GS 10 Study Guide Final

• Disability Justice

• Disability activists and theorists have asserted a distinction between a medical model and a social model of disability 

  • A medical model contends that disability is a deviant body formation that should be cured or controlled 

  • A social model contends that disability is a social construction that is part of one’s social identity. In critiques of exclusions based on disability, the social model shifts the focus from the disability itself to systemic discrimination and social barriers 

  • Disability justice extends the social model by contending that stigma and violence experienced by disabled people cannot be addressed by curing or changing bodies (in fact these efforts are sometimes considered acts of violence themselves),  ur by fundamentally transforming how social systems are organized 

  • Sins invalid: “We are in a global system that is incompatible with life. … Our communities are often treated as disposable, especially within the current economic, political and environmental landscapes. There is no way to stop a single gear in motion — we must dismantle this machine

First course text:

In the article entitled Crip Kinship: Beauty as Liberation, author Shayda Kafai (2021) discusses the way in which beauty can be a form of liberation, especially for those who come from marginalized backgrounds. However, beauty must be separated from systems of oppression that are rooted in violence, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy. Overall, Kafai argues that beauty is not inherently problematic. Instead, it has the potential to be reconfigured and transformed into a framework that is inclusive of both queer and disabled bodies. This reinterpretation of beauty is in line with the keyword “disability justice.” Developed by Sins Invalid, disability justice refers to an intersectional framework that advocates for the liberation of those most impacted by ableism. Overall, Kafai contends that liberation is possible through the redefinitions of beauty rather than its rejection. This is because beauty is a structure that can be separated from normativity and shaped into a structure of resistance.

Kafai engages with Mia’s The Ugly, which seeks to eradicate beauty as a system based in domination and elitism. In contrast, sins invalid instead takes a reconstructionist approach, calling to reconstruct and transform the existing system of beauty without abolishing it. In this way, both frameworks demonstrate different approaches towards confronting oppressive systems, one through eradication and the other reconstruction. 

Second Course Text: 

Within the article Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence, author Robert McRuer (2006) engages with the theme of disability justice. Specifically, the author contends that the system of compulsory able-bodiedness that produces disability is intertwined with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness. In this way, compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness and vice versa. For this reason, achieving disability justice ultimately requires destabilising both systems, that of heteronormativity and normative standards for able-bodiedness. 

Example: 

• Sins Invalid, which is a disability justice-based performance project that focuses on artists with disabilities, artists of color, and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists. Led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid's performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body.

  • BEAUTY AS SELF-RECOGNITION: Art-activism challenges the paradigms of normal and sexy…offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all bodies and communities. A restoration of beauty as liberation. “I was searching for beauty and I named myself.”

• Another example can be the politics implemented to combat discrimination, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits discrimination in employment, education, and other spaces. Disability justice can also be seen within our own campus, particularly through initiatives such as CAE. 

• POLITICAL ECONOMY

• Political economy is the study of how politics shape economic systems and how politics determine value. 

• Political economy asks questions such as:

  • What is valuable? What is the metric?

  • How valuable is it?

  • What does valuing it look like?

  • How are valuable resources distributed? Why?

• Critical political economy (or feminist political economy) examines systems of power that create and reinforce an understanding of value, economic systems, and related social formations that sustain scarcity and exploitation.

• Critical political economy also examines social systems that organize value and resources in ways that challenge or do not conform to the dominant economic system.

First course text:

The concept of political economy is engaged within the article entitled Wages Against Housework (1974) by author Silvia Federici. According to the author, capitalist society has subverted women to roles rooted in domesticity, motherhood, and child-bearing. Specifically, it highlights the way in which our capitalist society undermines women who perform domestic labor, particularly as they are not paid for domestic work. The unwashed condition of housework has become a powerful weapon in reinforcing the assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it. For this reason, Federici calls that women be paid fair wages for housework, which means refusing domestic work as the natural expression of female nature. This connects to political economy in the way that politics determine the value of women’s domestic labor, rendering it as a natural part of female expression and thus unworthy of paid wages.

However, the larger wages for housework campaign further extends this conversation, particularly as it calls for cutting down on housework, the ability to stand up to men, deciding the conditions in which to have children, the ability to win decent housing, etc. 

Second course text:

Furthermore, the concept of political economy is also discussed in an article by Grace Chang (2004) entitled From the Third World to the Third World Within: Asian Women Workers Fighting Globalization. According to Chang,  migration of third world people from their homes largely stands as a result of the destruction brought out by globalization. Specifically, Chang highlights the globalized context, particularly the way in which migration is as a result of the institutionalized underdevelopment and impoverishment of third world nations and people. Additionally, Chang also underscores how poor women of color are often the first victims of globalization, particularly as they experience losses in status, freedom, safety, education. This is a prominent example of the way in which a political economy operates, as resources are unevenly distributed within a globalized economy, thus undervaluing and impoverishing those residing in and immigrating from third world countries.  

Example: 

• An example is the Wages for Housework (1977) campaign, a 1970s feminist movement aimed at exposing the exploitation of unpaid domestic labor by advocating for financial compensation from governments. Launched by theorists like Silvia Federici and Selma James, it sought to recognize care work, redefine Marxist labor theories, and empower women. The movement recognizes that destabilizing patriarchal structures transforms the economy. 

• Another example is the National Domestic Workers Alliance which is an advocacy group promoting the rights of domestic workers in the United States. 

• Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, which extends overtime pay rights to certain personal attendants working in the home who were not previously entitled to overtime pay under California law. Additionally, it also ensures wages and overtime protections, paid time off, safe working conditions, protection from harassment etc. 

• REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE

• Reproductive justice (RJ) is a theoretical framework created by Black women in 1994 and developed by women of color organizers, activists, and theorists to more effectively describe how the intersections of gender, race, class, ability, nationality, and sexuality influence reproductive politics in the U.S. to produce a complex matrix of reproductive oppression.

• RJ has three core values: 

  • the right to have a child

  • the right to not have a child

  • the right to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments

First course text:

The concept of reproductive justice is discussed in the article Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice. Within this article, authors Jael Silliman et al. (2024) discuss an expanded definition of reproductive justice that extends beyond access to abortion. Specifically, this definition of reproductive justice critiques the concept of “choice," examining the constraints within which women of color navigate their reproductive lives and organizing.  Specifically, choice implies a marketplace for options in which women's right to choose what happens to their bodies is legally protected, but this often ignores that way in which women of color face economic and institutional constraints that restrict their choices. That being said, reproductive justice is framed as part of a much wider set of concerns, which calls for greater access to resources and services, economic rights, freedom from violence etc. In this way, the authors encourage us to think of reproductive justice as intertwined with the socioeconomic inequalities that women of color face in their lives. 

“For women of color, resisting population control while simultaneously claiming their right to bodily self-determination, including the right to contraception and abortion or the right to have children, is at the heart of their struggle for reproductive control.”

Second course text: 

Furthermore, challenges to reproductive justice are discussed within the article The Growing Criminalization of Pregnancy by Melissa Grant (2022). The article discusses the case of Kenlissa Jones, who was charged with murder for a self-managed abortion. Like Jones, many pregnant women who are seeking abortions and/or are being suspected of illegal drug use may face criminal penalties as a result of the overturn of Roe v. Wade. These women are being subjected to surveillance, arrest and incarceration at alarming rates. This extension of criminal punishment to abortion has resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of women who are being locked up.

Examples:

• Another example is reproductive justice can be seen within Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity, which is a Chicago-based feminist of color reproductive justice movement. The movement particularly provides a platform to mothers and caregivers of color, combining reproductive justice, abolition, and anti-militarist organizing. The movement also works in collaboration with movements across Egypt and Palestine, helping mothers and caregivers who are experiencing a genocide.

• An example of reproductive justice is the overturning of Roe v. Wade in which the supreme course does not protect the right for women to have an abortion. As a result, many women are being criminalized for having an abortion. However, states such as California recognize the right for a woman to have an abortion and access contraception and reproductive healthcare. 

• State Violence and Carcerality

• State violence is the use of governmental authority to cause and sustain harm and suffering to individuals, groups or communities such as political violence, incarceration. Ethnic cleansing, medical violence or surveillance. State violence is often not considered violence because it is justified by law and becomes socially normalized.  

• Both Richie defines carcerality as referring to all things punishment. Carcerality includes institutions like schools and shelters that are not usually considered police or prisons but as Richie argues, as involved or invoked in response to situations when laws have been broken, crimes have been committed, or norms have been violated

First course text: This text corresponds with the course text entitled “Administrating Gender” by Dean Spade. Within this work, Spade highlights the explicit use of race and gender categorization, demonstrating the way in which legal and administrative systems actively maintain racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism. The enforcement of a rigid gender binary, according to Spade, has significant implications on the life chances of transgender individuals. This is otherwise referred to as “administrative violence,” which is a form of state violence that often goes unnoticed as it functions through policies and paperwork rather than through overt force. I find that this form of violence relates to the framework of beauty, particularly as beauty functions as a system of recognition. In the same way as administrative violence, beauty is often used as a way to classify which identities are desirable versus invisible and disposable. Additionally, both normative beauty standards and administrative systems are often disguised as natural and objective. For this reason, the reimagination of beauty and disability justice run parallel to the dismantling of bureaucratic structures that sustain systems of oppression. 

Second course text: We Morph War into Magic by Ana Clarissa and Rojas Durazo (2013) highlights how border communities rearrange the geopolitical site of violent border-making processes, transforming meanings of belonging and community through creative practice and cultural production. Particularly the authors highlight the way in which the U.S.-Mexico border acts as a form of state violence, focusing on the community's efforts to reimagine this space from one based in exclusion and harm to inclusiveness to instead one grounded in belonging and collective identity. Furthermore, the authors also highlight the way in which historical colonial race coding of gendered/sexual hierarchies promoted violence against Chicana/Mexican and Indigenous women as well as those with gender and/or sexualities that deviate away from cisgender and/or heteronormative standards. Similarly, the heteropatriarchal order of the border patrol and the military continually deploys racial-gender constructs that promote violence against Latinas. For this reason, women's feminist leadership in the mural project was key in countering and humanizing the militarized hypermasculinities of the border patrol and building community accountability. 

Examples:

• The StoneWall Rebellion of 1969 is a prominent example of a resistance towards state violence, particularly directed towards LGBTQ+ individuals. It challenged the constant policing, criminalization and harassment of LGBTQ+ individuals by state authorities. During the late 1960s, laws in NYC made it illegal for individuals to engage in same-sex relationships or wear clothing that does not fit their assigned gender at birth. Police raids at gay bars, such as the Stonewall Inn, were frequent. However, instead of staying silent, the LGBTQ+ community decided to fight back.

• Another example of state violence can be seen within the current ICE raids happening across the nation. These raids involve law enforcement, namely immigration enforcement, surveilling marginalized communities and using deportation and intimidation tactics as a means of control. Such practices disproportionately target immigrant (predominantly Hispanic) communities, putting many individuals in a constant state of fear as they forcefully remove many individuals from their families and communities. Furthermore, the tactics used by ICE have also violated the fourth amendment, particularly as many cases involve unnecessary searches and detention without sufficient cause. Additionally, these raids also reinforce systems of exclusion.