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Public Culture 13.3 (2001) 511-531



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Disability and Domestic Citizenship:
Voice, Gender, and the Making of the Subject

Veena Das and Renu Addlakha


The figures of the diseased and the disabled have been at the center of analysis in conceptualizing certain postmodern forms of sociality. Paul Rabinow (1996) formulated the concept of biosociality to suggest the emergence of associational communities around particular biological conditions. Many others (Ginsburg 1989; Rapp 1999) have theorized that major transformations in biotechnology have led to new forms of community in which people with disability or impairment have formed associational relationships in order to act in civil society and to influence, on the one hand, the decisions of the state, and on the other, the course of scientific research. But while such political mobilizations are extremely important in changing the environment of the disabled, they locate the subject positions of the disabled firmly within a liberal political regime. Issues of sexuality and reproduction can only be addressed in such a framework in terms of the legal rights guaranteed by the state to its community of citizens. As Anne Finger (1992: 9) states the issue, "It is easier for us to talk about--and formulate--strategies of discrimination in employment, education, and housing, than talk about our exclusion from sexuality and reproduction."

In this essay, we propose to analyze notions of impairment and disability [End Page 511] through a reconfiguration of the domestic sphere, offering ethnographic vignettes from the fieldwork we have conducted in different kinds of locations in Delhi. We hope to show that the domestic, once displaced from its conventionally assumed reference to the private, becomes a sphere in which a different kind of citizenship may be enacted--a citizenship based not on the formation of associational communities, but on notions of publics constituted through voice. The domestic sphere we present, then, is always on the verge of becoming the political. A focus on kinship not as the extension of familial relations into community, but as the sphere in which the family has to confront ways of disciplining and containing contagion and stigma yields startling revelations about disability and impairment as located not in (or only in) individual bodies, but rather as "off" the body of the individual and within a network of social and kin relationships.

Finally, by pairing the notion of the domestic with that of citizenship, we will also suggest that community as imagined by the modern liberal state in India makes state and citizenship complicated entities, and that claims to membership and belonging within the state may be enacted in everyday life in all kinds of dispersed sites. We identify the hospital as one such site, at which the domestic is instantiated performatively in relation to both state- and kinship-bounded figurations of community. Our ethnographic examples are drawn from a study of Punjabi kinship in which Veena Das was engaged in varying intensity from 1974 through 1994, and from a study of hospitalized female psychiatric patients in Delhi conducted by Renu Addlakha from 1990 to 1992.

Visual Marking:
The Importance of Face

According to the editors of a recent volume entitled "Defects" (Deutsch and Nussbaum 2000), studies on disability have only recently begun to show an interest in the genealogies of earlier periods. Scholars have begun to take up diverse matters--femininity as monstrosity; ugliness as aesthetic category; deafness and sign language; the exotic deformed in the early modern and Enlightenment periods--in order to explore the historical connections between the imagining of community and the construction of normalcy. The category of gender is particularly important for such discussions within disability studies, demonstrating how contingent discursive inscriptions of "defect" could imperil the life projects of female subjects, even in the absence of any functional disability or impairment of the senses. Eighteenth-century European women whose smallpox-scarred faces were rendered "damaged" are one example of defective subjects produced at the intersection of norms of femininity and normalcy (Campbell 2000). Indeed, the [End Page 512] importance of the face in defining norms of masculinity and...

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