Crip Times

Disability, Globalization, and Resistance

Robert McRuer

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479808755
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Disabilities in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contends that disability is a central but misunderstood element of global austerity politics. Broadly attentive to the political and economic shifts of the last several decades, Robert McRuer asks how disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or “crip times.” Throughout Crip Times, McRuer considers how transnational queer disability theory and culture—activism, blogs, art, photography, literature, and performance—provide important and generative sites for both contesting austerity politics and imagining alternatives. The book engages various cultural flashpoints, including the spectacle surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; the murder trial of South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius; the photography of Brazilian artist Livia Radwanski which documents the gentrification of Colonia Roma in Mexico City; the defiance of Chilean students demanding a free and accessible education for all; the sculpture and performance of UK artist Liz Crow; and the problematic rhetoric of “aspiration” dependent upon both able-bodied and disabled figurations that emerged in Thatcher’s England. Crip Times asserts that disabled people themselves are demanding that disability be central to our understanding of political economy and uneven development and suggests that, in some locations, their demand for disability justice is starting to register. Ultimately, McRuer argues that a politics of austerity will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined “us” in need of protection from “them.”

1

An Austerity of Representation; or, Crip/Queer Horizons

Disability and Dispossession

My Introduction ended on austerity and an inevitable and necessary excess, as I both introduced the UK government’s radical post-2010 austerity agenda and gestured toward some of the excessive ways in which resistance has arisen in the wake of that agenda. Resistance can be discerned within a particular, critical valence of what I called “the crip’s speech,” collectively articulated by “emergent disabilities” in our moment. At times, as my reading of The King’s Speech should indicate, emergent disabilities are clearly useful for neoliberalism and can even, as with the disability identity represented in that film, be showered with awards by the establishment. I am ultimately more interested, however, in other emergent disabilities in crip times, in crip subjects materializing in ways that are “radically contrary to being aligned to a state or a dominant discourse,” to draw on Andrew Robinson’s analysis of the philosopher Alain Badiou. For my purposes in this chapter, Robinson’s “state” here should be comprehended both as the currently hegemonic neoliberal state administering austerity politics as a near-global common sense and as any fixed or static mode of being. Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), Broken of Britain, and others I consider throughout this book have come forward with new disabled subjectivities and coalitions actively contesting the insidious ways disability has been made to speak in and for neoliberalism.

The next two chapters introduce varied forms of crip activism in an age of austerity. I sustain a focus throughout on some of the understandings of “excess” available in Badiou’s work on subjectivity. I begin this chapter, however, with a consideration of the more familiar and somewhat predictable dangers of neoliberal capitalist excess, through an analysis of Olympic images of both spectacle and melodrama. Marx and Engels themselves literally predicted and observed capitalist excess, famously noting that the bourgeoisie “has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals” (476). In this chapter and the next, my own analysis eventually moves away from that more recognizable capitalist spectacle and toward an overview of unpredictable and differently excessive forms of resistance to a global austerity politics.

In what follows, I theorize austerity even more comprehensively as both an economic and a broadly cultural phenomenon or strategy. Put differently, the economic strategy of austerity in many ways requires a cultural politics that I will describe here as an austerity of representation. What Tobin Siebers calls an “ideology of ability” has long vouchsafed flattened, nonthreatening representations of disability (7); my contention is that such deadened representations are newly put to use, in crip times, to obscure the workings of austerity. A neoliberal austerity of representation is on display throughout Crip Times, but I focus here on how that austerity of representation works to foreclose other crip possibilities, both in the sense of ruling out or preventing and in the sense of (more specifically and a bit ironically) taking possession of something that has been the property of another. A literal foreclosure in the economic sense happens when one party “fails” to meet its obligations to pay the bank; the representational foreclosure I’ll put forward here is more metaphorical, but is likewise essentially a response to those who won’t abide by the economic and cultural rules neoliberalism affords us (because they don’t feel obliged to, or cannot). A neoliberal austerity of representation disciplines what Lauren Berlant, in a discussion of Brian Massumi, terms “unforeclosed experience” (5); it is a strategic (and ongoing) move that dilutes the power and potentiality of alternative, more radical or resistant, representations.1

