Arts, Faculty of
DSpace
UBCV
Stallings, Adrienne Ruth
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Another name for dystopian literature is “speculative fiction,” a term that can be deceiving due to separation in the connotation of the words “fiction” and “reality.” Combine this with the description of “speculative,” dystopian literature is thus positioned only ever as a possibility. That is why it is important to recognize the ways in pieces of nonfiction conform to the dystopian genre, as well as where memoirs written by authors with disabilities weigh in on societal and political issues.. My research thus seeks to interrogate the amenability of the dystopian genre to readings of selected pieces of disability literature across modern literary movements. Each chapter is centered around one significant novel from across a period of almost seventy-five years: Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (1948), Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride (1999), and Alice Wong’s Year of the Tiger (2022). By constructing this history, I uncover evidence to argue that linkage of disability and dystopia literatures reveals not only the manifestations of dystopia in our current reality—and has been for decades—but also that these authors identify a blueprint to fight against those harms. In Dazai’s work, we see his attempt to delegitimize the normate—Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s term for the imagined abled individual who serves as a marker of bodily deviance. In doing so, Dazai articulates his perception of the ways in which ableism is institutionalized and upheld through the dehumanization of disabled bodyminds. Clare elaborates further on this idea, marking the beginnings of imaginings of better futures by protesting against the delegitimization of disability and disabled struggles, as well as an acknowledgement of the ways that that struggle is intersectional. Finally, Wong expands the meaning of disability justice to include ideas of environmental and colonial justice as well—with this ecocritical approach being crucial to this reading.
CRIPPLING DYSTOPIA: A SURVEY OF DYSTOPIAN THEMES IN DISABILITY LITERATURE by ADRIENNE RUTH STALLINGS B.A., Texas Christian University, 2023 B.A., Texas Christian University 2023 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2025 © Adrienne Ruth Stallings, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Crippling Dystopia: A Survey of Dystopian Themes in Disability Literature submitted by Adrienne Stallings in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in English Examining Committee: Judith Paltin, Associate Professor, English Department, The University of British Columbia Supervisor Logan Smilges, Assistant Professor, English Department, The University of British Columbia Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Another name for dystopian literature is “speculative fiction,” a term that can be deceiving due to separation in the connotation of the words “fiction” and “reality.” Combine this with the description of “speculative,” dystopian literature is thus positioned only ever as a possibility. That is why it is important to recognize the ways in pieces of nonfiction conform to the dystopian genre, as well as where memoirs written by authors with disabilities weigh in on societal and political issues.. My research thus seeks to interrogate the amenability of the dystopian genre to readings of selected pieces of disability literature across modern literary movements. Each chapter is centered around one significant novel from across a period of almost seventy-five years: Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (1948), Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride (1999), and Alice Wong’s Year of the Tiger (2022). By constructing this history, I uncover evidence to argue that linkage of disability and dystopia literatures reveals not only the manifestations of dystopia in our current reality—and has been for decades—but also that these authors identify a blueprint to fight against those harms. In Dazai’s work, we see his attempt to delegitimize the normate—Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s term for the imagined abled individual who serves as a marker of bodily deviance. In doing so, Dazai articulates his perception of the ways in which ableism is institutionalized and upheld through the dehumanization of disabled bodyminds. Clare elaborates further on this idea, marking the beginnings of imaginings of better futures by protesting against the delegitimization of disability and disabled struggles, as well as an acknowledgement of the ways that that struggle is intersectional. Finally, Wong expands the meaning of disability justice to include ideas of environmental and colonial justice as well—with this ecocritical approach being crucial to this reading. iv Lay Summary Another name for dystopian literature is “speculative fiction,” a term that can be deceiving due to separation in the connotation of the words “fiction” and “reality.” Combine this with the description of “speculative,” dystopian literature is thus positioned only ever as a possibility. My research thus seeks to determine the ways in pieces of nonfiction conform to the dystopian genre, as well as where memoirs written by authors with disabilities lend their credence, using the works of Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (1948), Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride (1999), and Alice Wong’s Year of the Tiger (2022). By constructing this history, I uncover the evidence to argue that linkage of disability and dystopia literatures reveals not only the manifestations of dystopia in our current reality—and has been for decades—but also that these authors identify a blueprint to fight against those harms. v Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Adrienne Stallings. No Generative Artificial Intelligence tools were used in the research process, development, or writing of the thesis. vi Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................. iv Preface ......................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... vii Dedication ................................................................................................................................ viii Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: The Inhuman Establishment ................................................................................. 9 Chapter Two: A Multi-Faceted Delegitimization ..................................................................... 25 Chapter Three: Delineating Progression ................................................................................... 35 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 52 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 55 vii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the people who have supported me throughout the completion of this project. I would like to offer a special thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Judith Paltin, for guiding me through every step of this process and providing thoughtful feedback and support. Thank you to my second reader, Dr. Logan Smilges, as well, whose generative and reflective insight were instrumental to its completion. I would also like to thank Christie MacLeod for her consistent assistance before and during this project, as well as the faculty at the English Department who have helped to shape this argument. Finally, I cannot overstate my appreciation for my mother and sister. Without their support, none of this would have been possible. And for my dear friends who all pushed me to consistently do and be better, I am thankful for as well. viii Dedication To my mom, my dad, Cameron, Maddie, Kya, and Juliette. 1 Introduction Perhaps one of the biggest factors in the ease of a dystopian reading of disability memoirs is the influence that medical history has on disability studies. As Beth Linker points out, “disability often lurks on the margins of medical history, but is rarely brought front and center to be fully theorized and systemically studied” (502). If we recall that medical history is enshrined in the medical institution, which, I (perhaps needlessly) argue, is often one of the major oppressional forces being critiqued in disability memoirs, then in my reading of disability literature as a wing of the dystopian genre, we can say that “disability often lurks on the margins of [dystopia], but is rarely brought front and center to be fully theorized and systemically studied.” I seek to do exactly that. Another name for dystopian literature is “speculative fiction,” a term that can be deceiving due to separation in the connotation of the words “fiction” and “reality.” Margaret Atwood, the author of The Haidmaid’s Tale, advises of writing speculative fiction “one way to generate a plot is to take an idea from current society and move it a little further down the road” (“What”). I find both this definitional characterization, as well as Atwood’s descriptions, to be particularly alarming because they forever position dystopia as a possibility and never a reality, always perceiving dystopia as being “a little further down the road” when marginalized communities have been living with the oppressions that are often centered in works of dystopian literature. That is why it is important to recognize the ways in pieces of nonfiction conform to the dystopian genre. One cannot dismantle a dystopia if they do not realize they are living in it. This is where memoirs written by authors with disabilities lend their credence. If dystopian literature is meant to be a warning, then it’s important to recognize that disability advocates have been blaring alarms for decades and the collective has been ignoring 2 the signs, when really “disability should sit squarely at the center of historical inquiry, both as a subject worth studying in its own right and as one that will provide scholars with a new analytic tool for exploring power itself” (Kudlick 765). Rebecca Garden supports the assertion of the need to centralize disability in historical inquiries as well, saying “Autobiographical narratives of illness and disability are influential in popular and medical discourses of illness and disability, in part because these narratives represent illness and disability within a sociocultural context, intersecting with other categories of difference” (Garden 121). The distinction here of “autobiographical narratives” is particularly important to my proposed exploration. As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder point out that “people with disabilities have been the object of representational treatments… while stories rely upon the potency of disability as a symbolic figure, they rarely take up disability as an experience of social or political dimension” (204), such “stories” often being literary fiction or even some biopics. Centering this paper on autobiographies, however, works to circumvent literatures that neglect to “take up disability as an experience of social or political dimension.” Further, it is crucial to recognize that the focus on intersectionality within disability memoirs creates a space for this argument. Margaret Atwood identifies a dystopia as a society that is “in cataclysmic decline, with characters who battle environmental ruin…and government oppression” (“What”). In fact, recognizing how more modern disability memoirs often take an ecocritical approach—centering discussions of environmental justice within their overarching argument—is the hinge with which the viability of this project rests upon. With such sentiments established, we can see how such texts lend themselves well to the dystopian genre, “critically investigate the possibility of a worse future in order to warn their readers, viewers, appreciators, or players about potential trends apparent or present in discernible 3 forms in their specific empirical present” (Farca 68). This work honors those who take to task the identification of such “potential trends… in their specific empirical present” in their respective memoirs, giving each author leverage to argue that we must be willing to topple the pillars upholding our current abled bodied society, which are often explicitly identified by such “disabled oracles” (Wong), thereby proving that disability literature is one of the best genres to make such arguments accessible and digestible. My research seeks to interrogate the amenability of the dystopian genre to readings of selected pieces of disability literature across modern literary movements. Each chapter is centered around one significant novel from across a period of almost 75 years: Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (1948), Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride (1999), and Alice Wong’s Year of the Tiger (2022). By constructing this history, I uncover the evidence to argue that linkage of disability and dystopia literatures reveals not only the manifestations of dystopia in our current reality—and has been for decades—but also that these authors identify a blueprint to fight against those harms, paving a path forward towards true amelioration. In organizing my thesis chronologically, I chart a progression of our understanding of both disability and dystopian literature, emphasizing how nascent is contemporary academic study into both fields and the linking of the two while acknowledging that the disability identity has always been present and honoring the writers who lay the foundations of discussions around disability and society. Further, though dystopian literature is traditionally considered in purely fictional terms, dystopian societies and governments are woefully real. In learning to read this type of power structure in our world, the blame for a frayed society shifts away from a perceived “harsh and severe” (Dazai 119) society, thus working to hold accountable individuals who uphold such systems and writing a way to righting the wrongs that disability writers and scholars 4 have been calling attention to for almost a century, revealing the urgency in refusing to “leave the system