Dis/Abling Sex

I want to build off my last post titled “Desiring Disability” which I wrote not knowing the academic flames surrounding the issue had already been well stoked. Indeed, an academic flamethrower had already narrowed its sights directly at the target, although it remained unpublished at the time of my post; namely the new collection of essays titled Sex and Disability editedby Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow.

The book was published at the beginning of 2012 and I just picked up a copy I had the library order and so I’ve only read Anna Mollow’s essay Is Sex Disability?, but already the book seems rapturous and sophisticated in both scope and nuance.

Mollow develops an interesting thesis most clearly stated in the penultimate sentence of the essay:

Intrinsically obscene, yet inherently asexual: rather than attempting to assume a different position within this impossible paradigm, disability theory should perhaps underscore its pervasiveness as evidence of a disability drive; as a sign, that is, that our culture’s desexualization of disabled people functions to defend against a deeply rooted but seldom acknowledged awareness that all sex is incurably, and perhaps desirably, disabled (Mollow, 310).

Mollow builds upon Robert McRuer’s  crip critique of liberal humanism’s fantasy of a utopic politics which would allow all identities to harmoniously coexist. Her analysis emerges against a backdrop of psychoanalysis and queer theory.Is Sex Disability? Constitutes  a ‘counterpject’ which which opposes the humanizing impulse which comprises much of the contemporary disability rights advocacy landscape. While explicitly critical of ‘politics as we know it’ thework does not completely disavow Politics, or the importance of liberalist desires for political recognition or social inclusion. Instead, it envisionsitself as what Paul Longmore descirbes as “the academic counterpart to disability rights advocacy” (Burned, 2),even if that means it is in tension with the disability rights movement at times.

Fuck Tiny Tim, please!

“Fuck Tiny Tim, please!”: rid us, please, of this most reviled textual creation. And also: if it is our cultural mandate to embody this pitiable, platitude-issuing, infantilized, and irritating figure-well, then fuck us, everyone. Fuck us because, figuratively, we are already “so fucked” by our culture’s insistence. Through this figure, that the disabled are not fuckable.

Wow.

Sound familiar?

Like an echo to an earlier insistence on fucking?

How are we to read such a statement?

Mollow deliberately and thoroughly builds upon Lee Edelman’s work in NoFuture as a means of radically refiguring even well-meaning leftists' relationship to disability. Mollow writes that “this insistence, No Future gives us the tools to understand, must be understood as a displacement; propelling every cultural representation of disability as undesirable, I propose, is a “fearful ardor,”an unacknowledged drive” (Mollow, 296).

Fuck here is meant initially as literally to eradicate, remove, ‘the hell with’ Tiny Tim. This can be interpreted in a few ways though. There’s obviously the initial conservative over-tone, such as wow that sounds like Eugenics. But there’s also Fuck the figural image of Tiny Tim, the boy from the Christmas Carol who enjoys to sit up front during church services so that he may serve as a reminder of stories where Jesus made the blind see and cripples walk again. So there is the sense that we ought to eradicate Tiny Tim as a figure of pitiable fascination or existential revulsion.  And then there is another reading in which we understand Fuck Tiny Tim in the overtly sexual sense.

Mollow argues that there is an indissoluble link between sex and disability; not to conflate the actual experience of losing a limb to an IED, or the lack of a wheelchair ramp, or blindness to an orgasm. But that within our cultural imagination sex and love are understood as literally disabling; love leaves one stammering and speechless, overcome with unreasonable fits of passion, love can be blinding, or one may become ill as a result of lovesickness. Mollow develops the concept of the 'Disability Drive' or “the ways in which, in the cultural imagination (or unconscious), disability is fantasized in terms of a loss of self, of mastery, integrity, and control, a loss that, both desired and feared, is indissociable from sexuality” (Mollow 297).

Disability and Sex dance to a contradictory, ambivalent and yet rapturous tune. One may notice a peculiar double bind persisting: 


On the one hand the disabled body is perceived as either asexual or excessively sexual. Someone with a disability may be thought of as not being able to engage in sexual acts and/or embody reproductive futurism either as a result of an impairment or disability or due to forced sterilization programs – whether really existing or enforced at the level of cultural imagination. Or the disabled body may be seen as hypersexualized from certain fetishes to the idea that sex addicts are themselves suffering from a pathological disorder to the idea that disabled people are literally unable to control their sexual desires and emotions.

Yet our cultural imagination simultaneously imagines and desires the loss of self, mastery, and control as the ideal sexual act. Is not the orgasm itself the passing over into a state of impotence par excellence? Is not love itself a state of mindless attraction? Mollow mentions The Symposium as evidence of the ancient roots, but is not The Phaedrus almost a better example in which love is very rationally categorized into a systematized understanding of Madness. Sexuality is destructive, it marks the dissolution of the subject, the breakdown of the phantasmic illusion of a seamlessly unified and whole self. Mollow further traces the genealogical associations of sex and disability to Freudian psychoanalysis which has interpreted sex as “that which is intolerable to the structured self (Mollow, 301). Mollow then proceeds to uncover this connection as more explicitly developed in Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” which argues that “the most radical originality of psychoanalysis…has to do with a disabled consciousness” (Mollow 300). Sexuality is constituted and exhausted by the “abortive, incomplete and undeveloped ‘essence’ of sexuality” (Mollow, 300). This is what is at the heartof the Disability drive, the mystery ofsexuality is that we seek to both eradicate and repress this self-shattering tension, yet also can’t get enough of it.

Where fetishization merges with morbidity, sex meets disability.

Thus all sexuality could be thought of as a tautology for disability.

