1NC for Abhinav

1
Behold the image of the disgusting disabled child, which causes one to wince in
the face of egoistic empathy. Disability is abject to modernity through
emotional disgust and subject to psychogenesis and an irrational violence –
through these processes, the fundamental antagonism is sustained and upheld
by civil society.
Hughes 12 Bill (2012): Disability and Social Theory | Civilising Modernity and the Ontological Invalidation of Disabled People,
Bill Hughes is professor of Sociology in the Glasgow School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University. He was
awarded a BA (Hons) in sociology (1st Class) from the University of Stirling in 1979 and a PhD in political philosophy from the
University of Aberdeen in 1985.Bill’s research interests include disability and impairment, social theory and the body and he has
taught a number of courses over a thirty five year period on a variety of sociological subjects including theory, health, welfare, the
body, disability, human rights and social exclusion. He is co-author (with several colleagues at Glasgow Caledonian University) of The
Body, Culture and Society: An Introduction (Open University Press 2000) and is co-editor – with Dan Goodley and Lennard Davis of
Disability and Social Theory (2012). He has published in the journals Sociology and Body and Society and is a regular contributor to
and a member of the Editorial Board of Disability & Society. He is also Editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research. Bill is
currently working on a book with the provisional title: Invalidation: A Social and Historical Ontology for Disability. DOI:
10.1057/9781137023001_2 SJCP//JG
Disability and the civilising process The gods of Olympus showered heavenly mockery on deformity while those with earthly authority condoned
infanticide for children born with impairments. The disabled pharmakos or scapegoat provided the communities of Antiquity with the opportunity to
project their transgressions onto those who – by virtue of their physical or intellectual difference – existed on the margins of the polis. Such cultures of
exclusion took new forms in the Christian Middle Ages. The Lord of the Old Testament feared that anomalous bodies might ‘profane his sanctuaries’.
Flesh and sin became so inextricably bound that any waywardness of the former became a sign of the latter. Disability was positioned as a moral and
ontological pollutant. Modernity brings a new set of challenges to the place of disabled people in the world. As cultures of superstition give way to the
age of reason and rapid social change rips through the stasis of the long established courtly tradition, a cultural process marked by the march of
‘civilisation’ introduces new manners and technologies that slowly re-adjust Western self- consciousness, making anew, simultaneously, its personality,
its emotional values and its organisational structures (Elias, 2000). Yet the refinement of morals and manners that marks the civilising process is not
without barbaric consequences. Civility segregates, creates social distance between those who embody refinement and those who do not, creating a
new binary of bodies and minds and a new ‘tyranny of normalcy’ (Davis, 1995) predicated on the articulation of disgust for physical and mental
‘inappropriateness’. As the quotidian demand for bodily delicacy and emotional refinement advanced, so too did the ‘threshold of repugnance’ (Elias,
2000: 98–9, 414–21) and so too did intolerance of impairment. ‘A characteristic’, wrote Elias (2000: 103), ‘of the whole process that we call civilization
is this movement of segregation, this hiding “behind the scenes” of what has become distasteful’. The deepening of emotional control and new stricter
demands around bodily comportment reduces the social distance between social classes but creates an underclass of outsiders, a new stratum of

marginal men and women who were beyond the pale of polite communion. In civilising modernity, the cultures of
exclusion that taint disabled people’s lives begin with pronouncements on
etiquette that condemn the ‘animalic’ element of humanity and proceed to the
construction of stark, institutional spaces, camps of confinement and death.
These become places of internment for disabled people. As civilising
modernity plods along, it creates a new model of ‘cultural’ citizenship and,
simultaneously, a framework for conduct that clarifies those who are eligible
to embrace this cherished status. To do what is fitting, to be fit and to be fit to do what is fitting with respect to the
intricacies and intimacies of social interaction is, increasingly, tailored and constrained. The detail of appropriate conduct and emotional control is

developed at the quotidian level of everyday behaviour. Contempt and reserve is directed towards those
who do not appear to represent the embodiment of the civilised citizen. The
unfit fail the test of fitness for citizenship. Disabled people fail it every day, in
the moralised environment where judgement of conduct takes place. Elias (2000: 159)

