Vulnerability, for Example: Disability Theory as Extraordinary Demand

Vulnerability, for Example:

Disability Theory as Extraordinary Demand

Kate Kaul (bio)

Résumé

Le présent article examine les fonctions de l’analogie et de l’exemple dans la théorie interdisciplinaire de l’incapacité, citant la vulnérabilité comme un exemple éloquent de ce qui unit et oppose les études sur l’incapacité et la théorie féministe. Il place le caractère politique et subjectif de l’incapacité au centre de l’analyse et considère l’interaction entre l’universel et le particulier dans l’opération ou la fonction de l’incapacité comme catégorie. La première partie de l’article, qui porte sur les exemples et les analogies, présente les théories de l’exemple et de l’analogie et les met en relation avec les stratégies de l’exemple et de l’analogie que l’on retrouve dans les études sur l’incapacité et la théorie féministe, surtout dans le travail de Robert McRuer, de Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, de Joan W. Scott et de G. Thomas Couser. La deuxième partie aborde l’analyse de Debra Bergoffen de la vulnérabilité et le concept d’universalité genrée ainsi que la possibilité de l’appliquer à une théorie de l’incapacité. La troisiè me partie analyse l’articulation de la subjectivité vulnérable de Judith Butler et la notion de sujet vulnérable de Martha Fineman. La quatrième partie se tourne plutôt vers le particulier par la lecture de l’argument de Sherene Razack selon lequel la réforme féministe du droit devrait reconnaître la différence propre à l’incapacité. Cette partie présente également les exemples de Couser et de Paul Longmore sur le fonctionnement précis de la vulnérabilité dans l’expérience de l’incapacité.

Abstract

This article considers the function of analogy and example in interdisciplinary disability theory, taking vulnerability as an extended example of the shared concerns and the contrasting demands of disability studies and feminist theory. It centres a politicized disabled subjectivity and considers the interplay of the universal and the particular in the operation, or function, of disability as a category. The first section of the article, “Examples, Analogies,” presents theories of example and analogy and relates them to strategies of example and analogy in disability studies and in feminist theory, particularly in the work of Robert McRuer, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Joan W. Scott, and G. Thomas Couser. The second section, [End Page 81] “Translation into Politics,” considers Debra Bergoffen’s discussion of vulnerability and the gendered universal as well as the possibility of its translation into disability theory. The third section, “Vulnerable Subjects,” discusses Judith Butler’s articulation of vulnerable subjectivity and Martha Fineman’s notion of the vulnerable subject. The fourth section, “More Vulnerable Subjects?” shifts to the particular with a reading of Sherene Razack’s argument that feminist law reform must recognize disability’s specific difference and of Couser’s and Paul Longmore’s examples of the particular operation of vulnerability in disability experience.

Introduction

In “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” Judith Butler presents the odd commonality, the paradox, of embodiment’s universality: “[W]e are alike only in having this condition [—this embodiment—] separately and so having in common a condition that cannot be thought without difference.”¹ For Butler, individuation, embodiment, and community are linked, inextricable from one another and from the possibility of violence. We are, she writes, “as bodies, outside ourselves and for one another.”² To be embodied is to be vulnerable.

Of course, to suggest that embodiment is universal is, at one level, to state the obvious. Is any of us not embodied? The reverse is less certain, with anybody who seems to be just a body, rather than somebody, at risk of being declared not quite one of “us,” in a distressing challenge to our notions of life, death, and humanity. Drawing attention to the universality of embodiment is tactical, of course, given the term’s particular history, with some of us routinely framed in terms of embodiment and its concomitant vulnerability, others in terms that ignore it, that refuse it—terms that take bodies for granted. And yet embodiment, while it is not the only way to think about being—about subjectivity—is, so far, the only way to be.

This article takes vulnerability and its embodiment—in theory and in experience—as an example of some of the difficulties in conceptualizing feminist and disability theory together, reading feminist disability studies as a term that participates too readily in the practices of analogy and substitution. In considering not only the shared concerns and strategies, but also the contrasting and sometimes conflicting demands, of feminist theory and disability theory, this inquiry both draws attention to, and participates in, a radically inter-disciplinary understanding of disability theory. Disability theory is implicated with other critical theories in complex ways, with its imitation, translation, substitution, inversion, and reversal of other critical theories. This inquiry calls for the close attention to the real effects of our own textual practice—to the language, terms, and strategies that we use—which [End Page 82] Joan W. Scott calls for in her now classic 1986 essay, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.”³ In considering disability as a category of analysis, this article considers the ways in which Scott’s articulation of gender in a specific historical moment can be applied to an understanding of disability in this moment—not in translating one category into another but in taking up Scott’s careful attention to language and its material effects. It considers the work of example and analogy in disability theory, which is inextricable from the work—the operation—of disability as example. It cautions against analogies with gender, considers an example of a gendered universal, and suggests the impossibility, in these terms, of making an application to disability. And, yet, analogy is a way to make sense, to make meaning—it constructs disciplines, subjects, and readers. To discuss, even to argue against, this kind of analogy, this kind of application, is to repeat it—and not so much to operate it (to anticipate Debra Bergoffen’s reading of Derrida’s “universal translating machine”) as to watch it operating.⁴ The article takes up the difficult politics of the tensions between identity and function, universal and particular, that are inextricable from disability as problematic.

My concern in taking up vulnerable embodiment as a specific intersection of feminist and disability-focused concern and inquiry is to consider embodiment not only as a question of ethics but also as a question of form.⁵ What kind of universal is possible, useful, coherent, or imaginable in considering the vulnerability of embodiment—something we experience only alone, only together? In focusing on disability, my intention is not to take disability as a limit case—as extraordinary vulnerability or as extraordinary embodiment, although it is commonly represented in this way—but, rather, as a concept that, in its specific mobilizations of bodies and subjectivities, the biological and the social, the real and the figural, makes extraordinary demands. We might think of the ethics of embodiment, which a recognition of vulnerability seems to call for,⁶ as another demanding concept, one that expresses [End Page 83] the tension between ethics—which, as the consideration of right action (judging) necessarily stops short of action itself (judgment)—and embodiment, which is not only being-in-a-body, but actualization. Can a discussion of embodiment move from ethics to politics?⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “embodiment” presents the sense of “actualization” with its examples moving easily between the embodiment, or actualization, of ideas (a remarkable belief, a national feeling, evil) and people, or kinds of people (a sailor, a tradesman), in a way that demonstrates the impossibility, not of distinguishing between ideas and people but, rather, of using the notion of “embodiment” to do so.⁸ Embodiment, then, is never just about bodies.

As a phenomenon of representation—a figuring—that at the same time interpellates and identifies, compensates, and stigmatizes real people, disability—or disablement—occupies an odd in-between space in a consideration of the universal and the particular. As an instance of disability’s interdisciplinary operation, vulnerability points to the ways in which disability enables analogy and exemplarity, to the ways in which exemplarity and analogy fail disability as a political concept, and to the particular crisis embodied in the collapse of disability’s two functions: as a politics, an experience, a materiality, and, at the same time, as a coded system of representation and failure.