I also begin in this chapter a sustained attention to four keywords for the crip times we inhabit: dispossession, resistance, displacement, and aspiration. Dispossession is the focus of the current chapter, and is a keyword that my introduction of a neoliberal “foreclosure” should already anticipate. The activism spotlighted in this chapter and the next aspires to work against, with, and (perhaps most importantly) through a multivalent politics of dispossession that is a necessary component of austerity. David Harvey names neoliberal processes that centralize wealth through privatization and through redistribution of resources away from the public “accumulation by dispossession” (New 137). In Harvey’s terms, the global austerity politics that escalates super-exploitation of workers globally and protects capitalists while slashing services to the poor would be a clear example of such accumulation by dispossession: wealth is redistributed to/accumulated by those at the top while those at the bottom are dispossessed of resources, public services, or secure networks of care. Without question, we should oppose such neoliberal dispossession—the form of dispossession upon which austerity depends. The varied forms of crip activism I pivot toward in this chapter and the next, however, to draw on Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, allow us “to formulate a theory of political performativity” that might materialize contingent and desirable versions of dispossession that counter the dominant (and quotidian) forms of dispossession that should be resisted (ix–x). The versions of dispossession that Butler and Athanasiou invoke, writing in their own joint conversation literally titled Dispossession, take us out of ourselves in ways that allow for political action with others.

The forms of activist resistance that I introduce in this chapter and that I multiply in the next will be put forward as varied crip tactics. For Michel de Certeau, a tactic (which he differentiates from a dominant strategy) “makes use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse” (37). Not incidentally, for my purposes here, de Certeau’s writing on tactics emerges in part from reflections on the varied uses of an accoutrement of disability—Charlie Chaplin’s cane, a historical walking stick which we might, in José Esteban Muñoz’s sense of “cruising utopia,” apprehend by looking toward the past (and toward the utopian promise contained in performances from the past) in order to look forward; for Muñoz, cruising utopia generates “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (4).2 Chaplin’s cane, in most of the early twentieth-century films in which he appears as “the little tramp,” is fascinating to de Certeau because of the proliferating, nonsingular, and inventive possibilities it affords the socially marginal figure Chaplin portrayed: “Charlie Chaplin multiplies the possibilities of his cane: he does other things with the same thing and he goes beyond the limits that the determinants of the object set on its utilization” (98). The tactics of this chapter and the next likewise proliferate crip possibilities, going beyond the austere limits both the state and dominant discourses would impose upon disability (and indeed, upon the objects often associated with it).

In the following section, I turn to some of the limited representations of disability that were in wide—indeed, spectacular—circulation during the first summer Olympic Games to follow the global economic crises of 2008: the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, held from July 27 until August 12, 2012 and (for the Paralympics) from August 29 until September 9, 2012. Disabled activists, artists, and scholars have long critiqued the ways in which “inspirational” imagery or messages attach to disabled lives and experiences: as disabled individuals supposedly “overcome” what has long been put forward as the “struggle” or “hardship” of disability, they “inspire” nondisabled observers or readers, even by carrying out the quotidian activities of an ordinary life. “A boy without hands bats .486 on his Little League team,” Eli Clare writes. “A blind man hikes the Appalachian Trail from end to end. An adolescent girl with Down’s syndrome learns to drive and has a boyfriend. A guy with one leg runs across Canada” (Exile 2). The critique of this two-dimensional representation of disability is not new, but my contention in the following section is that it was particularly pronounced in 2012 because an inspirational understanding of disability, which activists denounced as “inspiration porn” or “cripspiration,” was especially useful to the neoliberal establishment as it sought to detract from the activism outside the Olympic and Paralympic stadiums and across the country. This activism was mobilizing a politicized disability critique of the harsher and harsher austerity policies that were devastating disabled lives in the UK and elsewhere. In my analysis of inspiration porn, I focus particularly on the complex and shifting ways in which the white South African athlete Oscar Pistorius was caught up in, and indeed helped to cement, an austerity of representation during this moment of spectacle.

