The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect ed. by David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi and Sharon L. Snyder (review)

The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect is a collection of theoretically insightful literary essays that engage with the topic of disability materiality. The editors trace the theoretical history of scholarship on materiality of disability by recognizing the role of phenomenology and disability studies scholars who have embraced the “encounter with the visceral” (ix). Among the scholars who furthered the theorization of disability in a new way was Tobin Siebers. Siebers proposed “a theory of complex embodiment” that understands disability beyond the medical/social model dyad as “an epistemology that rejects the temptation to value the body as anything other than what it was and that embraces what the body has become and will become relative to the demands on it, whether environmental, representational, or corporeal” (Siebers 326). Siebers’ theorization lays the foundation for posthumanism that invites us to think through disabled bodies rather than think disability through the world (xii). In juxtaposing transhumanism that promotes escape from disability and “late eugenic dreams” (4) with posthumanism that provides us with alternative ways of viewing disability, the authors of this collection demonstrate how “disability is part of the process of materiality’s active, unfolding participation in the world” (3). In other words, disability is not a destination point but rather a continuous process of constantly shaping and re-shaping diverse forms of embodiment that can be both non-human in nature and non-agency driven.

The book is divided into four parts: “The Matter of Subjectivity,” “The Matter of Meaning,” “The Matter of Mortality,” and “The Matter of Memory.” Each part provides a unique insight into how disability matters through a multiplicity of forms and locations. Such structure carefully delineates the theoretical foundation of posthumanism without reducing the significance of its workings through lived experiences of people with disabilities, the role of these experiences in meaning making, the distinction from transhumanism, and the implications of historical erasure of disability. The first part delves into ambiguity of who or what a subject is as it relates to disability. Joshua Kupetz employs a concept of disability ecology to explore “ontological slippages between human and nonhuman subjects” (49). In an insightful analysis of Richard Powers’s novel Gain (1998), Kupitz demonstrates how disability can be shared by multiple stakeholders—from a cancer patient to a corporation that paradoxically causes the patient’s cancer and finds a cure for it (53). Disability ecology connects the material conditions of nonnormative embodiment with the cultural meanings attached to them. Similarly, in the analysis of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Olga Tarapata makes a strong argument for the multiplicity of agency that is distributed not only across a multiplicity of human but also technological nodes (82). The second part demonstrates how even the omission of disability as a result of disability drag that non-disabled film actors engage in for the roles of disabled characters generate new meanings. Smith calls it “disaffection, or longing for alternative disability affects” (130–31) that occurs in response to the technical glitches that fail to hide the absence of disability. The author conveys a powerful message that inclusion of people with disabilities in a variety of media opens the space for a wide range of disabled embodiment, motion, and emotion (135).

The third part of the collection explores how the search for an ideal materiality and things like designer genetics (Yates) promote the eradication of disability, illness, and aesthetic “imperfections” (150), failing to recognize the ethical and moral implications for such transhumanism. Narrative prosthesis has been a powerful way of deploying disability as an explicitly complicating feature of the representational universes and as a way to “salvage denigrating social definitions” (Mitchell and Snyder 2). In their seminal work Narrative Prosthesis, Mitchell and Snyder demonstrate how disability has undergone a dual negation—it has been attributed to all “deviant” biologies as a discrediting feature, while...