Health and Social Development, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Hendricks, Ryan
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Over the last century, critical social theorists have contested the naturalization and normalization of birth, life, illness, and death. Critical social theorists have suggested that these biological processes deeply entwine with social, political, and economic systems of thought. In my dissertation, I explored my experiences of disability in relation to the discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism and disability. To facilitate this exploration, I brought together discourse analysis, evocative autoethnography, and intracategorical analysis. Emerging from this exploration, I suggested that the normative discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability construct discourses that dispossess Indigenous peoples, people of colour, women, disabled people, and LGBTQ subject positions of their claims of belonging. Simultaneously, these discursive frameworks produce discourses that assimilate dispossessed subject positions into alternative categories of interest and investment belonging at the fringe of neoliberal society. In this discursive space, normative discursive frameworks construct a hierarchy of belonging. Through diffuse speech acts that produce ‘blended spaces’, normative discursive frameworks categorize subject positions along an axis of oppression and privilege. Through sychronic, spatial, hierarchical relationships, normative discursive frameworks make claims over the conditions necessary to sustain human life. This is life enabled by politics.
AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF RACE, CLASS, GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND ABILITY INTERSECTING IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND CATEGORIZATION OF SUBJECT POSITIONS IN A PERSONAL NARRATIVE by Ryan Hendricks A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) March 2019 © Ryan Hendricks, 2019 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF RACE, CLASS, GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND ABILITY INTERSECTING IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND CATEGORIZATION OF SUBJECT POSITIONS IN A PERSONAL NARRATIVE submitted by Ryan Hendricks in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dr. Rachelle Hole, Faculty of Health and Social Development Supervisor Dr. Lawrence Berg, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Stephanie Bryson, Portland State University Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Allison Hargreaves, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies University Examiner Dr. David Butz, Brock University External Examiner iii Abstract Over the last century, critical social theorists have contested the naturalization and normalization of birth, life, illness, and death. Critical social theorists have suggested that these biological processes deeply entwine with social, political, and economic systems of thought. In my dissertation, I explored my experiences of disability in relation to the discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism and disability. To facilitate this exploration, I brought together discourse analysis, evocative autoethnography, and intracategorical analysis. Emerging from this exploration, I suggested that the normative discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability construct discourses that dispossess Indigenous peoples, people of colour, women, disabled people, and LGBTQ subject positions of their claims of belonging. Simultaneously, these discursive frameworks produce discourses that assimilate dispossessed subject positions into alternative categories of interest and investment belonging at the fringe of neoliberal society. In this discursive space, normative discursive frameworks construct a hierarchy of belonging. Through diffuse speech acts that produce ‘blended spaces’, normative discursive frameworks categorize subject positions along an axis of oppression and privilege. Through sychronic, spatial, hierarchical relationships, normative discursive frameworks make claims over the conditions necessary to sustain human life. This is life enabled by politics. iv Lay Summary Human life requires air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, shelter from inclement weather, and relationships. These are the conditions that sustain human life. In the twenty-first century, ways of thinking about belonging justify claims upon these conditions. If I belong and you do not then I can claim water, food, shelter, and relationships. You can be excluded because you do not belong. You belong elsewhere. The widespread circulation of stories about belonging justifies the survival of some people over others. In this study, I explored the influences of racism, sexism, classism, sexualism, and ableism upon these stories about belonging through a careful reading of the stories written by disabled people and my experiences of disability. Whose lives belong in your world? How is their belonging justified? v Preface This dissertation is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, R. Hendricks. The research reported in this dissertation is covered by UBC Ethics Certificate number H16-00717. vi Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................ iv Preface ........................................................................................................................ v Table of Contents ...................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ viii Dedication ................................................................................................................. ix 1 Reconfiguring Disability and Resisting Normative Discursive Frameworks ..1 1.1 The Biopolitics of Enabled Human Life ............................................................. 1 1.2 Organization of Chapters .................................................................................. 7 1.3 Post-structural Theories .................................................................................. 11 1.4 Conceptualizing Subject Positions .................................................................. 14 2 The Discursive Frameworks of Neoliberalism and Disability ........................ 16 2.1 Neoliberalism, Normalcy, the Human Sciences, and Eugenics ..................... 16 2.2 The Rise of Neoliberalism ............................................................................... 19 2.2.1 From Vienna to Chicago .......................................................................... 22 2.3 Neoliberalism, Normalcy, and the Human Sciences ....................................... 28 2.4 The Birth of Genetic Risk ................................................................................ 31 2.5 Genetic Risk and Eugenics in the Human Sciences........................................36 2.6 Discussion ...................................................................................................... 40 3 Movements of Resistance: Toward Intracategorical Analysis ....................... 41 3.1 Movements of Resistance to White Supremacy, Patriarchal Masculinity, Neoliberalism, and Heterosexism .......................................................................... 41 3.2 Influences of Indigenous, Gender, Class, Race, and Queer Theories ............ 43 3.3 Disability Rights Movements ........................................................................... 48 3.4 Limitations of the Disability Rights Movements ............................................... 51 3.5 The Social Model of Disability ........................................................................ 52 3.6 Limitations of the Social Model of Disability ................................................... 53 3.7 Intersectional and Interlocking Analyses ......................................................... 54 3.8 Discussion ...................................................................................................... 60 4 An Evocative Autoethnographic Analysis of Discourses of White Supremacy, Patriarchal Masculinity, Neoliberalism, Heterosexism, and Disability ................ 62 4.1 Toward Autoethnographic Research ............................................................... 62 4.2 Selection of Social Media Stories ................................................................... 63 4.3 Foucauldian Discourse Analysis ..................................................................... 65 4.4 Derridean Deconstruction ............................................................................... 67 4.5 Analytic Readings and Reflective Sub-Questions ........................................... 68 4.6 Limitations of Discourse Analysis ................................................................... 71 4.7 A Genealogy of Autoethnography ................................................................... 71 4.8 Writing the Personal into the Research Narrative ........................................... 73 4.9 Discussion ...................................................................................................... 74 vii 5 Foucauldian Derridean Discourse Analysis .................................................... 76 5.1 Findings from a Foucauldian Derridean Discourse Analysis ........................... 76 5.2 My Personal Narrative .................................................................................... 84 5.3 Discussion ...................................................................................................... 89 6 An Intracategorical Analysis of Normative Discursive Frameworks ........... ..90 6.1 An Intracategorical Analysis of the Discursive Frameworks of White Supremacy, Patriarchal Masculinity, Neoliberalism, Heterosexism, and Disability through a Round-table Discussion .................................................................................................. ..90 6.2 White Supremacy and Neoliberal Subjectivity ................................................ 90 6.3 The Normalization of White Supremacist Neoliberal Subjectivity.................... 94 6.4 White Supremacist Ableist Heterosexist Neoliberal Subjectivity ..................... 99 6.5 White Supremacist Ableist Heterosexist Masculinist Neoliberal Subjectivity 101 6.6 Discussion .................................................................................................... 104 7 Implications and Contributions .................................................................... ..106 7.1 Summary of My Study .................................................................................. 106 7.2 Implications and Contributions of My Research ............................................ 108 Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 114 Appendices .......................................................................................................... ..132 Appendix A: Participant Biographies .................................................................... 132 Appendix B: A Representation of the Round-Table Discussion ............................ 134 viii Acknowledgements This dissertation was researched and written on the traditional, unceded, and occupied Syilx (Okanagan) territories in the cities of Kelowna and West Kelowna. I express my gratitude to these nations and I support their ongoing struggles for sovereignty and social justice. I could not have completed this work without the support of my family, friends, and broader community of scholars/researchers/activists. I am profoundly grateful for the support, insightful guidance, and feedback from my supervisor and supervisory committee, Dr. Rachelle Hole, Dr. Lawrence Berg, and Dr. Stephanie Bryson. I would also like to thank the authors of social media stories who shared their experiences of disability. ix Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to my partner and our children. I am grateful for their collective curiousity, wisdom, creativity, support, and love 1 Chapter 1: Reconfiguring Disability and Resisting Normative Discursive Frameworks 1.1 The Biopolitics of Enabled Human Life From the beginning, the life and social sciences have had conflicting views about the nature of human beings (Rose, 2013b). The life sciences espouse theories about the physiological, social, and mental lives of human beings through the lens of biology (Rose, 2013b). Biology is a field of positive knowledge of living beings and the reality of those living beings (Rose, 2013b). Ultimately, humans are born, live, sicken, and die (Rose, 2013b). Biology contends that birth, life, illness, and death are ‘natural’ (Rose, 2013b; Venter & Cohen, 2004). By claiming that these processes are natural, scholars suggest that they are caused by nature rather than the social, economic, and political structures of society. In the context of this normalization of human nature, the critical social sciences have had to negotiate a contentious relationship with biology. In pursuit of social justice, critical social theorists argued against the naturalization and normalization of birth, life, illness, and death. Thinking through dilemmas about human vitality, critical social theorists argued for the right to life, the equality of humans, the worth of life, and the future of life (Rose, 2013b). Debates about human vitality in the critical social sciences have significantly influenced the field of biology, by making these dilemmas a central focus in discussions (Rose, 2013b). “To think of the human as animal: over the second half of the 20th century, such ideas became associated...with the naturalization of human delinquencies from sexism to warfare, and with a bloody legacy of horrors from racial science to eugenics” (Rose, 2013b, p 4). The critical social sciences helped the life sciences (re)conceptualize contemporary understandings about the physiological, social, and mental lives of human beings (Rose, 2007; 2013b). 2 Through efforts to resist normalizing trends in the life sciences, critical social theorists have distanced themselves from the field of biology. While this distance enabled a powerful critique of ideas and assumptions underpinning the life sciences, critical social theorists, for the most part, glossed over the materiality of the human body. As Rose (2013b) contends “nowhere was ‘the discursive turn’ more problematic than when debates over ‘the body’ seemed to deny any powers to the bloody thing itself” (Rose, 2013b, p 4). Over the last decades, critical social theorists “have come to realize that it is not reactionary to recognize the reality of our fleshy nature, and to examine the possibilities and constraints that flow from it” (Rose, 2013b, p 4). In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, Judith Butler (1993) reconfigured normative understandings about the human body to examine the power of heterosexual and masculine hegemony to discursively form the ‘matter’ of bodies, sexuality, and gender. Butler (1993) suggested that historical conditions frame the ritualized repetitive production of the subject (Butler, 1993). The ritual occurs under these historical constraints, with the threat of exclusion or death, compelling the production (Butler, 1993). However, the ritual is not fully predetermined; and so, it can be contested (Butler, 1993). The materiality of the human body can be a site for resistance to the meaning ascribed to it by the hegemony of normative discursive frameworks like heterosexuality and masculinity. With the return to the materiality of the human mind and body, disability presents an important way to engage critically with the interface between normative discursive frameworks, the human mind/body, and subjectivity. Rather than working to define the nature of the human mind and body, scholars in critical disability studies might ask: what can a human mind and body do? This question opens discussion about the historical, social, economic, and political conditions that discursively frame the ‘matter’ of the human mind and body. Simultaneously, the possible movements of the human mind and body 3 become sites of resistance to the constraints that frame this matter. Within these debates, critical disability scholars, like Lennard J. Davis (2010a), explored the historical conditions that produce normalcy and then place normalcy in relation to concepts like the grotesque. By positioning normalcy in a temporal context, Davis (2010a) rethinks assumptions about the universality, or common-sense language, of the norm. In Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment: For Identity Politics in a New Register, Tom Siebers (2010) defended disability identity “by claiming that experiences based on disability...represent forms of embodiment from which dominant ideologies become visible” (p 313). Through normative discursive frameworks, like disability, embodiment renders the contexts of knowledge/power visible and produces sites of resistance (Haraway, 1988; Siebers, 2010). The work of critical disability scholars extends critical engagment with the life sciences through an examination of normative discursive frameworks, like disability, that frame and produce the matter of the disabled mind and body. Contemporary biopolitics centres on the assertion and impact of intersecting categories of power, like race, class, ability, sexuality, and gender, manifest in the normalization of human minds and bodies to control the conditions necessary to sustain human life (Rose, 2007; 2013b; Foucault, 1980). In an age of contemporary biopolitics, categories of power shaped through discursive frameworks construct and organize subjectivity along an axis of oppression and privilege in a struggle to live (Rose, 2013b). I propose that ability, as Foucault suggests about sexuality, is one of the great technologies of power (Foucault, 1976, 1984, 1992; McRuer, 2006; 2010). Who has the right to life and the structural supports to enable it? What happens to the lives of some to enable the lives of others? The autoethnographic analysis that I present in the following chapters attends to two overarching questions: How might the intersecting discursive frameworks of white 4 supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, heterosexism, disability, and neoliberalism construct subject positions in my personal narrative? Under these intersecting discursive frameworks, how might subject positions organize along an axis of oppression and privilege in my personal narrative? These research questions seek to understand the intersecting historical, social, political, and economic conditions that discursively frame the ‘matter’ of disability in my experiences. To explore these overarching questions, I begin by tracing the power of ability manifest through the intersecting discursive frameworks of neoliberalism and disability to construct, enable, and normalize neoliberal subject positions. Turning to movements of resistance to white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, and heterosexism, I situate neoliberal-disability in relation to these discursive frameworks. By articulating these relationships, I show that neoliberal-disability rests upon racial-colonial-patriarchal-heterosexist conditions. These intersecting normative discursive frameworks produce forms of oppression, like mythologies about independence, that dispossess Indigenous peoples, people of colour, women, disabled people, and LGBTQ1 identities of their claims of belonging. Simultaneously, forms of oppression assimilate Indigenous peoples, people of colour, women, disabled people, and LGBTQ identities into alternative categories of interest and investment belonging at the margins of neoliberal society. In the discursive space created by oppression, normative discursive frameworks instantiate forms of privilege that enable and normalize white supremacist, neoliberal, patriarchal masculinist, ableist, and heterosexist subject positions to substantiate their claims of belonging. Through converging forms of oppression and privilege, intersecting normative frameworks 1 LGBTQ is an often used term to represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. In some contexts, ‘T’ or ‘2S’ is added to represent Two-Spirit. However, the term ‘LGBTQ’ can blur categorical differences between sexuality, race, class, gender, and ability by erasing the hierarchical specificities of oppression and privilege in the LGBTQ term. For example, the experiences of bisexuals, trans, and Two-Spirit people are often subordinately positioned in relation to the experiences of lesbian and gay people. Although I use LGBTQ in my dissertation, I recognize these concerns. 5 discursively construct a hierarchy of belonging. The categorization of subject positions within this hierarchy of belonging renders through the discursive synchronicity and spatiality of speech acts. Speech acts are utterances, bodily movements, spoken words, gestures, and so forth (Butler, 1993). Speech acts exercise a building power that produces “blended spaces” by simultaneously seeking to alter the world to fit the sign/word, through declarative language, and confirm that the world fits the sign/word through descriptive/depictive language. 2 For example, in a conversation with a physician in the hospital, the physician might provide a written prescription for medication. The prescription is declarative in the way it seeks to discursively proclaim that disability is a personal physical and mental impairment rectified through medication. At the same time, the prescription discursively affirms that the best way to fulfill this rectification is through a medical market (e.g., pharmaceutical companies) on unceded Indigenous territory (e.g., hospital). The prescription for medication is simultaneously a declarative form of oppression (e.g., medical view of disability) and affirmative form of privilege (e.g., confirmation of the continuation of neoliberal market logic and dispossession of Indigenous lands through white supremacy). Normative discursive frameworks construct a hierarchy of belonging and categorize subject positions into this hierarchy along an axis of oppression and privilege to proclaim who does not belong and affirm those who belong. The privilege of belonging bestows a claim over the social, political, and economic conditions necessary to sustain human life. By axis of oppression and privilege, I refer to a single vertical axis. This axis is a visual metaphor that signals the way normative discursive frameworks produce converging forms of oppression and privilege that construct a hierarchy of belonging and categorize subject positions, through speech acts, synchronically, spatially, and hierarchically into this 2 Space refers to a “mental space blending wherein structure is transferred from a representing space to the represented space” (Sweetser, 2000, p 305). 6 hierarchy. This axis constitutes a ‘flow of knowledge/power.’ Normative discursive frameworks shape this flow of knowledge/power, like the round tubular shape of an axis, and direct this flow through speech acts, like the vertical movement along an endless axis, to repetitiously, diffusely, and hierarchically construct and categorize subject positions. I invoke this visual metaphor, ‘an axis of oppression and privilege’, throughout my dissertation to signal these relationships. To explore this flow of power/knowledge, I bring together discourse analysis, evocative autoethnography, and intracategorical analysis. To begin, I evoke a flow of knowledge/power by reading social media stories written by disabled people. By reading these stories, this flow of knowledge/power works to elicit my thoughts, emotions, and memories about disability. This flow of knowledge/power is discursively constructing my subjectivity. Through this process, I record my thoughts, emotions, and memories in a journal. From these stories, I select emotionally and cognitively evocative stories. Then, I discursively analyze this flow of knowledge/power that produces subject positions in the selected social media stories. Discourse analysis deepens my reactions to the selected stories. From these discursively rendered reactions, I write a personal narrative about my experiences of disability. This flow of knowledge/power extends from the selected social media stories into my personal narrative. The interwoven findings from my discourse analysis and my personal narrative form the context for my intracategorical analysis of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, disability, and heterosexism in chapter six. Using intracategorical analysis, I bring together my textual friends3, the findings from my discourse analysis, and excerpts from my personal narrative to intracategorically analyze flows of knowledge/power that discursively frame, construct, and categorize subject positions in the selected social media stories and my personal narrative. By doing 3 Textual friends refer to the collective work of scholars and researchers who I have referenced in my dissertation. 7 so, I contribute an autoethnographic analysis to debates in critical disability studies about the normalization of human birth, life, illness, and death. In the next section, I outline the organization of the chapters in my dissertation and the way these chapters contribute important themes to my overarching questions. 1.2 Organization of Chapters In chapter two, I trace interlacing relations between neoliberalism, the human sciences, normalcy, and eugenics in the struggle of human beings to live in an age of contemporary biopolitics. To begin, I sketch an account of the rise of neoliberalism (Etchegary, Lemyre & Wilson, 2010; Foucault, 1969; Miller & Rose, 2008; Novas & Rose, 2000; Rose, 2007). Then, I detail the emergence of normalcy and the human sciences (Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). Looking closer at discursive influences of power in this unification, I sketch and extend an understanding of the birth of genetic risk (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2005;; 2015; Foucault, 1984; 1992; Larner 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 1999; 2001; 2007). Finally, I shape an account of genetic risk and eugenics in the human sciences (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2007; 2013b; Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013c). Drawing upon this rich constellation of relations, I articulate the rise of neoliberalism, as governmentality, and the birth of neoliberal homo oeconomicus (Brown, 2015; Foucault, 1979; Read, 2009). Then, I outline ways neoliberalism aligns with normative discursive frameworks, like disability, to organize normalizing practices in the human sciences, like genetic risk, to produce subjects best suited to fulfill its needs (Foucault, 1979; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2007). In this way, I build an apparatus for theorizing intersecting relations between normative discursive frameworks of neoliberalism and disability in the construction, enablement, and normalization of neoliberal subject positions (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2005; 2015; Foucault, 1984; 1992). In chapter three, I chart movements of resistance to the eugenic tendencies of the 8 discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability . To begin, I survey diverse influences of class critiques, gender studies, race theory, and queer theory upon the development of scholarly work in critical disability studies. Through my review, I signpost important ideas and contributions to the field of critical disability studies. Placed in relation to this broad landscape, I articulate important themes in the disability rights movements and its margins. Then, I construct an account of the social model of disability and its limits. Drawing upon diverse influences across movements of resistance, I develop an account of intersectional and interlocking analyses leading into an intracategorical framework. By building this framework, I suggest that examining relationships between white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability through an intracategorical approach is necessary to theorize the construction and categorization of subject positions. Like Butler (1990; 1993) proposes about the normative discursive frameworks of masculinity and heterosexuality, I suggest that there are reciprocal intersecting relationships between the normative discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, heterosexism, neoliberalism, and disability. These relationships require an intersecting and interlocking framework that can theorize multiple systems of oppression and privilege (hooks, 1981; 1988). To explore these systems, Leslie McCall (2005) advocates starting with a specific group, event or context. Then, the researcher can work outward to understand how categories of power produce oppression and privilege in human lives (McCall, 2005). As a starting point for my intracategorical analysis, I build an evocative autoethnographic personal narrative through a discourse analysis of selected social media stories written by disabled people. In chapter four, I begin by presenting the criteria used to select social media stories written by disabled people. Then, I detail my use of discourse analysis of selected social 9 media stories to evoke my personal narrative. As part of this elaboration, I develop an account of a Foucauldian genealogical approach to discourse analysis and Derridean deconstruction (Derrida, 1967; Foucault, 1969; 1979). Drawing upon Foucauldian Derridean discourse analysis, I propose analytic readings, constituted as reflective sub-questions, to unveil dualistic categories and binary oppositions operating in the spaces in-between the unity and fragmentation of discourse in the selected social media stories (Cheek, 2000; Derrida, 1967; Foucault, 1969; 1979). Analytic readings refer to my use of reflective questions to guide my discursive ‘reading’ of the selected social media stories. These reflective questions are sub-questions of my overarching research questions. I elaborate and detail my use of analytic readings and reflective sub-questions in chapter four. Afterward, I sketch a genealogy of autoethnography including analytic and evocative traditions. Moving deeper, I develop an account of evocative autoethnography and personal narrative. I outline the details and processes of personal narrative. In chapter five, I present findings from my Foucauldian Derridean discourse analysis of selected social media stories. Findings refer to the excerpts of explicit text and implicit ideas, concepts, and theories uncovered by each reflective sub-question to highlight specific social contexts, the presence/absence of content, subject positions, contradictions and tensions, and the legitimization/delegitimization of discursive frameworks in the social media story. Since the findings from each reflective sub-question intersect with one another, I present my findings as a productive discussion. This discussion moves seamlessly between layers of the five reflective sub-questions to theorize ways normative discursive frameworks intersect to construct and categorize subject