La verdad de los monstruos

Partiendo de un relato autoetnográfico, el texto presenta un análisis del impacto de los cuerpos no normativos, sus causas y efectos principales, así como su relación con el imaginario social de la discapacidad. La pregunta central que articula el texto se interroga no sobre esos cuerpos sino sobre las razones del malestar social que aquellos activan. Para abordar esta cuestión se presentan los aportes de la Crip Theory del lado de la Queer Theory y los estudios críticos de la discapacidad. La fuerte crítica al capacitismo de la primera abre una mayor centralidad para el cuerpo y la comprensión de las diferencias corporales como fundamento político y comunitario. En continuidad el trabajo educativo va más allá de las cuestiones de identidad y orientación sexual abriéndose a un interés radical sobre el cuerpo en su conjunto y en consecuencia sobre la vulnerabilidad, caducidad y enfermedad.

Developing post-ableist music therapy: An autoethnography exploring the counterpoint of a therapist experiencing illness/disability

<p>This PhD examined a therapist’s experience of illness/disability to see if any new light could be shed on music therapy whilst also finding ways to navigate disability as a practitioner. There has not been adequate research attention given to the experiences of music therapists who have an illness/disability. The position is often negotiated in isolation with minimal tools and resources. An arts-based autoethnography was used to determine how the close examination of one’s personal experience with illness/disability can impact on practice, how the work can be negotiated, and to uncover any new practical or theoretical meanings. Furthermore, it looked to determine what arts-based autoethnography could offer one’s practice. A poststructural lens was used that drew on social constructionism, feminism, and the work of Michel Foucault. Data generated from a music therapist’s practice, experiences of illness/disability, literature, and professional documents were analysed using Foucault’s “critical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault, 1984b, p. 47). Hidden processes of problematic ableism were found within the practice examined as well as in some educational and professional encounters. These regimes of ableism were supported by universalising and dichotomising discourses, namely humanism, western normativity, limited observable understandings of disability, and the enforcement of able/disabled divide through many binaries. The methodology provided the tools to reposition the practice to politicise disability and address ableism. Addressing ableism was found to be more complex than simply incorporating disability issues into existing contemporary frameworks. The analysis led to the development of Post-Ableist Music Therapy (PAMT). PAMT extended the relational ethic beyond what was present in the prior practice by drawing on aspects of posthumanism, agonistic plurality, and increasing the visibility of disability studies and crip theory. Therefore, PAMT offers a different lens to the critical orientations’ apparatus: a social justice practice not based on empowerment and humanism but on agonism and posthumanism instead. As there is a lag in the theorisation of ableism, PAMT provides an alternative framework that can be applied to current approaches to increase our professional consciousness of ableism. By repositioning the practice and exploring alternative subjectivities, the professional and personal narratives of a therapist experiencing illness/disability became more integrated, working with–not against–each other in a shared activism. The methodology fostered an increased ethical care of the self; offered tools that critiqued what we are; experimented with going beyond the limits imposed on us. The use of such tools could have wider application in the everyday practices of therapists. The findings have significant implications for practice and training, as the challenges people and societies face cannot be adequately dealt with without tools to explicitly uncover and address normalisation and ableism.</p>

Developing post-ableist music therapy: An autoethnography exploring the counterpoint of a therapist experiencing illness/disability