Martha Fineman observes, “[u]ndeniably universal, human vulnerability is also particular.”⁹ What is this universal particularity? Perhaps only an understanding of the universal particularity of subjectivity and of experience offers the possibility of understanding disability not as an example, not as an analogy, not as a figure of something else but, rather, on its own terms.¹⁰ This may be the epistemological [End Page 84] demand of a politicized notion of disability—but, of course, no concept can exist on its own terms. In the context of my inquiry into the politics and practices of interdisciplinarity, vulnerable embodiment serves as an example of some of the difficulties and possibilities at work in the contemporary interplay of feminist theory and disability studies—an interplay that exceeds any straightforward conceptualization as “feminist disability studies.”¹¹ The demand that disability makes of an ethics of embodiment, of any strategic shift in the universal, is that it be neither an example, nor an exception—that a category based always in notions of difference, be centred. Is this possible? Perhaps this is the demand that disability makes of a genuinely political interdisciplinarity.

Examples, Analogies

A student once told me, in a class discussion of what “counts” as disability studies: “I explain disability studies by saying ‘it’s women’s studies for disabled people.’ But now,” she said, “I’m in the critical disability studies program, my friend said, ‘Oh, critical disability studies; that’s for really, really, disabled people’.” The room commiserated—we have all had analogies fail.¹² Of course, the analogy worked too. It worked for the student as an example of how difficult it is to explain disability studies to people who do not understand a critical perspective, let alone a critical perspective on disability. In an effort to engage her listeners, the student had risked including herself in the category of people who think women’s studies is for women. The example worked as a way to show us, in the room, how hard the work of definition is—that it is work: action and performance—and that it is our work; it asserted the existence of a group.

Alexander Gelley’s discussion of “unruly examples” points to the overlap between analogy and example.¹³ The strange embeddedness of disability—as a function, a concept, and an experience—in both example and analogy makes this exemplarity a nexus for considering the interdisciplinarity of disability studies. This article’s discussion alone draws on feminist theory, queer theory, disability [End Page 85] theory, feminist legal theory, and critical theory. Is a political understanding of disability even imaginable without analogies to race, to gender, to queerness?¹⁴ Yet disability’s ordinary—we could say, normative—function is to represent difference in a way that explains the normal to the normal. It functions as an example that leads away from itself.¹⁵

Gelley discusses the oddly dual function of the example. For Aristotle, he suggests, exemplarity is—examples are—primarily oriented to a pragmatic function and to rhetoric. For Plato, in contrast, examples are linked to a cognitive principle and to ontology. “How,” Gelley asks, “are they related?” He writes:

If the example as model, as paradigm, derives from . . . the elevation of a singular to exemplary status—then its meaning becomes dependent not on the instance itself but merely on its application. Is the example merely one—a singular, a fruit of circumstance—or the One—a paradigm, a paragon? The tactic of exemplarity would seem to be to mingle the singular with the normative, to mark an instance as fated.¹⁶

Examples go further than what we would think of as simple illustration. Examples are strategic; they argue almost without arguing; they perform. Certainly—and I am trying to do this with you—they are a way to interpellate, even to construct, an audience. Drawing on these two traditions, the example, writes Gelley, points both backward and forward: “[B]ack to a source, a whole from which the example derives” (be it real, biblical, or—in a rhetorical context—hypothetical) and forward to an addressee “for whom the example has . . . been selected and fashioned.” Gelley suggests that this outward reach “constitutes the rhetorical—[even] pragmatic—dimension of example.”¹⁷ The example is oriented towards a conclusion, a truth, or principle that the speaker may have in view but that has not yet been established. And Gelley offers what he calls “another puzzle regarding example: is it, semiotically, sample or illustration? Does it work by way of [End Page 86] synecdoche (part for whole) or analogy (similitude)?”¹⁸ Gelley cautions: “[T]he analogical function is usually decisive,” and he warns:

[It] is very easy from this strategy to shift from an analogical to an iconic mode . . . [I]n the rhetorical sense not only does the example picture, it may also induce an imitating reproduction on the part of the receptor or audience. The mimetic effect here is linked not, as is usual, to techniques of representation but to forms of behaviour, to a goal of ethical transformation.¹⁹

Gelley’s account emphasizes the performance, the action, of example: “The example turns into an exemplar and its function becomes that of propagating itself, creating multiples.”²⁰

An example, an analogy, does not just illustrate a known truth, it makes an argument; it leaps. I am not suggesting that we step away from analogy, exemplarity, or even that the examples I am presenting are not useful, effective, or good. I want only to suggest that exemplarity is productive; it has consequences. To say “women’s studies is like disability studies”—for example—is, to some extent, to make this true. It is to conceive of disability studies as something that is like women’s studies and to abandon a conception of disability studies that might be different, contradictory. For example, Rosemary Garland-Thomson’s positioning of disability studies securely within “the critical genre of identity studies”²¹ is a narrowing of the scope of disability studies. It situates disability studies in the humanities and also in a specifically US trajectory that began with the civil rights movement. And the analogy has other consequences, of which Robert McRuer’s discussion of Judith Butler offers an extended, but important, example. In a chapter entitled “Compulsory Able-bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,”²² he writes:

Able-bodied identity and heterosexual identity are linked in their mutual impossibility and in their mutual incomprehensibility—they are incomprehensible in that each is an identity that is simultaneously the ground on which all identities supposedly rest and an impressive achievement that is always deferred and thus never really guaranteed. Hence Butler’s [End Page 87] queer theories of gender performativity could be reinscribed within disability studies, as this slightly paraphrased excerpt from Gender Trouble might suggest.²³

McRuer demonstrates this by “bracketing” what he calls “terms having to do literally with embodiment” for Butler’s own terms of gender and sexuality:

[Able-bodiedness] offers normative . . . positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals [able-bodiedness] itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would offer this insight into [able-bodied identity] as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative [disabled] perspective.²⁴

McRuer continues: “In other words, Butler’s theory of gender trouble might be resignified in the context of queer/disability studies to highlight what we could call ‘ability trouble’—meaning not the so-called problem of disability but the inevitable impossibility, even as it is made compulsory, of an able-bodied identity.”²⁵

McRuer’s assertion here that “[a]ble-bodied identity and heterosexual identity are linked in their mutual impossibility and in their mutual incomprehensibility” is compelling, but it is important to consider in more detail just how they are linked. Able-bodied identity and heterosexual identity are linked, connected, in their operation as categories and constructions, but they are also linked in the immediate context of McRuer’s text. What is the effect of the way that McRuer himself is connecting them? If, and I agree with McRuer, each of these identities is, in a sense, the ground on which all identities supposedly rest, then each is necessarily incomprehensible in the terms of the other. But gender and disability are separated in the first place, to some extent, because they are analogized; the tactic that brings the two sets of terms together, also separates them. Resignifying Butler’s theory of gender trouble in the context of queer/disability studies surely needs to leave concepts and terms “of gender and sexuality” operating. McRuer’s intention, “to highlight what we call ‘ability trouble’”—meaning, he says, “not the so-called problem of disability but the inevitable impossibility, even as it is made compulsory, of able-bodied identity”—is an interesting one, but one that requires abandoning analogy to consider the complex and difficult interplay of these identity constructions. As a strategy, analogy is both partial and productive. McRuer’s analogy is enormously effective in engaging, even constructing, a [End Page 88] queer-disability studies audience. Yet there are some important differences that the analogy not only leaves untouched but also produces. Within the frame of the analogy, we are left with the impossibility of discussing historical representations of homosexuality as disability, which justified/led to the incarceration of “perverts” in asylums and, more recently, to the diagnosis and treatment of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. McRuer’s own extended example, later in his introduction, demonstrates the connections between these two impossible performances, but to do this he has to overturn, exceed, his own framework.²⁶

