Deaf and Disability Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Committed Critique

Committed Critique An Interview with Nirmala Erevelles Nirmala Erevelles and Alison Kafer Keywords Class; Education; Globalization; Identity; Language; Location; Oral history; Race; Theory Nirmala Erevelles served on the board of the Society for Disability Studies from 2005 to 2007, and she was one of the program chairs for the 2006 conference that inspired this collection. As part of that project, Nirmala and Alison helped organize a plenary session on disability, race, class, and intersectionality for the conference, leading to multiple conversations about the whiteness of disability studies, the need for more economic analysis, and the value of feminist scholarship. Our different disciplinary locations (Nirmala is a critical education scholar based in the social sciences; Alison is a feminist and queer theorist working in the humanities) but overlapping political and intellectual commitments led to rich and productive discussions about the work of disability studies. Alison agreed to serve as moderator for the plenary session, and when two of the scheduled speakers had to withdraw the day before the conference, Alison asked Nirmala to substitute. She generously agreed, and her talk was nothing short of electrifying ; drawing on her work in transnational feminist theory, she used our framing questions for the panel to reflect on the field of disability studies in a time of war. The editors of this anthology invited Nirmala to build on that talk, offering her the space to expand her critique and our interventions. Nirmala favored the collaborative nature of an interview, and the following discussion took place over e-mail; she and Alison then lightly edited it for length 204 and clarity. Nirmala’s materialist approach and her commitment to asking difficult questions provide another path in our focus on deaf/disability studies and intersectional work. AK: How did you first come to disability studies? What drew you to the field? NE: Contrary to the popular assumption that radical perspectives attract a certain demographic, I was a special education teacher in a segregated school in Chennai, India, well-immersed in the dominant narratives of disability and located within the medical model. My introduction to more radical thinking in disability studies came when I enrolled in the special education graduate program at Syracuse University, where I was introduced to the social and political aspects of disability. Around the same time, I was formally introduced to other social and political theories of difference that had a personal resonance in me—Third World Feminism, Critical Theories of Race, Postcolonial Studies, and Queer Theory—and I slowly became frustrated that my academic learning in disability studies had little relation to these other theoretical perspectives. When my doctoral dissertation morphed into an intersectional analysis of difference, I found my academic passion: I sought to merge the personal, the political, and the academic. While writing my dissertation, I came upon Simi Linton’s Claiming Disability, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies, and Lennard Davis’s Disability Studies Reader. Until I read those books, my exposure to the political issues of disability was predominantly located within phenomenological sociology, particularly, the sociology of deviance. What attracted me to these three books was that they were engaging contemporary theories of difference within the humanities that echoed the theoretical conceptualizations I was reading in the context of race, gender, and sexuality. They allowed me to make necessary connections. At the same time, I was also reading the British Disability Studies scholars—Mike Oliver, Vic Finkelstein, Paul Abberley, Len Barton, Colin Barnes, Mark Priestley, Sally Tomlinson, Jenny Morris, Carol Thomas— Committed Critique 205 206 Nirmala Erevelles and Alison Kafer and their class analysis blew me away. Surprised that U.S. scholars often shied away from class analyses, I found myself working in disability studies at the confluence of several disciplinary contexts, and this location has continued to influence my thinking. AK: You’ve long argued for a more materialist approach to disability, and for a disability studies that takes class analysis seriously. Can you explain what you think such an analysis would give us or, to put it differently, what the field loses without it? And you can move more broadly here as well: What’s your understanding of disability studies as a field? I’m thinking about its scope and terrain, its methodologies , and, perhaps especially, its boundaries and limitations. NE: The aspect of disability studies that I have found most compelling is its relentless critique of the abstract and yet very material concept of...