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(Un)necessary Procedures: Black Women, Disability, and Work in Grey's Anatomy
- African American Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 50, Number 2, Summer 2017
- pp. 169-183
- 10.1353/afa.2017.0020
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Miranda Bailey's bout with OCD on the TV show Grey's Anatomy presents disability in black women as a threat to American capitalism, which legitimizes the state control and exploitation of black women's work. Because this OCD narrative emerges through contradiction, causing Dr. Bailey to work both too much and not enough, it construes black disabled women as a version of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "tangle of pathology" that comes into being because of disability. Producing black women as "bad" disabled subjects allows American popular culture to nominally prize "good" disabled subjects—white men whose OCD supposedly offers them genius and career excellence.