In her own response to Adrienne Rich’s essay (and to McRuer’s), “Compulsory Bodies: Reflections on Heterosexuality and Able-bodiedness,” Alison Kafer considers the effects of what she calls “the logic of substitution” at play in rewriting, analogizing, in the way that her own paper and McRuer’s do. Her article sets the effects of this logic of substitution against the gaps in Rich’s essay in an analysis that demonstrates that the two make each other, with substitution a response that cannot in itself address the gaps which provoke it.²⁷ For example, Kafer writes:

Queerness, due to its history of medicalization, threatens to disrupt the institution of able-bodiedness, while disability, because of its associations with deviance and perversity, threatens the boundaries of heterosexuality. This interrelationship is lost when heterosexuality and able-bodiedness are discussed in isolation.²⁸

Analogy, so valuable in introducing the idea of disability as a political category like sex, race, class, simultaneously forecloses a complex understanding not only of how disability is different from these other others but also of how it makes their operation possible. The translation that so many theorists have made of Butler’s sex/ gender distinction into impairment/disability is now a familiar one in disability studies. It allows us to distinguish between biological and social aspects of disablement at least for a moment before we have to acknowledge that these binaries, like others, are themselves political, with no “pure” social available for discussion. These are imperfect acts of translation, but they are, necessarily, how we make [End Page 89] sense to one another. But in what can only be a discourse of analogy and example, attention to these practices takes us from identity politics to questions of the relationship between the particular and the universal. What happens if we compare, instead of terms, acts of translation, rhetorical appeals, examples?

In turning to Joan Scott’s article, in offering her work as a model, I implicate myself entirely in the discourse of exemplarity, analogies, and models. But “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” offers a historically specific consideration of gender, one that offers a more concrete, nuanced—we might say, discursive—object to compare to disability than the simple, “disability is like gender” assertion (with which it is almost impossible to disagree) at first suggests.²⁹ More important, Scott’s close attention to form and to historical examples offers an articulation of the complexities, politics, and stakes at work in our understanding and use of “gender.” This articulation makes clear that, even twenty-seven years later, the suggestion that disability is like gender—that anything is like gender—leaves us with a great deal of theory still to do.³⁰

Scott suggests that “gender” allowed feminists “to insist on the fundamentally social quality of distinctions based on sex”; to reject “the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as ‘sex’ or ‘sexual difference’”; to stress “the relational aspect of normative definitions of femininity”; and “to introduce a relational notion into our analytic vocabulary,” considering women and men in relation, rather than separately.³¹ At this point, the “relational notion” that Scott refers to is women/ men, rather than the sex/gender the contemporary reader might expect.

Scott’s own examples suggest that gender was first articulated and analogized in terms of class. Scott quotes Natalie Davis, who “suggested in 1975, ‘It seems to me that we should be interested in the history of both women and men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex any more than an historian of class can focus entirely on peasants.’”³² Scott herself argues:

The litany of class, race, and gender suggests a parity of each term, but, in fact, that is not at all the case . . . [W]hen we invoke class, we are working with or against a set of definitions that, in the case of Marxism, involve an idea of economic causality and vision of the path along which history has moved dialectically. There is no such clarity or coherence of either race or gender. In the case of gender, the usage has involved a range of theoretical [End Page 90] positions as well as simple descriptive references to the relationships between the sexes.³³

Despite these references to both race and class, Scott offers no specific examples of race in her discussion.³⁴ While in 1985, class analysis, and Marxist feminism, in particular, was apparently robust enough to offer a basis for articulating gender, this class analysis has not survived the shift from gender analysis to feminist disability theory—not, at least, as a framing discourse with which most of the newly constructed feminist disability studies audience can be assumed to be familiar. Prioritizing this connection—making disability and class make sense together—may demand a shift in what we think of as feminist disability studies, and this is especially true in the North American context.³⁵ The clarity and coherence that Scott attributes to class, but not to race or gender, is likely to be elusive in theorizing disability.³⁶

This is not to say, of course, that comparisons between class and gender have been, in Scott’s view, always successful. Her discussion of Catharine MacKinnon’s work, for example, points to the limitations of analogy, which can only suggest a correspondence, without offering causes, reasons, or history. Scott quotes MacKinnon:

“Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away” . . . Continuing her analogy to Marx, MacKinnon offered, in the place of dialectical materialism, consciousness-raising as feminism’s method of analysis . . . Although sexual relations are defined in MacKinnon’s analysis as social, there is nothing except the inherent inequality of the sexual relation itself to explain why the system of power operates as it does. The source of unequal relations between the sexes is, in the end, unequal relations between the sexes.³⁷ [End Page 91]

Crucially, Scott’s analysis takes up the connection between the figural, or formal, function of gender and its real, historical, function in a series of examples in the last section of her article. Scott writes: “Gender has been employed literally or analogically in political theory to justify or criticize the reign of monarchs and to express the relationship between ruler and ruled.”³⁸ Her own examples consider the interplay of the literal and the analogical in which a state’s “assertion of control and strength” was not just coded in masculine terms “but was [also] given form as [an actual] policy about women.”³⁹ Scott considers the material effect of analogies between divorce and democracy, between the family and the state, from the time of the French Revolution to the twentieth century. In her last example, Scott argues, “the concept of class in the nineteenth century relied on gender for its articulation.”⁴⁰ This last example leads to her compelling articulation of gender “as a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” She writes:

Gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticized. It refers to but also establishes the meaning of the male/female opposition. To vindicate political power, the reference must seem sure and fixed, outside human construction, part of the natural or divine order. In that way, the binary opposition and the social process of gender relationships both become part of the meaning of power itself; to question or alter any aspect threatens the entire system.⁴¹

With this necessarily cursory treatment of Scott’s analysis, I hope to emphasize her engagement with form and content simultaneously. This is what we need to take up—and, in this suggestion, of course, I am agreeing with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who notes the importance of considering not only the overlapping concerns of feminist theory and disability studies—“representation, the body, identity, activism”—but also the importance of feminist methodology to disability studies.⁴² Scott notes, in tracing the emergence of “gender” in feminist scholarship, that the term was offered “by those who claimed that women’s scholarship would fundamentally transform disciplinary paradigms [not only adding] new subject matter but also [forcing] a critical reexamination of the premises and standards of existing scholarly work.”⁴³ Certainly, this impulse—we could call it universalist—is active in disability studies, with McRuer arguing, in the example discussed earlier in this article, that both homo/heterosexuality and disability/able-bodiedness function as foundational categories, the kind of category whose theory [End Page 92] might have the power to undo categorization altogether—or at least make it comprehensible.⁴⁴