untouched” (Clare 63). My overview of disability scholarship begins with Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay “On Being Ill.” As she points out, “among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of language” (34). Now, she says this in a context of the actual description of pain, but it is this sentiment of a lack of proper articulation that I seek to use both as a cornerstone of my argument and an exposure of the hypocrisy of the belief of the opposite. In the context of my argument, we can take “poverty of language” to be the articulation and study of disability itself, as the large bulk of foundational texts accompanied the surge in disability activism on the tail end of the postmodern period. However, by beginning my study with Woolf I establish a starting point of the comprehensible where disabled language is concerned—important given how “[i]ncomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately… than the upright will allow” (Woolf 41). Through this interrogation of incomprehensibility in conjunction with power held by the “upright,” Woolf identifies and scorns the ways in which society often dehumanizes those with illness, taking aim at the lack of the presence of illness in literature through a process of individualization, which allows Woolf positions herself as one such “critical theorist” who recognizes that dehumanization is institutionalized and the normate established through the delegitimization of abnormal bodyminds, which hints towards an early conceptualization of what is commonly acknowledged now as the social model of disability. Because of Woolf’s proleptic conformation with current theory, she pairs wonderfully with Dazai, whose mental health narrative—aptly titled No Longer Human—not only echoes Woolf’s scorn for the process of delegitimization, but makes clear his comprehension of his society as a dystopia. First, I want to make clear something about this particular novel—though it 5 is officially a work of fiction, it is only such in that it is an I-novel, which is a Japanese literary genre that performs a confessional style semi-autobiographical account of the author’s life. Oba Yozo, the novel’s protagonist, is, in Dazai’s own words in its sequel novella, “a mockery of [himself]” (Dazai, Flowers 8) and that he came into existence only because Dazai “this past spring… wrote a novel with a first-person narrator, so [he was] hesitant to do another so soon” (Dazai, Flowers 8). Thus, it is becomes clear that Dazai’s works are, indeed, memoirs, justifying their place in this study. Now, where it can be said that Woolf took the first steps to rectifying this “poverty of language,” Dazai perfected it. While “On Being Ill” does not shy away from connecting the visibility (or lack thereof) of disability to government oppression, Dazai does the same and then takes it one step further. Notably, there is no evidence in English to suggest that Dazai was familiar with Western concepts of disability. And though I recognize that I am reading this work in translation and, thus, the original Japanese might not reflect this sentiment as well I still find it remarkable how often Dazai takes to issue with oppression of the normate and works to dismantle perceptions of it being purely institutional—especially since the modern disability rights movement did not come to maturity until the late 1960s (Iwakuma 2). Prior to this, people with disabilities in Japan were often ostracized since “a slight deviation from the norms is quickly noticed and criticized in a tight society… people are inclined to become more collectivistic, longing for ‘sameness’ and loathing anything ambiguous, contradictory, or different” (Iwakuma 1), which not only establishes the normate that Dazai struggles against, but also helps establish his conceptualization of oppression being one as upheld by society at large. It is also important to acknowledge Japan’s cultural entanglement with suicide as well, due to how it is often employed in Japanese literature to undermine the “very notion of cultural 6 modernization” (Wolfe xiv). In line with this historical context, suicide narratives, such as Dazai’s, “[document] the ostensible failure of the individual to adapt to “modern” society… [and] provide us with a revealing shift in register, whereby the dry clinical data of nameless alienated individuals become indicators of a high level of cultural and psychological sensitivity” (Wolfe 16). In other words, such “alienated individuals” become better attuned to the “ostensible failure… to adapt,” given them a greater “sensitivity” in regards to their oppression. It can then be said, in reading Dazai in such a cultural context, that his interrogation of “What is society but an individual” (Human 120) seeks to center “‘modern’ society” in conversations regarding disability, providing a segue into Eli Clare’s writing. In Chapter Two, I seek to establish the climate of legitimacy out of which Clare is writing given its consequentiality in the creation of the current infrastructure around disability, as well as chart his struggles against the delegitimization of disability, insisting on interrogating “key concepts such as truth, progress, history, originality, and identity,” as well as Clare’s “openly disenchanted, if not cynical, attitude toward the cultural professions, their institutions, and their social meaning” (Capovin). Here, we can begin to see how works of non-fiction exemplify traits of the dystopian genre—allowing us to see how space could be made for a traditionally fictional genre to be expanded to include works of nonfiction within its folds. In a description of dystopian literature for an online course, Margaret Atwood identifies a dystopia as a society that is “in cataclysmic decline, with characters who battle environmental ruin…and government oppression” (“What”), both traits that Clare grapples with over the course of his 1999 memoir, beginning with the opening sentence: “[t]he mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people, people whose bones get crushed in the grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy” (Clare 1). Over the course of the rest of the memoir, he goes on to establish 7 key tenets of modern disability studies such as the concept of “supercrip,” pointing to what Lennard J. Davis describes as “disability activists and scholars… returning the Medusa gaze of the “normal” in action and in print” (501) and engaging with what Elizabeth Wheeler identifies as playing with the politics of disorientation in his memoir to “diverge from the ordinary paths through the forest, and… enrich his social ethics… dismantl[ing] bodily stereotypes and barriers.” This reveals the growing concern with “[n]aming [o]ppression” (Linton), shifting focus away from disability as a medical term and instead seeing it, as Thomas Couser describes in a later decade, as something that “inescapably attend[s] human embodiment” (3). There one of Clare’s most important arguments begin to take form. Borrowing from an analysis of the Hunger Games to summarize Clare’s claims to emphasize the overlap of concerns between the dystopian genre with disability memoirists, “the powerful presence of hunger is not enough to fuel rebellion. There must be cooperation, community, emotional more than political alliances to bring about change” (Jones 225). Through such explorations, Clare honors the human embodiment of oppression and rejects a further “[tearing] away” (Clare 12) of the bodily autonomy that accompanies systemic oppression. In Chapter Three, I argue for a reading of disability memoirs that embraces intersectionality and the ways in which overlapping oppressions inform our readings of disability, thereby allowing room for a call to decolonize. I center my assertion on the 2022 hybrid memoir of the Disability Visibility Project’s founder, Alice Wong, because of her explicit borrowing from the speculative fiction genre in writing it—interspersing her autobiography with fictional imaginings of a future where disability justice has been attained—marking contemporary disability studies as focusing on the future, rejecting notions such as “[e]nforcing [n]ormalcy” (Bell 276) and expanding the meaning of disability justice to include ideas of 8 environmental and colonial justice as well. Being conscious of this precedent, I seek to ensure that my research does not reinforce what Chris Bells deems as “White Disability Studies,” which would only fortify the dystopia I aim to identify and reject, echoing Alice Wong’s conclusion that “[i]t is not enough to say we exist and need more representation. I prefer to center ourselves and be in community with one another.” In other words, we see that Wong is essentially saying enough to have a field to “call our own.” As recent events within the United States have proven, as well, that “the law… enshrined our legal protections” (Wong 40) is not enough to rely on to prevent a descent into dystopia. Thus, it is important to listen to scholars and activists who recognize and work to deconstruct a struggle against dehumanization and delegitimization in order to advocate for a decolonization of the field and work as a community to actively construct an imagined future and work towards it urgently. And it is Wong’s idea of community that I conclude with—the end of the individual and embracing of differences that defines the disability community. In conclusion, by first recognizing that my analysis proves that disability literature is one of the best genres to make such arguments accessible and digestible, we thereby open a new avenue for analysis of dystopia’s realities and fictions through this disability-centered critique. 9 Chapter One: The Inhuman Establishment Virginia Woolf and Dazai Osamu are two authors rarely put into conversation together. Though both are modernist writers often credited with influencing their respective literary worlds, no scholar that I have found previously has connected that Woolf’s “On Being Ill” and Dazai’s No Longer Human and The Flowers of Buffoonery echo and explore the same themes, centering a critique of what we now identify as the “normate.” And though neither engage directly with ecocriticism (with ecocriticism being relatively under-theorized as a framework for cultural criticism in Woolf’s age (Marland) and Dazai being both temporally and spatial removed from western conceptions of environmental justice—nature is only ever an element to be engaged with, not theorized about), the criticisms they do contain cannot be ignored. First, to understand these authors’ criticisms, I think it best to establish the framework through which such arguments were formed. Woolf is noted to have “experienced mood swings from severe depression to manic excitement and episodes of psychosis,” at one point withdrawing from any human contact for nine weeks, after which she was faced with an “’assault of truth,’” feeling as though if she “sink[s] further [she] shall reach the truth” (Dalsimer). She would later commit suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse. Dazai’s was similarly secluded and ruminates often on his alienation in his semi-autobiographical novel through the character of Oba Yozo. He first confronts this theme in the first notebook when he reflects on his sexual assault. As he grew, Yozo continued struggled with depression and later fell into alcoholism and a morphine addiction in his adulthood. After two failed suicide attempts, he was institutionalized by his brother. He tried and failed two more times before succeeding on his fifth attempt. However, what differentiates Dazai from Woolf here is the philosophical conviction this division from society inspired in him. 10 What Dazai ultimately struggled with was dehumanization—both internally and externally. To be certain, No Longer Human (and, later, the Flowers of Buffoonery)’s protagonist Oba Yozo—who, in Dazai’s own words (as he takes on a narratorial role in Flowers), is “a mockery of [Dazai himself]” (Dazai, Flowers 8)—is a problematic character, harboring a deep, nigh on misogynistic, hatred of the women in his life and a harsh perception of those he considers his friends. However, this does work to achieve a concise summation of Dazai’s concept of self: “I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born” (Dazai, Human 67). Thus, where Woolf calls attention to the lack of discussion regarding illness (and, by extension disability), Dazai takes to criticizing society for it. In other words, through Woolf’s attempts to establish a disabled identity, we find the tools to identify Dazai’s attempt to validate it through a delegitimizing of the normate, thereby articulating his perception of the ways in which ableism is institutionalized and upheld through the dehumanization of disabled bodyminds. Woolf takes aim at the lack of the presence of illness in literature through a process of individualization. As mentioned prior, Woolf starts off broadly criticizing the state of literature, stating that “among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of language” (Woolf 34). This is noteworthy for several reasons. First, Sunaura Taylor gestures heavily at the fact that the ability to communicate is often tied to ideas of sophistication, using the lens of the historical perception of “gestural language” (50), which was perceived to be “an example of primitive language used by savages” (50), thereby demonstrating how “race, disability, and animality have been entangled in and co-constitutive of one another” (50). Of physical pain, Elaine Scarry writes something similar, claiming that it “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to 11 language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned (4). Taking a creative approach to applying this to Woolf, we can reinterpret the meaning of the statement “poverty of language” to mean instead a “gestural language” towards the “drawbacks of illness.” Afterall, “poverty” does not connotate a complete without—thus, it can be argued that Woolf is saying that authors will gesture towards disability without truly exploring it—thereby “resist[ing]” and “actively destroy[ing]” language that would grant