<p>This PhD examined a therapist’s experience of illness/disability to see if any new light could be shed on music therapy whilst also finding ways to navigate disability as a practitioner. There has not been adequate research attention given to the experiences of music therapists who have an illness/disability. The position is often negotiated in isolation with minimal tools and resources. An arts-based autoethnography was used to determine how the close examination of one’s personal experience with illness/disability can impact on practice, how the work can be negotiated, and to uncover any new practical or theoretical meanings. Furthermore, it looked to determine what arts-based autoethnography could offer one’s practice. A poststructural lens was used that drew on social constructionism, feminism, and the work of Michel Foucault. Data generated from a music therapist’s practice, experiences of illness/disability, literature, and professional documents were analysed using Foucault’s “critical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault, 1984b, p. 47). Hidden processes of problematic ableism were found within the practice examined as well as in some educational and professional encounters. These regimes of ableism were supported by universalising and dichotomising discourses, namely humanism, western normativity, limited observable understandings of disability, and the enforcement of able/disabled divide through many binaries. The methodology provided the tools to reposition the practice to politicise disability and address ableism. Addressing ableism was found to be more complex than simply incorporating disability issues into existing contemporary frameworks. The analysis led to the development of Post-Ableist Music Therapy (PAMT). PAMT extended the relational ethic beyond what was present in the prior practice by drawing on aspects of posthumanism, agonistic plurality, and increasing the visibility of disability studies and crip theory. Therefore, PAMT offers a different lens to the critical orientations’ apparatus: a social justice practice not based on empowerment and humanism but on agonism and posthumanism instead. As there is a lag in the theorisation of ableism, PAMT provides an alternative framework that can be applied to current approaches to increase our professional consciousness of ableism. By repositioning the practice and exploring alternative subjectivities, the professional and personal narratives of a therapist experiencing illness/disability became more integrated, working with–not against–each other in a shared activism. The methodology fostered an increased ethical care of the self; offered tools that critiqued what we are; experimented with going beyond the limits imposed on us. The use of such tools could have wider application in the everyday practices of therapists. The findings have significant implications for practice and training, as the challenges people and societies face cannot be adequately dealt with without tools to explicitly uncover and address normalisation and ableism.</p>

Thinking Capitalism from the Bedroom: The Politics of Location and the Uses of (Feminist, Queer, Crip) Theory

The New Histories of Capitalism (NHC) boast a foundational narrative that decries the supposed elision of the “economic” during the long reign cultural and social history. Yet, at the same time, the NHC are themselves based on a recognition that ideas of “economy” are not natural, and hence must be historicised using the same intellectual tools that powered the cultural turn in the first place. In practice, however, the demographics and structuring assumptions of the “new” histories of capitalism are remarkably similar to the “old” labour and economic history. Both its historical actors and its practitioners remain, by and large, white cisgender men engaged with normative visions of “capitalism” and “economy” that privilege finance, waged labour, business and trade. As the NHC take shape within Australia, this article highlights the imperative to learn from - but crucially, not appropriate - the expertise of communities who have long theorised and critiqued “capitalism” due to their subordinate position within its cultural and economic hierarchies. Using examples from feminist, queer and crip theory, I argue that the knowledges of those marginal to or excluded from waged labour, capital accumulation and material consumption constitute a rich repository of intellectual tools with potential to engender more robust historicisation of “capitalism” and the worlds it helps create.

Cripping the Dis§abled Body: Doing the Posthuman Tango in, through and around Sport

In this article we elucidate our understanding of the utility of a particular posthumanist lens to expose the fragility of compulsory ablebodiedness. Compulsory ablebodiedness is a central tool of crip theory that shows us how society reproduces disability as an expression of an ableist ideology. This positions those perceived as having ‘less-than-able’ bodies and minds as subaltern. Adopting our methodological position from crip theory, we explore how dis§abled bodies are co-produced along with the environments in which they pursue sport. Interpreting ethnographic data with, in, and around dis§abled bodies, we examine their lived realities and performed identities as biopolitical assemblages that are, at one and the same time, both subject and object in a state of what we term complex dis§able embodiment. The article begins by acknowledging the existence of disablism while also exploring the ideology of ableism, which leads to the social marginalisation of nonnormative bodies. We then articulate dis§ability as a choregraphed tango in which bodies and their environments are co-constituted, before cripping ableism in and through three manifestations of dis§abled sporting bodies. The end goal is to facilitate the celebration of nonnormativity as a positive expression of the plurality of human existence.

When Silence Said Everything

Reading X González’s, March 24, 2018, “March For Our Lives” speech—her words and silences—as an entry point into what I term a crip theory of trauma, this essay argues that the dominant narratives about and around Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) say more about the compulsivity of the “proper” citizen subject than they do the actual embodied experience and debilitation of trauma itself. The text reconceptualizes trauma narratives, like González’s, through critical disability studies to argue that certain cripistemologies—or crip ways of knowing—trauma arise that are not otherwise available or readily accessible. Most notably, by rejecting dominant pathologizing forces and embracing crip ways of knowing, this analysis brings forth a new working definition of trauma, as an embodied, affective structure. These ways of knowing offer crucial insights for efforts to grapple with the ongoing forms of trauma enacted and perpetuated across the globe, and are particularly urgent against a political and cultural landscape that, as my reading of González’s speech makes clear, in many ways refuses to hear, see, and learn from the knowledge that trauma produces.