notes that ‘ The trend of the civilising movement towards the stronger and stronger
and more complete “intimization” of all bodily functions, towards their
enclosure in particular enclaves, to put them “behind closed doors”, has
diverse consequences’. However, what these consequences might be for
disabled people remains a mystery. Although Elias recognises that the
civilising process is a charter for segregation, he pays scant attention to what
life is like behind the doors that have been closed. He describes the production
of a secret world, an escalation of taboo and the acquisition of techniques of
emotional and physical self-control that are developed to expiate disgust,
shame and embarrassment. But what of those who live in the shadows of this secret world, forced by the intolerances of
civility, to live behind its veil of righteousness? What of those who hide who and what they are because the dead weight of accumulated social
convention will not let them be? What is life like for those who have been socially invalidated by the ever advancing ‘threshold of repugnance’? Elias
does not tell their story. However, he gives some clues about how it might be told. The rest of this section gives examples of the ways in which the
civilising process configures disability. As the idea of citizenship developed in modernity – particularly in the quotidian spaces of everyday conduct –
disability played a crucial role. Garland-Thomson (1997: 42) argues that modern American citizenship is constructed on the fabled idea of self-governing
individualism which implies a particular kind of body, one that is ‘a stable, neutral instrument of the individual will’. The ideal citizen of the thrusting
mid-nineteenth century Republic – drawn in fine detail for example in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work, particularly his portrait of Henry Thoreau (1862) –
possesses the physical and intellectual capital that is conspicuously absent in the ‘cripple’ and the ‘idiot’. The distinction between the normal body and
its broken counterpart is sharpened and naturalised by both literary representations – for example the disabled and non-disabled characters in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin – and by certain cultural and social practices that draw the line between the dead world of the Rabelaisian grotesque and new civilised (yet
as Elias points out, mythical and theoretically naive) world of homo clausus. Crucial among these cultural practices was the nineteenth-century ‘freak
show’ which is based on the ‘cardinal principle of enfreakment’, that is, the abrogation of ‘the freak’s potential humanity’ (Garland-Thomson, 1997: 44).
The emotion of disgust – repugnance is Elias’ preferred term – mediates the freak show. Not only does the emotion of disgust embody a ‘curious
enticement’ but it also embodies ‘a certain low evaluation of its object, a feeling of superiority’ (Kolnai, 2004: 42–4). The ‘show’, of course,
simultaneously serves the parallel ‘positive’ purposes of confirming the spectator’s normalcy and humanity: manifest, most compellingly in the
difference between the civilised spectators and the baroque creatures on display. The freak shows and the ‘lunatic exhibitions’, common in early
modern Germany, England and France in which asylum ‘inmates were shown as caged monsters to a paying populace’ (Winzer, 1997: 100), highlighted
the difference between citizen/audience and exhibit/monster and consequently pushed the status of disability towards the animal. It is however,
precisely, the drives of the body and the lowly impulses of nature that the civilising processes seek to subvert. Disability finds itself pushed away from
the norms of conduct by the tide of civility, a tide that pushes ‘the more animalic human activities … behind the scenes of people’s communal and social
life’ and colonises these activities, indeed, invests our ‘whole instinctual and affective life’ with ‘feelings of shame’ (Elias, 2000: 365). Medicine as it
grew in power and prestige, during the nineteenth century, replaced this carnival of normalisation and dehumanisation with a science of much the
same, introducing new categories, such as pathology and abnormality, to sustain the ontological boundaries that kept disabled and non-disabled
people compartmentalised. The architecture of modern Western citizenship is defined against the background of the ruin of disability, the broken
timber of humanity that become candidates for the spaces of exclusions, those whose rights were spelt out in a declaration of dependency that was

never written down. Ableism and disgust: Psychogenesis and disability The stratifying binary of disability/non-
disability and the antagonism of the latter towards the former is mediated and
maintained, principally, by the emotion of disgust . Disgust is the bile carried in a discursive complex that
Campbell (2008: 153) calls ‘ableism’: ‘a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal

standard) that is projected as perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human’. The body produced by
ableism is dequivalent to what Kristeva (1982: 71) calls the ‘clean and proper
body’. It is the body of the ‘normate’, the name that Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson (1997) gives to the body that thinks of itself as invulnerable and
definitive . It is the hygienic, aspirational body of civilising modernity. It is cast from the increasingly stringent norms and rules about
emotional behaviour and bodily display that mark mundane social relations in the lebenswelt (lifeworld). This curious non-
disabled body/self has no empirical existence per se. On the contrary, the body
of ableism is a normative construct, an invulnerable ideal of being manifest in
the imaginary of ‘modernist ontology, epistemology and ethics’ as something
‘secure, distinct, closed and autonomous’ (Shildrick, 2002: 51). It embraces ‘human
perfectibility as a normative physical or psychological standard’ and involves ‘a
curious disavowal of variation and mortality’ (Kaplan, 2000: 303). It is what we
are supposed to aspire to, to learn to be but can never become . It has no grounding in the
material world. It is a ‘body schema, a psychic construction of wholeness that … belies its own precariousness and vulnerability’ (Shildrick, 2002: 79). It

is a ‘body divorced from time and space; a thoroughly artificial affair’ (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000: 7), the epitome of
civilisation, closed off from any connection with the animal side of humanity
and from the ways in which our bodily nature wallows in its carnal
improprieties. It is a body aghast at the messiness of existence. Disability is
the opposite of this ideal body, its ‘inverse reflection’ (Deutsch and Nussbaum, 2000: 13). The

disabled body is or has the propensity to be unruly. In the kingdom of the ‘clean and proper body’, disability is the epitome of ‘what not to be’. As
a consequence the disabled body can be easily excluded from the mainstream
‘psychic habitus’ (Elias, 2000: 167). The ‘clean and proper’ – a normative body
of delicacy, refinement and selfdiscipline – has powerful social consequences
most manifest in its normalising dynamics . It is the standard of judgement against which disabled bodies are
invalidated and transformed into repellent objects. It is the emblem of purity that by comparison creates existential unease. It apportions the shame