disabled identities a certain depth one would expect from true personhood, aligning them more with “savages” (Taylor 50)—a significantly more dehumanizing term. Woolf then individualizes the experience of disability, moving away from a generalized experience to a more specific one. She first does this through a presumed fictional “invalid” (Woolf 34), then through a voice of “we” (Woolf 36), and finally settling into named individuals such as “Mr. Smith” and “Mrs. Jones” (Woolf 38). Through these shifts in persona, Woolf gives physical body to the previously disembodied identity to the reader. More technically, as well, it allows Woolf to transform her own body. As Elizabeth Outka points out, “she occupies both normate and non-normate positions… [and] highlights the way mental health issues occupy a no man’s land, tangled between illness and disability” (Outka 510). In this way, Woolf is thereby seeking to rectify her “concern with the ways in which the textual representation of illness is shaped by what has come before by literary tradition and the kinds of habits, conventions, and expectations this tradition engenders in writers, in critics, and—perhaps most importantly, for Woolf—in ordinary readers” (Pett 30). In doing so, Woolf thus aims to cultivate “the divine relief of sympathy” (Woolf 35) in such “ordinary readers,” precisely because it is sympathy that she finds lacking when the “normate and non-normate positions” meet, providing a “textual 12 representation of illness” that defies both tradition and conventions, resulting in a resisting of further dehumanization. Finally, Woolf identifies those that perpetrate this dehumanization. She writes that “[i]ncomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately… than the upright will allow” (41) and that “the law is on the side of the normal” (43). To Woolf, then, it is the “upright” and the “law” that marginalize disabled bodies. That it is “incomprehensibility,” too, that she seeks to uplift, critiquing the “upright” who might view it less “legitimately” is noteworthy as well for the way that it arguably feeds into a “[r]ashness” that she identifies as “one of the properties of illness” (42). La Marr Jurelle Bruce comments on this attitude, labeling it as an “unruliness of will that resists and unsettles reigning regimes of the normal” (Bruce 8). This becomes significant primarily because “[w]hereas rationalism roundly discredits madpersons, mad methodology recognizes madpersons as critical theorists and decisive protagonists in the struggles for liberation” (Bruce 9). Thus, Woolf positions herself as a “decisive [protagonist]” who is calling attention to the fact that “the law is on the side of the normal”—pointing towards what later scholars would deem the normate—which is enforced and upheld through the dehumanization of those of whom “[i]ncomprehensibility has an enormous power over,” thereby allowing for the delegitimization at the level of the “law” and enshrining the institution. However, it is also important to recognize the deficits in Woolf’s construction of disability and illness. As Elizabeth J. Donaldson describes it, “madness itself offers women little possibility for true resistance or productive rebellion” (101). Her meaning, here, is that it errs on the edge of romanticizing madness—serving “as a class marker of a higher sensibility”—as marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by the marking of “mad.” We can see 13 a demonstration of Donaldson’s argument in practice because, as Matt Franks point out, Woolf’s “reaction to people with disabilities is consistently one of shock and disavowal” (2), thereby “casting temporary illness as an exceptional disability in contrast to the “deformed” bodies of people with permanent physical and intellectual disabilities” (2). This is where reading Dazai in conjunction to Woolf becomes imperative as Dazai refuses a romanticization of his mental health struggles, writing “[t]he stubborn realist might describe these days [in the mental asylum] as a farce… The real farce is the way I blame my wife’s dark past for my troubles, as I swing from joy to sorrow. The real farce is in the way I straighten my collar as I duck into the pawnshop, thinking that swagger will conceal how far I’ve fallen. We’re all a bunch of clowns. If you want to see a farce, look in the mirror. A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance” (Dazai, Flowers 91). In this way, Dazai posits himself as the opposite of Woolf, reacting to his own disability with “shock and disavowal” that speaks to the extent of his deep illness, demonstrating how “[t]he essence of deep illness is to be always there for the ill person, and the person believes it always will be there” (Frank 197) and illustrating how “the ill person… is struggling to negotiate a life lived in deep illness” (Frank 198), thereby “put[ting] on a show of endurance.” And indeed, his deep illness is shown to explicitly dog his daily life through these series of farces. This makes his conclusion that “[w]e’re all a bunch of clowns” and his urging to “look in the mirror” “[i]f you want to see a farce” all the more important as it rejects the normate through such an engagement with a frank deep illness. In this sense, where it can be said that Woolf took the first steps to rectifying this “poverty of language,” Dazai not only perfected it, but identified its pillars. While “On Being Ill” does not shy away from connecting the visibility (or lack thereof) of disability to government oppression, Dazai does the same and then takes it one step further. 14 First, where the normate is concerned, Dazai takes aim at it with a greater cynicality than Woolf. “Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves? …All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one with is entirely unlike the rest… I might already have been disqualified from living among human beings” (Dazai, Human 25). Yozo’s tone in comparison to Woolf’s has a marked “rashness” (Woolf 42). Notably, there is no evidence in English to suggest that Dazai was familiar with Western concepts of disability. And though I recognize that I am reading this work in translation, I still find it remarkable how often Yozo outlines a normate here. He questions the universality of “the normality of their way of life,” recognizes that he is “unlike the rest,” concluding that he cannot be considered one of the “human beings.” Furthering the significance of this, this is being written as a reflection on his childhood years, further emphasizing his marginalization as a result of his depression since it was so great that he, as a child, had noticed it. And, as a child, he perceives this not to be the result of a governmentally institutionalized oppression, but a societal one. This is further supported when Yozo describes to the reader his process of clowning. “‘As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing’” (Dazai, Human 29). Here again we see a demonstration of Yozo’s ostracization in his perception of others as “the human beings.” The simple addition of “the” creates an even further distance between both Yozo and those around him and Yozo and his humanity, minimizing himself to “nothing” to survive. 15 Further, we can see a demonstration of the way in bodies are reduced to the commodities that they are producing. In this case, laughter is the commodity that is being produced, which quantifies Yozo’s worth in their eyes, creating a parallel to modern arguments by demonstrating that “disabled people are increasingly fashioned as a population that can be put into service on behalf of the nation-state rather than exclusively positioned as parasitic upon its resources and, therefore, somehow outside of its best interests” (Mitchell 17). That Mitchell and Snyder position the ableist perception of this relationship as “parasitic” gives larger weight to Yozo’s designation to “remain outside their lives,” which carries the same connotation, only softer. In connecting the ideas of “parasitic” and “offensive” as well, it allows for a greater distance between Yozo and his identity as human to be formed in the reader’s head, bolstering the image of him as a pest. “Parasitic” also connects to the concept of “nothing” in that they are incompatible ideas. To be “parasitic” means to siphon resources rather than producing them “on behalf of the nation-state,” thus to be “nothing” disqualifies one from an identification as such. However, Dazai also implies here that disabled bodyminds can never be truly capable of having value, even when they are of service, as “nothing” also bars one from that consideration. This is reinforced in “[a]s long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how.” On the surface, this appears to imply that the perception of Yozo is one that is not parasitic. However, in reading the urgency of “it doesn’t matter how,” we see that it connotates that one must be constantly producing in order to not be considered such—that “nothing” is an ideal state being worked towards rather than the default “parasitic,” evidenced by “[a]s long as,” which imputes an endless continuity. Finally, while Mitchell and Snyder identify the perpetrator of this disparity to be the “nation-state,” Dazai argues it is more specific than that. To Dazai, it is “human beings” who do 16 this oppressing, not the system itself—the system is the weapon, not the wielder. This active voice of this sentence versus Mitchell and Snyder’s passive one makes this all the more apparent, creating space for those who feel that they are “no longer human” to empathize with Yozo and to incur “the divine relief of sympathy” (Woolf 35) among “them.” Altogether, this thus provides further proof of the ways that disabled bodyminds are devalued and dehumanized by ableist institutions, with people as a whole becoming a stand-in—an enforcer—of the systemic oppression of the nation-state. Therein lies Dazai’s strongest argument in No Longer Human: it is incorrect to blame society as a whole for institutional oppression and dehumanization. In a conversation with his friend, Horiki, who says “You’ve gone far enough. Society won’t stand for more” (Dazai, Human 119), Yozo comes to the following conclusion. What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinking that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him… Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society. It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?... From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual? (Dazai, Human 119). His conviction of “[w]hat is society but an individual” resists considerations of oppression and dehumanization as purely systemic, positioning it instead an intersocial phenomenon. And while this is no groundbreaking sentiment—Woolf herself gestures towards this same conviction—it is a noteworthy one for the vitriol in which Yozo delivers these lines, “remarking on what is so overwhelmingly present that it is made into non-presence” (Anonymous 424). In this sense, what 17 Dazai achieves here is the banishing of the “non-presence,” making “present” the reality that it is the individual who bears the responsibility for committing this systemic violence, made possible by the repetitive use of second-person within this passage, thereby speaking out not just against Horiki, but the reader. Indeed, that his conception of society as “something powerful, harsh, and severe” works to this end as well. The conciseness of which this description is delivered is undercut by the lead in of “I had spent my whole life thinking that,” as the past tense here marks a change in thought. Thus, he no longer thinks so, and it is because of this new “conviction.” Society is not “powerful, harsh, and severe,” because Dazai does not believe individuals to be such. “[O]stracization” is important to this reading as well due to the relative passivity of the word—supporting the idea that the oppression by individuals is not “powerful, harsh, and severe” because ostracization, in comparison to other words such as segregation, is not. Now, this isn’t to say that such oppression by certain individuals is not such—indeed, it is, and it is fatal—but it simply supports Antonio Gramsci’s argument that “political power is not just won and held onto through material force, but requires the ‘manufactured consent’ of a majority of citizens” (cited in Anonymous, 425), and in the process of manufacturing such consent “a violent state cannot rely solely on material violence against dissenters” (Anonymous 425). Here we see a dominance of a certain political power that is not achieved through “material violence.” Instead, it is won as simply as one choosing to “[hold] the words back, reluctant to anger.” In this sense, it can be said that Yozo consents to his ostracization, and that such consent was a manufactured one through societal conventions, thereby exposing how tools of “a violent state” such as dehumanization become so prevalent as to become institutionalized. 