1NC Ableism Stuf

Link/Violation The af engages in ableist discourse in

attempting to Listen to the Global South, or allow the
Global South to speak for itself

[ you can insert any other ableist word links here]

And that independently reinforces linguistic colonialism
and turns the af
Edwards 12 (R.A.R Edwards Edwards Intro New York University Press
http://nyupress.org/webchapters/edwards_intro.pdf //Abs)

Paddy Ladd, in his ground-breaking work Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood, has theorized

the cause of the Deaf as part of a larger struggle against linguistic

colonialism . He points rightly to both oralism and artificial sign systems as assaults on signed
languages, such as ASL, and on their users. As Ladd puts it, modern-day users of artificial sign systems,
the descendants of methodical signs, are in fact covert oralists.9 In the mid-nineteenth century, signing
in English word order appealed to certain hearing educators precisely because it promised to undermine
the newly emerging Deaf culture. With a language of their own, American Sign Language, Deaf people
became a community of their own. With methodical signs, they would not become Deaf at all. Rather,
they would remain culturally hearing. Arguments over manual language systems were not arguments
about pedagogy at all. Much as Ladd would have predicted, such arguments were instead arguments over

The oppression of American Deaf people is

intimately linked to the oppression of their language, American Sign
Language. In the end, methodical signing paved the way for oralisms entry into deaf education. As
the emerging sense of Deaf identity.

methodical sign supporters made clear their uneasiness with

Deafness, they increasingly shared the

The continued use of such signs

allowed oralists to ask, Why stop with signing in English word order?
Why not demand that the deaf speak, and not sign, in English?
Speaking in English would seem to guarantee their transformation
into culturally hearing people even better than methodical signs.
cultural concerns of the first generation

of oralists.

Chapter 7 accordingly explores the fight to found an oral school in Massachusetts, one of the first in the
nations history, the Clarke School for the Deaf.

The threat that Deaf culture posed to

the ableist status quo had to be countered immediately and in the
strongest possible terms. The bilingualbicultural manualist era can now be seen as the brief
historical moment when deaf people were able, with the help of hearing collaborators, to shape their
own understanding of deafness and, in turn, Deafness before other hearing people raised concerns about

These concerns harkened back to far older and

deeper trends in Western history, as far as deafness goes. For in the
West, speaking has long been privileged over other forms of
communication, and the inability to speak has long been seen as an
indicator of a persons general inferiority and lack of intelligence . So
this entire cultural project.

bilingual-bicultural manualism represented a brief period of countercultural rebellion, with oralism

constituting a return to the cultural status quo. The brief challenge of Deafness was beaten back and,

The disabled
community today still faces many of the same challenges the Deaf
community faced in the nineteenth century. In this way, the example of the
Deaf community has much to teach us about the ways in which
American culture has handled questions of the body, disability, and
diversity over the course of its history. Like Krentz, I wish to make clear that
with it, the prospect of similar rebellions by disabled citizens generally;;;;;;;.

nineteenthcentury deaf people were the first disabled American group to receive special

education, the

first to organize in a widespread way, the first to contest lack

of access, prejudice, and pathological views

This work is but a chapter in a larger American

narrative about disability history. For the story of nineteenthcentury deafness, and its transformation into Deafness, is a story
about the possibilities and limits of living a disabled life in the
United States, a story we need to know more about as we try to
understand what limits still impose themselves in our society
today.;;
of their difference.10

___ Ableist discourse strengthens systems of oppression and undermines community

movements

Wheelchair Dancer 08 (April 28th, 2008 On Making Argument:

Disability and Language, http://cripwheels.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-makingargument-disability-and.html)
If you are feeling a little bit of resistance, here, I'd ask you to think about it. If perhaps what I am saying
feels like a burden -- too much to take on? a restriction on your carefree speech? -- perhaps that feeling

As a community,
we've accepted that commonly used words can be slurs, and as a
rule, we avoid them, hopefully in the name of principle, but
sometimes only in the name of civility. Do you go around using derivatives of the b*ch
can also serve as an indicator of how pervasive and thus important the issue is.

word? If you do, I bet you check which community you are in.... Same thing for the N word. These days,
depending on your age, you might say something is retarded or spastic, but you probably never say that

society as a whole has not paid the same kind of

attention to disabled people's concerns about language . By not
paying attention to the literal value, the very real substantive,
physical, psychological, sensory, and emotional experiences that
come with these linguistic moves, we have created a negative
rhetorical climate. In this world, it is too easy for feminists and people of
colour to base their claims on argumentative strategies that depend ,
as their signature moves, on marginalizing the experience of disabled people
and on disparaging their appearance and bodies. Much of the blogosphere
it's gay. I'd like to suggest that

discourse of the previous weeks has studied the relationships between race, (white) feminism and

the intellectual takeaway has been an

emerging understanding of how, in conversation, notions of
appropriation, citation, ironization, and metaphorization can be
deployed as strategies of legitimation and exclusion. And, as a result, I
question how "oppressed, minoritized" groups diferentiate
themselves from other groups in order to seek justice and claim
authority. Must we always define ourselves in opposition and
distance to a minoritized and oppressed group that can be perceived
as even more unsavory than the one from which one currently
feminists, and WOC bloggers. To me,

speaks?

As I watched the discussion about who among the feminist and WOC bloggers has power and

authority and how that is achieved, I began to recognise a new power dynamic both on the internet and in
the world at large. Feminism takes on misogyny. The WOC have been engaging feminism. But from my

a wide variety of powerful feminist and anti-racist

discourse is predicated on negative disability stereotyping . There's a kind
of hierarchy here: the lack of awareness about disability, disability culture
and identity, and our civil rights movement has resulted in a kind of
domino efect where disability images are the metaphor of last
resort: the bottom, the worst. Disability language has about it a kind
point of view,

of untouchable quality -- as if the horror and weakness of a disabled body were the one true,
reliable thing, a touchstone to which we can turn when we know we can't use misogynistic or racist

When we engage in these kinds of argumentative strategies,

we exclude a whole population of people whose histories are
intricately bound up with ours. When we deploy these kinds of
strategies to underscore the value of our own existence in the world,
we reaffirm and strengthen the systems of oppression that
motivated us to speak out in the first place.
language.

