Feminist, Queer, Crip

7: Accessible Futures, Future Coalitions

149 7 Accessible Futures, Future Coalitions A vital moment in coalitional political rhetoric is its ability to construct connections among struggles that may be not only diverse, but opposed to one another in many respects. —Catriona Sandilands, The Good-Natured Feminist When describing disability studies to my students, I often draw on Douglas Baynton’s insight that “disability is everywhere in history once you begin looking for it.”1 For Baynton, “looking for it” entails not only recovering the stories of disabled people or tracing histories of disability discrimination but also exploring how notions of disability and able-mindedness/able-bodiedness have functioned in different contexts . Baynton issues his provocation to historians, but disability studies scholars in other fields have extended its reach, pushing their own colleagues to recognize disability as a category of analysis. Deeply influenced by and indebted to this work, I use this final chapter to read Baynton’s assertion differently. Rather than direct his insight outward, to those not currently working in disability studies, I turn inward, directing it to the field itself. If “disability is everywhere . . . once you begin looking for it,” where do we, as disability studies scholars and activists, continue not to look? Where do we find disability and where do we miss it? In which theories and in which movements do we recognize ourselves, or recognize disability, and which theories and movements do we continue to see as separate from or tangential to disability studies? These questions, and potential answers to them, have surfaced in previous chapters , but in this final chapter I address them more directly. In imagining what accessible futures might look like or might include, I find myself thinking about the possibilities of cross-movement work, both intellectually and politically. If disability is everywhere once we start looking for it, then why not look for it in the other social justice movements at work in contemporary culture? My understanding of disability rights, 150 | Accessible Futures, Future Coalitions justice, politics, culture, and scholarship has always been informed by my investments in feminist and queer theories and practices. Reading disability into and alongside those investments is one way to imagine disability differently. In other words, looking within disability studies for the traces of other movements while simultaneously looking for disability in places it has gone unmarked is one way of moving us toward accessible futures. I begin “looking for disability” in a canonical feminist studies text—Bernice Johnson Reagon’s influential essay on coalition politics—that is not widely recognized as being “about” disability. Reading disability into it not only allows for an expansion of feminist and disability studies genealogies but also offers a framework for imagining future work. I then move outward from Reagon’s text to explore three potential areas of growth for feminist, queer, crip theory and activism: bathroom politics and contestations over public space; environmental justice; and reproductive justice. Zeroing in on each of these sites allows us to think through how different formulations of disability encourage (and discourage) unexpected but generative alliances. I close by invoking still more connections and coalitions, making clear the multiple and overlapping possibilities for feminist, queer, crip futures. Reagon’s text serves as an apt introduction to this chapter because of her frank acknowledgment of and engagement with practices of dissent and strife. Throughout the essay, she encourages us to recognize that the benefits of coalition politics are bound up in the difficulties of such politics. Disagreement pushes us to recognize and acknowledge our own assumptions and the boundaries we draw around our own work; without such disagreement, and the ways it compels us to reexamine our positions , we can too easily skim over our own exclusions and their effects. I have chosen each of the sites I highlight here—trans/disability bathroom politics, environmental justice movements, and reproductive justice movements—in large part because they, too, are contentious. They force our attention to the formation of the identities, positions , and practices we name as feminist and/or as queer and/or as crip. They also offer contradictions that are not easily resolvable, contradictions that make difficult any facile claims to “unity” or sameness. I am influenced here by the work of feminist theorists such as Audre Lorde, Chantal Mouffe, and Ranu Samantrai, each of whom argues for the value, and necessity, of dissent. Samantrai explains that “dissenters draw attention to the border zones where . . . norms are negotiated,” subjecting “the terms of membership” in a political community to “continual revision.”2...