Introduction: Deleuze, Disability, and Difference

Deleuzoguattarian thought occupies strange and marginal spaces in Disability Studies literature. While some scholars find great depth and richness in work that de-naturalizes language and bodily experience, some find it too far removed from everyday life. But in this issue there are only a few notes about the historical relationship between Disability Studies as a discipline and Deleuzoguattarian thoughts and practices, even though the contributors, as well as scholars such as Margrit Shildrick, Janet Price, and Griet Roets, have a longstanding engagement with the themes and methods.

Instead, and as a welcome surprise to the editors, authors in this special issue write with and in (rather than for or against) Deleuzoguattarian thought. Many of the writings have taken the initial call for proposals seriously, using formal as well as thematic framings that illuminate the effects and labor of Deleuzoguattarian work in intriguing ways: what it does rather than what it is. At times, our contributors deconstruct conventional Literary Studies methodologies, evacuate the linearity and clarity of argument, and new forms of (rhizomatic) thought appear on the page. This has provided a challenge to the editors and the peer reviewers alike, and much of the writing here requires an active reader, an imaginative co-creator or co-presenter of textual production.

But these features also provide the heart of the original inquiry, the drive we first discussed at a Society for Disability Studies party a few years ago as the idea for the special issue took shape.

It has been a long time and the collection is still incomplete. One of the holes in this collection is the absence of work on and with mental-health difference. How can we have a special issue on Guattari and Deleuze, fighters against psychiatric institutions, without the voices and experiences of mental-health-system survivors and their allies?¹ The answers lie in structural issues of the home discipline of most contributors—namely, Disability Studies. Many potential contributors who submitted deeply intriguing proposals were overloaded, fell sick or experienced episodes of radical difference during the production of the issue, and were not able to work within the production modes academia allows. In a Deleuzoguattarian mode, we wish to offer their absence not (only) as a lack, but as an opportunity to read against and in the interstices of the texts assembled here. What is missing can become a machine that drives knowledge production, sees lacunae as opportunities and spaces of de- and re-territorialization (concepts that will be clarified in the articles). We invite the reader to question how the absences and presences of voices in this collection function as a microcosm of our shared critical landscape. Who finds voice, whose voices might be shrouded by the institutional practices we repeat and perform? Who speaks for whom, and why? How could the methods presented here, with their emphasis on writers with and allies of people with physical impairments, developmental disabilities or cognitive difference, become productive in other contexts? How stable are the categories we presented in the preceding sentence, the supposedly stable naming of certain kinds of difference? Would something like a wiki format, an assemblage over time, be a more appropriate format for Deleuzoguattarian issues than a stable collection of articles? How do structural issues of an academic life, such as job search, tenure issues, teaching evaluations, meetings, temporal and spatial synchronicity, and their alternatives, impact on the nature of scholarship in our discipline(s) and our writing practices? How can Deleuzoguattarian practices un- and redo an understanding of these concerns?

Many themes hotly contested and discussed in Disability Studies find rich exploration on these pages: issues of developmental disability/learning impairment, non-neurotypicality, pain, alternative forms of physical embodiment, interdependence, the undoing of (textual) power dynamics, non-dialectical inversions, and dichotomies. Models of disability multiply and query the notion of ‘models’ as stable forms of reading the world.

What we find most exciting are the ways in which the writings attempt to reflect disability in formal terms. The social sciences are in many ways (and in specific instances) further along the path of...