Speculating Crip Temporalities Against Eugenics and State Science Fictions of Health

• In Event: Critical Disability Studies Caucus: Cripistemologies of Continuous Crisis I: Exploring/Speculating/Imagining Crip Space and Time

Abstract

Scholarship on the politics of emergency argues that the modern liberal state routinely creates and mobilizes crisis in order to escalate the management of bodies (Agamben 2005). Bringing together political theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies, this paper considers how disability has been mobilized by the liberal U.S. state as a series of emergencies that justify scientific state intervention in order to correct and restore the health of the body politic. I use early twentieth century eugenics policies in California as a case study in the biopolitics of emergency. The second part of the paper considers counterhegemonic speculative fictions that undermine and unravel the state’s mobilization of emergency and the teleos of recovery. Feminist speculative fictions with disabled characters work in the realm of indeterminacy, intractability, and survival within contradiction as a counter to the state’s fantasy of health, wholeness, resolution, restoration, and mastery.
Early twentieth century California state eugenics imagined and materialized a class of people called “defective,” which in the words of the state’s Commission in Lunacy, worked to “designate a vast class of nervous and mental conditions embracing insanity, epilepsy, and feeblemindedness on the one hand; alcoholic tendencies, vice, eccentricities, absence of the moral sense, undue excitability and various anomalies of conduct and disposition on the other” (1912). The arbitrariness of linking together what we would today consider to be legitimate disability alongside what we might construe as normal moral failing, illuminates the ways that eugenics, like other discourses that purport to identify meaningful body and mind difference, operates as a science fiction of the state. Eugenics is, as a genre, a state science fiction organized under the rubric of emergency, with material effects, and a teleos of cure and race salvation.
What genres undermine, expose, and trouble the utopian and genocidal science fictions of the state? The legal and policy realm offers ultimately unsatisfying and in some cases dangerous solutions, because legal fixes obscure deeply entrenched dynamics of biopower (Spade 2011, Sins Invalid 2016). Like others seeking alternatives to state solutions in the realm of bioethics (Holloway 2011) and science and technology studies (Harraway 1991), I turn to feminist speculative fiction as a counterhegemonic genre that troubles and undermines the state’s desire for quick fixes and easy solutions through scientific management of so-called social problems. In particular, feminist speculative fiction is a rich site of imagining alternative modes for articulating the body and mind differences that we have come to call disability. As a form of oppositional consciousness, feminist speculative fiction creates a queer and crip temporality of indeterminacy, contradiction, and intractability. The paper briefly explores two examples of feminist speculative fictions -- Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1997) and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (2007) -- with neurodivergent and deviantly bodied women of color characters who expose and undermine the liberal state’s discourse that locates emergency in disabled minds and bodies, and fantasizes about recovery through scientific intervention.

Author

• Jess Whatcott, San Diego State University