4330 simplified

essay question one – something about the notion of misfit and applying it outside of disability — OUTLINE

start with what is a misfit — GARLAND-THOMPSON

looking at misfit in a slightly different way — PRICE

taking about misfit in other contexts

PUWAR — race & gender; space invaders

fatness

• austerity — GUTHMAN

• health — GUTHMAN

• mix of the two (+ race and gender) — STRINGS, black women as social dead weight

Q1 - start with what is a misfit — GARLAND-THOMPSON

• Can be a noun (to be a misfit), or a verb (the act of misfitting)

• Initially we think of it as someone not fitting, being out of place

  • Can be refusing to fit as an act of resistance.

    • An act of agency – reclaiming a word that is typically seen as being located in the person’s deficiency

• “recognition of our fleshliness and the contingencies of human embodiment”

  • How our bodies fit or don’t fit in particular environments.

• Misfitting “enacts agency and subjectivity” and relates to the notion of becoming

  • Performing agent is not in the person but up against the thingness of the world.

  • Notion of becoming – things are always moving and in a sense of becoming.

    • People move and interact with environments that are shaped due to those interactions.

• The concepts of misfitting and fitting guarantee that we recognize that bodies are always situated in and dependent upon environments through which they materialize as fitting or misfitting.

Q1 - looking at misfit in a slightly different way — PRICE

• Paraphrase: considering misfit in terms of mental disability would emphasize that these disabilities don’t fit the visible/invisible dichotomy, but are intermittently apparent.

• How does price’s scenario with person A and person B fit into the neat “square peg in a round hole” analogy? Who is the misfit here? Is it the person who is wanted to act in a certain way, or the person who’s trying to stop them from acting.

  • The idea of the misfit helps define what it means to be disabled --> fitting or misfitting is environmentally-constructed

• Then requires us to beg the question: are some disabilities worse than others? are some bad all together?

  • This orients us to CDS’s notion of desiring disability

  • Price says we cannot desire disability without full consideration of desire’s counterpart: pain

    • Need to pay more attention to pain “to help resolve the bodymind problem” beyond the symbolic

Q1 - taking about misfit in other contexts

PUWAR — race & gender; space invaders

• Women and people of colour as misfits in certain spaces, misfit = space invader

  • You can only invade a space if you are a misfit

  • “physical body out of line with the collective”

• What is a space invader?

  • People existing in spaces they’re not seen as normative.

  • Not transformative – leaves untouched a system that can still be openly hostile.

• Space invaders create this paradox due to the proximity and crossover between the outside (the misfit) and the inside proper.

  • This paradox causes this feeling of disorientation for the inside

    • This disorientation to seeing what you see as a misfit fitting.

    • Ties back to the misfit because this space has been constructed for white men, thus non- white, non-men are misfits. But somehow they’ve entered.

    • They misfit with the collective, causing this feeling of disorientation

    • Expression of disorientation reinforces and communicates boundaries.

• Space invaders also create this feeling of amplification

  • “known in ways which are seen to threaten the … coherent superior identity”

  • Again, they misfit with this preset identity – leads to confusion & discomfort for everyone

  • The inside group holds this imagined threat of the space invaders/misfits taking over.

    • Because if the misfits all come in, doesn’t that make you a misfit now? If they all match and rework the space to suit them, the white man is a misfit.

Q1 - taking about misfit in other contexts

fatness

• austerity — GUTHMAN

• Obesity understood through narratives of neoliberalism – surplus in bodies

• Culture of bulimia – must buy more and weigh less

  • Obvioiusly fat people aren’t adhering to this

• Link to neoliberalism – we are responsible and we have choice

  • The fat subject is not taking responsibility and choice properly

    • Fatness is a choice + we have choice + our choices must serve the neoliberal state + our choices must contribute to the slimming down = we must chose to not be fat.

• Misfitting with societal austerity measures

Q1 - taking about misfit in other contexts

fatness

• health — GUTHMAN

• GUTHMAN: “refraction of the individual body onto the social space”

• Healthism: performing morality by being healthy

  • Being healthy equated with being a good citizen

  • Health equated with weight

• Language of epidemic conveys:

  • Fat people as moral failing

  • Product of an unhealthy lifestyle (choice)

• Misfitting with the health norms we’ve decided

Q1 - taking about misfit in other contexts

fatness

• mix of the two (+ race and gender) — STRINGS, black women as social dead weight

• Black women as social dead weight

  • Endangering their health and the health of the society

  • Drain and burden on society

    • Worse than dead because they’re still there taking resources.

