Disability Studies Quotes

“Sympathy once more reveals its limits when faced with madness.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“Sometimes disabled people overcome specific moments of ableism—
we exceed low expectations, problem-solve lack of access, avoid nursing
homes or long-term psych facilities, narrowly escape police brutality
and prison. However, I’m not sure that overcoming disability itself is an
actual possibility for most of us. Yet in a world that places extraordinary
value in cure, the belief that we can defeat or transcend body-mind
conditions through individual hard work is convenient. Overcoming is
cure’s backup plan.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“Disability fluctuates, growing visible, then invisible, then visible again, becoming both ever-present and haunting. Such a problematizing of physical life added a new wrinkle to the genre's double/secret identity trope: the characters now interact with their shifting bodies as bodies with all the complications involved.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“The multiverse model offers an elegantly postmodern solution to character stasis in a market-driven serial publishing system which privileges constancy over major change.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“The stereotype of the supercrip, in the eyes of its critics, represents a sort of overachieving, overdetermined self-enfreakment that distracts from the lived daily reality of most disabled people.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“We should bear in mind the supercrip stereotype as a figure obsessively, indeed maniacally, over-compensating for a perceived physical difference or lack, since, as we shall see, this aspect ties in quite neatly with the genre specificities and narratival concerns of so much Silver Age superhero literature.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“If someone's personhood is in doubt (or seen as lacking), all the easier to direct death wishes at them. When a tiny minority of them transgresses, their crimes of violence only confirm their abjection from the human [. . .] Anxiety, threat, dread, fear, and prejudice feed into the explanatory mechanisms that construct them as somehow beyond human, beyond mercy.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“Whether the autistic subject is inscribed as 'nearly' developed or 'under' developed, developmental discourses always situate the autistic subject as partially developed and thus not fully human. [...] Developmentalist discourses frame the autistic subject in need of advocacy as a kind of development project, the autistic body becomes understood as 'develop-able.' The autistic is, in other words, framed as one who needs to be taught humanness.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“Watch,' the posters tell the potential advocate, but only if you embody normalcy. For it is normalcy, the posters point out, that is endowed with the power of the qualification to see. Abnormalcy is unseeing. . . Autism is not qualified to see itself.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“[The] excited, angry, upset, or calm choreography of fingers fluttering is simultaneously medicalized and moralized: re-encoded as '[an] odd or repetitive way of moving fingers.' The quiet play of a lone child in a busy playground is now seen as a pathological sign pointing not to personal choice or preference or even to social exclusion but to (medical/moral) deviance.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“Despite the constant lament that autism is just too costly, a significant or even 'crippling' economic burden for the social whole, the production of the time-rich but not time-efficient body of the autistic child has generated a multibillion dollar 'autism industrial complex.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“It was astonishing to finally realize that my difficulties were part of a larger problem that wasn’t my fault alone, but my brain’s, that there was a scientific modus operandi behind everything I’d come to see as the peculiarities of a besieged personality. It was amazing to comprehend that all the cat-and-mouse games my mind plays, all its endless scheming and compensatory, roundabout thinking, not only owned a name, but was a disability many others also suffered from, in many cases knowingly.”
― Philip Schultz, My Dyslexia

“With emancipation comes the opening up of new possibilities for challenging assumptions over women's appearance and, more radically, the gender order itself. Ventura (She-Thing) comes not only to accept her new "intragender" status but to see it as advantageous -- for dealing with her misandry, for personal growth, and even for becoming a person capable of giving and accepting love.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“[In "The Night Gwen Stacy Died"], death took on an existential quality -- the beloved, innocent but weak Gwen is merely a victim, the casualty of a war between superpowered rivals -- and as such the episode proved a turning point int eh genre's depiction of mortality.”
― Jose Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond

“As it represents and thus conceives of autism as a threat to the normative individual and social body, contemporary advocacy work issues an effective and powerful 'call to arms' against autism. The orientation of contemporary advocacy is clear: to be a 'good' autism advocate is to be positioned 'against' autism, to 'fight' it, 'combat' it, 'defeat' it, and so on. . . It is this war on autism that I take as my focus for the remainder of this book. I do this so as to interrogate how a militarized autism advocacy is systematically producing and sustaining a social environment that is hostile to autistic difference—an environment that, as we shall see, structures and supports possibilities for violence against those who embody autistic difference.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“While increasing numbers function to expand out, increasing odds conjure an atmosphere of enclosure and confinement. Growing odds tell an allegorical story of a circle that is closing in zeroing in on the '1,' which is, inevitably your '1.' To borrow the tagline from a 2010 Autism Speaks PSA, 'autism is getting closer to home.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“Within dominant discourses of autism advocacy, the autistic subjectivity—located simultaneously in the perpetual past (e.g. developmentally 'too slow' and always late) and the future (e.g. yet-to-be developed)—is discursively foreclosed from being (existing) in the privileged and agentive time of the 'now.' Via a kind of time-sensitive investment logic, autism is understood not as a being but as a happening—a costly body, a disruptive threat, a risky trend, and so on—a happening, moreover, that is happening fast.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“In the ratio, as autism rates are understood to be increasing, the autistic 1 stays the same; it is rather the non-autistic population that seems to be getting smaller. . . The ratio works, in effect, to structure a rivalry or competition—a kind of Foucaultian 'agon' or contest—between constructed oppositions: autism/nonautism, pathology/health, underdevelopment/development, cost/benefit.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“As per the terrorist narrative, the story of autism is told as a kind of 'spreading' pathology, infiltrating normative populations .. Knowing no borders or barriers, autism is framed as .. infiltrating homes, moving next door, and hiding in otherwise normative bodies. Figures of terror, in Bush's words, 'hide in the shadows' (Bush, 2001). Says the voice of autism in Cuaron's film [I am Autism]: they are 'invisible until it's too late' (Cuaron, 2009).”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“Beloved children split in two. A child-with: part child, part autism. A part to love and a part to hate. A part to cultivate and a part to eliminate.. Such cultural orientation did not force [Karen] McCarron's .. hand in killing her child, but it nonetheless provides the necessary conditions .. to make this kind of violence possible and even—for those of us monitoring the headlines—normal.”
― Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

“If I am a man, I am a man who always questions, who is driven to ask with a visceral urgency as irresistible and insatiable as an itch in a fold of my brain.”
― La Marr Jurelle Bruce

“Every belief, every word, every phrase, every observation, every proposition, every citation, every punctuation mark is subjected to ruthless doubt and viscious interrogation. The conventions of grammar oblige me to end most of these sentences with periods, but there are ghostly, invisible lines curling and hovering over most of these tiny dots. What I mean is that most of the periods in this book are interrogation marks in disguise. Most of these declarations are really restless questions underneath.”
― La Marr Jurelle Bruce

“With a chronic disease, prognosis is really more of an agnosis; as long as a condition remains chronic, one simply has it; one can go into remission or experience relapse or return.”
― Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century

“Incurable, hopeless, excessive, organic, ill: this is the language of chronic disease, of the static bodies it indexes and the defective temporalities it engenders. The modality of the chronic, then, is less safely habitual than the compromised, the unconjugated, the "would" in the sense of being able or unable to realize one's will.”
― Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century