and repugnance that underwrite the civilising process (Elias, 2000: 114–19, 414–21). Through ableism, modernity has
been able to structure disability as uncivilised, outside or on the margins of
humanity. One of the great books of the science of natural history published
under the title Systema Naturae by Linnaeus in 1735 distinguishes between
homo sapiens and homo monstrosus. In this classification impairment – at its
extreme and highly visible end – is excluded from the human family. The
distinction is, in itself, an act of violence and invalidation, an object lesson in
transforming difference and ‘defect’ into the abominable. The distinction
mobilises the aversive emotions of fear and disgust. Ableism is a cruel teacher.
It embodies violence at many levels: ‘epistemic, psychic, ontological and
physical’ (Campbell, 2008: 159). It is at its most bellicose when it is mediated by disgust: a mediation invoked
mostly in the social fabrication of taboo and most compellingly in a context
when the human/animal boundary is under threat . Ableism rests on the effort to eliminate from
awareness, chaos, abjection, animality and death: all that civilisation seeks to repress. It encourages us to live in the false hope that we will not suffer
and die, to adopt a perspective of invulnerability, to confuse morality with beauty and to see death, pain and disability as the repulsive woes of
mortality rather than as the existential basis for community and communication. Kolnai (2004: 74) reminds us that, ‘in its full intention, it is death …

that announces itself to us in the phenomenon of disgust’. Disability, in modernity, has been produced in
the ontological household of the abject, as the antithesis of communication
and community, in a place that we might on occasion peer into only to ‘choke’
on the unsavoury sights that greet us . Disability is put out, put away, hidden, segregated or transformed into its
opposite, covered up by whatever medical or aesthetic techniques are available to achieve this end. Any opportunity that
disability might have to take its place at the heart of communication and
community is thwarted by the ablest sensibilities that push it back down
among the disgusting, the sick, the dead and the dying . In fact, as Elias (2000) suggested, the making
of ‘civilised’ community and communication in modernity proceeds by exclusion and interdiction, by cutting out and hiding away whatever causes or

might come to inspire angar (choking) or anguista (tightness). It is important to understand ableist disgust as
an emotion that attests to the failure of non-disabled people to fully recognise
their own vulnerabilities and imperfections particularly as these relate to their
mortal selves and to the death and decay that is the fate of all. Although it
appears as an aversion to ‘the other’, it is a form of self-aversion or a means
by which we hide from the bodily basis of our own humanity (Nussbaum, 2004). Indeed, disgust
begins close to home and is derived from our discomfort with our own bodily functions, our oozy, sticky ‘leaky selves’ (Shildrick, 1997; Kolnai, 2004),
the fact that we cannot contain ourselves within our own boundaries and the shame and embarrassment that the ‘civilising process’ brings to bear
upon us if our leakiness is exposed to others. Because modernity is a charter for anal retentiveness, we cannot forgive ourselves for our physical
impurities. We hold ourselves ransom to the myth of the ‘clean and proper’ body; the perfect body of ableist culture is a myth that we use to screen

ourselves from the visceral realities of our own lives. The ableist body ‘helps’ non-disabled people cope
with their fears about their own corporeal vulnerability. It does so by invoking
its opposite, the disabled body, a foreign entity that is anomalous, chaotic and
disgusting. Modern history helps to make this object of disgust more tangible.
Civilising processes clarify stigma and make biological differences into socio-
moral categories. Disgust provokes the civilising sensibilities. It warns them of the presence of

possible contaminants (Miller, 1997). Consequently, psychological and social distance between disability and non-disability expands. Disgust
in ‘it’s thought- content’ is ‘typically unreasonable, embodying magical ideas of
contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality, and non-
animality, that are just not in line with human life as we know it’ (Nussbaum,
2004: 12). Disgust is an emotion that has a central role in our everyday
relationships with our bodies , our patterns of social interaction and – most pressingly from the perspective of this chapter –
in processes of social exclusion. Disgust is the emotional fuel of ableism . The threat posed by ourselves to
ourselves (and projected onto others), the threat of our ‘bodiliness’ and the shame and anxiety associated with it is a product of ableism, of the
‘tyranny of perfection’. Ableism makes the world alien to disabled bodies and, at the same time, produces impairment as an invalidating experience. It
is manifest in our cultural inclination towards normalcy by way of correction, towards homogeneity by way of disparagement of difference. What this
means for disabled people is that they are ‘expected to reject their own bodies’ and ‘adjust to the carnal norms of nondisabled people’ (Paterson and

Hughes, 1999: 608). The ‘corporeality of the disabled body’ is, according to Campbell
(2008: 157), ‘constantly in a state of deferral’ awaiting the affective response
that will demean it or the travails of sociogenesis that will either do away
with it or ‘make it better’.

