Critical Disability Theory

In this paper, I refute "the inability thesis," which says that people who act unethically due to social conditioning "suffer from some presumed culturally generated inability to avoid wrongdoing," and are therefore not responsible for their action.
Excerpts:
"I agree with Moody-Adams that the inability thesis is empirically and conceptually flawed, but I think that there is something else wrong with it as well. Namely, inability theorists tend to describe moral ‘inabilities’ by analogy with disabilities like blindness, blind-spots, and so-called ‘handicaps'... . Even if the inability thesis were not false, these comparisons would be ableist and harmful because they reinforce cultural associations between disability and moral depravity, which reinforces ableist prejudice.
...
I would suggest that we swap the concept of epistemic bad luck for the concept of structural oppression whenever possible. Instead of saying that men who silence women are “subject to ‘circumstantial’ epistemic bad luck” (Fricker: 33), say that they are perpetrators and beneficiaries of patriarchal oppression. Instead of saying that white people who deny the existence of racial inequality are epistemically “handicapped” (Mills: 51), say that they are acting on white group interests. Instead of saying that implicit sexists cannot “access” the “critical perspective on gender” needed to respect women as equals (Fricker: 101), say that they don’t want to listen to women. What may seem to be epistemic 'inability' may, on scrutiny, turn out to be epistemic privilege, being wielded by 'golden boys' to silence and smother the less privileged."

At the heart of American adventure sports is the appeal of personal challenge that has roots in 19th-century “wilderness cults.” Preserving wilderness and testing oneself against it were part of a search for moral, physical, and even national purity. But, as critics have begun to argue, racism, expansion, and exclusion underpin the wilderness movement. Although these exclusions have been identified, there has been less attention to these exclusions in contemporary adventure culture and environmental thought, which borrow values from the early wilderness movement and suggest that an environmental ethic arises from risking the body in the wild. By examining adventure culture
through disability studies, this article exposes the relationship between environmentalism and ableism. It argues that disability is the category of “otherness” against which both environmentalism and adventure have been shaped and revises environmental
thought to include all kinds of bodies.

Disability Studies: A Bibliography aims to extend the current discourses on disability by collating and consolidating the growing body of scholarship on the meanings and categories of disability from 2000 to 2021. This Bibliography is segmented into four parts- Theorizing Disability, Representing Disability, Intersectional Approaches and Rethinking Metanarratives. It is thematically arranged into 35 sections and contains entries from approximately 1100 seminal books and journal articles in Disability Studies that update and extend new knowledge around the discipline. 
All titles are in English and have been indexed using MLA 9th edition stylesheet.

DRAFT syllabus for team-taught Doctoral Seminar in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies. Course description. Like the fictions of gender and race, disability is a cultural and social formation that sorts bodies and minds into desirable (normal) and undesirable (abnormal, sick) categories. Regimes of representation in literature, art, music, theater, film, and popular culture—the ways that bodies and minds constructed as disabled are depicted—both reflect and shape cultural understandings of nonconforming identities and extraordinary bodies, affecting the lived experience of people understood as disabled, often in negative ways. Drawing on examples from the arts and popular culture, this course will interrogate the many ways disability identity has been confined to rigid and unproductive social, political, and aesthetic categories. It will also explore a significant counter-tradition in which disability is seen as a significant artistic resource and a desirable way of being in the world. Topics will include: the medical and social models of disability; narratives of disability; disability and performance; disability writing (memoir and fiction); narratives of overcoming; the histories and cultures of autism, deafness, blindness, intellectual disability, and madness. We will pay particular attention to the intersection of disability with other more familiar tropes of human disqualification, including race, gender, and sexuality.