The struggle between disability as universal and disability as particular is evident in this conversation. Reviewing the 2002 collection Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, Bruce A. White criticizes the impulse towards the universal as both repetitive and inappropriate. In his response to Michael Bérubé’s own hope, expressed in the afterword, “that the volume is indicative of the potential universalization of disability,”⁴⁵ White writes:

If he should live so long, [Bérubé] would like to see disability studies become “central to any adequate understanding of the human record.” Visionaries in the nascent phase of other disciplines, such as cultural studies, have expressed similar hopes, but such heady enthusiasm should be tempered . . . Given that the discipline of disability studies is ultimately grounded in unique embodiments, then theorization from the particularization of disability to the universalization of disability will always be limited.⁴⁶

This reading suggests that disability studies is necessarily proceeding by analogy, framing disability as just one more example of a category that, in Scott’s words, will force “critical re-examination.”⁴⁷ Yet these analogies are productive. Garland-Thomson, for example, transposes Eve Sedgwick’s 1990 version of the possibility of a universal category. She writes:

A feminist disability theory introduces what Eve Sedgwick has called a “universalizing view” of disability that will replace an often persisting “minoritizing view.” Such a view will cast disability as “an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum.”⁴⁸ [End Page 93]

Of course, Sedgwick’s actual suggestion is that an understanding of what she calls “the homo/heterosexual relation,” not “disability,” will do this, so that Garland-Thomson’s substitution effects an economic presentation of “disability” as a relation parallel to homo/heterosexual, containing both sides of the field it divides. This translation of queer theory into feminist disability studies, like McRuer’s translation of Butler, interpellates queer theorists, or feminists familiar with queer theory, into Garland-Thomson’s audience. Her examples do the real work of constructing a discourse by imagining, insisting on, a reader. And re-imagining is what is at stake.

Yet an important difference between gender and disability is obscured by these analogies and examples, perhaps also by my own. The suggestion that we theorize disability as a universal category, in the sense of the “ability/disability system”—as Garland-Thomson puts it—in which we all live, is an important one.⁴⁹ Disability does seem to have another, related, connection to the universal, one that is incompatible with positive notions of disability identity, with what I think of as my own identity as a disabled person. How do we account, within these translations and analogies, for the position of disability not only in the definitions of medicine, law, and policy and beyond the symbolic where, as Garland-Thomson suggests, “the cultural function of the disabled figure is to act as a synecdoche for all forms that culture deems non-normative”?⁵⁰ How do we account for the recurring function of disability as marking failure within, even the failure of, other categories? However successful we are, this demand that we represent failure is surely part of every disabled person’s experience. No analogy can help us with this. The tension between the figural function of disability and the possibility of disability as a political subject position is an important problematic in disability studies.

Within existing power relations—within the ability/disability system—disability as a concept, a strategy, a recourse—I would emphasize disability as a function—leaves each of us vulnerable to the de-legitimation and incomprehensibility that are, in Scott’s terms, a failure of experience, in ways that reinforce, re-inscribe, and uphold systems of power: gender and heterosexuality, race and class.⁵¹ “We” counter this with the positive: with disability as a way of encountering and identifying with a diverse, interesting, resourceful community, with the energy of activism, and even with the pleasure of critique. This can be an exciting coming-out—or perhaps falling-in—experience for people who fall into disability, or disability identity, through disability activism or disability studies. In these moments of transition, of bodies and identities, this kind of experience (identity formation, community building, subjectivation) is often clearly, and emphatically, positive. But does all this challenge the function of disability in supporting these other systems? [End Page 94]

Engaging with the dual function of disability as not only an identity category but also as the systematic, political, and necessary failure of every other category, or vector, of power and identity means considering race and gender as not analogous to, but inseparable from, disability. In the context of her discussion of gender, Scott connects this kind of de-legitimation and incomprehensibility to experience: “[W]ithout meaning, there is no experience.”⁵² To speak from an abject category, however faulty it may be, to make meaning and experience in this way, has a peculiar political force. Is this the force of shifting from the ethical to the political, of shifting the subject position? The texts, critical conversations, and cultural work that make up the discourse of disability studies present what they enable us to think of as a disability perspective as simultaneously particular and universal. This is the kind of exemplarity, of example work, that does the work of disability studies, that makes possible—demonstrates and performs—a kind of disability subjectivity.

What could this politicized, disability-centred, subject position look like? G. Thomas Couser’s work offers a compelling example. In “Life Writing as Death Writing: Disability and Euthanography,” Couser’s disability-based analysis of the suicide survivor story has a peculiar political force because it re-frames (we could say, it re-examples) a story of absolute vulnerability—of, apparently, the coerced suicide of a depressed woman with advancing multiple sclerosis by her older, male, partner. Couser considers the genre of life writing, or death writing, which he calls “the assisted-suicide note”—the note in which a survivor insists that his action was not murder but, rather, assisted suicide.⁵³ In the assisted suicide note, the more familiar subject position of the suicide note is reversed. The survivor represents the dead subject in one of the most invested representations imaginable, trying to avoid guilt, censure, and prosecution. In his example, Couser’s analysis frames, represents, this invested account in a way that sets individual experience—not only the survivor’s diary, which the survivor cites as proof of his partner’s readiness to die, but also the misery of a male partner who has become an unsupported, unwilling caretaker—in a social context. But this is a social context that, insofar as it justifies the survivor’s account as coherent, if not legitimate (“I was tired, she was needy; my work was affected, she could no longer write; I was older, she was incontinent”), is rendered as unsympathetic as the survivor is.⁵⁴

In Couser’s analysis, it is not only the writer, but also the anticipated reader—us—that makes this example into disability experience, that takes up the part of an absent subject as an active subject position, that speaks, acts, argues, and re-presents. The account makes us wish for the dead woman’s side of the story in a way [End Page 95] that the survivor’s diary entries, so manipulable and invested, do not present to us. The odd function of the example that allows us to speak, however imperfectly, for one another makes disability experience possible. It is the framework of disability studies that supports my own reading, a reading in which the survivor’s claim to vulnerability depends on erasing not only a woman’s voice but also her account, replacing it with two of his own—the apologia of the assisted-suicide note and the diary that may have resulted in his conviction.

In this example, vulnerability shifts, importantly, away from disability. A classic presentation, in which vulnerability is attached to a woman with multiple sclerosis who is dead, is countered by an alternative, in which the reader’s sympathy (and the narrator’s freedom from prosecution) depends on the success of the husband who has (at least) assisted her suicide in narrating himself as vulnerable, as a victim. The writer, George E. DeLury’s, apologia follows the structure of recognition and counter-claim: “Yes, she was vulnerable but I was more vulnerable,” and it follows four months of prison after his guilty plea to a judge (not jury) based on his own admission that he killed his wife. Couser suggests that DeLury’s published book, But What If She Wants to Die? is an effort to supplant earlier life writing, including his actual diary, more ominously titled: “Countdown: A Daily Log of Myrna’s Mental State and View toward Death.” Passages of the diary were released to the press, including:

I feel that everyone is perfectly ready to see me die for your sake, but no one is prepared to do anything for my sake. And I am dying. I have only a few years left, ten at most probably, but only two to three if my work load continues as it is . . . but no one asks about my needs.