The affirmative’s politics are tied to a rehabilitative futurism where the signifier
of the fantasmatic child is placed forward to eradicate and cure disability – this
deems the disabled child a threat and excludes disability from the political.
Mollow 2 Anna (2015): The Disability Drive, A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor
Kent Puckett, Chair Professor Celeste G. Langan Professor Melinda Y. Chen Spring 2015
https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/etd/ucb/text/Mollow_berkeley_0028E_15181.pdf SJCP//JG

Elsewhere, I have argued that No Future’s impassioned polemic is one that disability studies might take to heart.109 Indeed, the
figure that Edelman calls “the disciplinary image of the “innocent” Child” is
inextricable not only from queerness but also from disability (19). For example,
the Child is the centerpiece of the telethon, a ritual display of pity that
demeans disabled people. When Jerry Lewis counters disability activists’
objections to his assertion that a disabled person is “half a person,” he insists
that he is only fighting for the Children: “Please, I’m begging for survival. I
want my kids alive,” he implores (in Johnson, Too Late 53, 58). If the Child makes an excellent alibi for ableism, perhaps
this is because, as Edelman points out, the idea of not fighting for this figure is unthinkable. Thus, when Harriet McBryde Johnson hands out leaflets
protesting the Muscular Dystrophy Association, a confused passerby cannot make sense of what her protest is about. “You’re against Jerry Lewis!” he
exclaims (61). The passerby’s surprise is likely informed by a logic similar to that which, in Edelman’s analysis, undergirds the use of the word “choice”
by advocates of legal abortion: “Who would, after all, come out for abortion or stand against reproduction, against futurity, and so against life?” (16).
Similarly, why would anyone come out for disability, and so against the Child who, without a cure, might never walk, might never lead a normal life,

might not even have a future at all? The logic of the telethon, in other words, relies on an
ideology that might be defined as “rehabilitative futurism,” a term that I coin
to overlap and intersect with Edelman’s notion of “reproductive futurism.” If,
as Edelman maintains, the future is envisaged in terms of a fantasmatic
“Child,” then the survival of this future-figured-as-Child is threatened by both
queerness and disability. Futurity is habitually imagined in terms that
fantasize the eradication of disability: a recovery of a “crippled” or “hobbled”
economy, a cure for society’s ills, an end to suffering and disease . Eugenic ideologies are
also grounded in both reproductive and rehabilitative futurism: procreation by the fit and elimination of the disabled, eugenicists promised, would
bring forth a better future.110
The starting point of the 1AC is epistemically flawed and an independent link –
anything that doesn’t begin from the question of disability alone allows for
ableism to infiltrate modes of thought which means we’re an epistemic
prerequisite to their framing. Thus, the role of the ballot is to vote for the
debater who best methodologically challenges ableism – evaluate their
scholarship and assumptions first – they don’t get to weigh case. Outweighs
since any other role of the ballot actively papers over disability – their framing
is violent.
Campbell 13 Fiona Kumari (2013): Problematizing Vulnerability: Engaging Studies in Ableism and Disability Jurisprudence,
Fiona Kumari Campbell undertakes research in Studies in Ableism, coloniality, disability studies as well as explorations about
Buddhist formations of disability. Trained in sociology, theology and legal studies; she is interested in ways that law, new
technologies and the governance of marginal populations produces understandings of the productive citizen, normative bodies,
ideas of periphery and ways that ablement privileges and entitles certain groups in society. Campbell is the author of Contours of
Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness (Palgrave, 2009) and numerous other journal articles and book chapters.
SJCP//JG
Studies in Ableism What is meant by the concept of ableism? The literature suggests that the term is often used fluidly with limited definitional or
conceptual specificity. The work of Carlson (2001)5 and Campbell (2001) represented a turning point in bringing attention to this new site of

subordination not just in terms of disablement but also ableism’s application to other devalued groups. Ableism is deeply
seeded at the level of knowledge systems of life, personhood and liveability.
Ableism is not just a matter of ignorance or negative attitudes towards
disabled people; it is a schema of perfection, a deep way of thinking about
bodies, wholeness and permeability .6 As such integrating ableism into social
research and advocacy strategies represents a significant challenge to practice
as ableism moves beyond the more familiar territory of social inclusion and
usual indices of exclusion to the very divisions of life . Bringing together the study of existence and
knowledge systems, ableism is difficult to pin down. Ableism is a set of processes and practices that arise and decline through sequences of causal
convergences influenced by the elements of time, space, bodily inflections and circumstance. Ability and the corresponding notion of ableism are
intertwined. Compulsory ablebodiedness is implicated in the very foundations of social theory, therapeutic jurisprudence, advocacy, medicine and law;

or in the mappings of human anatomy. Summarised by Campbell (2001, 44) Ableism refers to; …A network of
beliefs processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body
(the bodily standard) that is projected as the perfect, speciestypical and
therefore essential and fully human. Disability then is cast as a diminished
state of being human . Writing today (2013) I add an addition to this definition: ‘The ableist bodily configuration is immutable,
permanent and laden with qualities of perfectionism or the enhancement imperative orientated towards a self-contained improvability’. Sentiency
applies to not just the human but the ‘animal’ world. As a category to differentiate the normal from the pathological, the concept of abledness is
predicated on some preexisting notion about the nature of typical species functioning that is beyond culture and historical context. Ableism does not

just stop at propagating what is typical for each species. An ableist imaginary tells us what a healthy body
means – a normal mind, the pace, the tenor of thinking and the kinds of
emotions and affect that are suitable to express. Of course these ‘fictional’
characteristics then are promoted as a natural ideal. This abled imaginary
relies upon the existence of an unacknowledged imagined shared community
of able-bodied/minded people held together by a common ableist world view
that asserts the preferability and compulsoriness of the norms of ableism.
Such ableist schemas erase differences in the ways humans express our
emotions, use our thinking and bodies in different cultures and in different
situations . This in turn enacts bodily Otherness rendered sometimes as the ‘disabled’, ‘perverted’ or ‘abnormal body’, clearly demarcating
the boundaries of normal and pathological. A critical feature of an ableist orientation is a belief that impairment or disability is inherently negative and
at its essence is a form of harm in need of improvement, cure or indeed eradication.