Child and Youth Care Practitioners (CYCPs) serve autistic young people in schools, hospitals, communities, residential facilities, and family homes. Yet, there is a dearth of knowledge regarding the lived experiences of autistic young people receiving these services. CYC literature does not reflect current autism advocacy or disability rights movements, which oppose behavioural interventions and person-first language. What is more, government policies focus heavily on early interventions in behavioural therapy, leaving gaps in services for autistic young adults. This negates their rights to full participation and accessibility in society. The current study adopts a disability interpretive lens within a transformative, narrative design to engage two young autistic adults in educating CYC practitioners on best practices using their lived experiences. This knowledge may help to support this population in attaining their human rights. Finally, the study challenges CYCPs to reflect on policies and practices that either emancipate or oppress autistic young people.

“Monkeys, Monsters, and Minstrels in Rise and Dawn of the Planet of The Apes” charts the complex and contradictory racial ideologies and technologies deployed in the latest additions to the Apes saga and their promotional materials, specifically the Simian Flu & You website and the
Simian Flu plug-in for the popular video game Plague Inc. (Ndemic Creations, 2014). If, as Eric Greene opines, the original simian quintet mirrored the racial power structures and antagonisms of the era in which it arose, what do Rise of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Rupert Wyatt, 2011) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Matt Reeves, 2014) tell us about the putatively postracial historical moment in which they were produced and consumed? I contend that the resurrected Apes franchise reveals that race and racism have not been vanquished but have merely transfigured themselves. I begin by establishing the stubborn racist linkage of African Americans with apes in the European imperial imaginary. Due to the fallacious but tenacious linkage of the savage with simian in the white supremacist mind, I argue that the apes in the series remain stand-ins for African Americans. I discuss how the films postracialize slavery and conquest by foregrounding the neocolonial complicity of people of color in the subjugation of the racialized apes. I also consider how the series recycles scientific racism and racializes pandemics. Of course, the fact that the lead apes in these films are played by white British actors raises a host of complex issues about minstrelsy, mimesis, and racial performativity. Caesar, the protagonist of Rise and Dawn, is played via motion capture by Andy Serkis, best known for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Toby Kebbell plays Koba, the disfigured and depraved bonobo that is Caesar’s Brutus. In addition to reflecting upon how the series allows whites to don “black ape-face with cultural impunity,” I contemplate how this cross-species masquerade simultaneously reactivates white fears about miscegenation, degeneration, and racial subjugation while mystifying the racial roots of these white supremacist fantasies. Since Rise and Dawn operate as prequels to the original series, the racialized apes are not just our evolutionary predecessors; they are our evolutionary successors. Why does such an apocalyptic vision of race relations, one in which there is no future and no home for (white) settler humanity, have so much currency in this particular historical era?

More than three centuries ago, a man named Kojo became the leader of a group of self-emancipated African Jamaicans , referred to as Maroons . Although Kojo is one of the most famous African Jamaicans of his time, little is known about his physical appearance. Based on equivocal historical sources, nineteeth- and twentieth-century writers generally accepted that Kojo was “hunchbacked”. More recent scholarship has challenged this interpretation, claiming that Kojo’s condition was rhetorical and not corporeal—nothing more than a posthumous colonial effort to disfigure an otherwise indomitable adversary. However, viewed through the lens of social disability theory, there is little compelling ethnohistoric evidence to substantiate the assumption that, if Kojo did indeed have a visible body difference or spinal pathology, like kyphosis, such a condition would have necessarily disqualified him from holding the chief Maroon leadership position. To the contrary, special marked status might have actually helped to enable Kojo to assume power. It is argued that if scholars do not carefully contextualize paleopathological data and allow for the role of cultural creativity, then they run the risk of perpetuating disability stigma. This is particularly important because bioarchaeologists, unlike many other history scholars, have the advantage of being able to marshal physical evidence about specific people that can be used to critically read disability history.

This text proposes a cripistemology of post-socialist rehabilitation into/through neoliberalism in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. It discusses the ways in which disability semantics as well as ideological structures of compulsory health and able-bodiedness served to fuel the optimism of the first post-revolutionary years, and reveals the ways in which the possibility of crip epistemologies and politicised crip horizons were foreclosed.  The example of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s facilitates a more capacious inquiry into the toxicity of attachments to optimism—an affective politics of positivity more generally, and for disability theory specifically. The text also speaks to the absence of disability from theories of neoliberalism and formulates a crip critique of the affective politics of neoliberalism for which Lauren Berlant coined the term “cruel optimism.”