positions in the selected social media stories. By conducting rigorous analytic readings of the stories, this discourse analysis deepened my cognitive and emotional reactions. These reactions helped to discursively elicit my personal narrative including my specific experiences, memories, and emotions. The findings from my discourse analysis produced my personal 10 narrative. The findings from my discourse analysis of selected social media stories and my personal narrative form an interwoven context for intracategorical analysis. In chapter six, I present an intracategorical analysis of white supremacy, neoliberalism, patriarchal masculinity, heterosexuality, and disability through a round-table discussion between my textual friends, findings from my discourse analysis, and my personal narrative (Arvay, 1999). In this discussion, I articulate ways normative discursive frameworks of white supremacy, neoliberalism, patriarchal masculinity, heterosexism, and disability construct subject positions in the findings from my discourse analysis and my personal narrative. I suggest that these normative discursive frameworks produce privilege, manifest in the blended spaces produced by speech acts, to enable and normalize white supremacist, neoliberal, heterosexist, ableist, patriarchal masculinist subject positions. At the same time, forms of oppression dispossess and assimilate Indigenous people, people of colour, women, disabled people, and LGBTQ identities into alternative categories of interest and investment belonging in a zone of abjection. For example, while white supremacist privilege normalizes the claim that I belong in the hospital on unceded territory, the rupture of my ritualized repetition of masculinity and disability suggests that I do not belong in the ER. I am called to persevere through my pain. In this way, speech acts conjure and impose a hierarchy of belonging under the threat of exclusion or death (e.g., exclusion from the ER) (Butler, 1993). In chapter seven, I present implications and contributions of my research to the field of critical disability studies. I propose that intracategorical intersections between my textual friends, findings from my discourse analysis, and my personal narrative form a discursive space to discuss important themes that explore my overarching questions. In this discursive space, my ‘madness’ motivates stories that dispute normative conclusions about my mind and body. My personal narrative reconfigures medical representations of disability to enable reclaiming a disabled identity. This ‘crip’ identity is supported by 11 researcher, activist, and scholarly conversations about disability in critical disability studies. At the same time, normative discursive frameworks bestowed privilege that shaped feelings of belonging in the emergency room at the hospital on unceded territory. I believe that reclaiming disability must analyze flows of knowledge/power to contest the reproduction of white supremacist, patriarchal masculinist, neoliberal, and heterosexist discursive frameworks. If I write a narrative that disputes medical representations of disability, it cannot build it upon the sense of belonging bestowed by white supremacist, neoliberal, masculinist, and heterosexist discursive frameworks. My research is part of a resistance to ableism, classism, sexism, racism, and sexualism 1.3 Post-structural Theories In ancient Greece, Plato argued that words do not name ‘things’ (Due, 2007; Williams, 2005). There are simply too many different ‘things’ to name. If words named objects in the world, there would be a unique word for every particular object. According to Plato, words, concepts, and ideas are abstractions that refer to essences (Due, 2007; Williams, 2005). Essences are the common thread that binds a group of individuals. For example, there are many different trees (e.g., fir, birch, maple) but the word tree denotes the characteristics of all trees (e.g., they all have a trunk with branches). For Plato, essences are not merely abstractions; they are eternal truths (Due, 2007; Williams, 2005). Essence precedes existence (Due, 2007). Taking a sign from Plato, rationalists propose that knowledge of the world is mediate. Knowledge is ‘mediated’ by language rather than intuitively known (i.e., a posteriori vs. a priori) (Belsey, 2002; Williams, 2005). Language, with its intrinsic ideas and structures, is the ‘medium’ that enables knowledge of reality (e.g., Plato’s Forms) (Belsey, 2002; Williams, 2005). In other words, people, through language, deduce universal truths about the world (Belsey, 2002; Williams, 2005). As a way to understand the world, rationalists privilege reason over the empiricism of the human senses. 12 Contrary to rationalism, de Saussure and Levi Strauss suggested that language is a constellation of signs (Belsey, 2002; de Sassure, 1972; Williams, 2005). A sign is a combination of a signifier (e.g., an audible sound) and signified (e.g., idea or concept) (Belsey, 2002; Williams, 2005). Radically, de Saussure and Levi Strauss suggested that the sign is arbitrary (Belsey, 2002; de Sassure, 1972; Williams, 2005). There is no natural connection between signifier and signified; there are only relations between words and meanings (Belsey, 2002; de Sassure, 1972; Williams, 2005). For example, the word bat is not required to refer to a small flying creature; it can also refer to a long wooden stick. Signifier and signified are not determined by facts in reality but by facts in the linguistic system (Belsey, 2002; de Sassure, 1972; Williams, 2005). The word bat is only meaningful within a linguistic system through its reference to other parts of the language (Belsey, 2002; de Sassure, 1972; Williams, 2005). de Saussure suggested that the mind is not merely a system of innate ideas activated by sense data (Belsey, 2002; de Sassure, 1972; Williams, 2005). Instead, the mind is a system of operations that generate structures of similarity and differentiation according to the rules of the linguistic system (Belsey, 2002; de Sassure, 1972; Williams, 2005). Marx, Freud, de Saussure, and Levi Strauss sparked the emergence of structuralism (Belsey, 2002; de Sassure, 1972; Williams, 2005). Under the rubric of structuralism, the individual does not have the power to change a sign once it is in the linguistic system (Belsey, 2002; de Sassure, 1972; Williams, 2005). The structure of a system is more important than the subject. Responding to the theories of structuralism, beginning in the 1960s, a number of philosophers including Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Kristeva, produced a broad collection of literature, politics, art, cultural criticism, history, and sociology (Williams, 2005). For some, the work of these philosophers began a dialogue that sought to understand instability and contradictions within modern meta-narratives produced by 13 structuralism. For others, these philosophical texts ushered in new-age nihilistic solipsism (Ajana, 2008). While structuralism establishes, maintains and seeks to extend an arborescent hierarchical view of knowledge, post-structuralism charts the differences, tensions, and contradictions through a rhizomatic view of knowledge (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Williams, 2005). For example, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) propose that evolutionary biology claims that the orchid imitates the wasp for the survival of its species. Biology extends an arborescent hierarchical view of knowledge that works with dualistic categories and binary oppositions. The survival of the orchid is positioned in opposition to the wasp (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Developing a rhizomatic form of knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggested that the orchid is becoming-wasp and the wasp is becoming-orchid. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp…what distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987 p. 12) Through this view of knowledge, post-structuralism incessantly attempts to deconstruct dualistic categories and binary oppositions (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Williams, 2005). The instability of hierarchical knowledge is found at the limits of these categories and oppositions. Post-structural theories attempt to graph the effects of a limit of knowledge as it differentiates from a core (e.g., the move from orchid to wasp and wasp to orchid). Williams (2005) illustrates the way each of the aforementioned post-structural philosophers map the limits of knowledge. Put simply, Derrida follows the play of the limit at the apparent more immediate and truthful core of language. Lyotard traces the effect of limit- 14 events in language and sensation. Deleuze affirms the value of a productive limit between actual identities and virtual pure differences. Foucault traces the genealogy of the limit as the historical constitution of later tensions and problems. Kristeva follows the limit as an unconscious at work undoing and remaking linguistic structures and oppositions. (Williams, 2005, p 3) Within this broad philosophical framework, post-structural theorists attend to subjectivity by focusing on categories of power like race, class, ability, sexuality, and gender. In my dissertation, I lean upon many of the latter works of Foucault (1965; 1969; 1975; 1976; 1984; 1992). In his last works, Foucault developed a suspicion about theories of totalization like psychoanalysis and Marxism (Brown, 2001; Foucault, 1979; Peters, 2001; Williams, 2005). Foucault advanced an interest in conventional relations that constitute language along with the individual speech acts that activate these conventional relations like discourse (Foucault, 1979; Williams, 2005). Discourse is desire and power in action (Foucault, 1979; Williams, 2005). Discourse is an inclusionary/exclusionary system whose rules not only determine what may be said but who can say it (Foucault, 1979; Williams, 2005). Foucault charts these systems in Madness and Civilization (1965), Discipline and Punish (1975), and The History of Sexuality (1979). In these works, Foucault traced the great technologies of power like sexuality (Foucault, 1979; Williams, 2005). Foucault along with the work of other authors responding to the limits of structuralism ignited the rise of post-structuralism (Williams, 2005). In the next section, I present Foucault’s conceptualization of the subject in his later work. 1.4 Conceptualizing Subject Positions In my dissertation, I draw upon Foucault’s conceptualization of the subject. Depending 15 upon the book or paper, Foucault positions the subject in multiple ways (Foucault, 1965; 1969; 1975; 1976; 1984; 1992). From the beginning, Foucault developed analyses about the relationships between knowledge and power (Foucault, 1965). Through his vast work, Foucault carefully articulates relationships between society, knowledge, power, and the human sciences with particular attention to categories of normal and abnormal in the governance of human behavior (1965; 1969; 1975; 1976; 1980; 1984; 1992). In his earlier work, Foucault closely examines the linguistic and social structures that produce knowledge and power to claim that knowledge is power (Foucault, 1965; 1969; 1975; 1976). In his later work, Foucault connects knowledge/power to the production of subjectivity. In the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality (1984), Foucault reflects upon the proliferation of discourse about the subject. Foucault positions the subject as “constituted not constituent, an effect of structures rather than their cause” (Grosz, 1992, p. 411). In terms of humanism and anti-humanism, the humanist “privileges the self as the origin and destination of discourse” (Grosz, 1992, p. 411). As Foucault suggests, for an anti-humanist, the ‘production of the subject’ is an effect of knowledge (Roberts, 2005); power is the discursive assertion of knowledge in the ‘production of the subject.’ It is the anti-humanist subject, borrowed from Foucault’s latter works, that informs my dissertation. Drawing on this Foucauldian view of the subject, the term subject position refers to a space produced by knowledge operating through discourse. 16 Chapter 2: The Discursive Frameworks of Neoliberalism and Disability 2.1 Neoliberalism, Normalcy, the Human Sciences, and Eugenics We should admit rather that power produces knowledge...that power and knowledge directly imply one another that; there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. (Foucault, 1979, p. 27) With the dawn of the eighteenth century, the European Enlightenment subject began to displace other ways of being in and knowing the world (Athanasiou & Butler, 2013; Butler, 1997; 2005; Rose, 2007). The subject, a mind separated by the body from the world, is the center in the production of knowledge (Butler, 1997; 1990; 2005; Rose, 2007). Through this radical split between subject and object, reality beyond the limits of the body is thrust out of reach (Athanasiou & Butler, 2013; Butler, 1997). This objective reality could open to the subject through activities of the mind transcending limitations of the body (Athanasiou & Butler, 2013; Butler, 1993). This radical split cast the subject and the object into disparate realms (Athanasiou & Butler, 2013; 2005). Like an oasis in harsh desert conditions, positivist epistemologies promise human beings the reunification of subject and object if they drink water from the fount of objectivity. In Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Haraway (1988) critiques the construction of disembodied objectivity that produces a nearly irrefutable point of view. According to Haraway (1988), the construction of objectivity rests upon an unmarked white male subject position. “This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation” (Haraway, 1988, p 581). Objectivity is the privilege of unmarked white male subjectivity that simultaneously marks the bodies of ‘Others’ (Haraway, 1988). The marking 17 of women, members of the LGBTQ community, disabled people, Indigenous peoples, people of colour, and members of the working class secures this exclusive claim of objectivity. As a result, a marked body’s point of view can only be that of one person. Objectivity ensures that the production of legitimate knowledge is only the right of white male subjects (Morella-Pozzi, 2014). Objectivity is a ‘God trick’ that promises vision from everywhere and nowhere at the same time (Haraway, 1988). While white supremacist, masculinist, ableist, heterosexist, neoliberal subjects may survive and thrive by drinking water from the fount of objectivity to claim the right to produce knowledge, the water is potentially toxic to women, members of the LGBTQ community, Indigenous peoples, disabled people, people of colour, and members of the working class. Like water, knowledge is essential for the survival of human life. Knowledge is the power to protect life from death and knowledge is the power to let death take life. With that said, there are methodologies and strategies that attempt to address this ‘God trick’ by situating knowledge (Haraway, 1988). Tracing systems and structures of thought and language is paramount to deconstructing ways a particular reality through its epistemological conditions appears to render reality sensible (Butler, 2005; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2007). Epistemological conditions, more precisely the way these conditions rest upon technologies of power, are an axis upon which doing and undoing subjectivity turns (Athanasiou & Butler, 2013; Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005). To expose some epistemological conditions and influences of power, I followed in the footsteps of Nietzsche, Foucault, Brown, and others by developing a genealogy of neoliberalism, normalcy, the human sciences, and eugenics (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2005; 2015; Foucault, 1984; 1992). This genealogy provides a landscape for theorizing intersecting relations between the discursive frameworks of neoliberalism and disability in the construction and categorization of subject positions (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2005; 2015; Foucault, 1984; 1992). 18 A genealogy, unlike dialectic approaches to history, traces and traverses aspects of life that seem to be without history (Foucault, 1976; Brown, 2001). A genealogy is not a search for an origin or a final account; instead, it seeks to reveal and connect often plural and contradictory influences of power upon formations of truth (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2005; 2015; Foucault, 1976). As Foucault contends, while progressive historical accounts move from the monument to the document, a genealogy moves from the document to the monument (Foucault, 1969). A document is an established structure and sign; a monument is a constellation of tensions emerging into something that endlessly necessitates further explanation (Foucault, 1969). A document might be a book confessing someone’s culpability; it is a sign that affirms a viewpoint (Foucault, 1969). A monument may be a long forgotten settlement; it is a complex constellation of social, political, and economic relations (Foucault, 1969). At the same time, a genealogy is spatial. By space, I refer to “space as difference” (Simonsen, 1996, pg. 499). In this sense, I am drawing upon Derrida’s differance to refer to entwining relations between the geographical and social realms (Simonsen, 1996). By moving from document to monument along a spatial and chronological axis, a genealogy violently removes the cover of continuity to show the genealogy’s powerful epistemological conditions (Brown, 2001; Foucault, 1969; Simonsen, 1996). Brown (2001) suggests that a genealogy “permits an examination of our condition that calls into question the very terms of its construction” (p 95). A genealogy exposes epistemological conditions and influences of power that construct a particular style of understanding and technologies to render reality thinkable (Brown, 2001; Miller & Rose, 2008). Drawing broadly upon this genealogical method, I sketch an account of the rise of neoliberalism (Etchegary, Lemyre & Wilson, 2010; Foucault, 1969; Miller & Rose, 2008; Novas & Rose, 2000; Rose, 2007). Digging into this broad landscape, I detail the emergence of normalcy and the human sciences (Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2001; 2007; 19 2013b). To dig deeper into influences of power propelling this convergence, I sketch and extend an understanding of the birth of genetic risk (Foucault, 1984; 1992; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 1999; 2001; 2007). Then, I shape an account of genetic risk and eugenics in the human sciences (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2007; 2013b; Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013c). Drawing upon this rich constellation of relations, I build a landscape for theorizing intersecting relations between the discursive frameworks of neoliberalism and disability in the construction and categorization of subject positions (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2005; Foucault, 1984; 1992). 2.2 The Rise of Neoliberalism Underneath the rhetoric of neoliberalism, there are many “overlapping convictions, orientations, and aversions” amongst its advocates (Peck, 2010, p. 42). Neoliberalism does not rest on some neatly aligned set of stationary creeds (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; 2018; Peck, 2010). Instead, neoliberalism is intellectual fabric tightly woven yet frayed by divergent political, social, and economic conditions (Brown, 2001; 2015; Harvey, 2007; 2018; Peck, 2010). These conditions are visible through its diverse actors and spaces within the neoliberal project (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; 2018; Larner, 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Rose, 1999). To illuminate these actors and spaces, I follow the pilgrimage of neoliberal luminaries on their trek across diverse geographies (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010). This journey begins with Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek in Vienna then travels to London and culminates in Chicago (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). I undertake this journey to illustrate some diverse influences within neoliberalism that construct and constitute its aggressive stance toward the enablement of some subject positions over others (Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001; 2007). To accomplish this journey, I draw upon a breadth of papers published by Brown (2001; 2003; 2005; 2015), Harvey (e.g., 2007; 2018), Peck (e.g., 2010) and Rose (1999; 20 2001; 2007; 2013a; 2013b). There are differences and similarities between these authors and their papers. Before I move onto constructing neoliberalism, I will briefly outline some of these differences and similarities. Wendy Brown (2001; 2003; 2005; 2015) offers a strong genealogical analysis of neoliberalism. By resisting a progressive narrative of history, Brown examines aspects of the past in the present to uncover spectres of neoliberalism (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2005; 2015). Brown (2001; 2003; 2005; 2015) examines ways people navigate the contradictory landscapes of contemporary neoliberal politics. To undertake these analyses, Brown (2001; 2003; 2005; 2015) engages a breadth of difficult philosophical texts (e.g., Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Spinoza, and Freud). In this chapter, I particularly draw upon Brown’s use of a genealogical approach to neoliberalism (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2005; 2015). Following a similar albeit not explicitly genealogical approach, Jaime Peck (2010) offers a spatial account of neoliberalism. Jaime Peck grounds neoliberal systems of thought in a geographical context. This means tracking the uneven and uncertain geographical direction of neoliberalism. This spatial rendering charts tensions between neoliberalism and its fabled rise to prominence alongside relatively unknown actors and influences (Peck, 2010). For example, Peck (2010) traces insightful intersections between the rise of von Hayek and the fall of Polanyi through their simultaneous publications of the the Road to Serfdom and the Great Transformation. While the Road to Serfdom was a bestseller, the Great Transformation was far less well-known. In the Great Transformation, Polanyi argued that the transformation of the premodern economy into a modern market economy separated human economic mentalities from their local social relationships and institutions. As a result, the modern market economy considers land, labour, and capital as "fictitious commodities.“ Polanyi suggested that society itself became subordinate to the laws of the market. Polanyi argued 21 that when the market economy separated itself from the fabric of society, society responds with protectionism. Revisited four decades later, Polanyi’s criticisms of von Hayek’s neoliberalism are particularly relevant in the wake of the rise of neoliberalism. By uncovering moments of the past that intersect in the present, Peck (2010) provides critical insights that break open the story of neoliberalism. In the preface to Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, Peck (2010) credits David Harvey. Later in the book, Peck suggests that… Harvey can be credited with elaborating one of the more singular and unambiguous accounts of neoliberalization, as a class project, primarily animated by (national) states, in search of politically sustainable means of profit restoration, following the accumulation of crises of the 1970s. (Peck, 2010 p 31) In a Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey (2007) offers a strong detailed account of the rise of neoliberalism as a class project (Peck, 2010). Firmly rooted within the traditions of Marxism, Harvey’s account organizes the neoliberal project as the restoration of class power (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010). Nikolas Rose (e.g., 1999; 2001; 2007; 2008; 2013) offers an account of neoliberalism and subjectivity in the age of biology. In some of these works, Rose (2001; 2007) draws upon Wendy Brown’s work. Notably, Rose (2001) uses the term advanced liberalism to signify …a number of broad configurations of governmental strategies – which I term ‘the social’, ‘advanced’ liberalism, and community – though without intending to suggest that these form a historical series where each time period is characterized by one style of government which is then succeeded by another. (p 12) Rose (2001) suggests that these strategies are new ways of understanding and acting upon human beings as subjects of freedom. These strategies govern autonomous individuals through their freedom (Rose, 2001). Through the lens of governmentality, Rose 22 suggests that neoliberalism is one way to organize these relations (Larner, 2000; Rose, 2001). Governmentality is the way the state tries to produce the citizen best suited to fulfill its policies along with the organized practices that govern subjects (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) (Foucault, 1979; Miller & Rose, 2008). However, there are other ways to approach neoliberalism through policy and ideology (Larner, 2000). In this chapter, I conceptualize neoliberalism through the lens of governmentality (Larner, 2000; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2001; 2007). With a sense of some theoretical relations between theorists, I will construct an account of neoliberalism. 2.2.1 From Vienna to Chicago In the early 1920s Vienna, amidst a widespread experiment with municipal socialism, Ludwig von Mises attacked its central planning policies within economic discourse (Peck, 2010). Mises published papers with an “unapologetic reassertion of liberal economic reason” (Peck, 2010, p 43). Drawing upon these liberal economic arguments, he railed against socialist visions (Peck, 2010). Mises established a formidable reputation (Peck, 2010). He gained some influence in economic debates as an economist with the Chamber of Commerce in Vienna. In the evening hours, Mises held private invitation only gatherings for classical liberals to refine their political, social, and economic ideas (Peck, 2010). Mises only granted entrance to the most gifted students (Peck, 2010). Friedrich von Hayek, reflecting upon his exclusion and later admission to these gatherings, suggested that he lacked the necessary intellectual maturity (Peck, 2010). Under the mentorship of Mises, Hayek vehemently criticized socialist economic calculations and central planning policies (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). Prophetically, Hayek suggested that Mises works would, at some point, provide the necessary ‘shock treatments’ for the economic struggles of the day (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). Through working together, Hayek and Mises 23 developed strong theoretical ties (Peck, 2010). By traveling to less aversive spaces like the United States, Mises and Hayek began to cross-pollinate with other sympathetic liberals (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). Through gaining novel economic methods (e.g., quantifying practices) from studies in the United States, Hayek, through support from Mises, became a Chair at the London School of Economics (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). At the London School of Economics, Hayek disseminated economic theories amongst a mainly unreceptive audience (Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). Despite his fervor for a new wave of liberalism, Hayek occupied a marginalized position within most economic debates (Peck, 2010). Agonizingly, intellectual discourse crept further and further away from his vision (Peck, 2010). By the end of the 1930s, Hayek began to lose support within the London School of Economics (Peck, 2010). To grow these fledgling neoliberal ideas, Hayek required an invitation-only exclusive space for like-minded intellectuals (Peck, 2010). Resembling the gestational gatherings with Mises, Hayek assembled a handpicked group of prominent liberal thinkers for an exploratory meeting at the resort of Mont Pelerin (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). He emphasized the need to gather other liberals that had been hardened by current intellectual conditions (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). Hayek endeavoured to rethink and reconfigure liberalism for contemporary circumstances (Harvey, 2007; Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). Hayek remarked, “[T]here is nothing in the basic assumptions of liberalism to make it a stationary creed; there are no hard-and-fast rules fixed once and for all” (Peck, 2010, p 39). Hayek also suggested that liberalism required a rigorous engagement with real world problems (e.g., tax policy, third-world development) (Harvey, 2018; Peck, 2010). In this sense, he proposed that the ideational policies of the new liberal project could only gain traction by engagement with the uneven spatial landscape of interventionist politics 24 (Harvey, 2007; Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). Working alongside members of the Mont Pelerin Society, Hayek envisioned development of a battle hardened strategy to accomplish the new liberal project (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). Despite its objectives, in these early years, the Mont Pelerin Society struggled to subsist let alone flourish (Peck, 2010). Nevertheless, this minority status within political discourse generated a cult-like mentality by vigorously managing internal differences in the face of substantial external forces (Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). While members of the Mont Pelerin Society shared a common vision, the group struggled to develop consensus for a positive vision of the state (Peck, 2010). Hayek suggested that the challenge was to simultaneously restrain and re-task the state (Harvey, 2007; Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001; 2007). Through international studies and membership in the Mont Pelerin Society, Hayek developed an enduring relationship with Henry Simmons in Chicago (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010). Simmons was the author of a Positive Program for Laisse Faire; it became a core text of the neoliberal project (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010). Simmons worked tirelessly, making applications to the Volker fund to bring Hayek to Chicago (Peck, 2010). Simmons efforts were unsuccessful and eventually he took his own life (Peck, 2010). Not long afterward, with money from the Volker fund, Hayek made his way to Chicago (Peck, 2010). Once in Chicago, Hayek deepened his alliance with fellow Mont Pelerin members (e.g., George Stigler, Milton Friedman, Frank Knight, and Aaron Director) (Brown, 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). Emerging out of these burgeoning relationships, Milton Friedman, a faculty member with the Chicago School of Economics, and Hayek began to further articulate and deepen the neoliberal vision for the state (Harvey, 2007; Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). Friedman and Hayek suggested that while the laisse faire economic system of classical liberalism permits individual freedom, it does not secure it (Harvey, 2007; Miller & 25 Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). They proposed that the state must take an active role in securing individual freedom by constructing necessary political, social, and economic conditions to enable a free market (Harvey, 2007; 2018; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001; 2007). Friedman and Hayek claimed that neoliberalism, through reconfiguration of the state, secures individual freedom and thereby the market (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; Larner, 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). Emerging from the spectre of classical liberalism, Friedman and Hayek developed a ‘middle way’ (Harvey, 2007; Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010). The state of the ‘middle way’ combines libertarian principles of individualism, egalitarianism, and rationalism with the dynamic economic planning associated with interventionist states (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; Larner, 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). This ‘middle way’ is unlike the laisse faire of classical liberalism that signifies economic absenteeism or the central planning associated with interventionist states (Harvey, 2007; Miller & Rose, 2008; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). The ‘middle way’ is a passion for the state’s role as guarantor; the state constructs and secures the conditions for the competitive order of the market (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; Larner, 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). While the neoliberal project took form at the edge of political discourse, this ‘middle way’ did not progress in public economic discourse (Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). At the time, most advanced economies experienced very high rates of economic growth (Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). Surrounded by hostile institutions and strong alliances, neoliberalism persevered at the margins of economic and political discourse (Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). As a result, these ‘intellectual pilgrims’ were the “square pegs of their time, often embattled and lonely, even at home” (Peck, 2010, p 40). Despite vigorous effort, the actors within the neoliberal project could not advance into the spaces of public economic policymaking (Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman (1982) remarked, “[O]nly a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change” (p xiv). 