Vote negative to endorse an unwavering pessimism and radical failure – we

The disabled are dying and with them dis/abled culture is being eradicated. In
the time between formulating this project and its completion already too
many disabled souls have been taken from this world , including pivotal disability studies influences for
this research. I barely had enough time to mourn the loss of disability advocate and inspiration porn critic Stella Young before grieving the loss of

disability studies exemplar Tobin Siebers. Attached to the grief I feel as a result of the fading
disability studies community is the perpetual grief I harbor since my disabled
Father’s suicide and in turn the grief concomitant to the claiming of a disabled
identity. I choose to start out this project with grief because it communicates
the tenor of this research; this is not the disability studies project of inspiration
or utopia. My entry point to the disability studies dialogue is riddled with grief,
anger, and pain and it is as such that this project plots a course of disability
research that attempts to make a space free from the ideological constraints
of optimism. The language surrounding dis/ability is highly political. Entire words, phrases, and identities are stretched between, in, and
out of the nexus of dis/ability. The choice, for instance, to include a backslash in the word dis/ability represents for Goodley (2014) a desire to delineate
and expand each of the categories in the face of global neoliberalism. My initial research inquired about the impact of dis/abled terms and phrases. I
went to interrogate rhetoric like “special education”, “handicapable”, and one of the most glaringly overused insults in the American education system
“retard”. The scholarship I was coming up with was plentiful but was for the most part located entirely outside of intercultural communication
programs like the one I was attending. For the most part the few and far between intercultural communication projects about dis/ability I was able to
locate were without modal complexity and didn’t bear semblance to so many of my own experiences. I was beginning to notice a layer of optimism that
has been communicatively imprinted upon the negotiation of dis/abled identity. The angst started to manifest as I questioned if I was in the correct
field or if dis/ability even was ‘cultural’. I felt a very real cultural erasure of dis/ability in academia and ultimately that glaring lack of consideration is
what pushed me to performance studies. I first worked to close the apparent research gap by crafting a collaborative performance titled Under the
Mantle (UTM), which put dis/ability, communication scholarship, and pessimist philosophy on stage. The larger purpose of this research report is to
antagonize the erasure of dis/ability from communication studies by autoethnographically analyzing the crip-pessimist performance art project Under
The Mantle. This research report will first detail the components of the theoretical work that was drawn on to create UTM. Next I offer a literature
review to demonstrate the combination of optimism and neglect dis/ability has undergone in intercultural communication models. Following that
section I mark my shift to performance methods as I explain how narrative autoethnography can illuminate cultural misconceptions regarding the
dis/abled. In the last sections of this report I offer a textual analysis of the performance UTM and analyze three significant arguments of the instillation
before concluding. Contextualizing Critical Dis/Ability Theory Often used interchangeably, critical disability theory (CDT) and critical disability studies
(CDS) contest dis/ablism (Goodley, 2011, 2014; Devlin & Pothier, 2006; Hosking, 2008). There are several unique additions made to CDS with every new
instantiation. Scholars in European countries and Canada attend to the theory, with United States academics often underrepresented. There are three
concurrent themes of CDT that I will synthesize in this section with some dis/ability studies authors claiming there are as many as seven themes of CDT
(Hosking, 2008). In the introduction to their edited collection of dis/ability essays, Richard Devlin and Dianne Pothier (2006) present three themes of
CDT as, first, to highlight the unequal status to which persons with disabilities are confined; second, to destabilize necessitarian assumptions that
reinforce the marginalization of persons with disabilities; and third, to help generate the individual and collective practical agency of persons with
disabilities in the struggles for recognition and redistribution. (p. 18, emphasis mine) Already the connections between the CDT and the critical
communication paradigm are visible as each respectively forefronts notions of power, privilege, identity, and agency. Outlined in more detail, the first
theme of CDT argues that there is systemic micro and macro level discrimination against bodies with disabilities. To some critical communication
scholars, this theme might be obvious, but it seldom is when “the resulting exclusion of those who do not fit able-bodied norms may not be noticeable
or even intelligible” (Delvin & Pothier, 2006, p. 7). As the bumper sticker on my laptop proudly disclaims, “Not all disabilities are visible,” which