Alt

Vote neg to reject the ableist discourse of the 1AC we

endorse a complex use of language
May and Ferri 05 (Vivian M. May and Beth A. Ferri Fixated on Ability
Questioning Ableist Metaphors in Feminist Theories of Resistance Prose
Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1&2 April-August 2005,
http://www.academia.edu/227091/Fixated_on_Ability_Questioning_Ableist_Met
aphors_in_Feminist_Theories_of_Resistance //Abs)
In questioning ableist analogies, our goal is not to find the most
correct language use, ultimate analogy, or perfect metaphor: we are
not advocating the policing of languages boundaries or the creation of a morally
superior linguistic orthodoxy. We recognize languages uidity and playful potential and
like Simone de Beauvoir (129),we find possibility in ambiguitya call to continuously take up the worlds

The core problem,

whether we are talking about refusing comparisons to disability or
embracing them for their utility, is that most analogies to disability
are often limited, careless, and overly fixed. Disability is rarely conceptualized as a
possibilities rather than a nihilism or fatalism about lived complexities.

constructed outcome of power, nor is it regarded as a political identity forged in and through systems of
domination. In other words, the intersectionality of identities (Crenshaw) and the necessarily coalitional
focus of instigating social change disappears: the presumed stasis of disability remains unchallenged in
efforts to examine womens social construction and social constraints. Moreover, because it only enters
the discourse in its metaphoric sense or as a medical or bodily fact, disability is not comprehended as a
lived reality or point of view, nor is it seen as an analytic category. The fact that power is itself a human
accomplishment, situated in everyday interaction (Ng 132) gets elided as well. Thus disability has been,

Facile
dismissals of disability as merely bodily or simply medical
obscure how bodies are inculturated, phenomenological, and
located. Medical-model understandings of disability also deny the myriad ways that science and
implicitly and explicitly, interpreted as an entirely bodily and/or medical state of deficiency.

medicine are inside culture, not pure, objective sets of practices immune from any imprint of power,
culture, identity, or time/place. Ironically, by conating disability with stigma or stuckness many feminists
also construe disability in opposition to the feminist subject. In other words, disabilitys facticity is
presumed, its concreteness assumed: it has no meaning except as illustrative to and for others. Given
these dynamics, we find ourselves compelled to examine the ubiquitous use of ableist metaphors in
contemporary feminist discourses aimed at critiquing and transforming the status quo. We have identified
several interrelated rhetorical strategies common in feminist and other liberatory theories. Perhaps the
most evident use of disability can be found in the over reliance upon metaphors of madness, crippling, and
more to characterize and locate objects of remediation, in this case dominant ideologies, practices, and
politics. In this paper, we outline two particular ways in which feminist theorists use disability to locate
objects of remediation: first, the construction of disability in opposition to knowledge and second, the use

In addition, we question
the use of ableist notions of mobility and movement to define and
imagine liberation, resistance, and transformation . All of these
rhetorical uses of disability reinscribe normative and exclusionary
paradigms within otherwise libratory feminist theories. We assert that such normative uses of
of disability to highlight the subtle workings of power and privilege.

disability highlight the need for new metaphors and frames of reference to more adequately theorize

we argue that
transforming the ways we use language in order to more fully realize
its paradoxes and playfulness will help to develop more
intersectional analyses and more fruitful political coalitions that do
not originate in an exclusionary subject-object or figure-ground
dualism in which people with disabilities are regularly characterized
as static or, conversely, romanticized and embraced for their difference. In other words, by taking a
multiplicity and to more fully realize social transformation.More importantly,

strong stand about ableist language use, our goal is to raise consciousness about the very limited and

rather than curing

linguistic pathologies, we advocate a more complex use of language
and a more multifaceted approach to politics and subjectivity
deterministic ways disability is characterized and put to use. However,

Specifically their authors ignore the disabled by coopting

language with ableist discourse turns the af by
inhibiting possibility for a new intersectional politics
May and Ferri 05 (Vivian M. May and Beth A. Ferri Fixated on Ability

Questioning Ableist Metaphors in Feminist Theories of Resistance Prose

Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1&2 April-August 2005,
http://www.academia.edu/227091/Fixated_on_Ability_Questioning_Ableist_Met
aphors_in_Feminist_Theories_of_Resistance //Abs)
Examples such as these, which construct disability in opposition to rationality or which romanticize
disabilitys differences, led us to examine further the paradoxical ways that critical

race and

gender scholars unconsciously reinforce normative and exclusionary

paradigms. In particular, we have noticed the inexorable use of disability
metaphors to identify and critique problematic ideologies, practices,
and politics. For example, in hopes of changing the tenor and genre of much contemporary theory,

Iris Marion Young describes the critical nature of some feminist discourse as paralyzing (16). Similarly, in
order to assert the necessity of intersectional approaches to liberation, Martnez reminds us that sexism
can cripple political work (147).In other words, when questioning exclusionary, violent, or hierarchical
ways of thinking and being, many feminist scholars use ableist metaphors for emphasis. This is particularly
evident in feminist critiques of the insidious nature of power in which unearned or unacknowledged
privileges are analogized to or equated with disability. Consider the following examples: . Christine De
Stefano argues that mainstream postmodernist theory (Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault) has been
remarkably blind and insensitive to questions of gender in its own purportedly politicized rereading of
history, politics, and culture (in Harding 300). . Spelman also asserts that one can be deeply
disfigured ( Fruits 111) by privilege. . Norma Alarcon therefore suggests that the Anglo-American
subject of consciousness cannot come to terms with her(his)own class-biased ethnocentrism. She is
blinded by her own construction not just as a woman but as an Anglo-American one (364). . With the
aim of transforming such racist, nationalist, and presentist practices in the field of Womens Studies, Robyn
Wiegman refers to the blind spots of both white feminism and the disciplines (10, 40) and discusses the
paralysis plaguing current debates about the field (4, 13). . Similarly, Luce Irigaray (in Young44),
Kathleen Blee (177), Trinh T. Minh-ha (163),Betty Sasaki(44),Kathleen Cleaver(39),Chandra
Mohanty(inAlcoff69),and Rachel Lee(83) all critique the blind spots of power or the blinding effects of
privilege on perception and understanding. . Because power can negatively impact our perceptions, Kelly
Oliver advocates what she calls the loving eye which is a critical eye, always on the lookout for the blind
spots that close off the possibility of response-ability and openness to otherness and difference (20). .
Mab Segrest, in thinking about the early stages of capitalism as deeply marked by and connected to racial
hierarchies, writes, its cost I can only describe as a maniacal decimation of other peoples and resources
across the globe (246). A few pages later, Segrest adds, the Spanish and Portuguese, like the British
after them, seemed drivenby a psychosis of domination (248). . In an effort to characterize the
pervasive nature of white supremacy within U.S. society, Trina Grillo and Stephanie Wildman explain that,
like cancer, racism/white supremacy is an illness (45), a characterization that Adrien Wing concurs with
in her critique of the use of analogy in feminist discourse. Ironically, Wing writes, Whites

can use
analogies to give them greater comprehension about the illness of
racism, but such analogies can create the danger of false
understanding (8).All of these rhetorical uses of disability to identify
and critique systems of domination rely on concepts of disability
that are negative, simplistic, and utilitarian. This precludes any
possibility for recognizing complexity and nuance in people with
disabilites phenomenological and political identities and
experiences. Stereotypical notions of blindness, mental illness, and paralysis are invoked in the
examples above in order to underscore the workings of privilege and power without acknowledging

Not only do people with disabilities

disappear: ableism as a systemic form of domination and privilege
with its own ability to skew perceptions and perpetuate inequity is
not even implicitly included in the analyses. Disability, in other words, is
not really considered as part of an intersectional politics or a core
aspect of coalition-building for change: it has pedagogical value for
highlighting the negative repercussions of unearned privileges other
than those associated with ableism
disability as also constructed in and through power.