I have fallen prey to the tyranny of a victim. You are sucking my life out of me like a vampire and nobody cares. In fact, it would appear that I am about to be cast in the role of villain because I no longer believe in you.⁵⁵

Given this context, Couser writes: “[DeLury’s] book’s burden as an assisted suicide note is to convince readers that it is not a ghostwritten note contrived to disguise his authorship of [his wife’s] suicide itself.”⁵⁶

Most effective, for me, is the way that Couser’s examples, which he situates in the context of debilitating illness and spinal-cord injury, refuse any distinction between the biological and the social. Instead, he considers event (a woman is dead, a young man has survived a diving accident) and narrative (the survivor writes a public defence, a father presents the real work it takes to re-imagine his son’s future in deciding whether to end his changed life) as both crucial to the construction of reality: not only crucial to the way we think of reality but also to what [End Page 96] we will allow it to be—for there is a real sense in which we will not allow to exist a future that we cannot imagine.

Bodies and narratives are inseparable in Couser’s reading, presenting the elusive fragility not only of life but also of subjectivity. In his reading of a memoir written after the author’s seventeen-year-old son’s accident, Couser observes that cards from friends and family—an immediate social—and the example of disabled celebrities—a greater social—may have made it possible for both a parent with no experience of disability and his newly injured teenager to imagine life after a spinal-cord injury. Couser suggests that the father’s being able to answer his son’s question “will I have to go to a school for cripples?” with “no” is crucial to the outcome of this narrative, showing a transition in the boy’s own ability to imagine his future.⁵⁷ The injured boy’s father, a lawyer (who is thus, as Couser notes, a professional storyteller) is able to draw on the specific gains of the US disability rights movement, including broader social acceptance, the very public, if often problematic, activism of Christopher Reeve and others, as well as legislation to support integrated education, in order to re-imagine his son’s future. In Couser’s reading, a father’s changing story changes his mind, moving him to support his son’s altered life, instead of authorizing the withdrawal of his treatment and ending his life.⁵⁸

Feminist theory, queer theory, and disability studies all make possible this reading of biography as political in Scott’s sense. In her words, it is “political in the sense that different actors and different meanings are contending with one another for control.”⁵⁹ The examples of an impossible, an unproven, proposition—of politicized disabled subjectivity—multiply, they propagate.

Translation into Politics

Debra Bergoffen’s article, “February 22nd, 2001: Towards a Politics of the Vulnerable Body,” does not present itself as feminist disability studies. But as a consideration of the politics and the limits of translation from one political demand to another and the shifting operation of the universal, it offers disability theory a suggestive, productive, example—if we choose to read it this way—of an inquiry into the difficult relationships between universal and particular, between theory and practice. And it offers an example of a shift in “vulnerability,” in which vulnerability is detached from the particularity of female experience and attached—along with that particularity—to a new universal, one that includes the vulnerability of the sexed body. [End Page 97]

Derrida’s notion of translation into politics is his response to suggestions that postmodern writing—or deconstruction, in particular—is not political—useful—enough.⁶⁰ It is a defence of the utility of deconstruction. Yet “translation into politics” both suggests that deconstruction is useful, and, at the same time, it suggests that deconstruction is never useful—that it is only political in translation. Bergoffen uses Derrida to understand the implications of a particular judgment by the UN Hague war crimes tribunal, a judgment in which the court identified rape for the first time as a crime against humanity. The tribunal found three former Bosnian Serb soldiers guilty of raping and torturing Muslim women and girls and also convicted two of the three men for enslaving their captives. Bergoffen notes that the court recognized the inequality of soldier defendants and civilian victims and “immediately identified the difference between submission and consent.”⁶¹

Bergoffen responds to critiques of postmodernism that suggest that it “[discredits] democratic discourse, [steals] subjectivity from women just as they were on the brink of securing it, and [undermines] the politics of rights necessary to securing women’s social, economic, and political well-being.”⁶² But she is also responding to postmodernism’s most famous defender, Derrida himself, who declares: “No deconstruction without democracy. No democracy without deconstruction.”⁶³ In reading Derrida’s theory of the event against this event, his analysis of judgment against this judgment, Bergoffen effects a dual interrogation of theory and politics in a demonstration of their mutual inextricability.

This interrogation, in which event and analysis challenge each other, is never so simple as a direct application of theory to practice, nor so satisfactory as a complete overturning of theory by practice. What, then, is the relation between the two? Bergoffen quotes Derrida: “[O]ur question at every moment concerns political translation. It is indeed a question of knowing the rules of translation, but first of all of making sure that translation is possible and that everything can be translated into politics. Is the political a universal translating machine?”⁶⁴ If the political were a universal translating machine, what would it translate from and what would it translate into? What might these two things be that are outside the political? Who could operate a universal translating machine? The image of the universal translating machine seems to make at least two suggestions: the first is a machine [End Page 98] that can be operated, one that Derrida can use in his book The Politics of Friendship to translate the heteronomies of friendship into the principles of citizenship.⁶⁵ The second is a mechanism in which translation itself is automatic, inevitable, which needs no operator, for which no subject need take responsibility—a machine that has no politics of its own.

Bergoffen’s reading, her translation, finds that what to Derrida seems to be prior to politics, waiting for translation, is already political. Not only that, but the desire for something prior to politics, the desire to fix the moment at which something enters the political—as well as the desire for automatic, necessary, translation—is always political. Bergoffen writes: “Patriarchy marks the woman’s body as definitively other and as uniquely vulnerable in its otherness.”⁶⁶ Translated through this patriarchy, Derrida’s reading cannot take us as far as the court’s. As Bergoffen puts it, “Derrida, suspicious of democracy’s juridical discourses, offers searching analyses and asks for women’s patience. The problem of masculine friendship’s legacy to/for democracy must be worked through before the question of woman can be raised.”⁶⁷ For Bergoffen, Derrida “buries the question of the feminine.”⁶⁸ The question of the feminine is not simply waiting for an application, or extension, of Derrida’s analysis of friendship. Instead, in Bergoffen’s own essay, it emerges as a disruptive, corrective, deconstruction of the deconstructionist’s own postponements and defences. The feminist reading that destabilizes Derrida’s own apologetic insistence on starting with the masculine works theory against reality (Derrida’s essay against the Hague’s ruling) and finds, for once—and for me, this is the big surprise of Bergoffen’s essay—that, in this instance, theory is more hesitant, less brave, and less hopeful than the real. How is this possible?