Paper presented at the 'Disrupting Visibility: The Politics of Passing' conference at Goldsmiths University, 12th June 2015, under the title: 'Cripping Up: The Politics of Visibility and Invisibility for Disabled People'.

Abstract: Studies of stigma management for disabled people, drawing on Goffman’s work, generally focus on the need for the reduction of visibility. The assumption is often that passing as non-disabled will reduce stigma, leading to acceptance by society.

Yet, in the social environment of our late modern surveillance society, passing may not be the most useful strategy for disabled people. Today, we see a revival of the discourse of the deserving and undeserving poor, with disabled people and others required to prove their ‘deserving’ status in order to receive essential benefits, services and assistance. A number of disabled people have talked about the need for performance that invalidates passing, such as emphasising limps, in order to emphasise their status as legitimately disabled within the binary discourse of deserving/undeserving or authentic/’faking’.

In this paper, I argue that identity management for disabled people can involve complex social choices between passing and legitimacy. In a social environment that requires legitimacy from disabled people, is the compensatory strategy of performing visibility a necessity? Must disabled people choose between legitimacy and passing in the austerity society?

This paper examines the representation of disability that is generated by, and supports, “people-first language.” The paper first describes the ubiquitous formulation of disabled people as “just people.” Second, the current ideology that stresses that disabled people are simply “people w i t h disabilities” is examined in one of its concrete manifestations: a recent government document entitled In Unison: A Canadian  approach to Disability Issues. By making use of Dorothy Smith’s concept that language is social organization, the author shows how disability is organized in this document as a medicalized and individual matter and, as such, takes shape as abnormal limitation and lack of function that some people–four million Canadians–“just happen to have.” Finally, the paper concludes that people-first language is best understood as part of an
ongoing process that removes the possibility of understanding disability as a social, and thereby complex, political phenomenon.

Literature has always portrayed the queer/disabled people as the Other. People with disabilities and queer sexualities are generally subject of ridicule and abuse. Historically literature has aided in the social constructionism of disability phenomena in the society by depicting the disabled as something nocuous and undesirable. Furthermore, traditional representations of queer and/or disabled existence have always been biased and are usually about how the 'able-bodied' or the so-called 'normal' people perceive people with diverse forms of the body and queer sexualities. Yet it has been conspicuously silent as regards the plight of the people with disabilities and queer sexualities. However, in a departure from traditional representations of queer and/or disabled existence, Firdaus Kanga presents a first-hand account of the lived experiences of his precarious life in the Indian socio-cultural context and beyond. He has to his credit a series of critically acclaimed books such as Trying to Grow (1990), Heaven on Wheels (1991), The Godmen (1995), and The Surprise Ending (1996). As a severely disabled individual suffering from a crippling disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta (brittle bones disease) Trying to Grow (1990), a semi-autobiographical novel, is a narrative of his lived experiences of disability and tryst with queer sexuality. While his other work, Heaven on Wheels (1991) is a discourse on queer sexuality and disability from the perspective of queer and disabled existence. Kanga critiques the ableist society's treatment of the queer and the disabled which is tantamount to Human Rights abuse.

book launch & signing for Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe

September 5, 2018 ≡ 6:30-7:30pm ≡ CUNY School for Professional Studies

Arguing that autistic expression has been an important contributing factor in many texts, this talk offers an overview of the c​entral themes of Autistic Disturbances, exploring how autistic verbal expression has frequently been miscast as waste and looking at the fundamental aesthetic and creative value of autistic language. Taking an autism positive approach, Dr. Rodas looks at the ways autistic rhetorics thread through and enhance the richness and vibrancy of shared human language.

co-sponsored by the CUNY Disability Scholars; the Columbia University Seminar in Disability, Culture & Society; the Futures Initiative & the CUNY Graduate Center Program in Music–thanks!

