraldine Bloustien suggest, quoting Anna Hickey-­Moody,
“Media representations ‘have the potential to ‘reimagine  .  .  . disabled
bodies’ . . . in the respect that: ‘they can be used to fold a viewer into the
embodied subjectivity of a disabled person and create [a] new relation-
ship between disabled and non disabled people. New affects are made
this way’” (493).
An encounter with disabled performers, then, opens toward new af-
fects, allowing viewers to glimpse disabled moves as agential adaptations,
alternative ways of being and affecting. Such conceptions resonate with
disability scholars’ insistence that “it is easy to tell disabled people what
they are missing; much more difficult to listen to, and understand, what
they have” (Joseph Grigely); or that “movement is a product of physiol-
ogy . . . : there is no ‘normal’ body and concomitant movement, but rather
an array of differences that reflect themselves in different movements”
(Grigely); or that “disability is an art. It is an ingenious way to live”
(Neil Marcus, quoted in Christie and Bloustien 494).
For an example of how dis-­affection might occur in encounters be-
tween disabled performers, nondisabled filmmakers/viewers, and special
effects, consider the 1972 sci-­fi film Silent Running, directed by Douglas
Trumbull, an appropriate choice both because of Trumbull’s status as an
FX wizard and because of the film’s imagining of a futuristic world. In Si-
lent Running, Bruce Dern plays Freeman Lowell, a crewman on a space
freighter who depends on three robotic drones he names Huey, Dewey,
132 | The Matter of Disability

and Louie. The drones were played by four bilateral leg amputees in robot
costume: Larry Whisenhunt, Mark Persons, Steve Brown, and Cheryl
Sparks. Trumbull explained the casting by recalling his impressions of
Johnny Eck in the 1932 film Freaks:

Well, there’s one little fellow; he’s very handsome, and neat—­he’s
dressed in a tuxedo and a bow tie. Only, from the waist down, he
isn’t there. So, here’s this remarkable, beautiful guy, with this amaz-
ing agility, leaping and running on his hands through the room,
jumping up on chairs, etc. And not once did you feel horrified.
You’re amazed and respectful at his adjustment. That impression
stayed with me when it came time to cast the drones. I knew what I
wanted. (Trumbull)12

Trumbull’s encounter with Eck derails the expected affective response of

horror, producing instead amazement and aesthetic pleasure: Trumbull
decides that disability is something he wants for his film.
While Silent Running’s costuming hides the amputee actors, making it
difficult for viewers to recognize their encounter with disability, it also
suggests disabled moves—­unpredictable and self-­generated motions by
impaired bodies—­as desirable, capable, and appealing. For instance, in
one moment, a drone impatiently taps his foot, and in another, one drone
draws another’s attention by touching it on the arm. In interviews, Trum-
bull has explained that these gestures were unscripted. In the case of the
arm-­touching, the motion emerged as an adaptation to the bulky cos-
tumes encasing the actors. Writes Mark Kermode,

The actors would apparently “speak” to each other through a com-

bination of clattering gestures, of which the tap on the shoulder was
but one. Picking up on the organic interaction between the per-
formers, Trumbull opted to put this unscripted gesture into his
shot, framing Lowell’s arrival from a low POV which places the au-
dience in a position of conspiratorial intimacy with the Drones—­
observing the world from their perspective, rather than that of the
human lead. (54)

The foot-­tapping, too, appears to mark a disabled performer’s agency.

Stated Trumbull, “A lot of the behavioral things emerged as we were shoot-
ing. . . . I didn’t necessarily preconceive everything. I just created a situa-
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  133

tion where things could evolve and emerge. Like that moment you’re talk-
ing about. . . . [T]he Drone just stands there very gently tapping his foot.
Well, that was Mark—­that was what he was doing! . . . I think it’s the direc-
tor’s job to embrace serendipitous moments of performance” (Kermode
55–­56).
Even as Trumbull “embraced” these unanticipated motions, they
worked against his own intended representation of the drones. Respond-
ing to a statement that the drones contribute “warmth” to the film, Trum-
bull disagrees: “If you were to see the film again, you’d see that most of the
humanity of those machines is a result of your own projection. . . . They’re
simply tools” (Trumbull). But as Kermode notes, the drone’s patting an-
other on the arm “is often cited as one of the most touching elements of
Silent Running” (55). A fan writes, “The performers added a human di-
mension to the robots, infusing human-­like mannerisms, such as an im-
patiently tapping foot, into inanimate hunks of plastic and metal” and
adds, “I have a lot of affection for this film” (Barry P). Thus, although the
amputee actors remain hidden, their disabled moves move audiences in
ways Trumbull cannot dictate. Their actions assert disabled bodies’ dis-
tinctive affective capacities, exceeding Trumbull’s use of the amputees as
“simply tools.”
Disabled moves also emerge in more contemporary movies featuring
digital effects. For instance, 2007’s Spider-­Man 3 presents a conventionally
digitally amputated character, as nonamputee Dylan Baker plays right-­
arm amputee Curt Connors. However, shadowing this disability drag/dis-
­FX is the moment elsewhere in the movie that relies on an “actual” ampu-
tee to prop up a nonamputee body. As Spider-­Man (Tobey Maguire)
battles the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), the former’s arm pene-
trates his adversary’s torso and emerges out the other side. The appearance
of Spider-­Man’s arm plunging through the Sandman’s chest is enabled by
the body and movement of stunt actor and kick-­boxer Baxter Humby,
whose right arm ends just below his elbow.
This effect produces a moment of dis-­affection for attentive viewers. A
writer for a pop-­culture website comments, “Given the notoriously high
levels of SFX inherent to the rest of Spider-­Man 3, this moment just seems
sort of insane” (Barnard), registering the apparent eccentricity of using a
real amputee body when computer-­generated imagery would have done
as well. Indeed, the scene in question also uses CGI, to fabricate a hand
protruding out of the Sandman’s body. Perhaps accustomed to movies that
employ digital effects to simulate disability, this viewer balks at the use of
134 | The Matter of Disability

a “real” disabled body to simulate (super)human potency: he even em-

ploys a disability term—­insanity—­to convey his unease.13 We can explain
the odd inclusion of Humby, however, if we consider that digital movies
are unwilling or unable to fully surrender or erase the disabled body and
its unexpected effects/affects. The movie wants this disabled body, not be-
cause it embodies loss or trauma, but because it can more effectively con-
vey material collision than digital effects. The emphasis on capacity trans-
forms disability drag, suggesting disabled moves as sources of creative
potential.
Attending to the presence of disabled bodies on-­screen works against
eugenic visions of the future. Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson argues we
should not aim to erase disability from our futures but conserve it as a vi-
tal part of human existence. Thomson cites Michael Sandel’s critique of
medical enhancements as a “drive to mastery” and “a kind of hyper-
agency—­a Promethean aspiration to remake nature, including human na-
ture, to serve our purposes and satisfy our desires.” Instead of assuming
the erasure of disability as a good thing, Thomson insists we acknowledge
the narrative, epistemological, and ethical benefits that disability brings,
especially as it generates “flexibility and openness to forces outside of our
will as a form of creative and flexible dialectical engagement with the
world” (348). It is worth noting that the Spider-­Man 3 effect does not sim-
ply fetishize the amputee figure as an icon of posthuman potency but
combines powerful action with an unexpected material collision.
It is this openness to the unexpected and unpredictable that disabled
bodies can help preserve. Michael J. Fox, discussing how his Parkinson’s
disease has altered his acting, observes:

I used to be really nervous and sit in my dressing room and fret

about a scene that was coming up and sweat it out and say, “What
am I going to do? You say ‘Action,’ and I have to do something.
What am I going to do? . . . And now it’s just like, ‘OK, what’s hap-
pening?’ And if something happens, I react to it and if nothing hap-
pens, I don’t react. I don’t worry about that bit I was going to do or
the look I was gonna give because when I get there I may not be able
to give that look or do that thing or move that glass.” (Hiatt)

Fox’s impairment introduces unpredictability into predetermined

scripts, while his statement affirms a capacity to improvise according to
the ways his body now works. The Spider-­Man 3 effect similarly calls on
a disabled body to register the exciting persistence, even in our imag-
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  135

ined futures, of embodied vulnerability in our encounters with the

world. In this “insane” effect, we glimpse a future that cannot imagine
itself without disability.
To conserve the flexibility and unexpectedness of disability, then, we
must challenge the dominant representation of disability as charade or
digital simulation. We must trouble renditions of disabled bodies merely
as affect-­generating machines that give vicarious depressive experiences,
emotional catharsis, and uplift. This is not to require that all amputee roles
be played by amputees, nor that all disabled characters be played by some-
one similarly disabled, nor that we eschew prostheses: such strategies cling
to impossible and unproductive essentialisms. But it is to suggest that
greater media inclusion of diversely disabled people can conserve and
convey a wide range of disabled embodiment, motion, and emotion. Only
such inclusion can widely disseminate the unexpected dis-­affections of
disability encounter, show the ways in which disability matters, and ex-
pand viewers’ conceptions of what is possible and desirable.
Making on-­screen bodies more diverse and less predictable not only
changes what we can imagine and desire for our futures but also contests
nondisabled assumptions about how disability feels. For instance, the 2013
documentary film Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement fea-
tures an interview with Gregor Wolbring, a biochemist, disability advo-
cate, and congenital amputee. Wolbring, whom we see moving down from
a wheeled chair and across the floor of his apartment, notes that many see
crawling as “the ultimate of undignified living.” However, he asserts, he
loves to crawl and does so whenever possible: “Crawling is in. Walking is
out.” Wolbring refuses the logic of disability drag, resignifying crawling as
purposive, pleasurable movement.
Wolbring’s description of his own moves proffers dis-­affection, rerout-
ing viewers’ expectations about how crawling feels and what it means. A
recent New York Times blog post does similar work, especially when jux-
taposed with the “feels” produced by the Alex Pring stories. The post is by
Catherine Campbell, mother of eight-­year-­old Thaddeus, who was born
without a right hand. Campbell had been researching a 3D-­printed pros-
thetic hand for Thaddeus when friends flooded her with excited email
messages about the Alex Pring Iron-­Man video. Campbell describes show-
ing the video to Thaddeus.

“Isn’t this great?” I said, smiling. “That’s going to be you very soon!”
We were sitting on the couch and he turned toward me. “I’ve
been thinking about it,” he said. “And I don’t want a new hand.”
136 | The Matter of Disability

Campbell writes, “I was devastated.” Thaddeus explains to her that, first,

he does not want to lose his sense of touch, of “how things feel”; second,
he asserts he can quite happily “figure out how to do stuff [his] own way,”
because his brain “works different”; and, third, he does not want friends to
like him only for his “robot hand.” Campbell concludes, “For eight years, I
had focused only on what was lost with my son. . . . And during that time,
he had seen what was there to stay for his lifetime—­an arm that simply
ended at the wrist—­and the possibilities that could grow from that”
(Campbell). The event is an affective interruption: the Iron-­Man video up-
lifts Catherine, holding out hope for the shining completion of the ampu-
tee body. But Thaddeus doesn’t feel the same way about his body and its
moves. He reroutes the expected interaction, momentarily devastating his
mother, by asserting the pleasure and value of his nonnormative embodi-
ment and the affective inadequacies of prosthetic technology.
The exchange concludes in affection, in a tight mother-­son hug. This
hug is no more or less “real” than Alex Pring’s prostheticized or unpros-
theticized hugs; each embrace brings into contact different bodies that
together effectively produce and convey affect. The disabled body exerts
an affective agency here that exceeds ableist scripts: Thaddeus’s words and
actions challenge his mother’s assumptions about how disability feels and
ask her to contemplate how disabled moves might generate new and un-
anticipated affects, effects, and ways of moving (in) the world.

NOTES

1. See “Is Amputation TV’s Hot Trend?,” TVline.com; Margaret Lyons, “This Season’s
Hottest TV Trend: Stumps,” Vulture.com; Lesley Goldberg, “Cut! Amputation Is Having
a Hollywood Moment,” Hollywood Reporter; and Matt Webb Mitovich, “Jessica Capshaw
Talks ‘Creepy’ Grey’s Anatomy Twist, Weighs In on TV’s Amputation Craze,” Tvline.
com.
2. Definitions of “affection” include “a moderate feeling or emotion,” “a tender at-
tachment,” “a bodily condition” or “disease, malady,” “the feeling aspect of conscious-
ness,” and “the action of affecting; the state of being affected.” Merriam-­Webster Diction-
ary, “affection,” accessed April 25, 2015, http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/
affection
3. While cross-­racial, cross-­gender, or cross-­sexual performances are not neatly
analogous to disability drag, the comparison does usefully raise questions about why
some identity or bodily differences are seen as more fungible than others.
4. For analysis of the complexities of fakery, reality, and masquerade in disability
performance, see Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification, especially Part I.
5. Dictionary.com Unabridged, Random House, accessed April 25, 2016, http://
www.dictionary.com/browse/drag
 Disability Effects and Disabled Moves at the Movies  |  137

6. Such technological erasures of disability thus work in tandem with the narrative
expulsion or extermination of disabled characters that, as Paul K. Longmore pointed out
in one of the earliest studies of on-­screen disability, “relieves both the individual viewer
and society” of the need to grapple with “antidiscrimination and accessibility laws” per-
mitting them to “escape the dilemma of . . . social accommodation and integration” (5–­
7).
7. See Danny Woodburn and Kristina Kopić, whose survey of employment of dis-
abled actors covers a number of the factors that obstruct disabled actors’ efforts to find
employment.
8. Examples include actress/model/athlete Aimee Mullins, athlete/model Alex Min-
sky, and pop star Viktoria Modesta.
9. This error is noted in a number of locations, including the “Forrest Gump: Goofs”
page of the Internet Movie Database; the Forrest Gump Wiki; and a thread entitled “For-
rest Gump Bloopers” on vhlinks.com.
10. The full statement reads: “When Ali first carries Stephanie to swim in the sea, as
he lifts her off the sun lounger, the actress’s real legs cast a shadow” (“Rust and Bone:
Goofs”). This statement reminds us of the variability and unreliability of film experi-
ence, since the writer misremembers the fact that Ali lifts Stéphanie from her wheel-
chair. For a disability critique of Rust and Bone’s failure to realistically represent reha-
bilitation and adjustment to prostheses, see Lawrence Shapiro. His criticism recalls the
many denunciations of Million Dollar Baby for its failure to realistically depict Maggie’s
postinjury situation and leg amputation. See, for example, Steve Drake and Scott Rich-
ard Lyons.
11. For example, discussing Jessica Capshaw’s performance on Grey’s Anatomy, one
self-­identified above-­the-­knee (AK) amputee comments, “She has no clue what it is to
walk with an AK prosthesis” (Mark Farrell). Amputee blogger Jason Sturm writes, also
of Capshaw, “In the show, after learning to walk on her prosthetic, Arizona goes from
barely walking and coping to walking in high heels, without a limp and absolutely no
visual queues [sic][.] [S]he is an amputee [for] what seems like 2–­3 episodes. It’s a mira-
cle!” Sturm’s experience conflicts with this depiction: “It’s difficult for an above knee
amputee to walk and move without a noticeable limp” (Sturm).
12. The film Freaks features several amputee performers, along with a range of other
unusually embodied actors; their presence, as Trumbull intuits, destabilizes the film’s
horror elements and unsettles easy interpretations of the film as an ableist or exploitative
text.
13. The use of “insane” to describe something odd, surprising, or strange has been
critiqued by disability activists and scholars, who see it as an ableist term akin to “lame”
or “retarded.” See, for instance, Liat Ben-­Moshe.

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Part III
The Matter of Mortality
Spider-­Man’s Designer Genes
Hypercapacity and Transhumanism in a “DIY World”

Samuel Yates

In the 2010 Broadway production Spider-­Man: Turn Off the Dark Peter
Parker and Norman Osborn are transformed into hypercapable subjects—­
Spider-­Man and the Green Goblin, respectively—­through a series of acci-
dents in the genetics laboratories at Oscorp Industries. When Stan Lee
beckoned Marvel Comics readers in Amazing Fantasy, volume 1, issue 15,
writing, “Like costumed heroes? Confidentially, we in the comic mag busi-
ness refer to them as ‘Long Underwear Characters’! And, as you know,
they’re a dime a dozen! But, we think you may find our Spiderman just a
bit . . . different,” little did he realize he was setting the stage for one of the
most popular icons of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries (Duncan
and Smith 180).1 Lee’s promise of something “different” in the introduction
of Peter Parker and his alter ego Spider-­Man intimately shaped the produc-
tion aesthetics structuring the Broadway performance of the mutant hero.
Presentations of the Spider-­Man universe are tightly controlled by Marvel
Comics, with the aim of standardizing and protecting depictions of the
material. While the onstage treatment of the comic’s canon in the Julie
Taymor–­led Turn Off the Dark is rather traditional in its approach to muta-
tion and desirability, the musical offers novel depictions of the Green
Goblin—­Spider-­Man’s infamous nemesis—­and rhetorics of mutation.2
Despite genetic enhancement’s centrality to the Spider-­Man mythol-
ogy, serious meditations on its material and ethical impact are missing in
the multiple performance-­oriented film franchises. This chapter compli-
cates the Broadway musical’s characterization of mutation by proposing
its transhumanist performance as a step toward the posthuman, as a way
of apprehending the genetically engineered subject—­those peripheral em-

143
144 | The Matter of Disability

bodiments that fall between delineated social categories of ability and dis-
ability, and therefore cannot be suitably registered within liberalism’s di-
versity model. The musical’s explicit rejection of a “normal” human body
as an inadequate framework for existing in the modern world begs in-
quiry into the alternatives suggested by the characters onstage, particu-
larly scientist-­turned-­villain Norman Osborn. Singing that “DNA is the
way, now that evolution’s had its day,” Osborn argues that we now are in a
“DIY world” in which humans must take control of their own genetic de-
velopment to avoid extinction (Bono and The Edge 7). For these reasons,
the effort of this chapter is to work through how Turn Off the Dark frames
the mutant body as an imperative next step for the human race.
Norman Osborn’s project of engineering human bodies to stave off
hurt, disease, and death in Turn Off the Dark demonstrates how a transhu-
man logic for evolutionary “progress” is faulty. Transhumanism’s central
argument is for a human-­directed escape from the miscoding errors in
our genetic material, reifying man as both the baseline and the benchmark
in our search for the next stage in man’s progress. In other words, transhu-
manism aims to move the body beyond its biology in search of an “ideal”
materiality. Posthumanism, by contrast, helps us oppose the premise of
erroneous materialities by appreciating the ways different embodiments
flourish: “Many invocations of posthumanism,” Alexander Weheliye con-
tends, “whether in antihumanist post-­structuralist theorizing or in cur-
rent considerations of technology and animality, reinscribe the humanist
subject (Man) as the personification of the human by insisting that this is
the category to be overcome, rarely considering cultural and political for-
mations outside the world of Man that might offer alternative visions of
humanity” (9–­10).
Following Weheliye, I understand genetic enhancements of the os-
tensibly healthy neoliberal subject as producing the very “exceptional”
nonhuman populations used as the impetus for enhancement itself.
Thus, we cannot use posthumanism as the analytic tool to understand
the representations of disability and cultures of ableism in Turn Off the
Dark because a posthumanism attempting to “overcome” man is actually
engaged in a transhumanist discourse. To become posthuman is to dwell
in a mode of humanity that does not rely on social contracts; it is a way
of being that revels in corporeal difference rather than denying or eras-
ing biological divergences. Posthumanism dwells in abject, risky, and
vulnerable states without presumptions of change or sociopolitical valu-
ation. Posthumanism signals the death of the humanist subject by un-
 Spider-Man’s Designer Genes  |  145

derstanding the limits of human as a conceptual category instead of a

designation or destination.
Osborn imagines himself capable of shaping natural selection, “the
process by which life-­forms change to suit the myriad opportunities af-
forded by the physical environment and by other life-­forms,” but evolu-
tion is a creative adaptation between the material body and biospheres
that either preserve or end life—­a process of chance, not design (Ridley
24). If progress as such does not exist, then humanity’s attempts to control
our own evolution are necessarily futile. Accordingly, Osborn’s fantasy of
scripting regulatory control over the human gene pool is a transhumanist
response to failed eugenic fantasies of eliminating illness, disability, and
death itself as conditions of life. Through genetic manipulation, precari-
ous humanist subjects in Turn Off the Dark can be recuperated into late
capitalist popular culture as one of what David Mitchell and Sharon Sny-
der call the “‘able-­disabled’—­those who exceed their disability limitations
through forms of administrative ‘creaming’ or hyper-­prostheticization but
leave the vast majority of disabled people behind” (12).
Although the musical generated frequent media coverage, relatively little
critical work has been written about Turn Off the Dark—­which is surprising
not only because of the combined star power of its creative team and the cap-
ital behind the Spider-­Man franchise, but also because of the musical’s brazen
intersection of eugenics, freak discourse, and disability. I will first contextual-
ize the musical’s introduction of eugenic logic through Norman Osborn’s
seemingly benign humanitarian project, which I understand to be a guise for
a more insidious commodification of the human genome by Oscorp Indus-
tries, notwithstanding its displacement of the normate body. Then I examine
Norman Osborn’s transformation into the Green Goblin, and the forced mu-
tation of his lab workers into the Sinister Six, to theorize Turn Off the Dark’s
genetic manipulation as a transhumanist project. I argue that despite the lyric’s
rhetorical invocation of a posthuman condition, genetic mutation is still
deeply invested in the human body; this inability to decenter the human ne-
cessitates that we view the musical’s mutants as transhuman rather than post-
human. Having established this context, my third section considers Turn Off
the Dark as an addition to the freak show canon. Here I examine the song “A
Freak Like Me” to unpack the musical’s bid to connote every body in the the-
ater as a “freak” through the shared performance. This is crucial for under-
standing the material impact of Turn Off the Dark’s ideological work on the
production itself; the pursuit of performing a fictional hypercapacity that,
ironically, disabled multiple actors during the production’s run.
146 | The Matter of Disability

Engineering a “DIY World”

There are multiple layers to Turn Off the Dark’s engineering of hyperca-
pable bodies in performance. With twenty-­seven aerial flight sequences
and an additional four aerial combat sequences—­to say nothing of the
immense set changes—­it was, as Patrick Healy writes, “the most techni-
cally complex show ever on Broadway” (2010). Actors performing the
roles of Spider-­Man, the Green Goblin, and Arachne used an intricate
harness system to “fly” across the stage and into the theater’s house, pro-
viding a spectacle not unlike the stage magic of Mary Martin flying off to
Neverland in the 1954 Broadway production of Peter Pan. The language of
the music and lyrics, which script eugenic fantasies of better bodies, com-
pounds these flying effects. Just as the unsavory strings attached to eugen-
ics were frequently erased by the blinding promise of biological perfec-
tion, so too were the harness wires forgiven to aid the biological narrative
of Turn Off the Dark. What do audiences make of this site at which hyper-
capacity not only proliferates, but is the new normal? Turn Off the Dark
opened for previews in November 2010 and concluded its run on January
4, 2014; despite whatever troubles the production encountered, a three-­
year run indicates a viable commercial interest in the transhuman subject.
If the show’s “legs” are any indicator, audiences were keen to experience a
staging of what Roy Ascott calls “the post-­biological era”—­“the site of bi-
onic transformation at which we can recreate ourselves and redefine what
it is to be human” (376). The expansion of bodily ability afforded by the
musical’s intricate rigging system and the narrative of genetic enhance-
ment encoded in the book and lyrics recreate the human onstage in order
to playact recreations of the human species.
Norman Osborn first introduces genetic enhancement in the musical
during Peter Parker’s school trip to Oscorp Industries. The science mag-
nate uses experimental technologies to advance cross-­species integration.
In various comic and film series Norman Osborn is presented as a hard-
ened amoral industrialist, but the musical rewrites his character as a hu-
manitarian scientist. Instead of making money, Osborn is interested in
harnessing animal capabilities for humans (such as devising a way for hu-
mans to replicate their own limbs as a starfish would). Although this shift
is, in part, due to the introduction of his oft-­absent wife, Emily, Osborn’s
good intentions reveal the moral framework structuring the script’s ap-
proach to genetic manipulation. As geneticists Norman and Emily Os-
born sing to a group of high school students visiting at Oscorp in “DIY
World,” their work centers on shoring up the sustainability of the human
 Spider-Man’s Designer Genes  |  147

race: “The human race can take a hit / We’re gonna sink but you can swim
/ If you don’t mind a little change of skin / Designer genes are a better fit”
(Bono and The Edge 7). Their good-­natured goal of saving the human race
is consumed by capitalism in one quick stanza, moving from species sus-
tainability to consumable designer models in two sung lines. This “DIY
World” echoes plainly what Garland-­ Thomson calls “Eugenic World
Building,” or the “ideology and practice of controlling who reproduces,
how they reproduce, and what they reproduce in the interest of shaping
the composition of a particular population” (2015). The Osborns’ bleak
projection that humanity is “gonna sink” is countered by their estimation
that humans have only one alternative for survival—­changing their “skin,”
or bodily capacities.
Oscorp is experimenting on augmenting the human genome in an at-
tempt to create the next iteration of human: hypercapacitated, or “su-
pered,” bodies. Norman Osborn creates a new hierarchical structure that
is reflective of a biopolitical economy within neoliberalism: affluent hu-
mans unsatisfied with swimming in the public gene pool can opt for “de-
signer” genetic modifications, reinscribing linkages between class divi-
sions and natural order. Neoliberalism, as described by Mitchell and
Snyder, “involves strategies of the seizure of the very materiality of life at
the level of the individual” (8). If so, then Oscorp Corporation is invested
in the biopolitical project of norming alternative corporealities; the engi-
neered bodies onstage represent hyperprostheticized bodies as productive
difference in order to reveal ways to approach transhuman peripheral em-
bodiment. Taken collectively, the repertoire of augmented bodies dis-
places hegemonic able-­bodied norms, emerging as a “fetishized product
of ‘bare life’ while referencing disability as the dissonant expression of a
distant kinship” (Mitchell and Snyder 181). Singing, “’Cause we can be
what we gotta be / And we need to be what we gotta be,” Osborn’s simulta-
neously eugenic and agentic worldview reifies the anthropocentrism situ-
ated at the heart of genetic research, in which human-­animals become the
standard unit of measurement against all other life.
Proclaiming, “DNA is the way, now that evolution’s had its day,” Os-
born attempts to establish mutation as an adaptation necessary for sur-
vival, instead of aberrant. This is complicated, however, by his change of
vocabulary after his transformation into the Green Goblin. When Osborn
was conceptually homo sapient, he imagined a “DIY World” that links hu-
mans and animals together in a coalition of bodies benefiting from each
other’s capacities; after mutating into a monstrous goblin, he changes his
tune, singing, “A freak like me needs company” (Bono and The Edge 11).
148 | The Matter of Disability

Through his transition from a global humanity to a solitary “freak,” we see

the Green Goblin fall on his own imagined animacy scale: Osborn rejects
his human name and takes up the monstrous moniker “Goblin” in its
stead. This plunge moves counter to Spider-­Man’s ascent. Parker’s “pro-
ductive” mutation gifts spider-­like abilities while still allowing him to
maintain his status as “man.” As Spider-­Man, Parker is the superhuman of
Osborn’s imagination made manifest, the body beyond (but not post-­) hu-
man. And perhaps it is this tempered change that makes Parker’s mutation
desirable, while the Goblin is rendered freakish.
When the Green Goblin calls himself a freak, he actively acknowledges
his own hand in the process—­as Norman Osborn he purposefully ma-
nipulated his genetic makeup to effect change and, in doing so, engaged in
a process of enfreakment. “Enfreakment,” as Ellen Samuels describes, is
the “process by which individual difference becomes stylized as cultural
otherness” (“Examining Millie and Christine McKoy” 56). A keyword to
Samuels’s enfreakment is “stylized,” which opens up the choices of pro-
duction, of making, of styling—­a purposeful fashioning of a subject into a
“freak” identity, as Garland-­Thomson argues in Freakery. To style takes an
explicit performative action, a narrative spiel, a doing. In theatrical con-
texts, stylizations include scripted remarks, scene blocking and choreog-
raphy, and costume changes. Although Samuels cites Garland-­Thomson’s
“array of corporeal wonders,” like the morbidly obese midgets and Sia-
mese twins, this process array often requires an aesthetic of normate able-­
bodiedness to constitute its center (56). Spider-­Man, having been trans-
formed and still appearing “normal” (if not ostensibly better, by
conventional standards of male beauty), escapes the title “freak,” while
Norman Osborn’s skin is transfigured into a green, misshapen approxima-
tion of his previous flesh.
The Green Goblin uses genetic mutations to make a case for victimiza-
tion of “freaks” and coalition-­building with the audience—­creating a con-
flict of interest for audiences who may well empathize with Patrick Page’s
campy Green Goblin more than Reeve Carney’s angsty Spider-­ Man.
There’s more to be said here about the link between morality and aesthet-
ics of the hypercapable subject—­specifically regarding physical deformity.
Across town, another green-­skinned mutant flies above the Gershwin
Theatre eight performances a week—­Wicked’s protagonist Elphaba is cast
as a “Wicked” witch and colored a sickly green. Turn Off the Dark enacts a
similar aesthetic coding for Norman Osborn / Green Goblin, linking
greenness to sickly pallor, wickedness, evil. Meanwhile, Peter Parker’s
need to wear a masked costume while exploring the full potential of his
 Spider-Man’s Designer Genes  |  149

alternative embodiment demonstrates one way in which the mutant body

is tyrannized by ideological constructs of the “normal” body, as Lennard
Davis theorizes in Enforcing Normalcy: “In fact, the very concept of nor-
malcy by which most people (by definition) shape their existence is in fact
tied inexorably to the concept of disability, or rather, the concept of dis-
ability is a function of the concept of normalcy” (2). If disability is brought
into being as the necessary opposition of “normal” (or, tautologically,
able-­bodied/minded), as Davis suggests, then mutants are forced into a
subordinate biological status despite their remarkable capabilities.3 Fur-
ther, since existence within a normed society is shaped by a supposition
that mutants do not exist or are the subjects of fantasy, the genetic differ-
ences yielding hypercapacity are doubly erased from consideration or
concern: once by a disbelieving public, and again by a policing of able-­
bodied/mindedness by the mutant him-­or herself. The mutant, then, is
analogous to Haraway’s cyborg in that she operates from multiple posi-
tions simultaneously, with every perspective “reveal[ing] both domina-
tions and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point” (154).
Stacy Alaimo refigures the boundaries of human as such in Bodily Na-
tures by arguing that the “‘outside’ is already within, inhabiting and trans-
forming that which may or may not be ‘human’ through continual intra-­
actions” (154). In thinking through how transhumanism functions
alongside (or as a product) of Alaimo’s philosophy of transcorporeality,
Turn Off the Dark positions these intra-­actions as dependent on the sur-
rounding environment, but precoded within the genome: bodily re-
sponses, adaptation, or mutations are catalyzed by environmental interac-
tions, but the blueprint for such change is always already within the
human-­animal. We can see this most clearly in the Green Goblin’s plan to
genetically alter other humans as he did himself in the number “A Freak
Like Me Needs Company.” Through his experiments on former employ-
ees, the Green Goblin manages to create six different villains from the
same experiment; the Sinister Six—­Carnage, Electro, Kraven the Hunter,
Lizard, Swarm, and Swiss Miss—­exemplify how different genetic coding
yields a variety of reactions to the same catalyst.4 What Elizabeth Grosz
says of Darwin’s concept of variation might also be said of the mutations
in Spider-­Man: “The continuity of life through time . . . is not the transmis-
sion of invariable or clearly defined characteristics over regular, measured
periods of time (as various essentialisms imply), but the generation of
endless variation, endless openness to the accidental, the random, the un-
expected” (7). This precondition for mutation troubles our ability to fully
render mutation as a posthuman condition, but it productively points to
150 | The Matter of Disability

the interrelation of human change and technology in modern culture. The

generative affordances of the serum’s toxicity refigure the forms of being
and relation in common with the human and the (im)material. Moreover,
Mel Y. Chen advocates for “the queer productivity of toxins and toxicity, a
productivity that extends beyond an enumerable set of addictive or
pleasure-­inducing substances,” provocatively suggesting that toxins in-
duce pleasure, love, rehabilitation, affectations, and assets (Animacies 211).
In other words, while the scientific leaps Osborn suggests may sound far-­
fetched, the more-­than-­human trajectory humorously cushioned in Bo-
no’s high-­energy pop score are on-­trend with discourses in contemporary
transhumanism.
The publication h+ magazine indexes the broader growth of transhu-
manism in popular culture. Read as “h-­plus,” where letter h signifies hu-
man, the magazine defines the bodily modifications that promise and
threaten to radically alter human life as including longevity, self-­
modification and performance enhancement, virtual reality, and NBIC
(nano-­bio-­info-­cog). In “Nano-­Bio-­Info-­Cogno: Paradigm for the Fu-
ture,” h+ writer Surfdaddy Orca argues:

Just as we battle over the right to life today, it’s almost a given that
we will battle in the future over the right to personal enhancement.
New and radical choices will be available to parents who want cer-
tain characteristics for their unborn children—­for example, aug-
mentation of intelligence or corrective genetic procedures. Im-
provement and human performance enhancing drugs and
neurotechnological devices are already entering the global market-
place. (Surfdaddy Orca 2010)

Transhumanism seeks improvement upon man’s natural human abilities;

Oscorp, being committed to augmenting the human race, positions itself
to sell these enhancements as “designer genes” on the global marketplace.
Designer genetics hinges on the eradication of disability, illness, and aes-
thetic “imperfections”—­biological preconditions that inhibit a full flour-
ishing of life. Because the genome is both the baseline and the benchmark
against which change is measured, Osborn’s project should not be de-
scribed as posthumanist; his investment in preserving human life and po-
sitioning genetic augmentation as a marketplace choice directly contra-
dicts the conceptual posthumanisms of Lyotard and Habermas. The
genetic augmentation in Turn Off the Dark is, if anything, an aggrandize-
 Spider-Man’s Designer Genes  |  151

ment of anthropocentrism given that its predicated entirely on hyperca-

pacitating the human body.
In the song “Pull the Trigger,” Osborn knows his secrets to enhanced
genetics, superhuman kinetics, and muscle augmentation are the key to
financial success: “And look at that, web bio-­generation. / Your secrets.
Getting Sold. Getting bought. / . . . Get Funded! Or your baby won’t live!”
(Bono and The Edge 7). Osborn’s ascription of “life” to his technological
project animates transhuman technologies as a living force capable of
growth. Yet transhumanism in philosophical practice and theatrical per-
formance is counterproductive when it limits the perspective of human
ability and denies the very precariousness that links humans with other
animals. Concerned with the “human race [taking] a hit,” Osborn resists
pain, aging, and death in his promise that “we could live a thousand years”
(Bono and The Edge 9). Oscorp, then, presents technology as the answer
to the natural “disability” shared by all humans: mortality. Moreover, there
is also a less universal eradication of disability at stake here, in that mor-
tality’s erasure covers over disability as a shorthand for truncated life.
Performers’ bodies are technologically transformed through an intri-
cate theatrical design and, indeed, it is the blatant transparency of spec-
tacle that enables the hero’s story to be acted onstage at all. The seemingly
superhuman ability of the actor playing Spider-­Man is characterized by
his acrobatic ability to appear and disappear across the stage in mere sec-
onds and “web-­sling” through the theater, traveling by a visible harness
system. Instead of a single, virtuosic performer navigating the aerial cho-
reography, audiences see multiple ensemble actors switching off the role
of Spider-­Man in order to create the superhero’s omnipresence within the
theater. This company of ten Spider-­Men visually indexes a creative anxi-
ety about the commoditization of the superhero, as well as broader con-
cerns about the collapse of unique identity into consumption and transhu-
man self-­interest.
As audiences watch the musical unfold, they temporarily become hy-
percapacitated themselves; the spectators’ investment in the premium
ticket prices at the Foxwoods Theatre gives them a designer “change of
skin” by augmenting their capacity for sight. In the performance venue,
the spectator’s perception is morphed to supered specificity: the produc-
tion design isolates the audience’s capacity for sight through focused light-
ing and a harness system that exaggerates the onstage actor’s physical
movement. By creating tight fields of vision with ever-­moving points of
interest, the direction emulates a cinematic effect through a pointedly
152 | The Matter of Disability

guided optical experience that stifles the eye’s ability to wander freely
within the world of the play. In this way, the audience eye is aesthetically
standardized, much like a movie guiding audiences through scenic editing
and focus shots, even as it is supered to a greater capacity for attention to
detail. The precarious politic is all the more perilous through its innocu-
ous presentation: audiences enjoy their heightened sight and tap their fin-
gers along to the pop stylizations of Bono and The Edge, applauding the
message of DNA modification as the “Solution” to human death at the end
of a rousing musical chorus. Turn Off the Dark’s success relies on the ex-
plicit performance and tacit acceptance of the transhuman body’s chang-
ing materiality upon interaction with new technologies.

