AFF: ADA AC November/December 2016

Ableism AC
We begin our narrative with a description of the status quo in
the United States, which is widespread criminalization of the
mentally ill and disabled.
Auner, Thomas. For The Protection of Societys Most Vulnerable, The ADA Should Apply To Arrests. Los Angeles Loyola of Los Angeles Law
Review. 2016. Web. October 07, 2016. <http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/llr/vol49/iss1/10>.
The United States largely criminalizes mentally ill people, resulting from
policies implemented in the 1970s favoring deinstitutionalization. Advocates initially
proposed deinstitutionalization with noble intentions to combat the inhumane conditions found
in mental institutions. Advocates [and] planned to provide the mentally ill with communitybased treatment, but this never fully materialized. This failure has
resulted in more mentally ill persons on the street and , thus, a higher
probability of being arrested. One study showed that 42 to 50 percent of the mentally
ill will be arrested in their lives, compared with 7 to 8 percent of the
general population

And, every 36 hours someone with a mental illness is killed by

police.
Appelbaum, Paul. Can The Americans With Disabilities Act Reduce The Death Toll From Police Encounters With Persons Wi. Psychiatric
Services. October 01, 2015. Web.
October 07, 2016. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26423161>.

every 36 hours, somewhere in the United States, a person with mental illness is shot
and killed by police. A team of reporters from the Washington Post tracked every police shooting in the United States in 2015
and found that, at the years halfway point, at least 25% of the 462 fatal police shootings involved
someone with mental illness. Similar efforts by other journalists suggest an even
higher proportion in some areas of the countrythe figure in Maine from 2000 to 2012 was 58%. Even if we accept
the inevitable imprecision in such data and the absence of reliable government statistics, it seems
clear that officers in this country are vastly more likely than police in other developed countries to kill
citizens they encounter, including people with mental illness. Although the basis for many
of the killings of people with mental illness appears questionable, individual officers and their
departments rarely face sanctions. Even as a growing number of police forces around the country implement
Roughly

programs intended to teach officers how to deal more appropriately with people with mental illness, it is not clear that these efforts have reduced the
number of deaths. Thus it was with considerable interest that advocates greeted the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to review a California case
involving a woman with mental illness who had been shot by police and survived. The case, San Francisco v. Sheehan, raised the critical question of
whether law enforcement personnel must take the mental impairments of citizens into account as they interact with them.

Champion

Briefs
1

AFF: ADA AC November/December 2016

In the US, Ableism is very much alive and well, as can be seen
in the particularly embedded form of discrimination present in
police misconduct.
BRODIN, RACHEL. REMEDYING A PARTICULARIZED FORM OF DISCRIMINATION: WHY DISABLED PLAINTIFFS CAN AND SHOULD BRING CLAI.
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW. 2005Web. October 07, 2016.
<http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1296&context=penn_law_ review>.

Discrimination against disabled individuals during arrests is a particularly

structural and embedded form of discrimination, and it often goes unrecognized. An officer
who is taught to use force when confronted with what he/she perceives as
a threat may apply that knowledge when responding to a mentally or
physically disabled person, not realizing that by treating this person the same way that she treats others, she may in fact be
failing to reasonably accommodate his disability, and thereby discriminate against him/her. Section 1983
actions, whether or not they result in a successful judgment for a plaintiff, will not by themselves send a sufficient message to police departments and
state and local governments that they must change their practices to accommodate people with disabilities and provide training for their officers in how to
respond to the needs of the disabled. Actions under the ADA will send precisely such a message.

Ableist policies and practices still thrive in the US, despite

perceived breakthroughs. While some may point to the passing
of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is only a hollow
victory, as QI prevents discrimination suits under the ADA.
Gildin 99
Gildin, Gary S. (Professor of Law, The Dickinson School of Law of the Pennsylvania State University.) "Dis-Qualified Immunity for Discrimination against the
Disabled." University of Illinois Law Review 1999.3 (1999): 897-948.