While research on autism has sometimes focused on special talents or abilities, autism is typically characterized as impoverished or defective when it comes to language. Autistic Disturbances reveals the ways interpreters have failed to register the real creative valence of autistic language and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive aesthetics of autistic rhetoric and semiotics. Reinterpreting characteristic autistic verbal practices such as repetition in the context of a more widely respected literary canon, Julia Miele Rodas argues that autistic language is actually an essential part of mainstream literary aesthetics, visible in poetry by Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, in novels by Charlotte Brontë and Daniel Defoe, in life writing by Andy Warhol, and even in writing by figures from popular culture.

REVIEWS

Los Angeles Review of Books, Travis Chi Wing Lau, 2 May 2019
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-poetics-of-autism/#!

Thinking Person's Guide to Autism, Maxfield Sparrow, 13 Jan 2019
http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2019/01/autistic-disturbances-review.html

Wordgathering, Michael Northen, 2018
http://www.wordgathering.com/past_issues/issue47/reviews/rodas.html

This paper argues for a reconsideration of the balance of power in theorizations of documentary ethics through discourses on intersubjective experience in disability studies, primarily analyzing the first film by director Hara Kazuo, "Sayonara CP" ("Goodbye CP," 1972). The non-sync black and white 16mm film documents his pact with a group of activist men with cerebral palsy called the Kanagawa Green Grasses, filming the members giving up all supports of Japanese society, crawling off wheelchairs to rally in the streets against the invisibility of the disabled. The project led to Hara and his partner Kobayashi Sachiko’s more famous political works pushing the boundaries of private and public realms in postwar Japan. However "Sayonara CP" not only captures a turn toward personal documentary when radical leftist collectives were producing activist films, but invites an investigation of the ethical space the apparatus establishes and the political implications of documentary ethics, particularly through the film’s controversial central images of the disabled body contorted in pain. Taking previous frameworks of ethical space in documentary theory (Vivian Sobchack’s taxonomy of gazes, Bill Nichols’ axiographics) outside a spectatorial model, I analyze the film’s two encounters, around the camera and before the projector, citing Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s adoption of the stare as a politically generative dynamic in disability studies in considering the agency of the documentary subject and the political potential of personal cinema practice.

In this chapter I explore the relationship of disability, power, and emerging biotechnologies in relation to critical posthumanism and Dan Goodley’s Dis/ability theory. I will aim to show that a posthuman critical disability studies must find its way to an affirmative and politically viable relationship to technology. I conclude that the relationship between the able-body/abnormal-body, the social norms of autonomy and productivity, and technomedicine introduces the gravest dangers with regard to biotechnologies--not the technologies themselves. I identify and think through the potential that resides in the lives of people living with disabilities, their activism, and their theoretical understandings to inform an affirmative relationship to biotechnologies.

The aim of this paper is to update the state of art of Bioethics in Spain. The retirement of the reform on the Law on Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy that banned the abortion based on the grounds of congenital defects has been analyzed in order to reflect about the constitutive tension between civic ethics and catholic confessional ethics that has been a constant trait in the origin and the developments of the discipline. The article discusses how the debate about the case of congenital anomaly has derived in an artificial conflict between the Disability Rights Movement –resignified as functional diversity- and feminism. The conundrum between Disability Rights and reproductive rights calls for intersectionality in order to rethink autonomy and justice in the bioethics´ arena. Our view emphasizes the intersection between gender and disability.

