Constructing Ableism

Stephanie Jenkins

doi:10.3390/genealogy5030066

Abstract

This essay builds upon research in disability studies through the extension of Garland-Thomson’s figure of the normate. I argue that biopower, through the disciplinary normalization of individual bodies and the biopolitics of populations, in the nineteenth-century United States produced the normate citizen as a white, able-bodied man. The normate citizen developed with the new political technology of power that emerged with the transition from sovereign power to biopower. I focus on the disciplinary normalization of bodies and the role of industrial capitalism in the construction of able-bodied norms. I argue that the medical model of disability is produced through a dual process of incorporation: the production of corporeal individuals and the localization of illness in the body.

Highlights

In her genealogy of race, Ladelle McWhorter notes that race is more about the construction of whiteness than it is about non-white racial categories
The main theoretical contribution of this essay is presenting the importance of Foucauldian genealogy to Disability Studies
I have argued that the significance of a genealogy of ability includes recognition of the historical construction of ability norms, productive nature of power relations, and contingency of the medical model of disability

Summary

Introduction

In her genealogy of race, Ladelle McWhorter notes that race is more about the construction of whiteness than it is about non-white racial categories. I argue that biopower, through the disciplinary normalization of individual bodies and the biopolitics of populations, in the nineteenth-century United States produced the normate citizen as a white, able-bodied man. In The Disabled State, Deborah Stone argues that one of the main aims of early laws in the emerging English welfare laws was to control, reduce, and eliminate begging and vagrancy so that they would not interfere with wage labor According to William Quigley, while there were differences in how relief was managed throughout the colonies, “all colonial poor laws acknowledged a public responsibility to provide for the impoverished neighbor who was unable to work;” White individuals, physiological difference in the United States before the nineteenth century was significant only inasmuch as it impeded or enabled the ability to work (Quigley 1996). Disciplinary power attached itself to bodily capacity, shaping, conducting, manipulating, and molding its functions over time

The Birth of Disability

Labor and Disability: A Case Study

Findings

Conclusions