• Tied to the idea of the welfare queen

  • Black mothers as indulgent & exploiting state funds.

essay question two – certain ways of thinking about embodiment OUTLINE

start with defining embodiment

• three categories of the body that shape embodiment

  • body as nature

  • body as socially constructed

    • weak — YOUNG

    • stronger

  • embodiment

    • GROSZ

    • example from HERNDON

other ways of thinking about embodiment

• SHILDRICK & disability

• AHMED & emotion

Q2 - start with defining embodiment

• three categories of the body that shape embodiment

  • body as nature

Essential traits between gender

biological differences between men and women

Q2 - start with defining embodiment

• three categories of the body that shape embodiment

  • body as socially constructed

    • weak — YOUNG

• residue of biological determinism

  • Ex. sex role theory, learning of attributes associated with one’s biological sex.

  • Socialized based on gender.

• YOUNG

  • Suggests a deep cultural power that places limits on the body that are enacted

    • You learn to move the body in ways that limit you

      • Internalized understandings of your body as limiting and limited

  • Ascribes agency and rationality but gives little time to the ways society alters or influences it

Q2 - start with defining embodiment

• three categories of the body that shape embodiment

  • body as socially constructed

    • stronger

• Stronger versions highlight the role of cultural and representations, material body all but disappears.

  • Think butler

    • Gender as performative, not really existing outside its production.

  • Body is what is represented in culture.

  • Nothing really exists outside of cultural representations

Q2 - start with defining embodiment

• three categories of the body that shape embodiment

  • embodiment

    • GROSZ

    • example from HERNDON

• Simultaneously physical and produced through cultural and discursive practices.

• Serves as a halfway point

• Co-created

  • You’re an acting subject but you don’t create the conditions under which you act

• “transformed in social practice” -- things happen when bodies interact with systems and how they interact in the social realm

• GROSZ

  • Not the real body on one hand and the cultural representations on the other

  • Rather the representations constitute bodies and help produce them

• HERNDON - Fatness as embodiment

  • No set category so anyone can be called fat

  • Ties to embodiment because the cultural representation helps create the bounds of the body

  • “‘the biological and the social are interactive in creating disability’”

Q2 - other ways of thinking about embodiment

• SHILDRICK & disability

• When we talk about embodiment as co-created by the body and the social, where is that line? Where does the body end?

• The limits of thinking of the human in isolation

  • Can’t think about the self without understanding how the self-interacts with (for example) prosthetics

  • Disordering the conventional limits of embodiment but questioning what it means to be human

    • What does it mean to talk about human being if they perform in ways that involve interactions with other objects or forms that might augment the way their body performs?

• What is at stake in rethinking embodiment?

  • Contestation of human exceptionalism and the prioritizing of a certain embodiment

  • Rethinking how people are made through connections with human and non-human things

    • Disrupting the idea that other things (ex. wheelchair) are props.

Q2 - other ways of thinking about embodiment

• AHMED & emotion

• Speaks to how bodies are transformed in social practice

  • Emotions serve to create certain embodiments – often following tropes, cultural representations

  • Bodies are transformed in social practice – they become certain bodies in our interactions with others – think Lorde’s story, her body became something for fear to be projected onto in social practice

• Idea that bodies produce the whole range of emotions collectively

  • Affect, registers in bodies and spaces without being named

  • The expression of emotions in certain people leads to a specific label

• What do racialized bodies embody?

  • Cultural representations have a life of their own and come to define and categorize people and can structure interactions

  • How people experience the world is an effect of the collective emotions attached to them

  • The important part is the naming

• “Emotions work to create the very distinction between the inside and the outside”

  • Separation happens through responding to others and objects (creating the body as either inside or outside)

• “encounter is played out ON the body and is played out WITH emotions”

  • The emotion is placed onto us and helps create our embodiment

  • Racism as a particular kind of encounter.

• The embodiment of emotion

AHMED - bodies, affect, & emotions

-              Bodies produce the whole range of emotions collectively.

o   Some of them are affect

§  Pre-linguistic; registers in bodies and spaces without being named

AHMED - what do racialized bodies embody

Cultural representations come to define and categorize people and can structure interactions

How people experience the world is an effect of the collective feelings that are attached to them

• Ex. policing the emotions of disabled people, Black people

• Some people aren’t able to express emotions and if they do its attached to certain labels.