Only the alt solves rethinking language is the only way

to enact the social transformation we seek
May and Ferri 05 (Vivian M. May and Beth A. Ferri Fixated on Ability
Questioning Ableist Metaphors in Feminist Theories of Resistance Prose
Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1&2 April-August 2005,
http://www.academia.edu/227091/Fixated_on_Ability_Questioning_Ableist_Met
aphors_in_Feminist_Theories_of_Resistance //Abs)
Rather than advocating a cure for wayward language use, we are
suggesting the need for more nuanced uses of language and
metaphor that do not characterize people with disabilities in
stereotypical, one-dimensional ways. Because language does not
merely reect reality but constructs it, we must be thoughtful about
the politics of our words if we want to enact the kinds of social
transformation we say we do. In order to promote changed social
relations, we must continue to create new ways of linking our
experiences and recognizing and accepting our diferences in ways
that retain and encourage an ambiguous, intersubjective ethic
between self and other.

2NC Impact Calc

They have destroyed the ability to create a new form of
intersectional politics. Their incorporation of the Global
South inevitably excludes those deemed disabled, those
who cannot be listened to. That reinforces the worst
forms of oppression and taints the debate space thats
Edwards
It is a moral obligation to use the debate space to
incorporate discussion of disabled our advocacy is the
only way to solve the case
Brub, '3 (Michael, Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania
State University, Citizenship and Disability,
Spring,http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=506)

It is striking, nonetheless, that so few leftists have understood disability in these terms. Disability is not the only area of
social life in which the politics of recognition are inseparable from the politics of redistribution; other matters central to

our
society's representations of disability are intricately tied to , and sometimes
the very basis for, our public policies for "administering" disability . And when we
citizenship, such as immigration, reproductive rights, and criminal justice, are every bit as complex. Nonetheless,

contemplate, in these terms, the history of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities, we find a history in which

first, in that people who were deemed

incapable of representing themselves were therefore represented by a
socio-medical apparatus that definedor, in a social-constructionist sense, createdthe category of
"feeblemindedness"; and second, in the sense that the visual and rhetorical representations of
"feebleminded" persons then set the terms for public policy . One cannot plausibly narrate a
"representation" takes on a double valence:

comprehensive history of ideas and practices of national citizenship in the post-Civil War United States without examining
public policy regarding disability, especially mental disability, all the more especially when mental disability was then
mapped onto certain immigrant populations who scored poorly on intelligence tests and were thereby pseudoscientifically linked to criminality. And what of reproductive rights? By 1927, the spurious but powerful linkages among
disability, immigration, poverty, and criminality provided the Supreme Court with sufficient justification for declaring
involuntary sterilization legal under the Constitution. THERE IS AN obvious reason why disability rights are so rarely
thought of in terms of civil rights:

disability was not covered in the Civil Rights Act

of 1964. And as Anita Silvers points out, over the next twenty-five years, groups covered by civil rights law
sometimes saw disability rights as a dilution of civil rights, on the grounds that people with disabilities were constitutively
incompetent, whereas women and minorities faced discrimination merely on the basis of social prejudice. Silvers writes,
"[t]o make disability a category that activates a heightened legal shield against exclusion, it was objected, would alter the
purpose of legal protection for civil rights by transforming the goal from protecting opportunity for socially exploited
people to providing assistance for naturally unfit people." The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in
1990 did add disability to the list of stigmatized identities covered by antidiscrimination law, but thus far the ADA has
been interpreted so narrowly, and by such a business-friendly judiciary, that employers have won over 95 percent of the
suits brought under the act. Perhaps if plaintiffs with disabilities had won a greater number of cases over the past thirteen
years, the conservative backlash against the ADA-currently confined to a few cranks complaining about handicapped
parking spaces and a wheelchair ramp at a Florida nude beach-would be sufficiently strong as to spark a movement to
repeal the law altogether. But then again, perhaps if the law were read more broadly, more Americans would realize their
potential stake in it. In 1999, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled on three lower-court cases in which people with "easily
correctable" disabilitieshigh blood pressure, nearsightednesswere denied employment. In three identical 7-2 decisions,
the Court found that the plaintiffs had no basis for a suit under the ADA precisely because their disabilities were easily
correctable. As disability activists and legal analysts quickly pointed out, this decision left these plaintiffs in the ridiculous
situation of being too disabled to be hired but somehow not disabled enough to be covered by the ADA; or, to put this
another way, plaintiffs' "easily correctable" disabilities were not so easily correctable as to allow them access to
employment. One case involved twin sisters who were denied the opportunity to test as pilots for United Airlines on the
grounds that their eyesight did not meet United's minimum vision requirement (uncorrected visual acuity of 20/100 or
better without glasses or contacts) even though each sister had 20/20 vision with corrective lenses (Sutton v. United
Airlines, Inc.); another involved a driver/mechanic with high blood pressure (Murphy v. United Parcel Service); the third
involved a truck driver with monocular vision (20/200 in one eye) who in 1992 had received a Department of
Transportation waiver of the requirement that truck drivers have distant visual acuity of 20/40 in each eye as well as
distant binocular acuity of 20/40 (Albertson's, Inc. v. Kirkingburg). Because, as Silvers argues, "litigation under the ADA

commonly turns on questions of classification rather than access," all three plaintiffs were determined to have no standing
under the law. The question of whether any of them was justly denied employment was simply not addressed by the
Court. Indeed, in writing her opinion for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor explicitly refused to consider the wider
question of "access," noting that 160 million Americans would be covered by the ADA if it were construed to include
people with "easily correctible" disabilities (under a "health conditions approach"), and since Congress had cited the
number 43 million in enacting the law, Congress clearly could not have intended the law to be applied more widely. "Had
Congress intended to include all persons with corrected physical limitations among those covered by the Act, it
undoubtedly would have cited a much higher number of disabled persons in the findings," wrote O'Connor. "That it did not
is evidence that the ADA's coverage is restricted to only those whose impairments are not mitigated by corrective
measures." It is possible to object that O'Connor's decision was excessively literalist, and that the potential number of
Americans covered by the ADA is, in any case, quite irrelevant to the question of whether a woman can y a plane when
she's got her glasses on. But I've since come to believe that the literalism of the decision is an indirect acknowledgment of
how broad the issues at stake here really are. If the ADA were understood as a broad civil rights law, and if it were
understood as a law that potentially pertains to the entire population of the country, then maybe disability law would be
understood not as a fringe addition to civil rights law but as its very fulfillment. RIGHTS CAN BE created, reinterpreted,