Crip Theory

Crip theory began to flourish in the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory in the early decades of the 21st century. These fields attend to the complex workings of power and normalization in contemporary cultures, particularly to how institutions of modernity have materialized and sedimented a distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” and to how subjects deemed “abnormal” have contested such ideas. Disability studies pluralizes models for thinking about disability: if a culture of normalization reduces disability to lack or loss and positions disability as always in need of cure, disability studies challenges the singularity of this medical model. Disability studies scholars examine how able-bodied ideologies emerge in and through representation, and how such representations result in a culture of ableism that invalidates disabled experiences. Crip theory, in turn, emerged as a particular mode of doing disability studies, deeply in conversation with queer theory. The pride and defiance of queer culture, with its active reclamation or reinvention of language meant to wound, are matched by the pride and defiance of crip culture. Crip theory, however, is generatively paradoxical, working with and against identity and identification simultaneously. Crip theory affirms lived, embodied experiences of disability and the knowledges (or cripistemologies) that emerge from such experiences; at the same time, it is critical of the ways in which certain identities materialize and become representative to the exclusion of others that may not fit neatly within dominant vocabularies of disability. Many works in crip theory focus on the supposed margins of disability identification as well as on the intersections where gender, race, sexuality, and disability come together. Crip theory, additionally, offers an analytic that can be used for thinking about contexts or historical periods that do not seem on the surface to be about disability at all. Cripping offers a critical process, considering how certain bodily or mental experiences, in whatever location or period, have been marginalized or invisibilized, made pathological or deviant. Within queer theory, crip theory thus perhaps has its deepest affinity with queer of color critique, with its attention not just to substantive identities but also to processes of racialization and gendering that pathologize or make aberrant particular groups. Queer theory, queer of color critique, and crip theory, moreover, often combine studies that focus on a macrolevel recognition of the complex workings of political economy (neoliberal capitalism, in particular) and the seemingly microlevel vicissitudes of identity, embodiment, or desire.

Patient Case Formulations and Oppressive Disability Discourses in Occupational Therapy Education

Background. Patient case formulations have become a standard feature in occupational therapy (OT) education. Despite their demonstrated benefits in optimizing student learning, patient case formulations may unintentionally convey oppressive disability discourses. Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and invite critical reflection on the use of patient case formulations in reinforcing ableist discourses and assumptions in OT education and practice. Key Issues. Through the lens of critical disability theory and Crip theory, the author demonstrates how patient case formulations are often reflective of institutionalized ableism that functions to support oppressive disability discourses in the profession, contributing to harmful healthcare practices. Implications. The ongoing use of patient case formulations rooted in oppressive disability discourses perpetuates oppressive constructions of disabled people in OT education and practice. A radical shift towards pedagogical materials and practices that support identity-affirming disability discourses would be more aligned with the profession’s expressed values.

Disability Studies, Crip Theory, and Education

Disability studies and crip theory emerged out of a need to reimagine, and directly challenge, dominant deficit perspectives of disability in many different contexts. Instead of framing disability as a problem of individual bodies, where the solution to difference is found in often deeply harmful rehabilitation and intervention, disability studies and crip theory allow for a more critical and expansive look at disability as an aspect of identity and culture that holds inherent value. While disability studies and crip theory have been used in academic and activist spaces, the impacts of a more critical and expansive framing of disability have incredibly important impacts on, and reciprocal relationships with, the theory and practice of education. Disability studies and crip theory both work to simultaneously critique and change dominant perspectives of disability in school settings, as it does in academic theory spaces; it challenges teachers, schools, and curriculum to ask questions of the benefits of using deficit perspectives, and what is lost when disability is seen only as a problem to be fixed. In this way, these two fields of inquiry and practice continue to shape, challenge, and push each other toward a more just sense of disability for all.