Locating Race and Learning Disabilities: Fantasies of Identification and the Problematic Body

• In Event: Disability Critical Race Theory and Conceptualizations of Place and Space: Working Toward Intersectional Understanding

Abstract

In this paper, we first review historical and contemporary attempts by researchers to locate race and disability as immutable features embodied by individuals. We argue that the science behind these categories share similar underlying systems of logic; both efforts attempt to locate social problems within/on bodies and both illustrate what Samuels (2014) calls “fantasies of identification,” or culturally embedded desires to definitively identify and categorize bodies. Drawing upon racial formation theory (Omi & Winant, 1994), we argue that the science of race is an example of a racial project that serves to reproduce structures of racial domination. Similarly, the effort to locate disabilities is a form of scientific ableism (Campbell, 2005) in which scientific researchers privilege certain bodies as normal, while distorting how disability is socially and culturally produced. Both projects represent an intertwined and culturally motivated “hunt” for race and disability respectively (Baker 2002; Roberts 2011).

Our aim in this paper, however, is not to simply show how these mutually constituted projects (of locating race and disability) are examples of “bad” science, but to further understand the inescapable interplay between culture and science that are embedded within them. In other words, we argue that science can best be understood as existing “inside culture” (emphasis in original) and thus influenced by cultural, economic, and political imperatives of a given social context (Ferri & Connor, 2006, p. 39). As Morning (2011) writes, “Despite the special authority that scientists enjoy, their beliefs are by no means independent of the broader society of which they train and practice” (p. 4). Morning points to a dialectical relationship in which science influences culture, and culture also influences scientific research. If science cannot exist outside of culture, than studying the social contexts of illness can illuminate the underpinnings of how and why medical researchers formulate particular hypotheses and research agendas in a particular social and historical context.

We conclude by asserting the need to engage with intersectionality, not simply as demographic variables along the lines of identity categories, but as an analytical tool for uncovering underlying logics that undergird systems of oppression. Specifically, we draw on tenets of DisCrit (Annamma, et al., 2013), to analyze and account for the simultaneous interworkings of race and dis/ability that are embedded in these projects of modern science. Ultimately, we see the potential of DisCrit to address issues of race and disability that can not just help to recognize patterns of oppression, but also to disrupt the racial and ablest hierarchies embedded within the science of race and ability.

Authors

• Justin Freedman, Syracuse University

• Beth A. Ferri, Syracuse University