The passage of the ADA should therefore be seen as an

extension of the promise of democracy, but only as a promise: any realization
of the potential of the law depends on its continual reinterpretation. For the
extended, and revoked.

meaning of the word, just as Wittgenstein wanted us to believe (in order that we might be undeceived about how our
words work), lies in its use in the language. Similarly, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975 (originally the
Education for All Handicapped Children Act) was not some kind of breakthrough discovery whereby children with
disabilities were found to be rights-bearing citizens of the United States after all, and who knew that we'd had it all wrong
for 199 years? On the contrary, the IDEA invented a new right for children with disabilities, the right to a "free and
appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment." And yet the IDEA did not wish that right into being
overnight; the key terms "appropriate" and "least restrictive" had to be interpreted time and again, over the course of
fifteen years, before they were understood to authorize "full inclusion" of children with disabilities in "regular" classrooms.
Nothing about the law is set in stone. The only philosophical "foundation" underlying the IDEA and its various realizations
is our own collective political will, a will that is tested and tested again every time the Act comes up for reauthorization.
Jamie Brub currently has a right to an inclusive public education, but that right is neither intrinsic nor innate. Rather,
Jamie's rights were invented, and implemented slowly and with great difficulty. The recognition of his human dignity,
enshrined in those rights, was invented. And by the same token, those rights, and that recognition, can be taken away.
While I live, I promise myself that I will not let that happen, but I live with the knowledge that it may: to live any other
way, to live as if Jamie's rights were somehow intrinsic, would be irresponsible. Of course, many of us would prefer to
believe that our children have intrinsic human rights and human dignity no matter what; irrespective of any form of
human social organization; regardless of whether they were born in twentieth-century Illinois or second-century Rome or
seventh-century central Asia. But this is just a parent'sor a philosophical foundationalist's-wishful thinking. For what
would it mean for Jamie to "possess" rights that no one on earth recognized? A fat lot of good it would do him. My
argument may sound either monstrous or all too obvious: if, in fact, no one on earth recognized Jamie's human dignity,
then there would in fact be no human perspective from which he would be understood to possess "intrinsic" human
dignity. And then he wouldn't have it, and so much the worse for the human race. In one respect, the promise of the IDEA,
like the promise of the ADA, is clear: greater inclusion of people with disabilities in the social worlds of school and work.
But in another sense the promise is unspecifiable; its content is something we actually cannot know in advance. For the
IDEA does not merely guarantee all children with disabilities a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive
environment. Even more than this, it grants the right to education in order that persons with disabilities might make the
greatest possible use of their other rights-the ones having to do with voting, or employment discrimination, or with life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. IDEA is thus designed to enhance the capabilities of all American children with
disabilities regardless of their actual abilities-and this is why it is so profound a democratic idea. Here again I'm drawing
on Nancy Fraser, whose theory of democracy involves the idea of "participatory parity," and the imperative that a
democratic state should actively foster the abilities of its citizens to participate in the life of the polity as equals. Fraser's
work to date has not addressed disability, but as I noted above, it should be easy to see how disability is relevant to
Fraser's account of the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution. This time, however, I want to press the
point a bit harder. Fraser writes as if the promise of democracy entails the promise to enhance participatory parity among
citizens, which it does, and she writes as if we knew what "participatory parity" itself means, which we don't. (This is why
the promise of disability rights is unspecifiable.) LET ME EXPLAIN. First, the idea of participatory parity does double duty
in Fraser's work, in the sense that it names both the state we would like to achieve and the device by which we can gauge
whether we're getting there. For in order to maintain a meaningful democracy in which all citizens participate as legal and
moral equals, the state needs to judge whether its policies enhance equal participation in democratic processes. Yet at the
same time, the state needs to enhance equal participation among its citizens simply in order to determine what its
democratic processes will be. This is not a meta-theoretical quibble. On the contrary, the point is central to the practical

One of the tasks required of democrats is precisely this: to

extend the promise of democracy to previously excluded individuals
workings of any democratic polity.

and groups some of whom might have a substantially different understanding of "participatory parity" than that held by
previously dominant groups and individuals. Could anything make this clearer than the politics of disability? Imagine a
building in which political philosophers are debating, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the value and the
purpose of participatory parity over against forms of authoritarianism or theocracy. Now imagine that this building has no
access ramps, no Braille or large-print publications, no American Sign Language interpreters, no elevators, no specialneeds paraprofessionals, no in-class aides. Contradictory as such a state of affairs may sound, it's a reasonably accurate
picture of what contemporary debate over the meaning of democracy actually looks like. How can we remedy this?

Only when we have fostered equal participation in debates over the ends
and means of democracy can we have a truly participatory debate over what
"participatory parity" itself means. That debate will be interminable in principle, since our understandings of democracy
and parity are infinitely revisable, but lest we think of deliberative democracy as a forensic society dedicated to empyreal
reaches of abstraction, we should remember that debates over the meaning of participatory parity set the terms for more
specific debates about the varieties of human embodiment. These include debates about prenatal screening, genetic
discrimination, stem-cell research, euthanasia, and, with regard to physical access, ramps, curb cuts, kneeling buses, and

buildings employing what is now known as universal design. Leftists and liberals, particularly those associated with
university humanities departments, are commonly charged with being moral relativists, unable or unwilling to say (even
after September 11) why one society might be "better" than another. So let me be especially clear on this final point. I
think there's a very good reason to extend the franchise, to widen the conversation, to democratize our debates, and to
make disability central to our theories of egalitarian social justice. The reason is this: a capacious and supple sense of

the more
participants we as a society can incorporate into the deliberation of
what it means to be human, the greater the chances that that
deliberation will in fact be transformative in such a way as to enhance our collective
what it is to be human is better than a narrow and partial sense of what it is to be human, and

capacities to recognize each other as humans entitled to human dignity. As Jamie reminds me daily, both deliberately and
unwittingly, most Americans had no idea what people with Down syndrome could achieve until we'd passed and
implemented and interpreted and reinterpreted a law entitling them all to a free appropriate public education in the least
restrictive environment. I can say all this without appealing to any innate justification for human dignity and human rights,
and I can also say this: Without a sufficient theoretical and practical account of disability, we can have no account of
democracy worthy of the name. Perhaps some of our fellow citizens with developmental disabilities would not put the
argument quite this way; even though Jamie has led me to think this way, he doesn't talk the way I do. But

those

of us who do participate in political debates, whether about school

funding in a specific district or about the theory and practice of
democracy at its most abstract, have the obligation to enhance the
abilities of our children and our fellow citizens with disabilities to
participate

in the life of the United States as political and moral equals with their nondisabled peers-both for

their own good, and for the good of democracy, which is to say, for the good of all of us.