18 This is reinforced in The Flowers of Buffonery. When institutionalized following his second suicide attempt, his friends question him on the circumstances, after which “[a]ll manner of forces swarmed [Yozo’s] heart. Haughtiness. Sloth. Flattery. Guile. Vice. Fatigue. Ferocity. Murder. Despair. Fragility. Deceit. Infection. He came this close to letting them spill out. But instead, he played the role of the heartsick man and groaned” (Dazai 34). From there, Dazai explains this emotional movement of Yozo’s, stating factually that “[i]t was only natural for Yozo to vacillate when asked about the reasoning behind his suicide—it was everything to him” (Dazai, Flowers 36). Once again, we see a manufactured consent, with the emotions of this scene being connected to Yozo’s “reluctan[ce] to anger” (Dazai, Human 119). Through this, though, we see an interesting commentary being made. Scarry writes that “[t]hough there are very great impediments to expressing another’s sentient distress, so are there also very great reasons why one might want to do so, and thus there comes to be avenues by which this most radically private of experiences begins to enter the realm of public discourse” (6). In this way, we can see this argument take shape through an interpretation of Dazai. Yozo is impeded from “expressing [his] sentient distress,” “vacillat[ing]” when asked about his reason to commit suicide. Now, it is important to recognize the importance of the “self” censorship here—which as stated before, is a result of societal conventions. This is very much still in play in this moment. By reading closely this passage, we can guess why Yozo might’ve chosen to “[play] the role of the heartsick man” instead. He attributes the attempt to a number of social taboos— “Murder” being the most evident of them. However, I am intrigued by the inclusion of “Infection” within this list. At no point in the narrative does it hint towards who Yozo might be “Infect[ing]” through his actions, nor who he might have received the infection from. However, by implementing a reading of a 19 possible engagement with degeneration theory, this then creates a concerning implication regarding the function of dehumanization. Again, there is no evidence to suggest Dazai had any familiarity with western conventions and conceptions of disability despite degeneration theory being well known and even engaged with by other prominent modernists of the time, meaning that any such engagement is unintentional on his end. However, it cannot be ignored the way in which Dazai/Yozo seems concerned with “an internal corruption” (Hernandez 187), that makes “the invisible malady of degeneration newly visible” (Hernandez 187). In this way, “Infection” is synonymous with “the invisible malady of degeneration.” With this, we then see that what Yozo fears in this moment is his “internal corruption” being “newly visible” as the “Infection” that it is by those he is speaking with in this moment, thereby allowing this “most radically private of experiences… to enter the realm of public discourse.” His rejection to do so, however, allows us to see yet another way Dazai might connect with Scarry. That is, “to have great pain is to have certainty: to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt” (Scarry 7). Yozo fears that his “great pain” will be met by “another person” and thus “doubt[ed].” He makes that clear when he explains his reasoning for not telling his cousin and his friend of the trigger for his suicide attempt—because his suicide “was everything to him,” and he does not want it to be misunderstood or belittled. Now, there are two ways to read “everything” that work to opposing ends of this dehumanization. The first, is that “everything” can be taken to mean all of the maladies that he lists out before. In this sense, his suicide is then “Haughtiness. Sloth. Flattery. Guile. Vice. Fatigue. Ferocity. Murder. Despair. Fragility. Deceit. Infection.” Again, “Murder” stands out here for the literal circumstances of this particular suicide attempt given that he had pursued a double-suicide 20 and that his partner had perished (later, he was almost charged with being an accomplice to suicide for this deed). In this way, “Murder” might point towards a guilt regarding her death—a moment that he ruminates on often through the rest of the novella. However, this is betrayed by his defaulting to the role of “heartsick man” when questioned by his friends. In this sense, this particular mask is an example of both his practice of clowning and his assertions of farce—both of which Yozo uses to circumvent interrogations into his “internal corruption.” Further, taking a more modern perception of disability to task here, there are some heavily stereotyped descriptions for a variety of disabled identities: “Sloth… Ferocity… Despair… “Fragility.” His reluctance to align himself with these ideals, then, further demonstrates his social consciousness, knowing that allowing his cousin and friend “to hear that another person has pain” will be met with doubt and further socially isolate him in the mental institution, which, in turn, would further dehumanize him by reinforcing his belief that “I barely qualify as human” since he questions “[w]ill I ever be a functional member of society?” (Dazai, Flowers 40), echoing earlier assertions that “I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born” (Dazai, Human 67). In this way, we see how disability, for Yozo, “functions primarily as a regulatory mechanism by which humanity can be distributed and withheld” (Smilges 9). It is because he is a “‘social outcast’” that he is not considered to be a “functional member of society,” which constitutes his qualification as “barely… human.” In this way, we see how Dazai brings to the forefront how society “distributed and withheld” humanity, thereby dehumanizing those who possess and “internal corruption.” The second way in which to read this “everything” is as a radical resistance of sorts against what Alexandre Baril calls “structural suicidism,” which “produces more harm and more deaths by suicide rather than [acting to] prevent suicide” (7) by enforcing a “compulsory 21 aliveness” which “impose a will to live that makes suicidal people’s desire/need for death abnormal, inconceivable, and unintelligible, except for those cast as unproductive, undesirable, and unsalvageable subjects” (Baril 11). In other words, suicidal subjects are robbed of their agency—denying them the right to die and forcing them to undergo treatment through structural systems that ultimately harms them and robs them further of their personal agency through the process of institutionalization. In Yozo’s case, the “it” here is meant to illustrate agency. Further, can clearly see both how structural suicidism and compulsory aliveness impose themselves in Yozo’s life through the fact that acts of suicide find a way to be criminalized (Dazai, Human 88) in the era of Japan that Yozo is operating within. This is why it is important not to read Yozo’s attempts as an idealization of suicide as doing so risks misunderstanding that it is not living that Yozo is struggling against, but compulsory aliveness itself—supported by his description of his suicidality being a matter of “Haughtiness… Infection.” Instead, it is better to consider that, in a system that has already robbed him of his ability to “qualify as human” by restricting his agency, we can see how this action could be framed as a form of resistance and, thus, his insistence on the “everything” comes in. Evidently, to brand his suicide attempt as “everything to him” means that it carries a meaning beyond the surface value—so much so that he fears vocalizing the “manner of forces [that] swarmed his heart.” Thus, it is no stretch to claim that Yozo might see his attempted suicide as a rebellion against the imposition of “a will to live” given that it carries such a weight to him. Through his clinging to this “everything,” it cements a transformation of an “abnormal, inconceivable, and unintelligible” into an act of calculated rebellion—a reclamation of agency from a society that renders those in deep illness as less than human. In doing so, dehumanization—which seeks to deprive its subjects of their agency—is both exposed for its robbery and subsequently resisted. 22 In reading this passage through the framework of suicidism, however, it is imperative that we recognize the importance of the ending of Flowers of Buffoonery to this message of agency. Though No Longer Human ends with the disappearance of Yozo from the narrative, Flowers ends with a flirtation. “Under the heavy morning mists, the seawater was churning. And then—no, that’s all I have” (96). This brings the novella full circle as it was a drowning attempt that landed him in the mental institution. Here, we see Yozo entertain the thought of a second attempt through his focus on how “the seawater was churning.” “And then” suggests that he was inclined to jump into the waters, but “that’s all I have” cuts through that, ending the narrative with inaction instead. Just as his attempt was meant to reclaim an agency that Yozo felt was deprived from him, this ending illustrates what Yozo does with his reclaimed agency. He actively chooses to live. He establishes that his “desire/need for death” is not “abnormal, inconceivable, and unintelligible,” thereby resisting the label of “unsalvageable” and further reclaiming his humanity. Now, having established the way in which Dazai sees dehumanization occur, I conclude my exploration of his work with his judgement on his own humanity. In the final pages of No Longer Human, Yozo’s brother sends him to an asylum. In the car, Yozo laments “And now I had become a madman. Even if released, I would be forever branded on the forehead with the word ‘madman,’ or perhaps, ‘reject.’ Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being” (Dazai, Human 167). Here, we see another instance of “manufactured consent.” “[M]anufactured” is read here through the verbiage of being “branded” and “[d]isqualified,” as they are being enacted upon Yozo by others, not by himself. In commenting on No Longer Human’s influence, Yoko Tawada writes “if someone is in a situation where they lack the strength or any real prospect for achieving [living without fear in society], the only 23 solution that seems possible is to give up being human… [a split] thereby emerges between one’s life (inochi) or one’s true self, on the one hand, and one’s existence as a human, as a self shaped by social pressures” (Tawada 10). Now, this disagrees slightly with my argument—insinuating that Yozo “[gave] up being human” instead of being coerced into doing so, but it is this mapping of the split in conjunction with a reading of “[giving] up being human” as a process of manufactured consent that I find fruitful in arguing for a dystopian reading of this work. By reading this work as dystopian, we see yet another way dehumanization occurs. Aaron S. Rosenfield makes the argument that in dystopian literature, “[t]he search for a negotiated settlement between the two imaged realms becomes both a diegetic and a formal problem: at the level of plot, a character must struggle and triumph or fail in establishing a stable space within his or her environment; at the level of form, the reader must struggle to determine where the character ends and setting begins” (Rosenfield 42). Now, it might initially appear that this would not apply to No Longer Human due to the autobiographical nature of the work. However, it is precisely because it exists in this medium that allows us to see this. Evidently, Yozo struggles and fails in establishing a stable space within his environment, as determined by how he “ceased utterly to be a human being.” Where form is concerned, it allows Dazai to become a reader to his own life. Thus, we can see that his decision to clown—his belief that “[a]s long as I can make them laugh” (Dazai, Human 29)—constitutes his own struggle to “determine where the character ends and setting begins.” Therein lies the final way that Dazai demonstrates how dehumanization occurs—when one is robbed of being an active agent within their own life. This is metaphorized in how Dazai was “[d]isqualified as a human being” and reduced down to a character rather than a person, making Yozo his “self shaped by social pressures” (Tawada 10). In this case, such dehumanization was a direct result of his institutionalization. 24 Through the course of this chapter, I have charted the ways that modernist writers Virginia Woolf and Dazai Osamu have identified the ways in which dehumanization comes to be institutionalized, as well as their attempts to resist it. Further, I have detailed the ways in which Woolf establishes a starting point of the comprehensible where disabled language is concerned and how Dazai mental health narrative’s not only echoes her sentiments regarding how “[i]ncomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness,” but makes clear his comprehension of his society as a dystopia and challenges perceptions of it being purely institutional, positing to his reader the question of “[w]hat is society but an individual” (120). In framing the process of dehumanization in this fashion, it paves the way for later scholars such as Eli Clare to elaborate further on this idea, marking the beginnings of imaginings of better futures. 25 Chapter Two: A Multi-Faceted Delegitimization Audre Lorde is an activist best known for her racial and gender advocacy. However, I’d like to give space to her here to acknowledge her writings on disability. Now, it is important to recognize that, though she wrote extensively about her experience with cancer, Lorde never considered herself disabled. As such, her writings on disability often center the other intersections of her identity, but I point to them nonetheless for the candidness with which she critiques efforts of delegitimization. In her speech “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Lorde writes the following. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid” (15). I choose to open this chapter with this invocation of Lorde for a handful of reasons. First delivered at the Modern Language Association’s “Lesbian Literature Panel” in 1977, this establishes much of what the foundational disability scholars later theorize. Here, in her “we,” Lorde is speaking primarily to the experience of Black women but acknowledges the ways in which this experience is shared amongst many other marginalized groups, as indicated by her “most of you here today, Black or not.” We can see how this quotation exists as a wonderful demonstration of the expansion of scope. We first see her call out systemic dehumanization as 26 early disability theorists did through her blatant recognition that “we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings.” Through this, she establishes the baseline of the movement. From there, we see a movement towards a protest against the delegitimization of disability and disabled struggles, as well as an acknowledgement of the ways that that struggle is intersectional. One such way she acknowledges this intersectionality is the respect she gives to the environment. When she writes “while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned,” I doubt that she meant “distorted and destroyed” to refer to disability theory given the context of this speech. Yet it nonetheless argues the point that such “distort[ion] and destr[uction]” is institutional since “the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway.” This, in tandem with her decrying that “our earth is poisoned,” works to resist the efforts of “the machine” to further delegitimize “that visibility which makes us most vulnerable,” therein allowing us to read dystopia in works that do the same, such as Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride. In fact, this sentiment mirror’s Clare’s opening line: “[t]he mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people, people whose bones get crushed in the grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy” (Clare 1). Over the course of the rest of the memoir, he goes on to engage with key points in both the legacy of disability in the United States and his own personal history, using these moments to formulate key theories that articulate the oppression of disabled bodyminds. This reveals the growing concern with “[n]aming [o]ppression” (Linton), shifting focus away from disability as a medical term and instead seeing it, as Thomas Couser describes in a later decade, as something that “inescapably attend[s] human embodiment” (3). Therefore, for the rest of this chapter, I will be exploring more in-depth Clare’s concern with the metaphorical and literal poisoning of nature and its implications on disability, as well as with the “human embodiment” of oppression. 27 Drawing once more on the genre conventions of the dystopian genre portraying a society in “decline” (“What”) with protagonists embroiled in a fight against a deteriorating environment and government oppression, it is important to recognize the candidness with which Clare often intertwines his natural imagery with that of oppression. Clare begins Exile and Pride with the image of a mountain, superimposing the metaphorical meaning of conquering a mountain with the lived, failed attempt to. To this effect, Clare writes “[t]he mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people, people whose bones get crushed in the grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy… We’ve hit our heads on glass ceilings, tried to climb the class ladder, lost fights against assimilation, scrambled toward that phantom called normality” (Clare 1). Now, I wouldn’t exactly say that this image embodies the environmental ruin, however, it very clearly displays the poisoning of it. Nature is something that is meant to nourish and provide, not “[crush]” and “grind.” In this way, the nature’s positivity has been destroyed—and the beginning of its destruction marked—in the name of upholding what Clare identifies as “capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy,” which act as the pillars of oppression that perpetuate a delegitimization of marginalized people. To this point as well, in connecting Clare with a contemporary disability scholar, we can further connect the “grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy” to the environmental destruction perpetuated by the United States Government. As Sunaura Taylor explains, “[m]y disability was caused by United States military pollution in the town where I was born. Everything about my story is typical: the military and its industries secretly dumping toxic chemicals in unlined pits in the ground for decades… My body was formed with the help of toxic chemicals, heavy metals, airplane degreasers—the mundane detritus of militarization” (120). Now, it is important that the context in which Taylor is writing her includes her drawing 28 distinctions between her “natural” body and her “medicalized” one. This excerpt is part of her descriptions of the former. Thus, we see “nature” directly connected to a poisoning—made explicit by the “toxic chemicals, heavy metals, airplane degreasers” that were being “secretly dump[ed],” with Taylor’s “formed” body representing nature at large. It is here that we see the truth and the urgency in connecting the struggle for environmental and disability justices—it is on disabled bodies that these pains are mapped. Thus, through the application of Taylor, we can also see it be made explicit that it is indeed an institutional oppression that Clare is identifying. In the chapter clearcut: brutes and bumper stickers, Clare pushes for his reader to see a similar “fuller analysis” (Clare 62) and recognize that, while the logging companies are certainly an issue, the government endorses their actions—just as Taylor has pushed to hold the military responsible. Clare argues that “[a]s citizens of the most powerful imperialist, resource-greedy nation in the world, as consumers who have forgotten the meaning of sustainable yield, are we now serious about changing our relationship to the planet and its resources” (Clare 67). He goes on to criticize the hold that industry has on societal wellbeing, how they created towns built on “a certain unquestioned greed” that consume unthinkingly. These both elaborate on his opening critiques of “capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy”—the first through his naming of the United States as “the most powerful imperialist, resource-greedy nation in the world,” through which we can see demonstrated by how “capitalism… white supremacy” “looms large in the lives of marginalized people.” Further, to give this the “fuller analysis” that Clare calls for, we can see that Clare goes through this effort in order to call attention to the delegitimization efforts by these groups—especially as pertains to how the struggles against imperialism are not a disability issue, which becomes especially important to disability studies in more contemporary times. 29 Elizabeth Wheeler takes Clare’s commentary regarding the interconnectivity of disability rights and environmentalism a step further in her essay “Don’t Climb Every Mountain.” In this essay, she examines Clare’s method of imaging of environmentalism. One important context that she introduces is the ecological perspective that positions disability and environmentalism as opposing forces, illustrated by Clare’s engagement with the imagery of the mountain, which exists both literally and figuratively and of which a disabled “we get to the summit [of], but probably not” (Clare 2) and gestures to the idea of the supercrip. First introduced by Clare, the supercrip is focused on disabled people “‘overcoming’ [their] disabilities. They reinforce the superiority of the nondisabled body and mind. They turn individual people, who are simply leading their lives, into symbols of inspiration” (Clare 2). Thus, those who “get to the summit” are manipulated to support ableist rhetoric that refuses to acknowledge the ways that the “lack of access, lack of employment, lack of education, lack of personal attendant services… stereotypes and attitudes… oppression” (Clare 3) are the true barrier for those who are “probably not” able to reach the summit—both metaphorically and literally. Through this naming of oppression, Clare thus delegitimizes it. Wheeler identifies this particular method of Clare’s as playing with the politics of disorientation in his memoir. This, she argues, allows him to “diverge from the ordinary paths through the forest, and… enrich his social ethics… dismantle[ing] bodily stereotypes and barriers.” One such example of his usage of this comes in his engagement with the literal and societal body. He muses on “[t]he body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies can be stolen, fed lies and poison, torn away from us. They rise up around me—bodies stolen by hunger, war, breast cancer, AIDS, rape; the daily grind of factory, sweatshop, cannery, sawmill; the lynching rope; the freezing streets; the nursing home and prison” (Clare 12). Here, we see 30 disorientation achieved through the initial softness of the image of “[t]he body as home” before that is “torn away from us,” disorienting the reader through the descriptions of the ways that Clare sees “bodies stolen” by the “grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy.” This resists the “stereotypes and attitudes” that are often associated with these oppressions—ones that are racialized (“the lynching rope”), economized (“hunger,” “daily grind,” “freezing streets”), and imperialized (“war,” “prison”), which are similarly cited as reasons for marginalized groups to “probably not” “get to the summit.” He concludes this section with an articulation of the importance of “diverg[ing] from ordinary paths through the forest” which might have him centering his singular disabled body to speak for all oppression, saying that “for the lies and false images, we need to name them, transform them, create something entirely new in their place… entering our bodies as liberation, joy, fury, hope, a will to refigure the world.” Therein lies one of his most important arguments: “the powerful presence of hunger is not enough to fuel rebellion. There must be cooperation, community, emotional more than political alliances to bring about change” (Jones 225). Thus, to “transform” the “lies and false images”—the praxes for oppression—we see how Clare honors the human embodiment of oppression and rejects a further “[tearing] away” of the bodily autonomy that accompanies a systemic oppression. Clare also takes care to explore a relationship between the systemic oppression and the oppressors. One way in which Clare does this is when he points out the growing discontent around the abuse of the natural environment in his hometown. He writes about its dying logging industry, and reflects on how very little positive action is actually taken as they instead try to circumvent the crisis by promoting further destruction through the phrase “‘save a logger, kill a spotted owl,’” (Clare 64) because it is easier to blame environmental protection efforts instead of the logging executives. As Clare points out, “[c]omplicity follows twin paths, one tracking the 31 course of capitalism and the other tracking the people who sustain and benefit the most from that system” (Clare 63). Here, we see the resonance of the earlier quotation that “[t]here must be cooperation, community, emotional more than political alliances to bring about change.” There is evidently a hunger for stability within the three active communities—the working class, the middle class, and the upper class—and the stability for the upper class comes at the expense of the two others. The “rich white men in suits who run the world” (Clare 64) have fostered this hostility to uphold their world order. They have pit the working and middles classes against each other to ensure that the “cooperation, community” (Jones 225) that is needed to change the world for the better never comes, thereby forcing the collective into the parallel paths of complicity. In other words, it is not a conscious decision for the collective to be such a passive force in their own oppression, but a manufactured environment to keep a specific group in power. Just as Clare cites these “rich white men in suits who run the world” as an oppressive force, however, he is clear to hold accountable other populations for their part. He reflects on how his classmates “taunted [him] with retard, monkey, defect” and subjected him to being “the class outcast” (Clare 108). In the same vein, it was not Clare’s cerebral palsy that ostracized him, it was his classmates and school district administrators. From there, he draws the conclusion that “to blame the system without also holding individuals accountable is to leave the system untouched” (Clare 63). Thus, in order to dismantle dystopia, we must recognize exactly which institutions are upholding them. Clare cites two such contributors to the problems that he has encountered: medicine and government. Scholars write plenty on the problematic nature of the medical model of disability. Clare, however, engages with this idea in a slightly different way. In Clare’s words, “[s]ome disabled people, depending on their disabilities, may indeed have pressing medical needs for a specific 32 period of time or on an ongoing basis. But having particular medical needs differs from labeling a person with multiple sclerosis as sick, or thinking of quadriplegia as a disease… In short it is ableism that needs the cure, not our bodies” (Clare 122). Where medicine becomes an institution is when individual doctors carry inherently ableism beliefs. As Rebecca Garden points out, illness and the experience with it is a subjective experience—a fact that doctors tend to forget when they indulge in texts that ignore the “larger socioculture context of health and illness” (Garden). And, given that in this situation, it is individual doctors making decisions to enforce on the collective, it is important to recognize the source of the influence which is “the desire of some to have comfort and safety at the expense of others” (Morris 262). Thus, by decentering the “comfort and safety” of the disabled individual and prioritizing the “comfort” of non-disabled bodyminds, we can see the roots of the perception of what is better for an abled bodied society, thus establishing a struggle for legitimization of disabled bodyminds within this institution. Once again taking on an intersectional approach, Clare calls attention to how government oppresses not only people with disabilities, but also discusses the discrimination against people of color and people within the LGBTQ+ community. Where this becomes important is that in the incidents that Clare cites such as the human zoo of Igorot Village or the usage of a pink triangle by the Nazis to identify gay men, though the government has a hand in this oppression, there is still the passive majority supporting them through their silence. When taking into account the governmental oppression of people with disabilities as well, it exposes that oppression rarely occurs in a bubble. In this regard, I want to give attention to a specific historical event that Clare brings up—P.T. Barnum’s circus, which put on exhibit for the public to gawk at society’s “freaks.” This is significant because of the connotations of the word “circus.” Gregory Aldrete writes of a Roman political