necessarily adds a level of nuance and complexity to the way that dis/ability studies attend to the prospect of discrimination and violence. Often
times, “social organization according to able-bodied norms is just taken as
natural, normal, inevitable, necessary, even progress” (Delvin & Pothier, 2006,
p. 7). It might be true that the lack of collaborative work between critical
communication studies and dis/ability studies is because neoliberalism is
supremely effective at rebranding marginalized oppression as a marker of its
progress . The implications of this assertion are dire but essential to the basis of crip-pessimism. Theoretical approaches based in pessimism
and skepticism are often necessary to distinguish the instruments of self destruction that have been mistaken for those of self betterment. Thus, a key
question remains, what is regarded as progress and to whom does it count? The politics of progress call for the second tenet of CDT, which is a
destabilization of neoliberal practices that strip power and agency from bodies with disabilities. Devlin and Pothier (2006) use the language of “anti-
necessitarian” (p. 2), which refers to the efficacy of social organizations and an unflinching skepticism of liberalism. For Shildrick and Price (1999),
“disabled bodies call into question the ‘giveness’ of the ‘natural body’ and, instead, posit a corporeality that is fluid in its investments and meanings” (p.
1). Anti-necessitarian logics ask questions that remain innocuous to the critical communication paradigm. Can the architectural proliferation of stairs
and multiple levels on buildings be attributed to neoliberalism and active disablism? If stairs seem to focus too exclusively on physical impairments,
then what about the sensitivity of the building’s lighting, acoustics, and spatiality? Finally, if neoliberalism fights to protect its grand narrative of
progress then is the social exclusion of bodies with disabilities necessary for the day-to-day operation of our globalized world? As Donaldson (2002)
posits: “theories of gendered, raced, sexed, classed, and disabled bodies offer us critical languages for ‘denaturalising’ impairment’” (p. 112) at the level
of the subjective and inter-subjective. The third theme of CDT is to attend to the agency of bodies with disabilities in the struggle for recognition. One
key element of extending agency to the disabled is the use of social experience. Experience is subjective “but experience remains intimately connected
to political and social existence, and therefore individuals and societies are capable of learning from their experiences” (Siebers, 2008, p. 82). Though
absolutely necessary, it is not enough to write treatises on the oppression of the disabled over time. Academics, theorists, intercultural trainers, and
storytellers alike should be aware of the constant risks of representation. Representation and context are at the core of critical disability studies. The
notion of agency is as unstable as the notions of dis/ability. There is no one-size-fits-all human rights based approach that will be suitable to address all
disabled experiences, as the theoretical call for crip-pessimism will remind us. Instead of a universal abstract Rawlsian concept of social justice, CDS
“attend(s) to the relational components of dis/ablism” (Goodley, 2011, p. 159). By a Rawlsian concept of social justice I mean a model that relies on
distributive justice with utopist equality at its core. Where utopist equality projects highlight human sameness to the point of purity. CDT unavoidably
invites a discussion about difference into the folds as postmodern and post-structural thinkers position the self as defined constantly in relation to
others. Therein lies the difference between an equality model and a justice model of social identity. Often in the attempt to open up spaces for
reconsidering self and other, CDS celebrates disability as a positive identity marker. This essay offers a strong argument of caution that the inclusion of
CDS in critical communication studies might rely too heavily on celebrations of disabled identity. Nothing better demonstrates that reliance on
celebrating identity than the myriad language choices used to describe a disabled identity including: differently-abled, special needs, person with
disability, disabled person, temporarily able-bodied, and others. Often, able- bodied audiences have a tendency to sensationalize the presence of
disability in a space that has not traditionally welcomed it. Examples of this are highlighted by the increasingly popular discussion of ‘inspiration porn’
(Young, 2014) and Hollywood’s representation of disability. The tendency is to inspirationalize the disabled for achieving tasks that would not be
celebrated if they were accomplished by an unimpaired body. Crossing the street, showing up on time, entering a building by oneself are all tasks

profoundly routine to the non-disabled and yet simultaneously cherished as markers of progress for the disabled. Philosophical
pessimism is articulated next as a way to temper the risk of sensationalizing
dis/ability . The theories ultimately fuse together like orchids and wasps to generate the larger theme of crip-pessimism. Philosophical
Pessimism Throughout the 19th century pessimism was one of the most popular intellectual and philosophical strains, crossing countries and
continents. Authors such as Rousseau, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche overwhelmingly created and lead the spirit of pessimism.
Contemporarily however, the word ‘pessimism’ is pejorative and describes a body’s emotional discontent rather than intellectual engagement with the
world. Dienstag (2009) writes, “Since pessimism is perceived more as a disposition than as a theory, pessimists are seen primarily as dissenters from
whatever the prevailing consensus of their time happens to be, rather than as constituting a continuous alternative” (p. 3). Power is responsible for
ontological shifts, and during shifts some populations benefit while others are harmed. The turn in thinking about pessimism from an intellectual