Terms of Disappropriation

As the specters—and discourses—of diaspora and disability meet, their relationship
need not be frightening.

Desiring Disability

Affirming the disabled body risks losing oneself – itexposes our shared phantasm of invulnerability; our irreconcilable fragility.Can we resist the capture of the world, close off every pore of our bodies and hermetically seal the soul from the excess of desire? On the other hand one mayalso embrace an affirmative critique that moves beyond a politics of the lowestcommon denominator – one that seeks an ethics beyond the baseline definition ofthe politics of pity.

Working through the question of deficiency means a movementbeyond desire as lack. From Plato’s androgyne to Hegel’s ‘Negativity as theintegrity of determination’ or Freud’s Thanatos and the haunting lack that impingesitself around every corner of the symbolic order, intellectual currents havehabitually sedimented deficiency as prima facie. How can these modes ofcritique and/or methodological orientations toward desire account for theexperience of being denied sexuality? Not that some people with disabilitiesare biologically or otherwise asexual, but simply that there exists amaterialized social structure which seeks to delimit the disabled body from therealm of sexual possibility.

Even if one grants a claim to authority or priority to therealm of sexuality, what is lost in the reading of desire as lack? If weunderstand the desire for the other primarily as an object oriented or goalfocused approach then what happens to the self in the moment of fulfillment (ifsuch a thing is possible) under this approach?

An indissoluble trap haunts understandings of desire aslack. If desire is constitutive of self-identity in the sense that through theidentification of the object of desire the self delimits the realm of itssubject position by marking that which is other, then in the moment offulfillment does the self not risk complete dissolution and loss? Is this notPlato’s point in the Symposium? Does the momentthat marks the eruption of absolute fulfillment not force the motivating lifeforce to resign?

Is this not living refutation of the closed system? Proof ofits inevitable implosion upon itself? Or is it simply a denial of themotivating negativity constantly stirring the pot of radical relationality?

Prosthetically, Poetically, Post-Humanly - Supplementing the End of History

On the University of Chicago's Theories of Media online glossary Sarah Coffey offers an interesting genealogical mapping of the concept of prosthesis. The glossary and Coffey's essay itself performs the concept itself. 

Combining the Latin pro (forward) with thesis (stressed syllable), prosthetics denotes addition or extension. The OED defines "prosthetics" in its plural form as "the branch of surgery concerned with the replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by artificial substitutes." "Prosthetic" derives from the word "prosthesis," which can refer to the addition of a syllable or letter at the beginning of a word, or to surgical prosthesis. The shift from the literal connotation of grammatical prosthesis to the figurative connotation of surgical prosthetics took place in the 16th century, when "prosthesis" was adopted by medical terminology to denote the substitution of an artificial body part for missing limbs or teeth (Jain 32). This article will examine prosthetics in reference to both the actual extension of the body by artificial means, and the virtual extension of the body by various forms of media.

Media theory examines the double meaning of prosthetics, as simultaneously supplementing a deficiency and signaling deficiency in the object to which it is supplied. In Marshall McLuhan's seminal text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he uses the concept of prosthesis to explain media's function as "any extension of ourselves" (7). Stressing the physicality of media extensions, McLuhan describes the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, and electric technology as an extension of the central nervous system. Yet as media extends, it also amputates. Although electric technology extends the central nervous system, "such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception" (McLuhan 43). Thus McLuhan asserts that a process he terms "autoamputation" accompanies any extension of media.

Prosthesis is a doing, a making, and a placing of the supplement. The addition to bodies includes something previously existing outside itself. Prosthesis ruptures the relations between man’s tripartite divisions, psyche, soma and soul. Yet in modern times, it has become not simply an addition but a replacement. Prosthesis begins to work by removing the previously deviant aspects of man’s existence. A reconstitution of ability inaugurated in the shadow of man’s uncanny wounded self. 

 

Does posthistorical man create the edifices like birds build nests, as Kojeve posits? Out of the question itself emerges the definitive characteristic of man, defined not in terms of attributes but an imperative, to know thyself through experimental investigation. Whereas disability, disease and madness previously were seen as a source of disclosing truths hitherto unknown to average man, in modernity, disability is exhausted of its vital force “by way of investment in believing that disability makes a person available for excessive experiment” (Snyder & Mitchell, 37). Man’s “speculation parading as empiricism” is most intense and uncertain at the limits of the anomalous body. “cultures thrive on solving the riddle of disability’s rhyme and reason” (25). 

In this sense Agamben’s work offers a promising site for investigating the disabled body. Politics in modern times has been depoliticized, emptied of its life force, by reducing the question of politics, history and ethics to a preordained reaction, not response, to the injunction to end suffering, cure the pathology, or fulfill the abstract containers of ‘human’ rights. The inability to reconcile the disabled body with the defining characteristics of man’s constitution performs an “interruptive labor” (53). The internal divisions of man are exposed as the conditions of possibility for any limit to be drawn between the human and non-human, as the fuel for the anthropological machine’s fire.

Back in Business

My blog has sat idly by for the past couple months. But to your delight it's back up and running. The next series of posts will focus on a set of seemingly disparate events or phenomena but hopefully the connections holding them together will become clear.

In general my theoretical disposition will center not solely on Marxist Ideological critique as it has in the past. Rather, I will attempt to return to 'the things themselves' and incorporate a more phenomenological framework for analyzing cultural events, texts and relations.  I'm currently in the midst of reading Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and some of his lecture courses, this will largely be my jumping off point.

In terms of content, I hope to incorporate works from the newly emergent field of Critical Disability Studies in order to map out the traces of ableism and its necessary resistant supplement, as well as the role of new media in culture in general.