distraction tactic known as “bread 33 and circuses.” The premise of this philosophy is that leaders “kept the populace complacent and politically inert by plying them with violent entertainments” (Aldrete 5). That Barnum’s circus came during a time where tensions were high (right off the Civil War, during the Restoration Period) should be recognized as one such “violent entertainment.” Now, it wasn’t violent in the physical sense of the work, but in the way in which it has impacted those in the disability community. In Clare’s words: “[t]he social construction of freaks always relied upon the perceived gap between a rube’s normality and a freak’s abnormality” (Clare 91). Through this, Clare is speaking to a simultaneously autonomous, empowering environment and dehumanizing situation by elevating people with disabilities to an international stage through the exploitation of their impairments, letting them be branded with label of “freak” contributing further to their overall ostracization from society through a marked delegitimization and dehumanization. Clare further establishes the importance of acting with an intersectional perspective in mind, beginning his memoir with the established goal of encouraging “gendered possibilities in the world to be, not normal, but rather profoundly ordinary and familiar” (Clare xxviii). We see this most strongly at the end of the mountain when Clare writes the following. Someday after the revolution, disabled people will live ordinary lives, neither heroic nor tragic. Crip, queer, freak, redneck will be mere words describing human difference. Supercrip will be dead; the nursing home, burnt down; the metaphoric mountain, collapsed in volcanic splendor. Post-revolution I expect there will still be literal mountains I want to climb and can’t, but I’ll be able to say without doubt, without hesitation, “Let’s turn around here. This one is too steep, too slippery for my feet. (Clare 13) 34 One of the most important points in this quote is the usage of “revolution.” Clare never once refers to the revolution in “ifs,” but in absolutes. He realizes that our society is reaching a breaking point in our intolerances for each other and our inherent “human difference.” Through this recognition, he argues as well that our medical model is unsustainable. That is why he envisions that “[s]upercrip will be dead; the nursing home, burnt down,” because Clare views these concepts as indicators of a broken system, not a functional one. In Clare’s eyes, they do no more than isolate and differentiate those to whom these institutions effect in the name of creating societal order. Finally, there is the subtle argument that society does not see disabled people as fully human. Clare fantasizes about how they “will live ordinary lives, neither heroic nor tragic.” This dehumanization to being nothing more than characters in some narrative that society spins serves only inspire others, further establishing the inequality between disabled and abled bodies by using abled bodies as a tool for further delegitimization. Drawing on Lorde one final time, we see the pains that Clare went to in order to teach “this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive.” Through the establishment of this lesson, he then urges the reader to recognize the importance of “[t]he [t]ransformation of [s]ilence into [l]anguage and [a]ction” in order to reject ableist perceptions concerns as illegitimate, giving name to a multi-faceted oppression and honoring the ways in which it is embodied. In doing so, we see how “disability activists and scholars… [are] returning the Medusa gaze of the “normal” in action and in print” (Davis 501), proving that “that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” Thus, we see the delegitimization of what was once the “‘normal,’” which leaves space for contemporary writers and scholars, such as Alice Wong, to critique other normalized institutional oppressions through the lens of disability studies. 35 Chapter Three: Delineating Progression Disability studies has undeniably become intertwined with medical history. However, it is in recent years that disability scholars have begun to resist this categorization, delineating the field and diversifying it to be more cognizant of cultural influences. Among those theories, we also see a criticism of the ways in which disability studies often centers whiteness, ignoring the imperialist influences at play. We see this best reflected in the first half of the contemporary period through pieces such as Chris Bell’s “White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal.” Additionally, we also see the rise of mixed media memoirs—Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility Project (founded in 2014) providing one such collection, describing itself as “an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture” (“About”). Therein lies the concern with Wong’s work: she focuses on diversifying the field of disability narratives by making the storytelling process more accessible. The second half of the contemporary period stands in stark difference to the first—the COVID-19 Pandemic having an undeniable influence on the disability community. Wong’s own memoir, Year of the Tiger, seeks to create space in this time period—influenced, no doubt, by the early contemporary scholarship in addition to pandemic attitudes. Wong marks contemporary disability studies as focusing on the future, rejecting notions such as “[e]nforcing [n]ormalcy” (Bell 276) and expanding the meaning of disability justice to include ideas of environmental and colonial justice as well, giving weight to Alice Wong’s conclusion that “[i]t is not enough to say we exist and need more representation. I prefer to center ourselves and be in community with one another.” Due to the multimedia nature of Wong’s memoir, temporality is played with heavily, allowing the ideas that she engages with to blur the division in the contemporary period that I 36 have identified. One such moment in which she does this is in an interview with Rochelle Kwan. Wong speaks on the impact of the American with Disabilities Act (passed in 1990), saying “the A.D.A. [gave] us a law that we could call our own. It was the law that was for us, and it was the law that enshrined our legal protections. There were other laws before that, but the A.D.A. really enshrined in our legal protections. There were other laws before that, but the A.D.A. really was the one we could use as a tool. And I think it’s a tool. It’s just the beginning of creating change” (40). I point to this specific quote of Wong’s because of how well it illustrates the foundation of Bell’s essay. Bell’s essay rejects the acceptance of a racial normate within the study of disability. Bell scorns “the failure of Disability Studies to engage issues of race and ethnicity in a substantive capacity, thereby entrenching whiteness as its constitutive underpinning” (275). In this way, we can extend this critique to activate Wong’s statements regarding the role of the A.D.A. In this way, both are “the beginning of creating change.” In reading the language of the A.D.A., at no point does it acknowledge the “issues of race and ethnicity in a substantive capacity” as relates to their intersection with disability, acknowledging only that “society has tended to isolate and segregate individuals with disabilities” (American with Disabilities Act). Therein lies the necessity to decolonize the field of disability studies. “As it stands, Disability Studies has a tenuous relationship with race and ethnicity: while the field readily acknowledges its debt to and inspiration by inquiries such as Black Studies, its efforts at addressing intersections between disability, race, and ethnicity are, at best, wanting” (Bell 278). In the previous chapter, I have paid homage to Audre Lorde for her own inquiries into disability. Over the course of this chapter, I hope to continue to address Bell’s concerns regarding a deficit among the “intersections between disability, race, and ethnicity,” extending it as well to the inclusion of 37 environmental and colonial justice as well. In this way, I seek to ensure that my research does not reinforce “White Disability Studies,” which would only fortify the dystopia I aim to identify and reject. In Alice Wong’s own words, “[i]t is not enough to say we exist and need more representation. I prefer to center ourselves and be in community with one another.” Thus, through the implementation of elements of speculative fiction in her memoir, Wong is thereby encompassing a struggle against dehumanization and delegitimization in order to advocate for a decolonization of the field. Wong’s most significant engagement with the concept of the dehumanization of disabled people comes with her assuming of the title “Medicaid moocher” (Wong 59). Wong states that “[w]hen Republicans talk about safety net programs like Medicaid, Social Security, and food stamps, the evoke images of people like me gabbing on their smartphones, eating steak, and watching T.V. from the comfort of home. Political rhetoric and media coverage paint us as unmotivated and undeserving individuals, passive consumers of taxpayer dollars who are out to “game the system,” taking resources away from hardworking people” (59). While I disagree with Wong’s specific naming of Republicans as being the one to establish these images (indeed, it is imperative to recognize that ableism is not a solely conservative thought), I find the rest of her writing to hold strong merit for the way it employs dehumanization that is contrary to what one might expect. First, the idea of “moocher” here invokes the imagery of a parasite, thus establishing the “Medicaid moocher” as a person not fully human—establishing a concept of dehuman that stands in direct contrast to the “people” who are “hardworking.” Thus, it is not dehumanizing in the sense that it directly compares people with disabilities to a non-human creature, but that it does so through a reliance of the connotation of “moocher.” 38 Further, Wong relies on Christian concepts of sin in order to work towards this goal as well by reading this passage through the lens of the Seven Deadly Sins—particularly those of gluttony and sloth. Gluttony gets invoked most prominently through the imagery of the “passive consumers of taxpayer dollars” “eating steak.” Because of the specification of “passive” here, we can doubly read this as a perpetual action. Pair this with the concept of consumption, and the association of this image becomes clear. However, it is the description of “eating steak” that cements this connection. Gluttony, after all, is the consumption in excess. With steak carrying connotations of opulence—standing in stark contrast to its connection with “food stamps,” which realistically impose limitations on the amount of food available for one to consume—we can thus read gluttony in this diction. Sloth is much easier to prove, here. In fact, it is almost stated outright through how “[p]olitical rhetoric and media coverage paint us as unmotivated and undeserving individuals… taking away resources from hardworking people.” More implicitly as well, we see it through the image of “people like me gabbing on their smartphones… watching T.V.” In the former quotation, “unmotivated” can be read as synonymous with laziness, lending itself well to the concept of sloth. “[G]abbing” and “watching T.V.” work to this effect as well. Both images are meant to emphasize a non-activity of sorts—one that is mindless due to “gabbing” being often being done with trivial matters and “watching T.V.” often tied to laziness through associations with the “couch potato.” This ultimately serves to highlight the perceived disparity, then, between this population and the “hardworking people,” which gets exaggerated by “[p]olitical rhetoric and media coverage” to justify the discrimination against people with disabilities, thus forming the foundation for a systemic oppression. 39 Now, I recognize that it might be a stretch to read religion in here as illustrating a method of dehumanization. However, by using religiously charged images in this way, Wong thus exposes that this particular vein of thought dehumanizes people with disabilities by demonizing them and rebels against it. Catherine J. Kudlick points out that “[t]he specter of disability also came through in religious writings and eventually would underpin scientific notions of progress and evolution’s ‘survival of the fittest’” (766). Moreover, viewing this passage through a lens of religiosity also hints towards a narrative phenomenon of what Jay Dolmage calls “Physical Deformity as Sign of Internal Flaw,” wherein “[d]escribing the body of an individual and accentuating its foreignness, abnormality, or exoticness allow for insinuations of internal deviance or lack” (35). In this sense, we might argue that “[t]he specter of [religion]” is coming through in this disability writing through the association of people with disabilities with sinfulness. We can see the critique of “scientific notions of progress and evolution’s ‘survival of the fittest’” here in how Wong resists the labeling of “unmotivated and undeserving” and rejects the idea that only “hardworking people”—the “fittest” according to a capitalistic praxis—deserve resources and can have them taken away. Further, “abnormality” is “[accentuated]” in this excerpt through the establishment of “people like me”—which connotates the existence of an other that stands in contrast to the normate—the “hardworking people.” Thus, in reading the “people like me” as gluttonous and slothful, people with disabilities are then insinuated by “[p]olitical rhetoric and media coverage” to bear “internal deviance or lack,” further cementing the effect of institutional oppression. Outside of this religious engagement as a method of subversion, Wong brings attention to the process of obtaining Medicare to emphasize the ways in which the process itself of fighting for one’s medical rights is dehumanizing—settling it more firmly outside the realm of a social 40 dehumanization and inside that of the institutional. Wong writes “‘[w]hen you are disabled and rely