Toward a Transhuman “Freak Show”

Turn Off the Dark’s fetishization of corporeal and ontological difference

situates the production beyond the Great White Way; the transhuman
bodies populating the theater and the mutant-­freak rhetoric scripting
their participation asks that we imaginatively place this musical in the tra-
dition of the freak show. By recapitulating the Peter Parker origin story
already told in comic books, television cartoons, and three popular film
franchises, Taymor’s blockbuster musical typifies a cultural implosion
born from an artistic commoditization and also creates a “freak discourse”
that interconnects these disparate media forms and resists critique. Rose-
marie Garland-­Thomson describes the freak discourse as a specific narra-
tive form that entwines a spiel (show advertisement), the freak’s extraordi-
nary identity, a specific staging, and ancillary media that confirms the
staged freakishness (film representations) (“Introduction” 6–­7). It also
cultivates identification with the mutant Spider-­Man through the audi-
ences’ experiencing the narrative from Spider-­Man’s point of view. This
perspective accelerates a desire for futurity as the audiences experience
the fantasy of productive, nonharmful, genetic mutation that refigures the
limits of the human without violating the aesthetic normate. Thus, audi-
ence interaction and contemporary media extend the performance be-
yond the stage, becoming co-constitutive aesthetic elements that generate
a larger commercial success. Such an expansion, however, necessitates
that we more carefully attend to positive rendering and circulation of ge-
netic modification in pop culture. Unlike freak shows of the late nine-
teenth century, Spider-­Man: Turn Off the Dark is able to promulgate its
narrative through a worldwide web, if you will, of media forms.
 Spider-Man’s Designer Genes  |  153

Freak shows, Robin Blyn argues, are theaters of mass entertainment

that feature “a complex orchestration of conflicting ideologies, libidinal
displacements, and anxious flirtations with an otherness from which the
viewer can always safely retreat” (xviii). Parker, Osborne, and the audience
begin the show in a normal, or perhaps more appropriately neutral, state.
Portrayed by actors without spectacle or extra theatrics, each character is
ostensibly like any audience member—­average in bodily ability. Much like
the enacted transformations into Spider-­Man and the Green Goblin, the
musical maps freakishness onto the audiences’ otherwise unremarkable
bodies through their spectatorship:

I said goodbye to my straight life cuz I love a freak

(A freak like me needs company)
All the weirdos in the world are right here now in New York City
All the brazen boys and girls (Bono and The Edge 11)

The “brazen” freakishness the Green Goblin sings about opens itself to
multiple readings of otherness: the embrace of queerness by abandoning
one’s “straight life”; the coalition politic and transhuman utopia of identi-
fying other self-­described freaks; the abject weirdness of life in the musi-
cal’s version of a technologically saturated New York City; the brazenness
of returning to or achieving perpetual childhood youth through mutation.
Unlike the traditional freak show Blyn maps, however, there is no safe re-
treat from the transhuman otherness in Turn Off the Dark. Every body in
the Foxwoods Theatre is physically augmented for the duration of the mu-
sical, and mentally altered afterward through the consideration and expe-
rience of the augmented bodies.
Watching Spider-­Man proclaim, “And you can rise above (Free your
soul) / Open your eyes up (Rise above yourself and take control),” the
public buys into self-­actualization of the “DIY World” Osborn articulates
(Bono and The Edge 12). In this way, Spider-­Man the Musical positions the
human body at what David Savran describes as a “site of struggle between
economic and symbolic capital on the one hand, and cultural capital, on
the other” (277–­78).5 Although C. B. Macpherson and Blyn remind us that
self-­ownership and escaping death in a capitalist market are an illusion,
the ideology of the self-­determined freak subject enables the chimera of
freedom onstage and elides contradictions between precarious life and
capitalism (Blyn xxix).
154 | The Matter of Disability

Actor Implications

Broadway is metonymic with the commercial theater industry and it has

long served as a litmus test for the political passions and social appetites
of American culture. Accordingly, we must pay attention to bodily con-
figurations on the Broadway stage to better understand how disability is
leveraged against the American imaginary’s normate body. Given that
Turn Off the Dark is also a superhero myth, the musical provides a par-
ticularly worthwhile site for exploration. Superhero genres, as José Al-
aniz writes, provide “a rich ‘mirror universe’ of American society” (8).
This production provides the dire warning that the space between our
reality and the “mirror universe” Alainz invokes is rapidly collapsing. At
this point, it is worth considering the material impact of the eugenic
logic and the resulting fantasy of hypercapacity at play in Turn Off the
Dark. Although there are several directions this exploration could take,
I address two effects here: the preclusion of disability and the simultane-
ous disablement of actors.
Disability inclusion is already forgone in Turn Off the Dark—­the nor-
mate body, for all its constructedness, is taken as the body in need of reha-
bilitation. It follows, then, that in performances of crip and queer bodies
we are not only entertained by the everyday management of peripheral
embodiments (while still maintaining distance enough for a “safe retreat,”
as Blyn describes), we entertain these same events as an operative mode
for present or future action. In Turn Off the Dark Norman Osborn preys
on a fear of disability by refiguring the normate body as the body already
in decline. The musical never quite delves into the disability terms of its
argument in that disability subjectivity is always intertwined with perfor-
mance. Turn Off the Dark requires additional capacities, accommoda-
tions, and modes of embodiment to render its hypercapable subject sig-
nificant. In this way, disability and hypercapacity become counterpoints
to each other as strategic executions against the normate body. Rather
than partaking in a “disability masquerade” in order to look “disabled
enough” to require help, as Ellen Samuels writes, the production’s hyper-
capacity demands the failure of a “normalcy masquerade” to reveal itself
to the spectator (Fantasies of Identification 137). The hypercapable body
waits in the wings, ready to facilitate and liberate the imagination of the
paying spectator.
Turn Off the Dark’s erasure of disabled bodies is complicated by the
musical’s production history, in which eight highly publicized accidents
highlight the precarity of able-­bodiedness.6 Between 1997 and 2007, the
 Spider-Man’s Designer Genes  |  155

US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Hazard Ad-

ministration (OSHA) investigated thirty-­ five incidents in live shows,
twenty-­five of which involved stagehands and technicians, ten involving
performers. After in-­theater rehearsals (the show had no out-­of-­town try-
outs due to the intricacy of the production’s fly system) and the first full
month of previews, OSHA had investigated violations of workplace safety
standards regarding four separate incidents (Hosier). This means that
Turn Off the Dark’s initial stages of production (rehearsals and first month
of previews) alone prompted nearly half as many performer-­related inves-
tigations into violations of workplace safety standards as the past decade
of all Broadway productions. In a March 2011 press release OSHA reported
issuing 8 Legged Productions three “serious citations,”7 due to the “sub-
stantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result from
a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known” (Fitzger-
ald). Two weeks after OSHA issued its citations, T. V. Carpio, the actress
playing Arachne, sustained a neck injury; three more serious injuries fol-
lowed during the production. Neither OSHA nor the New York State De-
partment of Labor (NYDOL) cited Turn Off the Dark beyond the first
three injuries, but the effect is clear: the show’s aim of performing hyper-
capacity comes at the expense of able-­bodiedness.8
Actors Equity Association (AEA) president Nick Wyman, responding
to mounting calls for accountability following Christopher Tierney’s seri-
ous injuries, stated: “I have been very disturbed and distraught by the seri-
ous injuries sustained by our member Chris Tierney at the December 20th
performance of spider-­man: turn off the dark” (“Spider-­Man and
Equity”). But “Part of the joy of live theatre—­for both the audience and
the performers,” Wyman argued, “is its immediacy and its vitality.” This
advocacy for “immediacy” and “vitality” hinges on the able-­bodiedness
assumed of triple-­threat Broadway performers, whose multiple skills in
singing, acting, and dancing approximate a different kind of hypercapac-
ity. “A ‘boy in the bubble’ strategy of taking everything down to half speed,
of wrapping everyone and everything in cotton wool, obviously will not
work. Live theatre, exciting theatre involves risk,” Wyman emphasized.
Wyman not only uses the disabled condition of severe combined immu-
nodeficiency as a metaphorical straw man, but also succinctly argues
against any notion of crip time on the Broadway stage. Although Wyman
speaks of a commitment to safety and minimizing risk in the theater, the
way in which he articulates actor performance echoes the neoliberal de-
sires to become more that we see throughout the script of Turn Off the
Dark. A desire for safety ensconces the normate actor in a protective bub-
156 | The Matter of Disability

ble or cotton wool, rhetorically suggesting ailment and deficiency. My ar-

gument is not that the narrative’s expendable treatment of the normate
body directly caused the lax regulations and responses guaranteeing actor
safety, but rather that the musical’s precarious framing of the human body
clearly did not facilitate greater care structures ensuring the actors’ well-­
being in the production.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have demonstrated how Spider-­Man: Turn Off the Dark
uses a hybridized theatrical design and pseudoscientific plots to create hy-
percapacitated bodies, and that this production situates these extracapable
performers and spectators as transhuman. The transhuman subjects in
Turn Off the Dark explicitly reject humankind’s vulnerable embodiments;
Spider-­Man’s altered, amazing body is a prophylactic narrative against the
specters of disease, disability, and death. As the first superhero musical
since It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman (1966) to appear on Broadway, it
signals a reemergence of the superhero in the American imaginary, in an
important departure into the realm of possibility for the generation and
purchase of extrahuman capabilities. The stagecraft and public fetishiza-
tion of mutation engendered by this production has allowed the musical
to reenter the twenty-­first century as a more accessible, flexible form in
popular culture. While the democratization of superhero materials and
the accompanying expansions of bodily capacity ultimately bring a diver-
sity of backgrounds into the theater, Turn Off the Dark is unable to criti-
cally assess and structure a moral value system around the establishment
of a transhuman body through theatrical production. The musical was
slated to undergo a creative overhaul before relaunching as an “arena spec-
tacular” designed to tour across the United States by winter 2016, but as of
this writing, such a tour has not opened (Cohen). Regardless of Turn Off
the Dark’s future, its Broadway production ushered in a new moment for
the commercial theater industry—­one requiring new questions concern-
ing the limits of bodily capacity, the representation of ability and disability,
and our valuation of the boundary between the actor as a sensate human
body and as an objectified material means of production. Spider-­Man:
Turn Off the Dark is caught in a web of adaptation as it makes a case for its
own scientific relevance, even though it is unable to unharness itself from
its theatrical trappings. Suspended somewhere between science and spec-
tacle, the musical itself enacts the lines of the aptly named opening ballad,
 Spider-Man’s Designer Genes  |  157

“Boy Falls from the Sky”: “I’d be myself, if I knew who I’d become” (Bono
and The Edge 2).

NOTES

1. This direct address is discussed in Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith’s The
Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (2009); the original issue is Marvel Comics’
“Amazing Fantasy #15,” by Stan Lee (w), Steve Ditko (i), and Jack Kirby (i), published
August 10, 1962.
2. The extensive legal battle following writer-­director Julie Taymor’s ousting from
the production in March 2011, and the subsequent direction by Philip William McKin-
ley that culminated in the “Version Two” performed for the official Broadway opening
on June 14, 2011, make creative and authorship credits to Spider-­Man: Turn Off the Dark
difficult to parse. In this chapter, all music and lyrics are credited to Bono and The Edge.
The book was written by Julie Taymor, Glen Berger, and Roberto Aguirre-­Sacasa.
3. Sadly, Turn Off the Dark misses an even greater opportunity here to play with the
fantastic. Each mutation in the show is represented as a bipedal humanoid, demonstrat-
ing how a compulsory able-­bodiedness is embedded even in the biologically nonnorma-
tive space.
4. Turn Off the Dark’s version of the Sinister Six is a marked departure from the
mythology of Spider-­Man universe. In the theatrical version the Sinister Six have muta-
tion thrust upon them by the Green Goblin as punishment for abandoning Osborn and
Oscorp industries. The original Sinister Six included Doctor Octopus, Electro, Kraven
the Hunter, Mysterio, Sandman, and Vulture; they first appeared in The Amazing Spider-­
Man Annual 1, 1964, with art by Steve Ditko. The character Swiss Miss is wholly original
to Turn Off the Dark.
5. When using terms associated with Spider-­Man: Turn Off the Dark in the Google
search engine, the common misnomer “Spider-­Man the Musical” is the first suggested
search item, an aggregate result based on popular searches of all Google users and pur-
chased search terms. This is partially because the production’s website does not market
itself by its proper name as most musicals do. Instead, its web domain is http://spider
manonbroadway.com
6. I am only tracing a brief history of the significant legal response to the dubious
workplace safety standards during the run of Turn Off the Dark. For a more thorough
inquiry and legal recommendations see Brooke Day.
7. 8 Legged Productions is a subcompany of Foresight Theatrical, a general manage-
ment company for big-­budget Broadway musicals. Other Foresight productions include
Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, Side Show, and Kinky Boots.
8. Regarding actual expense, OSHA cited 8 Legged Productions a proposed $12,600
in proposed fines for “serious citations.” The inspection detail released after the case
closed in January 2012 reported that the penalty paid was $10,630. The smaller amount
is accounted for by a reduction of two violations from “Serious” to “Other.” Interestingly,
OSHA has a “repeat” category for safety violations, but this does not appear to have been
invoked at any point after the initial citations. See United States Department of Labor,
OSHA, Inspection: 314883919-­8 LEGGED PRODUCTIONS, LLC, available at http://
www.osha.gov/pls/imis/establishment.inspection_detail?id=314883919. NYDOL is-
158 | The Matter of Disability

sued nonmonetary citations that subjected the production to unannounced safety in-
spections to ensure compliance. See Healy, “New York Issues.”

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An Arm Up or a Leg Down?
Grounding the Prosthesis and Other Instabilities

Chris Ewart

There are cases where a prosthesis is still a prosthesis.

—­Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand 176

Sarah S. Jain’s “The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the

Prosthesis Trope” (1999) critiques applications of prosthesis that seldom
consider the bodies and people who use them. Among other “problems
emerging from overgeneralizations of the prosthesis trope” (38), Jain dis-
cusses Mark Seltzer’s influential “double logic of prosthesis,” which arrives
from Henry Ford’s appropriation of disabled labor. Within such logic, a
cancellation of self (and agency) occurs with the violent loss of body—­
from what Seltzer calls a “natural body” (157)—­extended (and regained to
an extent) with the incorporation of a prosthesis. In the architectural do-
main, Jain notes Mark Wigley’s idea that the prosthesis “becomes a side-­
effect [that] reconstruct[s] the body, transforming its limits, at once ex-
tending and convoluting its borders. The body itself becomes artifice”
(qtd. in Jain 38).
Given how “the prosthesis [i]s a tempting theoretical gadget [to] exam-
ine the porous places of bodies and tools” (49), Jain helps establish a criti-
cal discourse of prosthetic theory and embodiment. She considers the
prosthesis a multivalent object that, for some, seldom leaves the medical
domain, operating as a metaphor and as a manufactured desire for prod-
ucts. She notes, for example, the proliferation of and cultural reliance
upon the automobile as a quintessential, problematic (North) American
prosthesis and that Ford’s automobiles were inaccessible for many dis-
abled workers who built them or who were disabled in the process. Such

160
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  161

assembled, biopolitical exclusion reminds us that we do not all experience

or afford prostheses in the same ways—­either during the machine age or
under neoliberalism.
Jain’s argument also draws attention to an “overwrit[ing]” of embodi-
ment via “assumptions of a physically disabled body and the liberal prem-
ise of the choice of the perfect body” (49). This chapter similarly seeks to
intervene in key instances of the kind of “overwriting” signaled by Jain. I
explore aspects of the prosthesis’s roles in narrative and in lived experi-
ence as a way to situate its conceptual diversity and materiality “that im-
prints itself upon human bodies” (Godden 1278). I then examine repre-
sentations of disability and prosthetics in two sensationalist, revenge-­
themed films—­Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (2007) and Noboru Igu-
chi’s Machine Girl (Kataude Mashin Gâru) (2008)—­that comment on par-
ticular national and social contexts. Machine Girl reflects a trajectory of
post-­atomic Japan’s national emasculation and the cultural phenomenon
of yakuza while Planet Terror satirizes material realities of those who cross
the border from Mexico into Texas, calling out inequity and othering
around border experiences. In addition, each film’s brutality and over-­the-­
top plot fulfill a pattern of cultural representations that use the prosthesis
as narrative enabler, moral barometer and spectacle of excess. Though
these films generate agency for their recently disabled female protagonists,
empowerment accompanies militaristic and gangster-­style violence where
prostheses—­and disabled bodies—­become contemporary fetishizations
of violence as power.

Proselytizing the Prosthetic: Not So Smooth After All

Advertise your leg in the largest way possible.

—­Henry W. Bellows (1862; qtd. in Herschbach 26)

He’s going to become a whole man, paradoxically, without that leg.

—­Dr. Russell Reid (2000; qtd. in Evans 309)

The allure of prosthetic theory invites a “grounding” of the prosthesis as

a way to mark the space between lived experiences of disability and the
at-­times excessive narrative freight and metonymic spectacle of fictional
prosthetics (i.e., it’s a leg and a gun). Creative renderings of disability
and prostheses in narrative that objectify the disabled subject in ways
that—­to borrow from Jain, “overwrite” disability—­whether through
162 | The Matter of Disability

compulsory able-­bodiedness or fetishized, embodied weaponization—­

tend towards ableist idealizations of disability. These spaces and rewrit-
ings reveal what I call sociotextual inequity. A disability theory of socio-
textual inequity illuminates moments in which disability’s employment
and representation (as metaphor or aesthetic signifier) in texts is dispro-
portionate to histories, contemporary experiences, and real exclusions
of people with disabilities. That such representations often distance
themselves from the matter of ordinary experience reveals how pros-
thetic ideology can appropriate bodies—­while simultaneously shaping
them. To this end, the prosthesis, as Richard Godden suggests, is “a re-
minder of the immanent vulnerability of all bodies” (1274) allowing us to
“consider more closely the role that objects play in constituting the sub-
ject, that is, how the body is just one entity among others in a prosthetic
ecology that forms the self ” (1275).
In “Interrogating the Founding Gestures of the New Materialism”
Dennis Bruining suggests that “the turn to agentic (non-­human) matter as
well as the expressed desire to avoid representationalism is linked to the
idea that there has been an excessive focus on discourse and language to
the detriment of materiality” (24). Noting the connections between body,
disability, and the agency of pain, for example, Mariah Crilley argues for a
“dynamic materiality” (306) that is “never so simple, so static, or reductive
in its representations in medicine and literature [and] is always
inseparab[le], a congealing of sometimes competing agencies [that]
challeng[e] static definitions of ‘normal’ and ‘natural’” (307). Similar to
disability theory’s undoing of normative constraints, a (new) materialist
perspective devalues “Enlightenment”-­inspired anthropocentrism and its
consolidation of power over centuries in part via representations, text, and
language. The “success” of post-­Enlightenment empiricism and eugenics
(that continue to privilege some bodies more than others) is a perpetual
reminder for the disabled community and its allies to recognize the im-
portance of language and text as material within and without metaphor
while also recognizing the importance of objects (from allergens to curb
cuts) and their often inseparable influence upon many of us. Emphasizing
material over the representational a new materialist approach within dis-
ability studies can help provide more equitable understandings of disabil-
ity in narrative and the larger social world from which they emerge—­to
challenge “enlightened” oppression and consumption of the disabled sub-
ject and to recognize the self-­shaping agency—­for better and for worse—­of
prosthetic technologies.
On the importance of matter in our lives and our thinking, Diana
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  163

Coole and Samantha Frost remind us of its “restlessness and intransigence

even as we reconfigure and consume it” (1). As they ask: “How could we
ignore the power of matter and the way it materializes in our ordinary
experiences or fail to acknowledge the primacy of matter in our theories?”
(1). In “A Leg to Stand On,” Vivian Sobchack explores the vexed problem
of how material discussions of prostheses contend with many difficult
figurative and theoretical applications of the term. She writes that, “with
the exception of disability studies,”

the literal and material ground of the metaphor has largely been
forgotten, if not disavowed.  .  .  . [T]he experience and agency of
those who, like myself, actually use prostheses without feeling
“posthuman” and who, moreover, are often startled to read about
all the hidden powers that their prostheses apparently exercise both
in the world and in the imaginations of cultural theorists [as] a
rhetoric  .  .  . that is always located elsewhere[,] displac[e] and
generaliz[e] the prosthetic before exploring it first on its own quite
extraordinary complex, literal (and logical) ground. (20)

While Sobchack’s focus on material prostheses and the experiences of

those who use them is significant to disability studies, part of the complex-
ity of the term arrives in its cultural appropriation for use as a theoretical
master key outside of embodiment, even while it persists as a significant
component of embodiment itself.
Davidson’s suggestion that sometimes a prosthesis is just a prosthesis
reminds us to consider the materiality of the body in theoretical discus-
sions. It is important to stop short of declaring the prosthetic as
universal—­insofar as everything is a prosthetic (from my computer to
your glass eye) and we all use them. From a disability perspective, I share
in Simi Linton’s critique of the neoliberal idea that “everyone is disabled
in some way” (“What Is Disability Studies?” 520). Dianne Price Herndl
suggests, “If we are all disabled in some way, then we cannot possibly
discriminate against the disabled and there can be no legal protections
and no serious attempts at making venues accessible” (594). Her obser-
vations reveal the importance of spatial, material considerations to exis-
tence and how inequity plays out in very real ways—­including through
the stereotype of a disabled person who requires access or assistive tech-
nologies in the workplace or other social spaces as an incessant com-
plainer or drain on capital resources.
The idea that we are not all disabled requires particular emphasis in
164 | The Matter of Disability

relation to people who use prosthetics—­for access, mobility, work, secu-

rity, and so on—­as a part of themselves. Loree Erickson, disabled artist
and porn star, who describes her own practice as a productive
“Femmegimp” politics (Campbell 42) is “adamant [in that] she ‘moves
through the world in a wheelchair,’ which she considers part of her.” Bring-
ing attention to people’s relationship to assistive technologies as exten-
sions of themselves reveals how technology can “unif[y] and transmogrif[y]
the corporeal and psychic life of the person with disability” (54). Ruthee, a
person who also uses a wheelchair, shares her/“our” collective unease
when people

kick our chair, move our chair while we’re in it, or touch our chair
without necessarily touching our body, there’s no difference. . . . The
chair is a part of me! People don’t understand that this is not a place
to sit, it is not a piece of furniture, it is who we are, it’s an extension
of ourselves. (qtd. in Campbell 54)

Here a prosthetic shapes identity and materializes the often abstract no-
tion of distance and space beyond the objects and signs that signify them.
As Crilley suggests, for Ruthee, the body and matter are “inseparable”
(307). By resisting normative oppressions or overwriting of disabled expe-
rience, Ruthee’s chair also becomes a site for the body beyond the body, or,
in a sense a “postbody.” Distinguishing this term from the “posthuman”
shifts discussion of prostheses from one of general cultural theory to a
focus upon physical materiality. Without diminishing concerns about the
prosthetic as reduced to a “fetishized and ‘unfleshed-­out’ catchword”
(Sobchack 21), the interconnective, interdependent relationships between
prostheses and users challenge theoretical meanings of the term and ex-
pose the agential inequities that play out upon disabled bodies within and
outside the text.

What’s the Difference Between a Limb and a Machine Gun?

He’s right. I am a murderer. But until six months ago I was just an
ordinary high-­school girl who could hold her little brother with her
left arm.
—­Ami, from Machine Girl

Humanity’s last hope rests on a high-­powered machine gun.

(Tagline from a promotional poster for Planet Terror)
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  165

V. A. Musetto’s New York Post review of Noboru Iguchi’s The Machine Girl
from May 23, 2008, begins as follows:

DID you hear the one about the schoolgirl who loses her left arm in
a fight with mobsters and has it replaced by an eight-­barrel machine
gun (shades of Rose McGowan in [Planet Terror]), which she uses
to exact vengeance on the bullies who killed her brother and his
best pal?

Musetto’s rhetoric asks us to agree that Iguchi’s Machine Girl is a joke—­

and be in on it, even as did-­you-­hear-­the-­one-­about jokes often invoke
stereotypes of race, gender, and disability that result in inequities for tar-
gets of the joke. The film’s many excesses (such as a yakuza boss who feeds
his blood to his son and makes their sushi chef eat sushi made of the chef ’s
own fingers) and uneasy humor—­like Ami having her arm battered and
fried into tempura—­ reflect a stylized grindhouse genre in a literal
grinding-­of-­the-­body sense, replete with sexualized prosthetic gadgets,
including a drill-­bra. The grinding that propels this film via fleshy movie
props and misogynistic objects of fetishization, like Rodriguez’s Planet
Terror, critiques a vapid entertainment industry as a biopolitical meat-­
grinder while simultaneously maintaining a spectacle of violence and tor-
ture upon disabled and female characters.
Each film’s troubling narrative inclination to fetishize militarization
and violence through disabled bodies reflects, in some ways, Alexander
Weheliye’s idea of “pornotroping.” Discussing texts that represent the vis-
ceral and visual unease of slavery, Weheliye situates victims’ often inex-
pressible experiences within the limits of film. Though Machine Girl and
Planet Terror occur in different contexts without slavery as a reference,
misogynistic violence (carried out by yakuza and zombies) creates and
perpetuates disabled, female, prosthesized characters’ hyperbolic re-
sponses to (fictional) injustices. Such responses maintain normative, able-
ist cultural imaginaries within each film’s cultural context (from post-­
atomic Japan and the contemporary analogy of yakuza to US-­Mexican
border tensions referenced in Rodriguez’s film). Each film relies on the
objectification of women’s bodies and portrays the overcoming of disabil-
ity through extreme violence that (akin to slavery’s motivations) promotes
national survival through human exploitation. Weheliye writes, “Since
cinema cannot give a first-­person account of the horror of torture, its tes-
timony remains suspended between the cinematic apparatus and the tor-
tured body, which in turn, when it encounters slavery, produces a sexual
166 | The Matter of Disability

surplus: pornotroping” (69). This ideological and representational surplus

then exists in film as a “politico-­sexual form of life” whose excesses “can-
not be contained by the legal order [and are] disseminated in the visual
realm” (69). For Ami and Cherry, the torturous removal of their limbs (an
arm and a leg, respectively), their subsequent mandatory prosthetic en-
ablement, and their violent, avenging narratives occur without recourse to
the law. All the while each character wears an outfit of objectification (Ami
as Japanese schoolgirl and Cherry as go-­go dancer), and each expels her
sexual excess through violent, weaponized hyperability.
Machine Girl’s and Planet Terror’s use of prosthesized characters in
disabled-­avenger narratives promotes violence as a troubling normative
response to fictional injustices whereby a disabled character’s achieve-
ments are measured in violent acts enabled by prostheses. Clearly we are
not all disabled, nor do we experience injustice in the same ways. Such
inequity reveals how, and perhaps why, narratives “overcome” or “avenge”
bodily violence (the loss of a limb) with the material of prosthesis, how-
ever fantastical. The trailer for Machine Girl, for example, evokes a univer-
sal ableism/revengism with image and text. Scenes of an able-­bodied Ami
playing basketball, walking to school, and joking with her brother (“A
Normal High School Girl, Living a Normal Life, From a Normal Family”)
precede scenes of a yakuza ceremony, a young, well-­dressed yakuza gang
and flashes of physical struggle (“Until a Ninja Yakuza Family, Took away
Everything”). The latter phrase accompanies the amputation of Ami’s arm
by sword and subsequent omnipresent spray of blood. Blunt and impera-
tive, the film’s advertisement equates the loss of a limb with “everything.”
Neoliberalizing disability with binaric, totalizing logic also implies that
those of us missing a limb have “nothing.” Such extreme ableism invokes
an extreme version of Paul Longmore’s disability avenger plot: In “Screen-
ing Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People,” he cites three well-­worn
tropes of disability in film: “Disability is a punishment for evil; disabled
people are embittered by their ‘fate’ [and] disabled people resent the non-­
disabled and would, if they could, destroy them” (4). Though more venge-
ful than embittered, Ami defies yakuza power and avenges her brother’s
murder by “destroying” those responsible.
A tradition of recuperation exists in modern Japanese narratives that
feature amputations and prosthetics. Amanda Landa’s “Mechanized Bod-
ies of Adolescence: Weaponized Children, National Allegory and Japanese
Anime” discusses the futuristic Akira (1988) as an example of how narra-
tives “write over national historical trauma [and] rise above the psychic
wounds within the body politic” (21). Akira, also the name of a child tele-
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  167

path responsible for Tokyo’s destruction and eventual World War III, takes
place in a dystopian Neo-­Tokyo. The film’s main antagonist, Tetsuo Shima,
who shares powers similar to Akira’s, is targeted by a satellite-­based gov-
ernment weapon and loses his arm. He then fashions a prosthetic limb out
of found material. Later, when Tetsuo smashes a container of Akira’s
government-­safeguarded biomatter, the limb morphs—­billowing flesh,
organs and cable-­like tendons—­into a giant inside-­out, bodily mass that
subsumes Tetsuo. Following a period of Japanese global economic and
technological dominance, the film foretells Japan’s economic crash of the
1980s. Landa writes, “Akira likens Tetsuo’s bodily metamorphosis and
eventual self-­destruction to the rupture of Japan’s economic inflation. In
fact, the unbound excess of Tetsuo’s physical growth, alongside the me-
chanical pieces and multi-­colored wiring[,] can be read as an allegory of
the bloated success of the Japanese electronics industry; a cautionary tale
for those who desire too much power but cannot control it” (21). Tetsuo’s
boundless matter marks Japan’s economic collapse and its electronic de-
pendence through bodily trauma. While Tetsuo’s new body brings power
on an individual level—­as a teen seeking acceptance with the biker
gang—­it also reflects a desire to avenge post-­atomic Japan’s “castrating loss
of power by the U.S. imposition of democracy and the de-­militarization of
the country” (Landa 31). Figuring the nation as an emasculated body sub-
ject to violence, amputation, and excess through a fictional character who
uses a prosthetic limb illustrates the metaphorical, sociohistorical, and
material power of the prosthetic to “imprin[t] itself upon human bodies”
(Godden 1278), along with the heteronormative overwriting that takes
place through a disabled body in order to “overcome” a range of wounds—­
psychic, physical, or national.
The yakuza’s cultural presence, including a popular film genre, in Japan
reveals how amputation and use of the body as artistic medium—­as in
Ami’s transformation in Machine Girl—­compel revenge or signify atone-
ment. As Katherine Mangu-­Ward notes: “Members of the yakuza have
long favored tattoos covering the entire upper body to signal their mafia
status. They also amputate all or part of a pinky finger. One study esti-
mated that between 40 percent and 70 percent of the yakuza had sacri-
ficed a digit, generally making the cut themselves.” She continues, “Even
with tattoos and auto-­amputations, this traditional mafia once operated
almost completely in the open” (64). While invoking a brief sense of social
panic caused by nonnormative bodies, Mangu-­Ward observes a recent
past where, to borrow from Weheliye, yakuza bodies and their excesses—­in
part due to amputation—­are a politicized, sexual life-­form outside the le-
168 | The Matter of Disability

gal order. As self-­punishment for significant crimes, pinky amputation,

ironically, becomes a means to signify and regulate yakuza order inter-
nally and externally. If “by 1974 the Japanese B-­movie industry was pro-
ducing 100 yakuza movies a year” (Mangu-­Ward 64), then many audi-
ences would be able to “read” yakuza bodies and their scarification
on-­screen and off while understanding amputation or bodily violence as a
reciprocal act of retaliation or punishment. Gambetta considers such scar-
ification generative, unifying and agential, calling it “the joint production
of a signal of courage—­I slash your face, you slash mine” (144).
Further historical context adds to Iguchi’s characterizations of Ami.
After receiving a weaponized prosthetic that enables her revenge, she op-
erates primarily as a killing machine. Ami’s partial machine body then
erases her biological and reproductive possibilities on film (something
Rodriguez’s film counters with Cherry Darling). Hirabayashi Hatsuno-
suke’s machine-­age short story “Robot” (1928) evokes anxieties of emer-
gent technology and eugenics by mechanizing the female body’s repro-
ductive abilities. Mimi Nakamura notes that the story “reveals both desire
and fear towards the mechanization of human bodies and explores the
bodily boundaries and responsibilities of female bodies” to reflect “certain
eugenic dreams (the mechanization of biological reproduction)” (171,
182). Like Ford’s assembly line and other Brave New World–­esque, mecha-
nized “dreams” of the modernist era, they often arrive with systemic ex-
clusion, sterilization, and the privileging of some biological or physical
traits over others to offer a “utopian” future that erases female (reproduc-
tive) agency. Nakamura notes David Skal’s discussion of a “mad science
genre” (182) where the female body and biological reproduction are re-
jected in favor of mechanical intervention. Taken further, “The female
body in the mad lab, as in the larger culture, simply can’t be left alone; it
must [be] surgically retooled and transformed, rearranged, replaced, or
replicated” (Skal, qtd. in Nakamura 183). In other words, the technologi-
cally altered female body becomes something else. For Ami, a history of
technology subsuming female reproduction limits her narrative possibili-
ties in sociotextually inequitable ways with no alternatives other than dis-
abled character as vengeful killer.
The amputation of Ami’s arm by the yakuza who kill her little brother,
Yu, and his friend Takeshi helps establish her short-­lived friendship with
Takeshi’s mom, fellow protagonist, training partner, and mechanic, Miki
(Asami Sugiura). The narrative expedites its prosthetic dependence fol-
lowing some brief preprosthetic medical care. Ami’s wounded arm is ex-
pertly stitched by Miki’s husband (also the son of a doctor, we are told),
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  169

who—­just before ninjas attack and slice him like a jelly mold—­completes
Ami’s machine-­gun prosthetic and throws it to her. As onscreen charac-
ters watch it float overhead in slow motion, attaching seamlessly and ready
to fire from her stump, Ami’s high-­powered arm/gun becomes the vehicle
for the film’s graphic movement and resolution.
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and its scientist-­ inventor character
Rotwang—­who has a prosthetic lower arm clad in black—­offer additional
biopolitical history concerning the reach of prosthetics and how narra-
tives rely on the loss of a limb and its prosthetic replacement.1 After he
successfully animates the now-­iconic, sexless “machine-­man” (who re-
sembles a woman), to the city/factory boss Fredersen’s amazement, the
film invites the possibility of replacing workers with (theoretically pros-
thetic) machines. While gazing emphatically at his prosthesis, Rotwang
exclaims, “Isn’t it worth the loss of a hand to have created the man of the
future, the machine-­man?” As Carole Poore notes, Lang’s film helps estab-
lish and maintain “the social trend toward functionalizing the bodies of
workers in the service of industry and capitalist profits rather than trans-
forming alienated working conditions so that workers would be treated
like human beings rather than machines” (75). Though Machine Girl is not
as worker-­focused as its title might imply, the loss of Ami’s arm leads to
the creation of a weaponized body, whose purpose is to kill. Even as her
acts are couched in an established genre of revenge, she is unable to con-
trol or stop her actions at times. Such excess echoes Poore’s concerns, in-
sofar as Ami’s newly functioning body “alienates” her in a pseudo-­Marxist
fashion from her previous “working” conditions. Her materially oppres-
sive prosthetic marks a precarious shift from a Foucauldian biopolitics to
a contemporary necropolitics, or, as Marina Gržinić notes of Achille
Mbembe’s concept, “the violent execution of bio-­power, but with the logic
of war and the military machine” (15).
The importance of a prosthetic limb to films like Machine Girl and
Planet Terror illustrates that a prosthesis is not just a prosthesis.2 Read
against the grain of Davidson’s literalization of prosthesis as a loss of the
disability real, film and digitization enable an artistic possible of future
bodies. Yet such excessive violence located upon and carried out by the
disabled body becomes troubling—­ even for the main subjects of
grindhouse-­like films. Here, the often culturally devalued disability real,
or, the “missing” in prosthetic logic (a short-­lived state for the films’ hero-
ines) is replaced with physically impossible weapons and destruction,
thereby charging disability experience with fictional spectacle and dan-
gerous implications.
170 | The Matter of Disability

In an interview, Iguchi reveals his intentions and inspirations for Ma-

chine Girl, stating:

It was originally “One Armed Big Busty Girl.” It was [a] simple idea
such as a girl in bikini got her arm chopped off then takes re-
venge. . . . [W]hen I started to think of plot, the idea of putting [a]
machine gun on the arm was added. It was based on my passion to
make a woman-­fighting-­action movie. . . . I was influenced by the
ghost houses or freak shows at Japanese play lands. I was easily
scared but [have] loved those facilities since I was a little child. I
always think a movie should [be] an entertaining tool. (qtd. in
Brown)

How do Iguchi’s tools and influences suggest Machine Girl is merely a joke
or merely entertainment? Using the body and technology to attribute vio-
lent potential to disabled experience—­especially drawn from the oppres-
sions of the freak show—­harms disabled people who struggle to live in an
ableist world.
Machine Girl’s and Planet Terror’s sensationalized femininity intersect
with popular spectacle and deepen militarized culture in ways that dis-
abled people rarely do. From an American perspective, Ami’s and Cherry’s
bodies are fetishized on behalf of the Second Amendment—­as a bodily
imperative to literally bear arms—­that few people with disabilities cite as
crucial to their daily existence. Machine Girl draws almost exclusively on
violent spectacle and shock value to disrupt bodies. Beyond its gore, how-
ever, the film presents an at-­times supportive, empowering onscreen fe-
male relationship between Ami and Miki—­through their shared grief in
losing family members—­from training together (like much of the film, a
send-­up of serious martial arts films) to an extensive final battle that fea-
tures Miki wielding a chainsaw. In avenger-­narrative fashion, hyperbolic
characterizations of bullying and organized crime are met or exceeded by
the protagonists’ violent response—­as a more extreme marking of a “joint
production of a signal of courage” (Gambetta 144).
At the end of the film, after a few rescued schoolboys who were used as
human shields by the teen-­yakuza boss bully—­sliced up by Ami’s brief use
of a chainsaw prosthetic—­thank Ami, Yu appears to her as a smiling, clap-
ping, sunlit apparition. Picking up a nearby sword and pressing it to her
neck, Ami declines suicide as atonement for her violent revenge and fail-
ure to protect her brother. Her parents, we are told early on, committed
suicide after being framed for murder, which left Ami to look after her
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  171

brother. At the beginning of the film a flash-­forward frames a male stu-

dent in the midst of a William Tell routine in an abandoned concrete
building. In a tame visual metaphor for the scenes to follow, he holds an
apple—­pierced by a bully’s knife—­atop his head. While the other high-­
school heavies await their turns, Ami shouts an off-­screen imperative for
them to “cut it out.” When confronted, she comes into view with her left
arm tucked conspicuously behind her back. Flashing a picture of her
brother, she holds them all responsible for his death. Her intimidating be-
havior is met with a misogynistic, murderous comment: “Crazy bitch. I’m
gonna kill you.” Ami’s swift response brings a slow-­motion leap, dissonant
sounds, and, using a scythe, a quick slicing off of the commenter’s hand.
Excessive screams and fake blood abound as Ami reframes ideas of male-­
dominance on her hyperpowered terms of disablement. She yells, “Oh,
stop screaming. You’re a man aren’t you? You’re not gonna die just because
you got your hand chopped off. You see?” And with a whooshing sound
(like Foley from a kung fu move), Ami thrusts her CGI’d stump into view
and shouts, “I only have one arm too!” As narrative often works against its
own declarations, Ami’s interlocutor dies, though not from his now-­
absent arm but from the weaponized prosthetic she subsequently attaches
and uses. Importantly, however briefly, Iguchi empowers Ami (albeit via a
CGI’d stump) without her prosthetic. Ami’s comment and bold fore-
grounding of her amputation challenges—­artistically and narratively—­
Seltzer’s notion of the double logic of prosthesis. Here, agency does not
disappear with a missing limb even as normative ideology equates bodily
wholeness with power.
Prior to one of the final climactic scenes in Robert Rodriguez’s film,
former go-­go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) blasts herself over
the wall of a military compound that houses a deliberately leaked, zombie-­
causing toxic agent, “Planet Terror.” Her actions allow fellow survivors of
the zombie apocalypse to get to nearby helicopters. Before she clears the
wall with the help of her high-­powered prosthetic leg / machine gun /
grenade launcher, her love interest, co-hero of the film, Wray / El Wray
(Freddy Rodríguez) says, “Cherry Darling, it’s all you.” And, for the pur-
poses of the film’s narrative and prosthesis’s role in its closure—­Wray’s
inspirational comment works on several levels. Though he dies on the tar-
mac after being shot by a zombie who was about to shoot Cherry, he, as a
sharpshooter who “never miss[es],” pats her belly. This gesture contextual-
izes their earlier sex scene in reproductive terms. The film closes with
Cherry on a white horse leading “the lost and the weary” to an idyllic
Mexico—­a beautiful beach-­laden shoreline and a Mesoamerican pyramid.
Fig. 1.  Top to bottom: screenshots of heroines Ami Hyuga (Minase Yashiro) from The
Machine Girl (DVD) and Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) from Planet Terror (DVD)
and the starring role of weaponized prosthetics as part of sexualized characters. The
films were released in North America within a year of each other and marked a brief
resurgence of the grindhouse genre—­with disabled twists that are difficult to miss.
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  173

True to sexual innuendo and viewer imagination, she has a baby girl on
her back and a multibarreled machine gun for a prosthesis protecting the
way to a new, zombie-­free utopia.
Christopher González notes how Rodriguez’s inclusion of Tulum (an
ancient Mayan settlement on the southeast coast of Mexico) to close out
the film “dynamically alters [its] sense” (121) in a symbolic fashion. Mov-
ing from a perpetually dark, foggy atmosphere to a sunny, historical sea-
scape shifts the film’s mood and reinforces its motivation of survival. Situ-
ating Mexico as the “promised land” outside the scope of the zombie
plague also enables Rodriguez’s use of “the zombie genre to comment sa-
tirically upon real life-­or-­death situations and material realities that com-
pel people to cross human-­made borders” (González 122). Reading the
film in this way “allows the audience to simulate crossing a border in order
to activate a survival plan” (131), and, more importantly, the elaborate
front-­loading of the film’s narrative to achieve a salient contemporary
critique—­along with the illogical means of escape from the military com-
plex that the film’s main characters endure (along with many other absur-
dities within the film)—­illustrates González’s apt observation that “the
absurd scale of escape is a stringent commentary on the nature of being
Latino in the United States” (131). Although Planet Terror is a US-­made
zombie film, it is also a Latino film that satirizes border-­crossing experi-
ences and comments upon the “other” who is both foreign national and
zombie. Like Iguchi’s Machine Girl, Rodriguez’s film utilizes the prosthetic
for (trans)national purposes where the militarized, disabled female body
reflects and avenges historical and present losses and anxieties in order to
perpetuate normative, stable, national, and cultural imaginaries.
As Javier Martinez avers, “Cherry’s body dominates the film” (333).
Planet Terror features and exploits many performative aspects of bodies,
dancing, fighting, turning into—­or being torn apart by—­zombies. From
Cherry’s routine at the local go-­go bar, to an increasingly chaotic local
hospital, the film features the visceral, and viscera, of the body (much like
Machine Girl, in a less-­camp way with more fleshed-­out characters and a
bigger budget), as its narrative material. Rodriguez’s film often privileges a
heterosexual male gaze and audience by focusing upon Cherry’s legs dur-
ing her onstage routine or while she washes blood from a cut on her leg
after avoiding an oncoming car. The camera’s objectification of Cherry’s
legs as beautiful and ideal foreshadows their wholeness as precarious. The
violent cannibalization of one of them aligns able-­bodiedness with hetero-
normativity, and generates space for the revenge narrative to follow.
Cherry’s body dominates in ways that fetishize (like Ami’s continuous
174 | The Matter of Disability

wearing of a school uniform) her embodiment as both an able-­bodied

dancer and recent amputee. After initially injuring her leg, she walks away
with a limp and offers a “Do I look okay to you?” comment to an inquiring
passerby. She eventually makes it to “The Bone Shack,” a neon-­signed bar-
beque joint that later acts as the film’s gathering spot, to strategize about
cars and guns and how to deal with the zombies. Here she meets Wray,
with whom she shares a romantic past. Though they aren’t entirely clear
about their professions, Cherry does reveal, dryly, that she wants to be a
stand-­up comedian—­ a comment that becomes an able-­ bodied joke
throughout. Their meeting precipitates their car accident—­where Cherry
loses her leg—­not from the crash, but from zombies who pull her out of
the car (into the perpetual greenish haze that lights the outdoor scenes in
the film) and consume her. Wray fends off the zombies to reveal Cherry’s
new physical state. In the next scene, Cherry lies in a hospital bed. She
pulls back the sheet to reveal her swaddled stump with a small square
metal peg attached to the end. After sounds of her holding back vomit, she
starts to cry. Her tears very deliberately etch the layers of makeup on her
face, as a sort of double reveal of a new vulnerability with her alternative
physicality. In terms of narrative time, she reconciles with her phantom
limb and new, disabled ontology rather quickly.3 This inequitable “mira-
cle” reinforces an immediate normative-­narrative requirement for a pros-
thesis so that the film can continue.
After battling his way into the hospital, Wray notices a single boot of
Cherry’s in the hall, signifying her location and her recently disabled body.
He removes the sheet that now covers her head—­presumably to hide from
the danger outside the door—­and the following dialogue ensues:

Wray: Get up. We’re leaving.