This paper argues for a reconsideration of the balance of power in theorizations of documentary ethics through discourses on intersubjective experience in disability studies, primarily analyzing the first film by director Hara Kazuo, "Sayonara CP" ("Goodbye CP," 1972). The non-sync black and white 16mm film documents his pact with a group of activist men with cerebral palsy called the Kanagawa Green Grasses, filming the members giving up all supports of Japanese society, crawling off wheelchairs to rally in the streets against the invisibility of the disabled. The project led to Hara and his partner Kobayashi Sachiko’s more famous political works pushing the boundaries of private and public realms in postwar Japan. However "Sayonara CP" not only captures a turn toward personal documentary when radical leftist collectives were producing activist films, but invites an investigation of the ethical space the apparatus establishes and the political implications of documentary ethics, particularly through the film’s controversial central images of the disabled body contorted in pain. Taking previous frameworks of ethical space in documentary theory (Vivian Sobchack’s taxonomy of gazes, Bill Nichols’ axiographics) outside a spectatorial model, I analyze the film’s two encounters, around the camera and before the projector, citing Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s adoption of the stare as a politically generative dynamic in disability studies in considering the agency of the documentary subject and the political potential of personal cinema practice.

This is an old 2010 conference paper which I am significantly redrafting as a stand alone paper but also  as a chapter in my new book. I will cut back on some of the content around silence as that will be in another chapter and will extend the investigation of different university sites and memorials. Any comments about what could be added would be gratefully received.

Actor Christopher Reeve's address to the 1996 Democratic National Convention was met with enthusiasm by the mainstream press, while the disability press responded with anger and disdain. This paper conducts a rhetorical analysis of text, context and audience reception
in order to explore these different interpretations of Reeve's speech.The study is framed by the concept of polysemy, and in particular Leah Ceccarelli's concept of strategic ambiguity and John Fiske's concept of "gaps and fissures" that allow for different meanings to
seep through texts. Reeve's speech was not perceived by members of the disability community as providing such openings for their voices to be heard. The negative reception of Reeve's speech was further exacerbated by his lack of credibility with many in that community, his choice of language and metaphor, and even the visual rhetoric of his convention appearance.

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of demographic factors on instructional practices and challenges teachers face in teaching students with visual impairments in the government secondary schools of Harari regional state. A quantitative method with a survey design was employed. The sample consisted of 100 (with 95% response rate) participants selected using simple random sampling technique. Data was collected using questionnaire in the form of Likert scale. Frequencies, percentages, means, standard deviation, independent t-test and One-Way ANOVA were used to analyze the data. The study revealed that teachers’ level of qualification has implications to the instructional practices, namely their collaboration with other professionals, classroom supplies and equipment and teaching strategies. Teachers with training on inclusive or special needs education were found to use more specialized or individualized teaching strategies in the classroom for SVI than those who di...

This paper explores injustices experienced by disabled people in the postsocialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theory of social justice, the analysis proposes a ‘matrix’ that reveals the negative impact of two factors – state socialist legacy and postsocialist neoliberalization – on disabled people’s parity of participation in three dimensions of justice – economic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political representation. The legacy of state socialism has underpinned: segregated service provision; medical-productivist understanding of disability for assessment purposes; denial of disability on everyday level; and weak disability organizing. Neoliberal restructuring has resulted in: retrenchment of disability support through decentralization, austerity, and workfare; stigmatization of ‘dependency’ through the discourse of ‘welfare dependency’; responsibilization of disabled people; and depoliticization of disability organizations by restricting their activities to service provision and incorporating them in structures of tokenistic participation. The analysis is informed by reports and academic studies of disability in the postsocialist region.

This event will be held on Zoom with ASL interpretation available. Please RSVP to torontofilmandmediaseminar@gmail.com with your name and institutional affiliation for the link and passcode. • 23 October 2020 • Social time at 4:00pm • Talks begin 4:30 •

Disability Studies is a relatively new but rapidly growing academic discipline, as illustrated by the international proliferation of courses, events, networks, journals, book series, monographs, edited collections, and so on. Though drawing on this progress substantially, the Disability Studies MA differs from similar programmes insofar as it places particular emphasis on cultural issues. We are not only interested in the policies, prejudices, and professions around disability but also its representation in literature, media, film, art and so on. Liverpool Hope University is particularly well suited as a host for this programme on many counts. Most obviously, and indeed most importantly, we have a wealth of specialist staff and resources. We have a number of experts in Disability Studies, award winning tutors, and internationally recognised scholars and researchers. What is more, the regional, national, and international profile of the programme is enhanced greatly by the Centre for Culture & Disability Studies–and, by extension, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, the Literary Disability Studies book series, the on-going seminar series, and the International Network of Literary & Cultural Disability Scholars–that is housed in the Faculty of Education, Liverpool Hope University.

