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living on; not getting better

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Feminist Review

Abstract

The contemporary emergence of the concept ‘debility’, which pertains to a broad swathe of humanity whose ordinary lives simply persist without ever getting better, shares a time span with an acute critique of neo-liberal biopolitics. Where capital has historically relied on a population that through its labour necessarily becomes debilitated, the newer model of understanding references the intrinsic profitability of debility itself. The two dimensions overlap and co-exist, but what I shall pursue here are the implications of recognising that, at the most fundamental level, it is in the interests of neo-liberalism to produce and sustain bodies as debilitated and therefore susceptible to a range of market commodities that hold out the promise of therapeutic interventions into the relative failures of physical, cognitive and affective embodiment. In previous work, I have argued strongly for the inherent vulnerability of all bodies, but in considering here a more overtly politicised context, it becomes possible to readdress the questions posed by Jasbir Puar: ‘which bodies are made to pay for “progress”? Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for neoliberalism, and which cannot?’ And at the present moment, writing at a time of imposed austerity, I would add, what, if anything, is lost in the deployment of the term debility instead of disability?

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Notes

  1. See Bambra and Smith (2010), Garthwaite (2011) and Soldatic and Meekosha (2012). I will return to this point later.

  2. See Ecclestone and Goodley (2014) for further discussion of this point.

  3. Despite its ubiquity in disability circles, the designation TAB has been challenged for its lack of nuance, with the term CA (currently abled) offered as an alternative. For an interesting discussion, see the guestpost by Edison and Notkin (2010) and the responses to it on the website Forward (Feminists with Disabilities).

  4. In their discussion of the impact of UK austerity measures on disability since the emergency austerity budget of 2010, Goodley et al. (2014) cite the 2012 Disability in Austerity Study undertaken by Claudia Wood for Demos. There it was estimated that the household income of each family showed losses of £2,000–3,000 over the course of the last parliament (2010–2015), with disabled people losing £9 billion in welfare support and one-third losing their Disability Living Allowance.

  5. See Kolářová (2015) for a thought-provoking analysis of neo-liberal choice in the context of the push for the rights of elderly, ill or disabled people to choose death.

  6. Fritsch (2013) traces the trajectory of wheelchair design—the marker of disability par excellence—from the passivity of early cumbersome models operated by an aide, through lightweight designs that enabled user operation, to contemporary motorised and super-lightweight models that are entirely within the control of the disabled person herself. Enhanced freedom is, of course, marked by sharply increased prices that not only generate profit for manufacturers but create a split between those able to afford the promise of rehabilitation and those who remain further immured in slow death.

  7. See Matthew Sothern (2007) for a queer critique of such neo-liberal ploys.

  8. Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (c. 50).

  9. Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, Pub. L. No. 101–336, §2, 104 Stat. 328 (1991).

  10. The Mirror report antedated the celebration of disability occasioned by the London Paralympics by just a few months, but the point is that that brief moment changed nothing in wider public attitudes. It is only the able-disabled who can count as valued citizens. The bitter irony of the contrasting perspectives on disability is that the contractor, ATOS, who operationalised the Work Capability Assessment was also the major sponsor of the Paralympics. After widespread criticism, they have withdrawn from the contract, but the WCA continues.

  11. I will not develop this line of thought here as I am sure other contributors to the Feminist Review special issue will do so.

  12. As I write, the UK Conservative party, the dominant group in the coalition government, have just announced further swingeing, but broadly populist, cuts to the welfare budget.

  13. That perspective is far from mainstream. As cripqueer theorist Kafer (2013, p. 102) sardonically writes, ‘Whenever I tell people I have been working on a book about the role of disability in imagined futures, they almost always assume I’m writing about science fiction’.

  14. Compare Deleuze and Guattari (1987[1980], p. 284): ‘we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, and how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body’.

  15. As well as my own work, see, for example, Goodley (2007), Gibson et al. (2012) and Feely (2014).

  16. Erevelles (2014, n. pag), again, raises a cogent question: ‘What does it mean to come to terms with the transgressive vagaries of … assemblage—precarious/partial/body-without-organs/liminal/affective/molecular—within political economic contexts imbricated in colonial/neocolonial practices of unrelenting social, economic, and militarized violence?’ Similar, though more local, concerns are addressed in a joint paper by Ecclestone and Goodley (2014), who outline but do not resolve their differences.

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  1. Margrit Shildrick
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Shildrick, M. living on; not getting better. Fem Rev 111, 10–24 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2015.22

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