Jasbir Puar has demonstrated that the targeted debilitation of entire racialized populations embodies a contemporary illustration of colonialism’s machine. For Puar, colonizing states exist as biopolitical assemblages of control, the technologies of which instrumentalize a spectrum of debilities and capacities in the service of neoliberal colonialism, which requires maiming populations who are preconditioned for injury to secure sovereign power. This paper stages a conversation with Jasbir Puar to ask what additional insights might be gained about the relationship between colonialism and debility if critical disability scholarship went beyond a Foucauldian biopolitical analysis of the management of life, death, and debility when theorizing colonial violence. This paper thus reads across postcolonial and anti-colonial thought as well as Indigenous theories of trauma to encourage critical disability studies to expand the horizon of its reading practices when engaging these questions. These approaches, I maintain, provide critical insights into sovereign power that biopolitics cannot, including critical attention to non-secular configurations of settler colonial debility that biopolitical theory misses. I aim to show that a locus of Canada’s colonial sovereignty resides in targeted attacks, or “dis-membering,” forms of Indigenous non-secular transcendent self-consciousness—that is, the sanctioned maiming of Indigenous heterogeneous agencies in the service of neocolonial economic designs. In this sense, theories of metaphysics and violence must also be accounted for when attending to debility, colonialism, and sovereign power.

My artistic practice focuses on the intersectionality of my lived experience of mental health difference as a Thai American woman who has contended with the impacts of the stigma and inequities in mental health care and access. Having been diagnosed with bipolar, I explore my way of being through my art and seek to assess and illuminate my lived experiences through the lens of disability justice and mad pride. My “archive” consists of medication guides, prescription bottles, historical and psychiatric resource materials, and medical texts that discuss mental health conditions. I use these texts and artifacts in my art and investigate systemic and historical legacies to find strength in vulnerability. In my large scale drawings, I use charcoal because of its transformative origins from solid matter and to acknowledge that its activated form absorbs chemicals after a stomach is pumped following an overdose. The smeared charcoal emphasizes outlandishness and an unwillingness to conform, as I resist containment and being categorized. In affirming freedom and individuality, I reveal the human touch behind the marks and processes that spill off the page and ignore the margins. Created during the pandemic, my large scale series of over 80 drawings, “What I have learned. (Fill in the blank.)” on oversized lined paper, 36” x 24,” questions how we learn, who is the “educator” and how do we unlearn harm. I mine interactions, relationships and responses to my being from micro aggressions, to stigma, racism, and ableism as well as reflect on current anti-Asian violence. By sharing these texts and images, I allow others who might identify with these experiences to enter a safe space and connect to others to build a community in pursuit of disability justice.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

In 2015, the news outlet Today posted a video interview with Chopper Maroshek, a former Navy Seal, about the “unbreakable bond” between himself and his service dog, a German Shepherd named Chopper. Before Chopper was Maroshek’s service dog, he was his multi-purpose canine partner, trained and deployed for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. This article analyzes representations of Chopper and Maroshek in the Today video, its comment archive, and popular news articles to show how Chopper, in his role as a multi-purpose canine-cum-service dog, is hailed to participate in the project of ablenationalism. I argue that Chopper is constructed as an exceptional technology of rehabilitation, facilitating Maroshek’s ability to fold back into the nation as an “able-disabled” subject. Building on transnational disability and animal studies scholarship, I illuminate how the circulation of Maroshek and Chopper’s spectacular story justifies the uneven biopolitical inclusion of American veterans with mental and/or psychiatric disabilities, effectively obscuring the violent production of disability through war. Ultimately, I show how the nationalist affects that shape Chopper as the apotheosis of a service dog covertly sutures an ablenationalist politics of disability to a racialized U.S. biopolitics of war.

Scholars studying sex work are often guided by compulsory able-bodiedness, asking sex workers for demographic information such as race, gender, and socio-economic position but not about disabilities. In addressing sexual ableism and the reproduction of compulsory able-bodiedness in studies of sex work, I demonstrate how disability is both a factor determining sex work participation and how sex work is a vehicle for disabled workers to explore their sexuality and disrupt tired stereotypes regarding disability and sexuality. In this article, I draw from data from two different studies 1) a five-year mixed-methods study on the erotic webcam industry and 2) an interview-based study on the workplace experiences of transmasculine and non-binary escorts. I use these data to demonstrate the role of disability, especially chronic illness, in individual motivations for entry into sex work. Research on sex work generally relies upon and proffers economically deterministic theories that show how whether, by choice or circumstance, people look to sex work for the same reasons they look for any job in a capitalist system—wages. However, the use of an intersectional frame yields richer results. Here, I also explore the convergence of cissexism and ableism in the lives of disabled trans sex workers, demonstrating how, for the most marginal, sex work is often a lifeline. Further, I examine the implications of these findings for thinking about disability justice movements and pushing back on capitalist, white supremacist, and ableist notions of productivity that have come to govern our lives.

This article explores how the University of Ottawa enacted interest convergence (Bell 1980; Dolmage 2020) during March 2020 when it changed its accessibility procedure because of the COVID-19 crisis. By looking to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP), I argue that educators should take a universalizing and intersectional understanding of disability in the classroom, designing classroom methods in advance to acknowledge ability difference from the beginning of teaching. Through two proposed assignments, this article outlines how educators can better care for their disabled, BIPOC, gender diverse, and/or queer students by acknowledging difference as itself an alternative means of knowledge-creation.

Since the merger of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios, Disney has been lauded for creating more progressive content that includes representations of main characters from diverse backgrounds. However, progressive representations of disability (both physical and mental disability) have been slow to emerge in most mediums. The objective of this research is to examine whether portrayals of illness and disability in recent animated feature films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios or Pixar Animation Studios depict progressive (or multicultural) narratives of disability versus traditional narratives of disability. We analyzed 20 of the most recent (i.e., 2008-2018) animated films from both studios with 9 films from Walt Disney Animation and 11 films from Pixar Animation Studios. Using thematic content analysis, a combination of pre-identified and emergent disability- and illness-related themes are described. Overwhelmingly, disability portrayals were traditional, with disability used to elicit pity or humor from the viewer and to indicate that characters were evil or old. Out of the 20 films, few progressive portrayals of disability were observed. Although Disney has been lauded for being more inclusive in their representations of characters, disability representations continue to perpetuate and reaffirm the stigmatization of disability.

Verbal description plays a crucial role in improving access to modern-day art museums. This article presents the results of a study of verbal description in art museums in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. These results are of two types: one, the communicative features of the verbal descriptions offered by museums and two, the social features of the context in which these verbal descriptions are created and implemented. Previous studies have partially described these aspects, but they mainly followed a quantitative approach or focused on the most frequent practices regarding specific linguistic devices. The goal of this article is to offer a qualitative analysis of these elements in a large sample and to provide a comparative analysis and critical discussion of both the majority and the minority practices in verbal description in art museums. The results show that art museums follow various approaches to foster the access for blind people to their collections. Some of these approaches open new ways of comprehending accessibility in art museums and especially, audio description. A critical and creative discussion of these findings and further collaboration within and across borders could revolutionize verbal description and visitors' experience in art museums in the years to come.