on public services and programs, you face vulnerability every day. This vulnerability is felt in my bones and in my relationship with the state. Fluctuations in the economy and politics determine whether my attendants will receive a living wage and whether I’ll have enough services to subsist rather than thrive. The fragility and weakness of my body I can handle. The fragility of the safety net is something I fear and worry about constantly” (61). Now, this is not explicitly dehumanizing in that it doesn’t literally render disabled bodies as non-human. However, it works to further debilitate the disabled body, operating as a mental maiming, which “becomes a primary vector through which biopolitical control is deployed in colonized space and hence not easily demarcated “necro” as it is mapped in Mbembe’s reworking of biopolitics” (Puar 136). And indeed, it is a maiming. We see that this is occurring in such a “colonized space” through Wong’s connection of this “vulnerability” as being subject to “[f]luctuations in the economy and politics.” And, similarly to Puar’s argument, Wong’s mapping of biopolitics is “not easily demarcated “necro”” due to the fact that death itself is not invoked in Wong’s passage. However, we can see that Wong alludes to a slow death here—to “a concept that refers to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population, which is very nearly a defining condition of the experience and historical existence” (Goodley 981). Slow death is alluded to here can be read in understand that when Wong speaks of having to “subsist rather than thrive,” she is pointing towards “the physical wearing out… and the deterioration” of both herself and her attendants, thereby speaking for the broader disabled population in this moment. Further, it is easy to recognize that Wong’s “fear and worry” contributes to this “physical wearing out” as well when we recontextualize the body 41 and mind as one singular entity rather than considering the mental separate from the physical, thus demonstrating yet another instance of institutional oppression. In her depictions of struggle against delegitimization of disabled bodies, Wong takes a much more intersectional approach of sorts—centering a critique of isolationist environmentalism in her advocacy through a dissection the ignorance that accompanies the bans on plastic straws. First, she acknowledges the struggle of environmentalists, writing “[p]lastic straws are considered unnecessary items used by environmentalists as a “gateway plastic” to engage the public in a larger conversation about waste” before pointing out the marginalization that occurs from this attitude since “one person’s social prop is another person’s conduit for nutrition. It’s as if people who rely on straws—older adults, children, and disabled people—don’t matter and our needs are less important that the environment. I feel erased by these attitudes” (113). Wong is very careful to not diminish the importance of the environmentalist movement—important due to her centering of community to her arguments regarding disability justice. However, her critique lacks no vitriol—calling out the unnecessary delegitimization of disabled bodies that often occurs in these spaces. And it is indeed unnecessary because, as Wong points out, the bans on plastic straws are meant only to “engage the public.” It is key here that this connotates that no grand environmental intervention is happening on behalf of these bans with the plastic waste generated by them being negligible in comparison to the destruction enacted by corporations and the United States military. Thus, for “older adults, children, and disabled people,” that this “social prop” is being touted about in such a way, it sends a clear message. Their concerns will be “erased” in favor of the environment. Along this line, there is also a problem with shifting the burden for care on the person with a disability as opposed to adopting a community care-oriented approach. As Wong points 42 out, “[p]eople have told me that I still have access to biodegradable straws at Starbucks, despite my reasons for using plastic ones. People have told me to bring my own reusable straws without thinking about the extra work that entails… This is not just, equitable, or hospitable. This is the experience of living in a world that was never built for you: having to explain and defend yourself while providing infinite amounts of labor at the demand of people who do not recognize their nondisabled privilege” (114). Here, we see a direct delegitimization of the concerns of people with disabilities—particularly in the emphasis of “still… despite my reasons,” which demonstrates the lack of true concern regarding the situation, thereby creating the delegitimization. Further, Wong’s decrying of “having to explain and defend yourself” provides another demonstration of my earlier argument regarding the interplay of slow death and necro politics at work here as it neatly parallels Goodley’s description of slow death as a “physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population.” Applying this now to the idea of delegitimization, however, is important for the way that Wong turns the argument back on those “who do not recognize their nondisabled privilege.” In this way, she formulates a call to action that requires one to familiarize themselves with their own positionality, thereby resisting this by delegitimizing the abled body’s opinion on the matter since they lack “the experience of living in a world that was built for [them].” In doing so, she makes no room for ignorance to be sheltered and emphasizes the need for a community-oriented approach to both environmental and disability activism—one that encourages people to consider the world beyond the ways their own body interacts with it. A second (albeit tangential) implication in this particular passage criticizes the role that capitalism has in the delegitimization of disability. When Wong invokes the concept of labor here, I recognize that she does not mean it in the sense of professional work, but rather to invoke 43 the idea of manual labor to emphasize the effort that these actions perceived to be as inconsequential by abled bodies requires. However, it is nonetheless important to consider this in the economic idea of labor so that we might begin to see more clearly Wong’s criticisms of such labor-centric communities. To this point, Wong writes that “[w]hat people don’t understand with bans like this is that having to ask for a plastic straw puts an unfair burden and scrutiny on people with disabilities. They should not have to prove a medical need or even disclose their disability status when having a fun night out with friends” (115). Aimi Hamraie points out that “[c]itizenship became contingent on productive labor, as determined by the science of work, in the twentieth century” (61). Similarly, Catherine Kudlick points out that “Western nations embraced capitalism, a system predicated on able-bodies ideals of independence, strength, control, self-mastery, and struggle” (Kudlick 766). “Citizenship” is the key to this reading of Wong as it is the one that most directly contributes to an idea of a shared identity that (theoretical) forms a community. In this way, to “properly” be a citizen one must demonstrate “independence, strength, control, self-mastery, and [prevail against] struggle”—all of which ignore the limitations imposed by disability in those regards, thereby delegitimizing those who cannot conform to these ideals. This also illustrates how “[i]naccessibility occurs when disabled people and our needs are intentionally dismissed or accidentally overlooked” (Smilges 3). In this case, we see that the needs of disabled people were, at first, accidentally overlooked and, when this deficit was called out, this inaccessibility was then doubled down upon, thereby “intentionally [dismissing]” “disabled people and our needs.” Thus, while the first two quotations speak more directly on an economic labor, we can nonetheless apply this logic to this excerpt in to read that social labor often goes unrecognized, and, thus, works to delegitimize marginalized communities through the reinforcement of an inaccessible environment. 44 Returning back to Wong’s engagement with environmentalism, we see her directly call for a cooperation between the two movements. Wong writes that “[t]he plastic straw ban is symptomatic of larger systemic issues when it comes to the continual struggle for disability rights and justice… Ableist attitudes that cast disabled people as “fakers” or “complainers” obscure the very real and painful experiences of not being able to eat and drink freely” (114). Again, we can see an explicit critique of delegitimizing rhetoric with Wong rightfully calling those who deride “disabled people as ‘fakers’ or ‘complainers’” ableist. “Fakers” in particular sends this message strongly and carries greater weight in light of her discontent with “[having] to prove a medical need or even disclose their disability status” as this creates an isolated experience that thus translates to a sort of segregation. Further, that the “fix” to this problem coming in the form of “[having] to prove a medical need” is also inherently problematic as it relies on the fact and reinforces the stereotype that “[p]eople with disabilities are represented as sad and impotent, a problem that can be solved via charity” (Dolmage 35). Though this social transaction might not be initially perceived as charity, it is nonetheless so as it positions the abled bodied person who graciously allows the person with a disability to have their “conduit for nutrition” in their moment of “[sadness] and [impotence],” thereby allowing them to step in and become a savior in this moment by granting them this bit of charity. In doing so, this further strips disabled bodies of their agency, reinforcing their delegitimization. Wong does not shy away from the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on disability rights either. Wong often speaks on the issue of race and the issue of disability over the course of her memoir, but very sparingly speaks of them in conjunction. One such instance of this occurs in her chapter titled “Letter to Asian American Disabled Women and Girls,” which helps to 45 directly connect the two. There, she acknowledges the difficulty of bearing that intersectional identity. There will also be times you’re made to feel like you can’t be your full self, that you have to choose. Or that you have to be grateful to be in America because things are “better” here (on stolen land, by the way). Resist the notion that disability rights and disability justice in the United States are more progressive or a beacon to the world, because that’s some capitalist colonizer bullshit. We can take the best parts of our cultures and let them inform our understanding of what it means to be human. There is wisdom and beauty from disabled people everywhere. We just have to look and have the humility to learn” (256). There are several important calls to decolonize that are occurring here. The first comes through the image of the “full self” and the fact that “you can’t be [it].” There are two primary images that this activates for me. The first is the racial sense of half-ness. Now, this comes to mind most prominently because of the activation of the specification of “Asian American” in this chapter’s title. Prominent in Filipino studies is the concept of the mestizaje, of which “simultaneously becomes a marker of difference from the colonized indio and a vehicle evoking and evidencing their reform—the mestizo body then is the evidence, product, and agent of colonial rehabilitation… mestizaje is itself a racial ideology of ability marking a preference for able-bodied and able-mindedness aligned with the colonial project” (Bolton 7). Though Wong is not explicitly pointing to this particular theory, we can nonetheless see some of it at play here. Interpreting this body that “can’t be [a] full self” as a mestizo one thus allows us to better understand Wong’s colonial critique. If “the mestizo body… is the evidence, product, and agent of colonial rehabilitation,” that she centers America (the primary colonizing force of the 46 Philippines) here allows this image to activate even further. Now, “evidence… and agent” are best read through their original racial lens. However, it is the concept of the mestizo as a “product… of colonial rehabilitation” that reveals an important engagement between the colonial theory and disability. “[P]roduct” exists in a double meaning here. The first is as a physical good—a product to be sold. The second is as a byproduct—the result of an action. Both readings can apply to Wong, Considering product as a commodity, it can be said that disabled bodies themselves are used as such by “[p]olitical rhetoric and media” (Wong 59). Both this rhetoric and media operate out of and platform “capitalist colonizer bullshit”—for their own gain, in which is itself a form of “productive labor” (Hamraie 61) as it is then leveraged to achieve a certain goal (as exampled in the earlier arguments surrounding the idea of Medicaid Moocher). This is best illustrated in Sonny Coráñez Bolton’s mapping of similar practices in the Philippines wherein “the confluence of political constructions of Filipinos’ mental fitness for self-government and the campaign of US imperial war in the Philippines is evidence that the US colonial project was a structural and colonial imposition of disablement” (33). In this case, through “[p]olitical rhetoric”/“political constructions,” a colonizing force justified their imperialism through the supposed lack of “Filipinos’ mental fitness.” Thus, “disablement,” in this case, is a produced product that is leveraged against colonized populations to delegitimize their claims to power. This reinforces both the dehumanization and delegitimization that disabled bodies are subjected to through colonial frameworks. It also cannot be ignored the ways in which is disability as a byproduct of the “colonial project.” It is once again important to this reading that Wong explicitly writes on the intersection of disability