Cherry: I can’t walk.
Wray: So what? Get up. Get up!
Cherry: Motherfucker. Look at me. Look at me! I was gonna be a
stand-­up comedian, but who’s gonna laugh now?
Wray: Some of the best jokes are about cripples. Let’s go—­
Cherry: It’s not funny. It’s pathetic.
Wray: Would you stop crying over fucking . . . spilt milk?
Cherry: I have no leg! [Wray breaks off a nearby table leg and jams it
into the base of her stump, she grunts slightly]
Wray: Now you do. What do you think?

[Now they are walking briskly down the hospital corridor, arm in arm]
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  175

Cherry: You could carry me, Wray?

Wray: You never wanted that before. Why start now?

Their obtuse exchange—­including Wray’s predictably uneasy double take

at Cherry’s swaddling—­suits the narrative’s pressures of immediate dan-
ger and normative outcome, while simultaneously suspending our disbe-
lief. From this point on, however (as in Machine Girl), Cherry’s prostheses
(which endure a rapid, militaristic shift from table leg to Gatling gun /
rocket launcher) motivate the entire film. In terms of on-­screen physical-
ity and narrative perspective, the story and its multivalent prostheses re-
fuse her convalescence—­a point their dialogue plays up with a mix of
comical understatement and urgency. Having one’s leg stolen by zombies
is certainly more than crying over spilt milk; however, without physically
moving from the under-­siege hospital, we are inclined to believe Cherry
and Wray will become zombies themselves. The prosthesis is a compul-
sory enabler—­a bootstrap prosthesis—­that supports the narrative and
privileges workability.
As unrealistic as Cherry’s experiences are, the prosthesis occupies the
often-­negative physical, social, and medical spaces of disability in contem-
porary society. Paradoxically, a prosthesis provides her as an (ultra)dis-
abled character with empowering experiences along with excesses of styl-
ized spectacle for presumably normative audiences. Though problematic,
and aware of itself (Cherry as the physical material of the best joke mate-
rial, for example), the above scene refuses sympathy and pity even while
forcing its narrative of compulsory able-­bodiedness on-­screen.
The bolt at the base of Cherry’s stump, which Martinez calls (via pros-
thetic extension) a “rod,” allows for a more sexualized prosthetic discourse
to “support” the film. Somewhat obviously, given how prostheses motivate
the narrative, he notes:

This device seems necessary to advance the plot. How else will the
machine gun attach? But why include this plot device that will ra-
tionalise one absurdity among so many others? The stump with the
protruding rod becomes Cherry’s main interface to the world
around her, especially in her relationship with Wray, who on two
occasions thrusts onto her stump a prosthetic device: first a chair
leg and later a modified machine gun he has made especially for
her. Cherry’s reaction as the prostheses attach is on both occasions
sexualized—­her expressions and sounds mark a kind of inter-
course. It can be argued that the two lovers make their deepest
176 | The Matter of Disability

physical and psychic connection only when there is a prosthetic

involved. (333)

Martinez’s observations, following from problems of prosthesis theories

that do not consider people’s material experiences of prostheses, reveal a
couple of convenient assumptions—­even as fictional representations. As
a fetishized relationship of curiosity, the stump/prosthesis becomes a fo-
cal if illogical detail given what else we are supposed to believe in the
film. From an entertainment-­value perspective, however, Cherry is the
star of the show, and viewers are cued to be most interested in her
status—­especially given the film’s earlier focus on her legs. Martinez’s
thinking through the small peg/bolt as a more sexually and visually pro-
truding “rod” does enable his intercourse theory. Recalling that Cherry
and Wray actually do have nonprosthetic sex during the film’s nondiag-
etic narrative, we might ask why Martinez’s theory also chooses to “ra-
tionalize one absurdity among so many others” when many people who
use prosthetic legs beyond the screen have a pin or peg interface? Wray’s
earlier disavowal of disability’s dominance in the visual field—­with his
I-­can’t-­look-­but-­I’ll-­look behavior—­also reinscribes Cherry’s stump as
spectacle, as a space that once again must be filled in normative-­narrative
ways. As Garland-­Thomson suggests, “Fitting and misfitting are aspects
of materialization” (595), and the resulting disability aesthetic helps the
film succeed by playing up ideas of what a prosthesis should look like
and achieve. Cherry’s “protruding rod” also acts as an interface helping
her to walk, escape zombies, and so on, beyond an overdetermined
“main interface to the world around her” that generates sociotextual in-
equity by limiting her existence or communication without it. Martinez
also observes: “If at first Cherry is portrayed as a hypersexualized object,
her sexuality becomes increasingly muted even as the film focuses on
her augmented form” (334). Assistive technology (however spectacular)
becomes desexualized because the film focuses on her prosthesis and its
accumulative metaphorical weight.
Planet Terror’s threading of compulsory ability in the form of “standing
up” manifests as a physical requirement for Cherry’s comedic aspirations,
which the film cleverly (if discreetly) spools into its able-­disabled resolu-
tion. While escaping from the military compound, Wray gives Cherry a
machine gun prosthetic that he’s (somehow) been working on (like Miki’s
husband on Ami’s prosthetic in Machine Girl) for her. As he attaches it to
her, he says (as ominous tones mix with Spanish guitar), in near evangeli-
cal fashion, “I need you to become who you’re meant to be. Stand!” Not
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  177

surprisingly, Cherry is a quick study and is able to decimate, in a kind of

burlesque barrage, any zombie or enemy in her path—­though it is unclear,
as with Ami’s device, how she actually fires it.
Such representation certainly resists the intent of medical prosthetics
insofar as they “help and imitate nature” (Paré, qtd. in Wills 243). How-
ever, Planet Terror (and its companion Death Proof) digitally destabilizes
and degrades the stability of the film (via scratchy, melting frames and
slipping soundtracks), as if natural elements and time have conspired to
create a worn-­down, nostalgic aesthetic. Taking this idea further, Knowles
discusses the agency of matter amid a contemporary artistic lament for
the loss of celluloid through “cameraless film practice, where physical en-
gagements emphasize time as material and embodied.” She suggests a
“prevalent tendency is the act of burying or submerging the film stock in
earth or water or exposing it to various weather conditions [to] give rise to
visible (and, in certain cases, audible) biochemical degradations” (148).
Rodriguez’s manipulation of film’s materiality coincides with its use of
prosthetics and other props. Cameron notes that Planet Terror “constantly
foregrounds the materiality of traditional cinema as cinema and connects
it with the deterioration of zombie flesh” (84). The film, its biopolitical
content, and commentary act as digital prosthetics. Effects imitate analog
film to generate nostalgia for a “lost” era that reinstates people’s interac-
tions with old technology as normative. Similarly, during the course of the
film, CGI works in multivalent prosthetic fashion to transform Cherry’s
character into a technologically enhanced body.

Conclusion: Empowering the Prosthesis to Enable Lines of

Contemporary Constraint

Isn’t it worth the loss of a hand to have created the man of the future,
the machine-­man?
—­Rotwang, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

The multivalent prosthetic becomes important in a larger sociocultural,

economic, and biopolitical discourse of ability and narrative as it governs
the body. These films, and most notably Cherry Darling’s character, hinge
their success on overt representations of disability that magnetize the
body/prosthetic relationship via spectacle—­where bodily loss also brings
material agency—­and textual element (joke) to sustain their narratives.
While such embodiments and writerly choices might seem innocuous, the
178 | The Matter of Disability

biopolitical and necropolitical roots of these artistic and playful moves

stem from similar “stand up” imperatives of near-­religious fervor. As Her-
schbach outlines, it became a national (American) cultural and economic
project, following the Civil War—­contemporary with the rise of eugenics
and constructions of normalcy—­to convince people (mostly soldiers)
who had lost a leg, for example, to achieve, contribute economically and
normalize socially and physically via a prosthesis.4 She writes that the bur-
geoning industry “drew on evangelical idioms that had proved so effective
in getting volunteers to serve, casting their sacrifice as heroic and indis-
pensable to the moral, political and military triumph of the Union,” not-
ing that “limb manufacturers participated wholeheartedly in this specta-
cle” (28). Invoking ideas of valid citizenry via able-­nationalism, Davis
suggests such companies were motivated to “restor[e] the limbs of soldiers
who had given part of their bodies so that their country’s body would re-
main whole and undivided” (93). As an imperative postwar rehabilitative
process takes hold as normalcy and results in a massive prosthetic limb
industry, sensationalizing prosthetics in militarized ways via a contempo-
rary film titled Planet Terror is no coincidence and shares new material-
ism’s interest in “controversial political issues which involve the politics of
matter” (Cudworth and Hobden 135). Given the film’s border (and broader)
implications—­where militarization becomes geopolitically specific to the
contentious space of the US-­Mexican border—­and that a militarized pros-
thetic enables characters’ escape to Mexico adds to the complexity of pros-
thetics, film, and materiality in contemporary culture.
Both Iguchi’s Machine Girl and Rodriguez’s Planet Terror are so over-
wrought with prosthetics that they offer ableist projections upon pros-
theticized individuals. Thus, the films’ protagonists’ revenge is not focused
on the loss of normative ability, but rather on an overheated symbolic
mechanism that their prostheticized bodies create and maintain. Reading
their bodies involves more than social satire. Each film’s satirization of a
given culture (yakuza and bullying in Machine Girl, militarization and
borders in Planet Terror) links disability with violence. Although disabled,
weaponized bodies share a lineage with post-­atomic Japanese fantasy (like
Akira) to ward off widespread terror and destruction, the overt objectifi-
cation and sexualization of disabled female characters such as Ami and
Cherry seeks titillation through bodies that a posthuman culture overout-
fits on behalf of fears of vulnerability to random violence. Given recent
attacks in France, the UK, Bangladesh, San Bernadino, Newtown, Or-
lando, and Munich, violent acts carried out by female, disabled characters
become additionally troubling. Significantly, in Machine Girl and Planet
 An Arm Up or a Leg Down?  |  179

Terror, vulnerable bodies (disabled, female) become the most militarized

and “protective” in their revenge narratives. Hence the disabled body con-
tinues to signify something else beyond itself—­sexualized, militarized,
compulsory violence. In other words, disability in these films becomes
emblematic—­and enables—­violence within current contexts of global
panic while also ensuring “stable and happy” endings.

NOTES

1. In Disability in Twentieth Century German Culture Poore mentions an “ironic

short prose piece” written “Shortly after the Kapp Putsch in 1920 [by] the dadaist Raoul
Hausmann” suggesting that, as Poore notes, “Germany needs workers with prostheses
because artificial limbs never tire and the proletarians could then work twenty-­five
hours per day.” An “officer’s solution for rebuilding Germany [after World War I and a
failed revolution] is ‘a prosthetic economy instead of a Soviet dictatorship.’” She suggests
that the “article was not mere dadaist silliness but rather a concrete satire that referred
to the peppy discourse in rehabilitation circles about getting disabled veterans back to
work as soon as possible” (33).
2. A recent viral video features amputee Christina Stephens, who builds and at-
tempts to use a lower-­leg prosthesis made of Legos.
3. Oliver Sacks’s A Leg to Stand On shares several “case studies” of phantom limb
experiences.
4. In Claiming Disability Simi Linton shares some “oral history conducted with dis-
abled Canadian World War II veterans and other disabled people” and their “transition
from hospital-­style wicker wheelchairs used to transport patients to self-­propelled,
lighter-­weight, folding chairs” (27). One person recalls, “There were a few cerebral palsy
chaps there. . . . If they transgressed any rule . . . they’d take their wheelchairs away from
them and leave them in bed for two weeks.” A vet described how the medical staff ’s ef-
forts were geared toward getting veterans to walk with crutches, but when the vets dis-
covered the self-­propelled chairs, they realized “it didn’t make much sense spending all
that energy covering a short distance [on crutches] . . . when you could do it quickly and
easily with a wheelchair. . . . It didn’t take long for people to get over the idea that walking
was that essential” (Tremblay, qtd. on 27). “As Appleton’s Journal noted in 1875, ‘Some
connoisseurs have collections of legs—­week-­day legs, Sunday-­legs, dancing-­legs, each
expressly made for a distinct purpose’” (Herschbach 28)—­arguably, to sell more legs.

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sunosuke’s ‘Robot’ and Early Showa Robot Literature.” Japan Forum, vol. 19, no. 2,
2007, pp. 169–­90.
Poore, Carol. Disability in Twentieth-­Century German Culture. U of Michigan P, 2007.
Sacks, Oliver W. A Leg to Stand on. Summit Books, 1984.
“Screenshot from Planet Terror.” Directed by Robert Rodriguez, performance by Rose
McGowan, StarPics, 2012.
“Screenshot from The Machine Girl.” Directed by Noboru Iguchi, performance by
Minase Yashiro, Media Blasters, 2008.
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. Taylor and Francis, 2014.
Sobchack, Vivian. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor and Materiality.” The Pros-
thetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, edited by Mar-
quard Smith and Joanne Morra, MIT P, 2006, pp. 17–­41.
Stephens, Christina. “My Legoleg.” YouTube.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke UP, 2014.
Wills, David. Prosthesis. Stanford UP, 1995.

FILMS

Akira. Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo, Pan Vision, 2005.

The Machine Girl. Dir. Noboru Iguchi. Performances by Minase Yashiro, Asami, Kentarō
Shimazu, Honoka, Tarō Suwa, and Ryôsuke Kawamura. Media Blasters, 2008.
Metropolis. Dir. Performances by Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel and Rudolf Klein-­Rogge.
Kino, 2002.
Planet Terror. Dir. Robert Rodriguez. Performances by Rose McGowan and Freddy Ro-
dríguez. StarPics, 2012.
Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS
Male Pregnancy, Disability, and Viral Materialism
in “Bloodchild”

Matt Franks

Narratives of male pregnancy breach traditional conceptions of reproduc-

tive materiality. Pregnant men simultaneously embody material excess
and lack, bodily enhancement and deformity, and a capacity for empathy
as well as an enforced reliance on others. They take on nonmasculine traits
of maternal interdependence and challenge traditional ideals about male
self-­sufficiency. The pregnant man can neither socially nor biologically
sustain the fiction of masculine selfhood as an individualistic, able-­bodied
endeavor, since his material body is no longer his own. As Michael David-
son has argued, representations of male pregnancy can be read as disabil-
ity narratives, since they defamiliarize bodily normativity, on the one
hand, yet often use disabled life to amplify the horrors of a genetically al-
tered future, on the other (208).1 I would add that male pregnancy dis-
rupts the material production of normative bodies by violating the bound-
aries between subject and object, between human and nonhuman life, and
between bodily matter and corporeal experience. For example, while me-
dia coverage has framed pregnant trans men like Thomas Beattie as freak-
ish and mentally unsound in his violation of material bodily norms of
pregnancy—­such as having top surgery and using hormone therapy—­
such stories also force mainstream viewers to split the materiality of re-
productive organs from the experience of being a gendered body.2 As
such, male pregnancy offers a unique model for theorizing the gendered,
racialized matter of disability.
Nowhere is the trope of male pregnancy more famously depicted than
in the 1979 film Alien. In the film a parasitic extraterrestrial species im-

182
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  183

pregnates a human male, and a phallic alien baby subsequently bursts

through the host’s ribcage, birthing itself in a gush of blood. Alien reverses
traditional sexual and reproductive roles within bodily matter itself, since
the male host is orally penetrated, made passively unconscious, and forced
to sacrifice his all-­too-­material body for the birth of another. The alien
ruptures norms of masculine capacity and mobility by literally breaking
through human skin and bone. Alien’s portrayal of male pregnancy relies
on narrative prosthesis, however, since material bodily disfigurement
comes to stand in for the consequences of violating both social and bio-
logical norms of gender.3 The monstrous birth represents gender and spe-
cies difference as nightmarishly repulsive, and the disfigured body of the
host father links disability with death. Alien uses the specter of deformity
to play into its audience’s fears about the instability of the body’s gendered
matter as well as its socialization. In the film’s logic, in other words, violat-
ing social and material boundaries results in deformities that kill.
In her 1984 short story “Bloodchild,” Octavia E. Butler reimagines the
interspecies reproduction of Alien—­complete with a similar bloody
birth scene—­by portraying male pregnancy as a disability, but one that
produces dependent life rather than death. The story is about an alien
species, the Tlic, who impregnate human males in order to reproduce.
With the care of a Tlic parent in the story, however, the brown-­skinned
human host in the birth scene is kept alive after the alien grubs eat their
way out of his abdomen. Unlike Alien’s portrayal of disability as a deathly
metaphor for violating gendered materiality, “Bloodchild” portrays alien
insemination as an act of state-­sponsored disabling that manages popu-
lations in ways akin to chattel slavery.4 I use the story to explore how the
US state materially exposes bodies of color to HIV/AIDS as a technique
of control in the afterlife of slavery. Although one could read “Blood-
child” as trafficking in the same kind of narrative prosthesis as Alien—­
since Butler likewise portrays male pregnancy as horrifying, violent, and
bloody—­I insist that the story moves beyond positioning disability as a
placeholder for other kinds of difference such as gender and race. Therí
Pickens makes this argument about Butler’s texts in general, demon-
strating that she “does not rely on disability solely to begin her texts.
Rather, disability suffuses [them] and becomes the scaffolding that aids
in understanding the text qua text” (175). While, like Alien, “Bloodchild”
depicts bodily difference as monstrous, I take up Pickens’s approach to
reading disability beyond positive and negative representations and in-
stead examine Butler’s textual engagement with interspecies reproduc-
tion as a way to depict the material production of HIV/AIDS-­related
184 | The Matter of Disability

disabilities. Further, Sami Schalk demonstrates that Butler’s work is an

example of how “disability metaphors often provide cogent allusions to
the historical and contemporary intersectionality and mutually consti-
tutive nature of blackness and disability” (148). Following Schalk, I re-
fuse the split between disability metaphors and disability structures, and
I read alien insemination in “Bloodchild” as a metaphor that does not
obscure disability, but instead draws attention to how disability biopoli-
tics are racialized in material ways.
In this spirit of reading racialized disability as a material element in
“Bloodchild,” I argue that the story demonstrates how disability, and HIV/
AIDS in particular, has been made to work in the service of producing
racialized state-­dependent life as well as death. Critically, the aliens in the
story ensure their own survival by continually reproducing the materially
dependent bodies of their human reproductive hosts. They are not con-
cerned for the lives of the humans except as reproducers, and I extend this
reading to account for how people with HIV/AIDS-­related disabilities are
not the primary beneficiaries of state care. Instead the state serves its own
interests by continually reproducing certain people with HIV/AIDS as
passive health-­care consumers, while preventing others—­largely people of
color—­from access to care, and disallowing any alternative forms of inter-
dependence or care outside of its own network. Such a reading demon-
strates how state biopolitics have harnessed HIV/AIDS-­related disabilities
as part of what Foucault calls “campaigns to teach hygiene and to medical-
ize the population” (Society 244). Butler allows us to see that the state no
longer eliminates all people with disabilities, but instead produces mate-
rial bodily difference along racial lines to reproduce some as docile medi-
calized populations and others as disposable. Timothy Lyle calls this the
domestication of HIV, which entails the rehabilitation of HIV-­positive
subjects into normative embodiment and thus “depends on the abjection
of other queerer black bodies and their supposed values and behaviors”
(154). While the reproduction of certain disabilities like HIV/AIDS is no
longer a death sentence, instead it has become a tactic for the state to con-
tinually produce dependent populations by manipulating the matter—­
viral and pharmaceutical—­that goes into and out of its subjects’ bodies.
And “Bloodchild” demonstrates that for black people in the United States,
who are the highest-­risk group for contracting HIV and who have been
largely barred access to treatment and prevention, the material produc-
tion of disability on and in the black body is a part of the biopolitical after-
life of slavery.
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  185

HIV/AIDS Biopolitics

“Bloodchild” traces how state biopolitics exposes bodies to viral matter at

unequal rates, and I use the story to account for how the state implants
some who contract HIV with life-­prolonging antiretrovirals while leaving
others to die. I use biopolitics to describe coercive state practices of popu-
lation management, and I apply a new materialist lens to disability bio-
politics in order to account for this viral manipulation of dependent and
disabled bodies. My approach responds to Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost’s call for a materialist understanding of “the biopolitical interest the
modern state has taken in managing the life, health, and death of its popu-
lations” by taking into consideration “the unprecedented micropowers
that biotechnology is engendering” on and within the body (22–­23). I read
Butler’s portrayal of interspecies breeding as a way to grasp how the state
uses viral infection and the micropowers of pharmaceutical consumerism
to manage life and death for those with HIV/AIDS. I thus engage with
new materialism by reading male pregnancy in “Bloodchild” as a repre-
sentation of the dislocation of human by nonhuman viral bodily matter.
Sophia Magnone argues that “Bloodchild” is a story about the domestica-
tion of nonhuman animals and the animalization of humans, challenging
“humankind’s altogether violent, repressive, and deadening treatment of
livestock, pets, and other domesticated creatures” (109).5 Analogous to
this reading, and in the spirit of Lyle’s account of domesticating HIV, I
focus on how the manipulation of viral matter domesticates some animal-
ized humans with HIV/AIDS while exposing others to death. My reading
is also in line with the work of Mel Chen, who chronicles the racialization
of nonhuman matter in the human body. Her account of the racialized
toxicity of lead, for example, parallels my reading of virality, since both
examples demonstrate how the state manages the “potential threat to val-
ued human integrities” posed by toxic and viral substances in order to
preserve racialized “animacy hierarchies” (159).
My reading of “Bloodchild” demonstrates that HIV infection and care
is one subset of the state’s hierarchical biopolitical management of crip/
queer/black bodies.6 This supports David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s
recent argument, in The Biopolitics of Disability, that the state increasingly
incorporates disabled bodies into national life—­or domesticates them—­in
profoundly discriminatory ways. Previously consigned to death, privi-
leged individuals with HIV and AIDS are now rehabilitated and enlisted
into life. They are subject to forms of self-­disciplinary care that manage
186 | The Matter of Disability

their viral load in order to make them productive, pliant citizens. In other
words, they are the targets of what Jasbir Puar characterizes as a “reca-
pacitation of a debilitated body” (“Coda” 152). In Puar’s terms, attending
to rehabilitation means theorizing how biopolitical aggregates of capacity
and debility work in tandem to manage populations. For populations with
or at risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, those who have access to prevention
and treatment are either kept on the side of capacity or recapacitated
through pharmaceutical regimens, while those who do not—­often people
of color—­are exposed to debility or premature death through neglect.
In his book Unlimited Intimacy, Tim Dean demonstrates how some
men have rejected these forms of population management by practicing
barebacking: intentionally passing and contracting the HIV virus by hav-
ing sex without condoms. Tim Dean describes barebacking as a radical
practice of rejecting risk management by becoming pregnant with and
reproducing a virus. He argues that barebackers revalue having HIV as a
positive form of embodiment rather than a stigmatized one, and that they
form radically new kinship networks through sharing the virus. Dean sees
intentional HIV infection as radical in its rejection of able-­bodied norms
of health, aligning it with a disability studies critique of able-­bodied stan-
dards of health. Despite the radical potential of barebacking as a model for
“desiring disability,” however, I explore how the biopolitical state has in-
creasingly neutralized such forms of resistance by developing ways to
regulate HIV/AIDS transmission without condoms and restigmatize the
virus. In other words, biopolitical intervention has transformed a crip/
queer barebacking subculture into a self-­disciplining, condomless, able-­
bodied gay mainstream. My reading of “Bloodchild” traces how transgres-
sive crip/queer bodies, while potentially resistant to or unincorporable
within biopolitics, have been brought into the service of producing state-­
dependent life.
The effect of such a reincorporation into state-­managed life is that
HIV/AIDS, and disability in general, is once again produced as something
to fear and avoid at all costs. Additionally, people with HIV/AIDS, and
especially those who are people of color, are blamed for having failed to
protect and care for themselves. By blaming the individual, the state masks
the profound lack of access to prevention and treatment for those without
white economic privilege. Butler’s treatment of slavery in “Bloodchild” il-
lustrates the way that the state has long used disability to enforce the dis-
posability of black bodies, and continues to do so through the racialized
biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in the afterlife of slavery. The story modulates
this history of biopolitical racism through speculative fiction, tracing how
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  187

the aliens implant the story’s protagonist Gan with nonhuman matter, de-
bilitate him under the illusion of free choice, and then compel him to re-
capacitation through state care. Such care legitimates direct intervention
into the material composition of the normatively disabled bodies to en-
sure their prolonged state-­dependent life or death as the state sees fit: as
the head Tlic ominously pronounces to Gan after impregnating him at the
end of the story, “You will live now” (29).
“Bloodchild” was first published in 1984, only a few years into the AIDS
crisis. Even though this was an early and chaotic moment in the epidemic,
well before bareback subcultures emerged, I want to suggest that the story
offers a way to think through how HIV/AIDS would later be incorporated
into state biopolitics. Marty Fink briefly points toward a reading of “Blood-
child” as an HIV/AIDS narrative in its viral portrayal of how “the Tlic
co-­opt humans as incubators for the creation of their own spawn” (418). In
the story male pregnancy is a risky, torturous, and bloody process, he
states, “that nevertheless inspires inseparable closeness and the physical
intimacy of sex” (418). Butler alludes to early reactions to the AIDS epi-
demic by evoking the intense pleasure and pain associated with queer sex,
as well as portraying it as risky in its reproduction of nonhuman biological
matter. For example, Gan assists in the bloody birth scene, and he de-
scribes it in sexual and sadomasochistic terms: “She opened him. His
body convulsed . . . I felt as though I were helping her torture him, helping
her consume him . . . I couldn’t possibly last until she was finished” (15).
His feelings of sickness are inseparable from his sexual pleasure, and his
orgasmic experience of pleasure/pain connote homophobic reactions to
“alien” desires and viral presences in the queer body in the 1980s. Moving
such discourses of gay sex as death that “consumes” life, though, Butler
also anticipates how biopolitics would incorporate normative HIV/AIDS
patients into life as dependent crip/queer consumers of life-­prolonging
medical goods and services. “Bloodchild” speculates about the future of
HIV/AIDS biopolitics by imagining what might happen to interspecies
forms of reproduction like barebacking once they become manageable
within systems of racialized, gendered, and economic life.
In order to engage with these HIV/AIDS politics, Butler uses male
pregnancy as a metaphor for bodily dependence. Carrie Sandahl points
out that the material process of HIV/AIDS transmission has long been
conceptualized in terms of procreation: “The AIDS virus, after all, tricks
the body’s cells into surrogate parenthood by forcing them to replicate bad
copies of themselves, renegade robot copies that eventually take over and
destroy the originals” (51). Further, Dean illustrates how barebacking
188 | The Matter of Disability

communities have taken up the language of pregnancy to describe passing

sperm and reproducing the virus from person to person, most notably in
the use of the term “breeding.” “With the virus coded as a gift, seroconver-
sion can be understood as successful insemination,” he writes (86). Since
protection was never needed to prevent pregnancy in sex between men, he
argues, men who bareback “represent their deliberate abandonment of
condoms as an attempt to conceive” (86). Far from mimicking heteronor-
mative reproduction, however, according to Dean reproducing the virus
breaks up traditional lines of inheritance by dislocating human life in fa-
vor of virality. Thus barebacking moves along the precarious lines of sex-
ual encounters and creates new hierarchies of family based on shared vul-
nerability rather than protection.7 Connecting this analysis with disability,
Octavio Gonzalez argues that for bugchasers—­those who seek serocon-
version through bareback sex—­ “their HIV/AIDS-­ philia suggests one
means of crafting a radical ‘critically disabled/critically queer’ sensibility”
(103). Bugchasers reject the stigma and disability-­phobia inherent in dis-
courses of safe sex by intentionally reproducing the virus, removing the
latex barrier that prevents exchange of bodily matter and become “preg-
nant” with each other’s viral “seed.” This material bodily openness to alien
matter and to disability refuses disciplinary regulations that would reca-
pacitate the debilitated queer body into hygiene and able-­bodiedness.
Despite this crip potential, in the years since Dean’s influential analysis,
material practices and representations of barebacking have swung back
toward risk management. While I do not wish to ignore the ongoing, cre-
ative models for refusing risk management and forging alternative forms
of kinship that continue to exist in and outside of barebacking communi-
ties, nonetheless disciplinary self-­care has begun to contain such disrup-
tive practices through newer techniques of pharmaceutical prophylaxis,
and particularly as barebacking has spread to the gay mainstream. The
vast majority of mainstream gay porn has converted to bareback sex in the
past six years, and typical mainstream gay porn videos begin with a warn-
ing screen encouraging viewers to reduce risk and assuring them that all
performers have been meticulously tested for HIV/AIDS, many even
specifying the method and type of test used. More fundamentally, bare-
back sex has become much less risky with the introduction of HIV en-
zyme blockers like PrEP and antiretroviral treatment-­ as-­
prevention
(TasP) drugs.8 These drugs minimize risk and protect the health of its
able-­bodied, normatively gendered stars, removing disability from the
realm of possible outcomes of “risky” sex and reinforcing ableist defini-
tions of HIV as undesirable and “dirty.” Rather than actual risk, PrEP of-
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  189

fers safe barebacking and fetishizes the illusion of risk. For example, bare-
back porn privileges the moment of insemination by fetishizing the thrill
and danger of inserting viral semen into the anus. But now that insemina-
tion can happen without passing on HIV, thanks to pharmaceutical inter-
vention, the risk has become hollowly symbolic rather than real. In place
of the crip/queer bonds and risks of male pregnancy, biomedical care now
redirects barebacking back toward the paradigm of safe sex, which restig-
matizes HIV/AIDS and disabled embodiment.
By tracing the stigmatizing effects of PrEP and TasP, I do not wish to
detract from the important recent advancements in HIV/AIDS treatment.
However, I also insist that the widespread usage of biomedical prevention
must not restigmatize HIV/AIDS, must not become coercive in its attempt
to eradicate disability, and must not cover over the continued lack of ac-
cess to care experienced by many, and in particular disabled people and
people of color. I am not arguing against using PrEP and TasP, particularly
since, as with condoms earlier in the epidemic, there are many homopho-
bic barriers toward education, accessibility, and the implementation of
protective measures against the spread of HIV/AIDS that desperately
need to be overcome. I also insist on the importance of maintaining op-
position to the many homonormative naysayers like Larry Kramer who
condemn PrEP because they fear it will lead to unbridled promiscuity, and
whose position ironically demonizes gay sex by employing the same re-
spectability rhetoric initially used against condoms.9 Instead, I attend to
how using pharmaceuticals as a form of risk management itself risks stig-
matizing and controlling crip/queer/black lives, and I argue that adopting
treatment need not mean sacrificing resistance to state biopolitics.
For the remainder of this chapter, I use “Bloodchild” to intervene into
some of the risks of HIV/AIDS biopolitics for crip/queer/black subjects.
Foremost among such dangers is the stratification of care not only be-
tween but also within queer, crip, and black communities, whose lives are
seen as more or less valuable in the state’s animacy hierarchy. As Mitchell
and Snyder argue, “The price of recent attempts to fold disability into the
life of the nation might prove quite steep—­for those disabled subjects who
aspire to find themselves comfortably ensconced among the normatively
disabled while further distancing themselves from those who decline such
membership” (62). In other words, those who have access to state medical
care reproduce norms of bodily health while they simultaneously stigma-
tize those who refuse such care, are ineligible, or seek alternative modes of
community-­based support. I also recognize the seemingly contradictory
nature of my argument, since it lies at the center of what Puar has recently
190 | The Matter of Disability

identified as a tension between maintaining disability pride and con-

demning the violent deployment of disability by the state. Extrapolating
from work by Nirmala Erevelles and Helen Meekosha, Puar argues that
affirming disability culture and halting the state’s production of disability
are projects that must be seen as “relational supplements” rather than con-
flicting agendas (Right to Maim 88). Following this imperative, I argue that
HIV/AIDS must be destigmatized and also that we must stop the uneven
production of HIV/AIDS on racialized bodies. I turn to “Bloodchild” not
to resolve the tension between these positions, but to insist that, for both,
HIV/AIDS care must be wrenched away from state biopolitics.