legislative instruction that the Acts be construed to afford relief to

victims of disability discrimination obviously repudiates a qualified
immunity defense
. Rather than promote relief, the qualified immunity
defense deprives the victim of a damage remedy against the government
official who engaged in the proscribed discrimination
because damages may not be obtained from the federal government
a
disabled person would be left without compensation for harms suffered as
a consequence of discrimination caused by a federal official who
successfully asserts the qualified immunity defense immunity may have
the effect of precluding recovery of damages for discriminatory acts
The

broadly

that does not appear on the face of the statutes

intent ionally

on the basis of disability. In fact, in two circumstances the immunity defense would have the effect of entirely barring recovery of the damages caused by intentional discrim inat ion. First,

under the Rehabilitat ion Act or the ADA

intentional

. Second,

of state and local officials. Although state and local governmental ent ities are

not sheltered by any immunity, the courts may require that plaint iff prov e that the discrim inat ion was inflicted pursuant to a governmental custom or policy before the entity will

be held liable. If the discrim inatory acts of a public official do not represent governmental custom or policy, the ent ity may not be liable. If at the same time the state or local official is exonerated under the qualified immunity defense, the risk of loss from violat ions of the disability discriminat ion statutes will be borne by the least appropriate party, the v ict im of discriminat ion. C ongress has repeatedly made plain its intent that the Acts should be construed, without exception, to afford relief when public officials discriminate against the disabled. Because qualified immunity im pedes, and in some cases defeats, recovery of the damages caused by v iolation of the Acts, the defense must not be made available to those who discrim inate.

Dehumanization of the disabled has prevented them from

achieving basic human rights, even in America.
Nelson 2016 (tom, admin. Dehumanization, Discrimination, and Segregation.
Disability Justice. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2016., http://disabilityjustice.org/justicedenied/dehumanization-discrimination-and-segregation/) Calculus BC
Stereotypes, misinformation
and a general lack of interest all contribute to a culture of ignorance
where people with developmental disabilities are viewed as a single,
homogenous group,
stereotypes persist that people with
Several disturbing themes dom inate the history of people wit h developmental disabilities. Documented as far back as 400 B.C ., these recurring themes cont inue to impact the lives of people with disabilit ies today and are reflected in the way that the justice system serves the disability community. These themes include: People wit h developmental disabilities are regularly dehumanized and devalued. Whenev er a group of people is deemed less valuable or less import ant, they become vulnerable to abuse, neglect, discrimination and exploitation.

rather than as indiv iduals with unique abilit ies, skills, interests and needs. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary,

Champion

Briefs
2

AFF: ADA AC November/December 2016

disabilities,
: Do not have feelings and emotions.
Do not
make any worthwhile contributions to society
. Are incapable of
making decisions for themselves.
Ensuring that all
people are participating in society may help break down stereotypes
Unfortunately,
discriminatory practices often make it
difficult for them to: Find jobs in the community that pay at least minimum
wage Have opportunities for promotions and career advancement. Find
, safe, accessible housing. Access the health care system, receive
adequate care or be allowed to make decisions regarding their own care.
Get access to appropriate communications support. Access a free and
appropriate education Pursue post secondary education.
part icularly individuals wit h developmental disabilities

human

In essence, that they are less than human. Are unable to feel basic physical sensat ions, such as pain, cold and hunger.

and, therefore, are viewed as less valuable

Therefore, they should not be allowed to control their finances, own a home, develop serious emotional relat ionships, ex perience normal sex ual feelings, or cont rol their own reproductiv e decisions. Stereotypes are harmful. Many people have taught Judge Frank about breaking them down.

. Do these beliefs ex ist today?

they do. People with developmental disabilit ies encounter discriminat ion in many areas. People with development al disabilit ies may be discriminated against in virtually every area of lif e. These

, including benefits.

appropriate

public

(FAPE).