with a specific racial identity because “race… is always mutilating and mutating” 47 (Puar 59). Combine this with the fact that “debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations” (Puar) with “injury as a crucial element of enslavement” (Puar 136). Applying this framework to Wong, we can thus read her call to “[r]esist the notion” of a “‘better’” disabilities rights and justice movement in the United States as a recognition of this. To do so would be to “continue the pretense of normality, the idea that everything’s just fine and that the disability community is one happy family with no diversity, no multivalence, only a collective sameness” (Bell 279). That is why Wong draws specific attention here to the “stolen land” and “capitalist colonizer bullshit.” By refusing to recognize race as a vector that states target in order to “[mutilate]” and “control populations,” thereby ensuring a means of “enslavement,” these struggles are delegitimized, thus allowing them to continue. The second image that the description of the “full self” and the confrontation that “you can’t be [it]” brings me to is that of the Body Without Organs. Originally defined as “[having replaced] the organism and experimentation [having replaced] all instrumentation, for which it no longer has any use,” (Deleuze 162), Nirmala Erevelles explains that it applies to disability theory as it “shifts the disabled body outside the restricted strictures of the sovereign subject… [and] morphs into a nomadic collective of assemblages” (44)—“the embodiment of possibility rather than as lack” (45). In this sense, like Deleuze and Guatari, Wong is also rejecting a binary through an embrace of a not “full self.” Further, through her calls to “take the best parts of our cultures and let them inform our understanding of what it means to be human,” we can read this as a call to “[morph] into a nomadic collective of assemblages.” In this way, disability studies itself has the potential to be “the embodiment of possibility rather than as lack” so long as “[w]e… look and have the humility to learn.” This acts as one of Wong’s primary calls to 48 decolonize the field of disability—to decenter a White Disability Studies, which would reinforce the institutional oppression that she is actively warning against. Now, before I delve into a specific consideration of Wong’s incorporation of speculative fiction elements in this work, I want to acknowledge one other source from this same period that does the same in order to establish the urgency through which Wong is writing out of—especially since I think it would be a disservice to write of the dystopian parallels of disability writing without discussing the COVID-19 pandemic. Arundhati Roy is an author and activist for environmental and human rights issues. At the beginning of the pandemic, she wrote an article the criticized the response of the American and Indian governments, mocking that “[i]f it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jet and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?” In this manner, we can read elements of dystopian literature—a speculative air is lent to this writing through the imagery of the portal, and dystopia by the emphasis on weaponry. She then expands this imagine to emphasize the rhetorical power of the coronavirus, and the importance of the next steps for dealing with it. Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next (Roy). 49 Wong echoes a lot of Roy’s sentiments, writing “[t]he public is incredibly eager to get back to “normal” ... I am perplexed by the lack of urgency in response to people trapped in institutions and congregate settings who face maximum risks with minimal protections” (270). Here, the rejection of “normal[ity]” is key to the reading of both works. Thus, when the future is called upon, the reader is forced to confront it as a “non-normal one” through Roy’s calls to “acknowledge the rupture.” And this “doomsday machine we have built for ourselves” heralds on the dystopian elements that are currently present in our society that has “people trapped in institutions… with minimal protections.” Indeed, it is this very essence of “urgency” that both Roy and Wong are ultimately concerned with—one that becomes relevant as, in the years after the publication of both Roy and Wong’s works, the world has largely embraced a “return to ‘normality,’” declaring the pandemic over. In line with this, we see Wong “imagine [our] world anew”—engaging in an almost speculative nonfiction to do so—in order to argue for the importance of disability history, thereby demonstrating a way to “stitch our future to our past and [while acknowledging] …the rupture exists.” She does this at two separate points. In the first, she dedicates a chapter to imagining a museum curator teaching children from across the galaxy about Earth’s history in which her memoir acts as an exhibit. Now, while the content itself highlights Wong’s life during the pandemic and her frustrations with attempting to receive a vaccine, it is the ending that I find the most noteworthy. The curator bids farewell to this students, saying “[t]hanks for visiting the timeline of Alice Wong, Proto-Oracle. You can also explore the following exhibits about the twenty-first century from the Oracle Archive: The Barbarity of Crowdfunding for Health Care; Who Gets to Breathe? Oxygen; Global Migration, Displacement, and Starvation: The Failure of Neoliberal Nation-States” (Wong 299). Now, speculative nonfiction operates here in that the text 50 itself is (largely) nonfictional—it is merely the circumstances that it is being read in that exist in the territory of speculative. However, it is in this ending with the fictional articles that fully embraces these elements to embody a critique of the dehumanization and delegitimization of disabled people and demonstrates the need for decolonization. “Barbarity” speaks most primarily to a dehumanization through animalization since it is the antithesis of “our intelligence, rationality, agility, physical independence, or bipedal nature [which] gives us dignity and value” (Taylor 57). Delegitimization can be read in the second article title, which pokes fun at concerns regarding access, thereby delegitimizing them. Finally, “Global Migration, Displacement” both heavily emulate ideas that circulate in postcolonial circles regarding the freedom of movement for migrants with the continuation to “Starvation” alluding to debilitation practices once more. However, to truly read a need for decolonization, we must look at what follows the colon. “The Failure of Neoliberal Nation-States” demonstrates that, in this imagined future, this pandemic has “forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.” It implies a shift away from the “Neoliberal Nation-States,” which, many scholars would argue, requires a heavy decolonization. Wong continues this experimentation with speculative nonfiction in her final chapter of the memoir, which is where Wong’s most important rhetorical strategy makes itself known. In this last chapter, Wong opens it with her date of death before both summarizing large swaths of the memoir and imagines her future beyond it. In this future, “[s]uccessive natural disasters, pandemics, wars, and mass migrations produced the largest percentage of disabled people in recorded history. The confluence of these forces created a reimagined society that dismantled notions of enforced productivity and toxic individualism. This allowed Alice the freedom and supports to do everything she wanted during the latter half of her life” (359). Once again, we see 51 Wong’s concern with environmentalism here through her description of the “[s]uccessive natural disasters,” which connects them to the very real way in which such forces create and exacerbate disparities for disabled people in real life. We can also see the elements of “societal oppression” that Wong believes needs to be dismantled— “enforced productivity and toxic individualism.” Most importantly, however, is her decision to emphasize hope through her imagining of a future that affords her “the freedom and supports to do everything she wanted.” Indeed, with a subject matter as blunt as this (and I recognize that it does not make it better to discuss it in terms of dystopia), it is easy to fall into doomsaying. However, by spreading a message of hope amidst calls for urgent action, Wong outlines what she believes to be the most feasible path forward—both for society and disability studies. It is not enough to have a field to “call our own.” As recent events within the United States have proven, as well, that “the law… enshrined our legal protections” is not enough to rely on to prevent a descent into dystopia. Thus, it is important to listen to scholars and activists who recognize and work to deconstruct a struggle against dehumanization and delegitimization in order to advocate for a decolonization of the field. Further, we must also work to actively construct an imagined future and work towards it urgently. 52 Conclusion In my introduction, I explained how dystopian literature “critically investigate the possibility of a worse future in order to warn their readers, viewers, appreciators, or players about potential trends apparent or present in discernible forms in their specific empirical present” (Farca 68). There, I’d connected it immediately to disability literature and spent the course of this paper tracking how disability memoirs work to do the same. However, I think it best now to offer up a passage for brief analysis from a well-received dystopian classic—after all, I think I’d be remiss to make an interrogation into the dystopian genre without invoking a text that is indisputably so. Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series is one of the defining texts for the genre. Noteworthy for her ability to capitalize on “potential trends” and follow and illustrate them in the logical conclusion, Collins’ work exemplifies the defining characteristic of dystopian literature as working to “warn their readers, viewers, appreciators, or players.” In Catching Fire, its protagonist is urged by her mentor, Haymitch, to “‘remember who the enemy is’” (378). This “enemy” is then given a more concrete urgency with the identification of what they do in her trilogy’s prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes where one of the characters, Sejanus, rebuts a figurehead of the state, saying “You’ve no right to starve people, to punish them for no reason. No right to take away their life and freedom. Those are things everyone is born with, and they are not yours for the taking. Winning a war doesn’t give you that right. Having more weapons doesn’t give you that right. Being from the Capitol doesn’t give you that right. Nothing does” (160). I bring up these two quotes in specific for how they echo plenty of what the “disabled oracles” (Wong) seek to “warn” their readers about. 53 Though these quotes, we can see a parallel between Woolf’s rejection of what “the upright will allow” (41) with Sejanus’ accusing of the Capitol of “tak[ing] away [the marginalized’s] life and freedom” through the way that both quotes center a dehumanization and hint towards the way in which it’s institutionalized. Similarly with Dazai, his urging for his readers to recognize “[w]hat is society but an individual” (Human 120) seeks to warn his readers in the way that Haymitch’s cautioning to “‘remember who the enemy is’” does—forcing them to recognize the pillars that reinforce their respective systemic oppressions. We can also see how these quotes echoes Clare’s conceptualization of the metaphor of the mountain. Like the Capitol, which believes itself superior for “[w]inning a war” and “having more weapons,” “[t]he mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people, people whose bones get crushed in the grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy” (Clare 1). Thus, Clare honors the human embodiment of oppression and warns of a further “[tearing] away” (Clare 12) of the bodily autonomy that accompanies a systemic oppression. Finally, through the same rejection of the colonial practices that frequently dog American society, Wong warns her readers to “[r]esist the notion that disability rights and disability justice in the United States are more progressive or a beacon to the world, because that’s some capitalist colonizer bullshit,” making explicit as well the ways in which civil rights movements must “‘remember who the enemy is’” and embrace intersectional approaches—rejecting attempts from “capitalist colonizer bullshit[ters]” to divide the movements and see to an increasing ineffectiveness. In this way—and through the exploration that was done in this paper at large—we see it perfectly demonstrated how these two genres carry an (admittedly frightening) amount of similarities, thereby justifying an extension of consideration to the expansion of the dystopian 54 genre. Indeed, it is time to cease configurations of dystopia as being a purely fictional construction. In doing so, we not only undermine the efforts of “disabled oracles” to circumvent the “possibility of a worse future,” but dismiss such concerns as nothing more than speculative fiction. Therein lies the implications for future research of this topic—evidently, it is not only disability memoirists and theorists who work with such predictions. Thus, if we extend a reading of dystopia to other sects of nonfiction, we can begin to truly comprehend the extent to which it has been seeded in our current society and work to uproot the systems of oppression just as civil rights activists have been urging us to. 55 Works Cited “About.” Disability Visibility Project, 9 Oct. 2024, disabilityvisibilityproject.com/about/. Aldrete, Gregory S. ""Bread and Circuses": Ancient Rome, Modern Science Fiction, and the Art of Political Distraction." Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 51 no. 2, 2021, p. 4-20. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/flm.2021.0004. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Paltin, Judith, 1959-
Crippling dystopia : a survey of dystopian themes in disability literature
Text