  • the important thing is the naming which creates the trope

AHMED - what does it mean for bodies to leave an impression

Physically impressing on

Also how bodies create boundaries through interactions

Think about the context of trauma as well (as leaving a mark)

“perception and emotion take place in what I would call the contact zone of impression”

• Perception of others causes emotional response that are shaped by history – the archive of the body

AHMED - how we feel about other is what aligns us with the collective

“emotions work to create the distinction between the inside and the outside”

Experiences are shaped by these kinds of interactions and experiences

AHMED - Lorde’s subway encounter

How the encounter is played out on the body and is played out with emotions

§  Ends with the hate

§  Racism as a particular form of encounter.

AHMED - discussion

• Emotions as a way to include/exclude certain groups.

  • Rise of the Right

    • Desire for a “we” and a belonging

    • A love for other white people, not just a hate for non-white people.

• Emotions as political practice rather than just psychological.

• Collective feelings, don’t just come into being but within the existence of a group.

  • Ex. AIDS activism, mobilization of anger, collective sense of grief

  • Emotions are formed intersubjectively

    • Work to create the bounds of community

    • Whats embodied in thsese emotions are collectively created

• Associations – think of 9/11 and how association leads to marginalization and how it grows and spreads

PUWAR - space invaders

People existing in spaces they’re not seen as normative

Not transformative on its own

§  Leaves untouched a system that is still openly hostile

§  Says we have a diverse space but then doesn’t have to put in the work

-              Distortion that there is an effort to accommodate.

PUWAR - relevance to embodiment

o   Physical body as out of line with the collective

o   Out of body experience

PUWAR - paradox

Paradox – proximity of the outside with the inside proper

o   Do not have an undisputed right to occupy the space

PUWAR - disorientation

o   Disorienting for those in power to see people in the spaces that you don’t feel should be there

PUWAR - amplification

Threatening because they are known

Exaggeration of this “take-over”

Threatening the coherent group identity.

Contributes to this governmentality of unease

• How unease is expressed in a space, not in words but felt

PUWAR - discussion

Universal somatic norm

• How things are universal but norms change within context

• Proximity to whiteness and universal

• Somatic norm = the body that is normal

  • Obviously the space invader’s body is not normal

Sense of unease

• Even when it doesn’t materialize it doesn’t dissuade the fear.

GROSZ - bodies as volatile

o   Raises questions of sexual difference that the mind does not; anchored in sexual politics

o   Volatility – unpredictable, difficult to read and contain

GROSZ - rethinking subjectivity

Resurrect the corporeal being

§  Subjectivity is made through the way your body is defined and how you enact your comportment

§  If we recognize the subject as corporal – it can no longer succumb to the neutralization that has occurred to women due to their subordination

GROSZ - differing conceptions of sexuality

As a drive

§  Biological essentialism creeps in

§  Suggesting there is difficulty locating agency or intention

As an act, series of practices and behaviours

As an identity

As a set of orientations – seeking pleasure

GROSZ - beyond dualism

Not a real material body or cultural representations

Both help to constitute bodies

Mutually define one another

Body as both a thing and not thing

§  If the body is a physical thing its not like any other physical thing

§  Body is not reducible to just thingness.

YOUNG

Deep cultural power places limits on the body that are enacted

Ascribes agency and rationality but gives little time to how society affects this

Distances herself from a sort of feminine essence

• Then suggests culture communicates to women that their body has limits

• You internalize understandings of your body as limited and limiting

Reproduces essentializing traits – weak, timid, hesitant, etc.

• Frames this only in a negative way

• Could be positive when thinking of something like GBV

Indictment of women’s historical objectification and how women come to see their bodies as objects

At the end of the article says this isn’t generalizable.

SHILDRICK - why should our bodies end at the skin

Mobility aids and prosthetics

Limits of thinking of the human in isolation

§  Can’t think about the self without thinking about how the self interacts with other things

SHILDRICK - embodiment and the expereince of disability 

Disordering the conventional limits of embodiment and bringing into question the attribution of human being

What does it mean to talk about humans if they perform in ways that involve interactions with other objects or forms that might augment their body?

Prosthetics trying to get the disabled body to reach a norm

§  Not obtaining a normative standard but in conversation with other forms

SHILDRICK - the athelete’s body as emblematic

Example of how we understand pushing the limits of the body (and mind)

Supercrip = disabled athlete needs to break barriers and records.