More Listening Links

The listening metaphor is uniquely ableist it knowingly excludes those who arent
capable of participating in a conversation
Lacey 10 (Teacher, MA in English, The Conversations Metaphor and Ableism,
9/6, http://equality101.net/?p=1886 Accessed 2/10/11 GAL)
In my last post, I discussed how I might use the seemingly elementary activity of show-and-tell to
introduce students to a foundational concept of college-level composition: the Burkean Parlor
metaphor. Frequently expressed as

the simpler conversation metaphor, this

metaphor illustrates what thinkers, researchers, scholars and, most importantly, writers do:

we listen to a conversation; we form our own opinions about this

topic of conversation as a result of listening; we eventually add our own voices
(opinions) to the conversation; and our voices become part of the
conversation that others listen to and use to form their opinions. As I prepared
for one of my classes today, I came across the following passage in a chapter called Reading
Rhetorically: The Writer as Strong Reader: The goal of this chapter is to help you become a more
powerful reader of academic texts, prepared to take part in the conversations of the disciplines you
study. To this end, we explain two kinds of thinking and writing essential to your college reading: Your
ability to listen carefully to a text, to recognize its parts and their functions, and to summarize its
ideas Your ability to formulate strong responses to texts by interacting with them, either by agreeing
with, interrogating, or actively opposing them (Ramage, Bean, and Johnson, Allyn & Bacon Guide to
Writing, 5th ed., pg. 109) Clearly, the conversation metaphor is a useful and important
framework that has the capacity to help college students understand college-level writing in a new
and more applicable way. This metaphor has helped me explain why we do research at all and how
composition classes are relevant outside of the required course structure at the university. But after

this metaphor built on the notions

of listening and speaking might actually be ableist in
efect. It might leave out many students who can still
participate in composition meaningfully but who dont have the
ability to listen (or hear) or to speak. Im not sure why this never occurred to
reading this passage, it struck me that

me before. Ive taught the conversation metaphor to students with hearing difficulties without thinking
twice about what I was saying. Despite the ableist language in the metaphor used to present this
concept, I think the concept itself is still valuable. So how can we modify this metaphor to
accommodate for all students? The easy answer is to change the language and comparison

We could use the more situation-neutral language of

rhetoric: the rhetor (who can be a speaker, a writer, an artist, a thinker
anyone who puts a message in some form out to an audience) takes in the
messages about a particular topic of the rhetors around him/her,
uses those messages to learn and to develop an opinion, and
then adds his/her own response to the collection of messages surrounding this
involved.

topic for other would-be rhetors to take in. This conception is rather vague, though, and lacks the
benefit of a realistic setting to deliver the metaphor and to demonstrate that what we do as composers
in college reects what we do as workers, family members, citizens, and activists beyond the college
classroom. Perhaps a more updated version of this metaphor would use the setting of an online chat
room. Instead of entering a parlor which is an outdated term anyway to listen and speak to people
already engaged in conversation, perhaps you enter a chat room where you read and learn more about
conversations that have been ongoing since before other chat users were in the room. While this is a
more realistic setting for the concept of participating in a discourse community, there are still touches
of ableism (being able to read though many individuals with visual impairment use devices to allow
them to read either print or Braille from their computers) and classism (access to the Web and time to
participate in chat rooms). As the composition field continues to become more relevant as students
engage with all kinds of texts and participate in all kinds of discourse communities, we who promote
these foundational concepts must remain cognizant that we are considering all of our students.

While communication is a human endeavor, we dont all

communicate in the same ways, and it is vital that

composition/rhetoric

make that basic fact a part of the daily

work of teaching students how to critically engage with texts
and contribute to their communities.

AT: Perm
1. The perm links
2. The permutation is a token gesture -- tacking on the
question of interrogating disability after the fact
participates in the structures of ableist privilege we
criticize
Campbell, Griffith Law School Faculty, 9

(Fiona Kumari, Griffith University Australia, Disability Advocacy & Ableism:

Towards a re-discovery of the disability Imagination, Keynote Address, 2nd
Strengthening Advocacy Conference, Nov 1718,http://griffith.academia.edu/FionaKumariCampbell/Papers/118483/Disabilit
y_Advocacy_and_Ableism_Towards_a_rediscovery_of_the_disability_Imagination, p. 1-2, accessed 7/6/12 sl)
Working models (often called conceptual frameworks) are very important as they help us
work out which questions to ask, help us interpret and process things and
events. We all have conceptual frameworks that shape our beliefs as
to why thing happen even if we do not use that language. In a keynote speech I made at a DPI
conference in Adelaide 1984 I said it was important for disabled people to
understand the nature of social change so that we will not be
fooled by any token one of gestures or initiatives handed out by government and
disability agencies (1984, 91). I still hold to that idea and add that we always need to test new ideas by
asking what is this proposal or idea saying about disability, does it assume that disability is terrible, or
that diversity and difference are terrible or is the idea on about celebrating and bringing out difference?

the necessity to have a theory of

disability before deciding strategies of political action was well understood as
From the perspective of political activism,

early as 1975 by the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation UPAIS in the UK whose minutes of a
debate between 2 advocacy groups produced a document called The Fundamental Principles of Disability
. They decided that disability should not be understood medically as a broken down body, mind or heart,
rather society and the way that it is organized had something to do with us becoming disabled.

Second ableist discourse has already tainted their

movement their attempt to break away from coloniality
fails they reinforce linguistic coloniality and forcibly
exclude the disabled from the discussion of oppression.
We have indicted their scholars unconscious use of
metaphors as another instance of societys ignorance
towards the disabled. That destroys their advocacy
Disabling language perpetuates ignorance and
misconceptions in regards to the lived experience of
people with disabilities
Ben-Moshe, Doctorate in Disabilities studies, 5
(Liat, 4-1-05, The Graduate School, Syracuse University, Building
Pedagogical Curb Cuts: Incorporating Disability in the University Classroom

and Curriculum,
http://www.syr.edu/gradschool/pdf/resourcebooksvideos/Pedagogical%20Curb
%20Cuts.pdf, accessed: 7-5-2012, p.109, CAS)
We learn about disability through everyday use of language. In the
same way that racist or sexist attitudes, whether implicit or explicit,
are acquired through the normal learning process, so too are
negative assumptions about disabilities and the people who are
labeled as having them. Our notions of people who are blind, deaf or
labeled as mentally retarded come into play when we use disabling
phrases, and these notions are usually far from accurate. They do
not convey the complexity of living in a society that regards people with
disabilities as the Other on the basis of perceived mentally or bodily difference. The use of
disability as a metaphor perpetuates false beliefs about the nature
of impairment and disability. People who are blind, for example, do not lack in knowledge;
they simply have different ways of obtaining it. Paralysis does not necessarily imply lack of mobility,
stagnancy or dependence since there are augmentative instruments, such as wheelchairs and personal
aids, that secure independence and mobility.