26 In the 1970s, in the context of economic crisis (e.g., inflation, high oil prices, unemployment, recession, and stagflation), critical social movements (e.g., feminism, gay liberation, and disability rights movements), and political crisis (e.g., watergate scandal, the Vietnam war), the rhetoric of neoliberalism, like its emphasis on freedom and egalitarianism, began to ressonate with people (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). Advocates of neoliberalism called for economic and social change (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). Through sophisticated rhetoric (e.g., the Chilean miracle, I love New York, shock therapy, and TV series Free to Choose), actors within the neoliberal project advocated for individual freedom through the market and social justice through state reform (e.g., deregulation and re-regulation) (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; Larner, 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). These actors in the neoliberal project suggested that individual freedom is attained and secured by sustaining, fostering, and enabling a dynamic free market (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; 2018; Larner, 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). After a series of complex political, social and economic battles beginning in the 1970s moving toward the 1980s, the social state began to give way to an enabling state in Canada and the United States of America (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; Larner, 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). The enabling state no longer responds, like a social state, to society’s requirements for basic needs (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). In its place, individuals and organizations assume responsibility for themselves under the universal metric of free choice and the rationality of the market (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; Larner, 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). Under the most positive lens, this neoliberal form of citizenship facilitates equal opportunity (Devlin & Pothier, 2006). Under a less positive lens, deep inequality within neoliberal societies facilitates dis-citizenship (Devlin & Pothier, 2006). By moving from a social state to an enabling state, neoliberalism profoundly 27 reshaped the landscapes of the market, the family, the community, the government, and the individual (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2015; Harvey, 2007; Larner, 2000; 2003; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). In this sense, neoliberalism is more than freeing the market from social constraints (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001). The neoliberal project is a “matter of organizing all features of one’s national policy to enable a market to exist and to provide what it needs to function” (Rose, 1999, p 141). Reconfiguring the classical liberal view of human nature, the rise of neoliberalism heralds the birth of neoliberal homo oeconomicus (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009). Unlike the creature of classic liberalism who satisfies needs through exchange of goods in the market, the basis of the neoliberal subject is competition (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009). While exchange was considered natural, competition is an artificial relation that must be protected (Read, 2009). Competition requires constant intervention by the state to rectify the conditions of the market (Read, 2009). This shift from homo oeconomicus as a trading creature to a competitive creature reconfigures the way human beings are constituted as subjects (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009). First, neoliberalism broadly and deeply expands the scope of economics (Read, 2009). Secondly, this expansion redefines the worker; human life is capital (Brown, 2015; Harvey, 2018; Read, 2009). Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of governmentality (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009). The operative terms of this governmentality are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment, and competition (Read, 2009). While rights exist to facilitate exchange, interest is irreducible (Read, 2009). Counting on the fact that subjects calculate their interests, the state channels flows of interest by making desirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly (Read, 2009). For example, in Canada, the unemployment insurance program’s eligibility criteria were revised in 1993 to make those who quit without just cause, fired for misconduct, or refused to accept suitable employment ineligible for benefits. As a result, these reforms significantly increased the cost of 28 unemployment to strongly incentivize employment. As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism paradoxically governs without governing (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009). Under the matrix of competition, the survival of the neoliberal subject is tethered to its capacity to align its interests, as human capital, with the interests of macroeconomic growth (Brown, 2015; Harvey, 2018; Read, 2009). Human life is bound to market interests. How is this tether enabled? 2.3 Neoliberalism, Normalcy, and the Human Sciences The rise of neoliberalism corresponds closely with the awakening and deepening of peoples’ technological understanding of life and living being (Foucault, 1965; 1975; 1976). Through this biological turn, peoples’ understanding of the human body began to shift away from the ideal to the normal (Butler, 1993; Davis, 2010a; Rose, 2007). In the past, the ideal, like the nude body of Venus de Milo, exemplified an unattainable model composed of parts from many different bodies (Butler, 1993; Davis, 2010a; Rose, 2007). In a society organized around an unattainable ideal, all members of society are below the ideal (Butler, 1993; Davis, 2010a; Rose, 2007). In this case, there is no demand to conform to the ideal (Butler, 1993; Davis, 2010a). Likewise, the grotesque suggested that all bodies are disabled (Butler, 1993; Davis, 2010a). Under the signs of the ideal and grotesque, peoples’ understanding of the human body is very different (Butler, 1993; Davis, 2010a). Through the science of statistics, normalcy firmly entered human awareness paving the way for construction of a ‘normal’ understanding of the body (Butler, 1993; Butler, 2005; Davis, 2010a; Rose & Abi-Richard, 2013; Rose, 2007). The science of statistics, a ‘political arithmetic’ for “promotion of sound, well-informed state policies”, suggested that it was possible to chart and manipulate human populations (Davis, 2010a, p 5). Specifically, the science of statistics suggests that populations chart along a bell curve (Butler, 1993; 29 Davis, 2010a; Rose, 2007). This central statistical insight divides the total population into standard and nonstandard populations (e.g., standard deviation on a bell curve) (Butler, 1993; Davis, 2010a; Rose, 2007). By drawing upon this statistical insight, the human sciences began to create and maintain discourse about the human body based upon statistical norms (Butler, 1993; Davis, 2010a; Foucault, 1984; 1992; Rose, 2007). For example, in 1829, Bisset Hawkins used statistical tools to “illustrate the natural history of health and disease” (Davis, 2010a, p 5). Building upon the efforts of Hawkins and others, statistical insights enabled practitioners to conceptualize features of the average person (e.g., height and weight) (Davis, 2010a; Rose, 2001; 2007). By linking the ‘middle way’ of neoliberalism with statistics and the human sciences, it became possible to construct a ‘middle way of life’ to enable the market to facilitate greater accumulation of wealth (Davis, 2010a; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2001; 2007). In pursuit of ‘the middle way of life’, the human sciences constructed/construct and wrote/write deeply political understandings of normal and abnormal onto their objects of study (e.g., the body) (Davis, 2010a; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). Using statistical norms, the human sciences laid claim and continue to lay claim, through a number of disciplinary techniques, to the human body’s operations (Foucault, 1975; 1984; 1992; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2001; 2007). This medical model has suggested and continues to suggest that disability is a medical problem of deviant human anatomy (Rose, 2007; 2013; Titchikosky, 2008; Withers, 2012). The medical model contends that medical issues are located in the body and fixed and/or their effects minimized through medical interventions (Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013; Withers, 2012). In a number of works, Foucault (1965; 1969; 1975; 1976; 1984; 1992) traced connections between knowledge, power, and the human sciences in liberal societies. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault (1975) tracks a fragmentation in 30 the structure of power by mapping changes in the modern penal system from the public execution to the modern prison. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault (1976; 1984; 1992) charts the fragmentation in the structures of power by examining the discourses about sex and sexuality. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Foucault (1965) maps the fragmentation in structures of power by examining shifting ideas and concepts within discourses about madness. Foucault uses a genealogical method, developed most clearly in the Archeology of Knowledge, to uncover the contradictory histories of these discourses (Foucault, 1965; Foucault, 1969; Foucault, 1975; Foucault 1976; Foucault, 1980). Emerging from profound connections between neoliberalism, normalcy, and the human sciences, the emergence of biopower heralds a transition of sovereign power from kill or let live to prevent, protect, foster, or let die (Foucault, 1979; 1984; 1992; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose & Rabinow, 2006; Rose, 2001; 2007). To illustrate this shift, Foucault (1979) proposes a simple bipolar diagram of power over life. The first pole called biopower focuses on the politics of the human body (e.g., maximizing the body’s forces); the second pole called biopolitics focuses on regulatory controls of populations (e.g., birth, morbidity, mortality) (Foucault, 1979; 1984; 1992; Rose, 2007). In the nineteenth century, Foucault (1979) argues these two poles conjoined within a series of great technologies of power (e.g., sexuality, race, ability) (Foucault, 1984; 1992). I suggest that ability is one of these great technologies of power (Foucault, 1976, 1984, 1992; McRuer, 2006; 2010). Under these great technologies of power, there is an uneven oscillation between disciplinary and control societies (Foucault, 1976, 1984, 1992; Puar, 2013). The tensions between these societal forces map as follows: …from normal/abnormal to variegation, modulation and tweaking; from discrete sites of punishment…to pre-emptive regimes of securization; from inclusion/exclusion to the question of differential inclusion; from self/other and subject/object construction to 31 micro-states of sub-individual differentiation; from different between to difference within; from the policing of profile to patrolling affect; from will to capacity; from agency to affect; from subject to body…from Althusserian interpellation to an array of diverse switch points of the activation of the body. (Puar, 2013, p 181) Within the categories of normal and abnormal, neoliberalism – through the activities of the human sciences – evaluates, judges, and ranks minds and bodies. These activities mark the minds and bodies of people based on many signs including health, wealth, productivity, mobility, and capacity (Puar, 2013; Rose, 2007). Through the birth of genetic risk, the human sciences deepen and extend categories of normal and abnormal. 2.4 The Birth of Genetic Risk For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being in question. (Foucault, 1978, p 143) The rise of neoliberalism, normalcy, and the human sciences corresponds closely with its technical instruments (Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013). These technologies are an integral feature of its capacity to endure in diverse social, political, and economic contexts (e.g., mapping of the human genome, identification of genes responsible for specific conditions, genetic screening, and genetic counselling) (Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013). One such instrument is the emergence and progression of genomics made possible by the Human Genome Project (Cohen, 2009; Rose, 2013b; Saunders, 2011; Venter & Cohen, 2004). At the same time, these instruments are becoming transformative pathways for resistance (Butler, 2005; McRuer, 2006). While the Human Genome Project mapped the human genome, the project did not quite deliver its promise. Since the late twentieth century, the life sciences seemed to progress with perpetual 32 earnestness toward mapping the human genome (Beckwith, 1991; Rose, 2007; 2013a; 2013b). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Human Genome Project began to take form (Beckwith, 1991; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). The Human Genome Project remains the world’s largest collaborative biological project (Saunders, 2011). Endeavours like the Human Genome Project render thinkable and visible the building blocks of life itself (Rose, 2001; 2007). With this expanding claim over human life, the social sciences confront the social, political, and economic limits of explanatory models, like the Human Genome Project, in the life sciences. As a result, across uneven human chronologies and geographies, the social sciences entwine with the field of genomics (Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b; Rowen, Mairas, & Hood, 1997; Saunders, 2011). Emerging and evolving within this enduring entanglement, the Human Genome Project would develop and sustain numerous theoretical and technological innovations (Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). On February 15th 2001, because of the Human Genome Project, Nature published an article titled, Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome; it offered the first broadly accessible gaze at the contents of the human genetic code (International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium., 2001; Lander, 2011). Ten years onward, this project, among others like the Human Genome Diversity Project, demonstrated “the power of genomic maps and catalogues for biomedical research” (Lander, 2011, p. 187). Lander (2011) suggests, [B]y providing a comprehensive scaffold, the human sequence has made it possible for scientists to assemble often-fragmentary information into landscapes of biological structure and function…By providing a framework to cross-reference information across species, [the Human Genome Project] has connected the biology of model systems to the physiology of the human. (Lander, 2011, p. 187) Through the successes marked by the Human Genome Project, there has been 33 sustained enthusiasm to extend genomic theoretical and technological innovations in novel ways (Rappert & Brown, 2000; Robertson, 2007). Subsequently, some academics and professionals have sought ways to integrate these genomic theories and technologies into the human and social sciences (Johnson, et al., 1990; Takahashi & Turnbull, 1994; Miller & Martin, 2008; Miller & Rose, 1994). For example, Miller and Martin (2008) endorse the role of social workers in the provision of genetic services (e.g., taking family genetic histories) for individuals and families experiencing illnesses. These expansions have produced avenues for the implementation of a vast new array of genetic technologies for people experiencing illnesses (e.g., genetic screening for scoliosis) in health care contexts (e.g., clinics, hospitals) (Hawes & O'Brien, 2008; Miller & Martin, 2008). The human and social sciences increasingly connect to genomic theoretical and technological developments (Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). This enthusiasm seems to continue to grow in the context of numerous potential benefits (e.g., genetic screening, genetic testing, health care cost reductions) identified and propagated by proponents of these projects (Phua, 2004; Hawes & O’Brien, 2008; Rose, 2013b). Beyond certain apparatuses, some advocates of these theories and technologies embrace the possibility that people may look forward to a time when illnesses may be identified and treated through diagnosis and intervention at the genetic level (Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). Undertakings like the Human Genome Project have deepened the entanglement between the field of genomics and the social sciences (Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). Within this landscape, some would herald that the twenty-first century is the century of biology (Venter & Cohen, 2004; Rose, 2013b). In response to this wide-spread and profound entanglement with genomics, there is reticence and discomfort within the social sciences about some political, social, and economic implications of these theoretical and technological expansions (Saunders, 2011; Munger, Gill, Ormond, & Kirschner, 2007; Amani & Coombe, 2005; Phua, 2004; Rappert & 34 Brown, 2000; Rose, 2007; 2013b). Some of these concerns tend to arise and become positioned in relation to a history marked by horrific initiatives (e.g., eugenics) (Burke & Castaneda, 2007; Munger, Gill, Ormond, & Kirschner, 2007; Saunders, 2011). Several advocates and critical social theorists argue that these technological ‘advances’ enable and institute discrimination through the possibility of preventing the births of children with disabilities (e.g., Down syndrome) (Munger, Gill, Ormond, & Kirschner, 2007; Saunders, 2011). A diverse constellation of people – concerned by socio-economic issues – indicate that patenting of human genomic material produces novel debates about the limits of biomedical research in advanced liberal societies (Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). Some people implicate, as necessary sites of dialogue, intersections between ethical and equity concerns arisen from the Human Genome Project among other genomic research (Phua, 2004; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). These social, political, and economic tensions have become constituted and produced in debates within and between the human, social, and life science literatures (Saunders, 2011; Munger, Gill, Ormond, & Kirschner, 2007; Phua, 2004). These debates reflect diverse attitudes toward genetic research from enthusiasm to criticism across disciplinary boundaries (Rose, 2001; 2013b). In the context of these rich transdisciplinary discourses, some scholars within the life sciences suggest that by mapping genomes it may be possible to understand the building blocks of life itself (Lander, 2011; Miller & Martin, 2008; Rose, 2013). This specific genetic discourse proposes that through identification of a ‘gene for’ a physical or mental illness, it may be possible to intervene at the genetic level in the lives of people to eradicate illnesses (Munger, Gill, Ormond, & Kirschner, 2007; Hawes & O’Brien, 2008; Rose, 2013). This ‘gene for…’ discourse has the potential to link identifying genetic mutations (e.g., locating the gene for bipolar disorder) with race, age, and ability (Rose, 2007; 2013b). Consequently, it treads a precarious path; and so, many scholars across the 35 life, human and social sciences have strongly resisted and contested this ‘gene for…’ paradigm (Lewontin, Rose, & Kamin, 1984; Munger, Gill, Ormond, & Kirschner, 2007; Amani & Coombe, 2005; Phua, 2004; Saunders, 2011). Yet, as Rose (2013) contends, this ‘gene for…’ paradigm rendered thinkable by the Human Genome Project did not deliver its promise (Manolio & Francis, 2007). Rose (2013) suggests, [T]he evidence from sequencing of humans and other organisms simply did not support the view that genes were distinct units, each of which coded for a single protein...[instead] each sequence of bases could be ‘read’ in many different ways, thus enabling a small number of coding regions to generate a large number of different proteins (p.17). As a result, genetic discourse ruptured and assumed a less determined stance (Carey, 2012; Carlson, 2010; Manolio & Francis, 2007; Rose, 2007; 2013b). With the shift away from genetic fatalism and toward indeterminism, genetic discourse converges with risk discourse in a contemporary focus on susceptibility (Rose, 2007; Rose, 2013c). Susceptibility is a continuation of a long history of thought about predisposition and risk (Rose, 2007). Since the eighteenth centurey, "a predisposition was an inherited taint or flaw that would, in the right (or wong) circumstances, manifest itself in illness or pathology" (Rose, 2007, p. 19). Contemporary susceptibility reconfigures this idea of predisposition and reworks well-established technologies of risk assessment, risk prediction, and risk management (Rose, 2007). Susceptibility charts "the problems raised by attempts to identify and treat persons in the present in relation to ills that they are predicted to suffer in the future" (Rose, 2007, p. 19). Susceptibility brings potential futures into the present and tries to make them the subject of calculation and the object of remedial intervention (Rose, 2007). This generates the sense that all people are asymptomatically ill (Rose, 2007). 36 The presence of genetic risk operating in susceptibility “creates an obligation to act in the present in relation to the potential futures that now come into view” (Rose, 2007, p. 107). This convergence of genetic/risk knowledges produces a subject whose body is marked by signs of illness that necessitate actions to mitigate risk and facilitate recovery (Rose, 2007). Subjects simultaneously become patients and "protoprofessionals" (Rose, 2007, p. 110). In this duality, individuals themselves begin to request genetic services from commercial organizations to manage their health (Rose, 2007). Contemporary medical practice acts as a service/servant rather than master of these processes (Rose, 2007). Under neoliberalism, the dual subject calculates the risk of possible illness, ‘knows’ the interventions to eliminate the potential illness, and manages the self with this intervention. The potential future ‘illness’ is eradicated. With the birth of genetic risk in neoliberal contexts, the subject's dual existence as patient and professional means the erasure of life. Counting on the fact that subjects calculate their interests, neoliberalism channels flows of interest and investment by making desirable activities inexpensive, like preventive genetic testing, and undesirable activities costly like health treatment services (Read, 2009). As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism paradoxically governs without governing (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009). Under the matrix of competition, the neoliberal subject aligns its interests and investments, as human capital, with the interests of macroeconomic growth to prevent disability (Brown, 2015; Harvey, 2018; Read, 2009). 2.5 Genetic Risk and Eugenics in the Human Sciences Through the technical capacity of the human sciences, neoliberalism tries to capitalize on novel forms of power, like genetic risk, to enable its social, political, and economic agenda (Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose & Rabinow, 2006; Rose, 2007; 2013b; 2013c). After all, the neoliberal project is a “matter of organizing all features of one’s national policy to enable a 37 market to exist and to provide what it needs to function” (Rose, 1999, p 141; 2001; 2007; 2008; 2013b). To enable the existence of a market, economic activities require the maintenance of normalcy. Normalcy enables movement of economic systems. For example, neoliberalism rests upon colonial laws that confer rights of ownership of unceded territory to white settlers. Through colonial laws, white settlers dispossess Indigenous peoples of land, trading routes, and transportation to facilitate movement of goods and services across unceded territory to sell in markets (Goldberg, 2009). Neoliberalism and racism work discursively to maintain the benefits of colonial laws for white settlers and mark abnormality upon Indigenous peoples. This marking of abnormalcy requires the technical capacity of the human sciences to understand and intervene in the human mind and body (Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2001; 2007). The field of eugenics, for a long time, promises to maintain normalcy. Academics and practitioners within the field of eugenics suggest that the human race might improve by eliminating problematic peoples and their behaviours (Davis, 2010a; Davis, 2010b). In some instances, eugenic activities overtly kill people (e.g., holocaust). In other cases, eugenic activities prevent the birth of people (e.g., forced sterilization and abortion) and mark the minds and bodies of living people (e.g., risk of developing a genetically based condition – schizophrenia or colonial legal frameworks that confer status based upon blood quantum). Eugenic activities advance under many systems of technical signification (e.g., genetic technologies, diagnostic manuals, laboratory tests). While the field of eugenics is longstanding, genetic risk produces new areas for eugenic activities (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). Genetic risk enables intervention in the past, present, and future of the human mind and body. Through genetic risk, eugenics infiltrates a “temporal field of life strategies, wherein, individuals seek to plan their present in the light of their beliefs about the future that their genetic endowment might hold” (Rose, 2007 38 p109; 2008; 2013b). New subject positions create the obligation to calculate choices in a complex interpersonal field, not only in terms of individuals’ relations to themselves, but also in terms of their relations to others, including not only actual and potential kin, past and present, but also genetic professionals and biomedical researchers. (Rose, 2007 p109) Identification of genetic risks has entwined with optimizing and improving quality of life (Rose, 2007). Biotechnologies, like genetic counselling, are no longer exclusively concerned with the prevention of genetic disease (Rose, 2007). Biotechnologies must include the communication of genetic risk (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). Through genetic risk, the field of eugenics reconfigures subjectivity in terms of a genetic past, genetic present, and a genetic future (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). With the birth of genetic risk, scholars warn against the possible stigmatization and denial of services to individuals who have a genetic diagnosis but are asymptomatic (e.g., denial of insurance claims due to a pre-existing condition) (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). The rise of genetic testing begins to blur the boundaries of ‘pre-existing conditions.’ Through genetic risk, pre-existing conditions may include conditions based on genetic markers regardless of whether the condition is symptomatic and asymptomatic (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). For example, an individual with a family history of schizophrenia is genetically at risk of developing schizophrenia; the individual does not show signs or symptoms of schizophrenia. Individual insurance is underwritten based on risk factors (e.g., age, medical history, occupation, and smoking); individual information on genetic risk is significant (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). Without insurance or similar protective services, individuals marked by pre-existing conditions, yet to manifest, may be ineligible for life preserving services (e.g., health insurance or life insurance) (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). Beyond the denial of services like health insurance and life insurance, debates about the possibility of genetic discrimination by employers and labor organizations extend 39 into many countries (e.g., United States of America, France, Norway, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Austria) (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). “Whether or not there is, or will be genetic discrimination, the injection of debates over genetics into practices of educational assessment, employment recruitment, and actuarial calculation is significant in its own right” (Rose, 2007, p 119). These debates serve to spread genetic conceptions of subjectivity to produce a generation of genetic responsibility (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013a; 2013b). Genetic responsibility produces an obligation to act in the present to prevent a possible future (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). For example, preventive screening for psychiatric conditions, based on genetic risk, extends into the lives of children in school. Through genetic markers, medical professionals seek early identification of psychiatric conditions such as minimal brain dysfunction, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorder, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and conduct disorder among others (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). With the molecular vision of genetic risk, medical professionals can begin pre-symptomatic intervention (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). Genetic responsibility is a eugenic activity that tries to prevent the future possibility of a condition (Rose, 2007; 2008; 2013b). In response to these endeavours, activists and stakeholders sought to resist and contest the politics of eugenics (Davis, 2010a; 2010b). In the wake of social change activities (e.g., black U.S. civil rights movement), disability rights activists challenged the dominance of the psychiatric system (Lewis, 2010; Linton, 1998; Nielsen, 2012). Resoundingly, disability studies scholars engage in political discourse across academic contexts to resist the eugenic agenda (Linton, 1998; Price, 2013). In the next chapter, I will chart movements of resistance within disability studies. 40 2.6 Discussion In this chapter, I sketched an account of the rise of neoliberalism. Narrowing my focus in this broad landscape, I detailed the emergence of normalcy and the human sciences. Next, I closely detailed the birth of genetic risk in relation to normalcy within the human sciences. Finally, I shaped an account of eugenic debates. Drawing upon these relationships, I suggest that the rise of neoliberal governmentality leads to the birth of neoliberal homo oeconomicus. With the emergence of neoliberal homo oeconomicus, the discursive frameworks of neoliberalism and disability align to organize normalizing practices in the human sciences, like genetic risk discourse, to govern neoliberal homo oeconomicus. Under the matrix of competition, neoliberal homo oeconomicus aligns its interests and investments with forms of market dependency enabled by neoliberalism. The combination of a neoliberal focus on interest and investment alongside an imagined future medical tragedy, made sensible by genetic risk discourse, produces a flow of knowledge/power through neoliberal-disability that seeks to prevent a life that includes disability. At the same time, this flow of knowledge/power shaped by neoliberal-disability affirms the normalcy of a human life enabled by neoliberalism. By genealogically and spatially mapping these relationships, I built an apparatus for theorizing ways the discursive frameworks of neoliberalism and disability work together to construct and categorize neoliberal-abled subject positions along an axis of oppression and privilege. 41 Chapter 3: Movements of Resistance: Toward Intracategorical Analysis 3.1 Movements of Resistance to White Supremacy, Patriarchal Masculinity, Neoliberalism, and Heterosexism Over the last century, critical social theorists have contested the alignment between the discursive frameworks of neoliberalism and disability by ariculating relationships between biological, political, social, and economic structures of society. For example, critical social theorists illuminated ways medical discourse produces subject positions (e.g., doctor/patient) that shape experiences of birth, life, illness, and death. These articulations suggest that the social, political, and economic agenda of neoliberalism does not necessarily align with the biological needs of all human life. Through these activities, critical social theorists, disability rights activists, and disability researchers have made important contributions to the cultural conversations about disability and disability rights. Emerging from within the global politics of disability rights and deinstitutionalisation, researchers and disabled activists produced novel ways to theorize and explain disability (e.g., the social model of disability) (Linton, 1998; Shakespeare, 2010). Beginning with the first generation of disability activists, critical disability studies began to broaden its critique of social institutions in the production of disability (Linton, 1998; Shakespeare, 2010). With the second wave, disability studies began to deepen its critique of discursive frameworks, normalcy, and power in the production of disability (Linton, 1998; Shakespeare, 2010). Researchers, scholars, and activitists challenged essentialist understandings of disability within the field of disability studies. By contesting essentialism, the field of disability studies turned to the many experiences of disabled people whose lives cross boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and class. The fight to live is not new. For a long time, scholars, researchers, activists, and participants across fields of Indigenous 42 studies, gender studies, class analysis, race theories, and queer theories have resisted eugenic endeavours. Drawing on significant work in these fields, disabled scholars explored ways race, gender, sexuality, and class reconfigure understandings of disability. Conceptualizations of disability that do not include race, gender, sexuality, and class may (re)produce racist, sexist, heterosexist, and classist discourse. Likewise, theories that do not include disability “can have disastorous and sometimes deadly consequences for disabled people of color caught at the violent interstices of multiple differences” (Erevelles & Minear, 2013, p 383). To chart these movements of resistance within the field of disability studies, I draw schematically upon a genealogical methodology to survey and signpost diverse movements of resistance to white supremacist, patriarchal masculinist, neoliberal, and heterosexist discursive frameworksand influences upon the development of scholarly work in critical disability studies. My review of these influences is not exhaustive; instead, I intend to signal these influences. Toward this end, I situate the discursive framework of neoliberal-disability in relation to the discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, and heterosexism. Under the broad influences of movements of resistance to white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, and heterosexism, disability studies moved from the the disability rights movements and social model of disability toward intersectional and interlocking analyses. Placed in relation to this broad landscape, I articulate important themes in the disability rights movements and its boundaries. Building upon this account, I construct an account of the social model of disability and its limits. To bring together the discursive frameworks of disability, white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, and heterosexuality, I develop an account of intersectional and interlocking analyses leading to intracategorical analysis. I suggest that examining relationships between the discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, 43 heterosexism, and disability through an intracategorical analysis is necessary to theorize the construction and hierarchical categorization of subject positions. 3.2 Influences of Indigenous, Gender, Class, Race, and Queer Theories Before white contact, most Indigenous societies were “matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal” (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001, p. 77). In Indigenous agricultural societies, women organized the distribution of food (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). Upon contact, white settlers refused to deal directly with Indigenous women (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). White settlers forced Indigenous men to take over the responsibilities of women so white settlers could negotiate directly with Indigenous men (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). White settler corruption of Indigenous culture led Indigenous men into capitalist arrangements (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). In the late 1400s and 1500s in North America, the processes of colonization began to bring Indigenous territory and peoples under rigorous structures of control (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). However, Indigenous women and men possessed skills needed by white settlers to obtain fur for the fur trade (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). As long as the fur trade remained central to the economy in Europe, white settlers required the traditional knowledge and skills of Indigenous women and men to obtain fur (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). By 1812, agriculture replaced the fur trade at the centre of economic activity (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). And so, the traditional knowledge and skills of Indigenous women and men were required to meet the agricultural needs of the economy (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 44 2013; Razack, 2002). Government policy deliberately tried to achieve assimilation by attempting to erase Indigenous languages, customs, religious beliefs, and traditional structures (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001). In Canada, these policies culminated in the Indian Act of 1876 to force assimilation (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). The Indian Act of 1876 created a reserve system, the establishment of a series of residential schools, and the institutions of punitive legal guardianship of Indigenous peoples (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). The Indian Act created a paternalistic system of dependency and tight control by placing all Indigenous peoples under the jurisdiction of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). Indigenous peoples were stripped of their political sovereignty, segregated on often economically unproductive reserves, and subject to state control directly through Indian agents and indirectly through their elected band councils (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001). An 1890 amendment to the Indian Act appropriated Indigenous land by legislating that “surplus or idle” Indian land could be available for use by non-Indians (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001). The legacy of colonial imperialism produced a legal system that systematically appropriated land from Indigenous peoples (Cassidy, Lord, & Mandell, 2001). This history created a structure of unequal access to the benefits of land that was built on and maintained by white-supremacist-capitalist-colonial-patriarchy (Hall, 2011; Razack, 1998; Smith, 2003; 2006). Contemporary Indigenous feminist scholars and black feminist scholars resist white-supremacist-capitialist-colonial-patriarchal-systemic structures (Campbell, 1973; hooks, 1981, 1989; Razack, 1998). The publication of Halfbreed by Maria Campbell in 1973 and Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism in 1981 by bell hooks mark important turning points in Indigenous and black feminist literary production. These literary works sparked 45 important debates about identity, gendered disenfranchisement, colonial law, racism, and representation. In the field of gender studies, contemporary Indigenous and black feminist critiques of colonialism challenged/challenge white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal systemic structures that positioned race and gender as separate categories of identity and oppression (Hall, 2011; Razack, 1998). White supremacy was certainly a necessary term when confronted with the liberal attitudes of white women active in feminist movements who were unlike their racist ancestors – white women in the early woman's rights movement who did not wish to be caught dead in fellowship with black women. In fact, these women often requested and longed for the presence of black women. Yet when present, what we saw was that they wished to exercise control over our bodies and thoughts as their racist ancestors had – that this need to exercise power over us expressed how much they had internalized the values and attitudes of white supremacy (hooks, 1989, p. 112). White supremecy is the liberal movement to distance onself from the perpetuation of overtly racist discrimination, exploitation, and oppression of Indigenous and black people (hooks, 1989; Smith, 2006). By distancing oneself from the activities of colonialism, white supremacy produces the claim that racism is something from the past that no longer applies to today (hooks, 1989). Simultaneously, white supremacy demands that Indigenous peoples and people of colour maintain white European values (hooks, 1989). White supremacy conceals itself under a cloak of assimilation (hooks, 1989). Assimilation urges Indigenous peoples and people of colour to disregard their colour by imitating white supremists to better absorb their values (hooks, 1989). Assimilation is a strategy that enables social legitimation and economic mobility (hooks, 1989; Morella-Pozzi, 2014). Assimilation deflects the need for radical transformation of the consciousness of Indigenous peoples and people of colour (hooks, 1989). 46 Indigenous and black feminist scholars emphasized that white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchical social structures oppress women in different ways and social structures position women hierarchically to one another in relations of power and privilege (Hall, 2011; hooks, 1981; Razack, 1998). In Ain't I a Woman?, bell hooks (1981) examined several recurring themes in the lives of black women. For example, hooks explored the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood, the idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, the marginalization of black women, and the disregard for issues of race and class within feminism. Indigenous and black feminists identified the privilege of white-supremist middle-class experiences in feminist theory (hooks, 1981; 1984; Smith, 2003; 2006). Indigenous and black feminists highlighted the way feminism did not originate from the most oppressed women (hooks, 1981; 1989). The rise of white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy coincides with the emergence of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism began with the philosophy of John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill. Through Of Property, Of the Dissolution of Government, and Rights of Man, Locke and Paine argued that man has a natural right to life, liberty, and property (McCullough, 2016). In the Wealth of Nations, Smith articulated the classical liberal view of economy based on trade and barter (McCullough, 2016; Read, 2009). In On Liberty, Mill's principle of liberty suggests that society may only interfere with the liberty of others for self-protection (McCullough, 2016). Despite their differences, these scholars support the fundamental tenant of classic liberal philosophy that suggests humans are first and foremost rational individuals rather than collective identities (Heywood, 2002). As rational individuals, classical liberalism focuses on humans natural tendency to barter and exchange (McCullough, 2016; Read, 2009). In light of this tendency, classical liberalism naturally extends the market as a space for trade, barter, and exchange (McCullough, 2016; Read, 2009). To protect individuality and property, classical liberalism insists on individual rights and freedoms enshrined in law. 47 Unconditional rights, like the right to private property, secure the market and the market provides a space for individuals‘ natural tendency to trade, barter, and exchange (Read, 2009). Classical liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of society. However, the application of exchange was built on racial-colonial conceptualizations of society and its notion of individuality, rights, freedoms, and private property (Parekh, 1997). For subjects of white-supremacist-patriarchal-classical liberalism to fulfill their natural need to exchange they needed private property. Under the matrix of white supremacy, patriarchcal masculinity, and classical liberalism, Indigenous peoples and people of colour lacked private property. Their land was vacant and unenclosed; therefore, it could be expropriated for resources to exchange, barter, and trade (Parekh, 1997). Neoliberalism reconfigures the tenants of classical liberalism and extends the scope of the market into social and political relationships. Reconfiguring the classical liberal view of human nature, the rise of neoliberalism heralds the birth of neoliberal homo oeconomicus (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009). With the reconfiguration of human nature under neoliberalism and its resultant egalitarian vision, Indigenous peoples, women, people of colour, and LGBTQ existence is imagined as an alternative interest, investment, desire, and aspiration in relation to the hegemony of white spremacist-patriarchal masculinist-neoliberal-heterosexist subject positions (McRuer, 2006; Read, 2009; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). The alternative status of LGBTQ identities reinforces the notion that heterosexuality is naturally dominant (McRuer, 2006). Within the egalitarian project of neoliberalism, LGBTQ sexuality is always and everywhere secondary (Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006). Systems of heterosexuality utilize this in/comprehensibility of LGBTQ existence to locate LGBTQ sexuality at the margins of heterosexuality (Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006). Heterosexuality cloaks itself and renders LGBTQ identities visible at the margins (Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006). The hegemony of heterosexuality casts LGBTQ identities as alternatives to strengthen the ideological notion that the dominance of 48 heterosexuality is the natural order of things (Foucault; 1980; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006). Scholars across the social sciences critique the implications of heterosexism in neoliberalism manifestations in Canada and the United States (Foucault, 1984; 1992; McRuer, 2006). Under the broad influences of Indigenous scholars, gender theories, class critiques, race theories, and queer theories, critical disability studies moved from the the disability rights movements and social model of disability toward intersectional and interlocking analyses. 3.3 Disability Rights Movements In the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Canada, many influential scholars and activists in the field of disability studies deepened resistance to the medical model of the human sciences and eugenics by advancing the rights of disabled people (Garland-Thomson, 2010; Samuels, 2011; Withers, 2012). Like their counterparts in the United Kingdom, in the early days of disability studies, Garland-Thomson (2010) suggests that disability studies required an essentialist understanding of disability to maintain cohesion and solidarity. Emerging from debates in the United States and Canada, the disability rights movement focused on “human and citizenship rights and ensuring that disabled people have equal access to these rights” (Withers, 2012, p 81). Rights are either negative rights or positive rights (Shakespeare, 2010; Withers, 2012). Negative rights involve equality of treatment; positive rights involve equality that requires special treatment (Withers, 2012; Young & Quibell, 2000). The rights movement suggests that disabled people are entitled to the same rights as non-disabled people (Withers, 2012). For the most part, the model focuses on eliminating discrimination to to provide equal opportunity for disabled people (Withers, 2012). Implicitly, the disability rights movement suggests that disability is a part of the person that leads to unequal treatment (Withers, 2012). 49 In the late 1960s, leaning on the civil rights and feminist movements, disabled people in the United States began to challenge the dominance of the medical model in the field of disability (Nielson, 2012; Withers, 2012). The medical-industrial complex has maintained significant control over the lives of disable people (Nielson, 2012; Withers, 2012). It legitimizes control of disabled people through medical stories produced by medical expertise (Morella-Pozzi, 2014; Nielson, 2012; Withers, 2012). The expertise of medical practitioners often aligns with the interests and investments of industry (Nielson, 2012; Withers, 2012). There are many instances of the alliance between the medical model and neoliberalism; I will briefly review a few in the United States and Canada. In 1967, Robert Payne, like so many other coal miners in a mine explosion, was unable to mine any longer (Nielson, 2012). Later in 1970, he would spend fourteen days in prison after leading a strike involving forty thousand coal miners across West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and Indiana (Neilson). When remarking upon his experience, Payne claimed, “[D]on’t intend to be mistreated or discriminated against” (Nielson, p 157). Despite the reassurance of company medical practitioners who proclaimed that coal dust promoted health, coal mining is very dangerous. Exposure to coal dust can lead to black lung disease (Nielson). With the efforts of Payne and others, unions negotiated benefits that included disability benefits and health care services (Nielson). Using the protest methods of the anti-war and racial freedom movements, disabled people demanded equality (Nielson). As Nielson (2012) suggests, the “story of Robert Payne and the Disabled Miners and Widows is a story of class, labor, race and place; it is also the story of the social reform movement” (p 159). In the 1970s, disability rights activists fought to ensure the enactment of the Rehabilitation Act (Nielson, 2012; Withers, 2012). The Rehabilitation Act is an important piece of disability rights legislation (Nielson, 2012; Withers, 2012). Nixon vetoed the legislation twice (Withers, 2012). Subsequently, numerous disability rights organizations 50 arranged protests to raise the profile of disability rights in the presidential debates (Nielson, 2012; Withers, 2012). Ultimately, Nixon signed and enacted the Rehabilitation Act (Withers). The protests surrounding the Rehabilitation Act paved the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act (Nielson, 2012; Withers, 2012). In Canada in the 1970s, the disability rights movements fought for recognition under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter prohibits governments from “discriminating against disabled people and disabled people are granted equity rights” (Withers, 2012, p 85). Alongside these protections, the rights obtained under the charter allowed disabled people to vote. The proposed new Accessible Canada Act will add to the existing rights and protections for people with disabilities. The Accessible Canada Act will attempt to make Canada barrier-free in areas under federal jurisdiction. However, these rights and freedoms did not ensure that disabled people had a voice in academic and scholarly debates. Until the late 1970s, the views of disabled people filtered through the voices of organizations, medical professionals, and family members (Rose, 2001; 2007; Withers, 2012). At the time, one of the crucial international disability organizations was Rehabilitation International (Withers, 2012). Rehabilitation International had a policy that allowed disabled people to attend its conference as observers; however, disabled people could not speak (Withers, 2012). In 1980 at the Rehabilitation International Conference in Winnipeg, disabled delegates walked out of the conference because they were upset about a lack of representation of disabled peoples’ voices (Withers, 2012). In 1981, the United Nations declared the International Year of Disabled Persons (IYDP) (Withers). The celebration of IYDP included many events organised by local, provincial, the federal government, and disability rights organisations (Withers). IYDP emphasized the rights of people with disabilities. IYDP represented a significant shift in the social consciousness of disability. 51 Disabled people began to understand disability based on rights and equality rather than the dominance of the medical model (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013c; Withers, 2012). The rights model produced new possibilities for disabled peoples’ identities in terms of physical accessibility, social inclusion, and civic participation (Withers, 2012). The disability rights movements in the United States and Canada are important landmarks in the field of disability studies. 3.4 Limitations of the Disability Rights Movements Rights movements focus on removing the effects of oppression to access the privileges of non-oppressed citizens (McRuer, 2006; Withers, 2012). Rights models access power rather than change it (McRuer, 2006; Withers, 2012). The disability rights movements in the United States and Canada intended to achieve equity with regard to civil rights. These movements focus on ensuring positive rights for disabled people. With oppressive social conditions still uninterrupted, rights movements can only achieve so much (McRuer, 2006; Withers, 2012). More so, capitalism can co-opt disability rights movements to support its activities (McRuer, 2006; Withers, 2012). For example, the American Disabilities Act does not address the way labour forces are structured by capitalism to leave millions of workers under-employed and unemployed (McRuer, 2006; Withers, 2012). Disability rights movements do not account for the emergence of profit generating markets built around activism (McRuer, 2006). From a position rights based equality, the disability rights movements contend that disabled people are entitled to the same rights as non-disabled people (Withers, 2012). Beginning with the social model of disability, critical disability scholars began to try to change the structures of power underlying the eugenic and medical models of disability (Shakespeare, 2010; Withers, 2012). 52 3.5 The Social Model of Disability For a long time, disabled people have organized resistance movements to the eugenic and medical models (Shakespeare, 2010; Withers, 2012). In these early years, many organizations created a space for resistance to these models (e.g., National Association of the Deaf; Canadian National Institute for the Blind; The League of the Physically Handicapped; Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation) (Shakespeare, 2010; Withers, 2012). In the 1980s and 1990s in the United Kingdom, influential scholars and activists in the field of disability studies began to resist the medical model and eugenics through the social model of disability (Garland-Thomson, 2010; Samuels, 2011; Shakespeare, 2010; Withers, 2012). Emerging from debates in the United Kingdom, the social model of disability claims that disability is not equivalent to physical and mental impairment (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Shakespeare, 2010; Withers, 2012). Physical and mental impairment is the absent or defective part of an organism or mechanism of the body. Disability is a product of a society that disables physically and mentally impaired people (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Shakespeare, 2010; Withers, 2012). “Under the social model of disability, disability is the oppression that people with impairments face” (Withers, 2012, p 86). For example, while impairment may be spasticity in your hands, disability is in a society that, on a mass scale, manufactures, distributes, and relies upon cups, almost exclusively, so people can consume liquids in public settings (e.g., multi-national corporate coffee shops) that produces the inability to hold a cup. The social model of disability disputes the causal link that medical theories contend exists between illness and disability (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Shakespeare, 2010; Withers, 2012). The medical model suggests that disability exists within the body or mind of the individual. The medical model claims that the abnormal mind or body may return to the norm, or as close to the ‘norm’, through acts of repair (e.g., medication) (Corker & 53 Shakespeare, 2002; Rose, 2007; Withers, 2012). Through the medical-industrial complex, medical practitioners, taking up stories of expertise, use practices like medication, therapy, rehabilitation to exert control over the lives of disabled people (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b; Withers, 2012). The social model of disability provides a valuable critique of the medical model and related theories within the human sciences by articulating and disputing underlying structures of power (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Withers, 2012). While illness relates to impairment, the social model of disability claims that impairment does not lead to disability. Impairment is the physical or mental presence of defect; disability is the product of the impairment within a set of social conditions (Withers, 2012). Shakespeare (2010; 2017) suggests the social model has been effective politically, instrumentally, and psychologically by building the social movement of disabled people, liberating disabled people, and creating a positive sense of collective identity. Cohesion and solidarity are necessary to maintain group function in relation to ambitions and objectives (Davis, 2010b; Garland-Thomson, 2010). Moving too quickly toward challenging essentialism may risk the collapse of the field (Garland-Thomson, 2010). Solidarity is a necessary step toward disputing dominant theories that claim to know disabled people’s lives. The social model of disability changed the views of disabled people, and the social model of disability receives widespread support among disabled people (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Withers, 2012). 