Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico by Julie Avril Minich (review)

Trained as a generalist with a specialization in Spanish peninsular literature, film and cultural studies, the first article I came across by Julie Avril Minich, “Life on Wheels,” was seemingly also her very first publication. This was a fascinating 2010 essay in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, on two Spanish films that were positioned to attract international attention: Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh [Carne Trémula] (1997), adapted from a book by Ruth Rendell, and Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside [Mar adentro] (2004), adapted from the life of Ramón Sampedro. When I read Minich’s article five years ago, I was impressed to see her working simultaneously at multiple levels: “Life on Wheels” boasted close readings of the films under discussion, attention toward wider issues of linguistic plurality on the Iberian peninsula, a critique of heteronormative masculinity and support for the struggles of LGBT communities, and nuanced exploration of the challenges to democracy as driven by national politics—all synthesized through a cultural studies method giving equal weight, as Raymond Williams has put it, to the project (art) and the formation (society).

What most struck me was the weight given there to a specifically “Disability Studies approach,” something I believe was, and arguably still is, somewhat rare in the field of Hispanic Studies (see her note #4 in that article, which suggests her understanding of the same at the time). The basic assertion that disability is not a mere metaphor for something else but itself an identity—she draws there on Michael Bérubé, Tobin Siebers, and Lennard J. Davis—is true to the spirit of David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis (2000) and expresses a central tenet of Disability Studies as it has taken root since publication of that work (see pp. 23-24 in the book under review). If a handful of scholars in Hispanic Studies were using Disability Studies approaches in 2010, a larger number—but not that many more—are doing so today in 2015, but that number is not sufficient enough to account for all studies of disability in cultural texts and social contexts throughout the field. All of this is important if readers are to understand the unique, transgressive and transnational value of Minich’s 2014 book—which arguably positions the Spanish and Portuguese Ph.D. from Stanford as the leading figure of disability approaches within the interdisciplinary area of Chicana/o Studies.

In its analyses that tie the mural, the play, the film and above all else the novel to webs of cultural production and socio-political struggles, Accessible Citizenships holds true to the sharp insights and methodological syntheses evident in Minich’s earlier article. What is most important here is to give readers—instead of a break-down of the book’s insightful studies of representational issues and they relate to Arturo Islas Jr., Cherríe Moraga, Felicia Luna Lemus, Alex Espinosa, Guillermo Arriaga, Tommy Lee Jones, Oscar Casares, Ana Castillo and Cecile Pineda—a sense of the book’s throughline and its significance. A wonderful focal point for this necessarily brief journey appears on her p. 3, where the critic quotes Tobin Siebers—who also penned a promotional blurb for the book prior to his relatively recent passing—as saying art is “the active site designed to explore and expand the spectrum of humanity that we will accept among us.” This expansive view of art is not far from the view Minich takes of scholarship, such that one can say about her book what she herself says about the texts studied therein: “because these texts strive toward broader, more expansive, and more just conceptualizations of national belonging, they offer new ways to theorize both citizenship and the representation of disability” (3). The notion of “accessible political communities” activated by Minich here clearly links “antiracist, feminist, and queer political struggles with struggles for disability rights” (4).

Citizenship is thus a notion...