Ableism excludes those with disabilities from participation in

daily life. Only challenging ableist practices solves.
Zelinger 15 (Julie Zeilinger: a freelance author from the Barnard College class of
2015. Mic.com: 6 Forms of Ableism We Need to Retire Immediately published July
7th, 2015. Accessed July 24th, 2015. http://mic.com/articles/121653/6-forms-ofableism-we-need-to-retire-immediately)TheFedora
Nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States has a disability
Yet many
forms of discrimination against the disability community
are
normalized and even integrated into our culture's very
disregard) of
disabled people
ableism extends beyond literal discriminatory
acts (intentional or not) to the way our culture views disabled people as a
concept. Ableism is also the belief that people with disabilities "need to be
fixed or cannot function as full members of society" and that having a
disability is "a defect rather than a dimension of difference
This
interpretation of difference as defect
that cause far too many to feel
marginalized, discriminated against and ultimately devalued in this
society
people think wheelchair
ramps everywhere" is true accessibility accommodates all types of
disabilities
. Individuals with
disabilities have reported not being able to receive health care because
their providers' facilities weren't accessible
There's a level of silencing and erasing the disabled experience
as an important experience because able-bodied experiences are the
privileged experiences in our society."
, according to a 2012 Census Bureau report.

not only persist, but

act ually largely

understanding (or, more accurately,

's experiences. Ableism refers to "discrim inat ion in favor of able-bodied people," according to the Oxford English Dict ionary. But the reality of

," according to the authors of one 2008 Journal of Counseling & Development article on the topic, as reported by Fem inists with Disabilities.

is the true root of ableist acts

. Here are just six forms of this behavior that, though largely normalized, need to be retired immediately. 1. Failing to prov ide accessibility beyond wheelchair ramps Source: Getty Perhaps the most obvious form of discriminat ion people with disabilities face is the inability to access places and serv ices open to their able-bodied counterparts even with laws in place to prevent such inequalit y. As Tumblr user The (C hronically) Illest noted, while most

"just [putt ing]

sufficient,

not just physical disabilit ies that specifically bind people to wheelchairs. Accommodat ions can also include "braille, seeing-eye dogs/assistant dogs, ergonom ic workspaces, easy to grip tools, closed captions ... class note- takers, recording dev ices for lectures" and other services and alterations. Though accessibility is certainly a matter of convenience and equity, a lack of accessible resources can im pact the very wellbeing of people with disabilit ies

, and one study found that women with disabilities part icularly face increased difficulty accessing reproduct ive healt h care, just to name two examples. 2. Using ableist language Source: Getty Ableism has become undeniably naturalized in the English language. Many people not only use words like "crazy," "insane" or "retarded" without a second thought, but many adamant ly defend their

use of these terms, decrying anybody who quest ions their right to do so as too "polit ically correct" or "sensitive." But this personal defense fails to recognize that ableist language is not about the words themselves so much as what their usage suggests the speaker feels about the indiv iduals they represent . "When a critique of language that makes reference to disability is not welcome, it is nearly inevitable that, as a disabled person, I am not welcome either," Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg wrote in a 2013 Disability and Representation article. But beyond indiv idual feelings, ableist language can contribute to a foundation of more system ic oppression of people with disabilit ies as a group. "If a culture's language is full of pejorativ e metaphors about a group of people," C ohen-Rottenberg continued, that culture is more likely to v iew those indiv iduals as less ent it led to rights like "housing, employment, medical care, education,
access, and inclusion as people in a more favored group." 3. Able-bodied people failing to check their privilege Source: Getty It may not seem like a big deal in the moment, but able-bodied individuals fail to recognize the priv ilege of having access to every and any space accessible. As Erin Tatum points out at Everyday Feminism, plenty of people may not directly discrim inat e against people with disabilit ies but effectiv ely do so by using resources allocated for them. For example, many able-bodied people use handicapped bathroom stalls or take up space in crowded elevators, rather than taking the stairs and leave room for people with disabilit ies who don't have other opt ions, without a second thought. While these actions may not be the product of ill will, they are evidence of the way able-bodied privilege manifests in our society. There's a general cultural notion that "disability is something inherent ly negativ e," Allie

C annington, a board member of the American Associat ion of People wit h Disabilit ies, told Mic. "

that happens,

of

Social abjection identifies those outside the norm, thus

identifying the Other as waste. Society reduces people to the
position of the other, feeding the plot of ableism.
Spitzer-Hanks 10 [D.T. Spitzer-Hanks, Research Masters Program in Gender
and Ethnicity Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands As Through a Glass, Darkly:
Abjection and Masculinity in Narrative Spring 2010 pg 23-26]