3.6 Limitations of the Social Model of Disability While the hallmark of the social model is simplicity, it is also a deep flaw (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Shakespeare, 2010). It is an effective slogan for political mobilization; however, it is not a robust academic account (Shakespeare, 2010). Shakespeare notes that the social model risks implying that impairment is not a problem. While there may be 54 some people with impairments that are relatively stable, many people experience unstable impairments (e.g., degenerative conditions and psychological conditions). Similarly, the social model defines disability in its totality as oppression rather than involving oppression (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Shakespeare, 2010). The social model excludes the complexities of disability in certain social conditions (e.g., disability can link with market forces to provide economic influence). Likewise, the social model of disability crudely defines impairment and disability. In the lives of disabled people, impairment and disability are almost impossible to separate (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Shakespeare, 2010; Withers, 2012). The simplicity of the social model also produces a utopian view of society (e.g., barrier free). There is significant heterogeneity among disabled people. For example, the adaptations necessary for some disabled people may conflict with others (e.g., the needs of blind people versus wheelchair users). The social model of disability provides an important contribution to the field of disability studies (Garland-Thomson, 2010). The social model is an important step toward solidarity and cohesion in organizing disability movements (Garland-Thomson, 2010). And yet, the social model does not address the complexity or heterogeneity of disabled people’s lives (Garland-Thomson, 2010). Drawing upon theories already underway in gender studies, race theory, queer theory, and class critiques, scholars in the field of disability studies began to theorize the intersectional and interlocking complexities of social conditions operating in disabled peoples’ lives (McRuer, 2006; Withers, 2012). 3.7 Intersectional and Interlocking Analyses With the movement toward intersectional and interlocking analysis, some scholars continued to emphasize the primacy of each as an analytical category to explain structural inequality (Hall, 2011). For example, David Harvey (2007) tried to emphasize the importance of capitalist economic exploitation of the working class (i.e., class conflict). 55 Harvey (2007) suggested that in academic discourse there had been a shift away from class-based politics toward a politics of difference. As a result, the idiosyncrasies of oppression were fragmenting a progressive politics (Harvey, 2007). While Harvey’s critique may have some merit, feminist scholars warn/warned about any retreat into categorical analyses (Harvey, 2007; Razack, 1998; Young, 1998). In Harvey's Complaint with Race and Gender Struggles: A Critical Response, Young (1998) suggests that social movements focus on gender, race, and sexuality due to the failure of class-based movements to address the realities of people marginalized across multiple categories of oppression. In Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, Harvey (2018) draws upon normative understandings of disability, like madness, to mark the irrationality of neoliberal economic reason and scribe the limits of the rational subject. Harvey (2018) reproduces a normative understanding of disability to advance a class-based movement (Butler, 1993) Emerging from the diverse landscape of gender studies, queer theory, race theory, disability studies, and class struggle, the many works of Judith Butler (1990; 1993; 1997; 2005) sent seismic waves through many debates about the social conditions that produce identity. Within these publications, Butler established theories of performativity in the field of identity politics (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005). Through performativity, Butler deconstructs essentialist notions about gender/sex in the field of gender studies (Athanasiou & Butler, 2013; Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005; Davis, 2010b). While essentialist notions supported solidarity and group identity in feminist theory, it also oppressed difference within the field (Butler, 1990; 1993; Davis, 2010b). In response to essentialist notions about gender/sex, Butler rejected the idea that gender identity was somehow located and written onto the body (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005). Instead, Butler suggested that identity is socially constructed and performative (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005). 56 In developing performativity, Butler drew upon several linguistic influences, Foucault (1977), Althusser (1971), Austin (1962), and Searle (1969) (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005). Beginning in Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) breaks open normative discussions about gender by exposing the variations, tensions, and inconsistencies within discourse about gender/sex. By doing so, she breaks it open to possibility (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005). Central to Butler’s understanding of the production of subjectivity through performativity is that “regulatory power produces the subject it controls, that power is not only imposed externally but works as the regulatory and normative means by which subjects are formed” (Butler, 1993, p 22). Performative speech acts, shaped by power operating through discourse, subjugates people into categorical norms (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005). As Butler (1993) argued, “[P]erformance acts are forms of authoritative speech; most performances, for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a building power” (pg. 225). Power within discursive practices operates as a productive force in the constitution of the subject and its place in relation to norms (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005). For instance, speech acts, constituted through knowledge/power in discourse, simultaneously produce a subject position and its relation to a norm (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005). The emergence of postmodern feminist theory unsettled certainties within gender studies by exploring connections between categories of oppression (e.g., class, race, sexuality, gender, and ability). Scholars began to take into account the way categories of oppression might work together. In the 2000s, many influential scholars in the field of disability studies (e.g., Corker & Shakespeare, 2002; Garland-Thomson, 2002; 2010; McRuer, 2006) deeply referenced Butler’s works (Garland-Thomson, 2010; Samuels, 2011). During this time, scholars began to explore and challenge essentialism within disability studies (Hall, 2011; Lofgren-Martensen, 2013; Samuels, 2011). Scholars began to reference Butler (e.g., 1990; 1993; 57 1997; 2005) as a source of important postmodern feminist and psychoanalytic thought (e.g., Kafer, 2013; Samuels, 2011). Some scholars implicitly and explicitly draw upon her work to enable an analysis of disability in relation to queer, race, class, and gender theory (Kafer, 2013; Lofgren-Martensen, 2013; Samuels, 2011). With the alliance of gender studies, race theory, queer theory, and class critiques, scholars in disability studies began to construct analyses of disability. For example, McRuer (2006) noted that “queer communities could acknowledge that the political unconscious of debates about normalization (including debates about marraige) is shaped, in large part, by ideas about disability… [and] that disability communities, primed to enter (or entering already) some of the territory recently charted by queers, could draw on radical queer thought to continue forging the critical disability consciousness” (p 80). McRuer (2006) used disability activists’ critiques of regimes of rehabilitation to find a ‘problematic rehabilitative logic’ that ‘governs contemporary understandings of and responses to the AIDS crisis (p. ix). Scholars examined some pitfalls with transposing gender/sex with disability/impairment (Hall, 2011; McRuer, 2006; 2010; Samuels, 2011). As Butler (1993) suggests, an analysis that centres one system of power over another is susceptible to criticism; furthermore, the structure of this analysis likely depends on the marginalization of others (Butler, 1990; Butler, 1993; Butler, 1997; Butler, 2005). Of significance to disability studies, Butler’s work relies upon an enabled body (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; Samuels, 2011). This body may walk, talk, see, and be seen (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; Samuels, 2011). By simply exchanging gender/sex with disability/impairment, researchers and scholars risk reproducing systems of oppression their theory intends to contest (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; Samuels, 2011). Critical disability studies scholars like Chris Bell (2010) tried to acknowledge the whitewash of disability studies. Bell (2010) signaled the failure of disability studies to 58 engage issues of race and ethnicity in a significant way. In Is Disability Studies Actually White Disability Studies?, Bell (2010) refers to a documentary, Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back. Author of the film, Joseph Shapiro, refers to the disabled community as the largest minority community in the United States (Bell). With the film nearly absent of non-white individuals, Shapiro claims the disabled community is larger than communities tallied by race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Shapiro folds race, sexuality, and ethnicity into a single group. Bell develops a critique of the film and its implications for disability studies. While reflecting on gender, race, and disability, Erevelles (2011) suggests that there is radical potential within feminist disability scholarship to destabilize static notions of identity, explore intersectionality, and investigate embodiment. However, feminist disability scholarship is overly reliant on metaphor at the expense of materiality; by materiality, she promotes “the actual historical, social, and economic conditions that influence (disabled) people’s lives” (Erevelles, 2011, p 119). Ervelles proposes that the “radical potential can be harnessed only within certain privileged material contexts that many disability studies scholars appear to take for granted” (p 119). Ervelles goes on to ask, “How can acquiring disability be celebrated as the most universal condition, it if is acquired under the oppressive conditions of poverty, economic exploitation, police brutality, neocolonial violence and lack of access to adequate health care and education?” (p 119). To continue to deepen movements of resistance to neoliberalism, normalcy, and the human sciences, scholars in disability studies require an intersectional or interlocking approach. Intersectional and interlocking theory and methodologies emerged from diverse spaces within anti-racist activism, gender studies, Indigenous scholarship, class critiques, and literature about sexuality (hooks, 1981; 1984; Smith, 2003; 2006). Intersectional and interlocking theories unsettle universal conceptualizations of identity by stressing that there are multiple systems of oppression and domination (hooks, 1981; 1988). Activists and scholars challenged/challenge white supremacist, masculinist, heterosexist, ableist, 59 neoliberal frameworks that positioned gender, race, sexuality, and class as separate categories of identity and oppression. Across academic literature and activism, intersectionality has become a significant paradigm operating in sociology, psychology, critical geography, cultural studies, social work, and health sciences. Despite the breadth of intersectional discourse in these disciplines, there are many differences between explanations of intersectional theory and modes of practice. Drawing upon critical race feminist theory, intersectional analyses tend to follow three divergent pathways Anticategorical frameworks that insist on race, class, and gender as social constructs/fictions… intracategorical frameworks that critique merely additive approaches to differences as layered stigmas…constitutive frameworks that describe the structural conditions within which social categories in the above models are constructive by (and intermesh with) each other in specific historical contexts (Erevelles & Minear, 2013, p 354). Intersectionality provides some technical ways to accomplish the task of theorizing multiple differences (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Withers, 2012). The intracategorical approach to intersectionality provides one way to maintain the constitutive aspects of a category and theorize multiple differences (Erevelles & Minear, 2013). However, if this intracategorical approach rejects simply adding categories together, it must also theorize connections and departures between categories (Erevelles & Minear, 2013). While foregrounding the actual experiences of disabled people, the intracategorical approach describes the structural conditions and historical contexts that construct these experiences. Rather than merely adding categories to ground an account of disability, scholars foreground the historical contexts and structural conditions at intersections between class, race, ability, sexuality and gender (Erevelles & Minear, 2013). As Withers (2012) 60 describes, intersectionality is "a multi-lane highway with numerous roads meeting, crossing and merging in chaotic and complicated ways" (p 100). Intersectional analysis encourages use of a context specific approach (e.g., case studies – personal narratives). A number of scholars have recommended a context-specific approach and the use of case studies, moments or events for intersectional or interlocking research. A context specific approach may include attention to social, political, economic, and geographical contexts. Leslie McCall (2005) suggested that by starting with a specific group, event or context, the researcher can work outward to understand how the categories or identities are lived, experienced and produced. Sherene Razack’s (1998; 2002) approach to studying race, gender, violence and space has similarly relied on a case study approach where she has used specific socio-legal moments and spatial contexts to consider the way different systems of domination rely on one another. 3.8 Discussion In this chapter, I surveyed important influences from movements of resistance to white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, and heterosexism upon the development of scholarly work in critical disability studies. Then, I sketched the disability rights movements and its limits. Afterward, I constructed an account of the social model of disability and its margins. Next, I mapped the emergence of intersectional and interlocking analyses in response to the limitations of class based analyses. I suggested that intersectional and interlocking analyses are critical to theorize and resist multiple categories of power. I proposed that an intracategorical framework enables theorizing multiple systems of oppression and privilege while maintaining the constitutive aspects of each category. By mapping these relationships, I situated neoliberal-disability in relation to white supremacy-patriarchal masculinity-heterosexism. Specifically, I showed that forms of 61 oppression, like the way the Indian Act dispossesses Indigenous peoples of their land to fulfill the needs of neoliberalism for private property, strips Indigenous peoples, people of colour, women, disabled people, and LGBTQ identities of their claims of belonging. Simultaneously, these forms of oppression, like the alternative status of LGBTQ identities in relation to the hegemony of heterosexuality, positions Indigenous peoples, people of colour, women, disabled people, and LGBTQ identities in alternative categories of interest and investment belonging at the margins of neoliberal society. Through dispossession and assimilation, normative discursive frameworks create forms of privilege that enable and normalize white supremacist, neoliberal, patriarchal masculinist, ableist, and heterosexist subject positions to affirm their claims of belonging. By illustrating these relationships, I traced the construction of a hierarchy of belonging produced by intersecting normative discursive frameworks of neoliberal-disability-white supremacy-patriarchal masculinity-heterosexism. In the next chapter, I bring together discourse analysis and evocative autoethnography to conjure a flow of knowledge/power running through these intersecting normative discursive frameworks by reading the social media stories written by disabled people. 62 Chapter 4: An Evocative Autoethnographic Analysis of Discourses of White Supremacy, Patriarchal Masculinity, Neoliberalism, Heterosexism, and Disability 4.1 Toward Autoethnographic Research The many scholarly publications of Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze, Lyotard, Kristeva, and Butler spawned new areas of study that required fresh research methodologies. While traditional qualitative research methodologies provide insight into the nature of categories and quantitative research delivers claims about the relations between categories, these methodologies tend to limit and exclude the self within research. These research methodologies rely upon the ideas of structuralism rather than post-structuralism; they focus on uncovering universal truth(s) rather than focus on multiplicity of truth and subjectivity. Neither traditional qualitative methodologies nor quantitative methodologies connect self and society by writing the personal into the research narrative. These research methodologies do not tend to permit a deep and evocative exploration of the self in connection to the research. Drawing upon the work of post-structural theorists, like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Kristeva, researchers began to connect personal experiences with the social, the political, and the cultural in novel ways (Phillips & Hardy, 2002). Researchers required fresh methodologies to explore implications of these emerging theories in the lives of people. Autoethnography and discourse analysis are methodologies that explore these theories through their focus on flows of knowledge/power in the production of subjectivity. In this chapter, I bring together discourse analysis and evocative autoethnography to construct an evocative autoethnographic analysis of discourses about white supremacy (race), patriarchal masculinity (gender), neoliberalism (class), heterosexism (sexuality), and disability (ability). To begin, I invoke a flow of knowledge/power by reading social media stories written by disabled people. This flow of knowledge/power works to elicit and 63 shape my thoughts, emotions, and memories about my experiences of disability. My cognitive and emotional responses to these stories contour the creation of my personal narrative. By writing my personal narrative in response to the social media stories, this flow of knowledge/power extends along an axis of oppression and privilege from the social media stories into my personal narrative. To start this process, I outline my criteria for selection of social media stories. Next, I develop an account of a Foucauldian genealogical approach to discourse analysis and Derridean deconstruction (Derrida, 1967; Foucault, 1969; 1979). Drawing upon Foucauldian Derridean discourse analysis, I use analytic readings, constituted as reflective sub-questions, to unveil categories and binary oppositions operating in the spaces in-between the unity and fragmentation of discourses in the selected social media stories (Cheek, 2000; Derrida, 1967; Foucault, 1969; 1979). I elaborate on my use of analytic readings and reflective sub-questions further in this chapter. Afterward, I sketch a genealogy of autoethnography including analytic and evocative traditions. Moving deeper, I develop an account of evocative autoethnography. Within evocative autoethnography, I explore the use of personal narrative. I outline the details and processes of personal narrative in evocative autoethnography. From this point, I identify and explore ways to evaluate my research and I identife and address ethical issues in evocative autoethnographic research. 4.2 Selection of Social Media Stories To begin, I selected social media stories that directly or indirectly address issues of disability. In other words, the author explicitly discusses disability and/or refers to disability through related terms in the social media story. I selected social media stories from publicly accessible sources (e.g., blogs) and from websites that use the English language. Social media authors were over the age of 19 and a person living in Canada. I selected 64 social media stories from websites with authors who self-identified on their blog as living in Canada with publicly available contact information (e.g., email address). I selected social media stories from websites with authors who recently wrote a social media stories (i.e., within 3 months of the start of the study). I selected the quantity of social media stories to facilitate a diverse round-table discussion. In this study, I selected ten social media stories that met the aforementioned criteria. As I read the selected stories, I chronologically composed ‘field notes’ that included my experiences, memories, and emotional reactions to these stories. Using these field notes, I selected stories that evoked a strong cognitive and emotional reaction; these stories became a textual source. Since self is considered a production of culture, intimately connected to others in society, the self’s reactions – intellectual and emotional – are relevant for source selection (Chang, 2008). The selected social media story offered contingencies of conversation that produced unexpected outcomes (e.g., subject possibilities) (Ellis, 2004; Bochner & Ellis, 2016). In summary, I selected social media stories based on my personal reactions (e.g., emotional and cognitive) along with connections to race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. After selecting social media stories, I completed a discourse analysis of the stories to guide the development of my personal narrative. Through discourse analysis, I deepend my cognitive and emotional reactions to the social media stories by conducting rigorous analytic readings of the stories. These analytic readings constituted as reflective sub-questions produced findings that enhanced my cognitive and emotional reactions. These reactions helped to discursively elicit my personal narrative including my specific experiences, memories, and emotions. The findings from my discourse analysis helped construct my personal narrative. 65 4.3 Foucauldian Discourse Analysis From a Foucauldian perspective, discourse refers to writings that produce specialized knowledge, technical vocabularies, and specialists (e.g., the field of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM, and psychiatrists) (Foucault, 1975; 1980; Rose, 2007; Rose, 2013b). The idea behind Foucauldian discourse is that specialists work together to establish a field of specialized knowledge and its dominant ideas (e.g., biology, psychology, medicine) (Foucault, 1975;1980; Rose, 2013b). Through activities of reiteration - speech acts based on a technical vocabulary - specialists exert the power to produce particular subject positions (e.g., disable/able, health/illness) within spaces of human activities (e.g., hospital, clinic, prisons) (Butler, 1993;1997; Foucault, 1975; Rose, 2007). Specialists have ever-increasing power over people (e.g., physicians and the diagnosis of physical and mental disorders) (Butler, 1997; Rose, 2007; 2013b). Power operating through specialists profoundly shapes the structures of society (e.g., language, spaces, and places – what can and cannot be said, thought, and/or bodily actions) (Butler, 1997; Miller, 2007; Nelson, 1999; Rose, 2007; 2013b). According to Foucault, discourse not only denotes unity, but also fragmentation (Foucault, 1969; 1975). For example, discourse refers to not only the close ties between specialized knowledge, technical vocabularies, and specialists but also the contradictions, tensions, and absences between them (Foucault, 1975; Rose, 2007). For example, specialists work closely together to produce the DSM but there are also intense debates between specialists about categories of disability in the DSM (Rose, 2013b). To analyze discourse, Foucault needed to develop a historical approach that could grapple with the complexities of unity and fragmentation of discourse (Foucault, 1969). Influenced by Nietzsche’s, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (1887), Foucault rejected the search for historical evidence that supports the rationale of absolute truth. In the Archeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault argued that the contemporary study of 66 history depends on logical continuities that break down under close examination. These histories mark points of discontinuity between broadly defined modes of knowledge (e.g., transitions from one significant idea to another) (Foucault, 1969). However, the assumption that those modes exist as aggregates does not capture the complexities of discourse (Foucault, 1969). Foucault (1969) argued that discourse emerges and transforms according to a vast and complex set of discursive and institutional relationships defined as much by breaks and ruptures as by unified themes. Foucault suggested that it is misguided to look only for unity to construct a historical account (Foucault, 1969; 1975; 1979). For instance, a history of neoliberalism includes not only ideas that unify neoliberalism, as a mode of knowledge, but also the contradictions, ruptures, and reorganizations within neoliberalism (Peck, 2010). For example, Mont Pelerinians unified to advocate for more liberty and freedom with less state interventionism (Peck, 2010). However, Mont Pelerinians disagreed about many of the practices and principles of neoliberal doctrine (Peck, 2010). The Society’s 1947 founding declaration explicitly refused to commit to any ‘meticulous or hampering ideology’, preferring to define the organization’s goals in terms of “the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common” (Peck, 2010). A history of neoliberalism that ignores the tension between unification and fragmentation of neoliberalism risks reiterating the idealization of the origin and unifying the ‘great moral truth’ of neoliberalism. In the Archeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault developed a genealogical approach to history that not only attends to unity but also fragmentation. Discourse analysis informed by Foucault’s genealogical approach, refers to the exploration of uneven relationships (e.g., absence/presence, legitimization/delegitimization) between discourse(s) operating within texts, technical vocabularies and specialists (Foucault, 1969; Morella-Pozzi, 2014; Phillips & Hardy, 2002). Exploring these rhizomatic relationships also 67 entails a close review of the ‘exteriority of accidents’ (e.g., social contexts, contradictions/tensions). To follow the complex course of descent is to identify the accidents, the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being do not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents. (Foucault, 1969) Alongside a Foucauldian genealogical approach that recognizes and analyzes unity and fragmentation in discourse, I also drew upon the influences of Derrida to attend to the language of deconstruction (Czarniawska, 2004; Derrida, 1967; Fairclough, 1995 Foucault, 1969). 4.4 Derridean Deconstruction In Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967), he introduced many of the influential concepts within the field of deconstruction. Taking inspiration from the work of de Saussure, Derrida suggested that language, as a system of signs and words, only has meaning through contrast between signs (Derrida, 1967). Consequently, the meaning of a word is never present in any concrete sense; rather, the absence of other signs produces its meaning (Derrida, 1967; Thompson, 2008). An idea or concept can only be understood in the context of its opposite, such as disability and ability. Derrida contends that the politics of these dichotomies is a violent hierarchy (Derrida, 1967; Butler, 1997; Rose, 1999). One of the two terms governs the other; one term is dominant. The first task of deconstruction is to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text (Cheek, 2004). However, the final objective of deconstruction is not to transcend all oppositions because oppositions are structurally necessary to produce sense (Cheek, 2004). Deconstruction only points to the necessity of an analysis that can make 68 explicit the decisions and violence intrinsic to all texts (Cheek, 2000; 2004). Finally, Derrida (1967) argues that it is not enough to expose and deconstruct the way oppositions work. To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms that are not a synthesis of thesis and antithesis (e.g., Hegel’s dialectics). Instead, Derrida marks their difference and eternal interplay. For example, one may move from ‘disabled’ to ‘disabled/abled’ to mark the interplay between these two concepts rather than synthesizing them. Derrida proposes new terms in deconstruction as a pure necessity of analysis to better mark the intervals (Derrida, 1967). Derrida (1967) called these new terms ‘undecidables.’ These new terms (e.g., disabled/abled) are unities of simulacrum that are not binary oppositions. They are philosophical oppositions – resisting and reorganizing – without ever creating a new term. Working together with Foucauldian discourse analysis, Derridean deconstruction unveils binary oppositions operating in the spaces in-between unity and fragmentation of discourse (Cheek, 2000; Derrida, 1967; Foucault, 1969). 4.5 Analytic Readings and Reflective Sub-Questions Drawing upon the genealogical method of Foucauldian discourse analysis and Derridean deconstruction, I used analytic readings, constituted as reflective sub-questions, to unveil binary oppositions operating in the spaces in-between the unity and fragmentation of discourse, in the selected social media stories, to produce my personal narrative (Cheek, 2000). By analytic readings, I refer to my use of reflective sub-questions to guide my discursive ‘reading’ of the selected social media stories. While I read each social media story, I held one reflective sub-question in mind. This question enabled a careful analysis of the story to look for findings (e.g., subject positions, social contexts, absences, contradictions/tensions, and legitimize/delegitimize) that contribute to the specific question. For example, one of the reflective sub-questions asked: “What subject positions are in the social media story?” While reading the story, I would 69 look specifically for subject positions (e.g., able/disabled). To complete these analytic readings, I took a copy of each social media story. I converted the story into a Microsoft word document. I ‘imported’ the Microsoft word document into NVivo 11qsr. I used NVivo 11 to code sections of written words (e.g., abled/disabled) in each social media story in relation to specific reflective sub-questions (e.g., what subject positions are in the social media story). I repeated this process with each sub-question; each sub-question constituted an analytic reading of the story. In this study, I used five reflective sub-questions. Discourse analysis situates a text within social contexts. I asked, “What social contexts are found within the social media story?” Next, discourse analysis attends to knowledge as a means to produce power. I asked, “What discourses legitimize/delegitimize the social media story?” Next, discourses exist in relation to other discourses; I examined relationships between discourses. Therefore, I asked, “How are contradictions and tensions produced within the social media story?” Discourse analysis attends to presence and absence; and so, I asked, “What is absent in the social media story?” Finally, discourse analysis attends closely to subject positions; there is a focused analysis of subject positions. Thus, I asked, “What subject positions are in the social media story?” After coding sections of written words according to each reflective sub-question in NVivo, I organized the coded words into discourses about normality/abnormality, disability/ability, sexuality, race, class, risk, and gender/sex. For example, by asking “What subject positions are in the social media story?”, I found and coded the word ‘disabled.’ Then, I organized the word ‘disabled’ under the discourse about disability/ability. The reflective sub-questions worked to identify specific findings that contributed to the identification of discourses about disability/ability, sexuality, race, class, risk, and gender/sex. By analytically reading the social media stories with these reflective sub-questions, I connected specific words to broader discourses. 70 Alongside this central contribution of my discourse analysis, I accomplished two important tasks. First, I used the reflective sub-questions to deepen my cognitive and emotional reactions to the selected social media stories by drawing a focused attention to social contexts, legitimacy, contradictions/tensions, absences, and subject positions in each social media story. These focused analytic readings shaped my thoughts, emotions, and memories in response to the social media stories. For example, as I read about Julie‘s bowel obstruction and subsequent encounter with a dietitian in the hospital, I began to think about my encounter with a neurologist in the hospital. In this process, I identified important connections between the production of subject positions in her story (e.g., dietitian/patient) and the construction of subject positions in my experiences of disability (e.g., neurologist/patient). These analytic readings helped extend the flow of knowledge/power from the social media stories to my personal narrative. Secondly, the analytic readings helped me to think critically and write intentionally about my experiences of disability in my personal narrative. Generally, authors wrote about their experiences of disability to resist normative representations and conclusions about their mind and body. Authors used specific social contexts (e.g., hospital), absences (e.g., focus on abled rather than disabled), and contradictions/tensions (e.g., resisting an ‘overcoming story about disability’) to shape the way the reader experienced their story. Focused analytic readings of the social contexts, absences, and contradictions/tensions in each social media story helped shape the way I wrote my personal narrative. In this way, analytic readings supported my efforts to think critically and write intentionally about my experiences of disability. Shaped by my analytic readings, my personal narrative undermines the discursively rendered imagine of a future medical tragedy that leads to disability or an inspirational story about overcoming disability. Since the findings from reflective sub-questions entwine with one another, in chapter five, I present my findings as a discussion. This discussion moves seamlessly 71 between layers of the five reflective sub-questions to theorize ways discourses about white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability intersect to construct and categorize subject positions in the selected social media stories. The analytic readings discursively evoke a flow of knowledge/power that extends into my personal narrative. By doing so, the analytic readings work to uncover interwoven findings that discursively link the social media stories to my personal narrative and establish the context for my later analysis that will contribute findings to my broader research questions. The analytic readings and reflective sub-questions are literal sub-questions of my overarching research questions from chapter one. 4.6 Limitations of Discourse Analysis Like many methodological approaches, there are limitations of discourse analysis. As Derrida suggested, discourse analysis is not a method; it is also an epistemological and ontological position (Derrida, 1967). Discourse analysis reveals some aspects of the world while obscuring others. Foucauldian discourse analysis and Derridean deconstruction illuminate specific theoretical and empirical evidence necessary for an intersectional analysis of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability in the construction and categorization of subject positions. Other qualitative and quantitative research methodologies can answer different types of questions. Drawing upon my field notes and my findings from a discourse analysis, I developed an autoethnographic approach to write my personal narrative. 4.7 A Genealogy of Autoethnography Within the social sciences, scholars have recognized that culture and subjectivity are complexly interwoven (Chang, 2008). Historically, anthropologists have been interested in life narratives of ‘insiders.’ Life narratives, shared by ‘insider’ people, provide important 72 insights into cultural, social, and political processes in ‘unknown’ communities. These ethnographers have recognized the significance of the self through use of journals to record their personal thoughts and feelings about their research. While these journaling activities operate at the margins of their research process, these activities reveal important connections between life narratives and the researcher and the insider narratives. Autoethnographers, like Bachlelard (1940, quoted in Rose, 2013b), suggest [T]ell us what you think, not when you quit the laboratory, but during the hours when you leave ordinary life behind you and enter scientific life. Instead of leaving us with your empiricism of the evening, show us your vigorous rationalism of the morning. (p. 22) Through an examination of ‘the margins’, autoethnography fosters a critical response to ethnography. Given these historical ties to ethnography, some debates within ethnography extend into autoethnography. Scholars continue to debate the boundaries between autoethnographical approaches based upon structuralism and post-structuralism (Chang, 2008). Under the aegis of structuralism, Anderson (2006) and Atkinson (2006) advance an analytic form of autoethnography. This style emphasizes the importance of objectivity (Chang, 2008). According to Chang (2008), Anderson (2006) suggests that the autoethnographer is expected to… satisfy the following conditions: the autoethnographer (1) is a “a complete member in the social world under study (p. 379); (2) engages reflexively to analyze data on self; (3) is visibly and actively present in the text; (4) includes other informants in similar situations in data collection; and (5) is committed to theoretical analysis. (p.46) In this study, I will not use an analytic style of autoethnography. However, I intend to signify its existence and I will not explore it at any depth. Unlike analytic autoethnography, evocative autoethnography embraces and 73 foregrounds subjectivity rather than attempting to limit it. Ellis and Bochner (2016) and Denzin (2006; 2018) advance this evocative form of autoethnography. In this study, I developed and extended an autoethnographical approach that is rooted within evocative autoethnography. Through an evocative autoethnographic approach, I wrote my personal stories into my research. Evocative autoethnography actively connects the researcher’s stories with cultural, political, and social processes. Under the umbrella of evocative autoethnography, there are numerous ways to explore these connections (Ellis, 2004; Bochner & Ellis, 2016). The field of evocative autoethnography is extremely diverse. In this dissertation, I used personal narrative to understand the “self or some aspect of a life lived in a cultural context” (Ellis, 2004, p. 45). 4.8 Writing the Personal into the Research Narrative Personal narrative centers the researcher in the story. Through storytelling, personal narrative describes a personal connection to a particular field of research. In personal narrative, as Ellis (2004) suggests, “authors become ‘I,’ readers become ‘you,’ participants become ‘us’” (pg. 45). Through this radical empiricism, authors connect their personal experiences to the stories of participants in the study (Jackson, 1989). Radical empiricism refers to storytelling that includes the author’s experiences alongside interactions with other participants (Jackson, 1989). Personal narrative developed through radical empiricism and a rich theoretical understanding that connects the deep evocative experiences of the personal with the theoretical. Through personal narrative, as Ellis (2004) suggested, “the goal is to write meaningfully and evocatively about topics that matter and may make a difference, to include sensory and emotional experience, and to write from an ethic of care and concern” (p. 46). After writing my personal narrative and using publicly available contact information from participant social media sites, I invited authors of selected social media stories 74 (publicly available) to provide a written response to my personal narrative. I sent a written letter of invitation. I asked participants to provide written informed consent to allow use of their responses as another source of data. If the participant consented, I asked the participant to read my personal narrative constituted as a response to his/her social media story. I expected participants to dedicate approximately four hours. These four hours included: time to read my invitation to participate, time to read and provide informed consent, and time to read the personal narrative and provide a written response. The participants invited to take part in this study did not respond by producing a written response. The absence of a written response is a response. Participants likely did not produce a written response for many different reasons. Given that the intent of the study is to theorize a flow of knowledge/power manifest through intersecting normative discursive frameworks in the construction and categorization of subject positions in my personal narrative, the data produced thus far fulfill the intent of the study. Through a discourse analysis of participants’ publicly available social media posts, I produced my personal narrative. In the absence of participants’ written responses, I combined my personal narrative, participants’ publicly available social media posts and my textual friends into a metaphorical round-table discussion (Arvay, 1999). To create this round-table discussion, I wove together participants’ social media posts constituted as participant interludes into a dialogue with my textual friends and my personal narratives. In the Ethnographic I, Ellis (2004) uses ‘participant interludes’ to inject interviews with participants into her work. By combining participant interludes, textual friends, and my personal narrative, I make explicit connections between the personal, the social, and the political. 4.9 Discussion In this chapter, I brought together discourse analysis and evocative autoethnography to 75 construct an evocative autoethnographic analysis of discourses about white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability. In this process, I called upon a flow of knowledge/power by reading selected social media stories written by disabled people. This flow of knowledge/power discursively extends through my analytic readings and reflective sub-questions from the social media stories into my personal narrative. My personal narrative is interwoven with the social media stories. The findings from my discourse analysis of selected social media stories and my personal narrative form the intellectual fabric for my intracategorical analysis in chapter six. In the next chapter, I present the findings from my discourse analysis of selected social media stories and my personal narrative. 76 Chapter 5: Foucauldian Derridean Discourse Analysis 5.1 Findings from a Foucauldian Derridean Discourse Analysis In this chapter, I present findings from my Foucauldian Derridean discourse analysis of selected social media stories. Findings refer to explicit text and implicit ideas, concepts, and theories. The excerpts of explicit text and implicit ideas, concepts, and theories uncovered by each reflective sub-question highlight specific social contexts, the presence/absence of content, subject positions, contradictions and tensions, and the legitimization/delegitimization of discourses in the social media story. Since the findings from each reflective sub-question intersect with one another, I present my findings as a productive discussion. This discussion moves seamlessly between layers of the five reflective sub-questions to theorize ways discourses intersect to construct and categorize subject positions in the selected social media stories. At the end of this discursive analysis, I present my personal narrative. In my discussion, I present seven discourses resulting from my analysis: discourses about normality/abnormality, discourses about disability/ability, discourses about sexuality, discourses about race, discourses about class, discourses about risk, and discourses about gender/sex. To facilitate my discussion, I present excerpts from the selected social media stories to explore intersections between these discourses. In appendix A, I offer participant biographies to help contextualize participant stories. Andrew shares a story about his life that brings together discourses about normality/abnormality, disability/ability, sexuality, and gender/sex. First, I want you to picture a little boy sitting in his wheelchair, one that is far too big for his tiny disabled body. It is a weekend morning in 1990; maybe a Saturday or Sunday, and the little boy is filled to the brim with an excitement that he almost can’t contain. This time he’s coming, and I can’t even wait, he thinks. He has been 77 waiting for this all week; he has been building up this moment in his young, impressionable mind, holding out hope that this time he’ll follow through with it. The trilling of the phone cuts through the hustle and bustle as he gets ready; packing his toys, his toothbrush and all the disability supplies he needs for the weekend. He hears his mom on the phone - he listens as her voice gets louder, and he can see the hurt in her face. She reluctantly passes the phone to the boy. On the other end of the line is the boy’s father. The boy answers with pure, genuine, unfiltered joy. He listens as his father tells him that he can’t take him this time; that it is too difficult. His father promises him that next time, he’ll be there. The little boy clings to this promise, even though he has heard it so many times before now. He holds the phone close to his ear, sinking deeper and deeper into his chair with every single breath. The little boy hangs up the receiver and is completely shattered. All of his excitement is gone, and all he is left with is a deep, palpable pain that stays with him. He tries not to let it show - he knows that he must stay strong. He can’t understand why his father isn’t taking him. He feels deep down that it is because he is in this chair. He knows that is the reason. A seed was planted then. The boy learned what disappointment and rejection really felt like. All of those feelings have followed me into adulthood as I have grown into my Queer Cripple identity. Each and every time a guy breaks plans, doesn’t call me back, ghosts me on app because my disability scared him away or fucks me and disappears without a trace, I am brought back to this moment when my father broke my heart. It is a familiar pang that never gets old, but is strangely comfortable all the same. My father taught me that I was different and that my path to acceptance would be full of this pain. My father taught me to swallow away my pain as a gay disabled man, and to pretend that the rejection didn’t bother me. My father left me 78 with the belief that I am “too much.” Every time I ask a guy how long he can stay before he agrees to hook up, it is the voice of that little boy asking if he is too much, asking if you see him, and if you really want him. In this story, wheelchair, disability supplies, too difficult, and too much are signs of dependence produced by discourses about disability/ability. While discourses about disability/ability mark signs of dependence on the body of the little boy (e.g., wheelchair), they also normalize and erase signs of dependence on the body of his father (e.g., mobility without a wheelchair - this time he is coming). The normality and erasure of his father’s dependence renders signs of dependence of the little boy abnormal. In this relational space, the abnormality of dependence leads to the experience of rejection (e.g., the phone call with his father). Normality and abnormality along with disability and ability entwine with one another (i.e., disability/ability; abnormality/normality). When the Andrew states that “each and every time a guy breaks plans…because my disability scared him away or fucks me and disappears without a trace, I am brought back to this moment when my father broke my heart”, the normality of the man’s dependence intersects with gender/sex and sexuality to produce privilege that leads to rejection. Categories are a violent hierarchy. Social structures oppress gay men in different ways and social structures position gay men hierarchically to one another in relations of power and privilege (Hall, 2011; hooks, 1981; Razack, 1998). Shapiro (2015) refers to these hierachical relations as homo-ableism. Homo-ableism is a set of attitudes and actions whose end result is the subjugation of gays and lesbians with disabilities by gays and lesbians without disabilities (Shapiro, 2015, p. 55). Gender/sex and sexuality intersect with disability/ability to form a hierarchical relationship that privileges the normativity of able gay men over the abnormality of disabled gay men (Shapiro, 2015). As Butler suggests, “regulatory power produces the subject it controls, that power is not only imposed externally but works as the regulatory 79 and normative means by which subjects are formed” (Butler, 1993, p 22). The normality and erasure of ableist male dependence (e.g., mobility) forms a regulatory power that produces privilege that (en)ables the gay man to “fuck me and disappear without a trace” (Shapiro, 2015). In another story, Julie shares her experiences with bowel obstruction and a subsequent stay in hospital to relieve the bowl obstruction. This story brings together discourse about normality/abnormality, disability/ability, gender/sex, risk, and class. The dietician was the last person I spoke to when I was discharged from the hospital on Monday (yes, Monday, three days ago, Monday). He was being almost-too-respectful so I kind of felt like I had to shake him down for insight and advice. I wanted to know how I ended up in the emergency department on Friday night. I wanted (like always) to know how to never ever ever be here having this conversation ever ever again. The best piece he gave me was this: “Be cautious, of course, I know you already will be, but you could have the exact same three days you had before you were admitted three weeks from now and be totally fine. A lot of this is luck.” It made me think of everyone’s favourite condescending judgment about people repeatedly doing the same things and expecting different results. The truth is we can never really do the same things over and over because too many factors are always out of our control….We can hyper-manage our diet, our activity and stress levels, our sleep schedule but really, more things than we like to admit are unpredictable and unpreventable. Friday night, nothing I had done before to relieve pain, nothing I had done before that moved blockages along had any effect at all. In all of these years I had been waiting for the right moment to rate my pain at a “10”, and Friday finally presented me with that opportunity. Nothing provided any relief until the emergency room nurse inserted the nasal-gastric (NG) tube through my 80 nostril and into my stomach and suction began. The skill I’ve learned from bowel obstructions is how to wait for survival. In this story, signs of expertise (e.g., insight, advice, hospital, emergency department) manifest in the clinical gaze of the dietitian produce discourse that marks dependence on Julie’s body (e.g., in hospital again). At the same time, these signs of expertise also erase signs of dependence (e.g., dietitian is frequently in hospital) from the body of the dietitian to (en)able the dietitian’s comment (e.g., Be cautious, of course). Discourses about disability/ability performed through speech acts, like the dietitian’s comment, produce a building power that marks abnormality on Julie’s body (e.g., in hospital for a bowel obstruction for survival) and normalizes then erases the body of the dietitian (e.g., in hospital to earn a pay cheque for survival). Discourses about disability/ability pivot on the signs and speech acts that mark abnormality and erase normality. At the intersection between these categories, discourses about risk emerge in the dietitian’s comments to suggest that certain actions undertaken by bodies (e.g., management of diet, activity, and stress levels) can mitigate risk to mediate between disability/ability. You too can be (en)abled like me if you do (insert action). Whether Julie can mitigate these risks also influences whether she will return to hospital or home. This convergence of genetic/risk knowledges produces a subject whose body is marked by signs of illness that necessitate actions to mitigate risk and facilitate recovery (Rose, 2007). Subjects simultaneously become patients and "protoprofessionals" (Rose, 2007, p. 110). In this duality, individuals themselves begin to request genetic services from commercial organizations to manage their health (Rose, 2007). Contemporary medical practice acts as a service/servant rather than master of these processes (Rose, 2007). With the birth of genetic risk, the subject's dual existence as patient and professional may mean the erasure of life. 81 The dietitian’s comments suggest Julie act in the present to mitigate a potential future (e.g., disability) by ‘managing’ diet, activity, and stress levels. The self-management of bodily activities invokes signs of neoliberalism and discourse about class. Neoliberal discourse operating through the human sciences constructs and writes deeply political understandings of normal and abnormal onto the body. Discourses about abnormality/normality invoke risk discourse to obligate bodies to perform actions upon the self that mitigate future potentialities (e.g., disability) (Davis, 2010a; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). After all, the neoliberal project is a “matter of organizing all features of one’s national policy to enable a market to exist and to provide what it needs to function” (Rose, 1999, p 141; 2001; 2007; 2013b). To enable the existence of a market, economic activities require the maintenance of normalcy. The maintenance of normalcy requires the technical capacity of the human sciences to understand and intervene in the human mind and body. With this technical capacity, risk discourse prompts self-regulation (Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2001; 2007). The maintenance of normalcy is a eugenic activity. A.J., Adrienne, and Eddie share stories about interdependence. These stories bring together discourse about normality/abnormality, disability/ability, and class. While talking about interdependence, they spoke about the ways that disabled people have learned about interdependence. A.J. says that “interdependence is a part of all of our lives. For some people it’s easier to pretend that is not the case.” A.J. goes on to say that in neoliberal societies, “certain needs are normalized and certain needs are needy…clothing, food…the way the market works is that the food we eat moves through so many different hands is normalized…but help to put spoon to mouth is too much.” Adrienne spoke about the way that poverty brings people together in unconventional forms of dependence. She was a working class women. She had been institutionalized…and had been given shock treatment. She was really isolated and really poor. We had to put up 82 with each other. I had to listen to her talk about space aliens making foot prints in the snow outside the porch and she had to put up with my weird political opinions and the fact her religion didn’t exactly have room for my sexual orientation and you know it wasn’t an easy friendship but I learned a lot. In these stories, institutionalized, shock treatment, and isolation are signs of dependence produced by discourses about disability/ability. Working class, poor, and needy are signs of poverty produced by discourses about class. While signs of poverty and dependence mark the bodies of A.J, Adrienne, and Eddie, discourses about class and disability/ability also erase signs of dependence (e.g., needs) and normalize signs of wealth (e.g., access to clothing, food, shelter, and water). The erasure of signs of dependence and normality of wealth renders signs of dependence and poverty abnormal. The intersection between of abnormality, dependence, and poverty lead A.J., Adrienne, and Eddie, unintentionally, to experiences of interdependence. In these experiences, normality/abnormality and disability/ ability entwine with class. In another story, A.J. responds to a question about the organization of coalitions between political groups that advocate for issues related to race, class, disability, sexuality, and gender. In Canada, I think Canada is often used as this like exceptional thing by folks in the states are like we’re all going to move to Canada and that way of building this mythology of Canada. When Canada is a fundamentally unjust country and folks are in trouble in Canada as well and very much under attack differently, so and right now the far left…is very much under attack…with the further entrenchment of neoliberalism. But I think that people absolutely need to work in coalition…Disabled folks are impacted by all of those issues. Migrant issues are disability issues. Reproductive rights are disability issues. It is essential that we also fight on those fronts. 83 One of the things the disability movements have done is signed a deal with the devil in the past. Mainstream white disability rights movement which it has aligned itself with anti-choice right wing movements are like the Christian right to really fight against reproductive justice in a very narrow view of what disability rights could mean rather than pushing disability justice into reproductive justice organizing which is what really should have been happening in my opinion. In this story, like the previous story, the intersection between dependence and poverty lead people to experiences of interdependence. In these experiences, normality/abnormality and disability/ability entwine with class. However, a deal with the devil, anti-choice right wing Christian movements, mainstream white disability rights movements, and a narrow view of disability rights are signs of white supremacy produced by discourses about race. White supremacy reiterates Canadian exceptionalism: a utopian place of equality. This mythology of Canada erases the colonial roots of Canada and erases the legal systems that support land ownership and use at the expense of indigenous rights. White supremist disability activists must acknowledge white supremacy by recognizing dependence on a colonial system. In this section, I presented my findings as a productive discussion. This discussion moved seamlessly between layers of the five reflective sub-questions to theorize ways discourses intersect to construct and categorize subject positions in the selected social media stories. This discussion helped me consider ways discourse operates through my personal experiences to construct and categorize subject positions. The findings of the discourse analysis facilitated the construction of my personal narrative. In the next section, I present my personal narrative. 5.2 My Personal Narrative In June 2015, like many of the past months in my life, I ran along nearby trails in the 84 morning hours. I ate breakfast with my partner and children. I drove my car to work. I returned home in the evening to read, study, and play with my children outside. To many in my daily life, I appeared to be ‘independent’ in these activities. However, independence is a dangerous mythology. My daily life, as I know and experience it, is only possible through the efforts of millions of people around the world. I live on land that is part of the unceded territory of the Syilx (Okanagan) Peoples. I benefit directly from legal systems of ownership that enable living on this land. Nearly all of my daily activities take place on this land. People construct homes, roads, grocery stores, and trails on this land. These trails support activities, like running, through the meticulous efforts of many people to alter this land by removing logs, branches and rocks. Despite my non-heterosexual status, my partner and I benefit from a legal system that has longstanding ties with institutions that endorse and legalize heterosexual partnership/marriage. The breakfast I ate with my partner and children manifests on my plate after passing through the hands of countless people around the world. The car ride to work is only possible through the imperial activities of corporations abroad to extract resources (e.g., fossil fuels) and the organization of a working class to work in factories that build cars among many other support networks (e.g., networks of roads, car dealerships). Around the clock, 24 hours a day, I am (en)abled through social, economic, and political structures that normalize aspects of my dependence. These structures render parts of my daily life normal and parts of my daily life abnormal. When do my needs move from normal to abnormal? I propose that when my needs do not fit within the normality of white supremacist, heterosexual, neoliberal male dependence then my needs are abnormal. When my needs are abnormal, I am no longer en(abled) by dominant social, economic, and political structures. I am disabled. At intersections between ability, race, sexuality, class, and gender/sex, disability/ability pivots on the normality/abnormality of 85 dependence. This story is one moment of time in my life when my needs were abnormal… In July of 2015, after a 5km run, I began to experience worsening back pain along with mild weakness in one of my legs so I went to the emergency room (ER) in the local hospital. Upon meeting with an ER doctor, he outright dismissed my concerns. Apparently, my experiences were not that bad. Then, he began to talk about his experiences with back pain. Now and then, he has sciatic pain and you do not want to experience it (i.e., pain moving down your leg). He concluded our brief meeting by prescribing some narcotic medication. I returned home. I felt like I wasted my time. Over the next day or so, I experienced increasingly intense back pain and weakness in one of my legs. At this point, I could not put my body weight on that leg. At the behest of my partner, I went back to the emergency room for further assessment. Initially, I met with a nurse who asked quite a few questions about my experiences. Then, I met with another ER doctor. Like the last ER doctor, he appeared to be doubtful about the validity of the changes in my body. I recall overhearing a discussion between the ER doctor and nurse about it. At first, they thought I might be ‘medication seeking.’ However, he recalled that I stated quite clearly that I am not interested in medication for pain; I am mainly concerned about weakness in my leg. In jest, they said a CT scan would show whether the weakness in my leg is true. Thus far, the accuracy of my thoughts about my bodily sensations was repeatedly subject to debate, jest, and dismissal. However, the gaze of the CT scan would determine whether I could put my body weight on my leg. I felt irritation rising up through my body. The ER doctor ordered the CT scan; I waited for the scan. Enduring repeated assessments by doctors, nurses, and waiting for further technical assessments is normal in clinical contexts; however, whether or not I can truly put my body weight on my leg is a matter of deep scrutiny. When the ER doctor returned, he said that the CT scan showed herniated discs at 86 L3/4 and L5. The CT scan confirmed that my experiences were likely accurate. In this moment, my experience of my body aligned with his clinical assessment and the CT scan of my body. The doctor’s attitude was notably more helpful, supportive, and less suspicious. Interestingly, after confirming the validity of my experiences, some medical students arrived to discuss my body. I felt increasingly fearful. The doctor arranged for an admission to a bed in the emergency area of the hospital. When a bed was available in a medical unit, I transferred for further consultation by a neurosurgeon. After an assessment by the consulting neurosurgeon, he was doubtful about the accuracy of the CT scan. He wanted a clearer image of my spine and spinal cord so he wanted to order an MRI. Once again, the accuracy of my thoughts about my bodily sensations was subject to debate. Now the accuracy of the CT scan was also debateable. He ordered an MRI and I waited for the scan. While waiting for the MRI in the medical unit, nurses repeatedly checked my leg for signs of increasing weakness. After a short time, I experienced increasing weakness in my other leg. I could no longer put weight on either leg. I could not walk. I could not leave my bed. I also began to have trouble with urination and bowel movements. I felt increasingly fearful; at the same time, I felt emotionally numb. I asked for a wheelchair so I could leave my bed. When my wheelchair arrived, I felt relieved. As the nursing staff observed the changes in my body, they tried to expedite the MRI. They spoke with the neurosurgeon. Apparently, the neurosurgeon believed that muscle tension in my legs likely caused my experiences. I met very briefly with a physician from a physical rehabilitation unit. The physician reiterated that muscle tension might cause my experiences. I felt infuriated. In 2011, I experienced muscle tension and severe cramps after running a marathon, how can muscle tension cause weakness like this? Not long after speaking with the physician, a nurse on the medical unit told me that I had to move to the physical rehabilitation unit. However, the medical and the rehab unit 87 were ‘short staffed’ and they could not help me move. Alone, afraid, and angry, I used my upper body to drag myself across the bed and slid into my wheelchair. The staff put my bag of my clothes on my lap and I wheeled myself to the other unit. When I arrived, it was mealtime so no one could help me transfer onto my bed. I dragged myself out of the wheelchair then onto the bed. When the nurse arrived to see me, she brought me a dinner tray. Before I could say anything, she left it on the other side of the room then she left. How could I possibly reach it? I felt utterly exhausted and lost. I began to cry. Fortunately, I kept my cellphone with me. I spoke briefly with my partner. She was already on the way to the hospital. At the urgent request of a nurse on the medical unit and with tears streaming down my face, the neurosurgeon arrived at my bedside to reassess my symptoms. Moments after, he quickly arranged for an emergency CT scan. The CT scan indicated that the herniated discs had worsened. The neurosurgeon diagnosed cauda equina syndrome. At this point, I could no longer move anything below my waist (e.g., legs, feet, or toes). I could not urinate. Despite the tears streaming down my face, I felt emotionally and physically numb. Immediately following the emergency CT scan, I had emergency surgery. After surgery, I met with the neurosurgeon. He explained that I had spinal stenosis, a severe herniation at L3/4, a herniated disc at L5, and many bone spurs. These spinal issues caused cauda equina syndrome. He repaired the herniation at L3/4 and he removed many bone spurs to widen my spinal canal. He elected not to repair the herniation at L5 because he believed it was unnecessary. After surgery, I was able to put my body weight on my legs again; however, I continued to struggle with urination and bowel movements. I also experienced changes in the sensations in my legs. I could not quite use my legs the way I could in the past. They felt different. In the days that followed surgery, I began to experience a recurrence of ‘medically unexplained’ neurological symptoms. The neurosurgeon scheduled an emergency MRI. 88 The neurosurgeon reported that my MRI was clear. I went home. However, I continued to struggle with ‘medically unexplained’ neurological symptoms. I went back to hospital; however, after medically cleared, I returned home. As I later learned from my medical records, the MRI indicated the L5 disc appeared to be pressing on my spinal cord. Regardless, the hospital staff, neurosurgeon and neurologist did not mention it. During my last visit to hospital, the neurologist diagnosed a functional neurological disorder. At this point, I endured a significant shift in the attitude of medical staff toward me. I experienced the pain of rejection by hospital staff, neurosurgeon, and neurologist. Hospital staff shifted from available to help to avoiding me. I felt ghosted. At one point, a consulting neurologist warned me that ‘you don’t want to end up this way.’ The neurologist told me a story about a woman with a functional neurological disorder. While he told the story, he seemed to have an attitude of derision toward the abnormality of her dependence. Under his gaze, I vividly recall feeling intense shame; I wanted to hide in the corner. I wanted my dependence to disappear. As my shame turned to anger, I did not want to be part of the medical system. Not long after returning home, I elected to stop further medical assessment and treatment. I cancelled all of my follow up appointments except with my family physician. I required the approval of my family doctor to return to work. I continued to see him until I received approval to return to work. Since then, I have not seen anyone in the medical system. Shifting between walking, a cane, a walker, and a wheelchair, I slowly reintegrated into my life with a different body. My body is a body. I have needs. I need to eat. I need to breathe air. I need to use the bathroom often. I need support to walk now and then. Sometimes my hands unexpectedly drop things. I cannot run anymore. As I reacquainted with my body, I also met with a counsellor. Based on my experiences, my counsellor suggested that I was experiencing many symptoms consistent with Post-traumatic Stress 89 Disorder (PTSD). My mind and body have needs. Some of these needs do not fit within the normality of white supremacist, heterosexual, neoliberal male dependence. In the next chapter, I will create a round table discussion using excerpts from the selected social media, my personal narrative, and theoretical sources to facilitate a discussion about ability, race, class, gender, and sexuality intersecting in the construction and categorization of subject positions in my personal narrative. 5.3 Discussion In this chapter, I presented my findings from my Foucauldian Derridean discourse analysis of selected social media stories and my personal narrative. Through analytic readings, I explored the social contexts, legitimacy, contradictions/tensions, absences, and subject positions in the selected social media stories. As a result, I found seven discourses in the selected social media stories. I identified discourses about normality/abnormality, disability/ability, sexuality, race, class, risk, and gender/sex. I traced these discourses in each selected social media story. These discourses form parts of a flow of knowledge/power in the selected social media stories shaped by the intersecting normative discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability. This flow of knowledge/power extended into the construction of my personal narrative. The analytic readings deepened my emotions, thoughts, and memories. The analytic readings shaped the way I intentionally wrote my personal narrative. In the next chapter, I present an intracategorical analysis of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability intersecting in the construction and categorization of subject positions along an axis of oppression and privilege through a round-table discussion between my textual friends, findings from my discourse analysis, and my personal narrative. 90 Chapter 6: An Intracategorical Analysis of Normative Discursive Frameworks 6.1 An Intracategorical Analysis of the Discursive Frameworks of White Supremacy, Patriarchal Masculinity, Neoliberalism, Heterosexism, and Disability through a Round-table Discussion In this chapter, I use intracategorical analysis to accomplish the task of theorizing multiple categories of oppression and privilege in the findings from my discourse analysis and my personal narrative (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Withers, 2012). While foregrounding the actual experiences of disabled people, intracategorical approaches describes the structural conditions and historical contexts that construct these experiences (Erevelles & Minear, 2013). In this chapter, I used intracategorical analysis to chart intersections between white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability by weaving together my textual friends, findings from my discourse analysis, and excerpts from my personal narrative to create a round-table discussion. For reference, I offer a visual representation of my round-table discussion in appendix B. In June 2015, like many of the past months in my life, I ran along nearby trails in the morning hours. I ate breakfast with my partner and children. I drove my car to work. I returned home in the evening to read, study, and play with my children outside. To many in my daily life, I appeared to be independent in these activities. However, independence is a dangerous mythology manifest through class, ability, race, sexuality, and gender relations. 6.2 White Supremacy and Neoliberal Subjectivity In Canada, myths of independence and individualism rest upon legal, racial, and spatial relationships (Lawrence, 2003; Razack, 2002). These relationships are established by the colonizing activities of white supremacist European settlers that simultaneously dispossess Indigenous peoples of their right to their territory and erase white supremacist dependence 91 on racial colonial hierarchies (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Goldberg, 2009; Lawrence, 2003; Razack, 2002). This duality of dispossession and erasure in white supremacist discourse produces a myth about white supremacist independence and individualism that is reliant upon national mythologies (Athanasiou & Butler, 2013; Goldberg, 2009; Lawrence, 2003; Wiegman 1999). In mythologies about the origins of Canada, white supremacist discourse suggests that white people brought modernization to an 'uninhabited' land (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Lawrence, 2003; Razack, 2002). To construct this narrative, Indigenous peoples are constituted under a single Native identity and largely 'disappeared' through assimilation or illness (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Lawrence, 2003; Razack, 2002). For contemporary Indigenous peoples, individual identity is always being negotiated in relation to collective identity in the context of a colonial white supremacist settler society (Lawrence, 2003; Goldberg, 2009; Razack, 2002). Colonial laws that specify and control legal status contorted traditional Indigenous ways of identifying oneself in relation to community and land (Lawrence, 2003). By erasing Indigenous peoples, white supremacist discourse constructs a story about rugged European individualism that led the first European settlers to occupy the land (Lawrence, 2003; Razack, 2002). As the first people to settle the land, white supremacist discourse concludes that white people are entitled to the rewards of citizenship and the land (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Lawrence, 2003; Razack, 2002). These national mythologies erase and deny the subjugation, genocide, and systematic exploitation of Indigenous peoples (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Goldberg, 2009; Lawrence, 2003; Razack, 2002). National mythologies enshrine the white supremacist history of a nation; the repetition of these historical mythologies erases and denies Indigenous historical accounts (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Lawrence, 2003; Razack, 2002). National mythologies enable 92 white supremacist citizens to think of themselves as belonging to a nation that possesses and owns the land; it is a national politics of possession, ownership, and belonging (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). Discourse about belonging marks and defines the people who possess or own on the land (Erevelles & Minear, 2013;Goldberg, 2009; Razack, 2002). People erased from the land are dispossessed of their rights (Lawrence, 2003). National mythologies of white supremacist societies are deeply spatial stories (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). By defining who possesses, owns, and belongs on the land, these national mythologies confer the rights of white supremacists to possess, own, and occupy the land (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Goldberg, 2009; Razack, 2002). Discourse about white supremacist rights to the land is written into colonial law (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Razack, 2002). Colonial law excludes rights to the land that are not based on ideas about possession and ownership (Lawrence, 2003). In one of the social media stories, A.J. responds to a question about the organization of coalitions between political groups that advocate for issues related to race, class, disability, sexuality, and gender. In Canada, I think Canada is often used as this like exceptional thing by folks in the states are like we’re all going to move to Canada and that way of building this mythology of Canada. When Canada is a fundamentally unjust country and folks are in trouble in Canada as well and very much under attack differently, so and right now the far left…is very much under attack…with the further entrenchment of neoliberalism. In national mythologies, white supremacist discourse reiterates Canadian exceptionalism. Canada is supposedly a utopian place of egalitarianism (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Hooks, 1989; Razack, 2002). This mythology of Canada simultaneously dispossesses Indigenous peoples of their rights to their territory, erases the benefits of these colonial structures to 93 white people, and claims that Canada is egalitarian (Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Goldberg, 2009; Razack, 2002; Wiegman 1999). White activists must acknowledge these legal, racial, and spatial structures by systematically recognizing their dependence on a colonial system (Berg, 2012; Erevelles & Minear, 2013; Goldberg, 2009; Razack, 2002). I live on land that is part of the unceded territory of the Syilx (Okanagan) Peoples. White supremacy erases the way I benefit directly from the legal, racial, and spatial relations that enable living on this land. Through colonial legal systems of land possession and ownership, the hospital that I attended for medical services was constructed and is maintained on this unceded territory. White supremacist discourse, supported through its national mythologies about independence and individualism, erases questions about whether or not I belong on this unceded territory. Under colonial law, I 'belong in Canada'; and so, I am able to enter a hospital and receive health care services. The neoliberal state requires these legal, racial, and spacial relationships to enable, control, and regulate unceded territory (Goldberg, 2009). “Race and racism are inextricably embedded in the neoliberal project” (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010 p. 3). Neoliberalism reshaped ideas about the ideal relationship between citizen and society (Goldberg, 2009; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). Neoliberal theorization of society suggests that the material wealth of the individual is directly related to individual productivity (Goldberg, 2009; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). National mythologies of independence and individualism align with neoliberal theories (Goldberg, 2009). Under this racial-class formation, neoliberal doctrine claims that modalities of difference do not predetermine one's success (Goldberg, 2009; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). Supposedly, each individual is evaluated solely in terms of their economic contribution to society (Goldberg, 2009; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). Racial relations are hidden within neoliberal institutions and structures (Goldberg, 2009). Upon closer examination of neoliberalism, this racial-class formation is evidently not ideal for everyone (Goldberg, 2009; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). Erasure of the Canadian 94 histories of colonialism disconnects Indigenous rights to unceded territory, the benefits of this territory, and produces a discursive space for neoliberal egalitarianism (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). As a result, neoliberalism efficaciously masks white supremacy through a moral project of egalitarianism (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010; Thompson, 2003). By disguising white supremacist practices in a meritocracy, neoliberal citizenship enables a vision of society that is not racial (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). Race is both evoked and suppressed under neoliberal discourse (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). “Modern racist culture is marked, fundamentally, by its refusal to acknowledge the role that racism plays in everyday structures of society and how these structures work to fundamentally disguise and, simultaneously, reify the power of racism within society” (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010, pg. 7). Neoliberalism is complicit with racist structures and reproduces racial knowledge in every egalitarian discourse about Canada (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). Neoliberalism normalizes racism as a just another aspect of life in Canada (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). Neoliberalism and white supremacy intersect in this normative discursive framework (Goldberg, 2009). 6.3 The Normalization of White Supremacist Neoliberal Subjectivity Classical liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of society. However, the application of exchange was built on racial-colonial conceptualizations of society and its notion of individuality, rights, freedoms, and private property (Parekh, 1997). For white spremacist classical liberals to fulfil their natural need to exchange they needed private property. Under the matrix of white supremacy and classical liberalism, Indigenous peoples lacked private property. Their land was vacant and unenclosed; therefore, it could be expropriated for resources to exchange, barter, and trade (Parekh, 1997). Neoliberalism reconfigures the tenants of classical liberalism to extends the scope the market into all spheres of human life. 95 Under the rubric of neoliberalism, humans are competitive creatures (Brown, 2015; Peck, 2010; Read, 2009). Unlike the nature of exchange in classical liberalism, competition is a human feature that must be enabled (Brown, 2015; Peck, 2010; Read, 2009). Competition necessitates constant intervention by the neoliberal state to sustain the conditions of a competitive market (Brown, 2015; Peck, 2010; Read, 2009). Through the rubric of state enabled competition, neoliberalism extends the scope of the market by making competitive economic activity the defacto paradigm of human life (Brown, 2015; Peck, 2010; Read, 2009). Neoliberalism installs market logic across spaces of human activities then aggressively invokes the state to police the competitive conditions of market (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009; Rose, 2007). By reshaping spaces of human life into economic endeavours, neoliberal rationality posits that human life is naturally dependent on the competitive market (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009; Rose, 2007). This logic normalizes modes of white supremacist colonial dependence that underpin the conditions of neoliberal subjectivity (Brown, 2015; Razack, 2002; Read, 2009). By uncovering this logic, the absurdity of normalizing white supremacist modes of dependence while also disciplining disabled forms of dependence produces visible ruptures in market logic (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009). For example, the breakfast I ate with my partner and children manifests on my plate after passing through the hands of countless people around the world. The commute in my car to work is only possible through the imperial activities of corporations abroad to extract resources (e.g., fossil fuels) and the organization of a working class to work in factories that build cars among many other support networks (e.g., networks of roads, car dealerships). These are examples of neoliberal modes of white supremacist dependence that require extensive white supremacist colonial economic and social networks (Lawrence, 2003; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). In my daily activities, these colonial networks are rendered invisible through processes that normalize white supremacist modes of dependence. 96 Unlike the invisibility of colonial economic and social networks, when I revisited the hospital due to ‘medically unexplained’ neurological symptoms my dependence was rendered painfully visible. During this visit to hospital, the clinical gaze of the neurologist saw signs of a functional neurological disorder. At this point, I endured a significant shift in the attitude of medical staff toward me. I experienced the pain of rejection by hospital staff, neurosurgeon, and neurologist. Hospital staff shifted from available to help to avoiding me. I felt ghosted. At one point, a consulting neurologist warned me that ‘you don’t want to end up this way.’ The neurologist told me a story about a woman with a functional neurological disorder. While he told the story, he seemed to have an attitude of derision toward the abnormality of her dependence. Under his gaze, I vividly recall feeling intense shame; I wanted to hide in the corner. I wanted my dependence to disappear. As my shame turned to anger, I did not want to be part of the medical system. I experienced a disciplining of the abnormality of my dependence. When I compare my dependence, at the time, on a wheelchair for mobility to my dependence on fossil fuel to drive a car, the apparent absurdity of these processes of normalization produce a visible rupture in market logic (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010; Rose, 2007). The neoliberalism enables complex industrial relations necessary for production and transport of fossil fuel but a wheelchair is ‘too much.’ Likewise, A.J. shared that “certain needs are normalized and certain needs are needy…clothing, food…the way the market works is that the food we eat moves through so many different hands is normalized…but help to put spoon to mouth is too much.” The neoliberalism constrains human interests and desires by making desirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly (Read, 2009). Neoliberalism counts on the idea that subjects will adjust their interests and investments accordingly (Read, 2009). When my needs are too much, neoliberalism encourages (re)calculation of my interests and investments by withdrawing support. 97 Under this market logic, neoliberalism can create and maintain extensive networks of gas stations, pipelines, refineries, and oil extraction across unceded territory to enhance the flow of human capital to enable a competitive market (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010; Rose, 2007). My participation in these networks is not often openly called into question; my belonging on this land is normalized. However, my use of a wheelchair is abnormal and "You don't want to end up this way" because you may need accommodation (e.g., a wheelchair ramp for my home and insurance claims). As white supremacy and neoliberalism intersect with disability in my experiences, white supremacy and neoliberalism simultaneously constitute disability and disability constitutes white supremacy and neoliberalism. Paradoxically, when I drive a car, I am a enabled neoliberal creature of competition who belongs on roadways across unceded territory. When I use a wheelchair, my belonging is called into question. Processes of normalization encourage a recalculation of my interests and investments so I will realign with form of dependence supported by white supremacy neoliberal disabled identity (Butler, 1997; Rose, 2007). In one of the social media stories, Julie shares her experiences with bowel obstruction and a subsequent stay in hospital to relieve the bowl obstruction. She speaks about her conversation with a dietitian in the hospital. The best piece he gave me was this: “Be cautious, of course, I know you already will be, but you could have the exact same three days you had before you were admitted three weeks from now and be totally fine. A lot of this is luck.” It made me think of everyone’s favourite condescending judgment about people repeatedly doing the same things and expecting different results. The truth is we can never really do the same things over and over because too many factors are always out of our control….We can hyper-manage our diet, our activity and stress 98 levels, our sleep schedule but really, more things than we like to admit are unpredictable and unpreventable. Discourses about disability/ability, race, and class pivot on the signs and speech acts that normalize forms of dependence supported by white supremacy, neoliberalism, and disability. At intersections between these normative discursive frameworks, discourses about risk emerge in the dietitian’s comments to suggest that certain actions undertaken by bodies (e.g., management of diet, activity, and stress levels) can mitigate risk to mediate between disability/ability. You too can be (en)abled like me if you do (insert action). Whether Julie can mitigate these risks also influences whether she will return to hospital or home. The dietitian’s comments suggest that Julie act in the present to mitigate a potential disabled future by ‘managing’ diet, activity, and stress levels. The self-management of bodily activities through the market invokes signs of neoliberalism made possible by racial-colonial relationships (Foucault, 1984; Peck, 2010; Rose, 2007). Discourses about abnormality/normality converge with risk discourse to obligate minds and bodies to perform actions upon the self that align their interests, as human capital, in light of future potentialities like disability (Davis, 2010a; Rose, 2001; 2007; 2013b). White supremacist neoliberal ableism, operating through the speech acts of the dietitian and my consulting neurologist, assert that 'you are at risk of not belonging and, to belong, you need to do (insert action)' (Kumari-Campbell, 2009). I am called to step back into the boundaries of white supremacist ableist neoliberal subjectivity. Whether I am 'at risk' of using a wheelchair or a bowel obstruction, I am subject to disciplinary speech acts that (re)inforce self-management. These disciplinary modes operate not only in the moment but also to discipline the future. Neoliberalism counts on the idea that subjects will adjust their interests and investments according to a future that comes into view (Read, 2009). When my needs are too much, neoliberalism encourages (re)calculation of my interests by withdrawing support to force (re)calculation of my needs or my claim to life is 99 jepordized. 