As Emily Violet Maddox explains about the work of disability in the writings of Walter Benjamin, “Redemption in a Benjaminian sense means that objects are ruptured from their place in the order of things. Thus, things or, as I will argue, bodies which have been ordered through their use values or their commodity value, can be redeemed by being used otherwise.”1 In making this argument, Maddox takes up a formative approach that guides many contemporary disability studies methodologies developed as “cripistemologies” (a term theorized by Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer).2 Cripistemological approaches challenge the presumed desirability of the normal and reorient readers toward less beaten pathways. Such alternative vantage points and practices dislocate our expectations and foreground productive, more foundational interdependencies otherwise obscured by the myth of independence. The object, as Maddox explains, does not even have to be representative of a disabled person; genres, metaphors, and...
An Avalanche of Cultural Rejections: Black, Disabled, Gay Exclusions, and the Seduction of Shame
david t. mitchell is a scholar, editor, history/film exhibition curator, and filmmaker in the field of disability studies. He is author of Narrative Prosthesis: Discourses of Disability (2000), Cultural Locations of Disability (2005), and The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (2015) and is editor of The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997), A History of Disability in Primary Sources (vol. 5 of The Encyclopedia of Disability, 2005), The Matter of Disability (2018), and Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age (2020). He created the Chicago Disability History Exhibit (Vietnam Veterans Memorial Museum, 2006) and also assembled the program for the Screening Disability Film Festival (Chicago, 2006) as well as the “DisArt Independent Film Festival” (Grand Rapids, MI, 2015). His documentary film work was given a special acknowledgment in 2007 at the Way We Live Now: Disability Short Film Festival and the Munich Film Museum for substantially impacting filmic representations of disability. He is working on a new book and feature-length documentary film on the medical mass murder of psychiatric patients in German, Polish, and Austrian killing centers at the focus of the Nazi Aktion T4 program.
David T. Mitchell; An Avalanche of Cultural Rejections: Black, Disabled, Gay Exclusions, and the Seduction of Shame. English Language Notes 1 October 2022; 60 (2): 180–190. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890868
Download citation file:
Advertisement