The court’s position is different from Derrida’s, since its task is at some point to stop thinking and to suspend possibility by acting, speaking, judging; his is to keep thinking, to keep open the many possibilities of the perhaps.⁶⁹ In this particular judgment, as Bergoffen’s analysis shows, the court uses the tools available to it; these tools are both necessarily subject to critique and, at the same time, available. Where Derrida is rightly suspicious of all universals, the court manages to extend the universal to the sexed body, enacting what Butler calls a “performative contradiction.” ⁷⁰ Echoing the example-structure that Gelley describes earlier, the [End Page 99] performative contradiction involves the tension between universal principle and particular event. Butler notes that universals are the result of consensus, and they change. The undecidability inherent in the universal is suspended in the enactment of a particular judgment.

If the political were a universal translating machine, an unproblematic mechanism for which no one need take responsibility, Derrida’s masculine neuter analysis would somehow translate itself into the feminine. Would Derrida’s analysis also translate itself into disability? Where would it stop? If the political were a universal translating machine, surely an application, or translation, of Bergoffen’s feminist critique to disability would have made itself available at this point in the article. Instead, her reading suggests a different kind of translation, one that concentrates on tactics rather than on content, a translation not into disability or disablement, but, rather, into disability studies or disability theory.

What, then, can Bergoffen’s extended example—her analysis of the event of the UN decision—have to do with disability or with disability studies? This analysis has implications for a politics of difference as it suggests, in its consideration of this judgment, the possibility of recognizing vulnerable embodiment as the presentation of universal humanness, in acknowledging the sexed body as a presentation of the universal. In terms of content, then, Bergoffen’s article seems to beg for translation into disability studies. In her conclusion, Bergoffen writes:

If we pursue the logic of this ruling we discover that the politics of the vulnerable body leads us to speak of justice in terms of the community of those with nothing in common. Nothing in the ruling suggests that the difference of the woman’s sexual integrity could or should be erased. The point of the ruling is to insist that the difference be recognized and respected. In this the court brings the Enlightenment’s universal principles of humanity, equality, and dignity to the hope and anxiety of a politics of the body—perhaps.⁷¹

But to take this conclusion as a jumping-off point for translation into disability would be to hit a limit point. It seems to me that to suggest that a specific difference—the sexed body—be recognized and respected is radically different from suggesting that difference—any difference, difference as an organizing principle, difference as an identification (or a refusal of identification) in itself—be recognized and respected. The tension between the universal and the particular that Bergoffen raises here is important to understanding the operation—the function—of disability as a concept and a category. Nonetheless, in extrapolating from this example, this specific instance, to disability, we need to be cautious of an over-simple translation. For example, are we necessarily, always already, talking about disability when we talk about bodies and vulnerability? [End Page 100]

In shifting Bergoffen’s enquiry, the assumption that talking about bodies and vulnerability means talking about disability is itself an inescapable object of disability theory. This shift demands not yet another analogy between one object and another—between women’s bodies and disabled bodies, for example—but a recognition of the tension between two specifics, two sets of investments, concerns, and strategies. These sets—we might call them feminist theory and disability theory, since there is no ready parallel to the open-ended problematic of “disability” available—not only overlap one another but also support each other; they make each other comprehensible, possible.

Disability theory needs interrogations of universals, of rights discourse, of the politics of identification—as well as interrogations of its own translations from one social movement, or political discourse, to another—as themselves political. Scott’s analysis both argues for, and demonstrates, the material force of analogy and example. This force is most obvious in the context of the legal decision, but it operates, nonetheless, in more humdrum textual practices. In moving from Bergoffen’s extended example to the specificity of disability, we take up more examples of the strange, imperfect, operation of the far-from-universal translating machine that we can imagine connecting “feminist” to “queer,” to “disability,” constructing these categories just as it connects them. And the faulty productiveness of this interdisciplinary translation is, surely, comparable to the work of analogy and of example: the partial (in both senses) mapping of the familiar onto the new, the making sense by making things make sense.

Perhaps Derrida’s translating machine, operating even as Bergoffen discredits it, is the same faulty mechanism as the robotic judge that Eve Tavor Bannet describes in her own discussion of the analogy and exemplarity inherent in law.⁷² In the structure of analogy that Bannet presents, it is the subjectivity, the reality—we might say the actualization—of the judge that makes law, example, meaning possible, even as it demonstrates the impossibility of law’s perfect operation. Quoting Max Weber, Bannet writes: “The purest type of exercise of legal (or rational) authority is that which employs a bureaucratic administrative staff [that makes decisions according [End Page 101] to] a law that can be counted on like a machine.”⁷³ As Bergoffen demonstrates, translation takes place not through a universal machine but, rather, through patriarchy, racism, and the unpleasant complex of the contemporary, and no discourse, or discipline, is immune. This is one insight that we may be able to translate relatively directly, when we consider the discursive strategies of disability studies, and disability theory. We should also be prepared for the possibility that this kind of translation into interdisciplinary disability theory may, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, have an unsettling effect on its original.⁷⁴ To take up Bergoffen’s analysis of the court ruling that makes rape—violation rather than violence—a crime against humanity will not be simply to extend her provocative, useful, reading but instead somehow to unsettle it, to shift its terms.

Vulnerable Subjects

Butler asks: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, What makes for a grievable life?”⁷⁵ She argues for the need to reimagine the possibility of community on the basis of a universal, human-defining, vulnerability and its shared exposure to loss. Butler reads the post-9/11 United States as a melancholic subject, one that is unable to properly mourn its notion of itself as invulnerable on home soil. Butler points out that as states and as individuals, we mourn familiar lives more readily than unfamiliar lives. In refusing to fully recognize, to grieve, the casualties of US and US-supported military action abroad, we render those lives—and deaths—unreal. This “derealization,” she argues, perpetuates violence. ⁷⁶ For Butler, vulnerability depends on recognition, a recognition through which we open ourselves to one another and to the possibility of something different. Recognition opposes derealization. And Butler charges feminism with this task of asserting vulnerability, of recognition, of grieving. This is a feminism that itself must be open—an international feminist coalition will also depend on a recognition of vulnerability, of the vulnerability of subjects to one another.

Butler’s essay is “Violence, Mourning, Politics”; it is not “Violence, Mourning, Ethics.”⁷⁷ As politics, rather than ethics, the essay’s crucial subject is not individual deaths but, rather, the state that is refusing to recognize and to grieve them—namely the United States. In shifting a psychoanalytic discussion away from individual American psyches to the new object of the state, Butler is wary of analogy: [End Page 102]

I realize that it is not possible to set up easy analogies between the formation of the individual and the formation, say, of state-centered political cultures, and I caution against the use of individual psychopathology to diagnose or even simply to read the kinds of violent formations in which state- and non-state-centered forms of power engage. But when we are speaking about the “subject” we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for agency and intelligibility, one that is very often based on notions of sovereign power.⁷⁸