6.4 White Supremacist Ableist Heterosexist Neoliberal Subjectivity Under the egalitarian vision of neoliberalism, Lesbian/bisexual/ gay/transgender/queer (LGBTQ) existence is often imagined as an alternative to heterosexuality (McRuer, 2006; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). Like heterosexuality, ability is considered a normal requirement of life in neoliberal society (Davis, 2010b; McRuer, 2006). When disability threatens to break the economic tether that binds homo oeconomicus to life, having an 'able body and mind' becomes compulsory (Brown, 2015; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006; Read, 2009). Andrew shares a story about his life that speaks to intersections between disability and sexuality. All of those feelings have followed me into adulthood as I have grown into my Queer Cripple identity. Each and every time a guy breaks plans, doesn’t call me back, ghosts me because my disability scared him away or fucks me and disappears without a trace, I am brought back to this moment when my father broke my heart. It is a familiar pang that never gets old, but is strangely comfortable all the same. My father taught me that I was different and that my path to acceptance would be full of this pain. My father taught me to swallow away my pain as a gay disabled man, and to pretend that the rejection didn’t bother me. My father left me with the belief that I am “too much.” In this story, when Andrew states that “each and every time a guy breaks plans…because my disability scared him away or fucks me and disappears without a trace, I am brought back to this moment when my father broke my heart”, the normality of masculine dependence intersects with homosexuality to produce privilege that leads to rejection (Shapiro, 2015). Categories of belonging are a violent hierarchy (Razack, 2002). Social structures oppress gay men in different ways and social structures position gay men 100 hierarchically to one another in relations of power and privilege (Hall, 2011; hooks, 1981; Razack, 2002; Shapiro, 2015). As the story above suggests, intra and inter categorical violence threatens belonging (e.g., homo-ableism) (Shapiro, 2015; Kumari-Campbell, 2009). Like the centrality of ableist heterosexuality that enables a sense of belonging in neoliberal society, white supremacist settler narratives enable white supremacists to think of themselves as belonging on unceded territory (Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006; Razack, 2002; Shapiro, 2015). Belonging ‘anywhere’ is compulsively and repetitiously constructed in white supremacist ableist heterosexual neoliberal societies (McRuer, 2006; Razack, 2002; Shapiro, 2015). At the same time, belonging is never a final achievement; belonging requires constant compulsive reiteration of speech acts. Speech acts of human minds and bodies can disrupt the ritual construction of white supremacist ableist heterosexual neoliberal identity. And so, the dependence of these identities must be hidden by making visible the containment of abnormality in racialized/LGBTQ/disabled subjectivities (Athanasiou & Butler, 2013; Butler, 1990; 1997; Haraway, 2004). This normalization of white supremacist ableist heterosexuality is maintained by its compulsive repetitive disciplining of marginalized human minds and bodies (McRuer, 2006; Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997). The compulsive repetitive disciplining of these minds and bodies is a reiterative part of 'normal' human life manifest in by invoking and imposing from within a hierarchy of belonging that positions racialized/LGBTQ/disabled identities 'at the margins' (e.g., national mythologies, alternative LGBTQ subject positions, and self-management of human capital interests to mitigate risk of disability) (Roberts & Mahtani, 2010; Razack, 2002). The minds and bodies of Others 'at the margins' requires compulsive repetitive disciplining to affirm and reaffirm the normality of white supremacist ableist heterosexual neoliberal identity because these norms are in reality impossible to ever fully inhabit 101 (McRuer, 2006; Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; Lawrence, 2003; Siebers, 2010). The disciplining necessary to conceal white supremacist ableist heterosexual identity by positioning the other at the margins produces visible ruptures in market logic (e.g., wheelchairs and bowel obstructions) (Brown, 2015; Read, 2009; Siebers, 2010). By positioning racialized/LGBTQ/disabled identities in an alternative discursive space, white supremacist ableist heterosexist neoliberal discursive frameworks simultaneously conceals itself and creates an egalitarian vision in neoliberal society (McRuer, 2006; Peck, 2010; Razack, 2002; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010; Siebers, 2010). 6.5 White Supremacist Ableist Heterosexist Masculinist Neoliberal Subjectivity Andrew shares a story about his life that brings together discourses about normality/abnormality, disability/ability, sexuality, and gender/sex. My father left me with the belief that I am “too much.” Every time I ask a guy how long he can stay before he agrees to hook up, it is the voice of that little boy asking if he is too much, asking if you see him, and if you really want him. Gender/sex and sexuality intersect with disability to form a hierarchical relationship that privileges the normativity of ableist gay men over the abnormality of disabled gay men. As Butler suggests, “regulatory power produces the subject it controls, that power is not only imposed externally but works as the regulatory and normative means by which subjects are formed” (Butler, 1993, p 22). The normality and erasure of ableist patriarchal masculine dependence (e.g., mobility) forms a regulatory power that produces privilege that (en)ables the gay man to “fuck me and disappear without a trace.” In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), Butler develops the idea of abjection. She suggests that that there is a field of inconceivable, abject, unlivable bodies (Butler, 1993; 2016). Butler suggests that abjection by the ‘normal’ subject helps the subject to constitute itself (Butler, 1993; 2016). Butler contends that this zone of 102 inhabitability constitutes the limit of the subject's domain (Butler, 1993; 2016). Through this limit, the domain of the subject circumscribes its claim to autonomy and life (Butler, 1993; 2016). Like the centrality of white supremacist ableist heterosexuality that enables a claim of belonging, masculinity necessitates compulsive repetitive speech acts that embody racialized/LGBTQ/disabled/gendered figures in a zone of inhabitability at the margins of neoliberal society (Butler, 1993; 2016; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006; Razack, 2002; Siebers, 2010). In July of 2015, after a 5km run, I began to experience worsening back pain along with mild weakness in one of my legs so I went to the emergency room (ER) in the local hospital. Upon meeting with an ER doctor, he outright dismissed my concerns. Apparently, my experiences were not that bad. Then, he began to talk about his experiences with back pain. Now and then, he has sciatic pain and you do not want to experience it (i.e., pain moving down your leg). He concluded our brief meeting by prescribing some narcotic medication. I returned home. I felt like I wasted my time. When I described the pain in my body, the ER doctor simultaneously invoked medical discourse to normalize/erase my experience of pain and discipline my body's performance of masculinity by describing his perseverance through 'more' severe forms of pain (e.g., sciatic pain). The reiteration of medical and masculine discourse contained and embodied in my gendered disabled body reaffirmed the normalcy of ableist masculine identity. At the same time, the normalcy of heterosexuality and white supremacy produces privilege. Despite my non-heterosexual status, my partner and I benefit from legal systems, social structures, and cultural processes that bestow heterosexual privilege. I can pass as heterosexual. Heterosexuality has longstanding ties with institutions that legalize and normalize the centrality of heterosexual partnership/marriage. The hegemony of heterosexuality ensures that my partner is automatically recognized as next-of-kin in emergencies like visiting the ER. My partner and I share health insurance policies to 103 access reduced rates for medications and health services. Like heterosexuality, white supremacy produces benefits from legal systems, social structures, and cultural processes that bestow white privilege. For example, I benefit from colonial laws that maintain the claim that I belong in a hospital on unceded territory. I benefit from a provincial medical services plan that was constructed and maintained to serve the needs of residents in BC. As a result, at admission to the ER, recognition of my benefits under the provincial medical services plan was automatic. The status of Indigenous peoples is often questioned in health care settings (Hole, Evans, Berg, Bottorff, Dingwall, Alexis, Nyberg, & Smith, 2015). When I received health services, these services were rendered through a Western view of medicine. I did not have to contend with a medical system that often opposes traditional Indigenous beliefs about medicine (Hole, Evans, Berg, Bottorff, Dingwall, Alexis, Nyberg, & Smith, 2015). While heterosexual and white privilege normalize the claim that I belong in the hospital, my performative rupture of masculinity and disability suggested that I did not belong in the ER (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006; Razack, 2002). Along an intersecting axis of oppression (e.g., gender/sex and disability) and privilege (e.g., race and sexuality), my claim to belonging is negotiated within a hierarchy of belonging (Razack, 2002). In the hospital, before I went to the ER, I did not have to present an MSP card and my next-of-kin was automatically identified. The absence of my mind and bodily actions reaffirmed the normalcy of white supremacy and heterosexual privilege. After proceeding into the ER, the rupture in the performative actions of my mind and body produced a space to reaffirm ableist masculine identity (Butler, 1997). In this space, the hegemony of normative discursive frameworks, like patriarchal masculinity and disability, produced through the ER doctor to reiterate an ableist masculinity that affirms the normalcy of patriarchal masculinity and ability by embodying gender/sex and disability in my mind and 104 body. Along an axis of oppression and privilege intersecting in seemingly contradictory ways, the discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability work spatially to affirm and reaffirm the normalcy of white supremacist ableist heterosexual identity in neoliberal society (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005; Foucault, 1980; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006; Peck, 2010; Razack, 2002; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010; Siebers, 2010). White supremacist neoliberal ableist heterosexual patriarchal masculinity is marked, fundamentally, by its denial of the performativity of race, class, sexuality, ability, and gender relations in the structures that essentially disguise and, simultaneously, affirm and reaffirm the flow of knowledge/power that manifests currents of racism, sexism, ableism, and heterosexism within neoliberal society (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005; Foucault, 1980; Kafer, 2013; Kumari-Campbell, 2009; McRuer, 2006; Peck, 2010; Razack, 2002; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). 6.6 Discussion In this chapter, I charted intersections between the discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability that produce forms of oppression and privilege. These forms of oppression and privilege render through speech acts to synchronically, spatially, and hierarchically construct and categorize subject positions in the collective stories of disabled people. These stories and my textual friends formed a round table discussion. This round table discussion is culturally sewn experiential fabric. It is woven together by the collective diffuse efforts of disabled people to contest normative discursive frameworks and reconfigure systems of representation. These systems try to eradicate the lives of disabled people by suggesting that disabled people do not belong or only belong as alternative categories of interest and 105 investment. Disabled people who do not belong are excluded from the conditions necessary to sustain human life (e.g., death). Disabled people who belong are cast as alternative categories of interest and investment (e.g., objects of the market). In this discursive space, disabled people are shaped into subordinate forms of human capital placed in hierarchies of belonging. Contesting systems of representation and dismantling these hierarchies of belonging is imperative to cultivating discursive ‘living’ space for disabled people to claim the conditions necessary to sustain human life. 106 Chapter 7: Implications and Contributions 7.1 Summary of My Study I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end (Foucault, 1982, p 9). The autoethnographic analysis that I presented attended to the following overarching questions: How might the intersecting discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability construct subject positions in my personal narrative? Under these intersecting normalizing discursive frameworks, how might subject positions organize along an axis of oppression and privilege in my personal narrative? In chapter two, I theorized intersections between the discursive frameworks of neoliberalism and disability by tracing the rise of neoliberalism, emergence of normalcy, practices of normalization in the human sciences, and eugenics. Then, I showed that the discursive framework of neoliberalism aligns with the discursive framework of disability to organize normalizing practices in the human sciences, like genetic risk, to produce the subjects best suited to fulfill neoliberalism (Foucault, 1979; Miller & Rose, 2008; Rose, 2007). I built a thoeretical apparatus to chart intersecting relations between neoliberalism and disability in the construction and categorization of subject positions along an axis of oppression and privilege (Brown, 2001; 2003; 2005; 2015; Foucault, 1984; 1992). In chapter three, I charted movements of resistance to white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, and heterosexism. I surveyed diverse influences of class 107 critiques, gender studies, race theory, and queer theory upon the development of scholarly work in critical disability studies. Placed in relation to this broad landscape, I articulated important themes in the disability rights movements and its margins. Then, I constructed an account of the social model of disability and its limits. Drawing upon diverse influences across movements of resistance, I developed an account of intersectional and interlocking analyses leading into an intracategorical framework. By building this framework, I suggested that examining relationships between white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability through an intracategorical approach is necessary to theorize the construction and categorization of subject positions in my experiences of disability. To deepen my exploration, I brought together discourse analysis, evocative autoethnography, and intracategorical analysis. As articulated in chapter four and five, I undertook a discourse analysis of selected social media stories to construct an evocative personal narrative. This is a flow of power/knowledge from the stories into my personal narrative. This flow of knowledge/power shaped the way I wrote about my experiences of disability by sparking my thoughts, memories, and emotions. My personal narrative formed the basis for my intracategorical analysis. In chapter six, I presented an intracategorical analysis of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability through a round-table discussion between my textual friends, findings from my discourse analysis, and my personal narrative (Arvay, 1999). In this discussion, I suggested that the normative discursive frameworks of white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability repetitiously dispossess and assimilate racialized/LGBTQ/disabled/gendered subject positions into a hierarchy of belonging in a zone of abjection (Butler, 1990; 1993; 1997; 2005; 2016; Foucault, 1980; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006; Peck, 2010; Razack, 2002; Roberts & Mahtani, 2010). This zone of 108 abjection positions disabled people in alternative categories of interest and investment. By positioning racialized/LGBTQ/disabled/gendered subjects in this zone of abjection, normative discursive frameworks affirm and substantiate the belonging of white supremacist, patriarchal masculinist, neoliberal, heterosexist, and ableist subject positions (Butler, 1993). Through this hierarchy, normative discursive frameworks claim the conditions necessary to sustain human life (Butler, 1993). By articulating these relationships, I theorized ways white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability intersect in the construction and categorization of subject positions in my experiences of disability. 7.2 Implications and Contributions of My Research I initiated this study to examine more deeply some of the persistent problems and tensions in my personal experiences of disability. I wanted to critically reflect on these experiences to understand the complex and contradictory effects of knowledge/power operating in normative discursive frameworks like disability. In the context of these frameworks, I wanted to understand the way subjectivity and spaciality are (re)produced and contested in white supremacist, patriarchal masculinist, heterosexist, ableist, and neoliberal contexts. Through my research, I interrogated how knowledge/power operating through these normative discursive frameworks and practices construct subject positions. I deepened my exploration of this relationship through a close examination of the way intersecting knowledge/power relations produce oppression and privilege to categorize these subject positions. Emerging from this study, I propose that ability, as Foucault suggests about sexuality, is one of the great technologies of power (Foucault, 1976, 1984, 1992). Like sexuality, ability is built upon normalcy and normalizing judgements (Foucault, 1975; 1984; 1992). Normalizing judgments focus on disciplining deviations from the norm (Foucault, 109 1975). Disciplinary power compares, differentiates, stratifies, homogenizes, and excludes to normalize subject positions (Foucault, 1975). Technologies of knowledge/power manifest through discursive frameworks regulate and normalize the minds and bodies of subjects. This normalization of subjectivity leads to the marginalization and exclusion of disabled people. Exclusion leads to internalization of conclusions about the abnormality of disabled people. The internalization of these pathologizing conclusions appears in culturally shaped stories shared about disabled people and the stories disabled people share about their experiences. When we speak and write about ourselves, we draw upon culturally available meanings. Normative discursive frameworks like disability produce these meanings. For example, the dominance of medical narratives about disability, like genetic risk discourse, produces meanings available to disabled people to construct stories about their experiences (e.g., cauda equina syndrome, functional neurological disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder). These culturally shaped stories appear in venues like social media posts, informal conversations, and academic discussions. These stories shape the way disability is placed in the overarching collective conversations in research, art, media, literature, and politics. Within these collective conversations, stories about disability are reiterative and reinforce the way clinicians, academics, and researchers think and speak about disabled people. Likewise, these stories about disability also form the way disabled people think and speak about their experiences. This has implications for the way disabled people think and feel about themselves. In my experiences of disability, normative discursive frameworks, like disability, produced conclusions about the abnormality of my mind and body that rendered feelings of shame, guilt, fear, sadness, and anger. At the same time, discursive frameworks, like white supremacy, bestowed privileges that shaped feelings of belonging in the emergency room at the hospital on unceded territory. These conflicting conclusions about my mind 110 and body led my emotions to oscillate in relation to the moment-by-moment production of my subjectivity. My thoughts, emotions, and memories are an extension of knowledge/power operating through normative discursive frameworks to produce forms of oppression and privilege. For example, under the clinical gaze of the neurologist, he warned me that ‘you don’t want to end up this way’ and I vividly recall feeling intense shame. The productive power of medical conclusions about my mind and body led me to feel powerless. I wanted to hide in the corner. I wanted my dependence to disappear. However, the ritualized reproduction of these discursive frameworks required my participation. My ‘madness’ motivated an interrogation of the conclusions about my disabled mind and body like the diagnosis of cauda equina syndrome, functional neurological disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The ritual of stories is a powerful site of potential (re)production and/or contestation of the conclusions shaped by normative discursive frameworks. These frameworks form the limit between what can and cannot be said in stories. However, dominant stories are not a perfect account or representation of ‘what is’ or ‘what was.’ In these stories, marginalized voices are often silent. Through an autoethnographic analysis, I attended to the silences in my stories like the things I declined to say to the neurologist in the hospital, my forbidden feelings, and my unspoken memories. These silent aspects of stories provided a pathway to explore the normative power of discursive frameworks. By exploring these silences, like the clinical gaze of the neurologist, I created a discursive opening to contest the normative conclusions about the ‘pathology’ of my mind and body. In this opening, through collective critical stories about disability, I contextualized pathological conclusions about my disabled mind and body by tracing their relationship with normative discursive frameworks. Then, I questioned the conclusions about my mind and body produced by these normative frameworks. I externalized the medical story about my mind and body. This medical story is not my story; it is a product of intersecting 111 discursive frameworks. By externalizing medical conclusions about my mind and body, I can begin to reduce feelings of shame, guilt, fear, and sadness. The power and influence of this medical story begins to subside. In this discursive space, empowering and ‘maddening’ stories begin to emerge. Stories of remembrance give voice to my thoughts and feelings about disability. While the hospital records retain the story written by my neurologist, my research is a record of my story. My story is a counter narrative to the medical story. Through this opposing narrative, I can reclaim disability (Linton, 1998). Enter disability studies: a location and a means to think critically about disability, a juncture that can serve both academic discourse and social change. Disability studies provides the means to hold academics accountable for the veracity and the social consequences of their work. (Linton, 1998, p 4) These stories enable construction and reclamation of a disabled identity. This identity is supported by collective conversations about disability in critical disability studies. In these conversations, disabled people have “found one another and found a voice to express not despair at our fate but outrage at our social positioning” (Linton, 1998, p 4). My research is a project of reclaiming disability. Reclaiming disability must include a serious examination of race, class, gender, and sexuality to avoid reproducing white supremacist, neoliberal, masculinist, and heterosexist discursive frameworks. For example, “just as disability studies shows how disability is irreducible to bodily impairment, feminist theory shows how gender is irreducible to biological sex” (Hall, 2011, p 1). Disability reimagines gender and gender reconfigures disability (Hall, 2011). For example, when I described the pain in my body to the ER doctor, he simultaneously invoked medical discourse to normalize/erase my experience of pain and discipline my body's performance of patriarchal masculinity by describing his perseverance through 'more' severe forms of pain (e.g., sciatic pain). The reiteration of 112 disability and patriarchal masculinity discourse framed in my gendered disabled body reaffirmed the normalcy of ableist patriarchal masculinity. In my research, I carried out an intracategorical analysis to reflect on my experiences as a white non-heterosexual disabled man in neoliberal society. With this analysis, I sought to understand ways white supremacy, patriarchal masculinity, neoliberalism, heterosexism, and disability produce forms of oppression and privilege intersecting in my experiences of disability to produce subject positions. For example, while the normative discursive framework of disability produced oppression through medical discourse manifest in the neurologist’s clinical gaze, the discursive framework of white supremacy bestowed the privilege of benefiting from colonial laws that maintain the claim that I belong in a hospital on unceded territory. As I moved in the hospital, I felt conflicting feelings between shame and belonging. If I produce a counter narrative that reclaims disability and reduces shame, I cannot build it upon a sense of belonging bestowed by white supremacy. My research is not only a project of reclaiming disability; it is rebuilding the foundation for that reclaimation by acknowledging and contesting white supremacist, neoliberal, patriarchal masculinist, and heterosexist discursive frameworks. Likewise, acknowleding and contesting disability must be a part of anti-racist, feminist, Marxist, and queer frameworks. The work of many scholars, like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Lennard J. Davis, in critical disability studies provide a strong critique of normalcy. Their scholarly work renders the problems of abled identity visible. Left unquestioned, the discursive framework of ability will normalize abled subject positions and marginalize the voices of disabled people. In Enabling Disabled Scholarship, Vincent (1999) wrote that the human body is a machine…one that has evolved functional parts: lungs for breathing, legs for walking, eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, a tongue for speaking 113 and most crucially for all the academics concerned, a brain for thinking. This is science, not culture. How then can we make the case that blind eyes, or deaf ears, or mute tongues are serving the purpose for which they evolved? They are, in purely ergonomic terms, broken, dysfunctional and -- contrary to what SDSers might maintain -- in need of repair, if repair is feasible. Ableist sentiments can endanger the lives of disabled people by naturalizing and normalizing the human mind and body. These ableist claims aim to delegitimize the viewpoints of disabled people and, thereby, build a foundation to legitimize the perspectives of abled people (Morella-Pozzi, 2014). Research that seeks to reclaim an identity must build the foundation for that reclaimation by acknowledging and contesting white supremacist, neoliberal, masculinist, heterosexist, and ableist discursive frameworks. By contesting intersecting normative discursive frameworks, my research created space to support social activism by unsettling ‘normal’ subject positions that rest upon certainties of modern science and reason to foster a serious discussion about the role of language and power. This discussion connects and extends into broader stories of activism in disability communities. My research is part of a growing field of interdisciplinary studies that embrace an intersectional approach to analyzing normative discursive frameworks, knowledge/power, subjectivity, and spatiality. 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Julie Julie Devaney is a patient-expert based in Toronto. She is the author and performer of the critically acclaimed show, educational workshop series, and book, My Leaky Body. My Leaky Body was named one of Quill and Quire’s Top Five Non-fiction books of 2012. According to the National Post, “While this memoir is an uncompromisingly detailed account of one woman’s medical experiences, it acts as a sort of Everyman tome, a handbook on the rights of the patient to dictate their own path to wellness.” Devaney was named a Woman Health Hero by Best Health Magazine in 2011 and has been profiled on CBC Radio’s White Coat, Black Art and The Current, Chatelaine and the Toronto Star. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Life and numerous anthologies. Julie has performed at medical schools, nursing conferences and theatres throughout Canada and in the US and the UK using participatory techniques with patients and professionals to formulate strategies for change and innovation in healthcare. Her work at the University Health Network in Toronto has transformed real patient stories into staff training. Andrew Andrew Gurza is a Disability Awareness Consultant and Cripple Content Creator. In his work, he seeks to explore how the lived experience of disability feels, as it interplays with intersectional communities. By using hashtags like #diSAYbled, #DisabilityAfterDark, #BearinAChair and #KissAQueerCripple Andrew shares his lived experiences of disability, queerness, sexuality and body image in a raw, vulnerable and unapologetic fashion. 133 He has presented all across North America on sex and disability as a Queer Crippled man. His written work has been highlighted in Out Magazine, The Advocate and Huffington Post. He hosts the Disability After Dark podcast, which shines a bright light on sex and disability, as well as the Disability With Drew Podcast which aims to explore the everyday issues that surround disability AND share disability experiences we don't often hear. Andrew resides in Toronto, Canada, and loves 80s/90s pop, bad Chinese take-out and Netflix marathons.... A.J. A.J. Withers is a disabled, queer and trans anti-poverty activist living in Toronto. A proponent of radical disability theory and politics, A.J. is the author of Disability Politics and Theory. Adrienne From A.J.'s Perspective, "Pushing Limits is a community radio show out of KPFA in Berkeley. I was privileged to have a conversation with Adrienne Lauby and Eddie Ytuarte about interdependence. They both had some nice stories to tell and I think we all learned from one another – which is a great example of interdependence." Eddie From A.J.'s perspective, "Pushing Limits is a community radio show out of KPFA in Berkeley. I was privileged to have a conversation with Adrienne Lauby and Eddie Ytuarte about interdependence. They both had some nice stories to tell and I think we all learned from one another – which is a great example of interdependence." 134 Appendix B: A Representation of the Round-Table Discussion In this appendix, I present a 3D graphic representation of the round-table discussion between authors of selected social media stories, my textual friends, and my personal narrative. I present this graphic representation to facilitate visualization of this group discussion. The spheres represent a story of an author, my personal narrative, or a textual friend. The spheres intersect with eachother at the centre of the discussion. When the spheres intersect, the shade of their colour is changed by the other spheres and changes the other spheres.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
An autoethnographic analysis of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability intersecting in the construction and categorization of subject positions in a personal narrative
Text