The continued use of disabling

language in the classroom perpetuates ignorance and misconceptions in
regards to the lived experience of people with disabilities.

AT: But We Didnt Mean It

THATS JUST ANOTHER LINK
Smith 09, Co-Founder Feminists with disabilities for a way forward, 9

(s.e., FWD (feminists with disabilities) for a way forward , What We Talk
About When We Talk About Language,
http://disabledfeminists.com/2009/10/16/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talkabout-language/, accessed 7/8/12)
There are a lot of things we talk about when we talk about language, of course, but its worth highlighting

when we talk about language, we dont talk about

what it used to mean, or what it is supposed to mean, or what you
think it means. We talk about how society uses language, right now.
Because its the social use of language which can turn language into
a weapon, and its the engrained nature of ableist language which
makes it so harmful. One of the most common defenses I see of ableist language is well, it
doesnt mean that anymore. So, my question is, what does it mean? One of the things I like
to do when I am illustrating why language is exclusionary is I plug in
a commonly-known original meaning of the word in question into a
sentence. Lets take lame, which is generally taken to mean has difficulty walking or
limps, although the original use was actually just broken. So, if someone says this
television show is lame and you turn the sentence into this
television show has difficulty walking, it doesnt really make sense ,
something important:

right? Just like when you say this social activity which I am being forced to do by my parent is a

And this should tell you something. It

should tell you that the word you are using has an inherently
pejorative meaning. Which means, actually, youre totally right
when you say a word doesnt mean that anymore. In fact, its gone
from being a value neutral term used to describe a state of being to
being a pejorative. A pejorative so universally accepted that you can
expect users to understand exactly what you mean when you say it.
When you say this television show is lame you mean its bad, not worth your time, boring, etc., and
heres the trick: People understand that meaning and they derive it
from the word that you have used, because that word is universally
accepted as objectively bad.
homosexual man, it doesnt really make sense.

AT: Re-appropriation
Using disabling language de-values people with
disabilities
Ben-Moshe, Doctorate in Disabilities studies, 5
(Liat, 4-1-05, The Graduate School, Syracuse University, Building
Pedagogical Curb Cuts: Incorporating Disability in the University Classroom
and Curriculum,
http://www.syr.edu/gradschool/pdf/resourcebooksvideos/Pedagogical%20Curb
%20Cuts.pdf, accessed: 7-5-2012, p.110)
Using disability as a metaphor to represent only negative aspects of
a situation is problematic. It is made worse by the fact that blindness, deafness,
paralysis, etc., are not oating signifiers, but have real referents
behind thempeople with disabilities. When using disabling language, we do
not only de-value the lived experience of people with disabilities,
but we also appropriate these lived experiences for our own use.
This means that disabled people have been presented as socially
awed able-bodied people, not as people with our own identities. As
responsible instructors, we must ask ourselves, when was the last time we discussed disability in our
classrooms, not as metaphors, but as lived experiences?

AT: But You say Disabled

No contradiction disabled as we reference it really is a

positive use of re-appropriation
Mason 92 [ Micheline, British Council of Organisations of Disabled People,
Disability in the classroom: a human rights issue,
http://www.worldofinclusion.com/res/deinclass/text_only.pdf]

My disability is a fundamental factor in the being that is " me".

I do not want to deny this by calling myself 1 "a person with
special needs" or any other such euphemism, nor do I want to
deny the collective identity we have achieved for ourselves.
Therefore I am a disabled person, and proud of it . I was bom with a
condition called Osteogenesis Imperfecta, or "Brittle Bones" I am neither ashamed nor particularly proud of
this as it was not of my choosing What I am very proud of is the kind of person that dealing with this
challenge has enabled me to become I think I am a wiser, deeper, richer and more competent person than
I would have been had I not had this challenge put before me I have also had the privilege of close contact
with many others who have had similarly enriched experiences of life - my friends at school, my sisters and

Our aim is to alter

the way people feel about the word "disabled" from a negative
attitude to a positive attitude, in exactly the same way that
"Black" has to be a positive assertion of identity in a racist
society Black people are not "people whose skin tone is slightly different to that of the dominant
culture", nor are they people who achieve things, "despite blackness " The term " Black" is a
politically motivated identity of a group of people who
recognise that (a) they are proud to be the way they are,
including their skin colours, cultures, languages, etc, and (b)
they belong to a group of people who are systematically
oppressed by the dominant culture which is white i.e by
racism Disabled people feel the same way.
brothers in the Disability Movement, my own wonderful daughter I treasure.

Ableism Before Race(?)

Disability cant be fully explained by whiteness
Smith 4 [Phil, Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities
Council, Whiteness, Normal Theory, and Disability Studies, Disability
Studies Quarterly Spring 2004, Volume 24, No. 2, http://dsqsds.org/article/view/491/668]

In ways similar to those in which marginalized racial groupings have been forced to live outside the

segregation into literal and virtual disability

ghettos has been the norm in modernist Western culture (Groch 1998;
Smith 1999b). People with disabilities are denied even basic health care ,
boundaries of normalized white landscapes,

so that those labeled as having so-called mental retardation have a life expectancy that is as little as two-

And people with

are at significant risk for violence in the form of sexual, physical, mental,
emotional, and verbal abuse in their lives (Horwitz, Kerker, Owens, and Zigler 2000; Sobsey and Doe
thirds or less that of the total population (Horwitz, Kerker, Owens, and Zigler 2000).
disabilities

1991; Smith 2001c; Sullivan and Knutson 2000). Some have suggested that the creation of the institutional
framework of special education itself has served "...to provide an education for 'normal' students
unimpeded by students who are troublesome, in the widest possible sense" (Tomlinson 1995, p. 127).
Groch (1998) has pointedly noted that both racism and ableism are ideologies , "with
most Americans seldom questioning their legitimacy" (p. 202). By "most Americans," I understand her to
mean "most white, able-bodied Americans." The clarification is significant, I believe, because it begins to
explore the invisibility of ability, what some see as "normal," for those who define others as disabled.
Doing so denies the normality of disability, the ways in which what is portrayed as outside boundaries of
normative landscapes by the ideology of eugenicist ableism is, from critical theory and disability studies

Others have also pointed out the invisibility of

ability, of being able-bodied. For example, "there are few names that
refer to that status except those in currency within the disabled
community such as 'able-bodied', 'nondisabled,' and 'abled" (Gordon and Rosenblum 2001, p.13). In
the same way that people of "color" may see whiteness better than Whites, so people labeled as
having a disability may be able to see normality better than those
who are only, at best, temporarily able-bodied. There is one diference
perspectives, in fact normative.

between the status of whiteness

(or, for that matter, masculinity)

and the status of

able-bodiedness: "Whites do not worry about becoming black ; men

don't worry about becoming women.

