“The Atlas of Our Skin and Bone and Blood”: Disability, Ablenationalism, and the War on Drugs

Andrea Pitts

doi:10.3390/genealogy3040062

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between disability and the aspirational health of the civic body through an analysis of the criminalization of immigration and the war on drugs. In particular, this paper utilizes tools from transnational disability studies to examine the formation and maintenance of a form of ablenationalism operating within immigration reform and drug-related policies. Specifically, the militarization of border zones, as well as the vast austerity measures impacting people across North, Central, and South America have shaped notions of public health, safety, and security according to racial, gendered, and settler logics of futurity. The final section of the paper turns to three authors who have been situated in various ways on the margins of the United States, Gloria Anzaldúa (the Mexico-U.S. border), Aurora Levins Morales (Puerto Rico), and Margo Tamez (Lipan Apache). As such, this article analyzes the liberatory, affective, and future-oriented dimensions of disabled life and experience to chart possibilities for resistance to the converging momentum of carceral settler states, transnational healthcare networks, and racial capitalism.

Highlights

This paper explores the relationship between disability and the aspirational health of the civic body through an analysis of the criminalization of immigration and the war on drugs
Rather than examining the material deprivations and sociohistorical factors that shape each of these structuring elements of experience, disability, like forms of illness, disease, maiming, or the slow death of Black, brown, and Indigenous populations across the Global South, are seen as causally linked to the behavior or bodies of the peoples themselves. Both disability and global inequality, in this sense, are considered unfortunate and unavoidable. Following these strands of critique, this paper explores the relationship between disability and the aspirational health of the civic body through an analysis of the militarization of border control in the second half of the 20th century
The final section of the paper turns to three authors who have been situated in various ways on the margins of the United States, Gloria Anzaldúa, Aurora Levins Morales (Puerto Rico), and Margo Tamez (Lipan Apache)

Summary

Introduction

This paper explores the relationship between disability and the aspirational health of the civic body through an analysis of the criminalization of immigration and the war on drugs.

Results

Conclusion