Champion

Briefs
3

AFF: ADA AC November/December 2016

social abjection identifies groups as outside the bounds of the norm ,
Others are identified with waste;
Dirt, defined as matter out of place characterizes people impure in a
pure space identified with the ideals of a social group. Thus social
abjection
displaced onto specific bodies, supports
rhetoric
about contamination and criminality.
Social abjection hinges on social space
the defiled body is felt either
in its proper absence or its improper presence;
Disability
causes the able body to appear
Thus disability, , is
minoritized
: minoritized identity defines the norm and
coheres it,
the imaginary ideal of the body politic repudiates
: the Other.
society trots
along reproducing the mechanism of the death struggle: the reduction
of a person to a nobody to the position of other
What abjection does is to locate the source of alterity
within the subject
why it must be endlessly rehearsed and recited,
and what makes the problematic of the Other so durable
abjection
begins in personal experience and shapes social forms,
In the three examples above,

either as demonic, as crim inals, or as

carriers of disease, and prov ides a rationale for surveilling these groups. As Judith Butler bluntly states, this is the mode by which Others become shit. (Butler 1999:170) In becoming shit

they, and especially their bodies, are figured as more productiv e of filt h than the norm ative body, who in ret reating from his bodys excrement al proclivit ies, in extreme cases denies the body altoget her. In addit ion to shit-waste, in the social account of abjection dirt is an im portant category .

by Mary Douglas

, (Douglas [1966] 1984:44)

out of place,

becomes a way of understanding the procession from incest prohibit ion to the social repudiation of the fem inine which,

religious persecution and racist

This also underlies the doubled, ambiguous, repept itive nat ure of social abject ion: shit, after all, comes from somewhere. The source of abjected waste is the self, just as the source of the abjected self is the mother. The feminisation of the abject ed Other ident ifies the demonized group with the repudiat ed (m)other, but also with the denied port ions of the self that do not belong to the imaginary clean and proper body abject ion both creates and refutes.

the defiled body in

. The importance assigned to

in Extraordinary Bodies (1997) Thomson connects Douglas definition of dirt as out of place to disability, stat ing that extraordinary bodies defy social expectat ions based on the so-called healt hy body. (Thomson 1997)

index ing disease, illness, and deat h,

, in

and rem inds the healthy of their eventual decline: [ T]he fact that we will all become disabled if we live long enough is a reality many people who consider themselves able-bodied are reluctant to admit. ( Thomson 1997:14)

like the abject ion it represent s

to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks term. (Sedgwick 1990:1) Disability appears to be the limited concern of a small group of people whose bodies fix them in a specific area of inquiry, and the structural importance of abled-ness is denied

masking the central category as invisible, universal, and assumed. The same happens to ethnic categories. Like the egos imaginary relation to the bounded body ,

it as constructed, changeable and finite

that which confront s

In White Mythologies (2004) Robert Young offers an apposite quote from C ixous: What is the Other? If it is truly the other, there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorized. The other escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolut ely other. It doesnt sett le down. But in History , of course, what is called other is an alterity that does settle down, that falls into the dialect ical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns it s other. With the dreadful simplicity that orders the movement Hegel erected as a system,

before my eyes

to perfect ion

the inexorable plot of racism. There has to be some other no master wit hout a slave, no economico-polit ical power without ex ploitat ion, no dominant class without catt le under the yoke, no Frenchmen without wogs, no Nazis without Jews, no property without exclusion an

exclusion that has its lim its and is part of the dialect ic. C ixous & C lment 1986:701, quoted in Young 2004:33-4 No difference without an Other, no white without people of color- no self without an abject.