THE PICTURE THEORY OF DISABILITY
Background:
Over the last 50 or so years, many models have been proposed which seek to describe and define the phenomenon of disability. The medical model gained early ground and is still influential in many aspects of welfare distribution. Following seminal work in the mid ‘70s, the social model has since become hegemonic as praxis and is the model supported by disability rights movements. More recently, accounts such as the welfarist account have sought to provide a more structured philosophical perspective on the phenomenon.
These current hegemonic approaches, however, hold ‘disability’ to be nounal — the sort of thing possessed by a person, caused by a person’s environment, or some combination of the two. In contrast, the Picture Theory of Disability (PTD) offers an adverbial account of disability and evaluates disability as an experience rather than a property someone has.
In this sense then, the PTD asserts that ‘disability’ is an aspect of ‘doing’ rather than a ‘something’; for the PTD, there are no ‘disabled people’ or ‘disabling social conditions’, there are just people who experience a certain kind of irremediable impediment to ‘daily-living-tasks’ or ‘goals-like-ours’. More simply put, current models of disability make a category error: disability is not a ‘thing’, it is a certain kind of ‘experience’.
Method:
Conducted in the Analytic tradition, the PTD also incorporates feminist and phenomenological approaches. The PTD is a descriptive theoretical effort and offers a careful analysis of the interplay between the individual and their environment. Within the PTD, the use of Wittgensteinian pictures shows how and why a person in the picture experiences what they do, whilst conation arising as a result of Humean sympathy (in the historical sense of the term) helps to understand how a person in the picture might feel about that experience.
Results:
The PTD shows exactly when, where, and how disability is experienced — and by whom. In short, and broadly speaking, disability is experienced when verbs are negatively modified to the extent that the verb is irremediably impeded. The PTD makes no normative claims — but is offered as a heuristic, metric, and theoretical model of disability which, by paying close attention to the manner in which the verb is being modified, should permit focussed heteroclitic and neoteric ameliorations.
Conclusions:
Contemporary models of disability fundamentally misunderstand the nature of disability. Thus, current normative claims employed in health care, welfare distribution, law, social and political policy, etc., may be improper, unhelpful, and even counter-productive. The PTD stands as a heuristic, a metric, and offers an improved theoretical model from which to generate more appropriate normative claims.

La diversidad funcional ha sido tradicionalmente nombrada de forma estigmatizadora: discapacidad, minusvalía, invalidez, etc. El activismo de vida independiente español batalla contra esas heterodesignaciones, apostando por formas de auto-enunciación en positivo, incluso desde la reapropiación del insulto. Este artículo busca analizar este proceso a raíz del surgimiento y difusión del término tullido en un momento particular de confluencia entre activismos: las alianzas queer-crip o tullido-transfeministas. Para ello, se parte de los resultados de una investigación etnográfica, a caballo entre la academia y el activismo, que permite, por un lado, trazar una genealogía de lo tullido, y de su traducción como crip, en el contexto español; y, por otro lado, reflexionar, gracias a las entrevistas realizadas con activistas de la diversidad funcional, transfeministas y queer, sobre los diferentes posicionamientos en torno a la utilización, y posible politización, de estas injurias. Las conclusiones apuntan a las tensiones existentes en torno a la representación y la enunciación de/desde lo tullido y con relación a las lógicas coloniales subyacentes a la reivindicación de lo crip. No obstante, también se identifica el potencial político del término tullido que resulta subversivo cuando es reivindicado por los sujetos concernidos. Llamarse tullido conlleva no solo evidenciarse como diferente, sino como deficitario según los estándares vigentes de normalidad y deseabilidad y, por tanto, reírse de sus lógicas capacitistas y denunciar la biopolítica que los gobierna.

