Is the Study of Debility Akin to Disability Studies without Disability?

In The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Jasbir Puar provides important new insights for understanding state-sponsored productions of bodily harm through "the study of capacity and debility" (15). The main idea of Puar's coinage of "debility" is to articulate a way to approach questions of devalued populations experiencing forms of active abandonment by the state. In particular, the critique focuses on those whose health and well-being are consciously left to languish in proximity to human-made hazards, including toxicity, maiming by police or militias, exposure to environmental lethality, and the incarcerating practices of ongoing settler colonialisms. One continuing goal of Puar's work is to challenge liberal categories of discrete minority identities that splinter abilities to analyze wider swaths of "social suffering" (69). Ironically, as Puar trenchantly points out, such identity partitions are based on fetishizations of the exclusionary normative citizenship rights they critique.

Instead, Puar argues for replacing these terms of partitioning with a more expansive rubric (i.e., debility) that better apprehends the inseparability of impairment from the wider social immobility wrought by biopolitical regimes of authoritarian power (157). The study analyzes a wide swath of violence that cannot be easily traced to state primogeniture, such as racialized queer suicides, police killings of unarmed black men and trans people in the US, and, most important, Palestinians enduring unlivable lives in Gaza (now designated as the world's largest "open-air prison" [128]). The Right to Maim reads like an extended bricolage of dispatches from the postcolony that includes those populations seeking to resist their consignment to necropolitical orders — devalued peoples whose mortality outcomes are routinely buried in euphemistic reports of "collateral damage" resulting from "police actions" and/or border security enforcement initiatives (147). "Right to maim" policies reduce entire populations to the abject conditions of disabled people existing without supports while living in the shadows of the wealth and consumptive excesses of the occupier.

All this analysis is necessary as a synthesis of the literature on contemporary expendability practices and their relationship to disability and cultivated debilitation. The Right to Maim critiques limitations in Foucauldian formulations of biopolitics — the power to let die and make live — by applying such arguments to colonial racisms neglected by Michel Foucault (128). Yet, despite all this promise, Puar finds an odd antagonist to anchor her arguments from the outset: disability studies. One might expect to find some significant common ground for movements contesting lack of access to health care, nonincarcerating living conditions, near total unemployment, withholding of treatment and assistive devices, raids on health care coffers to balance budgets, as well as homelessness. Yet Puar front-loads her argument with a critique of gay and disability Pride parades — celebratory community marches (really protest rallies passing as positive identity showcases) that ground her understanding of superficial minority claims to citizenship rights and efforts to make rejected bodies more acceptable through forms of social visibility (xi–xii).

In our last book, The Biopolitics of Disability, we argue that neoliberalism obscures the destitution of most disabled lives by acting as if national inclusion projects, now presumably complete, can be applied as a presumptive "gold standard" against which non-Western nations and racialized populations should be measured and found wanting (Mitchell and Snyder 2015: 59). Nonetheless, The Right to Maim inadvertently assists this neoliberal bait-and-switch operation by contending that the pursuit of access and accommodation in the West redirects attention from the production of debilitation by militaries abroad. Is the violence of immobility for all inhabitants that characterizes places such as Gaza somehow undermined by efforts to improve access and secure livability in the occupier's homeland? Given that racialized crip/queer women birthed the #BlackLivesMatter movement, is it possible to separate disability from other debilitating conditions so easily (Day 2015)? It is never quite clear how these projects undermine each other beyond the suggestion that one (the more "privileged" enactment) obscures other disabling colonial pursuits abroad (xv).

While...