, thus explaining why the brutal work of racism and sexism doesnt finally work,

. The foundat ion of the I is absence, and forevermore the presence of that repudiated desire out of which the self is born must be ident ified, prohibited, and surveilled. On the outside- of the group, the body politic, or the body-

the Other is identifiable without especial difficulty, and the work of doing so consists in endless specificit ies of type, of behavior, of what Fanon calls being battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slav e-ships, and above all else, above all: Sho good eat in. (Fanon [1967] 2002:234) On the inside the work of identificat ion and surveillance is made more difficult, and prohibit ion severely complicated, by the locat ion of the Other within. Kristeva says that excrement and menstrual blood symbolize these divisions of the Other into outer and inner. (Powers 71) Excrement stands for the danger from without, which can be expelled and apport ioned to another space, hidden away from the senses, while menstrual blood stands for the danger issuing from within the ident ity (social or sexual) ; it threatens the relat ionship between the sexes within the social aggregate and, through
internalizat ion, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference. ( ibid) Sexual difference and the internalization of abjection interact to create what Adrienne R ich calls compulsory heterosexuality, (Rich 1980) and the inst itut ion of heterosexuality itself becomes subject to gradat ions from the norm of perfect heterosex ual male masculinit y. Sexuality becomes the field of personal abjection in which inner div isions can be divined through outer manifest ations, especially through act ion directed towards the other sex. If abject ion can offer an ex planat ion of the power of the normate body, of minoritized ident ities in a social economy of meaning, of how repudiated and approved desires work themselves out in the interactions between people and between groups of people, and the function of rit ual assignments of Otherness to abjected persons, how does all this work in the symbolic act ivity of language which Lacan

and Krist eva tell us is the priv ileged out let of the subject hav ing passed through communion with and repudiat ion of the maternal/feminine? Would it not be logical to suspect that this repudiation, already a topos of the indiv idual and social relat ions to abjection, would also form a central topic in literature? Ezra Pound once remarked, in an essay on Henry James, that [M]ost good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of negat ion, is the detailed, conv incing analysis of something det estable, of something one wants to eliminate. (Pound [1918] 1954:324) Whether this is wholly true or not, Pounds statement sums up the relation of literature to abject ion, which Kristeva sees as central to her own study of the abject. As I hav e stated in the int roduction to this chapter,

and mediates the narratives that bind the two in literature. This presupposes a view of literature as somewhere between the personal and the social; simply put, literature forms a priv ileged point of contact between personal

understandings of ex perience and the social meanings these personal experiences somehow garner. It will be the purpose of this t ext, as a whole, to out line a way of understanding how this happens.

Bodies are not only broken by violence, but are made to be

killable through political relationships. This affects who can
be killed and whose lives are risked and whose are
invulnerable.
Wilcox 11 [Lauren Beth Wilcox, graduate student of the University of Minnesota for the degree of a doctor of philosophy The Body of
International Relations November, 2011 Pg. 49-42]

By explicitly theorizing bodies as produced by

practices
we can view violence as more than a rational policy or
something undesirable to be avoided if possible. More than broken by
violence, bodies are constituted as belonging to a particular identity,
and are made to be killable or torturable.
This
affects who can be tortured or killed, and how,
the
tortured becomes to be embodied in such a way that he is only embodied
stripped of subjectivity and reduced to physical embodiment such that
torture becomes rationalizable and calculable. the torturer becomes
disembodied as his or her body is not subject to violence or violation; it
is no longer the selfs vulnerable interface with the world
. Biopolitical state security practices produce bodies by designating
certain bodies as risks or threats, while other bodies are constituted as
those to be protected.
Bodies are not only killed, but made to be killable
political changes
instituted
result in profound changes in the nature of human
embodiment. Such technologies
produce certain bodies as killable
targets
Rather than harming or protecting natural,
Focusing on the ties between bodies and subject ivity illustrat es how violence is not only a destruct ive force, but is product ive in a variety of ways as well, constituting certain subjects and enabling or closing off political worlds and possibilit ies.

of internat ional relat ions,

raced or sexed or

constit uted as objects of medical interv ention,

Through practices of int ernational security, some people are effectively disembodied and some are constituted as pure or only bodies, subjects whose ex istence is stripped of polit ical agency and meaning, who are understood only in terms of biological processes of lif e and deat h.

