The Right to Correct: Disability, Prosthetics, and Prison

• In Event: Rethinking Cyborg Subjectivity, Bio-political Surveillance, and the State

Abstract

In The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar articulates “debility” as a framework to understand how racialized bodies are “worn down” by the biopolitical state, even when doing so fails to result in formal disablement. This paper considers “correction” as a biopolitical mechanism for debilitation and capacity-building. I argue that disability precedes both debility and capacity-building when debilitation is enacted through “correctional” facilities and when capacity is increased through “corrective” technologies like “cyborg” prosthetics and prenatal genetic diagnosis. The state’s “right to correct,” then, may be read as a mode to render all disabled bodies docile within debilitated or capacative statuses.

Presenter

• Amanda Apgar, Pomona College