Disability, however, is always a potential

status..." (Gordon and Rosenblum 2001, p.16). It is probable, therefore, that significantly
greater anxiety perhaps terror is a better word attends what is thought to be
the dark specter of disability, and why eugenicism again, perhaps
genocide is a better word remains a real possibility in the lives of people
with disabilities.

____ Exclusion of disabled bodies underlies all forms of

oppression and mass death especially racism.
Siebers 2010 (Tobin, professor of English, University of
Michigan, Disability Aesthetics, pgs 23-28)
Disqualification as a symbolic process removes individuals from the
ranks of quality human beings, putting them at risk of unequal
treatment, bodily harm, and death . That people may be subjected to violence if they do not
achieve a prescribed level of quality is an injustice rarely questioned. In fact, even though we may redefine what we mean by quality
people, for example as historical minorities are allowed to move into their

ranks,

we have not yet ceased to

believe that non quality human beings do exist and that they should
be treated diferently from people of quality . Harriet McBryde Johnson's debate with Peter
Singer provides a recent example of the widespread belief in the existence of non quality human beings (Johnson). Johnson, a disability
activist, argues that all disabled people qualify as persons who have the same rights as everyone else. Singer, a moral
philosopher at Princeton University, claims to the contrary that people with certain disabilities should be euthanized, especially if they are .
thought to be in pain, because they do not qualify as persons. Similarly, Martha Nussbaum, the University of Chicago moral philosopher,
establishes a threshold below which "a fully human life, a life worthy of human dignity:' is not possible (181). In particular, she notes that the
onset of certain disabilities may reduce a person to the status of former human being: "we may say of some conditions of a being, let us say a
permanent vegetative state of a (former) human being, that this just is not a human life at all" (181). Surprisingly little thought and

This belief is so
robust that it supports the most serious and characteristic
energy have been given to disputing the belief that nonquality human beings do exist.

injustices of our day. Disqualification at this moment in time

justifies discrimination, servi- tude, imprisonment, involuntary
institutionalization, euthanasia, human and civil rights violations,
military intervention, compulsory sterilization, police actions,
assisted suicide, capital punishment, and murder. It is my contention that
disqualification finds support in the way that bodies appear and in
their specific appearances-that is, disqualification is justified through the accusation of mental or physical
inferiority based on aesthetic principles. Disqualification is produced by naturalizing inferiority as the justification for unequal
treatment, violence, and oppression. According to Snyder and Mitchell,

disability serves in the modern

period as " the master trope of human disqualification."4 They argue that
disability represents a marker of otherness that establishes diferences between human beings not as acceptable or valuable
variations but as dangerous deviations. Douglas Baynton provides compelling examples from the modern era, explaining that during the

disability identity disqualified other

identities defined by gender, race, class, and nationality. Women
were deemed inferior because they were said to have mental and
physical disabilities. People of color had fewer rights than other
persons based on accusations of biological inferiority . Immigrants were excluded
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States

from entry into the United States when they were poor, sick, or failed standardized tests, even though the populations already
living there were poor, sick, and failed standardized tests. In every case,

disability identity served to

justify oppression

by amplifying ideas about inferiority already attached to other minority identities. Disability is
the trope by which the assumed inferiority of these other minority identities achieved expression. The appearance of lesser mental and
physical abilities disqualifies people as inferior and justifies their oppression. Thanks to the work ofBaynton and others, it is now
possible to recognize disability as a trope used to posit the inferiority of certain minority populations, but it remains extremely difficult to
understand that mental and physical markers of inferiority are also tropes placed in the service of disability oppression. Before disability can
be used as a dis qualifier, disability, too, has to be disqualified. Beneath the troping of blackness as inbuilt inferiority, for
example, lies the troping of disability as inferior. Beneath the troping of femininity as biological deficiency lies the troping of
disability as deficiency. The mental and physical properties of bodies become the natural symbols of inferiority via a process of
disqualification that seems biological, not cultural-which is why disability discrimination seems to be a medical rather than a social problem. If
we consider how difficult it is at this moment to disqualify people as inferior on the basis of their racial, sexual, gender, or class characteristics,
we may come to recognize the ground that we must cover in the future before we experience the same difficulty disqualifying people as
inferior on the basis of disability. We might also recognize the work that disability performs at present in situations where race, sexuality,

the current time we prefer

to fix, cure, or eradicate the disabled body rather than the
discriminatory attitudes of society. Medicine and charity, not social justice, are the answers to the
gender, and class are used to disqualify people as physically or mentally inferior. At

problems of the disabled body, because the disabled body is thought to be the real cause of the problems. Disability is a personal misfortune
or tragedy that puts people at risk of a nonquality existence-or so most people falsely believe. Aesthetics studies the way that some bodies
make other bodies feel. Bodies, minimally defined, are what appear in the world. They involve manifestations of physical
appearance, whether this appearance is defined as the physical manifestation itself or as the particular appearance of a given
physical manifestation. Bodies include in my definition human bodies, paintings, sculpture, buildings, the entire range of human artifacts as
well as animals and objects in the natural world. Aesthetics, moreover, has always stressed that feelings produced in bodies by other bodies
are involuntary, as if they represented a form of unconscious communication between bodies, a contagious possession of one body by another.
Aesthetics is the domain in which the sensation of otherness is felt at its most powerful, strange, and frightening. Whether the effect is beauty

the emotional impact of one body on

another is experienced as an assault on autonomy and a testament
to the power of otherness. Aesthetics is the human science most concerned with invitations 'to think and feel
and pleasure, ugliness and pain, or sublimity and terror,

otherwise about our own inuence, interests, and imagination. Of course, when bodies produce feelings of pleasure or pain, they also invite
judgments about whether they should be accepted or rejected in the human community. People thought to experience more pleasure or pain
than others or to produce unusual levels of pleasure and pain in other bodies are among the bodies most discriminated against, actively
excluded, and violated on the current scene, be they disabled, sexed, gendered, or racialized bodies. Disabled people, but also sex workers,
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people, and people of color, are tortured and killed because of beliefs about their relationship to

aesthetic disqualification is not merely a

matter for art critics or museum directors but a political process of
concern to us all. An understanding of aesthetics is crucial because it
pain and pleasure (Siebers 2009). This is why

reveals the operative principles of disqualification used in minority

oppression. Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That
oppression involves "groups," and not "individuals:' means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that
oppression always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its
specific and various appearances. Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority-what some call "in-built" or
"biological" inferiority; Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as
disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body
and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics-not only because
oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art,
where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation ofbodi~s are openly discussed. Two additional thoughts must be noted before I
treat some analytic. examples from the historical record. First, despite my statement that disability now serves as the master trope of human
disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the
work done by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are
socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present
moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed
identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the
oppressed identity. "Racism" disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and
physical features. "Sexism" disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. "Classism"