as well as whose lives are put at risk and whose lives are invulnerable. For example, the terrorist subject is produced and transformed through, among other practices, the violence of torture and force-feeding. Through the pract ice of torture,

prisoner

; he is

Simultaneously,

. When prisoners attempt to resist by one of the only means of agency left to them, the refusal of food, they are force- fed, transforming them into dependent objects of biopower rather than fully political subjects

exercising autonomy over their own bodies

In a different context from the torture and force feeding of Guantnamo Bay, the terrorist subject is also produced by practices of surveillance and detect ion that purport to read the body for signs of ill-intent. By these practices, the terrorist is const ituted as a dangerous body that must be separated from the body politic. In instances of what could be read as a failure to maintain the boundaries between dangerous bodies and protected bodies, suicide bombing and the following recovery efforts reveal the political work necessary to constitute what Kristeva calls the selfs clean and proper body. As I argue in chapter 4, efforts to identify and

reconstruct the bodies of vict ims by ZA KA members and the Israeli Forensic Inst itute transform victims bodies into meaningful polit ical subjects as Israeli Jews. Efforts at recov ering and identifying the bodies do more than reflect the subject ivities of victim and perpetrator: they work to establish them. As suicide bombing result s in a shattering of bodies frequent ly rendering the vict ims indistinguishable from perpetrators, the bodies must be reconstructed from their condit ion as heaps of meat, bodies without subject ivity in order to reconstruct the semblance of nat ional wholeness and unit y. The practices of ZAKA, the ultra- Orthodox organization that collects the bodily remains, and the Israeli government provide a case study of how the body is politically produced through pract ices of internat ional relat ions, as well as how this const itut ion of bodies is direct ly t ied to the format ion and maintenance of the borders of the

state and self.

by practices of international relations. Some of the key

by technologies of war do not only increase the lethal capabilit ies of governments, but also

including both technological systems like drones and political/legal methodologies such as summary execut ions

and others whose deaths are seen as regrettable but inev itable. These instances, and many others, reveal our bodies to be deeply unnatural, shaped and molded by material and discursive practices associated with int ernational securit y.

Champion

Briefs
4

AFF: ADA AC November/December 2016

pre-constituted bodies, various modes of violence in security produce
bodies as we know them.
int ernational

The body as the focal point central to security and politics

becomes erased and ignored. Vote aff to understand the
relationship between the body and politics which opens up the
space for thinking about politics and resistance and see bodies
as sites of politics rather than organisms that suffer from
violence.
Wilcox 11 [Lauren Beth Wilcox, graduate student of the University of Minnesota for the degree of a doctor of philosophy The Body of
International Relations November, 2011 Pg. 1-3]

politics has been characterized by a proliferation of modes of violence

that construct bodies in complex ways
the body becomes the focal point central to practices of security
body brought into excruciating pain, the body as weapon, or the body as
that which is not to be targeted and hence is hit only accidentally or
collaterally
as objects of security
studies, the people that are protected from violence or are killed are
understood as only bodies: they are ahistorical, biopolitical aggregations
whose individual members breathe, suffer and die the politics and
sociality of bodies are erased. One of the deep ironies of security studies
is that while war is actually inflicted on bodies, bodily violence and
vulnerability, as the flip side of security, are largely ignored.
human bodies are
relevant to
politics only as they live or die.
they exist to be manipulated, possess
no agency and are only driven by the motivations of agents.
Challenging this theorization of bodies
as natural organisms is a key step in not only exposing how bodies have
been implicitly theorized but in developing a reading that is attentive to
the ways in which bodies are both produced and productive
we can understand much more about violence
if we expand our
conception of embodiment
there are normative and
political implications of the body
and the world of politics. Explicitly
theorizing the body in relation to the subject and violence opens up space
for thinking about politics and resistance in ways that are overlooked. By
theorizing bodies, we can see bodies as sites of politics, not only as
organisms that suffer from violence.
Internat ional

in recent years

use, target, and

. Virtually invulnerable pilots and drones operated from thousands of miles away drop precision guided bombs intended to dest roy buildings or indiv idual people, often causing the accidental slaughter of dozens of others at a time. Suicide bombers seek certain death by turning their bodies into weapons that seem to attack at random. Images of tortured bodies from Guantnamo Bay and Abu Ghraib provoke shock and outrage,

and prisoners on hunger-strikes to protest their treatment are force-fed. In each of these instances,

and international

relations the

. Such bodily focus is quit e dist inct from prevailing internat ional security pract ices and the disciplinary ways of knowing those pract ices in IR. C onvention has it that

states or groups make war and, in doing so, kill and injure people that other states are charged wit h protecting. The strategic deployment of force in the language of rational control and risk management that dominates security studies presents a disembodied view of subjects as reasoning actors. However,