Parallel or not, the melancholic, violent, state that Butler describes as the post-9/11 United States is surely to some extent made up of the psyches of millions of Americans. Yet as Butler suggests, in drawing this cautious relation, the structure of analogy cannot present the connections between these. Perhaps to ask for a trajectory, real or theoretical, in this web of overlaps and associations, would be to ask too much. Instead, Butler’s presentation of individual psychopathology, model, state, subjectivity, and sovereign power in this passage suggests Theodor Adorno’s constellation structure or, perhaps, Chaim Perelman’s notion of presence. ⁷⁹ In both of these conceptions, association itself, presentation, is a form of argument. Subjectivity, or subjectivation, is the model par excellence of the process of modelling, of exemplarity. We could take Butler’s reading, too, as a model for vulnerability and subjectivity, one that recognizes the difficulty of recognition and the violence that is bound up in failures of recognition, the failures of grieving, of mourning, of recognizing the abject. We might think of this less as analogy than as embodiment, as actualization.⁸⁰

Martha Fineman’s articulation of vulnerability is as concerned with the state as it is with the subject; the institutions that connect the two are able to support resilience in vulnerable subjects but, like those subjects, the institutions and the states themselves are also vulnerable. Fineman does not follow Butler’s analogy between states and subjects, with the state operating like a subject, so that her formulation encourages a consideration of the relations (rather than simply similarities) between states and subjects and the connecting institutions. Fineman’s conception [End Page 103] of the vulnerable subject steps away from identity groups and the difficult space they occupy, or offer, between the universal and the particular. Beyond her suggestion that in an economy of vulnerability and resilience, identity is a social asset, Fineman asserts that because of the “shared, universal nature of vulnerability . . . the vulnerability approach might be deemed a ‘post-identity’ analysis of what sort of protection society owes its members.”⁸¹ Fineman explicitly separates her “vulnerable subject” from the notion of “vulnerable populations current in feminist legal theory”:

I want to claim the term “vulnerable” for its potential in describing a universal, inevitable, enduring aspect of the human condition that must be at the heart of our concept of social and state responsibility. Vulnerability thus freed from its limited and negative associations is a powerful conceptual tool with the potential to define an obligation for the state to ensure a richer and more robust guarantee of equality than is currently afforded under the equal protection model.⁸²

In moving from dependency to vulnerability, Fineman’s formulation necessarily moves different experiences and groups to the centre. Inevitable dependency suggests to the liberal subject that she or he should identify with the situation of children, for example, since she will always have been a child. But the force of this concept, its radical possibility, is in the shift to where it is most counter-intuitive—in the vulnerability of subjects whose subjectivity has never, as such, been challenged or open to debate. The assertion of vulnerability in the traditional liberal subject—the adult male whose autonomy Fineman has argued elsewhere is a social construct (we could call it an effect of power)—brings vulnerability and autonomy, knowing, action, and subjectivity, together.⁸³ In the context of disability’s long-standing identification with vulnerability and incapacity—with, indeed, the idea of a vulnerable population—this constellation, this presence, is crucial.

Fineman’s articulation of vulnerability leaves me with at least two questions. First, what is the difference between vulnerability as an experience and vulnerability as a conceptual tool; how might it matter? And, second, what is the relationship between the universal and the particular in considering vulnerability and disability; is vulnerability universal enough? Fineman observes: “Undeniably universal, human vulnerability is also particular: it is experienced uniquely by each of us and this experience is greatly influenced by the quality and quantity of resources [End Page 104] we possess or can command.”⁸⁴ We experience vulnerability in ways that challenge the argument for universality; vulnerability may be universal, but some of us are more vulnerable than others. In separating vulnerability from vulnerable populations, does Fineman’s formulation separate disability from vulnerability or does it, in offering vulnerability as a universal, reinforce the relationship between the two, with disability as one of the harms that vulnerability exposes all of us to but leaves only some of us with? Eunjung Kim has cautioned against interpretations of this concept that leave disability as the harm to which the vulnerable subject is, well, subject.⁸⁵ But is this avoidable or to be avoided?

In writing at, or through, the disciplinary juncture of critical legal theory and disability studies, is it possible, or necessary, to frame disability as something other than a harm? Fineman at no point associates harm and disability in her analysis, but this association is unavoidable in discussions of disability. If vulnerable subjectivity does include vulnerability to disability as a harm, what might it mean for disability theory to follow, or to participate in, Fineman’s heuristic?

Disability studies has an uneasy relationship to the notion of harm, to the negative aspects of both impairment and disability.⁸⁶ Any politicized model of disability necessarily complicates, if not counters, framings of disability as harm, but the nuances of the many positions disability studies encompasses in respect to this are sometimes lost in the need to counter the relentless collapse of the two terms outside disability studies in work that refuses to consider the medical and social aspects of impairment and disability as separate, if related. It is necessary that disability theory pursue, rather than avoid, this discussion.⁸⁷ For disability theory to refuse to conceptualize disability as in any sense a harm would surely mean failing to theorize disability’s complex relationship to harm, in which the interaction between social factors and physical (or cognitive ones) produces disability and constitutes some bodily variations as impairments. Emphasizing the social factors in this production is not only politically important but also in keeping with many people’s experiences of disability; but failing to recognize the role of pain, injury, and degeneration is to nullify some other experiences of disability and to leave disability theory itself vulnerable to various charges. [End Page 105]

Writing in a different context, Ian/Janet Halley argues for “decisionism”⁸⁸ and presents the risks of deciding, of moving from ethics to politics: “We might have to decide without knowing that our understanding of the situation is right, without knowing how our decision will play out.”⁸⁹ In Halley’s analysis, to refuse the radical possibility of theory, a possibility that following any existing model—even an ethical one—may preclude, is to stop short of deciding, which is, perhaps, the only action possible for theory. And yet, the radical possibility of disability theory is not to set its ethical demand aside—not, in Halley’s terms, to “take a break,” as she suggests queer theory might from the constraints of a narrowly framed feminism—but, rather, to set it into context, into the full context of disability’s interdisciplinarity—one that, even in this discussion, includes disability studies, feminist theory, feminist ethics, medical ethics, and feminist and queer legal theory—and this is a partial list.⁹⁰

Following Fineman’s heuristic, then, may open new possibilities for conceptualizing disability in relation to vulnerability and to subjectivity. Certainly, the example of disability operates as a forceful presentation of the possibility presented by Fineman’s centring of vulnerable subjectivity in the context of critical legal theory. In the (loosely) converse formulation, considering what Fineman’s notion of vulnerable subjectivity can offer disability theory means turning to the particularity of disability and vulnerable embodiment, vulnerable subjectivity.