position to an emotional state has been particularly gratuitous for bodies with disabilities. I come to pessimism because
of my experience with disability. My anxiety disorder comes with an
exteriority of anti-social behavior that has branded me pessimistic. The
concern for my anxiety in public situations is often commented on as overly
critical, negative, narcissistic, and most often pessimistic. I experience an
anxious state of becoming different, and after years of failing to rehabilitate
my sameness to able-bodied standards, I have come to a comfort with
pessimism. I choose to include pessimism as a theoretical crutch to avoid communication studies’ sensationalism of disability. I imagine
that when critical communication studies does bridge the dis/ability research gap that it might, at least initially, extend some neoliberal logics at the
expense of CDS. This might manifest by scholars simply asserting disabled personhood where it does not institutionally, culturally, or individually exist. I
find that CDT and philosophical pessimism combine in unique and valuable ways, particularly around tensions of personhood, abstract ideal humanism,
and neoliberalism. Neoliberalism should be understood as “the superiority of individualized, market-based competition over other modes of
organization. This basic principle is the hallmark of neo-liberal thought— one with old roots that lay partly in Anglo economics and partly in German
schools of liberalism” (Mudge, 2008, p. 706-707). There are four components of pessimism outlined by Joshua Foa Dienstag (2006) in his book
Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit that I wish to explore difference through. They are as following that: (1) time is a burden, (2) history is ironic, (3)
human existence is absurd, and finally (4) resignation or affirmation. To write about pessimism necessarily involves questions of time, temporality, and
history. The development of philosophical pessimism, specifically, the theories regarding the burden of time-consciousness, begins with difference. For
the pessimist, the concept of time begets a differentiation between human and animal. Being a dog-owner myself, I have heard the colloquial aphorism
that dogs, as all animals, have no concept of time. Pessimists understand time consciousness as a unique, but ultimately loathsome, trait of the human
condition. Even in projects that appear to be geared toward sameness there are always unperceived and neglected populations. For example, even the
U.S. constitution alleges persons of color were (and still are often) racially subjugated as property instead of considered to be fully human. The notion
of difference is at the center of the pessimist’s position on time-consciousness because the philosophy accepts that the conditions of our existence are
subject to relentless unpredictable change. “To the pessimists, however, the human condition is existentially unique— its uniqueness consisting
precisely in the capacity for time-consciousness” (Dienstag, 2009, p. 20). For the pessimist nothing is ever the same, everything is always different, and
to inhabit linear time means that everything in existence is always rushing off into the past. The advent of human time consciousness is also what leads
the pessimist to find the course of history to be ironic. History is ironic for the pessimist because progress is always related to a greater set of
unperceived consequences. As suggested above, philosophical pessimism acknowledges that change occurs; technologies develop and improve over

time. Pessimists ask if those improvements are related to a greater set of costs
that are not immediately recognizable. (Dienstag, 2006, p. 25) Similar to critical
disability theory, pessimism interrogates power and privilege. Pessimists rely
on the logic of difference to chart consequences. Consequences go
unperceived because they occur across populations with disproportionate
access to power, populations that are often culturally unintelligible. For instance, the
massive boom in mobile technologies like cell phones and laptops has created vast pits of ‘e-waste’ in Africa, surges in child labor, and conflict over rare
earth minerals (Vidal, 2013). Pessimists use difference to tease out the distinction between the instruments of suffering and those of betterment. The

third philosophical pessimistic position is that human existence is absurd. The absurdity of existence “is illustrated
by the persistent mismatch between human purposes and the means available
to achieve them: or again, between our desire for happiness and our capacity
to encounter or sustain it” (Dienstag, 2006, p. 32). Difference is built upon exanimations of power, which is both fluid and
transferable but ultimately permanent. Classical western philosophy has an optimistic pragmatism built into it that posits there must be an answer to
our questions. Alternatively, the pessimist embraces uncertainty, ambiguity, and intersubjectivity. Pessimism encourages a sense of comfort around the
idea of multiple, coexistent, and perhaps competing histories. Neoliberal optimism is the logic of conflict as materially reconcilable, rather than

antagonistically irreconcilable. The fourth and final tenet of pessimism that we are to
examine asks what we are to do about our dire human condition. There are multiplicities of
rationales that ultimately inform the pessimistic dualism to either resign from life or affirm it entirely. I defer to an existential or Nietzschean pessimism
that recognizes suffering is inevitable for two reasons. First, human time-consciousness necessitates an awareness of our impending death. Second,

mutually assured value systems will always intersubjectively exist. The choice to affirm life in its entirety is a
pessimistic choice. Embracing life as both miserable and beautiful, fleeting and
enduring, validates the perpetually fragmented subject seeking a world that
exists beyond good and evil and instead just is.
Case
 FW
Berardi 1 - Semiocapitalism mis-reads how violence works – symbolic
signification is not a neutral phenomenon but relies on the derelict position of
the disabled body – if we win our thesis of power, it proves the Aff and Perm
only paper over the fundamental opposition of Civil Society
Hughes 12 (-Disability and Social Theory pp 17-32 | Civilising Modernity and the
Ontological Invalidation of Disabled People Authors Authors and affiliations Bill Hughes-)
BL
Elimination and /or correction have been the primary social response to
disabled people in modernity. The primary form of experience (of disability ),
during the same period, has been one of invalidation. Invalidation carries a ‘dual
meaning’ as both ‘confinement through incapacity’ and ‘deficit of credibility’
(Hughes, 2000: 558). This (latter and more crucial) claim is based on the view that in the non-disabled
imaginary disability is an ‘ontological deficit ’ – a reduction of ‘leib’ to ‘korpor’ , human to
animal, subjectivity to flesh, identity to excessive corporeal presence . It is this
deficit of credibility that provides the spurious rationale for the disposal of
disabled bodies by means of elimination (inter alia extermination or segregation) or correction
(inter alia sterilisation or rehabilitation). These are the social practices that have been used to
erase both the psychological aversion and the problematic social difference
that disability has come to represent . In this chapter, I will argue – using Norbert Elias as a touchstone –
that the treatment of disabled people in the modern period is a barbaric
sideshow in the long march of the ‘civilising process’ (Elias, 2000). The ‘personality structure’