Producing Dependence

Butler traces how potentially transformative crip/queer/black practices of

kinship and support are seduced back into the biopolitical state through
enforced dependence on—­and exclusion from—­medical consumerism.
The Tlic character T’Gatoi represents the intertwining of state and kinship
in the story, since she is not only the head of Gan’s family but also the
“government official in charge of the Preserve” where all the humans are
kept (3). T’Gatoi assumes the state’s role in administering biopolitical care,
and she institutes kinship networks that are dependent on the state by
breaking up human family ties. The Tlic keep their human families passive
by feeding them “sterile eggs,” which are nonreproductive but bring plea-
sure, prolong life, and increase vigor (3). The eggs are a kind of drug, and
T’Gatoi encourages Gan to eat them so he can “enjoy not being sober” (5).
The Tlic also sting humans with their tails in a way that is not painful, but
draws blood, dulls pain, and induces sleepiness. The sterile eggs and pain-
less injections are techniques of risk management in the story, since they
insulate against the natural and pregnancy-­related deterioration of human
health. The eggs and injections also coerce the human reproducers into
passivity by drugging them, producing their consent to being held captive
and impregnated. In other words, the Tlic use biopolitical techniques that
manipulate the bodily matter of the humans to extend and optimize life,
thereby reducing them to passive reproductive hosts.
The story’s treatment of male pregnancy differs from HIV infection in
distinct ways, since in reality the state does not directly implant the virus
directly in its subjects as the Tlic do in “Bloodchild.” However, the state
does expose many crip/queer/black subjects to the virus by limiting access
to prevention and then claiming the right to intervene in their material
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  191

bodies. Robert McRuer argues, for example, that “global capitalism (and
specifically the multinational pharmaceutical companies most invested in
the traffic in protease inhibitors) reins in or constrains justice for people
with HIV/AIDS, short-­circuiting their capacity to exercise choice in rela-
tion to the collective future” (230). Just as the human hosts do not have the
ability to choose whether to receive the “benefits” of the sterile eggs and
injections, people with HIV/AIDS and other disabilities often do not have
the ability to choose alternative options for treatment or to refuse care in
the first place. This is symptomatic of what McRuer calls a “rehabilitative
logic” that “governs contemporary understandings of and responses to
what we should still call the AIDS crisis” (108). The imperative of reha-
bilitation is coercive because it lulls and “drugs” people with HIV/AIDS
into accepting forms of state and medical care that are predicated on the
undesirability of disability.10
Butler refutes the pretense that such biomedical intervention serves
the interests of people with HIV/AIDS, and instead demonstrates that
“care” primarily serves the interests of the state in reproducing compliant
health-­care consumers. In the birth scene, for example, T’Gatoi adminis-
ters stings like anesthetics to the pregnant man, saying, “I’ve stung you as
much as I dare for now. . . . When this is over, I’ll sting you to sleep and you
won’t hurt anymore” (14). She also tells him that when the Tlic who im-
pregnated him arrives, “she’ll give you eggs to help you heal” (14). While
T’Gatoi assures him that it is for his own good that she administers such
care, it is clear that her real concern is not for his life but for the survival
of her own species. “A good family,” she declares as she pulls six healthy
grubs from him, explaining that if the Tlic used other species besides hu-
mans to reproduce, she would be “happy to find one or two alive” (17). In
other words, the Tlic administer such thorough care only because humans
serve as optimal reproducers compared with other animals. The care ad-
ministered by the Tlic certainly has a desirable effect by saving the lives of
their reproductive hosts, but this care would not be needed if the Tlic did
not impregnate humans in the first place. It is also clear that such care is
motivated by the desire to extend human life only in order to produce pas-
sive host bodies within the Tlic baby industry. When T’Gatoi cuts into the
pregnant human host, for example, the man screams and convulses, but
she “seemed to pay no attention as she lengthened and deepened the cut,
now and then pausing to lick away blood” (15). Her lack of attention to his
pain demonstrates that she only cares about the future generations he will
eventually carry if he lives. Licking his wounds is a form of both consump-
tion and care, since, as Gan explains, “His blood vessels contracted, react-
192 | The Matter of Disability

ing to the chemistry of her saliva, and the bleeding slowed” (15). The am-
biguity between consuming and caring for the host demonstrates that
T’Gatoi is not concerned with saving his life in itself, but for the purposes
of prolonging his material existence as a host body that she and her grubs
will continually consume and replenish.
T’Gatoi’s consumptive care is analogous to HIV/AIDS pharmaceuti-
cal markets. HIV/AIDS medicine is a part of what Mitchell and Snyder
call a disability consumption market, and what Merri Lisa Johnson and
Robert McRuer have termed a “crip economy.” “Disability identity is
now part of capitalism’s array of target markets,” Johnson and McRuer
argue, constituting an emergent “‘crip economy’ akin to the globalized
queer pink economy” (128). By prolonging the life of those with and at
risk of getting HIV/AIDS who can afford health care, the medical indus-
try maintains an endless stream of pharmaceutical consumers at the in-
tersection of crip and pink economies, rather than losing them to death.
Quite literally, as “Bloodchild” demonstrates, “licking the blood away” is
a more sustainable form of “consuming” and replenishing HIV/AIDS
patients, since it continually produces them as consumers dependent on
biomedical care. While the economy in the story is fundamentally dif-
ferent from HIV/AIDS biomedicine, in that the story portrays a sce-
nario more akin to reproductive slavery than medical consumerism, by
linking the two I demonstrate how “Bloodchild” exposes that biomedi-
cal capitalism is a part of the afterlife of slavery. For example, certain
resistant, unruly characters, like Gan’s mother and brother, are unincor-
porable within the Tlic state, and this demonstrates how transgressive
crip/queer/black subjects are implanted with disability and left to die
outside of state care, even while upstanding subjects like Gan are incor-
porated into the state. This aggregation of populations demonstrates
that, while HIV/AIDS biopolitics is not a form of slavery, it nonetheless
works along and within racialized lines forged in slavery to ensure the
dependence and disposability of black bodies.11
Mitchell and Snyder articulate such forms of dependence on a larger
scale, noting that “neoliberalism tends to produce all bodies as languish-
ing  .  .  . in order to exploit new treatment markets” (40). The voracious
appetite of such markets is evident in “Bloodchild,” when Gan wonders
about T’Gatoi, “Did she like the taste? Did childhood habits die hard—­or
not die at all?” (17). Once a grub herself, eating her way out of her human
host for her own sustenance, she now continues to consume human blood
with techniques that ensure an indefinite supply. This mirrors how phar-
maceutical companies perfect techniques of prolonging dependent life so
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  193

that they will continually consume and replenish their patients, ensuring
a continual flow of profit. As Nishant Shahani argues, “the biopoliticiza-
tion of AIDS” is expanding such markets “through continued pharmaceu-
tical profiteering, a regime of intellectual ‘rights’ that mediates drug af-
fordability, and patent exclusivity that is implicated in a form of
necropolitics” (27). Such trends suggest that the bloodlust of pharmaceuti-
cal profit is what drives the crip economy of HIV/AIDS consumerism,
rather than a concern for patients themselves.
Perhaps the most viable model for resistance to biopolitical consumer-
ism in the story comes from Gan’s mother, Lien. In the first pages of the
story, while Gan is comfortably cradled within T’Gatoi’s limbs and drinks
greedily from the drugged eggs, his mother refuses to drink. Gan wonders
why she “denied herself such a harmless pleasure,” since “Less of her hair
would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs prolonged life, pro-
longed vigor. . . . But my mother seemed content to age before she had to”
(3). Clearly, though, Lien is aware that the eggs are not “harmless,” since
although they prolong life, they also induce consent. When Lien reluc-
tantly takes a small sip from an egg, Gan describes her as “unwillingly
obedient” (4). Lien’s failed attempts to refuse care mirror Kane Race’s dis-
cussion of the increasing pressure of HIV/AIDS biomedicine: “The persis-
tent appeal to an AIDS-­free generation effectively overrides any in-­depth
consideration or balanced discussion of the material needs of actually ex-
isting adults, not least those living with HIV infection” (11). In the story
the Tlic similarly override Lien’s material needs: T’Gatoi coerces her into
an arranged marriage and forces her to surrender her children into repro-
ductive slavery. As a result Lien winds up branded with the stigma of one
who would rather be disabled than continue to rely on biomedical care,
and nonetheless forced into rehabilitation.
The imperative of eradicating risk in the story, and in HIV/AIDS pre-
vention itself, reproduces disability stigma in that it assumes that a world
without impairment is universally desirable. Disability studies critics have
consistently pushed back against such rhetoric, insisting that, as Rosema-
rie Garland-­Thomson writes, “the ostensibly progressive socio-­medical
project of eradicating disability all too often is enacted as a program to
eliminate people with disabilities” (15). Butler, though, draws our attention
to how such projects of eradicating disability have developed processes of
extending life for certain people with disabilities in addition to eliminat-
ing others. The Tlic eradicate the risk of birthing “bloodchildren” but si-
multaneously perpetuate dependence on state care. Race outlines a similar
process in terms of HIV/AIDS, arguing that “the possibility of queer resis-
194 | The Matter of Disability

tance to [ending HIV] is rendered unthinkable . . . strategic optimism is

practically compulsory” (11). The “optimism” of ending HIV/AIDS and
disability makes it impossible to refuse care and wishes disabled people
out of existence through killing as well as biopolitical life-­making.

The Biopolitical Afterlife of Slavery

“Bloodchild” showcases how HIV/AIDS is fundamentally racialized, as

the humans in the story are described as having “brown flesh” (14). The
story mirrors Alexander Weheliye’s argument that “the politicization of
the biological always already represents a racializing assemblage” (12).
More specifically, Julie Minich stresses that disability is “highly racialized—­
both in the sense that disability is disproportionately concentrated within
communities of color, which receive unequal health care and experience
elevated risk of experiencing workplace injuries, environmental contami-
nation, and state violence, and in the sense that disability is often used
rhetorically to reinforce white supremacy” (para. 7). HIV/AIDS is a prom-
inent manifestation of how disability is racialized in material ways: as Nir-
mala Erevelles demonstrates, just as black women’s bodies were used in
the reproduction of slaves, the “construction of African American wom-
en’s sexuality and reproductive capacity continues to manifest itself in
policies representing African American women with HIV/AIDS as both
dependent and diseased and, thus, ineligible for resources needed for sur-
vival” (“Color of Violence” 122). The state allows the virus to dispropor-
tionately infect and kill people of color, who are excluded from treatment
and prevention efforts that rely on racist notions of black bodies as already
diseased and disabled.
To read “Bloodchild” as an HIV/AIDS narrative entails seeing viral-
ity as a metaphoric and material mode of bodily difference that is inter-
woven with historical practices of racism. Neel Ahuja argues that, in the
expansion of the US empire over the long twentieth century, “the pur-
ported universality of imperial public health was betrayed by its circula-
tion of racial fears of disease. This made the microscopic bodies of vi-
ruses and bacteria into the very matter of racial differentiation, the lively
conduits of debility and death that threatened a dangerous intimacy be-
tween species and social groups in a globalizing world of empire” (5).
Such dangers called for biomedical management techniques that would
insulate against the risk of racial and species mixing on a material level,
to ensure prolonged life in a racially stratified order. “Bloodchild” repre-
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  195

sents this order in an enslaved human population who are trained to

participate in their own enslavement, as Elys Weinbaum argues. Gan
and his family are forcefully “implanted” with alien DNA and then sub-
ject to the imperatives of “care” and disposability dictated by their alien
overlords. In terms of HIV/AIDS, the story illuminates that, as Shahani
argues, “the attempts to manage ‘risk’ only place queer communities of
color in greater proximity to death and disposability” (26). In other
words, Butler demonstrates how the modes of biological control over
black bodies that were developed in slavery have adapted to the racial-
ized micropowers of HIV/AIDS biopolitics.
As an allegory about slavery coded in terms of male pregnancy, “Blood-
child” makes apparent how disability is materially produced on the flesh
to institute racial control. As Pickens argues about the protagonist Dana in
Butler’s novel Kindred, “Her disability remains tethered to historical black
experiences of enslavement in America. So, disability moves beyond met-
aphor or narrative prosthesis to foreground Dana’s embodiment as testi-
mony about the reality of having social and political ideology emblazoned
on one’s flesh” (170). In other words, slave owners mutilated black bodies,
producing physical and social disabilities as a technique of controlled de-
pendence. And, like the Tlic, slave owners forcibly impregnated female
slaves, raping them in order to ensure a steady supply of future slave gen-
erations. Erevelles argues that “slave women were utilized not only to meet
the Master’s sexual needs, but also in a very concrete way to reproduce the
labor force in the slave economy” (Disability and Difference 57). Erevelles
and Pickens demonstrate the materiality of disability as it was inscribed
on black flesh under slavery, tracing how masters enforced ownership
over slaves by physical disabling them as a way of administering their de-
pendence and obliterating black kinship structures. In “Bloodchild,” the
Tlic similarly produce disability on and in the bodies of their human re-
productive hosts. They implant material dependence into the “brown
flesh” of their slaves, since the pregnant humans will die if unattended by
Tlic care. As Elyce Helford argues, “T’Gatoi, like slavemasters of the ante-
bellum South, attempts to win cooperation through coercion and content-
ment through narcotics” (267). “Bloodchild” makes apparent the thread
that connects the narcotic, sexual, physical, and mental control over black
slaves with the current exposure of black populations to HIV/AIDS.
Butler highlights the sinister nature of this system of dependence by
describing how the Tlic eggs are “anchored” into the human host’s blood
vessels with “hooks,” suggesting not only the parasitic nature of the alien
brood but also the fact that killing or removing them would also kill the
196 | The Matter of Disability

host (18). While disability theorists insist that dependence is a common

feature to all human life, disabled people and people of color are particu-
larly vulnerable to the manipulation of dependence when the biopolitical
state hooks them to its own institutional lifelines. As Mitchell and Snyder
demonstrate, for example, “Contemporary bodies find themselves in-
creasingly colonized by ‘big pharma’ through a process that segments
body parts into insufficiencies, ailments, and shortcomings in need of
chemical and surgical interventions” (40). Such economies of dependence
are also part of the afterlife of slavery: as Christina Sharpe argues, slavery
“simultaneously exhausted the lungs and bodies of the enslaved even as it
was imagined and operationalized as that which kept breath in and vital-
ized the Black body,” and we are now “living in the wake” of such managed
forms of “aspiration” (112–­13). The state reduces the autonomy of people
with disabilities and people of color by enforcing dependence on state in-
stitutions in ways that prevent alternate forms of community support.
Within its context of slavery, “Bloodchild” demonstrates how the manage-
ment of disability was, and continues to be, central to the management of
black bodies—­not only because slaves were literally disabled via amputa-
tion, torture, and forced physical and reproductive labor, but also because
disability was inscribed on black flesh to ensure dependence on white
masters and on the state.12
Resistance to such forms of enforced dependency has often tended to
reassert black able-­bodiedness. But, as “Bloodchild” crucially demon-
strates, such recourse to rehabilitation is destined to fail. Resistance, But-
ler’s text insists, can only be achieved by forging new relations of depen-
dence through crip/queer/black practices of taking ownership over one’s
communal and individual risk, precarity, and dependence rather than at-
tempting to purge disability from blackness. As Ellen Samuels argues,
from the slave era to today, critics have been “deeply invested in the recu-
peration of the black body from a pathologizing and dehumanizing rac-
ism that often justified enslavement with arguments that people of African
descent were inherently unable to take care of themselves—­in other words,
disabled” (30). The tight bind between disability and blackness in the time
and afterlife of slavery means that in attempting to fight to regain bodily
and symbolic freedom, resistance has often denigrated disability and at-
tempted to assert the able-­bodied, able-­minded independence of black
individuals, communities, and populations.13 In “Bloodchild” Gan’s
brother, Qui, represents how such strategies of recuperating the debili-
tated black body to resist enslavement are destined to fail. Qui’s strategy is
to run—­an able-­bodied activity that represents his determination to es-
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  197

cape from being enslaved by using his individual, capable body to flee his
Tlic masters. But in an enclosed, prison-­and plantation-­like compound
on an alien planet, there is literally nowhere to run. The very ground and
infrastructure is set up to deny him mobility: “He began running away—­
until he realized there was no ‘away’” (19). By attempting to recuperate his
individual, able-­bodied, masculine independence, Qui only further en-
trenches his enslavement.
In contrast to Qui’s running, Butler insists that unofficial, non-­state-­
sponsored forms of crip community care, like Lien’s, are the only poten-
tially empowering ones for crip/queer/black people, because individual
rehabilitation and institutional state care are always disciplinary and many
crip/queer/black subjects are barred access to them. “Bloodchild” is rife
with imagery of cages that represent the enfolding protection offered by
the state, but also the entrapment that they learn not to see, or to see as a
comfort rather than an institutional structure of enslavement and incar-
ceration. The insect-­like limbs of the Tlic represent this comforting im-
prisonment. Gan, who was “first caged within T’Gatoi’s many limbs only
three minutes after [his] birth,” finds it comfortable and secure to be en-
closed in them (8). But the other members of his family, who did not ex-
perience this “embrace” until they were older, “said it made them feel
caged” (6). The Tlic cage humans to foster passivity and make them adapt
to and even grow to love their imprisonment.14 In the afterlife of slavery,
moreover, this aspect of the story demonstrates how the mass incarcera-
tion of black people in prisons continues to materially segregate racialized
populations.
The caging is also a way to monitor the bodily fitness of the humans as
reproductive vessels. In a sly reference to “Hansel and Gretel,” Butler sug-
gests that T’Gatoi is trying to fatten Gan up—­not for her, but for her babies
to eat. “It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and
hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny,” thinks Gan (4).
“You’re better  .  .  . You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous,”
says T’Gatoi, as Gan describes her “probing me with six or seven of her
limbs” (4). T’Gatoi cultivates a sense of comfort and care in Gan by caging
him, which prevents him from resisting (by, say, throwing her into a fire).
Butler pointedly highlights how such consent is produced when Gan no-
tices that T’Gatoi’s “probing changed suddenly, became a series of ca-
resses” (4). The Tlic optimize the health of the humans under the illusion
of care, blurring the line between a cold probe and a warm caress. Such
care encourages privileged black subjects to accept state-­sponsored, insti-
tutional forms of treatment that perpetuate their biopolitical dependence
198 | The Matter of Disability

rather than to forge crip/queer/black forms of support on their own terms.

In the afterlife of slavery, the cages are not as literal and visible as they are
in “Bloodchild” or in the era of slavery—­although mass incarceration cer-
tainly comes close.
Black people continue to be, by far, the racial/ethnic population in the
United States that is most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, and it is in part this
active exposure to risk that legitimates state discipline and biopolitical in-
tervention into black lives (“HIV”). For Gan, being skinny is dangerous
only because of the risk that is imposed upon him by implanting him with
the parasitic Tlic grubs. And the only recourse he has to managing that
risk is to accept the “loving” care of T’Gatoi as a state official and family
member who will protect him. As a story about enslavement and virality,
then, “Bloodchild” exemplifies how exposure to the risk of living with or
dying from HIV/AIDS enables state intervention into black lives as part of
the afterlife of slavery. Weheliye articulates these biopolitical valences of
Saidiya Hartman’s concept of the afterlife of slavery, arguing that “racial
slavery and its afterlives in the form of hieroglyphics of the flesh intimately
bind blackness to queering and ungendering” (97). While black bodies are
no longer physically enslaved, in other words, they are still disabled and
queered, and as such painfully feel the phantom limbs of slavery. And Gan
quite literally carries such queer disability on and in his flesh as a pregnant
black boy.

Care or Coercion?

Like Alien, “Bloodchild” reverses traditionally gendered reproductive ma-

teriality. Beyond the fact that the Tlic exclusively impregnate male hu-
mans to reproduce their young—­as Gan explains, they calculatingly save
women “to provide the next generation of host animals”—­it is the female
Tlic who penetrates the host with her phallic ovipositor to deposit the
alien eggs inside of him (21).15 Yet when T’Gatoi insists on implanting him
with her eggs at the end of the story, Gan takes up a shotgun to resist her
and protect himself. This is a reversal of his reverse gendering, since bran-
dishing such a phallic weapon is a way for him to reassert his lost mascu-
linity. While Gan eventually gives in, he insists on keeping the gun and
tells T’Gatoi to “accept the risk” that it presents (26). On the surface it
seems that T’Gatoi is vulnerable here, and that she indeed is sharing some
of Gan’s risk in a kind of biopolitical partnership that mitigates his own
powerlessness. The gun does not represent a fundamental risk to the state’s
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  199

biopolitical system, however, since the humans’ captivity on the preserve

would render any attempt at armed resistance futile, even if Gan were to
kill T’Gatoi. In fact, in a more sinister way, the gun provides Gan with an
illusion of his own power and the risk to the Tlic, and this makes him yet
more passive and manageable. I argue that Gan’s illusion of power corre-
sponds to how barebacking on PrEP, for those who can afford it, reduces
unprotected sex to the fetishized illusion of risk and produces barebackers
as passive consumers of pharmaceutical and state care. As with the loaded
gun, an item that has often been compared to an HIV-­positive erect penis,
the risk is not real.16 As Gonzalez argues, such “ambient fantasies rehearse
attitudes toward the monstrosity of gay desire and gay desire for the
monster—­our collective fascination with and titillating fear of the HIV-­
infected body as queerly enabled because queerly disabled” (104). But it is
now merely the fetishized fantasy of risk as resistance that is titillating—­
while real resistance to the state biopolitical management of HIV/AIDS is
rendered unthinkable.
In the history of HIV/AIDS, there are countless examples of crip/
queer/black resistance to the state-­sponsored management of the virus.
Many of these examples, in seeking to dislodge the stigma around HIV/
AIDS, are based in grassroots kinship networks of dependence and pride
rather than either relying on the state or attempting to eradicate disability.
Dean’s analysis of barebacking is one model—­but there are many others,
from the AIDS quilt to ACT UP.17 But once the state enforces the promise
of a world free from HIV/AIDS and its related disabilities, the ability to
craft bottom-­up forms of care or to refuse risk management dwindles. For
example, when Gan thinks about his mother’s refusal to accept the Tlic
sterile eggs and drugging stings, he thinks, “I wondered when she had
stopped, and why” (6). Race ends his analysis similarly wondering “what
to make of such refusals of prevention and care . . . there are broader ques-
tions about the reluctance of marginalized subjects to access care that ac-
quire particular significance in the biomedical prevention context” (25).
While Butler and Race do not give us a solution, “Bloodchild” does illus-
trate the coercive nature of state biopolitics as it envelops anti-­biopolitical
practices like barebacking, and the importance of keeping open alterna-
tive, community-­based networks of resistance and care. Forgoing resis-
tance runs the risk of (re)stigmatizing disability and HIV/AIDS, locking
crip/queer/black subjects out, and playing into the interests of the state by
perpetuating pharmaceutical economies of dependent care. The final lines
of “Bloodchild” eerily encapsulate how the imperative of biomedical care
manufactures consent by passing itself off as an inevitable public good:
200 | The Matter of Disability

after T’Gatoi states her caring command to the newly pregnant Gan, “You
will live now,” she assures him, “I’ll take care of you” (29). In “Bloodchild,”
such “care” for male pregnancy, as a metaphor for HIV/AIDS, signifies not
only the promise of protection but also the threat of retaliation for any act
of resistance.

NOTES

1. Davidson argues that scenes of male pregnancy “lay bare the artifice of bodily
normalcy by imagining biological reproduction as an unnatural act performed through
an unnatural body” (214).
2. For example, Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut articulate how Beattie “defied the
long-­standing cultural belief that anatomy always dictates a person’s gender” (5).
3. In their articulation of narrative prosthesis, Mitchell and Snyder point out how in
such metaphoric uses of disability, “the ‘real’ stigma of a disability deforms the otherwise
evident value of gender and race as cultural differences” (Narrative Prosthesis 33).
4. Elys Weinbaum’s important reading of “Bloodchild” eschews Butler’s insistence
that it is not a story about slavery, arguing that Gan is “a slave who nurtures his desire for
unfreedom” (64).
5. I cannot, however, agree with Magnone’s reading of the story as offering a “viable
mode of collaborative partnership rather than a necessarily parasitic exploitation” (120).
Butler does not offer a model for HIV/AIDS community care outside of pharmaceutical
consumerism and state dependence, particularly since forms of resistance by minor
characters are proscribed and because partnerships outside of the state are prohibited.
6. Mitchell and Snyder use the term “crip/queer” to mark how “all bodies identified
as excessively deviant are queer in the sense that they represent discordant functional-
ities and outlaw sexualities” (3). My use of “crip/queer/black” throughout this essay is an
attempt to push such an analysis to account for the triangulation of race within such an
analysis by drawing attention to how black bodies are materially produced as sexually,
physically, and cognitively deviant.
7. Dean, however, fails to interrogate how barebacking subcultures and representa-
tions produce racist stereotypes, confirm able-­bodied norms, and exclude women and
trans people. See Shaka McGlotten for an analysis of racism in porn and hookup sites.
8. According to Jeffrey Escoffier, “Since 2003 bareback videos have been among the
fastest-­growing segments of the gay porn market” (136). A casual glance over titles on
gay porn websites or video stores demonstrates that this is a gross understatement. As of
2017, bareback videos have almost completely eclipsed condom-­only titles in visibility
and popularity.
9. As Kane Race argues, resistance to PrEP has come from all sides, from homopho-
bic conservatives to HIV/AIDS activists like Kramer who worry about the loss of a
moral high ground through “reckless hedonism” (12).
10. See, for example, Henri-­Jacques Stiker’s critique of how rehabilitation frames dis-
ability as a lack that must be overcome idealizes the sameness of the able body, and as-
serts immanent control over disabled people in the name of cure and reintegration.
11. Saidiya Hartman, for example, traces “the coerced and cultivated production of
race” through subjection, spectacle, and even enjoyment and humanization (57).
 Breeding Aliens, Breeding AIDS  |  201

12. Like Erevelles, Cassandra Jackson demonstrates that, in the context of slavery,
“the meaning of disability . . . is indelibly entangled in the meaning of blackness, both its
ideological meaning and the ways in which it manifests materially as a violated body”
(33).
13. See Jennifer James for a disability studies reading of black rehabilitation politics.
14. This love of imprisonment evokes the figure of the dying child in the Mettray
penal colony, whom Foucault quotes famously as lamenting, “What a pity I left the col-
ony so soon” (Discipline 293).
15. In her reading of “Bloodchild,” Kristin Lillvis argues that Gan must come to un-
derstand his own “femaleness” as a penetratable body.
16. For example, see the title screen in The Gift, Louise Hogarth’s 2003 documentary
film about barebacking (178).
17. See McRuer’s analysis of the AIDS quilt as a disability artifact, for example, and
his reading of ACT UP as embodying crip activism.

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Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks
Reading for Idiocy, Caninity, and Tropological
Confusion in Of Mice and Men

David Oswald

On July 5, 1941, one of the final Merrie Melodies shorts directed by Tex
Avery, legendary animator and cocreator of the carrot-­munching icon
Bugs Bunny, was released. Entitled The Heckling Hare, it follows that ras-
cally rabbit as he is pursued by Willoughby the Dog, one of Avery’s lesser-­
known characters. The cartoon is noteworthy, argues Robert Morsberger,
because this “dim-­witted dog” mocks a popular—­and keenly melancholic—­
literary idiot: namely, Lennie Small from John Steinbeck’s 1937 classic Of
Mice and Men (112).1
In a telling scene, Willoughby avows that he is Lennie, a mentally dis-
abled human incarnated in a dog’s body. The scene begins with Bugs hid-
ing behind a hollow tree. When Willoughby plunges his paw through its
trunk in hot pursuit, Bugs tricks him by plopping a tomato into his out-
stretched paw instead. Then, as Morsberger explains, the dog speaks in an
unmistakable idiom:

Willoughby promptly squashe[s] the tomato and withdr[aws] his

hand, to find it covered with red pulp and juice, which he mist[akes]
for blood. “I crushed him,” wail[s] Willoughby. “I done a bad thing.
I didn’t mean to crush him. I done a real bad thing.” . . . [T]he re-
frain “I done a bad thing” comes verbatim from Steinbeck. (112)

No doubt Willoughby is a thinly disguised Lennie Small. However, I dis-

agree with Morsberger that this confusion of idiot and canine tropes bears
little consequence, that it “does not signify anything more profound than

204
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  205

Steinbeck’s being adopted by popular culture” (112). On the contrary, the

meanings and feelings that accrue to Lennie as canine are far from silly,
benign, or simple. Unstable matters of dis/ability, sex/gender, and race are
complexly interwoven with unstable matters of species in Steinbeck’s aes-
thetics, and it is no hyperbole to propose that the interpretive stakes are
life and death.
Writ large, this essay examines how Steinbeck’s novella impinges on
the physical world, and why this relates to stereotypes—­even ontological
fictions—­about historical bodies. At the same time, it considers ways inti-
mate embodiments—­albeit ones reconceptualized according to Mel Y.
Chen’s argument that bodies are not singular and discrete, but always
mixed in greater-­than-­human relations—­might catalyze a hermeneutics
that addresses the “co-­substantiating contingencies” between nonhuman
and human animals (193). My close readings do not prioritize bodies over
tropes (or vice versa), but affirm their constitutive interimplication. Play-
ing with this tension, I turn Lennie, an idiot/dog figure, against Of Mice
and Men’s alleged privileging of the normative human subject, an ap-
proach that requires bringing the fields of disability studies and animal
studies into closer discussion.
Willoughby the Dog clearly capitulates to Steinbeck’s animalization of
Lennie as canine. As is well known, besides his mental disability and pow-
erful strength, Lennie’s murderous capabilities and mortality hang over Of
Mice and Men. After unintentionally crushing his boss’s daughter-­in-­law
to death, he is executed by George Milton, his only friend. It’s also well
known that George’s heart-­wrenching decision to personally “put down”
Lennie comes informed by the prior mercy killing of an old, physically
impaired dog. The dog’s owner, Candy, confides that he regrets letting
Carlson, another ranch hand, kill his companion: “I ought to of shot that
dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog”
(Steinbeck 108). In the end, Candy’s dog and Lennie are shot in the same
spot—­the back of skull—­with the very same gun—­Carlson’s Luger. Critics
have noted the “heavy-­handedness” of this analogy, which implies Lennie
is George’s pet (Cardullo 19). Usually, however, this depiction of idiocy as
tantamount to caninity gets written off in favor of plucking out a senti-
mental theme about the value of behaving humanely, a moral lesson “suit-
able for children” (Halliwell 142).
However, dogs are key to enciphering mental disability as degraded
biology—­as “not quite human” (Goffman 14)—­along lines contiguous
with the “received racist image of the black [American] as simianlike”
(Gates 52). In fact, Lennie’s animalization epitomizes a more sweeping
206 | The Matter of Disability

confusion of mental disability and caninity across twentieth-­century US

culture, which is undergirded by the rise and inextricably entwined prac-
tices of the eugenics movement and the dog-­breeding industry.2 It is nei-
ther arbitrarily conceived nor purely discursive, but historically material.
From this angle, Steinbeck’s conflation of idiocy and caninity intersects
with polygenetic theories and racist proscriptions against miscegena-
tion—­a term broadly connoting a mix of incompatible kinds (Peterson
34). Louis Owens cannily pinpoints this subtext in the idiot/dog parallel:
“Steinbeck was clearly aware of the widespread eugenics movement. . . .
And based on his awkward repetition of the word ‘Luger,’  .  .  . it would
seem that he wanted his reader to associate the supposed ‘mercy killings’
of the novel with the rise of Fascism in Germany” (331). The rise of dog
breeding and eugenic practices also finessed ableist and racist notions
about biological inheritance and selective reproduction in the United
States, as well as fears of bodily contamination, inferior offspring, and im-
pure populations; this spawned violent acts of segregation and euthanasia
under the guise of medical and scientific techniques.3 As Donna Haraway
argues, literal and figurative dogs are directly linked to the biopolitical
emergence of population management and regularization techniques:

Dogs return us to crucial nineteenth-­century economic and cul-

tural innovations rooted in the biosocial body.  .  .  . The breeding
system that evolved with the data-­keeping system was called scien-
tific breeding, and in myriad ways this paper-­plus-­flesh system is
behind the histories of eugenics and genetics, as well as other sci-
ences (and politics) of animal and human reproduction. (53)

Historically, then, idiot/dog conflations suggest profound political, ethi-

cal, and corporeal consequences that are not yet adequately recognized.
To this end, reading for idiocy and caninity in Steinbeck’s novella un-
covers another layer of meaning: not only that certain privileged lives and
bodies are thought to matter more than others in the United States, but
that mentally disabled humans and canines have both been made—­that is,
forced and produced—­to bear an inordinate affective burden when it
comes to shaping what counts as an unremarkable or “normal” human
life. Moreover, it suggests that they have been made to do so in figurative
and literal registers at once. I call this conflation of idiot and dog tropes, as
well as the ambiguity that it activates for readers, tropological confusion.
Can Lennie be approached as a harmful representation of mental dis-
ability and, simultaneously, as an opportunity to contest the denigration of
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  207

animality and embodiment that preconditions the derogatory meanings

that accrue to critical terms like “animalization” and “dehumanization”?
To answer, I will first outline specifics regarding Lennie’s life-­and-­death
stakes, discussing his deployment from 2004 until 2017 in Texas law to
foist capital punishment onto prisoners who claimed to be constitution-
ally exempt from an imposed death. Next, turning to depictions of Len-
nie’s body, I locate and unpack tropological confusion in the text. At this
point, Lennie comes into view as an idiot/dog figure. By refusing to sub-
mit that disability or animality automatically signifies inferiority, I draw
out how idiot/dog confusion opens untapped hermeneutic and epistemo-
logical possibilities. Hewing closely to biopolitical theories regarding so-
cial affection, I then address how Of Mice and Men reinforces a fictive
discourse of normative US subjectivity that was wrought within the pri-
mary eugenics period: Steinbeck’s aesthetics finesse a sentimental moral
pedagogy reliant on animal figures and aimed at young readers, which
promulgates loving social attachments as the proper way to learn “our hu-
manity” (Boggs 116). As pathetic identification with Lennie the idiot/dog
is cultivated, this supports readers’ fantasies of their own subjectivization,
namely, by “extrapolat[ing] a human subject circularly from the phenom-
enon of emotion” (Terada 11). Readers’ orientations toward dogs, idiots,
and even idiot/dog confusions prove key to this “humanization” training.
Lastly, the conclusion revisits my close readings vis-­à-­vis Lennie’s material
effects within the historical terrain of US biopower.

Lennie Matters

Punning on the word “matter,” Sara Ahmed argues that physical sub-
stances and discursive conventions, including figures, are always affec-
tively inter-­implicated (235). Following Ahmed’s lead, I contend that the
life-­and-­death stakes of Steinbeck’s figures are nowhere more glaring than
in the legal context of Moore v. Texas.
Bobby James Moore, an African American male convicted of capital
murder in 1980, petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene in a prior rul-
ing handed down by Texas’s Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA). Despite
ample clinical evidence that Moore is mentally disabled, the CCA rejected
his claim; this, in turn, barred him from constitutional protection under
the Eighth Amendment and Atkins v. Virginia, which forbids capital pun-
ishment for mentally disabled defendants. The CCA maintained, however,
that Moore did not satisfy Texas’s definition of mental disability, which
208 | The Matter of Disability

was set out in 2004 with Ex parte Briseño. More popularly known as the
“Briseño factors,” this precedential ruling authored by Judge Cathy Co-
chran became a de facto law, providing guidelines for defining mental dis-
ability, with Steinbeck’s Lennie as the benchmark. In short, if the CCA
found that a defendant was less disabled than Lennie, then—­absurdly
enough—­a capital sentence would stand (Long 868).
On March 28, 2017, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Moore (Liptak).
A key component of his petition was that a literary character was an exces-
sively arbitrary and flexible legal standard compared to current medical di-
agnostic frameworks. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed, ruling the
“Briseño factors” were an “unacceptable method” for enforcing Atkins (Lip-
tak). Other factors were arguably implicated in Moore’s case too. His racial
identity was not a superfluous detail, evincing the CCA’s history of rampant
racial bias in deciding constitutional protections.4 Though less salient, the
complicated meanings accruing to Lennie’s animalization were also impli-
cated in the state’s pursuit of Moore’s capital sentence.
Moore v. Texas helps me to reveal a key paradox of idiot/dog tropo-
logical confusion: it’s because of Lennie’s tacit caninity—­not in spite of it—­
that he served as Texas’s juridical exception to capital punishment. To
date, disability scholars have mainly interpreted Lennie through a herme-
neutic of euthanasia, claiming his animalization justifies his execution. In
turn, they have condemned the resolution of Steinbeck’s plot for typifying
a degrading “‘cure or kill’ approach to disability” (Jensen-­Moulton 150).
Some have also tried to restore desirability to Lennie with assertions about
his “human stature” (152). Though well intentioned, this rehumanizing ap-
proach risks reinscribing the cultural script that human life is ontologi-
cally superior to animal life. Granted, at the level of Steinbeck’s plot, being
treated like Candy’s dog is hazardous: the convergence of disability and
animality seems to reduce a vulnerable human to the status of “bare
life”—­a mere biological existence outside of the law (Agamben 2). And
yet, in a more nuanced reading, the pet dog tropes accruing to Lennie
pathetically rouse readerly concern for him; this affectively domesticates
his “threatening” aspects—­physical, sexual, and reproductive—­and ren-
ders his death unfortunate, thereby preserving and protecting his moral
worth. The complicated affects and manifold meanings attached to this
figure suggest that tropological confusion always subtended the CCA’s
ambiguous definition of mental disability. On the one hand, idiot/dog
confusion is a stigmatizing exclusion of disability that costs Lennie his
subjectivity and life; on the other, it fosters pathos, which absolves him
from accountability within a system of human law.
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  209

Also, Moore v. Texas helps me show that anthropocentrism is not the

sole condition of possibility for stigma. Put another way, animalization
alone is not “what makes the abjection of human others possible” (Peter-
son 2). Ableism and racism are equally at play. Rather than reducing dis-
tinct forms of abjection to a common disavowal of human “animal” bod-
ies, my close readings of Lennie follow Ellen Samuels’s recent argument: to
evoke the body as both the referent and sign of a corresponding identity—­
one based on an absolutist notion of biology—­is, ipso facto, to dovetail
with preexisting “fantasies of identification” (13). These fantasies are suf-
fused with desires “to definitively identify bodies, to place them in catego-
ries delineated by race, gender, or ability status, and then to validate that
placement through a verifiable, biological mark of identity” (2). I agree
there are constitutive intersections between disability, sex/gender, and
race, but add that species is enmeshed with these taxonomies. The myriad
histories and meanings of disability, sex/gender, race, and species con-
verge, especially under regimes of management and regularization, since
each can purportedly be bio-­certified. Moreover, these fantasies are his-
torically embedded in eugenics-­inflected cultural scripts (161). Thus, they
perform a linked tropological function that sustains the cultural fantasy
that nature is constant and stable—­an empirical kernel of ontological
truth. Extending Samuels’s insights to Steinbeck’s aesthetics, I propose
that critical efforts to rehumanize Lennie—­to make appeals to his species
as proof of his desirable identity—­are exercises no less riven with this kind
of fantasy.
Reading for tropological confusion destabilizes fantasies of identifica-
tion. To the extent that Steinbeck’s idiot/dog figure moves or “directs”
readers in significant ways, and inasmuch as “matter [itself] is affected by
orientations, by the ways in which bodies are directed toward things, it
follows that matter is dynamic, unstable, and contingent”—­not some im-
mutable truth (Ahmed 234). Intimate relations, including cross-­species
relations, indelibly shape the physical world. The presuppositions inform-
ing one’s interpretations are also integral to that shaping. As Moore v.
Texas attests, matter’s relative dynamism, instability, and contingency
comes with steep risks: words—­and, by extension, literary figures—­can
produce ontological fictions about historical bodies, sometimes with le-
thal effects (Chen 2–­3). Although the CCA’s definition of mental disability
was ruled to be in violation of the Eighth Amendment and Atkins, this
does not undo the thirteen-­year span during which it was repeatedly used
to enforce capital sentences. Potentially impeding future harmful effects,
tropological confusion offers readers an alternative hermeneutic for Of
210 | The Matter of Disability

Mice and Men and suggests why interpretations of this novella still mat-
ter—­in both senses of the term.

