The bug bear of essentialism has been eating my nerves. Ableist culture is the term people use in disability circles to frame self-advocacy as a struggle against–well–”the culture that only values healthy bodies”. My problem is that I don’t like being eaten. The essentialist model of disability makes me feel like a mantis being chewed from below, my head being saved for last.
The problem–my problem I suppose–is that I don’t believe ableist culture exists. I believe in ableism to be sure and like millions of people with disabilities I’ve experienced grievous and unjust opposition to my very presence in public, in school, on the streets. With my guide dog at my side I’ve been prevented from entering restaurants from Milan to Manhattan. Ableism is inveterate behavior, transmitted within families, affirmed by media representations of bodily preferment, preached by ministers–don’t misunderstand me–there’s plenty of ableist activity in the village square. In fact “plenty” is the wrong word. Prejudice against people with disabilities is pervasive both in the United States and around the globe.
Ableist ideas are spread by organs of culture(s), including but not limited to ministries of propaganda (Joseph Goebbels), Time Magazine, or John Stossel. Hip-Hop promotes ableism and schoolyard lingo spreads it widely–”he’s so lame”; “what are you, blind/deaf/retarded…? Mis-representations of cripple-dom burgeon all about us.
Culture is not hegemonic concerning the subject of difference despite Foucault’s broad insistence that it is. Oppositional rhetorics that incorporate cultural abjection depend on reaction formations of alienation. The term is Freud’s and may seem dated but the principle stands. Reaction formation is a defensive process in which unacceptable emotions and impulses are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency.
I hate myself and will declare myself beautiful. Wikipedia offers the example:
“A man who is overly aroused by pornographic material who uses reaction formation may take on an attitude of criticism toward the topic. He may end up sacrificing many of the positive things in his life, including family relationships, by traveling around the country to anti-pornography rallies. This view may become an obsession, whereby the man eventually does nothing but travel from rally to rally speaking out against pornography.”
Foucault argues that what overly arouses all of western culture is fascism: “the strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
Self-insertion: if you believe this I’m sorry for you.
I will not psychoanalyze Foucault as I’m neither qualified to do it and I’m unwilling to say he was sick. There’s a trap in essentialist thinking which is neo-Victorian, tending to see things as black or white–accordingly it tends toward the obsessional.
I’ve always liked Edward Said on the subject of Foucault:
“Many of the people who admire and have learned from Foucault, including myself, have commented on the undifferentiated power he seemed to ascribe to modern society. With this profoundly pessimistic view went also a singular lack of interest in the force of effective resistance to it, in choosing particular sites of intensity, choices which, we see from the evidence on all sides, always exist and are often successful in impending, if not actually stopping, the progress of tyrannical power. Moreover Foucault seemed to have been confused between the power of institutions to subjugate individuals, and the fact that individual behavior in society is frequently a matter of following rules of conventions. As peter Dews puts it: ‘[Foucault] perceives clearly that institutions are not merely imposed constructs, yet has no apparatus for dealing with this fact, which entails that following a convention is not always equivalent to submitting to a power…But without this distinction every delimitation becomes an exclusion, and every exclusion becomes equated with an exercise of power.’”
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I do not believe in hegemonic ableist culture. Like Said I’ve seen effective resistance. Nevertheless the formation of a stabilized (dominant) ableist culture persists throughout disability studies and is accepted widely. The materialities of diverse embodiments are serious subjects and pervasive rhetorics of exclusion need to be resisted. But one should also resist Foucault’s metaphorization of fascism.
Planet of the Blind 