McRuer sets the margin at the centre

“As the heterosexual/homosexual binary is entirely historical, so is the able bodied/disabled binary,” says Robert McRuer, crip theoretic who scrutinizes the disabled identity.
 
When Robert McRuer says that performance artist Bob Flanagan works like a queer, it has nothing to do with Flanagan's sexuality. Flanagan was not a homosexual, but he did operate within several subcultures: as a man living with cystic fibrosis and as an artist who practiced supreme masochism as a way to channel the pain inspired by his disease. McRuer's characterization is a critique of Flanagan's economy—his capitalist production in the context of his disability.

Beyond expectations

“He was able to generate values in excess of the demand he produced himself. Flanagan was working beyond what a person with cystic fibrosis is supposed to be, what a disabled person is supposed to be,” explains McRuer, professor of disability studies and critical theory at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006), McRuer seeks to investigate the disability movement not from its center but from its margins, where cultural workers like Flanagan figure in. “You find queers at those margins, who don't fit neatly into the representative, down-the-middle, disability-movement disability identity.”

Disability politics

These margins are the focus of McRuer's research. Placing these disabled communities at the center, so to speak, requires identifying the factors that result in marginalization as well as the promotion of specific disabled groups as representatives within the disabled community. To that end, McRuer's work examines several factors that prefigure disability politics.

Common feature

One common feature shared by most well-known disability movements, argues McRuer, is their orientation vis-a-vis the state. Disabled movements draw recognition through appeals to the nation, seeking incorporation, inclusion, and tolerance as a group that is imagined as national in nature. McRuer gives the Americans With Disabilities Act as an example, a document that has served as a model for other state-based disability movements in nations such as Uganda.

Cross-border alliances

McRuer's interest in cross-border alliances and other non-national groups stems from the drawbacks associated with locating disability movements at the state level. “Liberal strategies have clear limits and can't necessarily imagine communities beyond national borders—or the borders that are maintained and regulated by state,” he says. For example, he observes that in the U.S., the economy “completely depends on exploited and undocumented immigrant labor. The labor that's performed is often quite literally disabling. But often the bodies in question don't show up on the radar of the disability movement. So an undocumented worker can't claim protection under the AWDA. You see right there the limitations of a state-based liberal strategy, indispensable as that strategy may be. ”

“disability identity politics 101”

McRuer says that disability movements that do not think beyond the borders of the U.S. and Europe are bound by the framework of identity politics. McRuer almost jokingly discusses a World Bank pamphlet on the bank's policies on disabilities, which he describes as a “disability identity politics 101” text. McRuer cites a World Bank microcredit initiative that specifically targets women with disabilities in India—a place where those identified women might not necessarily think of themselves as disabled. “What good is an identity-based model in a location, say, where many or most of the bodies in question are impaired?”

Representative figures

“Identity politics always hands you representative figures,” says McRuer. “I am very suspicious of [identity politics] as they take hold in disability studies, and precisely my suspicion emerges from a belief that identity politics always generates representatives and those who can never be the good, dutiful representatives.”

Intertwined histories

Several clarifications emerge from a globally focused crip theory. One regards the history of disability. McRuer argues that the concept of disability emerges in Michel Foucault's 1974–5 lectures on the “abnormal” individual—the modern queer, whose predecessors include the monster, the masturbating child, and other individuals who need to be corrected. Homosexual people and queers more broadly construed—and under this rubric, McRuer would include the disabled—emerge in this time period. “As the heterosexual/homosexual binary is entirely historical, so is the able bodied/disabled binary,” says McRuer. “Part of the reasons why my work has so fruitfully stayed at the intersection of queer studies and disability studies is because those histories are so absolutely intertwined.”

McRuer says that Roderick Ferguson (Aberrations in Black) and Jasbir Puar (Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times) established the important groundwork in addressing intersectional identities or figures who otherwise are overlooked in favor of a representative identity. A disability politics that expands beyond the narrow center—that is, the representative figures proffered by identity politics—captures figures who, as McRuer puts it, “work like a queer.”

“I think often those who are understood to inhabit intersectional identities are rarely eligible for the 'representative' position than an identity politics puts forward. Gay identity politics in the U.S.—largely the identity is the gay white man,” says McRuer. “Intersectional analyses are often critical of identity politics.”

HIV on the margin

It was an intersectional analysis that drew McRuer to the study of disability politics. “The very first test of the Americans With Disabilities Act was a Supreme Court case over an HIV individual. It's an intersection” between the HIV/AIDS and disability communities, says McRuer, “but in some ways, it shouldn't be. Often, people with HIV/AIDS are on the margins of the disability community.”

Positive but ironic development

McRuer says that the proliferation of new academic disability studies programs is a positive but ironic development. “Despite the fact that all this is happening, there are other things we can't fully attend to if we stay so focused on celebrating those spaces. Disability politics established in the academy? That's all great,” he says. “My question is: What does that allow us to think, and what does that keep us from thinking? All events give us ways of thinking and also hand us ways in which we're unable to think.”

Kriston Capps, free lance writer