Tropological Confusion: Reintroducing Lennie

Besides Willoughby the Dog, Lennie has reappeared in numerous tele-

vision, film, radio, ballet, opera, and theater adaptations, as well as in
contemporary burlesques on Saturday Night Live and Key & Peele. Ad-
ditionally, Steinbeck’s novella remains “one of the most commonly
taught texts in secondary literacy classrooms” (Borsheim 125). Criti-
cally perceived as a sympathetic and naturalist literary document of
the harsh social reality faced by migrant workers following the stock
market crash of 1929 (Halliwell 138–­39), the text is more popularly in-
sinuated into the US cultural imagination as a dramatic revamp of the
Cartesian subject/object dyad. George and Lennie are presumed to fig-
ure, respectively, the mind/body division (Levant 135). From this angle,
it is shot through with a tropology that capitulates to the most endur-
ing cliché of humanist doctrine: a strict ontological division between
the fully rational human subject and (all other) animality.5 Yet the tro-
pological confusion of Lennie the idiot/dog evinces disruptive aes-
thetic effects, which arguably impede anthropocentrism—­the very
discourse his animalization seems to secure.
Lennie’s idiocy is never clinically diagnosed, but his difference from
George is contrastively pronounced. George is introduced first as “small
and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features”
(Steinbeck 9). Lennie emerges from his shadow as “a huge man, shapeless
of face, with large, pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders” (9). Although
both are white males, the order of their appearance affirms George’s prior-
ity, which the narrator marks by labeling Lennie his “opposite” (9). This
term establishes the two figures as polar physiological exemplars. For
Martin Halliwell, it “fixes them” with distinct images to suggest they are
also psychologically mismatched (1). This characterization plays out in the
introductory scene: the duo enters the scopic field of the text alongside the
Salinas River, and when George comes to an abrupt stop his “follower
nearly [runs] over him” (Steinbeck 10). Labeling Lennie a “follower” un-
dermines his agency, especially since his large body seems out of control,
prefiguring a possible threat (Owens 325).
Slowly, it is revealed that the duo, drifting through California in search
of work, has arrived in Soledad after evading a lynch mob in Weed, where
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  211

Lennie did “bad things” (Steinbeck 16). Later on, readers learn what this
means: he stands accused of rape (75). Defending Lennie to Slim, their
“God-­like” ranch foreman (72), George explains away the charge: “[Len-
nie] wants to touch ever’thing he likes. Just wants to feel it. So he reaches
out to feel this red dress an’ the girl lets out a squawk, and that gets Lennie
all mixed up, and he hold on ’cause that’s the only thing he can think to do”
(74–­75). The accusation of sexual violence conjures the novella’s miscege-
nation subtext: the menace that Lennie connotes has less to do with this
particular woman’s safety than with his reproductive potential to pollute
the national stock.6
According to George, Lennie is simply a “poor bastard”: confused, im-
poverished, worthy of pity, and in need of brotherly caritas (19). George’s
epithet cultivates readerly pathos for Lennie, but it suggests more about
George’s self-­conception as a moral agent than it confirms his friend’s in-
nocence. His construal of Lennie as “nuts” and the charitable rationaliza-
tion that he provides is, at bottom, an ontological fiction (168). The central
irony, driving home the partiality of George’s discourse, is that he is no less
dependent on Lennie for social affection. After Lennie accidentally kills
Curley’s wife—­an act that is similarly overdetermined as sexualized vio-
lence, another mob is organized to hunt him down. George appears
“hopelessly” resigned to the impossibility of taming Lennie’s physical
strength and mental disability (163). So he sets out to euthanize him.
When he discovers his friend back at the Salinas River clearing, Lennie
confesses his crime: “I done another bad thing” (178). But he does not
perceive the precariousness of their situation, and he does not foresee that
his life hangs in the balance. Thus, mental disability serves as a hermeneu-
tic device woven into the fabric of Steinbeck’s narrative: “Intellectual dis-
ability provides the structure for the narrative irony, and the narrative
irony defines the novel. Lennie knows not what he does, and we know he
knows not what he does” (Bérubé 14). Whereas readers are implicitly dis-
tinguished by the text as having interpretative insight and knowledge, im-
plying hermeneutic and epistemic mastery, Lennie seems to be primarily
an irrational body within it.
George approaches his companion armed both with Carlson’s Luger
and Candy’s confession of regret over letting a stranger kill his dog. He
instructs Lennie to gaze off into the distance, and recites their shared
dream of living off “the fatta the lan’”—­but he augments this version with
an ideal of perpetual peace: “Ever’body gonna be nice to you. Ain’t gonna
be no more trouble. Nobody gonna hurt nobody or steal from ’em” (Stein-
beck 183). And then,
212 | The Matter of Disability

George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the muzzle of
it close to the back of Lennie’s head. The hand shook violently, but
his face set and his hand steadied. He pulled the trigger. The crash
of the shot rolled up the hills and rolled down again. Lennie jarred,
and then settled slowly forward to the sand, and he lay without
quivering. (184)

The image of Lennie’s serene corpse contrasts with the “violently” shaking
hand that pulls the trigger, implying that suffering now belongs to George.
Lennie’s death might be anticipated, but the plot’s resolution remains no-
toriously distressing for its melancholic ambivalence.
Lennie’s death has been widely accepted as George’s humanitarian
“gesture of sacrifice and responsibility” primarily because it is prefigured
by the execution of Candy’s dog, another “intensely lachrymose” scene
(Owens 321–­22). When this dog is first introduced, he is likewise described
as a follower: “The old man came slowly into the room. . . . And at his heels
there walked a dragfooted sheepdog, gray of muzzle, and with pale blind
old eyes” (Steinbeck 45). As with George and Lennie, this order affirms
Candy’s priority. Later, when Carlson complains that the dog is stinking
up their bunkhouse, he appeals to Candy on compassionate grounds:
“‘This ol’ dog jus’ suffers hisself all the time. If you was to take him out and
shoot him right in the back of the head—­’ he leaned over and pointed,
‘—­right there, why he’d never know what hit him’” (80). Candy replies that
he cannot kill his beloved companion: “‘I’m so used to him,’ he said softly.
‘I had him from a pup’” (81). But Carlson appears unmoved, arguing that
the dog is too physically impaired and old:

“If you want me to, I’ll put the old devil out of his misery right now
and get it over with. Ain’t nothing left for him. Can’t eat, can’t see,
can’t even walk without hurtin’.”
Candy said hopefully, “You ain’t got no gun.”
“The hell I ain’t. Got a Luger. It won’t hurt him none at all.” (84–­
85)

Carlson relentlessly appeals to Candy by invoking the dog’s sensory and

physical disabilities as forms of embodied suffering that justify euthanas-
tic violence, and he promises his Luger will kill the dog with merciful
swiftness. He declares the dog will not “quiver” (82). Though Candy re-
sists, he ultimately cedes his companion to Carlson, and the dog is imme-
diately led away to its death.
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  213

“Quiver”—­the term that Carlson uses to convince Candy to relinquish

his canine companion—­resurfaces in the end with the narrator’s report
that Lennie’s dead body “lay without quivering” (184). This repetition bal-
lasts the disability/pet analogy, while ostensibly confirming Carlson’s
promise: the dog and Lennie appear to perish without suffering. Never-
theless, by positing disability as the rationale for both mercy killings, hav-
ing both characters “put down” in an identical manner, and then marking
this parallel with a phraseological echo, Steinbeck stacks the deck to en-
sure that Lennie’s tacit caninity is identifiable, yet seemingly presented to
rouse readers’ desires for narrative order. To put it bluntly, this is reader-­
bait. It exemplifies “that which makes a plot ‘move forward,’ and makes us
read forward, seeking in the unfolding of the narrative a line of intention
and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward mean-
ing” (Brooks xiii). Yet, on a tropological level, the idiot/dog association
seems to be of secondary significance—­something that isn’t missed, but
that doesn’t warrant much scrutiny. If one reads exclusively for the plot,
then George’s possible avenues of action appear very slim and Lennie’s
death seems inevitable; this is emblematized—­appropriately enough—­by
Slim’s authorization: “You hadda, George. I swear you hadda” (186). Slim’s
approval echoes the ableist sentiment in his prior approval for killing Can-
dy’s dog: “Carl’s right, Candy. That dog ain’t no good to himself. I wisht
somebody’d shoot me if I get old an’ a cripple” (81). By touting disability as
moral justification for euthanasia in both cases, the novella’s meanings of
idiocy and caninity begin to bleed together.
But are the mercy killings as necessary as Slim suggests? Or are they
vexed supplications to the normative order of the ranch? Lennie and the
dog are arguably killed because their disabilities impede profitability and
productivity. For Louis Owens, Steinbeck’s narrative is more a dramatiza-
tion of “Social Darwinism” (326) than “a coldly objective rendering” that
documents naturalist violence (331). Published on the brink of World War
II, this novella captures Steinbeck grappling with the implications of the
eugenic era—­“the profound human crisis of his times” (331). Though I
agree with Owens, I veer from his characterization of the crisis as exclu-
sively human. Informed by Chen and Haraway, I contend instead that
Steinbeck’s canine figures help to show that the scope of this crisis was al-
ways greater than human.
Considering how routinely Lennie is associated with dog figures, it is
surprising that Steinbeck’s critics have not addressed the nuances of his
animalization. In the introductory scene, Lennie is contrasted with George
for behaving “like a terrier who doesn’t want to bring a ball to its master”
214 | The Matter of Disability

(20). Later, Crooks explains that, without George as a caregiver, Lennie

would be institutionalized and fitted with “a collar, like a dog” (126).
George also slanders Lennie by calling him a “son-­of-­a-­bitch” (24). After
inadvertently killing a puppy he intends to adopt, Lennie then mimics
George and calls it a “son-­of-­a-­bitch” (149). This ironically literalizes the
analogy upon which George’s expletive was based.
When Lennie displays the pup’s limp body to Curley’s wife, she tries
to console him: “Don’t you worry none. He was jus’ a mutt. You can get
another one easy. The whole country is fulla mutts” (151). Her appeal
abstractly invokes a human/animal binary, suggesting no trespass has
occurred. More specifically, however, the term “mutt” raises the subtext
of miscegenation once again, suggesting an omnipresent threat that
haunts canine pedigree and US identity alike. The irony, of course, is that
Lennie is associated with caninity throughout, implying that he is like-
wise a threat—­one that can be killed with impunity. This remarkable
dialogue manifests the submerged scripts of breeding and miscegena-
tion, which implies dis/ability, race, and species mixing. Meanwhile, the
association of Lennie with the “mutt” seems to reinscribe ableist, racist,
and anthropocentric norms regarding the recalcitrant deviancy of men-
tal disability and animality—­a link justifying the two mercy killings as
permissible violence.
However, the signifying functions of Steinbeck’s tropes are trickier
than such a reading permits. This idiot/dog comparison coexists with less-­
salient idiot/dog confusion. After Lennie kills Curley’s wife and attempts
to bury her corpse in the barn, he is framed as both human and canine at
once: “He pawed up the hay until it partly covered her” (159). By sugges-
tively appending paws to Lennie, the text organizes this idiot figure’s lack
of self-­reflexivity so that he is no longer doglike; instead, his species iden-
tity itself appears fungible and uncertain. Whereas the idiot/dog analogy
hinted at an underlying likeness, while maintaining distance between the
terms “idiot” and “dog” and their referents, this homology dissolves that
gap into a catachrestic equation of biological identity—­a hitherto unreal-
ized intersection of “idiot” and “dog.” Now, idiocy is tropologically con-
fused with caninity—­or idiocy is caninity.
Tropological confusion points readers toward this representational
gap, a material-­semiotic muddle—­indeed, a textual aporia—­where it is
possible to discern both anxious demarcations of the human and the ani-
mal even as Lennie is, paradoxically, denied such distinctions. Framing
Lennie’s body in this way serves as a synecdoche for the narrator’s inability
to capture and masterfully represent a desired division between subjects
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  215

and objects. This aporia signals a pivotal inscrutability: the narration

flaunts its own semantic limits through taxonomic confusion, signaling a
moment of indeterminacy—­of trembling and infidelity—­wherein the nar-
ration appears to recoil from mimetic readings and to expose its own on-
tological fiction as partial. A fundamental undecidability exists within the
narrative order regarding how its tropes function, which rouses aesthetic
effects that at once undermine interpretative mastery and subvert the au-
tonomy of the subject of interpretation by exposing humans and other
animals as discursively and materially entwined. On one level, tropologi-
cal confusion renders hermeneutical logics that would perpetuate the hu-
man/animal order and confirm subjectivity over and against the objective
world inoperative; this excessive representational turn delivers a destabi-
lizing epistemic jolt. On another, it precipitates a crisis of interpretation
that suggests readerly incertitude is morally significant.
Steinbeck’s aesthetics can thus be used to unlock otherwise hidden
meanings: a hermeneutic of tropological confusion allows for biological
identities—­ontological fictions themselves—­to be critically seized upon
and troubled from within. This concept is closely aligned with Ato Quay-
son’s “aesthetic nervousness” and, specifically, its “short-­circuiting of the
hitherto dominant protocols of representation” within a text in relation to
disability (26). Whereas Quayson’s guiding metaphor of the “short-­circuit”
can be critically applied to this text to describe an internal disabling “func-
tion” that disrupts readers’ extratextual comprehension vis-­à-­vis disability
representations (Bérubé 58), the hermeneutic of tropological confusion is
more capacious, extending beyond Quayson’s tight focus on disability fig-
ures. Rather, it is an invocation, mix-­up, and destabilization of manifold
tropes, which, in turn, serve to mix up and destabilize readers’ expecta-
tions and presuppositions regarding conventional meaning. As my next
section elaborates, though Lennie’s love bond with George can be read to
reinforce an extratextual illusion about his readers’ own self-­possessed hu-
mane subjectivity, the critically overlooked effects of tropological confu-
sion remain a potent counterpoint.

Learning to Feel Superior

From Sally Chivers’s disability studies perspective, Lennie’s animaliza-

tion is an insult that only “disappoints” disability scholars; this explains
why his “dehumanization” is rarely analyzed at length. In her reading,
Steinbeck’s plot and its “simple moral lesson leaves little room for com-
216 | The Matter of Disability

plex analysis,” ensuring there is little to be redeemed by a field that

largely seeks to redress the dispossession of disabled people (Chivers).
Granted, Steinbeck’s plot is symptomatic of the era in which it was
wrought—­an era when mental disability was pervasively feared as de-
graded biology and, without the implementation of historically legalized
restraints like institutionalization and sterilization, was supposed to lead
to “crime, indiscriminate sexual activity, and careless reproduction”
(Keely 207). However, Lennie’s association with dogs appears to be
exclusively—­and irredeemably—­negative for Chivers. Stephanie Jensen-­
Moulton concurs, arguing Lennie symbolizes a threat because he seems
monstrously nonhuman: “[He] perpetuates the stereotype of the intel-
lectually disabled as animalistic or subhuman” (140); this is why he “de-
serves to die” (145). Approaching Steinbeck’s plot exclusively through
the hermeneutic of euthanasia, Lennie emerges as a prima facie case of
abjection: “[He] is cruelly executed in exactly the same manner as Can-
dy’s old dog,” so he comes off “as a pernicious and unpredictable mem-
ber of society, no better than an unruly pit-­bull” (152). From this angle,
caninity is merely a figurative substitute for idiocy, producing a stylistic
resemblance; in other words, idiocy is perceived to be the literal term.
Meanwhile, animality’s so-­called unruliness extends fears of retrogres-
sion and “caus[es] a general apprehension about intellectually disabled
people [as dangerous]” to flourish in the US cultural imaginary (140).
Both of these disability studies readings appeal to an abstract human/
animal binary, and neither addresses the tropological nuances of Lennie’s
animalization. Instead, they arguably assume the luminous value of hu-
manity, while evincing a metonymic slide between “animality” and
“embodiment”—­a slide that is also problematically evident in a number of
influential biopolitical theories. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life”
is one paradigmatic example. For Agamben, “Animality functions pre-
dominantly as a metaphor for that corporeal part of ‘man’ that becomes
subject to biopolitical calculation” (Shukin 10). Agamben understands
“bare life” as a biopolitical body that can be sovereignly killed with impu-
nity, a merely “animal” biology “included in politics in the form of the ex-
ception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion”
(8, 11). The plot-­oriented readings of Chivers and Jensen-­Moulton accord
with Agamben’s biopolitical framework: Of Mice and Men merely drama-
tizes how the animal(ized) body of an idiot figure is rendered exceptional,
cordoned off from the human collective, and killed with impunity. But
Steinbeck’s novella is more biopolitically complex than a reading for “bare
life” permits.
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  217

Described by its author as “a tricky little thing” (Steinbeck and Wall-

sten 132, qtd. in Owens 320), Of Mice and Men—­and, more specifically, its
idiot/dog tropological confusion—­fosters lines of cross-­species feeling
and intimacy, even of interdependent contingency, between human and
nonhuman animals. The trope of idiocy marks exclusion, but it simultane-
ously functions as a “symbolic repository for that which defies categoriza-
tion” (Halliwell 5). The trope of caninity marks exclusion too, but it also
evokes the excess and ambivalence of figurative and literal canines. Since
dogs are primarily viewed as pets in the United States, they figure the re-
markable opposite of the unremarkable human in the human/animal bi-
nary, and also produce interspecies intimacies as “mediators” straddling
the interval in the binary (Boggs 19). Steinbeck’s mixing of idiot and dog
tropes constitutes a flexible aesthetic resource for abjection, affection, or—­
confusingly—­both at once, thereby uncovering the complicated, contra-
dictory significations and affects accruing to mental disability in US cul-
ture. Since Lennie’s disability is associated with caninity, and because
caninity tropologically encodes a domestic, loyal, sentimentalized, or even
“humanized” animality, the meaning behind his animalization is not only
degradation. Rather, it emerges as ambiguous and paradoxical: being dog-
like is a vicarious experience of being human, as something humans can
and do sympathetically and anthropomorphically possess; meanwhile,
being doglike translates as being less than human and prone to being “hu-
manely” killed (Fudge 108).7
I turn now to consider textual evidence cited by Chivers that Lennie’s
animalization is only negative. Crooks—­the novella’s “crippled” African
American figure—­teases that, without George, Lennie would be institu-
tionalized by the state:

Crooks bored in on him. “Want me ta tell ya what’ll happen? They’ll

take ya to the booby hatch. They’ll tie ya up with a collar, like a dog.”
Suddenly Lennie’s eyes centered and grew quiet, and mad. He
stood up and walked dangerously toward Crooks. “Who hurt
George?” he demanded.
Crooks saw the danger as it approached him. He edged back on
his bunk to get out of the way. “I was just supposin’,” he said. “George
ain’t hurt.” (126)

Crooks’s “like a dog” simile implies Lennie’s precarious position, suggest-

ing he does not qualify for the full rights and freedoms of legal citizenship.
Crooks is also an authority on disenfranchisement: this is not only marked
218 | The Matter of Disability

by signs of race and physical disability, but also emblematized by one of

his few “personal possessions”—­“a mauled copy of the California civil
code for 1905” (117)—­a text responsible for enacting eugenic fears of mis-
cegenation into law (Moran 31–­32). As well, prior to teasing Lennie, he
confesses he is terribly lonesome: “There ain’t a colored man on this ranch
an’ there’s jus’ one family in Soledad” (Steinbeck 123). Deprived of inti-
macy, Crooks has internalized his marginalization. In Chivers’s reading,
this scene problematically juxtaposes and homogenizes “a number of [dis-
tinct] forms of marginalization” in order to launch a lament about oppres-
sion in general—­one without much bite.
However, whereas Chivers appears to take for granted that Crooks’s
canine simile confirms Lennie’s abjection, I propose that dogs are also ci-
phers for idiocy because they are signs of loving fidelity and obedience.
Although the dog trope is no doubt suggestive that animalization justifies
abuse, Lennie also appears to be a sympathetic, likable character in this
scene because he remains unconditionally faithful to George. It is pre-
cisely when he is rendered canine that he appears prepared to serve and
protect the person he loves most against all possibility of threat: he experi-
ences a defensive rage when Crooks suggests George might be hurt, and
this overwhelms whatever has been said about him. This unconditional
love bond is evoked alongside Lennie’s tacit caninity, which sympatheti-
cally incites readers’ vicarious identification with him.
As Mel Y. Chen highlights, to be treated like a dog is widely assumed to
be synonymous with dehumanization; however, “the statement that some-
one ‘treated me like a dog’ is one of liberal humanism’s fictions”—­fictive
because “some dogs are treated quite well, and many humans suffer in
conditions of profound indignity” (89). On top of that, Chen points out
that “dehumanizing” representations of “humans as abjected matter or
less than human . . . cannily assert human status as a requisite condition
for securing nonhuman comparators, thereby rendering the idea of ‘dehu-
manization’ paradoxical” (13–­14). As an emotionally affective figure, Len-
nie’s paradoxical animalization seems designed to cultivate pathos, predis-
posing readers to feel loving sympathy, but also fear, toward people living
with mental disability. These emotional responses—­or “gut feelings”—­are
subsequently accepted as a measure of truth, rather than being recognized
as the ontological fictions they are.
Whereas affects tend to be associated with physiological bodies, the
superior power to experience and express personal emotion is most often
reserved for human subjects (Terada 2). What is “at stake in” reserving
emotion for individual humans, according to Colleen Glenney Boggs, “is
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  219

the production of a particular notion of subjectivity marked by an indi-

viduality independent of others and clearly demarcated by the separation
of reasoning from embodiment” (134). Against this notion, she traces an
alternative genealogy of US liberal biopolitical subject formation, charting
how the nation’s pedagogical models and institutions bear the influence of
the British empiricist John Locke. Locke maintained that individuals are
not born in full possession of human subjectivity, but learn to become hu-
man (Boggs 138). Humanity, then, becomes a status achieved by and
through embodied practices of feeling in relation to others (138). Boggs
suggests that a Lockean education in humane attachments is pivotal to the
emergence of this more affirmative ontological fiction of human subjec-
tivity and that it, in turn, supplements disciplinary techniques of sover-
eign biopower that are the focus of Agamben’s biopolitical theory. The il-
lusion of a distinctively human subjectivity thus gets reinforced through
claims to sovereign reason as well as the “bonds of sympathy that underlie
civic society” (Boggs 140).
Of Mice and Men’s intimate companionships, whether inter-­or intra-
species, and its mercy killings come into focus here as sentimental scaf-
folding for the compassionate treatment of both human and nonhuman
others—­a humanitarian sentimentalism that is a regulatory resource for
biopower. Young readers’ relationships with literal and figurative nonhu-
man animals are key to inculcating these bonds since “humanity is the
product of an educational process that relies on the relationship to ani-
mals to elicit and direct emotions” (141). This sympathetic education cul-
tivates “appropriate” cross-­species intimacies, especially with pets, through
sentimental aesthetic depictions of human and nonhuman others (141). In
this way, Of Mice and Men can be—­indeed, it has been—­put to use as
“humanization” training.
Insofar as this Lockean pedagogy implies that readers’ emotional re-
sponses offer “proof ” of liberal human subjectivity, Steinbeck’s classic re-
inforces what Rei Terada calls an “ideology of emotion”: that is, emotions
can be construed to perform the extratextual and normalizing function of
positioning readers as naturally free subjects (3). For example, when I
weep after reading Steinbeck’s scenes of euthanasia, this emotional re-
sponse permits me to claim that I am a humane subject who is capable of
vicariously sympathizing with fiction. Put another way, readerly emotion
gets interpreted and repackaged as autoaffective evidence for subjectivity’s
self-­possessed power to interpret and respond to the objective world: “The
beholder—­the Cartesian would-­be subject—­feels [emotions] when it rep-
resents itself to itself, when it reads its self-­representation” (21). Yet when
220 | The Matter of Disability

emotion is understood as that which hermeneutically fills in and connects

the subjective and objective realms with meaning, the underlying logic
appears positively circular: the fully human subject is assumed to be not
only rationally superior to a figure like Lennie; it is now also “naturally”
equipped with the power to feel the truth of itself (3,14).
Accordingly, it is not only idiot/dog figures that are fashioned to vari-
ous effects by Steinbeck’s aesthetics, but the affective production of a hu-
man reader whose superiority rests not only on the possession of reason,
but on freely given humane feeling. This pedagogy suggests why Of Mice
and Men is a staple in the US high school canon: it remains institutionally
disseminated because it reinforces a fiction of biopolitical subject forma-
tion through the consensus-­building ideology of emotion. Steinbeck’s id-
iot and canine tropes are crucial to an understanding of how this novella
inculcates humane feeling. Both seem to stabilize the human subject by
figuring its binary opposite. What singles dogs out from other species is
how flexible a resource they have proven to be for reinforcing the notion
that subjectivity is a natural identity that corresponds to Homo sapiens.
Against this naturalization, tropological confusion exposes subjectivity as
one trope in relation to manifold intersecting tropes, one that fundamen-
tally “relies on affective relationships that cross the species line” and that
“strategically get worked out by biopower” (Boggs 6).

Indeterminate Conclusions

Far from simple, Steinbeck’s aesthetics are complex, contradictory, and in-
determinate. As my analysis shows, for instance, unstable biological mark-
ers of identity accrue to Lennie, including dis/ability, race, sex/gender, and
species, and these routinely overlap and converge. The animalization of
his disability can be approached as mere denigration, serving hazardous
cultural scripts of miscegenation and eugenics—­ones that rationalized
historical cases of segregation and euthanization; at the same time, his
love bond with George can be read to serve the extratextual production
and biopolitical regularization of a “superior” humane subjectivity that
hinges on humans’ feeling ability. Yet, more complexly, Steinbeck’s tropo-
logical confusion of idiocy and caninity offers readers an alternative her-
meneutic, one that is decidedly text-­based even as it is aporetic. A criti-
cally overlooked paradox in the novella, tropological confusion destabilizes
anthropocentric notions that the human subject is ontologically discrete
and self-­sufficient. Also, it provides readers with an extratextual opportu-
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  221

nity to modestly reconsider the corporeal contingencies underlying ev-

eryday bonds of greater-­than-­human intimacy. My close reading of this
idiot/dog confusion vis-­à-­vis disability studies and animal studies never
assumes that the meaning or moral value of human being is a self-­evident
priority: humanness is not a biological identity or norm, but a fantasy that
must be anxiously reproduced by means of a number of intersecting
tropes at once.
I also acknowledge that prior interpretations of Of Mice and Men can-
not be disarticulated from the thanatological workings of US biopower. As
Chen suggests, ontological orders might not be fixed, stable, or essential,
but they still constitute limiting frames for fleshy bodies. These provi-
sional orders can be resisted as fictive stereotypes, but they remain affec-
tively powerful scaffolding for biopolitics, for “the governmentality of
animate hierarchies, . . . how acts seem to operate with, or against, the or-
der of things” (12). Historically, as the “Briseño factors” attest, Steinbeck’s
novella has been interpreted in reductive ways that have conceptually co-
erced and indelibly shaped historical bodies.
Michael Bérubé was the first to bring my attention to the potential
dangers—­and even lethal effects—­of Lennie, referring me to Ex parte
Briseño and the 2012 execution of Marvin Wilson, a mentally disabled Af-
rican American male (192). On January 30, 2015, Robert Ladd, another
African American male, was executed despite likewise meeting clinical
definitions of mental disability. He was administered a lethal dose of pen-
tobarbital in the same Huntsville County facility where Wilson was killed
(Pilkington). Recalling my earlier suggestion regarding Moore v. Texas,
however, it is a mistake to suggest that Steinbeck or Lennie is to blame for
these deleterious material effects; rather, readers’ interpretations are what
matter most here.
The legacy of the “Briseño factors” serves as a case in point. On Febru-
ary 11, 2004, Judge Cochran “disregarded the standardized results of an
adaptive behavior assessment” of the defendant, Jose Garcia Briseño, who
was seeking exemption from the death penalty under Atkins v. Virginia
(Long 869). That assessment, which was to be considered alongside Brise-
ño’s clinical IQ score, was developed over years of specialized psychologi-
cal research; nevertheless, Cochran ruled that its results were “exceedingly
subjective” (869). In an absurd twist, she installed Lennie instead as the
state-­sanctioned benchmark for determining the legitimacy of a defen-
dant’s claim to mental disability. The “Briseño factors” were designed by
Cochran to be used on a case-­by-­case basis (869). Comprising seven ques-
tions, they included the following:
222 | The Matter of Disability

Has the person formulated plans and carried them through or is his
conduct impulsive?
Does his conduct show leadership or does it show that he is led
around by others?
Is his conduct in response to external stimuli rational and appropri-
ate, regardless of whether it is socially acceptable?
Can the person hide facts or lie effectively in his own or others’
interests? (868)8

Though Lennie was not explicitly mentioned in these guidelines, he in-

forms them as the implied negative case. Judge Cochran’s rationale for
inscribing a fictional character into legal procedures was linked to his
popularity: she reasoned that he was so well-­known and well-­loved that
“most Texas citizens might agree that Steinbeck’s Lennie should, by virtue
of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt” from the
death penalty (869). In other words, this judge assumed that the majority
of Texans would agree with her own humane interpretation. As well, her
direct invocation of Lennie in this ruling laid claim to the CCA’s own sym-
pathetic feeling—­a display of its superior humane subjectivity. Ironically,
however, it did so while establishing the grounds for enacting sovereign
violence on bodies constructed as criminal. In this light, then, Cochran’s
interpretative act enshrined a sympathetic approach to Of Mice and Men
as a deciding factor in whether Texas could pursue capital punishment of
defendants who claimed to be exempt under Atkins—­at least until Moore
v. Texas.
I conclude my analysis by citing the specific historical cases of Wilson,
Ladd, and Moore, not to morbidly sensationalize or conflate them, but to
stress that Steinbeck’s aesthetics have had indisputable physical effects in
the terrain of US biopower. In lieu of the life and death stakes of the
“Briseño factors,” this claim is practically inarguable. Judge Cochran’s
Lennie-­inspired guidelines proved far too flexible in practice, allowing
Texas to carry out the executions of “several intellectually disabled
individuals”—­people who would have been legally protected in other
states (865). Like Wilson and Ladd, the majority of those executed were
people of color; this indicates—­once again—­that neither anthropocen-
trism nor ableism is the sole condition of possibility for stigma, bigotry,
and disqualification in US culture. To the extent that the executed were
predominantly marked as African American and male, this evinces the
overdetermined and entwined biological meanings that attend tropes of
race, gender/sex, dis/ability, as well as species. I emphasize the racialized
 Why Lennie Can Teach Us New Tricks  |  223

identities of Wilson, Ladd, and Moore to highlight how Lennie’s excess as

an idiot/dog figure can be radically reduced and instrumentalized. Rather
than uncovering complex layers of meaning in Steinbeck’s novella, the
likes of which I have steadfastly pursued, the CCA deployed this character
as a mere stereotype to justify the state’s lethal imposition on the bodies of
particular citizens—­mortal bodies that had already been made to bear the
burden of supporting a fantasy of an unremarkably “normal” human sub-
ject in US civic and economic life (i.e. white, adult, middle class, able-­
bodied, rational, and male subjectivity). It’s difficult to imagine a more
flagrant or contemptible example of literary fiction being used by a state
power—­and in such a reductive way no less—­to frame bodies as criminal
and inferior.
For thirteen years, Lennie Small was used to kill in the name of biopo-
litically protecting a population. This is an odious historical legacy. In the
wake of Moore v. Texas, I initially drew tentative hope from the Supreme
Court’s ruling. After all, the CCA would be required to revise Texas law to
ensure that the determination of mental disability comports with current
medical professional standards, not a judge’s reductive reading of Of Mice
and Men. At the time of writing this conclusion, those glimmers of hope—­
though not dashed—­have been sharply tempered. In June 2018, the CCA
once again denied Moore’s application for habeas relief under Atkins in a
majority ruling of 5–­3. As Judge Alcala writes in the dissenting opinion,
the CCA majority arguably pursued a faulty interpretation and applica-
tion of the DSM-­5 that led to its determination that Moore is not mentally
disabled, a clear “outlier” position at odds with the consensus reached by
the state prosecution, the habeas court, the Supreme Court, and six ex-
perts (qtd. in McCullough). Evidently, constitutional protections continue
to be decided in an uneven, biased manner in Texas. It is horribly unjust
that Bobby Moore remains on death row. Still, I reiterate that expurgating
the “Briseño factors” from the state’s criminal justice system is, unequivo-
cally, a “good thing.” Regarding Steinbeck’s classic more specifically, I in-
sist that it can—­and should—­be interpreted otherwise. To this end, Len-
nie can teach us new tricks.

NOTES

1. I use the term “idiot” to denote a historically defined disability and trope. Follow-
ing Waggoner, I also use “mental disability” even though many “scholars and activists
have adopted the term intellectual disability to distance cognitive disability from the
stigma of ‘mental retardation,’ which ‘mental disability’ risks echoing. However, this
224 | The Matter of Disability

term’s focus on ‘intellect,’ defined as the capacity to reason, risks recentering liberal hu-
manist rationality, a dangerous category for disabled and racialized people alike” in the
context of contemporary US civic and economic life (91). I acknowledge all terms’ dis-
cursive instability.
2. For another canonical example of idiot/dog confusion, see my essay “Otherwise
Undisclosed: Blood, Species, and Benjy Compson’s Idiocy.”
3. Snyder and Mitchell chart how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, US
eugenicists pathologized disabled bodies, framing them as reproductive threats to the
national population (69–­99). This biologization of disability, Snyder and Mitchell argue,
is entwined with questions of race and sex and, thus, has an international scope, culmi-
nating in the Nazi Holocaust (100–­129).
4. See Perlin for how “ethnic adjustments” are used in Texas to make some defen-
dants “who would otherwise have been protected under Atkins . . . eligible for the death
penalty” (1439).
5. See Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am for the now-­classic deconstruction
of the priority of human response over animal reaction.
6. See Jensen-­Moulton for how “California’s eugenics laws allowed for the steriliza-
tion of more than 21,000 people between 1907 and 1939 in order to prevent the passing
of ‘feeble-­mindedness’ from generation to generation. . . . This obsession with steriliza-
tion or even eugenic elimination . . . represented a particularly U.S. approach to dealing
with disability” (130).
7. See Fudge for statistics about euthanasia in the US pet industry: “For every four
healthy companion animals one is destined . . . [to be] humanely killed” (109).
8. See Long for all seven “Briseño Factors” (868).

