A War of Minds Waged Against Bodies: The Political Activist as Prisoner and Patient

Abstract

In disability studies, discussing the process of becoming disabled is often discouraged. It is not ok to ask “what happened” because it positions disability as an accident and otherwise undesirable. Instead, the field has focused on the social model as a way to divorce disability from discourses about suffering, and rightly so, affirm disabled identity while challenging social societal attitudes that devalue disabled life and obstacles such as environments inhospitable to disabled bodies. Despite the interventions of scholars like Susan Wendell, Tom Shakespeare, and Margaret Price, there is still an understandably strong resistance in the field to discussing disability and suffering. What has happened, however, is that the experiences of becoming disabled for those who occupy multiple marginalized positions must be elided. For instance, to ask disabled black women “what happened” might reveal narratives like that shared in Assata Shakur’s memoir, which reveals that she experienced a temporary physical disability, in the form of paralysis, and chronic illness as an effect of state violence. As Nirmalla Erevelles has argued elsewhere, disability is often the result of racialized socio-economic subjugation. In this paper, I analyze Assata Shakur’s 1987 memoir, Assata: An Autobiography, as but one instantiation in a body of African American literature that links state violence to becoming disabled. I argue that Shakur uses her bodily fragility to bear witness to the violence the state executes against the U.S. marginalized communities.