(Re) Navigating Ableist Terrains: Antisociality, Negative Turns and Anti-Hero's?

Abstract

Typically in mainstream society, studies in metaphysics and medical sociology, disability is constructed as anti-productive, unthinkable and unintelligible. The dominant discourse in late modernity has been normalisation and more recently social inclusion. In the former, emphasis is on morphing or to spunk up impairment. Whilst the latter, although promulgating diversity, actually induces ambivalent performances that enforce the health - not/health division hence leaving an ableist ethos intact. This paper takes the view long recognised in the phenomenological tradition that alternate embodiments result in markedly different forms of human ontology (Campbell, 2009; Scully, 2009; Vehmas & Makela, 2009). Contra the proposition that disabled people are the same as the ‘abled’, this paper points to a (trans)difference and suggests a way out of confines of recuperative liberal intolerance is to figure the disabled body conceptually, as anti-social and ableistnormativity as (non)compulsory. I propose the disabled body is counter-intuitive and negotiates ‘negative’ ways of knowing or dis-identification (Halberstam, 2008; Munoz, 2007). A consideration of the efficacy of disability antisociality occurs through an appraisal of the anti-social thesis of queer theory (Bersani, 1996, 1999; Edelman, 2004) and contemporariness (Agamben, 2009). As an exemplar for analysis, I consider crip anti-heroes - those figures who actively attempt to invert ableist culture in order to refigure disability imaginations.