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226 | The Matter of Disability

Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. U of Minnesota P,

2009.
Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell. Cultural Locations of Disability. U of Chicago
P, 2006.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. Collier and Son, 1937.
Terada, Rei. Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the “Death of the Subject.” Harvard UP,
2001.
Waggoner, Jess. “‘Oh Say Can You ___’: Race and Mental Disability in Performances of
Citizenship.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016,
pp. 87–­102. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2016.6
Part IV
The Matter of Memory
Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit
The Matter of Disappearance

Susan Antebi

A man in a wheelchair sits in the metro station of the Plaza de la Transpar-

encia, Mexico City, at the base of two flights of stairs, each leading upward
in opposite directions. There is no other entrance to the space he occupies.
The athletic style of his chair with its angled wheels might suggest that he
arrived at this floor on his own, somehow navigating the steep stairs, or he
may have been assisted. But in either case, the presence of the wheelchair
user in a jarringly inaccessible space cannot fail to command the attention
of passing commuters, some of who respond to his requests for money as
they reach the bottom of one flight of stairs, on foot, and then ascend to-
wards the platform on the other side.
In December 2013, the cost of a one-­way metro ride in Mexico City
increased from three pesos to five, at the same time that the city enacted
an explicit ban on informal commerce, or the presence of unlicensed ven-
dors, in the subway cars. The anti-­vendor policy appeared most visibly in
an advertising campaign, featuring the photograph of a music CD vendor
in a subway car, with the subtitle, “No les compres y desaparecen” [Don’t
buy from them and they will disappear] (Mora; Aristegui Noticias). Al-
though there was no direct mention of disability in this ad campaign, it is
well known that many disabled people in Mexico City participate in infor-
mal commercial practices; blind vendors in particular are well represented
among those selling music or other products in the subway.
I begin the present chapter with the juxtaposition of these two scenes,
in order to consider the circulation of social and corporeal vulnerability as
materialized processes in the context of twenty-­first-­century Mexico City
public transit. My reading in the pages to follow is based on the concept of

229
230 | The Matter of Disability

Fig. 1.  The Mexico City campaign to ban informal commerce on the subway featured
this advertisement, which states: “Don’t buy from them and they will disappear. Infor-
mal commerce is prohibited on the metro. If you don’t buy from them they won’t come
back to sell. With this action you will avoid the disturbance and excessive noise that
the vendors generate. For more peaceful transit, tell them no! The metro is yours, take
care of it!”

the “host,” an ambivalent mode of psychically inflected intercorporeality

suggestive of impairment, with reference to the novel El huésped, by Gua-
dalupe Nettel, and on the politically charged uses of the projected threat of
disappearance as central to the lived materiality of nonnormative and pre-
carious embodiments. As I discuss further, “hosting” and “disappearance”
become mutually implicated because the corporeal and economic depen-
dency associated with the structure of the host-­relation, in some analyses
akin to parasitism, and also at times linked to repressed desire, implies the
threat of extirpation, hence potential disappearance. In this argument, use
of the term “disappear” also points toward an ongoing violence specific to
Mexico, in which “the disappeared,” including victims of organized crime
and political targets, indicates a category of those who may or may not
 Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit  |  231

have been killed, for their absence is not fully explained. Yet first, I return
to the scenes described above.
In the first episode, featuring a version of the classic image of the
wheelchair user before the staircase, the presence of disability evokes a
long and familiar history of nonnormative embodiment as the logical
justification for begging, but with the key difference that here it is the
body’s incongruous presence in a seemingly inaccessible space that be-
comes the instigator of a financial transaction. In other words, rather
than “selling” his physical impairment as signifying an inability to work,
the disabled person sells a gesture toward the physical environment that
he shares with other travelers. This material space and its failure to ac-
commodate disability, rather than the body’s failure to conform to estab-
lished normativity, becomes the key marker of difference that now de-
mands rectification, as if in a textbook rendition of the transition from
the medical to the social model.
Our work in posthumanist disability theory throughout this volume
emphasizes the limitations of the overused social model, in large part for
its privileging of the environment over the specific materiality and agency
of the body, and also, paradoxically, for the way in which in the social
model, as Tobin Siebers notes, impairment—­hence the body itself—­
remains key to the diagnosis of inaccessible environments.1 The social
model thus sustains itself through surreptitious, backward glances to the
impairments that it nonetheless refuses to approach or interrogate further.
Here too, the wheelchair user as disabled body might appear as
strangely reduced to a diagnosing function, as if structurally present yet
viscerally absent in this scene of injustice, inaccessibility, and commercial
exchange. But at this point, let us expand the field to incorporate the sec-
ond scenario mentioned above, in which a transit price increase—­one that
created significant economic hardship for many users—­coincided with
the attempted exclusion of subway vendors, many of whom are disabled.
In this way, I want to pay further attention to the dynamic, interactive
mattering of disability, through the labor of nonnormative bodies as cen-
tral to the public practices of both transit and financial transaction. The
cited slogan, “Don’t buy from them and they will disappear,” is exemplary
of the processes by which disability materiality circulates as a public threat,
shadowed by its own potential disappearance, and integral to the work-
ings of both affective and commercial exchange.
In making explicit a projected disappearance, the phrase suggests on
one hand a collective desire to eradicate a vaguely defined plural subject,
and on the other the power and supposed social responsibility of the os-
232 | The Matter of Disability

tensibly legitimate subway rider, whose decision to buy or not to buy will
literally “disappear” the undesirable subject—­the subway vendor. The use
of a photograph accompanying this slogan gives specific, embodied form
to the offending subject: he appears as male, young, and racialized as mes-
tizo by his clothing and complexion. Also, despite being in an under-
ground subway car, he wears dark sunglasses, which function in this im-
age as an ambivalent marker of potential blindness, or alternatively as the
projection of intimidation through a stylized social barrier. In this scene,
the music vendor jeopardizes the comfort and tranquility of the other pas-
sengers, as potential blindness and potential threat mutually enact their
indeterminate equivalences. The ambivalent slippage between disability
and vaguely defined categories of poverty and criminality depend here on
a history of their fluid cross-­referencing. At the same time, the sense of
threat, disturbance, or repulsion that the scene may elicit emerges instan-
taneously, thanks in large part to the ingrained familiarity of similar im-
ages. In this way, the advertisement cultivates rejection and dis-­ease in the
viewer as immediate and intimately experienced sensations.
Considered through this wider framework, the wheelchair user at the
foot of the metro staircases gestures not only toward the inaccessibility of
the space, as in a classic social model diagnosis, but also participates in a
fraught affective and monetary economy, one that his material practices
transform, and in which all transit users necessarily have a stake. The two
additional pesos per trip that each passenger spends following the rate
increase might previously have been invested in goods sold by subway
vendors, or in charitable contributions. Now, the ad informs us, they have
been channeled toward a more agreeable transit experience, contingent
on the disappearance of vendors, beggars, or other transgressive bodies
from the public space. In paying the additional transit fee, passengers
“choose” to be complicit in the eradication of disturbances occasioned by
the informal sector and the bodies associated with it.2 In this context, the
man in the wheelchair makes literal his paradoxical status as “matter out
of place,” in a dual sense—­because there are no elevators or ramps through
which he could enter or exit his location, and because the diversion of
cash flow from the informal sector to the transit system has failed in its
attempt to make him disappear via boycott.3 Like the vendors who con-
tinue to work throughout the subway system, the wheelchair user remains
undeterred, underscoring the continued economic viability of his local-
ized, embodied position.
The scenes I have described here enact a series of close associations
between disability and socioeconomic vulnerability, one that is consistent
 Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit  |  233

with a long and well-­documented history of informal sector economics,

and with contemporary statistics on disability in Mexico and worldwide.
Nonetheless, my intention is not to propose a direct equivalence between
these categories, but rather to engage their mutually constituting fluidity
as a critical strategy, while remaining aware of the potential pitfalls of false
equations. Reading disability and vulnerability as co-­constitutive in spe-
cific instances allows for an approach that considers the organic, embod-
ied quality of risk or investment that is often measured only abstractly in
pesos and cents; and insists on the impact of nonnormative embodiment
in public spaces as both affectively and economically transformative.
Histories of disability, labor, and public space offer key accounts of the
dilemma of social vulnerability as continuous with nonnormative em-
bodiment, even as these socioeconomic and corporeal categories still tend
to enact the porosity of their boundaries. In Henry Mayhew’s classic text,
London Labour and the London Poor, the disabled people in the nineteenth-­
century urban center are defined as “those who cannot work,” in order to
distinguish them from “those who will not work.”4 These nomenclatures
have always encountered ambiguity or flexibility in their practical applica-
tion; work and disability are not mutually exclusive today, nor was this the
case in the London that Mayhew described. In addition, the terms allow
for the common suspicion that an immoral or criminal refusal to work in
fact masquerades as the inability to work.5
In early to mid-­twentieth-­century Mexico City, disability, criminality,
and begging were frequently associated as co-constitutive social ills.6 Thus
in 1935, José Casimiro Hernández, a sixty-­two-­year-­old indigenous man,
described as having a “mutilated leg,” would be forcibly taken by public
welfare officials to a shelter and held there against his will for at least seven
months, on suspicion of begging in the streets. Yet Casimiro Hernández
turned out to be a landowner who had worked all his life, hence the only
evidence against him was his physical appearance, perhaps most notably
the condition of his leg.7 In this case and others, visual diagnosis is suffi-
cient to confirm the inability to work, while not working, in turn, suggests
possible laziness or illicit activity. Through this process, nonnormative
embodiment, depicted as a form of vulnerability in need of rescue, be-
comes a social threat as soon as it enters public space, by virtue of its am-
bivalent status as potential labor force. This dilemma extends continually
from individual to larger group, by casting suspicion on those of similar
appearance. Those bodies that appear “not to work” in the physical sense
are thus assumed to be incapable of work—­that is, of performing labor.
In accordance with an alternative, contemporary model, described by
234 | The Matter of Disability

Argentinian social anthropologist Juan Pablo Matta, the pity that a vul-
nerable (read: visibly disabled) person in public space evokes forms part
of the material binary of pity/charity. In this sense, the act of evoking pity,
whether through one’s physical appearance or through action, intentional
or not, is an economic act, rooted in corporeal technique and in material
and affective exchange. Moreover, the emergence of pity calls into ques-
tion the legitimacy of such exchanges, as well as that of the broader and
more established economy in which they occur. These models of disability
as threat or as evocation of pity are perhaps excessively familiar, often
overlap, and are not entirely unique to any locale or historical period. The
point here, however, is to pay attention to forms of nonnormative embodi-
ment as actively bound to the structure and performance of economic
exchange. Disability materializes and goes to work within and across di-
verse economies, both evoking and engaging the risks of embodiment in
these spaces. In this sense it does not simply emerge via the predeter-
mined, discursive ascriptions of socioeconomic systems. In these scenar-
ios, the evocation of pity in public spaces also links to a particular struc-
ture of ambivalent disgust and repressed desire. The tangibly materialized
economic value of pity may, perhaps surprisingly, translate to the viewer’s
desire to embody the position of physical vulnerability, and hence to oc-
cupy the valued site of abjected matter, to be taken care of by others, and
ostensibly freed from the market’s continuous, oscillating demands. This
dynamic emerges in particular in Guadalupe Nettel’s novel, to be dis-
cussed at the conclusion to the present chapter.
In the context of contemporary neoliberalism in Mexico, social vulner-
ability derives in part from what Miguel Ángel Vite Pérez describes as a
process through which what were previously considered rights of social
protection become commodities (155–­56). The same author also refers to
the “rupture of established ties between work and state-­sponsored social
protection” (156) as an additional source of the new social vulnerability.
Disability in Vite Pérez’s reading relates directly to the ascription of social
meaning and resulting processes of exclusion from the sphere of economic
productivity. By the same token, disability as closely tied to the category of
social vulnerability includes subjects in the process of “disaffiliation” from
social and economic protection against market risks. In accordance with
Carolina Ferrante it is through such processes that disabled people be-
come “expendable bodies” (89). As Ferrante also notes, the ironic juxtapo-
sition of the recent United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons
with Disabilities, with the increased presence of disabled people begging
in public spaces, underscores the inadequacy of social rights discourse.
 Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit  |  235

Vite Pérez and Ferrante both adhere to a notion of disability as deter-

mined by ascriptions of meaning, in overall accordance with the social
model. Yet their emphasis on contemporary divisions between the sphere
of the market and that of rights-­based public welfare is nonetheless useful
here for making apparent the increasingly ambivalent function of the roles
of work and commerce in relation to social vulnerability. In this context,
work as a concept expands to encompass multiple levels of formal and
informal activities and interactions. Work and social vulnerability cease to
be imagined as mutually exclusive categories, for even the most seemingly
stable employment is at constant, heightened risk, while many forms of
labor are completely devoid of worker protection. Hence forms of precar-
ity cross freely into the labor market, at times imperceptibly. Through the
same process, legislative guarantees of social rights have little to no bear-
ing on the market value of labor power; for this reason, so-­called rights-­
bearing citizens may still materialize as the “expendable bodies” to which
Ferrante refers. The expanded, flexible, and often precarious marketplace
within this model does not necessarily exclude nonnormative embodi-
ments, but rather encompasses them on a noncontractual, fluid basis, al-
lowing for their elimination at any time, or indeed, harnessing their
unique qualities toward profitable ends.8
Shortly after the increase in Mexico City metro ticket fees, the photo-
graph of a young man in a wheelchair passing over the metro turnstiles,
with assistance from the metro personnel, began to circulate online,
thanks in part to a Twitter campaign titled “#posmesalto.”9
During this protest campaign, many metro riders showed solidarity in
resistance to economic inaccessibility by jumping the turnstiles without
paying. Initially, this sign of civil disobedience occurred without interven-
tion from the authorities, who decided to respect the protest for a limited
time. The activity of this popular protest effectively fused the issue of
rights in the context of civil society with the marketplace dynamics made
evident by the transit price increase. In other words, the protest opened a
space of economic participation as a legitimate sphere through which to
demand social rights, and in this way questioned the neoliberal separation
between civil society and the marketplace.
The photograph of the wheelchair user as specific, individual protest
participant is perhaps especially revelatory of the ironic and innovative
qualities of this collective movement. Public transport in Mexico City is
free for disabled people as well as for senior citizens, a fact that makes the
wheelchair user’s actions doubly symbolic. Jumping the turnstile in this
case does not—­on the surface—­represent any direct savings, given that
236 | The Matter of Disability

Fig. 2.  A man in a wheelchair passes over the metro turnstiles with assistance from
personnel, as part of the #posmesalto campaign. (Credit: Miguel Fuantos. Agencia Re-
forma. Consorcio Interamericano de Comunicación S.A. de C.V. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in any manner in any language in whole or in part without prior written
permission is prohibited.)

the young man’s transit is always free. Yet this act underscores the fact that
participation in civil society and in public spaces is inevitably an economic
practice, an obligatory entry to the marketplace, and part of a collective
action. And it signals that the ticket price and metro ride form part of a
wider market, in which simply getting from point A to point B is never the
whole story. As an “out of place” protest, the wheelchair user’s turnstile
jump demonstrates that the price increase, as in the case of other eco-
nomic adjustments that impact daily life, transcends the individual and is
distributed over a broad field of intersubjective interests, with effects that
tend to express themselves more tangibly among the most vulnerable so-
cial sectors. It is of course ironic that the public protest originally imag-
ined the participation of hypercapacitated subjects, those able to leap over
a turnstile. The wheelchair user’s solidarity with the broader movement,
intentionally or not, draws attention to material embodiment as a condi-
tion of participation, and thus highlights both economic and other forms
of exclusion.10
In the neoliberal labor market analyzed by Vite Pérez, financial inter-
 Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit  |  237

ests are untethered from social protections and from the discourse of
rights such protections imply; here, however, the fluid and collectively in-
habited space of public transit tends to reiterate its complex web of links to
both labor and consumer activity. In this photographed action, the dis-
abled metro rider materializes in the public spaces of both metro and in-
ternet, literally suspended midair, and in this way performs the paradoxi-
cal embodiment of a commercial transaction. The effect is a simultaneous,
cross-­cutting disruption both of market logic, dependent on continuous
price increases, and of social protections that are piecemeal, based on re-
ductive categories, and falsely cordoned off from the material realities of
the market.
Both the wheelchair user’s protest in the photographed turnstile jump
and the advertising campaign targeting subway vendors underscore the
central relevance and material qualities of disability to the quotidian and
contemporary issue of public transit in Mexico City, though in clearly dis-
tinct ways. In the case of the wheelchair, it is an easily recognized symbol
of disability, yet here it appears in the air “out of place,” thus indirectly
emphasizing the issue of limited accessibility in many metro stations. In
fact, despite Mexican legislation that guarantees accessibility in public
transit and in other areas, it is common to witness the spontaneous coop-
eration of passengers who lift wheelchair users up and down staircases,
due to lack of alternatives.
The ad campaign, in contrast, seems to at least partially sidestep the
issue of disability, arguably increasing the efficacy of its message by mini-
mizing controversy. According to the electronic publication Dis-­capacidad.
com, the group of vendors of pirated music CDs who circulate on subway
cars carrying speakers on their backs—­one of whom is represented on the
advertisement poster—­copied the model of a group of blind vendors who
were the first to implement this practice. While most subway passengers
would be unaware of this history and of the particular and complex work-
ings of vendor groups, along with their practices and hierarchies, the spe-
cific agency of vendors who identify with a given cohort emerges explicitly
in the internet publication with the insistence that blindness is indeed
central to their collective identity and labor practices. In this context, the
“disappeared” disability from the subway poster may easily go undetected
yet remains sedimented in the histories of ambivalent social vulnerability
and threat as intrinsic to informal, potentially illicit commercial practices.
Disappearance, and the action of disappearing with its dual meaning,
suggestive of either the vanishing or departure of a given subject, or an
action performed upon a human or nonhuman object, tends to evoke
238 | The Matter of Disability

magical or violent practices. In the Mexican context in which the poster

appears, and indeed within an expanded trajectory of twentieth-­century
Latin American history, the term “disappear” frequently reverts to its past
participle form, “the disappeared,” in reference to political prisoners and
other targeted individuals and groups, as well as victims of many forms of
organized or state-­sponsored crime.11 Thus the future disappearance of
subway vendors that the poster demands as inclusive in the increased
transit fare cannot fail to summon a complex necropolitics, in which the
violence of killing is carefully subsumed into the language of augmented
personal space and reduced disturbance. The magic of disappearance
works by simultaneously removing the offending body and erasing recog-
nition of the unpleasant process by which that removal would take place.
In this case too, focus on the desired disappearance of vendors from the
informal marketplace might be said to momentarily shift attention away
from the ongoing phenomenon of disappearance as an implied, partial
synonym for murder.
The politically and affectively charged notion of disappearance ac-
quired unprecedented weight in Mexico following the kidnapping and
disappearance of forty-­three students of the rural school of Ayotzinapa in
the state of Guerrero in September 2014. Municipal police affirmed that
the students, who had been involved in political protest, were turned over
to members of a drug cartel, who then killed them. Investigation into the
case has led to the discovery of many mass graves with human remains,
but those of the Ayotzinapa students have not been definitively located.
Mismanagement of the investigation called into question the veracity of
some official testimony, and suggested the potentially illicit involvement
of higher levels of government authority.12 The case points to an intensi-
fied delegitimization of the state, and to the state’s role in competition and
collaboration with highly profitable criminal organizations within the
paradigm of narcocapitalism.13 Attention to the horror and corruption of
the Ayotzinapa case also underscores a trajectory of violent disappear-
ances in Mexico, many still unsolved, from those of political activists of
the 1970s to the wave of femicides impacting Ciudad Juárez from the
1990s, to the nearly thirty thousand cases of disappearances since the 2006
initiation of the Mexican war against narcotrafficking.
In each of these contexts, the mechanism of disappearance bears a
close relationship to structures of increasing socioeconomic inequality,
through which gendered and racialized bodies become differentially ex-
pendable. In this way, the rise of factory production in the border location
of Ciudad Juárez following the onset of NAFTA led to low-­paying job op-
 Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit  |  239

portunities for young rural women, many of whom had to travel to work
at irregular shifts, through areas lacking street lighting or consistent pub-
lic transit. Lack of public accountability, police corruption, and an easily
replaceable, female workforce has arguably led to conditions in which
gendered disappearance is a by-­product of economic growth.14 In the case
of Ayotzinapa, as Rossana Reguillo has suggested, the students’ political
activism may have made them a potential threat to the capitalist interests
of the cartels and their state affiliates. Moreover, as has arguably been the
case in many other instances, their status as rural, poor, politically unruly,
and racialized tends to define their expendability.
Use of the term “disappear” in the subway poster, in conjunction with
the photograph of an anonymous music vendor with dark sunglasses, re-
fers in one sense to a kind of straightforward market logic, dictating that
products materialize and continue to exist only in response to demand. In
the informal, improvised marketplace of the subway car, the product, ven-
dor, and “shop” form a continuous, fluid unit, emerging and vanishing in
accordance with the needs and desires of paying customers. From this
perspective, the “disappearance” of the vendor is no different from that of
the product. At the same time, the term “disappear” carries an inevitable
political and affective charge that is specific to contemporary Mexico,
evoking an ongoing history of targeted violence that remains painfully
suspended, for the deaths of the disappeared are suspected but rarely if
ever confirmed. In this poster, it is through the paradoxical fusion of the
neoliberal marketplace’s flattened affect with a threatening, indeterminate
violence conditioned by vulnerability, that the imperative for disappear-
ance achieves its full effects. In other words, the implied threat of the sun-
glass wearer, who both invades passengers’ space and may remind them of
his own precarious status, is veiled and contained by the economic frame-
work in which he materializes, with clear instructions that grant agency to
the potential buyer and explain the presence or absence of the vendor in
terms of straightforward market logic. The market, in its informal sector
iteration, thus appears to become host to the materiality of vulnerability
and threat as continuous with the emergence and disappearance of non-
normative embodiment.
The concept of the host, and the act of hosting, is relevant here as a
mechanism through which the public may observe human or nonhuman
bodies in their environments as either conforming to expectations, or out
of place, as in the case of wheelchair users before staircases, or jumping
over turnstiles. Hosting defines a material, spatial, and economic relation-
ship, suggestive of parallels with containment, dependency, and corporeal
240 | The Matter of Disability

proximity. Needless to say, hosting does not necessarily suggest a welcom-

ing or cooperative relationship, but instead may describe a form of para-
sitism, the dilemma of an unwelcome presence, or desire for extirpation,
as in the case of the campaign to “disappear” subway vendors. The struc-
ture of hosting and parasitism at work in this scenario is further compli-
cated when we consider the function of noise within the system, as Mi-
chael Serres discusses in his classic work The Parasite. In Serres’s reading,
the host, whether human or nonhuman, scares away the parasite by mak-
ing noise, as in the case of an alarm system, or a bird singing, hence draw-
ing attention to the parasitic relation, and attempting to drive out the of-
fending element. Yet in this complex structure, noise itself is also the
parasite, a disruption to the system, and its renewed beginning. The issue
of noise in a literal sense is made explicit as central to the problem embod-
ied by subway vendors in the ad campaign. The image of the man carrying
a large speaker on his back as he sells music reminds passengers of the
high volumes at which such music is regularly played in the subway cars.
The noise emanating from the body of the vendor who transmits it is ap-
parently, at least for a moment, the offending, parasitic element. In Serres’s
analysis, parasitism also functions as “white noise” and is defined as “the
heart of relation” (52); thus singular (noisy) interruptions draw attention
to the structure of relation, and in this case to its material inequalities,
even as noise itself—­as a kind of third term—­is continuous with the evolv-
ing system itself.15
The dilemma of hosting/disappearance, or extirpation, materializes in
repeated instances in the fraught, negotiated space of public transit dis-
cussed here, and in a broader economic framework in which corporeal
affect jostles with market interests. The Host (El huésped) is also the title of
a 2006 novel by Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel, a text I now turn to for
further exploration of the corporeal, affective, and monetary economies of
the Mexico City metro, and of the circulation of nonnormative embodi-
ment as central to the work of threat, desire, and vulnerability.
In Spanish, the term huésped (host) bears an ambivalent meaning, re-
ferring either to an invited guest, or to one who receives and houses the
guest.16 Nettel’s novel appears to favor the first and more common defini-
tion, for the story centers around the narrator’s inner experience of inva-
sion by a strange being that gradually exerts power over her and trans-
forms her existence. This transformation in turn corresponds to the
narrator’s process of vision loss, and to her growing identification with a
community of blind people, through scenes that take place in the Mexico
City metro, and in an institute for the blind in Mexico City’s Colonia
 Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit  |  241

Roma.17 Yet here too, the “host” necessarily also reverts to its second
meaning, through the increasingly blurred division between protagonist
and “parasite,” referred to in the text as “La Cosa” (The Thing).
The novel’s associations between disability, including blindness, and
the psychoanalytic notions of abjection and the uncanny are fairly direct,
and tend to take advantage of familiar cultural scripts whereby the threat
of invasive, nonnormative embodiment, in this case hovering between
psychic and material manifestations, drive the plot and sustain readerly
interest. Yet of particular interest here is the way this fictional exploration
of disability, psychic transformation, and the space of public transit un-
derscores a close interweaving of affective and monetary structures of
“hosting” as key to the protagonist’s experiences and projections of her
changing world. As in the case of my discussion of the informal sector in
the Mexico City metro, its historical underpinnings, and the campaign
against subway vendors, in Nettel’s novel too, informal commercial prac-
tices, including begging, link directly to representations of disability as
materializations of threat and social vulnerability. In addition, it is par-
ticularly the case in the novel that disability evokes responses that trouble
the division between disgust and desire; the narrator’s encounters with
social vulnerability become occasions for her intimate, visceral engage-
ment with intercorporeal affect, as she navigates conflicting impulses to
flee from or to succumb to the material provocation of nonnormative em-
bodiment.
In El huésped, the space of the metro evokes both fear and a sense of
liberation for the narrator, who begins to discover a world at odds with her
prior concepts of financial transactions and corporeal affect, for in this
fictitious metro, begging is a logical and legitimate mode of survival, di-
rectly equated with the affective performance of physical impairment. The
text participates revealingly in an economy of social vulnerability, espe-
cially because the protagonist, in navigating between her attraction and
disgust toward disability, frequently exemplified by blind people, implic-
itly questions herself about the aesthetic and social value of the Others she
encounters. The following passage and its further unfolding are especially
suggestive in this regard: “Apareció frente a mí un personaje de aspecto
familiar, con esa inconfundible cara de beatitud, de quien lo merece todo,
que tienen los miembros del grupo. Era un niño tullido. Me costó trabajo
observarlo porque se arrastraba con los brazos a la velocidad de un tor-
pedo más o menos a la altura de mis rodillas. Son una plaga, pensé, habría
que detenerlos” [A familiar-­looking character appeared before me, with
that unmistakable beatific, all-­deserving face, typical of the group mem-
242 | The Matter of Disability

bers. It was a crippled child. I had trouble observing him because he

dragged himself along with his arms at torpedo speed, passing at about the
height of my knees. They are a plague, I thought. They should be stopped]
(125–­26).18
The protagonist’s offensively expressed rejection of disabled people, as
in this case, is complicated further upon her observation of the child’s
economic activity. The child’s success in soliciting charity leads to further
reflection: “Si alguien, por más mutilado que sea, sabe que cuenta con la
lástima de los demás, deja de ser un absoluto desvalido” [If someone, no
matter how mutilated, can count on the pity of others, he is no longer
completely helpless] (126).19 This train of thought certainly suggests the
material binary of pity/charity, discussed earlier in reference to the work
of Juan Pablo Matta, in which active, corporeal affect becomes inseparable
from materially lucrative exchange, potentially leading to a sense that the
disabled person has a kind of “unfair advantage.” Moreover, in this in-
stance, an abrupt transition occurs, as the narrator recognizes, perhaps
with some irony, that the characteristics of the child—­in this case, his rela-
tive “helplessness,” and related implications—­are determined by an evolv-
ing process of affective relations with all others with whom he comes in
contact. In addition, these characteristics are not mere impressions, but
actively transform the child’s economic status. Although this realization
may not actually change the narrator’s disparaging view of disability and
disabled people, it emerges here as a kind of begrudging admittance that
human materiality in public spaces is inevitably fluid, determined by mul-
tiple and ongoing processes of interaction and exchange.
The eruption of pity in the space of public transport provokes not only
an economic exchange, but also, from the narrator’s perspective, the flour-
ishing of an expanded intersubjective field. As she states: “Miré después a
las señoras que abrían su bolso para dar unas monedas al muchacho. ¿Qué
grupo sostenía a esas mujeres para lidiar con sus mutilaciones?” [After-
ward, I looked at the ladies who opened their purses to give a few coins to
the boy. What group supported these women in dealing with their mutila-
tions?] (126). The “group” here refers within the novel to a collective of
disabled people who live in the subway and survive by begging. In indicat-
ing that the ladies lack such a social collective, the narrator affirms the
efficacy of the disabled people’s group and their solidarity, while at the
same time transferring her prior expression of disgust from the child to
the charitable ladies, who now appear as metaphorically mutilated thanks
to their participation in the observed exchange. The familiar use of dis-
ability as a charged metaphor through which to project discredit by asso-
 Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit  |  243

ciation is clearly at work in this scenario; yet disgust appears to adhere

only briefly to any given object and is primarily defined by its capacity to
circulate and acquire new forms. In this way, the logic of economic ex-
change gives shape to affective responses that materialize but easily dissi-
pate and emerge elsewhere. In a similar sense, the narrator’s descriptions
of her actions and of the world around her seem to suggest a certain re-
move, as if she were observing herself responding to others and then re-
counting the scene at a distance. From early on, we learn that the narrator
as a child believes herself to be inhabited by The Thing, thus casting doubt
on her responsibility for her actions and statements. As a narrative tech-
nique, the presence of the host fuses the indeterminate question of corpo-
real integrity with structures of affective exchange, with the result that
rapidly shifting impressions of human and nonhuman others correspond
to a transforming projection and materiality of the self as both within and
beyond its familiar, tangible boundaries.
The role of The Thing in the narrator’s intimate account of her psyche
evidently parallels that of the vulnerable, disabled Others she encounters
and describes in the space of the metro, as in her descriptions of the “crip-
pled child.” This link underscores the intensely material quality of the af-
fective exchange, in which the narrator’s impression of disgust shifts and
implies a repressed desire to inhabit the ostensibly advantageous position
of disability as social vulnerability. This form of desire or jealousy, in tan-
dem with the narrator’s more directly expressed disgust, is the mechanism
through which the matter of corporeal otherness exerts its intimate force;
it is a desire to escape the constant demands of the circuit of affective and
economic exchange, to cede control, and to fully embody the materiality
and value of abjected flesh.
Affective exchange in this work also relates closely to more literal fi-
nancial transactions. The narrator makes this point explicit in her reflec-
tion on the situation of the blind people who inhabit the institute where
she occasionally works, noting that the blind live in such institutions:
“gracias a la hospitalidad de los videntes, a quienes, en el fondo, debían de
odiar con toda su alma. Todos, de alguna u otra manera, soñaban con la
autonomía, con abandonar su eterna condición de huésped” [thanks to
the hospitality of the sighted, whom, at bottom, they should have hated
with all their soul. All of them, in one way or another, dreamed of auton-
omy, of abandoning their eternal condition of “host”/guest] (109). Being a
“host” in this case specifically means depending economically on others
for one’s survival. The narrator’s disgust, expressed in response to forms of
nonnormative embodiment at various points in the novel, is also directly
244 | The Matter of Disability

tied to the question of economic dependency, the abjected condition of

the host. The host is necessarily vulnerable, and equally capable of threat-
ening or provoking pity or desire; it is a personal, embodied condition,
while at once an expansive, interactive, and market-­based social dynamic.
In this novel, the dilemma of socioeconomic inequality is materially
expressed through the protagonist’s body, experiences, and impressions of
others, as an internalized fusion of hospitality and the threat of potential
disappearance or extirpation. The materialization of inequality thus pro-
duces a constant preoccupation that is both social and corporeal, hovering
around the dilemma of the aesthetic and economic values of embodiment
as ambivalently intimate and foreign to the self. From here, one might re-
turn to the image of the sunglass-­wearing music vendor, and the message
of nonconsumption of his wares with the goal of “disappearance” of this
offending embodiment from the subway. To some extent, the expression
of nervousness surrounding the lived embodiment of inequality in this
advertisement scene, and the wish to eradicate it by removing its alleged
material cause, parallels the corporeal and affective structures at work in
the novel. In both cases a form of hosting takes place, in which an eco-
nomic relationship is posited in terms of an invasive embodiment within
a confined physical space, one that calls into question the material con-
tours and potential value of an implied subject, its vulnerability and its
projection of threat to others. The hosting relationship also exerts specific
demands on the viewer of the advertisement or the narrator of the novel,
because the intimate, material encounter elicits both fear or disgust, and a
repressed desire to embody extreme vulnerability. In this way, the matter
of these subway encounters allows for the materialization of a highly
charged structure of intercorporeal affect.
Ultimately, the question of whether any given, materialized subject is
itself at risk of disappearance, or instead posited as an integral, valued self,
to be defended from encroaching external—­or internal—­dangers, sug-
gests potential ambivalence. This is not to imply that all bodies are equally
at risk in the informal marketplace, nor in the broader economic frame-
work of global capitalism, but rather that in this context, and in accor-
dance with the logic of hosting and potential disappearance through
which nonnormative embodiment circulates, it is the movement of tran-
sit, affect, and exchange that conditions risk, desire, and threat as intercor-
poreal processes of transformation.
In highlighting particular instances of vulnerable embodiment within
the affectively and economically charged scenes of Nettel’s novel, in the
subway advertisement, in iconic instances of political protest, and in the
 Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit  |  245

evocation of quotidian metro encounters, part of my intention has been to

frame these scenarios within a familiar and fluid marketplace. In these
settings, movement and exchange triggered by notions of (non)normative
embodiment and corporeal boundaries may pass unnoticed, because of
an apparent continuity with standard practices of labor, consumption, and
related social interaction. At the same time, prolonged attention to the
materiality of such scenes serves to pull them momentarily from the cir-
cuits in which they repeat, thus isolating instances in which the ambiva-
lent oscillation of vulnerability congeals to display the violent and materi-
ally specific conditions of radical inequality. At the conclusion of Nettel’s
novel, the protagonist, now united with The Thing that inhabits her body,
listens to the passing metro trains as they come and go, “uno después de
otro, pero siempre iguales, como un mismo tren que regresa sin cesar”
[one after the other, but always the same, like one endlessly returning
train] (189). In this ending, all trains become one and the same in their
homogenous movement, reverting to a singular direction; the continuous
return suggests, in these lyrical, compelling lines, a collapsing of tangible,
corporeal distinctions, and the acceptance of exchange as always equiva-
lent. Yet this seamless movement undoubtedly belies the particularity of
the embodiments which the narrator has experienced, and the material-
ization of vulnerability—­in fiction as in other scenes of transit—­as specific
to each traversal from there to here.

NOTES

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.
1. Siebers further elaborates this point in his chapter in this volume; also see intro-
duction.
2. It is worth noting here that the proposal for improved transit conditions does not
explicitly include accessibility features, as these are not mentioned in the list of specific
changes in service to be implemented following the rate increase; however, improved
access for disabled people is mentioned in a more general sense as an area that was taken
into account in the prior study (Mancera Espinosa 6).
3. “Matter out of place” is borrowed from Mary Douglas’s classic Purity and Danger,
in which she uses this phrase in her frequently cited definition of dirt (36).
4. Also see Martha Stoddard Holmes’s reading of this text from a disability studies
perspective (123–­32).
5. As Henri-­Jacques Stiker suggests, the notion of disability as imposture is already
at work in the Middle Ages, and categories of marginality are ambiguous: “Between the
authentic and the false disabled the boundaries are not so simple” (85).
6. See, for example, Urías Horcasitas, who argues that nineteenth-­century dis-
246 | The Matter of Disability

courses of degeneration propose these associations, which also emerge in the Mexican
penal codes of 1929 and 1931. In the postrevolutionary period, however, efforts shift
toward normalization, rather than control of the population (66–­67).
7. “Investigación para externación.”
8. While the neoliberal model of social vulnerability discussed at length by Vite
Pérez suggests similarity to Jasbir Puar’s notion of debility, a useful distinction here
stems from the fact that Mexican neoliberalism (from the early 1980s to the present) is
read specifically in contrast to mid-­twentieth-­century Mexican structures of social pro-
tection as linked to the workplace, and typically associated with the legacy of Lázaro
Cárdenas, president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. Ferrante’s analysis focuses on dis-
ability and begging in urban Buenos Aires, but is still relevant here for her emphasis on
the paradoxical role of “rights” in relation to the marketplace.
9. As Andalusia Knoll explains, “#PosMeSalto loosely translates into, ‘guess, i’ll just
jump’” in reference to those who jump the turnstiles rather than pay the increased fee.
Knoll’s article includes more detailed discussion of this protest movement. With thanks
to Robert McRuer for suggesting the reference to this photograph and protest.
10. It is worth noting that many protest participants of a variety of ages and physical
attributes did not actually jump over turnstiles, but opted to duck or crawl under, or as-
sisted each other in climbing across barriers.
11. Within a broader Latin American context, the “disappeared” most frequently
evokes the tens of thousands of victims of the Southern Cone Dirty Wars under the Plan
Cóndor during the 1970s and 1980s. I am grateful to Patricia Brogna for her suggestion
of the important link between use of term desaparecen in the advertisement and the
political context of disappearance in Mexico.
12. See Andrea Noble for detailed discussion and analysis of this case and its reper-
cussions.
13. Patrick Dove focuses in particular on the delegitimization of the state in the after-
math of Ayotzinapa. Rossana Reguillo reads the case in relation to complicity between
organized crime and the state.
14. See Emily Bruce et al. for discussion of femicides in Ciudad Juárez in relation to
economic transformation of the border region.
15. The concepts of host and parasite figure in many works of literary theory and
philosophy. As Derrida writes: “Since there is also no hospitality without finitude, sov-
ereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing and thus by excluding and doing
violence” (55). Also see J. Hillis Miller, for his reading of the ambivalence of the host and
of parasitism.
16. In its biological application, huésped refers to an organism that houses a parasite,
but not the inverse. Note that J. Hillis Miller also refers to this dual meaning in the ori-
gins of the word, “host.” As he writes: “The words ‘host’ and ‘guest’ go back in fact to the
same etymological root: ghos-­ti, stranger, guest, host” (442).
17. The author notes in an interview that the institute is based on a real one, which
she has read about but has never visited (Hind 344).
18. All translations from Nettel’s novel are mine.
19. Note that the word desvalido is also associated with inválido, meaning invalid, not
valid, or disabled.
 Informal Economies in Mexico City Transit  |  247

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Posthumanist T4 Memory
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder

Introduction: Alternative Genres of the Human and Nazi T4

At base, both disability studies and critical race studies attempt to usher in
what black feminist materialist theorist Sylvia Wynter refers to as “differ-
ent genres of the human” (McKittrick 9). Such recognition involves an
enunciation of alternative ways of being human that are not based on
qualities advocated in classical liberalism’s hierarchical human-­centered
models of rationality, able-­bodiedness, European/American exceptional-
ism, and the agency of a politically capacitated citizenship (Weheliye 5;
McKittrick 109; Braidotti 24). Because these alternative genres of the hu-
man are grounded in a more active recognition of materiality’s agency that
is not overshadowed by discursivity (i.e., embodiment is more than the
passively inscribed surface that social constructivism posits as “citation-
ally iterative” [6]) those who embody alternative genres of the human find
a relative comfort of inclusive (mis)fit beneath the elastic category of the
new materialist methodologies loosely grouped together under the rubric:
posthumanism.
The “new materialist” turn of posthuman theory (particularly the
works of Rosi Braidotti, Asma Abbas, Alex Weheliye, Elizabeth Grosz, Di-
ana Coole, Samantha Frost, and Sylvia Wynter) posits “the flesh” (i.e., ma-
terial embodiment) as a site of critique for biopolitical concepts of ex-
pendability such as “bare flesh” (Agamben 8), “to take life or let live”
(Foucault 136), “necropolitics” (Mbembe 39), and “social death” (Cacho
32). These theories of the state-­sponsored destruction of lives tend to fur-
ther abject the bodies in question by avoiding a more materialist grappling
with the lives they represent (Weheliye 4). They all share a penchant for
positing expendability as a discursive construct that makes the lives under

249
250 | The Matter of Disability

erasure somewhat abstract and, therefore, avoid a more materialist en-

counter with nonnormative being. Unlike many biopolitical theories of
the human, posthuman materialism does not strictly adhere to models of
resistance embedded in the agency of “politically sturdy citizens” (Abbas
40), persons who exercise their rights with a fictional ideal of full, self-­
present, and coherent subjectivity. Why, as Asma Abbas asks in Liberalism
and Social Suffering, are formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory
only if they resist hegemony or exhibit the full agency of the oppressed
engaged in acts of civil disobedience?
Our key topic of analysis in this essay—­contemporary scholarship and
memorializations of those killed by Nazi medical mass murder in German
psychiatric institutions during World War II—­demonstrates the disas-
trous effects of transhumanist (read: eugenicist) approaches to rid society
of the “burden” of people with disabilities. This operation of the mass
murder of psychiatric patients is known as Operation T4 and began as an
extermination practice that corresponded with the invasion of Poland, be-
ginning in the fall of 1939. Ultimately, by war’s end, T4 culminated in the
deaths of three hundred thousand or more disabled people by bullets, gas-
sing, lethal injection, and starvation (Müller-­ Hill 64–­ 65; Knittel 43).
Scholarship on T4 has increasingly linked the killings of disabled people
in psychiatric institutions as leading directly to the Holocaust. For in-
stance, Henry Friedlander refers to the euthanasia murders as “the first
chapter of Nazi Genocide,” and his evidence supports a conclusion of “di-
rect links” between the Holocaust and the euthanasia murders (Origins,
xii). Timothy Snyder argues that the euthanasia murders served as “pre-
cursor” to the development of “Nazi death factories” (Bloodlands 256–­57).
Yet, as Suzanne Knittel points out in her book The Historical Uncanny,
“Despite the firmly established links between the ‘euthanasia program’
and the ‘final solution,’ these people (people with psychiatric, cognitive,
and/or physical disabilities) are not commonly numbered among the vic-
tims of the Holocaust” (11).
While we don’t believe an aporia between the T4 murders and the Ho-
locaust exists, we do want to join Knittel and other memory studies schol-
ars in contemplating why “their (disabled people’s) memory does not form
part of the commemorative discourse about this period” (11). Up until re-
cently the scholarship and memorialization of T4 have primarily pursued
a practice of exposing the killing psychologies, policies, and practices of
the perpetrators (Lifton xi–­xii); this inclination of the findings result from
the fact that few records exist regarding how disabled people experienced
this murderous episode. Thus, T4 scholarship and memorialization have
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  251

continued to leave aside disabled people’s points of view, meaning their

material participation in this history. The existing body of work on T4
pursues the import of this information primarily as a cautionary tale to
medicine, one that exposes the murderous results of medical overreaching
and the danger awaiting professionals who cross the line of “First, do no
harm” established by the Hippocratic oath (Agamben 143).
Our argument will consider how the intersection of disability studies
and memory studies might come into posthumanist interactions with dis-
ability as an alternative to—­or, at least, extension of—­the fetishization of
perpetrator mind-­sets. Such a move might further open up questions of
what to do about reading participant lives that fall short of what we refer-
ence as the liberal ideal of documenting the activities of a robust, capaci-
tated counter-­citizenry. How can we imagine alternative lives lived in
zones of indeterminacy and social erasure such as the lock-­down psychi-
atric wards or even the gas chambers of Germany in World War II? In
taking up this question, our essay pursues an analysis of post-­Holocaust
contemporary memorialization practices of medical mass murder cur-
rently operating in Germany (with gestures toward parallel efforts in the
United States, Austria, Poland, and Italy). Our explicit goal is to examine
ways of imagining a “less agential” population navigating “unworthy” lives
that does not inadvertently render such lives as meaningless and evacu-
ated of historical weight.
This is not to claim an absence of resistance exercised among disabled
participants, but rather that we might come to a more layered and impro-
visatory understanding of those who experience “extreme subjection” and
“suffering.” In order to accomplish this task we pursue the most radical
promise of posthumanist memory studies in order to introduce a more
visceral agency of materiality back into the equation. Such a practice can
only happen if we don’t begin by assuming what forms these state-­authored
memories may take from the start and how alternative forms of nonnor-
mative living emerge in ways our current agential measures of resistance
fail to record. Most importantly, we plan to show how recent memorializa-
tion efforts have begun to adopt a posthumanist, new materialist memory
framework to their presentations in order to redirect attention from the
perpetrators to the experiencers of the euthanasia murders (past, present,
and future). This alternative direction of emphasis matters, we argue, be-
cause disabled people have been misrecognized in the historical erasure
that was intended as the outcome of T4 as something less than liberal ide-
als of robust political citizens. We call this misrecognition a primary prod-
uct of an encounter with “low-­level agency.”
252 | The Matter of Disability