Sherene Razack emphasizes the importance of such specificity in considering the impact of feminist law reform, arguing that it cannot meet the needs of women with disabilities unless, as she puts it, “we” non-disabled feminists critically examine the ableist gaze that sees the disabled as “icons of pity.”⁹¹ Razack suggests:

[A] politics of rescue prevails when women with disabilities are seen as doubly or triply vulnerable, as “icons of pity.” Pity is the emotional response to vulnerability and being saved, the only outcome. How do we move from pity to respect, where we acknowledge our complicity in oppressing others and consider how to take responsibility for the oppressive systems in which we as women are differently and hierarchically placed?⁹²

But, as Razack’s analysis of case law shows, pity is not the only response to vulnerability. Violence is another response to vulnerability. As she puts it, [End Page 106] “[w]omen with developmental disabilities have been constructed almost universally as vulnerable, a social construction most often used to explain tremendous social and sexual violence in their lives.”⁹³ This emphasis on vulnerability—increased rather than different vulnerability—has the dangerous effect of taking the focus away from “those who actively and aggressively set out to sexually violate and, again [from asking about] the sources of the violence itself.”⁹⁴ “At its core,” Razack writes, “the argument of greater vulnerability invites a tautology: women from historically disadvantaged groups are more vulnerable because they are more vulnerable.”⁹⁵

Razack asserts that “[h]ierarchies among women are maintained in law through a number of universalizing or homogenizing tropes and explanatory frameworks.”⁹⁶ How “we” argue—and how people argue on “our” behalf—makes a difference. Razack argues that the emphasis on consent and force in rape law make it difficult to draw attention to the social conditions that construct having an intellectual disability as a vulnerable situation. Razack ends with the suggestion that “the stories of women with disabilities must be told, not as stories of vulnerability, but as stories of injustice.”⁹⁷ How do we translate a story of vulnerability into a story of injustice? The “we” is important in this translation. The identification with, and recognition of, difference that is a necessary part of disability studies take us some way towards accountability, some way towards respect, but this change of “we”—from the able-bodied feminist scholar to the uneasy subject of disability studies—shifts the original discourse, making possible a broader accountability, at least in the academy, than Razack seems to imagine. Shifting the subject position in this project, imagining a disabled subject position, is part of a shift from ethics to politics.

More Vulnerable Subjects?

This accountability, this centring of a reader informed by disability studies and disability politics, is an emerging achievement of the examples and performances of disability studies. Consider, then, a few more examples of the particularity of disability’s relationship to vulnerability, in which supposedly universalist notions of vulnerability are inverted. Couser warns of the danger of vulnerability framed as invulnerability, pointing out that some people’s disabilities, their lack of awareness, may be represented as protecting them from the harm of a betrayal—from “psychic pain or harm to reputation”⁹⁸—which would otherwise be considered unethical. He [End Page 107] observes that “if subjects—Iris Murdoch, for example—are incapable of reading the texts their cooperation or collaboration makes possible, they may be considered beyond being harmed by them. Ironically, then, the assumption of their invulnerability to harm may make them all the more prone to abuse.”⁹⁹ This structure of vulnerability as invulnerability, its refusal of the analysis that a greater accountability would demand, echoes Razack’s tautology: “[W]omen from historically disadvantaged groups are more vulnerable because they are more vulnerable.”¹⁰⁰

Couser’s example of the suicide-survivor note reminds us of the impact that the representation of vulnerability as invulnerability—of suicide as a rational, autonomous decision—can have in the context of disability. The survivor, DeLury, frames his account in a way that suggests the author’s familiarity with, and manipulation of, the conventions of disability life writing. As Couser observes, “[DeLury] claims that to blame him for Myrna’s suicide—to argue that he unduly influenced her decision—is to cast her in the role of victim and therefore to dishonour her memory . . . to the extent that her suicide appears rational—even heroic—his assistance seems blameless, even admirable.”¹⁰¹

Paul Longmore presents this inversion of the discourse of autonomy in his analysis of Larry McAfee’s 1989 petition for doctor-assisted suicide. McAfee was a ventilator- using, spinal cord-injured quadriplegic who was forced to live in a series of nursing homes and even, for eight months, a hospital intensive care unit, because the State of Georgia refused to fund independent living. McAfee said: “You’re looked upon as a second-rate citizen . . . People say, ‘You’re using my taxes . . . You should hurry up and leave.’”¹⁰² In Longmore’s reading, the resentment and the institutionalized obstacles that McAfee encounters in trying to live his life stand in stark contrast to the admiration he receives for his expressed wish to die: “McAfee’s attorney asserted that ‘he’s made a rational decision,’” the judge “ruling in favor of McAfee’s request for doctor-assisted suicide expressed admiration for his ‘courage,’” while an expert in medical ethics “declared to the court: ‘We acknowledge an individual’s right to autonomy, self-determination and liberty as part of our ethical vision in this country.’”¹⁰³ [End Page 108]

Longmore’s framing of this debate with his own experience as a history professor who also uses a ventilator and extensive assistant services because of paralysis (his the result of childhood polio) emphasizes the political over the ethical by shifting the subject position. Ethics demands that an external “we” respond to the “other’s” need for autonomy, but a political framing of this event centres McAfee’s experience, locating it in an experience shared by other disabled people and in a social and economic context. Longmore makes an identification with McAfee, stating that he himself was unable to work as a professor without the funded independent living supports that his community’s advocacy (and his own) put in place in California in 1988. As he notes, he would have been unable to work in Georgia, which did not have such services.¹⁰⁴ Here, Longmore asserts his own vulnerability and autonomy together as inextricable from his disability experience.

In the context of these examples, I am cautious of Fineman’s “setting aside” the history of “vulnerability.” “Vulnerability,” like “disability,” is inextricable both from etymology and from new formulations, new claims. The tactical assertion that vulnerability can be removed from its context seems almost counter-disciplinary, with vulnerability, like disability, continuing to operate in precisely the contexts with which we might like to dispense. Perhaps this is less a refusal of discursive force in general than a recognition of the discursive force of legal theory—and of law—in particular. Asserting the universality of vulnerability does not accomplish it—not even at the level of theory—but it makes it imaginable. In Perelman’s terms, it brings it into presence.

Bergoffen’s exploration of the universal and the particular in the decision that centres the vulnerability of the female body leaves me wanting a presence in Butler’s own articulation of universal vulnerability. This is not a call for a translation of Butler’s own examples into the unrecognized lives and ungrievable deaths of disabled people. Instead, I call for a recognition that disability haunts such analyses—the analyses that leave it, us, out of discussions of human-ness and of the violence with which humanity’s border is defended. An understanding of vulnerability must recognize both its universal character and its particularity, its specific operation in the present moment, in the examples that experience offers. At the same time, the example of vulnerability offers a demonstration of some of the complications that make it difficult to refer to “feminist disability studies” as if “feminist” and “disability” might line up effortlessly together, each making sense in the terms of the other.

In my own reading, at least, Fineman’s heuristic of the vulnerable subject and Bergoffen’s analysis of the gendered universal offer something to a disability theory transposed from the immediate—and urgent—concerns of its own context, [End Page 109] to a more broadly interdisciplinary discourse. In this discourse, disability theory is in conversation with feminist legal theory and feminist philosophy, but this is a conversation in which we are all prepared to take risks, to make decisions. This transposition offers a constellation of subjectivity and subjectivation, vulnerability and vulnerable embodiment, harm, and identity—and disability. This constellation, like Butler’s difficult presentation of individual and state psychopathology, offers no clear causal relationships, no persuasive arguments; it offers only presence. But in centring disabled subjectivity, in making it imaginable—if not, perhaps, explaining it—this constellation moves from ethics to politics. Is this an extraordinary demand, the extraordinary demand of disability—or is it what all of us should ask of theory? [End Page 110]