Dans cet article, nous examinons la notion d'incapacité telle qu'elle est créée et véhiculée par le langage qui privilégie la « personne avant tout » Nous nous penchons en premier lieu sur la formulation très répandue, qui consiste à désigner les personnes handicapées comme des « personnes comme les autres ». En second lieu, nous étudions l'idéolo-gie actuelle, qui met l'accent sur le fait que les personnes handicapées sont simplement des « personnes avec des handicaps », dans l'une de ses manifestations les plus concrètes, c'est-à-dire un document récent du gouvernement intituléÀl'unisson: Une approche canadienne con-cernant les personnes handicapées. En partant du concept de Dorothy Smith, selon lequel le langage constitue l'organisation sociale, nous démontrons la façon dont l'incapacité est médicalisée et individualisée dans ce document, et, par là, la manière dont l'incapacité prend la forme d'une limitation anormale et d'une insuffisance fonctionnelle que certaines personnes, quatre millions de Canadiens en l'occurrence, «éprouveraient ». Enfin, nous concluons que le langage qui privilégie la personne avant tout se comprend dans le cadre d'un processus continu où l'incapacité n'est plus perçue comme un phénomène social et, par conséquent, complexe sur le plan politique.This paper examines the representation of disability that is generated by, and supports, “people-first language.” The paper first describes the ubiquitous formulation of disabled people as “just people.” Second, the current ideology that stresses that disabled people are simply “people with disabilities” is examined in one of its concrete manifestations: a recent government document entitled In Unison: A Canadian Approach to Disability Issues. By making use of Dorothy Smith's concept that language is social organization, the author shows how disability is organized in this document as a medicalized and individual matter and, as such, takes shape as abnormal limitation and lack of function that some people-four million Canadians-“just happen to have.” Finally, the paper concludes that people-first language is best understood as part of an ongoing process that removes the possibility of understanding disability as a social, and thereby complex, political phenomenon.How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation— Dyer, 1993: 1

This talk explores the typically unrecognized autistic rhetoric of Brontë’s Villette. Specifically, the paper delves into the widely recognized narrative and rhetorical opacity of the novel—aspects of the text which have prompted scholars to note the “queerness” of the narrator (Weinstone), contributed to interpretations of Lucy Snow as a “frozen woman” (Forsyth 21), speak to the novel’s “traumatic moments of narrative amnesia” (Shears and Harrison 27), and which argue that “the apparent intimacy of first person narration [is] never borne out, the trust breached by opacities in the narrative, so that we are imprisoned within Lucy without full knowledge of her” (Beer 182)—and contemplates the ways in which these rhetorical features reflect an autistic linguistic register. Part of a larger project on autism poetics, the focus here is on two salient qualities of autistic language: verbal expression that reads as “silent” and “local coherence.” The former emerges from a powerful construct of autism, fueled by medical discourse and popular culture, that suppresses authentic autistic expression, leading to a false perception of autism as absent, opaque, or silent; the latter (“local coherence”) describes a distinctive autistic inclination for the finite and particular, frequently regarded by mainstream culture as communicative failure rather than cognitive or aesthetic preference. The talk observes the way these aspects of Villette’s rhetoric play against the relentless monologic or apostrophic frame of the larger text, generating an unusual discursive pattern, redolent of autism poetics. Within the narrative of Villette, there is a tension between these three features—silence, local coherence, and persistent narrative monologism. For many readers, this tension functions as a destabilizing rhetoric and contributes to a sense of hiddenness, or, to the feeling that the narrator is pulling away. Without diminishing existing feminist and historically-grounded interpretations that read these aspects of the novel within the context of the oppression of 19th-century British women, this paper seeks to open additional avenues for exploration at the intersection of disability theory, autism studies, and critical feminist thought.