Low-­Level Agency

Before we get to our discussion of posthumanist alternatives emerging in

the contemporary memorialization efforts around those who died in the
Nazi T4 program, we want to theorize what we call “low-­level agency.”
Our goal in doing so is to identify a pathway for the necessity of a further
specification of the material lives of disabled people extinguished in the
Holocaust. A reluctance to expose disability as the basis for one’s determi-
nation as expendable by the Nazis, as we explain below, is an explicit prod-
uct of encounters with what to do with individuals who experience their
lives through periods of low-­level agency. To keep these identities hid-
den—­as was the case until very recently at German euthanasia center me-
morials and continues to some extent even today—­is to further deepen
the social stigma of disability that made T4 possible in the first place. This
practice of avoidance of the materiality of disability leaves the lives of
those living in nonnormative embodiments as a discomforting sidebar to
the inhumanity of the murders.
As the editors point out in the introduction, the application of disabil-
ity as a barometer for social oppression within the social model of disabil-
ity suggests a somewhat monolithic methodology that requires further
critique if the field is to ultimately engage a more robust encounter with
disability as an alternative genre of the human. One of the courses we
teach at university is a graduate seminar on crip/queer theory (with a
healthy dose of critical race theory) and our readings begin with two im-
portant works that allow us to better understand the problems at the base
of the social model of disability. Asma Abbas’s Liberalism and Human Suf-
fering and Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages,
Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of Embodiment; both offer up an
analysis of what we term “peripheral embodiment” in our book: The Bio-
politics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Em-
bodiment. “Peripheral embodiment” involves the analysis of those who
could be characterized as experiencing lives of low-­level agency (10–­11).
There are many gifts that Abbas and Weheliye’s works offer to disability
studies, but a key one for us is their serious turning to efforts at thinking
peripheral embodiment at the level of subjective, embodied experience;
they both refer to their work as part of the tradition of historical material-
ism at base. What this means is that even in the most leftist, progressive
works of political theory there exists an overemphasis on the agency of
“politically sturdy citizens” who, although experiencing significant levels
of marginality, continue to exert a full degree of claims-­based effort in
pursuit of attaining equal rights (Abbas 40).
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  253

In part, this argument is based on a critique of Liberalism’s over deter-

mination of the concept of “agency.” What, they ask, do we do with people
who do not, or are incapable of, performing in the role of the robust,
sturdy, minority, rights-­seeking citizen? Is there not, even in disability ac-
tivist and academic circles, a preferential treatment we give to those lives
that exhibit the correct level of resistance as a matter of course?1 Are we
not all culpable of excessively privileging (to one degree or another) those
who openly and actively challenge a discriminatory political system?
What of those who do not perform their opposition openly or even with a
working knowledge of themselves as oppressed? How might we get to the
significant question of identifying how disability and other minority citi-
zens effectively navigate their embodied lives without only finding ways to
expose a discriminatory, oppressive politics? Is there anything out there to
be learned from those whose lives involve suffering, but do not appear to
qualify at the basic level of regard we give to our idealization of the “sturdy
political citizen”?
For instance, Abbas convincingly argues that liberal formulations of
personhood are founded on concepts of embodiment as commodity; to
seek one’s “rights” in relation to embodiment must be expressed in terms
of damage, loss, or defacement of property (including one’s body). So one
may have lost loved ones in Hurricane Katrina, for instance, but, in order
to effectively seek reparations within liberalism’s property-­based claims
system, one has to pursue the systemic recognition of harm in terms of the
loss of private property. Abbas draws many of her examples from damage
litigation related to Hurricane Katrina victims such as the loss of one’s
house as a result of the levees breaking, or in the totaling of one’s car by a
felled tree, or the closing of a business and the ensuing loss of profit which
results, or even the collapse of an entire economic way of life related to
fishing in the now contaminated Gulf of Mexico, etc. These all represent
serious harms to livelihood; they also involve translating harm into in-
fringements of property rights—­there is no place in liberalism to define
and pursue justice on the basis of things without a property component.
Such a situation involves the necessity of turning harms into things we
possess and seeking reparations on their behalf. It is, at base, a substitution
of limited property rights for a vast range of experiential knowledge upon
which we have given up. We might think of hunger or starvation as Ab-
bas’s example of visceral experiences that cannot be adequately recognized
within liberalism’s property-­based logics (31).
Abbas and Weheliye would both argue that what is lost here is not the
consequences of power inequity leading to victimization in need of repa-
ration. That is merely the resurfacing of Liberalism’s perpetual property
254 | The Matter of Disability

emphasis on claims to damages. Rather they both argue that our vocabu-
lary of suffering is incredibly limited because we do not seek out the expe-
rience of those who undergo the labor of low-­level agency (Abbas 31). We
ask nothing of those who experience suffering because the point is to
usher them into recognizable categories of harm (malpractice, a flooded
house, defacing a public work of art) in order to move on to the next case
(138). By taking up some matters of property damage Liberalism effec-
tively silences the ways in which the experience of suffering might bring
us new knowledge. There is a decided over-­emphasis on perpetrators’ mo-
tives, interests, and practices without a significant effort to access how
those subject to the effects of harmful actions underwent the experience
of harm and the creativity of navigating such circumstances.
The labor of being a patient at a psychiatric institution that signifi-
cantly immobilizes one’s freedoms goes silently underground and will not
resurface unless we coax it into the world as significant. These experiences
“undo” a person psychically and, in doing so, they radically alter the way
one experiences the world. Low-­level agency is often about the ways in
which experiences of docility allow those who receive state sponsored
supports to be denied a future of expanding agency. This is the meaning of
living with suffering and the paucity of language/narratives we have for
describing what experiences of material vulnerability bring into the world.
Such embodied knowledge is due to the fact that Liberalism does not seek
to know about the experiential side of these embodied situations.
In the historical cases of medical mass murder under examination in
this essay we look at reasons for the perpetuation of silence about crip/
queer lives and how that inclination in contemporary commemoration
practices are giving way to more materially visceral encounters with dis-
ability. For instance, liberal courts’ requirement of translating harm or loss
into the terms of property value that Abbas discusses is pertinent to those
murdered in the Nazi T4 program. Until recently compensation for vic-
tims’ families has gone unrecognized in courts and thus the silence around
victims’ experiences has been doubly marginalized (Knittel 14). Rather
than translations into monetary value posthumanist disability frame-
works pursue the inclusion of biographical materials to make the indi-
vidual lives of disabled people surface. This effort involves fighting back
against a common argument about medical privacy that keeps the mate-
rial nature of victims’ conditions hidden and, for many years, off limits to
researchers of T4. Further, our examination discusses the alternative path-
ways through which posthumanist disability frameworks make connec-
tions between the treatment of disabled lives during World War II and
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  255

today in order to posit a transgenerational process of imagining disability

into the future. Finally, we follow the tracks of the inhumane dumping of
human remains during T4 (a gruesome investigatory undertaking at best)
in order to make available ways of approaching questions of the endanger-
ment of disabled lives and the alternative fashioning of crip/queer subjec-
tivities in the present.

T4 Memorialization: Telling the Truth but Telling It Slant

In order to show how posthumanist disability theory proves necessary for

making direct links between T4 and the Holocaust more explicit, we un-
dertook a longitudinal research project involving fellow researchers, stu-
dents, and German colleagues on visits to various T4 memorial sites
(called euthanasia memorial centers in Germany) between the years 2002
and 2015. During these visits we actively pursued a desire to make the
stories of the Operation T4 program materially emerge.
Our return visits brought posthumanist methodologies to bear on
these public memory exhibitions by leading us to these sites with specific
questions drawn from crip/queer studies. While we sought our own edu-
cation in relation to the prepared content of German guides and exhibi-
tion directors alike, we also intended to productively question the perva-
sive resistance toward making direct links between T4 and the Holocaust.
This identification of the continuing reluctance in some German memo-
rial euthanasia centers about connecting disability mass murder to the
Holocaust persistently emerged at several of the centers during multiple
return visits. We use posthumanist theory as a basis for transforming ways
of conceptualizing the historical relationship between the perpetrators of
mass murders and those with low-­level agency in order to make direct
links more apparent to the public memory of disability history.
In other words, we went not just as visitors, tourists, or memorializers,
but also as active shapers of the knowledge base that informs tour guide
training and research at T4 memorialization centers. Our questions were
as much about memorialization as a practice undertaken by contempo-
rary institutions with respect to disability attitudes, for many of the me-
morials have been established at sites that were psychiatric facilities be-
fore, during, and after the war. One of the most striking experiences of
visiting these euthanasia memorial centers after studying the history of T4
is the ways in which many visitors experience discomfort with the fact
that several of the memorial sites still function on the campuses of active
256 | The Matter of Disability

psychiatric hospitals. The irony of memorializing murder on the grounds

of a lock down penitentiary space where such mass murders originally
occurred causes visitors to do a double take with regard to whether such
killings could recur in our own time.
The information we uncovered during these interactions proved criti-
cal to our growing understanding of medical mass murder in the sense
that we wanted to apprehend attitudes about the targeted groups today as
well as in the historical moment of their unfolding. Feminist memory
scholar Marianne Hirsch refers to this expanded approach to the Holo-
caust as “postmemory”—­“a generational structure of transmission” (114).
We uncovered new information during each return visit and thus these
memorial pilgrimages have proven rich as a way to track shifting informa-
tion, attitudes, and presentation strategies over the past decade and a half.
Our groups always include disabled people and, as a result, these site ex-
cursions have also played a hand in making the memorial sites more ac-
cessible: during the past five years each site has added an elevator, simple
text versions of exhibition materials, and braille signage in an effort to
expand access for a variety of disability groups.2 Such interventions could
be read through Abbas’ theorization of low-­level agency in that the mate-
riality of disabled bodies entering inaccessible memorial spaces on multi-
ple occasions resulted in the revision of public space through more inclu-
sive accessible architecture and materials in the second decade of the
2000s. Such material imprinting on the space did not occur as a result of
“political actions,” but rather through a gradual recognition on the part of
the memorial organizers that disabled people were going to use this his-
tory for their own ends and the site needed to integrate accessibility into
their plans and practices.
Beyond these structural revisions of the space and guide practices,
other materialist unearthings of T4 history also proliferated. For in-
stance, at Bernburg we spoke with the director, Ute Hoffmann, who told
us that her mother, who worked as a nurse at the psychiatric hospital
during reunification, showed her the gas chamber when she was four-
teen years old (Hoffmann). Later, as a young woman, Hoffmann was
charged by institution staff (including the director and her mother) with
the obligation of overseeing the opening of the memorial after the reuni-
fication of East and West Germany in 1989. Hoffmann continues as di-
rector to this day. It was also through Hoffmann’s narration that we
learned of the disposal of human ash from the crematoria ovens under a
football field uncovered by a review of psychiatric hospital payment re-
cords to a man who transported ash in a horse-­drawn wagon to a public
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  257

dumping site in 1941 and 1942 (the primary T4 phase of gassings at Ber-
nburg before the ovens were dismantled and moved to Dachau). The
original location of the dump today exists below a community soccer
field and a battle for excavating the remains is ongoing. The effort to
explicitly track down the location of human remains serves as a
posthumanist-­based effort to make the material lives of these victims of
Nazi mass murder surface—­to literally expose the palimpsestic lives of
our contemporary moment existing on top of the death-­making pro-
cesses of the past—­as well as to fashion a more meaningful material
burial of the remains that has yet to happen.
In each of these instances one can witness the ongoing efforts on the
part of historians, researchers, and memorial staff to deepen their under-
standing beyond the necropolitics that informed the mass murder of dis-
abled people interred in the German psychiatric system during the war.
Their social marginality was physically approximated in their geographi-
cal isolation within psychiatric institutions located outside of major Ger-
man city centers. This literal absenting of disabled people and the strip-
ping of their citizenship rights by the state (yet, ironically, within an
elaborate state bureaucracy that actively supervised and meticulously re-
corded the killings) made many crip/queer lives more susceptible to radi-
cal exclusion and, ultimately, mass murder. Their material presence prior
to extermination was first absented geographically and the posthumanist
disability turn makes their further absenting in the gas chambers and kill-
ing wards of these psychiatric institutions and hospitals more palpable as
an encounter with the materiality of nonnormative lives. For instance, at
the Brandenburg Euthanasia Center we discovered that the last disabled
individual killed by the medical culture of murder was a young boy named
Richard Jenne, who died of starvation on May 29, 1945, in Kaufbeuren-­
Irsee state hospital in Bavaria, Germany more than three weeks after US
armies occupied the town and the German army had surrendered uncon-
ditionally. Brandenburg has allowed the biographical details of individual
fates to emerge more viscerally as a contestation of their anonymity and a
redress of the assumed stigma that would follow individuals diagnosed as
disabled and exterminated in the gas chambers of Operation T4.
This posthumanist memorialization tactic also surfaces in the display
of personal keepsakes recovered from victim remains. At the Sonnenstein
Euthanasia Center, for instance, we learned of crematoria ash being
dumped over the hill behind the gas chamber and into the town of Pirna
that sits idyllically at the bottom of the hill. Archeological exhumation in
the 1990s uncovered personal relics interred with human remains such as
258 | The Matter of Disability

perfume bottles, “Frozen Charlotte” dolls, hair combs, pins, barrettes, and
two charred leg braces during the exhumation. All of these items are pow-
erful emblems of the lives that passed through them as they represent per-
sonal materials that victims were able to secret on their persons even after
disrobing and undergoing medical examinations prior to their gassing.
The objects are now displayed in a glass display case hung from the ceiling
of the room that once housed crematoria chimney #2. This display of hu-
man artefacts may seem as if it could be completely contained within Lib-
eral Humanist practices of the memorialization of individual lives lost,
however, we argue that the belated nature of the effort to tell the story of
T4 mass murder through the points of view of the victims exposes the
degree to which those who occupy alternative genres of the human have
been consciously left out of previous historical memorializations of the
Holocaust. Their exclusion from the Western Project of the Human by
Liberal Humanism speaks to the crip/queer recovery efforts that form the
basis of posthumanist materialism.
While all of the euthanasia centers have traditionally told the story of
T4 through the perspectives of the perpetrators, these alternative findings
at Bernburg and Sonnenstein suggest that approaching the materiality of
those in positions of low-­level agency offer significant avenues for further
imagining the events of T4 because they increasingly attempt to bring
these nonnormative lives back into our contemporary memories through
the materials, objects, and biographical details of the particularities of the
lives that passed through them. Their recognition is not through the tradi-
tional channels of narrating instances of political resistance but rather
through the display and presentation of mementos that signify the mate-
riality of comfort sought by those who possessed them. Further the arte-
facts themselves speak of the materiality of lives lost and now sit abstracted
in the numerical tallies that characterized the German killing bureau-
cracy. As Katherine Harrison explores in her essay, “What Remains: The
Lure of Relics in a Faithless Age,” to enter into an imagined relation with
these lives across time and space does not mean abandoning their
earthboundness—­rather posthumanist materialism proves the opposite
more true.
Perhaps one of the most striking posthumanist strategies of presenta-
tion occurs at the euthanasia center at Sonnenstein. Whereas medical se-
crecy and concerns about public shame have pressured other centers to
keep identities hidden to a substantial degree, the Sonnenstein Euthanasia
Center publishes the names of those killed in the mass extermination pro-
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  259

Fig. 1.  Sonnenstein Euthanasia Center, Germany. A disrobing room where psychiatric
patients were made to undress prior to moving to the gas chamber, disguised as a
shower room next door. These are photos of some of the victims displayed on posts
with individual biographies on the back of each portrait. Photography by Sharon L.
Snyder.

gram on a series of frosted glass walls as one enters the basement area of
the T4 memorial site.
This public display of names seeks to actively counter the stigma asso-
ciated with inclusion in the Nazi killing program by refusing to recognize
the medical histories of individuals in the T4 program as a source of de-
valuing revelation in need of protection and further state secrecy.
When we started this longitudinal project, one had to procure special
permission from the German government to view the records of those
killed in the T4 program. From our posthumanist perspective, not talking
about disabled people’s medical histories is a form of oppression rather
than a form of protection. Such a vantage point recognizes the defining
nonnormativity of bodies as a foundational premise of embodiment rather
than its exceptional opposite. Whereas disability has been traditionally
treated as evidence of something gone awry in individuals and therefore
260 | The Matter of Disability

worthy of personal and generational shame and divestment of support

from those bodies, the display of the names of those murdered at Sonnen-
stein refuses anonymity as substantive to the act of memorialization.
Rather, the frosted glass walls of victim identities yield evidence of the
curatorial refusal to participate in the stigma of disabled lives by hiding
them away from view. They are openly recognized as worthy of commem-
oration, and even existing family members are not consulted for permis-
sion on their publication. This open display of the identities of those with
low-­level agency breaks a significant historical barrier of silence around
the material lives exterminated in the T4 program. While this display of
names and victim biographies may appear as a common humanist presen-
tation tactic, the fact that their unveiling has taken so long and the institu-
tional records treated as private medical information underscores an al-
ternative posthumanist methodology at work.
Yet, as we show below, the euthanasia centers also shy away from ef-
forts to explore any relationship between the Holocaust proper and the
medical disability murders that preceded them. For example, during a
visit in March 2014, our Sonnenstein T4 tour guide explained that “T4 was
an experience for the later Holocaust—­how to do it, how not to do it with
these killing facilities in Germany, in this society itself. And so it went far
and away into the Polish nowhere.” The comment suggests a link between
the two mass murder operations despite the fact that the Holocaust mur-
ders were exported out to lesser-­known, rural locations. Yet this direct
relationship between T4 know-­how about mass murder and Holocaust
implementation was interrupted whenever a question about the direct
link between the two was proposed:

Visitor: Should we understand that the Holocaust could not have

unfolded the way it did without these euthanasia killings?
Tour guide: Yeah, I would be a little bit careful with that. And, of
course, they used experience. Of course they learned about it,
what is going to happen, what [one] was able to do and what [one]
was not able to do. But these organizations in the background are
not the same. So, of course, they talked about it, but it’s not the
Holocaust in a smaller way. Or it’s also not a test for the Holocaust.
Visitor: Couldn’t you say it’s the germ or the first chapter of the Ho-
locaust?
Tour guide: Also, I would be careful with that because in the back-
ground the ideas have not this much to do with each other. Of
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  261

course, there was also the idea to clean the German people and so-
ciety of the Jewish influence, of the Jewish people. And it’s also
some way of racial hygiene, but it’s not the center of racial hygiene.

Translation across linguistic boundaries always poses difficulties and in-

stances such as those recorded here are no exception. Yet this circuitous
effort to avoid the identification of direct links between T4 and the Holo-
caust explicitly emerges in exchanges on the topic at many euthanasia cen-
ters, including Sonnenstein, Bernberg, Hadamar, and Hartheim Castle.
Brandenburg and Grafeneck both make more explicit connections be-
tween these two historical events, and the exhibition presentation materi-
als display less tentativeness overall. Positing a relationship between the
two historical episodes of mass murder is assiduously avoided at the four
centers mentioned above. They bring the threat of nonnormative crip/
queer lives (a cause of killing that might be explained or rationalized to
some extent) into the world of the inexplicable meaning of killing Jewish
people en masse as an explicit objective of the state, Operation Reinhardt,
and so on. We would call this chronic dis-­ease or trepidation about linking
one to the other yet another aspect of the ambivalence of contemporary
memory practices with regard to those with low-­level agency. It is in the
avoidance of complicating a story of ethnic genocide with the mass killing
of those who were definitively defined as biologically and psychically non-
normative, abnormal, and avoidance of burdens on the state that threaten
the story of ethnic genocide most explicitly. The leakage of one minority
group’s murder into the other is a highly regulated matter that has bor-
dered at various times on a concern about slander toward others killed on
the basis of the social construct of ethnicity.
During a tour of Bernburg in early 2015, our tour guide was queried in
a similar manner regarding whether the T4 murders could be considered
anticipatory of the Holocaust. While not severing the relationship as com-
pletely as the guide at Sonnenstein, our Bernburg tour guide made an ex-
plicit gesture toward the lack of consensus in Holocaust scholarship about
the ability to draw a connection between the two events:

Tour guide: That’s a very difficult question (i.e., making direct links
between T4 and the Holocaust) because scientists nowadays have
different opinions. One group of scientists say the Holocaust was
planned from the beginning, and it first starts and it goes on and
on and on. And others would say it’s radicalization. So it’s really
262 | The Matter of Disability

hard to say, “So this is the start and from this point on they start
planning to do this on a bigger scale.” So that’s a question that I
cannot answer.
Visitor: By using this word “radicalization” did they mean just size of
the program, or did they mean radicalization in terms of moving
from disability to ethnicity?
Tour guide: The second one. Or there are some scientists who say
the situation in the concentration camps got so much worse that
they need to find a new solution to handle this bad situation in the
concentration camps. There are different views. So that’s why I
cannot answer exactly your question.
Visitor: I think we’re just looking for your opinion. Do you think the
Holocaust could have unfolded without the euthanasia program in
front of it?
Tour guide: I guess if you really want to kill so many people there’s
always a way. I think they didn’t really need these euthanasia cen-
ters at the beginning. I guess maybe sooner or later they would
find another way to kill so many people. And they did find other
ways: they shoot people, they let them starve or kill them by work,
so I guess they would have find another way. So I guess they didn’t
really need euthanasia before.

One should give credence to the nuances of this argument in that it is

qualitatively different to posit that the euthanasia program was part and
parcel of the Holocaust and quite another to argue that the former was a
necessary precondition of the latter. As the guide points out: to find an-
other way of killing is always possible. However, the question of radical-
ization of Nazi ideas about how to eradicate Jewish people in Europe be-
gan with plans of slave labor or banishment to remote locations such as
Lublin, Madagascar, and Siberia (Snyder, Black Earth 28). A posthuman-
ist, new materialist approach asks what motivated these radical sequester-
ing projects of labor and deportation into systematic mass murder of
those living lives of low-­level agency in nonnormative bodies? Does it
matter that the mass extermination of Jews in the Holocaust ultimately
occurred with an accelerated and expanded model of the killing proce-
dures that unfolded during the T4 program?
Direct links between Operation T4 and the Holocaust abound, includ-
ing the architects of the mass killing facilities who situated the process on
a straight line of industrial, assembly line-­like efficiency operated exclu-
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  263

sively by physicians (Friedlander, “From ‘Euthanasia’ to the ‘Final Solu-

tion’” 164), autopsy rooms to expand medical knowledge as a justification
for the necessity of the killings (Burleigh, “Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Programs”
151), the physical removal of crematoria ovens and the transfer of ninety-­
two T4 staff to the sites of the Holocaust (Snyder, Bloodlands 257), the
elaborate ruse of transfers of disabled people from one facility to another
(Burleigh, Death and Deliverance 144), and, finally, the administrators
who creatively financed the cost of mass murder by delaying reports to
their own state welfare agencies regarding the death of clients receiving
public monies for their care or the pirating of family’s private wealth to
finance the killing of their own relatives (Aly 38; Friedlander, Origins 72).
In other words, in the advent of the modern factory of death, the Holo-
caust depended on the workings of a system that effectively produced
mass murder with great regularity due to earlier experiences in German
psychiatric institutions (Bauman 17).
All of this information served to nuance our understanding of the
overlaps and differences between T4 killing centers, the conduct of their
deadly operations, and the nature of contemporary memorialization ef-
forts. Some euthanasia centers are located in isolated castles, such as at
Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, and Hartheim, while others are located in the
centers of thriving cities such as Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg.
The killing centers pursued their murderous work in full knowledge of the
local residents: “The events in Grafeneck and elsewhere were widely
known and had become a ‘public secret’” (Friedlander, Origins 107). At
each memorial we asked our guides if current medical staff were trained
about the T4 program on site. We also queried our guides on whether or
not patients were allowed to visit the center to learn of a history that might
have well included individuals such as themselves now being treated at the
same facility. These queries intended to get at the necessity of bringing a
posthumanist framework to bear on T4 memorialization as they more ex-
plicitly make connections between generations of crip/queer people to-
day. The euthanasia centers are becoming sites of radical political trans-
formation in our understanding of nonnormative bodies as persisting
across history, actively accessing T4 as part of their own histories, and
recognizing disability as something other than deviant biology. At a wider
social level, crip/queer lives are increasingly being encountered as evi-
dence of materiality’s intra-­agency in the meaning-­making process. Post-
humanist disability theory can assist in effecting a cultural transformation
of disability as an inevitable aspect of all material lives as they mutate,
264 | The Matter of Disability

adapt, and rearrange our understanding of materiality. By recognizing

disability as something other than failing bodies that prove a burden to
families and/or the state, posthumanist crip/queer approaches endeavor
to create bridges to contemporary modes of disability existence in order to
promote a Nietzschean “transvaluation of value” where nonnormative
embodiments are concerned.
All of the existing memorials openly claim ties to hosting training pro-
grams for professional, medical, and educational purposes. The exposure
of the history of medical mass murder to patients was more haphazard
and exuded traces of the persistent ambivalence toward T4. At Bernburg,
for instance, we were told by one tour guide about patients who were ad-
dicted to drugs and happened to wander into the memorial site when
their appointments were canceled in order to “waste some time” while
awaiting a ride home. Dr. Hauer, one of the lead tour guides and T4 histo-
rians at the Brandenburg Asklepios Fachklinikum und Psychiatriemu-
seum, explained that prisoners in the psychiatric penitentiary on campus
were often brought over to learn about the history of medical mass mur-
der (Hauer). This was the only memorial site that argued it pursued an
active education about the historical atrocities for patients on campus.
Likewise, the T4 memorial center at Brandenburg has connections with
local universities that bring medical students in training to the memorial
site. In other words the memorials are slowly emerging as active education
centers during preprofessional medical training rather than as reluctant
memorializers of a barbaric past long gone. By drawing on posthumanist
disability practices in their presentations, the euthanasia centers transi-
tion beyond facilities that had largely relegated one of their major func-
tions to the role of serving as a cautionary tale to medicine.

Posthumanist T4 Memory

In order to build on the posthumanist arguments we have made to this

point that both acknowledge and critique presentation modes of historical
information about T4 at memorial sites, we want to extend our argument
to include recent developments where one can witness posthumanist ma-
terialism coming into a fuller transformation of contemporary commem-
oration strategies. While many euthanasia centers demonstrate the slow
emergence of a more posthumanist-­based grappling with crip/queer ma-
terialities, as represented by decisions such as the open publication of
twenty-­ two thousand names eradicated in the gas chambers at
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  265

Sonnenstein-­Pirna, we want to point toward sites (both digital and physi-

cal) where the participation of nonnormative bodies is being made in-
creasingly explicit. Such surfacings of posthumanist memorialization ef-
forts evidence the degree to which T4 commemoration is being
transformed from prior inclinations to fetishize perpetrators’ mind-­sets in
order to move toward a more fleshy interaction with the crip/queer bodies
in question.
For instance, the T4 website Gedenkort T4,3 curated by German histo-
rian Robert Parzer, reflects the expanding body of posthumanist T4 mate-
rials slowly emerging on the contemporary memorialization and research
of medical mass murder in Nazi Germany. Not only does this research and
virtual memorial site contribute to the foundations of understanding laid
by Holocaust studies, it also helps to make more explicit links between the
T4 program and the mass murder of Jewish and Sinti people within and
without the borders of Germany. The site offers a series of interactive
nodes where visitors can uncover the hidden histories of T4 through in-
vestigations into the biographies of those killed. Significantly, contempo-
rary disabled people participate in this unearthing of individual lives lost,
as well as family members who desire to make clear that being murdered
in the program is neither a stigmatizing revelation nor a matter of private
dysfunction to be kept hidden. Instead, the biographies chart out the di-
versity of ways in which crip/queer individuals came to be included in the
mass murder program, from participation in instances of petty crimes, to
the espousal of political beliefs held untenable by the Nazis, to being iden-
tified by medical personnel as having a body excessively unfit to maintain
oneself and others without burdening the state. This approach does not
underplay disability, nor does it adopt the common tact of revealing that
nondisabled people were caught up in the T4 dragnet; instead it recog-
nizes that physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities are expressions of
nonnormative embodiment that do not lessen the value of the lives taken.
Their crip/queer content is explicitly unearthed and addressed as an as-
pect of the alternative genres of the human these lives represent.
Further, as a participant in recent digital humanities projects that make
historical materials more public, the Gedenkorte T4 website also makes
materials previously available only in remote locations more visible. By
housing these memorial details on an interactive website, the digital cura-
tors turn accessibility into a virtue and make travel to these remote loca-
tions less necessary. There is still something significant about physical
participation in the locations of the killing centers, yet for many disabled
people and the general public such travel is unavailable, inaccessible, and/
266 | The Matter of Disability

Fig. 2.  Photography of the blue wall at the Berlin T4 memorial at Tiergartenstrasse 4,
where the offices supervising Nazi medical murder once existed. In the background is
the Berlin Philharmonic Opera House. Photography by Sharon L. Snyder (March 15,
2016).

or economically unfeasiable. Thus, the geographical barrier of remoteness

is removed by the development of the Gedenkorte T4 online presence,
and memorialization itself goes digital in its efforts to make this formerly
disguised history more public.
Practices parallel to those on the Gedenkort T4 website are also em-
ployed at the Berlin T4 memorial located at the physical address of the
former T4 headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. The memorial was curated
by a committee of disability professionals and advocates alongside disabil-
ity studies scholars and cognitively disabled “citizens” (Fuchs). Despite
Germany’s open public commemorations of those killed in the Holocaust
and its own state-­sponsored tragic history, it has taken more than seventy
years to include medical mass murder in the national conversation on Ho-
locaust atrocities.
The physical memorial site includes a blue glass wall that represents
the relationship of the past to the present and the necessity of seeing this
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  267

intra-­active connection more clearly. The blue wall separates the Berlin
Philharmonic Building from an angled display that chronicles the history
of those swept up in Operation T4. Importantly to the realization of post-
humanist practices informing contemporary memorialization efforts, the
exhibit includes the names of those who were transported on the Black
Buses to the killing centers, stories of crip/queer people who wound up
dying in the gas chambers, and the point of view of contemporary dis-
abled people that begin the exhibit. One of the first quotations to open the
exhibit by a disabled member of the Netzwerk People First Deutshland
explains, “If we had been alive during the war, we wouldn’t be here today.
Then you would not be able to get to know us anymore.” The comment
may at first seem to represent a radical distance between the low-­level
agency of T4 victims and contemporary German disabled people. How-
ever, we would argue that the possibility of erasing disability today by
various transhumanist objectives still informs the comment. Eradicating
disabled people remains on the not so distant horizon of historical possi-
bility, and doing so would mean a loss of exchange about disabled lives
rather than a benefit. This frontloading strategy of including the perspec-
tives of disabled community members living today emphasizes the fact
that nonnormative lives persist and express chagrin at the attitudes of
those who might will them not to exist. Further, the T4 memorial actively
makes the disability conditions of those murdered in the program surface
as the reason for their extermination, rather than de-­emphasizing differ-
ence in order to make the killings seem more horrendous. The posthu-
manist rationale of what is at work in this choice of presentation regards a
refusal to allow a simple strategy of identification between the viewer and
the victim form the primary basis for bonding over the outrage of the kill-
ings. Instead, nonnormative embodiment is held out as a site of human
diversity that is being honored in the memorial effort.
Prior to the web posting of Gedenkort T4 and the September 2014
opening of the T4 memorial, there was one other transitional exhibition
space that explicitly employs a posthumanist framework to address direct
links between the extermination of disabled people and the Holocaust:
Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind on Rosenthaler Straße 39 in Berlin.
The former broom-­and-­brush workshop is now transformed into a per-
manent exhibition with tours of a building that kept blind Jewish workers
from being deported by the Nazi SS. The workshop was run by a man with
a visual impairment, Otto Weidt, who cunningly used labor productivity
arguments and bribes to preserve the value of his workers’ lives despite
their ethnic and disability embodiments. Weidt hid his workers in nearby
268 | The Matter of Disability

neighborhoods and in the back of his workshop while he bargained with

local Nazi SS officers and cajoled them into allowing his manufacturing
plant to produce items for wartime consumption at various sites—­
including the Wehrmacht, disability institutions, Jewish hospitals, and de-
portation camps, where both groups were being exiled and systematically
slaughtered. The effort to preserve blind and deaf lives, which finally fell
through due to the deportation of many of the workers in 1943, explicitly
indicates that disabled Jewish people were hunted down due to the haz-
ardous liberal humanist intersection of ability and ethnicity.
Thus, we see these three recent memorialization efforts as posthumanist-­
based examples of the “politicization of memory” in regard to disability
history. These sites all serve as important exceptions to a generalized am-
bivalence toward making direct connections between T4 and the Holo-
caust, but, more importantly, they go more directly to the existence of the
materiality of crip/queer lives as a valuable aspect of contemporary en-
counters with difference. Rather than make the liberal assertion that these
lives should be valued “because they are just like you and me” (an equation
of homology as value), posthumanist disability exhibitions recognize non-
normative materiality as a basis for a contemporary revaluation of the
lives lost. Thus, the terms of disability existence do not get set aside to be
taken up at a later date or avoided due to fears of public stigmatization of
relatives in future genetic lines of intimacy with the victims. Instead the
nonnormative materiality of these lives is addressed directly in order to be
recognized as a substantive loss within the terms of low-­level agency. This
approach, as we argue, does not require the fetishization of perpetrators’
perspectives, nor does it rely on the robust tactics of an exceptional politi-
cal citizenry. Rather, posthumanist disability frameworks allow a more
earnest encounter with loss on the terms of material differences.

Conclusion: Of Moral Agents and Moral Patients

Perhaps the difficulty of maintaining disability history from the point of

view of low-­level agency comes most to the foreground in the experiences
of Uta George, who formerly served as the director at the Hadamar Eutha-
nasia Memorial. Ms. George explained to our group during a 2004 visit to
the T4 archives that her role as director was largely that of “goalkeeper.”
She attended town meetings every few months where residents denounced
the memorial as a stain on the community’s reputation. The existence of
the memorial was detrimental to local businesses because people did not
 Posthumanist T4 Memory  |  269

want to shop in a place where so many thousands of people were killed

and the killings were perpetually exhumed for beleaguered consciences.
Ms. George, in turn, argued that the memorial was part of communal
memory and a physical reminder not to forget the traumatic events or
lives lost. She perpetually wrestled with the dilemma of how to explain
that even severely disabled lives were worthy of support, caretaking, and
love. The residents responded with arguments about how those who were
killed would have asked for a peaceful death to remove them from their
suffering. She, in turn, argued that “euthanasia” operated as a T4 euphe-
mism for Nazi physicians seeking to promote death as a medical interven-
tion desired by their patients. This, she explained, was the least successful
of her tactics, as crip/queer lives remain heavily stigmatized within the
borders of Germany.
In his book What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe makes a further cri-
tique relevant to the theorization of low-­level agency by drawing a distinc-
tion between “moral agents” and “moral patients” (58). If liberal humanist
formulas posit that only those who are rational and autonomous as re-
sponsible (moral agents) and only interventions performed on agential
citizens (by the state, for instance) have moral weight, then this explicitly
leaves out groups such as disabled people in psychiatric institutions as well
as nonhuman animals (moral patients). This passive assumption of exclu-
sion effectively argues that what is done to those living lives of low-­level
agency occurs without a need for moral reflection or evaluation. They
only possess a body from which things are to be extracted and thus are
defined as static, passive, non-­agential actors as a result of their status as
those experiencing low-­level agency. They cannot act within the terms of
moral recognizability within liberal humanist conceptions of moral agents
(i.e., robust political citizens).
For instance, in the United States the implementation of neoliberal
austerity measures reference “access” to health care for all but falter at
medical care as a right of individuals. They also have little say about
quality of care, how and where one might receive said care, even the
more critical question of what supports might make a life possible out-
side the walls of an institution. These are all part of the persistent terrain
of social uncertainty regarding how much any crip/queer body can ex-
pect of the social order within which it must exist. To leave these ques-
tions as unanswerable, or to continue to perpetuate resistance to identi-
fying the links between T4 and the Holocaust, which by now are deeply
established in the scholarship even though only a partial historical rec-
onciliation effort has been made. Tentativeness toward a fuller recogni-
270 | The Matter of Disability

tion of the value of crip/queer lives in relation to other forms of social

devaluation has to cause us to ask questions of ourselves as scholars,
memorializers, and advocates. In the resurfacing of refusals for recog-
nizing a continuum between T4 and the Holocaust we also allow an
avoidance of a general sense of material jeopardy to which disabled peo-
ple continue to be exposed today within fully functioning states. Posthu-
manist new materialisms seek to make links between ethnicities, gen-
ders, sexualities, and disabilities that refuse to fetishize traditional forms
of leftist resistance as the only activities worthy of memorialization—­
they resist applying the definition of robust political citizenries as a
baseline determination of lives to commemorate, mourn, and celebrate.
Rather than continue these refusals, hesitancies, and misfittings of dis-
ability within liberal humanist conceptions, posthumanist disability
theory emphasizes alternative “genres of being human” that expand the
terrain of political analysis to a wider range of abject bodies.