ableism (see Kumari Campbell (2001) and in this volume) in modernity transforms its own ontological
precariousness into aversion for and disposal of disability. The negative
response to biological and intellectual difference in modernity is strongly
influenced by the tendency embedded in the ‘civilising process’ to
incrementally deride the value of physical and intellectual difference and
promote a sanitised norm of human behaviour and appearance ( Elias, 2000). The
social and social policy response to disability in the modern period cannot be
separated from the emotional aversion to impairment characteristic of non-
disabled hegemony . I will utilise Elias’s concepts of psychogenesis and sociogenesis1 to explain that the story of
disability in modernity is one that develops towards the social and ontological invalidation of disabled people’s lives. The sociogenisis
of disability is, in practice, twofold: it can be ‘anthropoemic’ or ‘anthropophagic’. The first refers to social processes that rootout and
eliminate people: if error and imperfection are the anti-heroes of modernity, then one
might expect to find examples in which the desire for truth and purity is
exercised through the root and branch elimination of those who offend
against this moral universe. Locking disabled people into a ‘zone of exception’
(Agamben, 2004) in which they are subjected to the eugenic gaze and categorised as
inhuman or sub-human is one strategy for dealing with disability (Reave, 2008). ‘The real
solution to heresy’ suggested George Canguilhem in his discussion of the normal and the pathological (1991: 280) ‘is extirpation’,

meaning to destroy totally or exterminate. In modernity medical ideas and practices have been
a fertile source of radical solutions to impairment. Medical solutions also
embrace anthropophagic strategies. They deal in the correction and
rehabilitation of ‘abnormal bodies’. Cure/rehabilitation stands at the heart of
the medical doctrine of salvation (soteriology) and it is a prospect often held
up to disabled people by optimists who fetishise scientific progress and
promote biological solutions to impairment. Both strategies – to kill or to cure
– transmit the same core cultural message: disabled people represent ‘what
not to be’ and are, therefore, ontologically invalid or ‘uncivilised’. Social
responses to impairment, in modernity, are underpinned by the processes that
constitute the psychogenisis of disability. These include the emotional aversions and intolerances of
impairment that derive from the civilising process. The ontological invalidation
that disabled people experience in their everyday encounters is mediated
primarily by the emotion of disgust (with fear and pity in tow ). At an existential level the
presence of the disabled body is unsettling for non-disabled people who are
often in denial about their own vulnerability . This is the psychological and emotional component of
what disability scholars call ableism. The standard resolution to this ‘problem’ of non-disability in modernity has been to have the
object of discomfort – the disabled person – removed or corrected. The sociogenesis of anthropoemic and anthropophagic
strategies for dealing with impairment are rooted in the emotional dispositions of non-disabled people as they develop their civilised

protocols for behaviour and bodily comportment. In what follows, I will focus on the ways in which the ‘civilising
process’ invalidates impairment and demonstrate how opportunities to
escape this ontological dead-end usually require the erasure of disabled
identity . In the first section that follows I will give some examples of the way in which one can read disability as a product of
the civilising process. In the section, thereafter, I will examine the psychogenesis of disability relating it to the disgust response to
impairment and to the development of ableism, the complex of processes that exclude disabled people from the ‘psychic habitus’
(Elias, 2000: 367) of modernity.
The 2nd Berardi Card – 1) Chaos Rhetoric is our link – Chaos is associated w/ abe-
bodied forms of rationality that puts the Aff in a privileged position, 2) Any risk
of a link means they don’t shift mental processing which means its try or die for
the Alt, and 3) Only the Alt solves because the Aff merely reconstitutes civil
society
The 3rd Berardi Card – 1) Campbell is a prior question because you have never
interrogated your assumptions about disability – the neutral position towards
symbols of significations is able-normativity which means the RoTB lexically
comes prior, 2) Able-normativity is the mediation of your experiences within
Semiocapitalism since the figure of disability shapes how you view yourself i.e.
how you see a person in a wheelchair and am thankful that you are not them –
only our argument explains how that mediation operates, 3) We meet their
RoTB better since radical failure is the only aesthetic paradigm that is ethical
The 4th Berardi Card – 1) Subjectivity flattening proves our link about how they
assume that creativity and value is something that all should strive for which
excludes those who are not cognitively abled, 2) Their Theory of Power is a link
argument since it can never understand the exclusion of disabled students
within schooling – not all bodies are valued equally since value comes from
able-normativity
The 5th Berardi Card – We’ll impact turn this card – Identification is good – Crip
Failure is a valuable identification within negativity that affirms Crip Social Life
– you should reject their flattening as an attempt to exclude us from engaging
Civil Society
The James Evidence – 1) You are the resilient liberals that you point us out for
being – you are an elastic mode of being that seeks to create a resilient subject
of class consciousness – the attempt to bounce back from the trauma of capital
and reclaim means of production is an agency that is endemic of the disability
drive so you re-shuffle violence, 2) We refuse resiliency since we’re an
affirmation of Crip Failure, 3) Our negation solves their external theory since we
no longer produce for the system
The Wiltgen Ev – Crips are the unspecified enemy that controls lash-out
Haiven is wrong since Capital shifts in Form but not Content i.e. Crip Bodies can
be treated both as the Super Crip like Steven Hawking and the Homeless Crip
but the content by which they are treated as non-human is the same
The last piece of Evidence is a link – futurity is able-normative since subjectivity
is defined by what it is not