. In both cases,

By contrast, feminist theory is at its most powerful when it denat uralizes accounts of indiv idual subject ivity so as to analyze the relat ions of force, violence, and language that

compose our profoundly unnatural bodies. Security Studies lacks the reflex ivity necessary to see its contribution to the very context it seeks to domest icate. Security Studies has largely ignored work in feminist theory that opens up the forces that have come to compose and constit ute the body: by and large, security studies has an unarticulated, yet im plicit , conception of bodies as indiv idual organisms whose protection from damage constit utes the provision of security. In IR,

implicitly theorized as organisms that are exogenously determ inedthey are

Such bodies are inert objects:

Attent ive to the relations provoked by both discourse and political forces , feminist theory redirect s attent ion to how both compose and produce bodies on terms often alien and

unstable. Contemporary fem inist theorizing about embodim ent prov ides a provocat ive challenge to the stability and viability of several key concepts in IR such as sovereignty, security , violence, and vulnerability. In this project, I draw on recent work in feminist theory that offers a challenge to the deliberat e maintenance and policing of boundaries and delineation of human bodies from the broader political cont ext.

in IR,

of IR

. In concept ualizing the subject of IR as essentially disem bodied, IR theory impoverishes itself. An ex plicit focus on bodies is important for two broad reasons. First,

in International Relat ions

beyond a picture of bodies as inert, biological entit ies solely driven by the minds of agents. Theorizing the const itution and agency of bodies can reveal consequences of polit ical violence that have not prev iously been recognized. Second,

both in terms of IR theory

internat ional

in IR

Policy frameworks rely on a liberal subject to enact politics

leads to more violence against non-normative bodies.
Wilcox 11 [Lauren Beth Wilcox, graduate student of the University of Minnesota for the degree of a doctor of philosophy The Body of
International Relations November, 2011 Pg. 25-29]

Champion

Briefs
5

AFF: ADA AC November/December 2016

Liberal political thought takes
a concern with the cultivation of
conditions for human achievement and flourishing. Self-preservation
is necessary
as is evident by liberalisms emphasis on toleration and
deliberation. liberalism is not only dependent upon a protected, healthy
and natural body, but also a subject with exogenous interests and
desires
. This liberal subject is a body that is
always at least
potentially threatened by the state itself.
it is this fear of cruelty that legitimizes the sovereign state and the rule
of law
. In liberal societies, pain is not mere
negativeness. It is , a scandal
The subjects of liberalism are
motivated by a fear of violence and cruelty, but as such, they solve
problems in the domestic realm by deliberation
The possibility of violence provides the motive for founding a
community that rejects it entirely and seeks to define humans in terms of
their capacity for flourishing as evidenced in their abilities to deliberate
and reason. violence is thought of as a violation of not only community
standards but also inalienable rights.
. The liberalism of fear may therefore be
understood as a political theory built upon the same concept of security
for individual bodies as for the national state
Ultimately, the liberal emphasis on the
protection of human rights against the violence and cruelty of
governments is founded on a similar conception of the subject as the
subject of security, a subject whose political subjectivity is dependent
upon the elimination of violence.
Those whose bodies are outside of the standard
are considered to be improperly embodied, and thus to be incapable of
the reason required for full participation in public life. In short, only those
inhabiting proper bodies are considered to be full subjects. Bodies
were marked as other by constructions of class, race and gender, in
contrast to the unmarked body
us away from Hobbess pre-occupat ion wit h self preserv ation to

is not the primary purpose of polit ical community, but rather,

condition for human flourishing

The subject of

is

a willing, speaking subject that can pursue his or her own interests in the public sphere

not only

threatened by violence from outside of the sovereign state, but is

This is a central fear driv ing the liberal polit ical tradition. Shklar writes, liberalisms deepest grounding is in place from the first, in the conviction of the earliest defenders of tolerat ion, born in horror, that cruelty is an absolute evil, an offense against God or humanity (Shklar 1998, 5). Defining cruelty as the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear (Shklar 1984, 8),

not only

, as in Hobbes, but lim its on governmental power to prev ent the government from cruelty toward its citizens . State-sponsored torture, for example, reveals a tension between the states imperat ive to provide security for its cit izens and its duty to respect the moral stat us of individuals as subject s with a moral right over their own bodies