NOTES

1. For instance, a social media advertisement for a new play about T4, All Our Chil-
dren by Stephen Unwin, circulated whose tag line reads: “Germany, 1941. A terrible
crime is taking place. One brave voice is raised in objection.”
2. When we initially visited the memorial sites in the late 1990s and early 2000s, no
such accessibility existed. Our first visits to Hadamar and Bernburg necessitated sliding
down to the gas chamber exhibition on our backsides after transferring to the floor from
our wheelchairs. Thus, the changes documented in this article refer to architectural as
well as informational and presentational alterations in concepts of disability history.
Posthumanist T4 research involves not only a review of the research but, perhaps more
importantly, a reclaiming of disability history by and on behalf of those who exist within
disability materialities in the most literal sense.
3. http://blog.gedenkort-t4.eu/

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Contributors

SUSAN ANTEBI is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and

Director of the Latin American Studies Program at the University of To-
ronto. She has published on discourses of public health and architectural
aesthetics in post-­Revolutionary urban Mexico and on the production
and circulation of disability in Mexican literature, film, and public space.
Her work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies,
Disability Studies Quarterly, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies,
and Latin American Literary Review. She is the author of Carnal Inscrip-
tions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability
(2009) and coeditor, with Beth Jörgensen, of Libre Acceso: Latin American
Literature and Film through Disability Studies (2016). Her book in progress
is titled Eugenics and Intercorporeality: Reading Disability in Twentieth-­
Century Mexican Cultural Production.

PATRICK DURGIN teaches critical theory, art history, literature, and

writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of
two books of poetry and poetics: PQRS and The Route (a collaboration
with Jen Hofer). His critical writing has appeared in journals such as Dis-
ability Studies Quarterly, Jacket2, and Postmodern Culture. Durgin is the
editor of Hannah Weiner’s Open House, a selected works.

CHRIS EWART has a doctorate with distinction in English and Disability

Studies from Simon Fraser University. He teaches disability studies, hu-
manities, and creative writing in the Faculty of Culture + Community at
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His publications include the novel
Miss Lamp, short fiction in Calgary Renaissance and West Coast Line, po-
etry in Open Letter, Canadian Literature, and Why Poetry Sucks: An An-
thology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry, articles in the Journal
of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and Shift: A Journal of Visual

273
274 | Contributors

and Material Culture, and chapters in Global Rights and Perceptions and
Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance. His work
often explores disability in literature, film, popular culture, art, and expe-
rience.

MATT FRANKS is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of

West Georgia. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled
Crip/Queer Modernisms and has published articles in Feminist Formations
and the Journal of Modern Literature. His research focuses on queer dis-
ability studies in British modernist and postcolonial literature.

JOSHUA KUPETZ researches, writes, and teaches on the intersections of

critical disability theory, disability justice, and twentieth-­century US lit-
erature at the University of Michigan. His work has been published in the
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and The Cambridge
Companion to American Novelists. He holds a doctorate in English Lan-
guage and Literature from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Po-
etry from Columbia University School of the Arts.

DAVID T. MITCHELL is a scholar, editor, history and film exhibition cu-

rator, and filmmaker in the field of disability studies. His books include
the monographs Narrative Prosthesis: Discourses of Disability (2000); Cul-
tural Locations of Disability (2005); The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliber-
alism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (2015) and the collec-
tions The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997) and
A History of Disability in Primary Sources, volume 5 of The Encyclopedia of
Disability. He curated The Chicago Disability History Exhibit (Vietnam
Veterans Memorial Museum, 2006) and assembled the programs for the
Screening Disability Film Festival (Chicago, 2006) as well as the DisArt
Independent Film Festival (Grand Rapids, MI, 2015). His four award-­
winning films include Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1995), A World
without Bodies (2002), Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer (1995), and
Disability Takes on the Arts (1996). He is currently working on a new book
and feature-­length documentary film on disability and the Holocaust ten-
tatively titled Disposable Humanity.

DAVID OSWALD teaches in the Department of English at the University

of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. His published writing appears in
the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and The Goose: A
Journal for Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, and his main areas
 Contributors | 275

of research include twentieth-­century US literature, disability studies, ani-

mal studies, biopolitics, and critical theory. In 2018, he successfully com-
pleted his SSHRC-­funded dissertation, “Of Dogs and Idiots: Tropological
Confusion in Twentieth-­Century U.S. Fiction.” This project elaborates his
critical concept of tropological confusion vis-­à-­vis the literary-­cultural
habit of conflating caninity and idiocy, focusing on works by William
Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Djuna Barnes, and Cormac McCarthy.

TOBIN SIEBERS (1953–­2015) was born in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, and was

diagnosed with polio at the age of two. He authored ten books, including
the field-­defining Disability Aesthetics (University of Michigan Press,
2010) and Disability Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2008). In 2004
Siebers was named the V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor at the Univer-
sity of Michigan. In 2009, the University of Michigan Council for Disabil-
ity Concerns presented Siebers with the James T. Neubacher Award in
recognition of extraordinary leadership and service in support of the dis-
ability community. Siebers was selected for fellowships by the Michigan
Society of Fellows, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation,
and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.

ANGELA M. SMITH is Associate Professor in English and Gender Stud-

ies and Director of the Disability Studies Initiative at the University of
Utah. Her research focuses on body politics in American literature, cin-
ema, and popular culture, and she has published in the journals Post Script
and College Literature and in the essay collections Horror Zone and Popu-
lar Eugenics. Her book Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic
Horror Cinema (2011) studies the ways classic American horror cinema
exploits and alters eugenic understandings of disability.

SHARON L. SNYDER’s career includes a range of work as an author, art-

ist, activist, and filmmaker. Her books include The Body and Physical Dif-
ference: Discourses of Disability (1997); Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and
the Dependencies of Discourse (2000); volume 5 of An Encyclopedia of Dis-
ability in Primary Sources (2005); Cultural Locations of Disability (2006);
The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Periph-
eral Embodiment (2015), as well as more than thirty-­five journal articles
and chapters. She has curated a museum exhibit on disability history at
the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial Museum, done disability film
and arts programming for festivals and conferences, and created four
award-­winning documentary films: Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back
276 | Contributors

(1995), A World without Bodies (2002), Self Preservation: The Art of Riva
Lehrer (2005), and Disability Takes on the Arts (2006).

OLGA TARAPATA holds a doctorate in English from the University of

Cologne. Her dissertation, Extraordinary Bodies in the Work of William
Gibson, reads Gibson’s representations of the human body from the late
1970s until today in parallel with disability history. Olga specializes in
North American literature with an emphasis on contemporary fiction.
Her research and teaching interests include disability studies, literary the-
ory, cultural constructivism, literature and law, science fiction, and zine
and comic culture. She is the guest editor of “Bodies on the Line: Intersec-
tions between Gender and Dis|ability,” the spring issue of Gender Forum:
An Internet Journal for Gender Studies.

SAMUEL YATES is a doctoral candidate at George Washington Univer-

sity, where he researches disability aesthetics and theatrical performance
in his dissertation “Cripping Broadway: Neoliberal Performances of Dis-
ability in the American Musical.” His project was awarded the 2017 Helen
Krich Chinoy Dissertation Fellowship from the American Society for
Theatre Research. He received his M.Phil in Theatre and Performance
Studies from Trinity College Dublin as a Mitchell Scholar and his BA from
Centre College as a John C. Young Scholar. Samuel holds a Humanity in
Action Senior Fellowship for his work on performance and body politics
and has previously collaborated as a dramaturg, playwright, and per-
former with theaters such as the Abbey Theatre, the Eugene O’Neill The-
ater Center, the Samuel Beckett Centre, and New Harmony Theater,
among others. His recent work is published or forthcoming in Radical
Contemporary Theatre Practices by Women in Ireland (Carysfort Press),
and Studies in Musical Theatre, among others.
Index

Note: Page numbers appearing in italic refer to an illustration on that page.

8 Legged Productions, 155, 157n7 agentiality, 1, 4, 7, 9, 33, 56, 74, 130–­31, 164,
168, 251, 269; intra-­, 11, 16
Abbas, Asma, 7, 32, 249–­50, 252–­54, 256 Ahmed, Sara, 50, 61, 207
ableism, 5, 25, 28, 33n3, 60–­61, 94, 119, 131, AIDS quilt, 199, 201n17
136, 138n13, 162, 165–­66, 170, 178, 206, Akira (Otomo), 166–­67, 178
209, 222; in Deleuze and Guattari, 113n2; Alaimo, Stacy, 12, 149
of employers, 58; Freaks (Browning) and, Alien (Scott), 182–­83, 198
137n12; HIV/AIDS and, 188; logic of, 52; amputation, 121–­22, 137n10, 166–­68, 171,
of medical practices, 56; in Of Mice and 196; bilateral leg, 129; CGI and, 133, 171,
Men, 213–­14; in Spiderman: Turn Off the 177; fictionalized, 26; simulated, 120,
Dark, 144. See also affect: ableist 127–­28, 133; spectacle of, 118–­19; stories,
actor-­network theory (ANT), 57–­58 52. See also prosthesis; prosthetics
ACT UP, 199, 201n17 amputee bodies, 26, 28, 118, 123, 125, 128
affect, 119–­21, 123, 135–­36, 239; ableist, animacy, 96, 114n5, 148; hierarchies, 185,
129–­30; corporeal, 240–­42; disability, 189
128; intercorporeal, 241, 244; interspe- animality, 30, 144, 207–­8, 210, 214, 216–­17
cies, 30; literary, 30, 130 animalization, 185, 205, 207–­10, 213, 215–­
affection, 131, 136, 136n2, 217; for disabil- 18, 220
ity, 119, 130; social, 207, 211. See also dis-­ animals, 2, 22, 29, 34n5, 130, 147, 185, 191,
affection 198, 205, 215, 217, 219, 244n7, 269
Agamben, Giorgio, 20, 216, 219. See also anonymity, 101–­2, 104, 257, 260
bare life Antebi, Susan, 15, 31–­32
agency, 7, 9, 39–­40, 42, 47, 51, 57, 78, 112, anthropocentrism, 19, 147, 151, 162, 209–­
132, 160–­63, 171, 253; affective, 136; of 10, 214, 220, 222
the body, 231; of citizenship, 249–­50, Anti-­Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 91–­
252; collective, 77; creative, 27; female, 95, 97
168; feminist, 28; grammatical, 97; hu- The Automobile Accident, 124–­25
man, 20, 130; intra-­, 263; low-­level,
251–­52, 254–­56, 258, 260–­62, 268–­69; of Barad, Karen, 1, 10–­11, 34n6
materiality, 2–­3, 11, 26, 249, 251; of mat- barebacking, 186–­89, 199, 200nn7–­8,
ter, 72, 177; of T4 victims, 267; of ven- 201n16. See also Dean, Tim; HIV/
dors (Mexico City metro), 237, 239 AIDS; male pregnancy; parasitism

277
278 | Index

bare life, 20, 147, 208, 216 ment and, 41–­42, 47; materiality of, 67–­
Beattie, Thomas, 182, 200n2 68, 70, 163, 231; medical model of dis-
Bennett, Jane, 12, 68, 72–­74, 77–­78, 84n2, ability and, 40; as passive recipient, 23;
90 social model of disability and, 39–­42,
biopolitical economy, 97, 147 49; technology and, 170, 185; transhu-
biopolitics, 186, 190, 193–­94, 198–­99, 207, manism and, 162. See also nonnorma-
216, 220–­21, 223, 249–­50; aesthetics tive bodies
and, 60; Agamben and, 216, 219; de- Braidotti, Rosi, 17, 249
pendence and, 197; disability, 177–­78, Briseño factors (Ex parte Briseño), 208,
184–­86; entertainment industry and, 221–­23
161; exclusion and, 161; Foucauldian, Butler, Judith, 3, 4, 113n1
169; HIV/AIDS, 29, 186–­87, 189, 192, Butler, Octavia E., 29, 183–­87, 190–­91, 193,
195; inequality and, 31; networks of, 28; 195–­97, 199, 200nn4–­5; “Bloodchild,”
population management and regula- 29, 183–­87, 189–­200
tion, 206; prosthesis and, 169, 177; ra-
cialized, 30; racism and, 186; sacrificial cancer, 24, 33n1, 39, 49–­51, 53, 58–­59, 62–­
subject and, 20; slavery and, 29, 184, 64
198; state, 184–­85, 187, 189–­90, 196, 199 caninity, 30, 204–­206, 208, 213–­14, 216–­18,
biopower, 219–­20; critiques of, 90–­91; 220. See also dog breeding; Of Mice
state-­centered, 31; US, 30, 207, 221–­22 and Men
blindness, 10, 22, 31, 229, 232, 237, 240–­41, capacitation, 6, 13
243, 267–­68 capacity, 2, 4, 71, 74, 134, 186; ableist, 5;
“Bloodchild” (Butler), 29, 183–­87, 189–­200 bodily, 17, 119, 129, 156; clairvoyance
Blyn, Robin, 153–­54 (Weiner) as, 91; for empathy, 182; mas-
bodies: abject, 270; amputee, 26, 28, 118, culine, 183; of materiality, 76; reproduc-
128; animal, 209; augmented, 147, 153; tive, 194; for sight, 151
black, 184–­86, 192, 194–­96, 198, 200n6; capitalism, 24, 74, 91, 95, 147, 153, 192; cri-
of color, 183; crip/queer/black, 29, 154, tique of, 96; global, 16, 34n9, 49, 191,
185–­86, 265; as diagnostic tools, 2; dis- 244; industrial, 20; logic of, 63–­64;
ruption of, 170; historical, 205, 209, 221; narco-­, 238; popular culture and, 145
human, 20–­21, 161, 167–­68; hyperca- Chen, Mel Y., 64, 96–­97, 150, 185, 205, 213,
pable/hypercapacitated, 146–­47, 151, 218, 221
154, 156; hyperprostheticized, 147; im- Chivers, Sally, 215–­18
paired, 5, 132; material, 8, 190–­91; non- collaboration, 29, 77–­78, 101–­2, 110, 112–­
disabled, 26; nonhuman, 1, 239; norma- 13, 114n3, 200n5. See also Unnatural
tive, 182 (see also embodiment: Acts; Weiner, Hannah
normative); othered, 13, 19; prostheti- commodification, 74, 83–­84, 145
cized, 178; racialized, 22, 190, 238; complex embodiment, 23–­24, 33n1, 39,
transgressive, 232; transhuman, 152; 42–­45, 47, 50, 56, 70
undercapacitated, 9; weaponized, 178; constructivism, 23; social, 1–­2, 4–­5, 9, 68,
women’s 165, 168, 194; of workers, 169; 74, 249
yakuza, 157–­58. See also disabled bod- Coole, Diana, 34n6, 73, 120, 129–­30, 162–­
ies; nonnormative bodies 63, 185
body, the, 48, 69–­73, 83, 85n3, 90, 92, 130, corporeality, 70–­72; agentive, 3; extraor-
164, 209; as artistic medium, 167, 173, dinary, 74, 78; paraplegic, 80. See also
177 (see also amputation; bodies: intercorporeality; nonnormative cor-
yakuza); disability and, 44, 98; environ- poreality; transcorporeality
 Index | 279

creativity, 58, 70, 73, 80, 84n2, 113, 254 body of knowledge, 42, 47; conceptual
Creeley, Robert, 100–­101. See also Weiner, model of, 48; disappearance and, 31,
Hannah 229–­35, 237–­40, 244, 246n11; erasure of,
Crilley, Mariah, 162, 164 31, 134, 137n6, 151, 154, 251; experience,
crip/queer, 200n6; bodies, 34n4, 186, 265, 34n4, 121, 169; fetishization of, 134, 162,
269; bonds and risks of male preg- 165, 170, 173, 176; HIV/AIDS and, 184,
nancy, 189; consumers, 187; lives, 254, 186, 189, 191, 199; identity, 39, 43, 192; il-
257, 261, 263, 267–­70; materialities, 264; lusion, 129; images, 119; informal sector
recovery efforts, 258; studies, 255; sub- and, 31, 232–­33, 239, 241; interpreting,
jectivities, 255; theory, 252 41; literary depictions of, 80; as
crip/queer/black, 200n6; bodies, 29, 185; material-­semiotic, 50, 54–­58, 63; mate-
forms of support, 198; lives, 189; prac- rialism, 29, 32, 73; materiality and, 3
tices, 190, 196; resistance, 199; subjects, (see also disability materiality); medical
189–­90, 192, 197, 199 model of, 2, 24, 40–­41, 43; memoir, 11,
34n5; as metaphor, 184, 242; new mate-
Davidson, Michael, 160, 163, 169, 182, rialist conception of, 48; pathologiza-
200n1 tion of, 4, 196, 224n3; political/rela-
Davis, Lennard, 149, 178 tional model of, 50, 56; psychosocial,
Dean, Tim, 186–­88, 199, 200n7. See also 98, 110, 113, 114n6 (see also Weiner,
barebacking Hannah); representation, 130, 215; sim-
Deleuze, Gilles, 25–­26, 71–­72, 89–­96, 98, ulations, 128, 131; strong definition of,
101, 112–­13, 113–­14nn1–­4, 114n8. See also 58–­59; weaponization of, 28, 162, 168–­
Anti-­Oedipus; Massumi, Brian; Guat- 69, 171, 172, 178 (see also Machine Girl
tari, Félix; minority; schizo; schizo- (Iguchi); Planet Terror (Rodriguez). See
analysis; schizophrenia also ableism; affect: disability; affec-
Derrida, Jacques, 71, 113n1, 224n5, tion: for disability; biopolitics: disabil-
246n15 ity; capacity; embodiment: disabled;
desire, 71, 92, 95, 109, 134, 168, 240–­41; hypercapacity; impairment; material-
alien, 187; collective, 231; gay, 199; man- ism: disability; mental disability; social
ufactured, 160; repressed, 230, 234, model (of disability)
243–­44 disability drag, 27, 119, 122–­23, 128–­30,
digital effects, 125, 130, 133–­34, 177. See 133–­35, 136n3
also special effects disability ecology, 24, 48–­50, 54–­58, 60–­
disabled bodies, 15, 19, 21–­23, 26–­27, 43, 61
69–­73, 83, 121, 125, 128–­31, 133–­36, 161, disability materiality, 2, 4, 11, 24, 26–­28,
231, 256; ableist assumptions and, 119; 31, 33, 34n7, 231
choreographing of, 120; disability drag disability studies, 2, 9–­12, 23, 30, 33n1,
and, 123; erasure of, 154; normatively, 34n4, 39–­41, 56, 72, 78, 89, 96, 113,
187; pathologization of, 224n3; prosthe- 245n4, 249, 252, 266; animal studies
sis and, 28, 164; violence and, 165, 167, and, 205, 215–­16, 221; black rehabilita-
169, 179; viral manipulation of, 185. See tion politics and, 201n13; critical, 49,
also nonnormative bodies 70; debates within, 67–­68; Deleuze and
disabled lives, 7, 32, 62, 254–­55, 260, 267, Guattari and, 91, 93; feminist, 7; HIV/
269 AIDS and, 186, 193; materialism and,
disability: aesthetics, 39, 112; agency, 26; 162; memory studies and, 251; posthu-
as alternate becoming, 5; alternatives, manist, 6, 29, 32; prosthesis and, 163.
9, 34n4; biologization of, 224n3; as a See also literary disability studies
280 | Index

disability theory, 39, 54, 97, 112, 113n1, 162; Falstaff, 23, 39; as disabled, 43–­47. See also
posthumanist, 4, 7, 9–­10, 12–­13, 17, 19–­ Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2; passing
20, 22–­23, 25–­26, 32, 39, 231, 255, 263, feminism, 34n7, 70; black, 12, 249; De-
270. See also Siebers, Tobin leuzean, 113n1; false, 28; materialist, 12,
disability subjectivity/subjectivities, 23, 16, 249
49, 54, 60–­63, 75, 154 Ferrante, Carolina, 234–­35, 246n8
disabled moves, 122, 128–­34, 136 Forrest Gump (Zemeckis), 121, 123, 125,
disabled performers, 119, 125, 131–­32 126, 137n9
dis-­affection, 130–­31, 133, 135. See also af- Foucault, Michel, 9, 65n2, 184, 201n14
fection freak shows, 145, 152–­53, 170
disappearance, 31, 229–­32, 237–­40, 244, Friedman, Ed, 101–­2
246n11; theatrical, 125, 150. See also Frost, Samantha, 34n6, 73, 120, 129–­30,
hosting 162–­63, 185
disidentification, 98, 112
dog-­breeding, 30, 206. See also eugenics Gain (Powers), 24, 48–­55, 58–­64. See also
cancer
embodied knowledge, 39, 43, 52, 61, 254 Garland-­Thomson, Rosemarie, 70, 134,
embodiment, 2, 5–­7, 12–­13, 16–­17, 20, 23–­ 147–­48, 152, 176, 193
27, 32, 61, 71–­72, 154, 160–­61, 163, 219, Gibson, William: fiction of, 67; Idoru, 70,
244–­45; agential, 74; alternative, 11, 149; 85n4; Pattern Recognition, 25, 67, 74–­76,
animality and, 207, 216; as commodity, 78–­84; Virtual Light, 76–­78
253; disability and, 48, 59, 234; disabled, Gonzalez, Octavio, 188, 199
44, 52, 129, 135, 189; environment and, Grosz, Elizabeth, 3, 149, 249
41–­42; experience of, 23, 34n10; ex- Guattari, Félix, 25–­26, 71–­72, 89–­98, 112–­
traordinary, 67; HIV/AIDS and, 186; 13, 113–­14nn1–­3. See also Anti-­Oedipus;
material, 236, 249; materiality of, 62; Deleuze, Gilles; Massumi, Brian; mi-
nondisabled, 77; normal, 123; norma- nority
tive, 74, 184, 245; peripheral, 34n4, 147, guest, 31, 240, 243, 246n16. See also host
154, 252; of resistance, 44. See also com-
plex embodiment; nonnormative em- Haraway, Donna, 11, 19, 30, 149, 206, 213
bodiment Harman, Graham, 90, 97
enhancement, 84, 97, 150, 182; genetic, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (Shakespeare), 23,
143–­44, 146; human, 11, 19, 28, 34n10; 43. See also Falstaff
medical, 134 heteronormativity, 9, 13, 17, 28, 61, 167, 173,
Erevelles, Nirmala, 5, 190, 194–­95, 201n12 188
eugenics, 4, 22, 30–­31, 94, 134, 162, 168, historical uncanny (Knittel), 250
178, 206–­7, 209, 220; disability and, HIV/AIDS, 185–­95, 198–­200, 200n5; ac-
224n3, 250; laws, 224n6; Nazi, 20; Spi- tivists, 200n9; biomedicine, 192–­93;
derman: Turn Off the Dark and, 145–­47, biopolitics, 29, 186–­87, 189, 192, 195; cri-
154. See also dog breeding sis, 29, 187, 191; disability and, 183–­84,
euthanasia, 22, 27, 224n7; memorial cen- 186, 189, 191, 199; patients, 187, 192;
ters, 32, 252, 255, 263, 268; in Of Mice TasP (treatment-­as-­prevention) drugs,
and Men, 30, 208, 211–­13, 216, 219; mur- 188–­89. See also ACT UP; AIDS quilt;
ders (Nazis), 250–­51, 257–­64, 269 (see barebacking; “Bloodchild” (Butler);
also Holocaust, the; T4 [Operation male pregnancy; PrEP
T4]); segregation and, 206, 220 HIV infection, 185–­86, 190, 193
exploitation, 16, 165, 200n5 Hoffmann, Ute, 256–­57
 Index | 281

Holocaust, the, 32, 224n3, 250, 252, 255–­ kinship, 147, 186, 188, 190, 195, 199
56, 258, 260–­63, 265–­70. See also eutha- Knittel, Susanne C., 250
nasia: murders (Nazis); T4 (Operation
T4) Ladd, Robert, 221–­23
hospitality, 243–­44, 246n15. See also guest; Landa, Amanda, 166–­67
host; hosting Latour, Bruno, 54, 57, 85n3. See also actor-­
host, 183, 191–­92, 196, 198, 230, 239–­41, network theory (ANT)
243–­44, 246nn15–­16; disability, 9. See Lewis, Bradley, 97, 114n6
also barebacking; guest; hosting; El liberalism, 4, 7, 32, 62, 161, 219, 251, 253–­
huésped; male pregnancy; parasitism 54, 268; classical, 249; diversity model
hosting, 31, 230, 239–­41, 244, 264. See also of, 144. See also humanism: liberal;
disappearance; guest; parasitism subject: liberal
El huésped (The Host) (Nettel), 31, 234, Linton, Simi, 163, 179n4
240–­41, 244–­45, 246n18 literary disability studies, 48, 54
humanism, 4, 7, 21, 210, 258, 260; classical, Longmore, Paul K., 137n6, 166
17; in Gibson’s early fiction, 72; liberal, low-­level agency, 7, 32–­33, 251–­52, 254–­56,
4, 224n1, 258, 268–­70; Western, 13. See 258, 260–­62, 267–­69
also posthumanism; subject: humanist; Lucretius, 12, 74
transhumanism Lyle, Timothy, 184–­85
hypercapacity, 4, 145–­46, 149, 154–­55, 236;
fictional, 145; genetic, 27; masculinity Machine Girl (Iguchi), 28, 161, 164–­67,
and, 28; sexualized, 22. See also bodies: 169–­70, 172, 173, 175–­76, 178
hypercapable/hypercapacitated; Spider- Magnone, Sophia, 185, 200n5
man: Turn Off the Dark; subject: hy- male pregnancy, 29, 182–­83, 185, 187, 189–­
percapable 90, 195, 200. See also “Bloodchild”
(Butler)
Iguchi, Noboru, 161–­165, 168, 170–­7 1; Ma- masquerading, 45–­47, 233; disability and,
chine Girl, 28, 161, 164–­67, 169–­70, 172, 136n3, 154
173, 175–­76, 178 Massumi, Brian, 119–­20
impairment, 5–­7, 9–­10, 24, 26, 33n1, 114n3, materialism, 5, 33, 74, 84n2, 185, 249–­50,
120, 134, 193, 230–­31; boundedness of, 256; alternative, 34n4; black, 16; disabil-
56; clairvoyance as, 91 (see also Weiner, ity, 29, 32, 73; feminist, 12, 16, 249; his-
Hannah); mental, 40; mobility, 39; torical, 252; iterative, 113n1; poetry and,
physical, 231, 241; psych-­, 8; visual, 10, 98; posthuman, 250; posthumanist, 32;
267 revival of, 72, 97. See also neomaterial-
intercorporeality, 32, 230, 241, 244 ism; new materialism
intersubjectivity, 25, 91, 236, 242 Matta, Juan Pablo, 234, 242
intra-­action, 24, 33n2, 149 matter, 1–­4, 7, 9–­10, 34n6, 56, 68, 73–­74,
intra-­activity, 1, 23–­24, 33, 267; iterative, 4 77, 84n2, 113, 130, 162–­64, 167, 207,
209; abjected, 218, 234; agency of, 72,
Jain, Sarah, 28, 160–­61 162, 177; bodily, 182–­85, 188, 190; de-
Japan, 28, 165, 167; B-­movie industry in, viant, 6; disability and, 8–­9, 12, 33; in-
168; national emasculation of, 161 ert, 9, 56–­5 7, 69–­70, 73; living, 11;
nonhuman, 185, 187; nonself, 71; out
Kafer, Alison, 5, 50, 56, 61, 128. See also of place, 232; politics of, 178; trans-
disability: political/relational model of versal theories of, 90; vibrant, 84n2,
Kermode, Mark, 132–­33 113
282 | Index

Mayer, Bernadette, 99, 101–­103. See also new materialism, 20, 25, 27, 34n6, 48–­49,
Weiner, Hannah 55–­56, 68, 72–­73, 89, 91, 96–­97, 101, 112–­
Mbembe, Achilles, 20–­21, 169. See also 13, 120, 129–­30, 162, 178, 185, 249, 251,
necropolitics 262; posthumanist, 270
McRuer, Robert, 5, 9, 113n1, 191–­92, Newtonian physics, 10–­11
201n17, 246n9 “New Vitruvian Woman” (Dowdalls), 17, 18
medicalization, 29, 40, 184 nonnormative bodies, 2, 25, 31, 79, 84, 128,
medical practices, 24, 48, 51, 56 167, 231, 262–­63, 265
mental disability, 30, 205–­209, 211, 214, nonnormative corporeality, 25, 67, 69, 72–­
216–­18, 221, 223. See also Of Mice and 76, 78, 80
Men nonnormative embodiment, 5, 16, 27, 32–­
metaphor, 96, 215; animality as, 216; cri- 33, 56, 60, 67, 82–­83, 136, 231, 233–­34,
tique of, 97, 112; disability and, 162, 184, 239–­41, 243–­44, 259, 265, 267
200n3, 242; HIV/AIDS and, 187, 194–­ nonnormative positivism, 4, 34n4, 97,
95, 200; prosthesis as, 160, 163, 167 113n1
metaphoric substitution, 92, 97 normalcy, 57, 60, 72, 131, 149, 178; bodily,
metro (Mexico City), 229, 230, 235–­37, 200n1; masquerade, 154; symmetrical,
243, 245; economies of, 240–­41; ven- 20
dors in, 22, 31, 229–­32, 237–­41, 244;
wheelchair users and, 232. See also objectification, 156; of disabled people,
public transit 40, 42, 47, 161, 178; of women’s bodies,
Metropolis (Lang), 169, 177 165–­66, 173, 178
minority (Deleuze and Guattari), 90, 93, object-­oriented ontology, 90–­91
95, 98 Occupational Safety and Health Hazard
Mitchell, David T., 13, 15, 32–­33, 33n4, 55, Administration (OSHA), 155, 157n8.
57, 60, 72–­73, 75, 80, 129, 145, 147, 185, See also workplace safety
189, 192, 196, 200n3, 200n6. See also Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), 30–­31,
prosthesis: narrative 204–­8, 210–­23. See also Briseño factors
monstrosity, 15, 34n8; of gay desire, 199 (Ex parte Briseño); mental disability;
Moore vs. Texas, 207–­209, 221–­23. See also Moore vs. Texas; tropological confu-
Briseño factors (Ex parte Briseño); Of sion
Mice and Men Oswald, David, 29–­31
Müller-­Hill, Benno, 250n otherness, 106, 153; corporeal, 15, 243; cul-
mutant, 143–­45, 148–­49, 152. See also tural, 148
Spider-­Man: Turn Off the Dark Owens, Louis, 206, 213
mutation, 6, 8, 24, 27, 143, 145, 147–­49, 153,
156, 157nn3–­4; genetic, 145, 148, 152 pain, 25, 67–­70, 72–­73, 79–­80, 123, 151, 187,
190–­91; agency of, 162. See also suffer-
necropolitics, 20–­21, 169, 178, 193, 238, ing
249, 257 paraplegia, 19, 25, 78, 83
neoliberalism, 51, 73, 85n3, 144, 147, 155, parasitism, 9, 31, 182, 195, 198, 200n5, 230,
161, 163, 235–­36, 239, 269; disability 240–­41, 246nn15–­16. See also guest;
and, 166, 192, 234; Mexican, 246n8 HIV/AIDS; host; hosting
neomaterialism, 2, 4, 8, 12, 90 passing, 46; as disabled, 44–­45; as nondis-
Nettel, Guadalupe, 31, 230, 234, 240; El abled, 44, 47. See also masquerading
huésped, 31, 234, 240–­41, 244–­45, pathology, 5, 73, 75–­76, 97; disability as,
246n18 58; history of desire as, 95
 Index | 283

performativity, 113n1, 148, 173; gender, 3; racism, 30, 41, 194, 196, 200n7, 205–­206,
transversality and, 92 209, 214; biopolitical, 186
personhood, 32, 49, 54–­55, 59, 97, 253; cor- Reagan, Ronald, 120, 131
porate, 24 realism, 68–­70, 73, 91, 128, 137n10; agen-
phenomenology, 10, 97; queer, 50 tial, 1, 11
Pickens, Therí, 183, 195 Reguillo, Rossana, 239, 246n13
Planet Terror (Rodriguez), 28, 161, 164–­ relationality, 56, 90, 97, 101, 114n5
66, 168–­78 Rodriguez, Robert, 161, 165, 173, 177;
plasticity, 69–­7 1, 76, 83 Planet Terror, 28, 161, 164–­66, 168–­
Poetry Project, 99, 101. See also Weiner, 78
Hannah Rust and Bone (Audiard), 122–­23, 127, 129,
Poore, Carol, 169, 179n1 137n10
posthumanism, 1, 3–­4, 12, 27, 144, 150,
249. See also disability theory: posthu- Samuels, Ellen, 113n1, 148, 154, 196, 209
manist; humanism; neomaterislism: schizoanalysis, 90–­91, 93–­94
posthumanist; transhumanism schizophrenia, 22, 26, 89–­90, 92–­95. See
poverty, 31, 46, 232 also Anti-­Oedipus; Deleuze, Gilles;
Powers, Richard, 24, 48, 51, 59, 63–­64; Guattari, Félix; Weiner, Hannah
Gain, 24, 48–­49, 54, 58, 61–­64 Seltzer, Mark, 160, 171
precarity, 4, 196, 235; of able-­bodiedness, Shahani, Nishant, 193, 195
154; ontological, 49 Shildrick, Margrit, 67, 70–­72, 80
Prendergast, Catherine, 93, 97, 112 Siebers, Tobin, 2, 23–­24, 33n1, 39, 56, 62,
PrEP, 188–­89, 199, 200n9. See also bare- 67–­73, 79, 122–­23, 231, 245n1. See also
backing; HIV/AIDS complex embodiment; disability drag;
Pring, Alex, 118, 123, 135–­36 Shildrick, Margrit
prosthesis, 69–­7 1, 74, 83, 97, 123, 135, 160–­ Silent Running (Trumbull), 131–­33
66, 169, 174–­6, 178, 179nn1–­2; above-­ Silliman, Ron, 106–­107, 109–­12,
the-­knee (AK), 137n11; adjustment to, 114nn11–­12; “Skies,” 106–­12
137n10; double logic of, 160, 171; narra- “Skies” (Silliman/Weiner), 106–­12
tive, 75, 78, 183, 195, 200n3; violent, 28, Smith, Angela, 26–­28
173. See also amputation Snyder, Sharon L., 13, 15, 32–­33, 33n4, 55,
prostheticization, 136; of bodies, 28, 67, 57, 60, 72–­73, 75, 80, 129, 145, 147, 185,
72, 126, 178; hyper-­, 145, 147 of reality, 189, 192, 196, 200n3, 200n6. See also
125 prosthesis: narrative
prosthetics, 161, 164, 166, 169, 172, 177–­78. Snyder, Timothy, 250
See also amputation Sobchack, Vivian, 34n10, 97, 163
prosthetic theory, 160–­61 social justice, 5–­6, 40
Puar, Jasbir, 22, 186, 189–­90, 246n8 social model (of disability), 2, 4–­6, 23, 25,
public space, 31, 54, 232–­34, 236–­37, 242, 33, 39–­43, 47, 56, 114n6, 231–­32, 235, 252
256 special effects, 26–­28, 119, 121, 123, 131. See
public transit, 31, 229, 235, 237, 239–­42. See also digital effects
also metro (Mexico City) Spider-­Man 3 (Raimi), 133–­34
Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark (Taymor),
Quayson, Ato, 130–­31, 215 27, 143–­56, 157nn2–­6. See also mutant
Quijano, Aníbal, 16, 34n9 Steinbeck, John, 29, 204–­209, 211, 213–­17,
219, 222; Of Mice and Men, 30–­31,
Race, Kane, 193, 199, 200n9 204–­8, 210–­23
284 | Index

stereotypes, 45, 163, 165, 200n7, 205, 216, tropological confusion, 22, 30, 206–­10,
221, 223 214–­15, 217, 220. See also Of Mice and
Stiker, Henri-­Jacques, 200n10, 245n5 Men
subject, 17, 32, 76–­77, 95, 109, 182, 244; au- Trumbull, Douglas, 131–­33, 137n12
tonomous, 62–­63; biopolitical, 219–­20;
Cartesian, 210, 219; colonized, 12; dis- unique mattering, 22, 25, 67, 69, 80, 82, 84
abled, 47, 58, 161–­62; Falstaff as, 44; Unnatural Acts, 97, 101–­4, 111–­12
freak, 148, 153; genetically engineered,
143; human, 57; humanist, 144–­45; hy- Vite Pérez, Miguel Ángel, 234–­36, 246n8
percapable, 143, 148, 154; of interpreta- “Vitruvian Man” (Da Vinci), 13, 14, 16–­18,
tion, 215; liberal, 62, 64; materiality of, 20
25; nonnormatively embodied, 55; plu- “Vitruvian Man with CP” (dePackh), 13,
ral, 231; transhuman, 146; undesirable, 15, 17
232 vulnerability, 174, 178, 188, 229, 239–­40,
subjectivity, 23–­25, 27, 31, 41, 57, 70, 82–­83, 244–­45; of bodies, 162; disability and,
90, 95, 104, 208, 215, 223, 250; alterna- 233; embodied, 135; human, 119; mate-
tive, 2; disability, 23, 49, 54, 56, 60–­63, rial, 254; social, 233–­35, 237, 241, 243,
75, 154; of disabled people, 48, 131; hu- 246n8; socioeconomic, 232
man, 24, 30–­31, 54, 62, 219; humane,
215, 220, 222; material, 22; normative, Weheliye, Alexander, 16, 20, 32, 144, 165,
23, 207; queer, 255; unfixed, 44. See also 167, 194, 198, 252–­53
intersubjectivity Weinbaum, Elys, 195, 200n4
suffering, 33, 75, 212–­13, 251, 253–­54, 269; Weiner, Hannah, 26, 89–­91, 97–­103, 105–­
disability and, 68–­69 13, 113n2, 114n6, 114nn9–­10; clairvoy-
synecdoche, 97, 214 ance, 26, 89–­94, 98, 100–­101, 113 (see
also schizophrenia); collaborations,
T4 (Operation T4), 32, 250–­52, 254–­70, 89–­90, 98, 101, 103, 106–­7, 112, 114n10;
270nn1–­2; memorialization of, 32, 250–­ The Difficulties, 107, 111; Open House,
52, 255–­58, 260, 263–­68, 270. See also 98, 107–­8; Pictures and Early Words,
euthanasia: murders (Nazis); Holo- 103, 105; “Skies,” 106–­12; Unnatural
caust, the Acts, 97, 101–­4, 111–­12. See also Creeley,
Taymor, Julie, 27, 143, 152, 157n2 Robert; Friedman, Ed; Mayer, Berna-
thing-­power, 72, 74. See also Bennett, Jane dette; Poetry Project; Silliman, Ron
Thomas, Carol, 5, 7 Wilson, Marvin, 221–­23
transcorporeality, 12, 96, 149 Wolfe, Cary, 4, 7, 17, 21, 269
transhumanism, 4, 7, 27, 33n3, 143–­47, Woods, Angela, 95–­96
149–­53, 156, 250, 267 workplace safety, 28, 155–­56, 157n6, 157–­
transversality, 89–­92, 94–­98, 101, 112–­13, 58n8
114n3 Wynter, Sylvia, 16, 19, 249