In the section that follows my survey of inspiration porn in and around 2012 and of the activism that was obscured by it, I turn toward the work of Kevin Floyd, who puts forward other, more generative understandings of “pornography” in The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (203). I contend that Floyd’s explicitly queer project can lay the groundwork for an analysis of what we might understand as an excessive and “pornographic” crip sociality explicitly opposed to an austerity of representation that would tame, domesticate, or contain disability. In my final section, I read that pornographic crip sociality into a collective 2012 project of counterrepresentation, This Is What Disability Looks Like. This activist photographic project flourished on social media for a time in the wake of, and opposed to, the inspiration porn that was in wide circulation around the London 2012 Games. I argue that This Is What Disability Looks Like put into circulation what I will theorize as a critically crip dispossession that can be positioned as against austerity and that can arguably be discerned in a range of locations around the world. In the chapter that follows this analysis of representation and counterrepresentation, in the interests of extending the crip theory of political performativity I introduce in my analysis of This Is What Disability Looks Like, I turn directly to the keyword resistance and put forward six tactical, geographically dispersed examples of this critically crip dispossession.

Cripspiration and Its Discontents

As is always the case with the Olympics and Paralympics, excess and spectacle, driven by corporate capital, were in evidence around the London 2012 Games. I focus in what follows on a specific image that can be read as marking that excess, in and through disability. As Olympic and Paralympic fever swept the United Kingdom and the globe in July and August 2012, a 2009 photo of Oscar Pistorius and a five-year-old British girl named Ellie Challis resurfaced [Figure 1.1]. In the photo, Pistorius, who is a double amputee, is represented running alongside a cherubic Challis, whose hands and lower legs were amputated after a serious, life-threatening bout with meningitis.

This photo, of course, to virtually any reader of Crip Times, means something completely different from what it meant in August 2012 and thus requires some contextualization before I discuss its Olympic and Paralympic circulation. As of this writing in January 2017, Oscar Pistorius has served more than two years of what was initially a five-year prison sentence, handed down by South African Judge Thokozile Masipa. Pistorius had been charged on September 14, 2014, with culpable homicide for the February 14, 2013, killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, a white South African model. Culpable homicide is essentially the South African term for manslaughter; after an extended trial, Pistorius was, in other words, initially sentenced by Judge Masipa for unlawfully, but also unintentionally, killing Steenkamp. Pistorius was considered for release by a parole board in August 2015, but that release was temporarily suspended while a higher court considered an appeal of the original ruling. If the parole board had allowed early release it would have been because of Pistorius’s “good behavior” or rehabilitation while in prison; under such circumstances, he would have remained on a restrictive probation. On December 3, 2015, however, the Supreme Court of Appeal overturned the charge of culpable homicide and found Pistorius guilty of murder.3

Figure 1.1. “The Only Disability in Life Is a Bad Attitude,” Oscar Pistorius and Ellie Challis meme.

When the culpable homicide charge was overturned, a decision on a more extended sentence for the murder conviction was set for later in 2016. On July 3, 2016, Judge Masipa amended her initial conviction, handing down a six-year term to Pistorius for the murder of Steenkamp. South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and a murder conviction generally carries a minimum fifteen-year sentence. In delivering a lighter sentence, Judge Masipa took into account what she saw as some “mitigating factors” in Pistorius’s case, such as remorse (“Oscar Pistorius”). From 2014 onward, Judge Masipa herself had received numerous verbal threats and attacks, and was placed under police protection for her own safety. Some prominent legal organizations in South Africa explicitly connected these attacks to Masipa’s race and gender. The case, as I will underscore in the next section, was already completely about gendered violence and masculinist rage, and the threats against Masipa reflect the violence and rage so readily aimed at women and at people of color in South Africa. “People may disagree with the judgment,” the legal organizations speaking out against the threats levied at Masipa said in an official statement. “However, attacking and threatening Judge Masipa because she is black or because she is female is simply unacceptable” (qtd. in Conway-Smith).

Steenkamp was killed late at night in the couple’s home in the gated, almost entirely white, Silver Woods Country Estate, where they lived. Steenkamp was behind a locked bathroom door. By some accounts, Steenkamp had locked herself in the bathroom following a heated argument. As Pistorius’s story would have it, however, the couple had been sleeping in the moments leading up to Steenkamp’s death, and he feared that an intruder had broken into the house. What was not in contention in either the original trial or the appeal that resulted in the conviction for murder is that Pistorius fired four shots into the locked bathroom door; one of the shots (perhaps the first) ended Steenkamp’s life.

Pistorius’s sentences for both culpable homicide and murder have largely been served in Kgosi Mampuru II jail in Pretoria, Sou...