, literally

(Asad 2003, 107). In the social contract, violence is disqualified from the public, domestic realm.

and the creation of a sphere of tolerance. They are subjects of reason, who do not resort to violence except in self defense. For Hobbes, it is an inalienable right to defend oneself, even against the sovereign (1996[ 1651], 93). This is a right that cannot be contracted away, for it has to do wit h mans safety and security and so renders

subjects as predominant ly defined by a constitut ive anxiety to preserve themselves. Violence in liberalism is figured differently.

The result is that

Sovereign power is not the means to security but rather a key threat to security. Liberal norms of human rights are meant to prov ide the same protect ions for individuals against states as the sovereign provides against other cit izens. Human rights are a statement of the limitat ions of government interference. The human rights that are considered jus cogens or non-derogable, even in times of emergency or martial law, are prohibit ions against summary

execut ion, torture, and slavery. Even in a state of emergency or stat e of except ion, the human rights regime stipulates the lim its of sovereign power in killing, torturing, or enslav ing the bodies of cit izens. These non derogable rights instant iate the body of the cit izen as sacrosanct, as that which must be protected

. While the concept of human rights is understood to entail many more freedoms than the absence of state-sponsored violence against the body, these basic non-derogable rights form the basis without which no other right s or libert ies could be enjoyed. The concept of human security attempts to art iculat e this combinat ion of state and individual security in which

states are not only the protectors of citizens, but also a major source of insecurity for cit izens. This concept, first developed by the United Nat ions Human Development Program in 1994, attempts to shift the referent of security from the state to the indiv idual, and brings wit h it issues of health and welfare as well as the tradit ional freedom from violence. Security is re-theorized to encompass threat s to the well-being of people, adding what had been considered development or economic issues to the security agenda. The doctrine of responsibility to protect has emerged as sim ultaneous challenge to, and reinforcement of, state sovereignty. This doctrine stresses that sovereignty is not absolute; states have a responsibility to protect their own cit izens against wide-scale violence and genocide. At the same time, the doctrine emphasizes that such human rights abuses are the states responsibility to resolv e before

internat ional actors may be involved (Bellamy 2009) . Human right s and human security are not only seen as foundat ional of the liberal state, but also serve as a pre-condition for the exercise of freedom. In the social contract, mens bodies are protected as a necessary means to allow reason to flourish. In order to live as free subjects, mens bodies have to be protected, inviolable.

The body, in liberalism, is a body whose nat ural funct ioning is prot ected and whose needs are met so that the subject can transcend such concerns to thrive and prosper according to his interests and desires.

As violence is disqualified within the polit ical community, the subject is able to exercise his or her own reason in the serv ice of his interests and pursuits. The subject has interests and preferences that are determined exogenously, and which he is ent itled to pursue up unt il the point that he int erferes

with the same rights others enjoy. The subject of liberalism is a rational, autonomous individual who is entit led to a sphere of freedom from government int erference. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the indiv idual is sovereign (Mill 1989[ 1859], 13) . Similarly, Lockes liberal subject is the owner of his body. In the liberal polit ical tradition in general, the body is a mechanical feature that is animat ed by the conscious mind. The body of the citizen (and the cit izens property, as an extension of his body) is an instrument for putting the minds desires into act ion. The sovereignty of the subject means that the subject is a self-governed and willing subject; the mind of the subject is in control and can freely interact in the world to pursue its own direction. However , in order to be a sovereign, self-governing subject the liberal indiv idual must possess reason, defined as freedom from bodily passions and other such

im pediments. Mills canonical account on liberty, for ex ample, excludes children, those in a state of dependency, barbarians and those in backwards states(1989[1859], 13). Feminists hav e also noted how women were excluded from liberal subject ivity because they were believed to lack reason and judgment.

set by

white, bourgeois, het erosexual men

of workers, the colonized, enslaved, and women

of the rational, white, upper-class man.

Champion

Briefs
6