Inspiration porn

§  Serves the non-disabled people

§  Overcoming narrative, linked to the notion of cure

What happens to embodiment if the body is understood as a machine?

CLARE - brilliant imperfection

o   Non-negotiable value of body-mind different

o   Resists the pressures of normal and unnormal

o   Defies the easy splitting of natural and unnatural

o   Pushing back on the idea of having to be a perfect being

CLARE - ideology of cure

o   Predicated on an eradication of disability and the violence that accompanies it

o   Cure leads to the elimination of certain body-minds

o   Recognition that cure can be liberty enhancing for some

o   Treatment doesn’t fail you, you fail treatment

CLARE - violence of cure

1. Systems that saved peoples lives work to eliminate certain condtions

• Sign of progress in the ableist world to have these conditions cured

2. Focuses not on diseases but on the people who have them

• Genetic counselling – DS

• Governing at a distance

  • Not overt power over people

  • Intervening in decision making

3. Eradicating particular body-minds stops for nothing even death

• Ex. separating conjoined twins

What unites these?

§  Elimination of disease, future life, present life

§  Moves in terms of severity

§  How cure governs life – serves as like biopower no?

CLARE - care

o   Thinking of care as interdependence

o   MAID – most people cite feeling like a burden

GARLAND-THOMPSON - the misfit

Both verb and noun

Can be an act of resistance/refusal to not fit

§  Reclaiming a word that’s seen as deficiency in the person that does not fit

Not physically fitting or a bodymind that cannot acclimatize

§  Can’t always be fixed by the social model

Ignites a recognition of our fleshliness

The concepts of misfitting and fitting guarantee that we recognize that bodies are always situated in and dependent upon environments through which they materialize as fitting or misfitting.

Both informs disability experience and is crucial to disability identity formation

§  Identity needs not to be the sole way of speaking about disability

§  Even if you don’t define as disabled, you can exist in a disabling environment/situation

§  Not everyone has access to identity as it relates to the privileged white subject with rights

GARLAND-THOMPSON - misfit as a feminist materialist concept

Fem’s move from the discursive to the material

Co-constituting relationship between flesh and environment

Encounter between bodies with particular shapes and the shapes of the world

Misfitting enacts agency and subjectivity

§  Materializes up against the thingness of the world, not within the person

§  Notion of becoming – always dynamic and in motion

PRICE - bodymind

o   Physical and mental processes that not only affect each other but give rise to each other

o   Pain taking place in the body but pleasure to the mind

PRICE - caring for bodyminds

o   Feminist ethic of care

o   Not knowing what another’s pain feels like but recognizing it as real

PRICE - what should we do with pain?

o   Uncomfortable for CDS scholars who talk about desiring disability as a way to speak back against ableism

o   Can’t have desire w/o consideration of desire’s counterpart: pain

HERNDON - why not see fatness as a disability

Focus on biology.

Weight seen as a problem with an impaired individual

§  Individual issue to correct rather than social action.

§  Not a disability because people can alter their condition.

One side says why should fat people have to contend with this too?

Other side says why do they get to gain access to this category?

HERNDON - what explains the feminist resistance to fatness as a political category

Reminder that our bodies are dynamic

§  If we have to acknowledge that our bodies are not static, then neither is gender = neither is woman

HERNDON - fatness as embodiment

o   No set category so anyone can be called fat

o   Ties to embodiment because the cultural representation helps create the bounds of the body

o   “Fat women—not as biologically categorized by weight and impairments but as socially situated.”

o   “’the distinction between the biological reality of a disability and the social construction of a disability cannot be made sharply, because the biological and the social are interactive in creating disability’”

STRINGS - the beginning of pathologizing fatness

o   Black women have often been heavier than white women, but healthier at heavier weights.

o   Black culture seen as inhibiting motivation for weight control

STRINGS - black women as social dead weight

Marking black women as deviant and spreading disease

Fatness gains this same narrative

Derided for their presumed over-indulgence

Endangering their own health but also the health of society

May not be physically dead, but socially abandoned

Drain and burden on society

§  Thus worse than dead because their physicality is still there.

GUTHMAN - links to neoliberalsim

Surplus in bodies

Culture of bulimia       

§  Buy more & weigh less

Responsible political subjects with choice, must chose to not be fat for the betterment of society

GUTHMAN - obesity in the classroom

Biopolitics: others’ fatness proved highly distressing.

Reflection of the body onto the social space.

View of fatness as a choice, matter of willpower

§  Individual responsibilitization