Scenes of Subjection/Spaces of Solidarity: Disability Labor at the Intersections

• In Event: 31.063 - "Whose Truth(s)?" Advancing DisCrit Solidarity in Research and Practice to Disrupt Educational Inequities

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper I trace how the socio-political category of disability is utilized to produce the carceral subject not only in the historical context of the chain gang and convict labor but also in the contemporary contexts of segregated special education classrooms, alternative schools, juvenile detention homes, and other institutional settings.

Theoretical Frameworks
My analysis derives from the intersecting frameworks of Black feminist theory (Spillers, 1987; Crenshaw, 1991; Hartman, 2007; Hartman, 2008) and a transnational materialist feminist disability studies (Erevelles, 2011). These intersecting frameworks conceive of disability as a historical category whose emergence is closely intertwined with race, another historical category, within specific historical conditions in order to appropriate the labor and land for transnational capitalism.

Methods: Textual Analysis
This paper centers on a critical reading of two texts, Sarah Haley’s (2016) historical narrative, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity and Subini Annnama’s contemporary ethnographic study, The Pedagogy of Pathologization: Disabled Girls of Color in the School-to-Prison Nexus.” Haley’s book describes the practices that occurred when Black female prisoners were first contracted out to private individuals and companies under the convict leasing system to build under terrible conditions “the railroads, turpentine farms, plantations, brickyards, sawmills, coal mines and broom making camps…[as well as] clean, pave, and maintain city streets (p. 3). In The Pedagogy of Pathologization, Annamma animates theories of intersectionality, race and disability (DisCrit) via the lived experiences of Black/Latina girls who are subjected to a litany of violent practices abetted by the school-to-prison pipeline not very different from the violence described by Haley in the convict labor camps a century earlier.

In Haley’s text, disability as pathological deviance is casually invoked, but never critically engaged as mutually constitutive of black femininity via invocations of “deviant motherhood, physical grotesqueness, the capacity for hard labor, the impossibility of sexual emotional, and physical injury, mental inferiority and disposability” (p. 6). My reading of Haley’s text is to demonstrate how disability is deployed to enable acts of unspeakable violence in these carceral states at the violent intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. At the same time, this analysis reads disability as providing a fulcrum for solidarity by laying claims to what Avery Gordon (2008) calls “complex personhood” (p. 4). Complex personhood “confer[s] the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning (p. 4-5). I argue here that this is what Annamma does by documenting the women/girls practices of resiliency while at the same time foregrounding structural interventions to resist their criminalization in our public schools.

Conclusions/Significance
I discuss the possibilities of solidarity that are enabled when we draw on an intersectional framework that simultaneously foregrounds the materialist as well as representational labor that disability has historically been called to do in carceral and educational contexts. The significance of this study will foreground the necessity of an intersectional analysis that highlights the significant labor disability does in emancipatory discourses of education.

Author

• Nirmala Erevelles, The University of Alabama