'Ableism"
disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical diferences, first selecting
disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status .

and then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is
socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of
nature. Second, it is crucial to remember the lessons of intersectional theory. This theory rightly focuses on how oppressive systems affect
the identity of the oppressed individual, explaining that because individuality is complex, containing many overlapping identities, the
individual is vulnerable to oppressive systems that would reduce the individual to one or two identities for the purpose of maintaining power
and control (Collins 208),5 Intersectional theorists restore a complex view of the individual and fight against creating hierarchies between
different identities. For example, the debate whether it is worse to be black or female is viewed as divisive and unproductive. My tactic here is

look at identity not from the point of view of the oppressed

individual but from the point of view-limited as it may seem and significant because
limited-of oppressive systems. Disability is the master trope of human disqualification, not because
disability theory is superior to race, class, or sex/gender theory, but because all oppressive systems
function by reducing human variation to deviancy and inferiority
defined on the mental and physical plane. Intersectional analysis shows that disability identity
similar. I want to

provides a foundation for disqualification in cases where other minority identities fail because they are known to be socially constructed for the
purposes of domination. It is not clear why disability has proven so useful a trope for maintaining oppression, but one reason may be
that it has been extraordinarily difficult to separate disability from the naturalist fallacy that conceives of it as a biological
defect more or less resistant to social or cultural intervention. In the modern era, of course, eugenics embodies this fallacy.
Eugenics has been of signal importance to oppression because eugenics weds medical science to a disgust with mental and physical variation,
but eugenics is not a new trend, only an exacerbation of old trends that invoke disease, inferiority, impairment, and deformity to disqualify one
group in the service of another's rise to power. As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority-and the
critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression the prejudice against disability remains in full force,
providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage
will continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability
as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the
final frontier of justifiable human inferiority.

AT: Case O/W

Their choice of rhetorical tools short-circuits their claims
to solvency
Vidali 10 [Amy, Dept of English U of Colorado-Denver, Seeing What We Know:
Disability and Theories of Metaphor, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies,
v4, #1, pp33-54]

Failure to interrogate the role of disability in our academic

theories and methodologies can result in unknowing adoption
of ableist theories to make disability-progressive arguments. In
"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," Audre Lorde claims that
using the master's tools "may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they
will never enable us to bring about genuine change" (112).
While Lorde is speaking about a racist feminism that excludes the
perspectives of women who are poor, lesbian, Black, older, international, and 1 would add, disabled , her
point is also relevant to Disability Studies, which endorses underlying ableist
perspectives ("tools") by adopting theories such as Lakoff and Johnson's (on Lorde and disability, see

Ableist artifacts cannot be analyzed with equally ableist

theoretical and methodological tools: a disability approach to
metaphor is needed.
Barager).

Impacts
The devaluation of lives of people with disabilities is
historically responsible for genocide
Russell, 98

disability rights activist, writes on the political, social and economic aspects of
disablement. Her socio-economic analysis has been published in the Berkeley Journal of Employment and
Labor Law, the Review of Radical Political Economy, the Journal of Disability Policy Studies, Disability &
Society, Monthly Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, Left Business Observer, Real World Micro (9th
edition), Socialist Register 2002, and Backlash Against the ADA: Reinterpreting Disability Rights (Marta,
Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract p. 18-19)

Most people, excluding the neo-Nazis, accept that there was a holocaust in
Germany, but how many know that disabled people were the first to be
systematically exterminated by physicians? Disabled people know that
quality-of-life judgments made about us by nondisabled people can prove not
only inaccurate but deadly. To combat oppression, we must understand its
historical roots, partic ularly the institutional support that makes it possible.
"LIVES NOT WORTH LIVING" AND "USELESS EATERS"

The phrase "lives not worth living" came from the title of a book published in
1920, Release and Destruction of Lives Not Worth Living, by two German
social Darwinists Alfred Hoche, a professor of medi cine, and Rudolf Binding, a
professor of law. The book defended the right to suicide, and called for the
killing of not only incurably sick people but also the mentally ill, the feebleminded, the retarded, and deformed children. Arguing that such people led
"ballast lives" and were only "empty human husks," these professors
medicalized the concept of killing disabled people by making it seem
therapeutic; they upheld that it would be "healing work" and humane to
destroy such lives which, in their view, were "not worthy of life."! These
were not uniquely German ideas; support for eugenics also existed in the
United States and in England, where euthanasia was viewed as a way to
"economize" into a more "efficient" society.
Not long after the publication of this book, hundreds of thousands of disabled
people were systematically killed in German gas chambers set up in the very
institutions where people went for treatment. How can a society be
maneuvered into a regimen of murder? The answer is found in the ideas that
led to a "science" of eugenics, the economics that made the practice
attractive, and the history of the agents applying euthanasia.

And The exclusion of people based on their physical

status is the root cause of conict wars are fought and
life is exterminated not because of particular geopolitical
interests but because of the biopolitical commitment to
eugenic violence
Elden, 2002 (Stuart, Professor of Politics at the University Warwick, Boundary 2, 29.2)
reverse side is the power to allow death. State racism is a
recoding of the old mechanisms of blood through the new
procedures of regulation. Racism, as biologizing, as tied to a state, takes
The

shape where the procedures of intervention at the level of the

body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification
from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and
ensuring the triumph of the race (VS, 197; WK, 149).37 For example, the old anti-Semitism based on
religion is reused under the new rubric of state racism. The integrity and purity of the race is threatened,
and the state apparatuses are introduced against the race that has infiltrated and introduced noxious
elements into the body. The Jews are characterized as the race present in the middle of all races (FDS,
76).38 The use of medical language is important. Because certain groups in society are
conceived of in medical terms, society is no longer in need of being defended from the
outsider but from the insider: the abnormal in behavior, species, or race. What is novel is not
the mentality of power but the technology of power (FDS, 230). The recoding of old problems is
made possible through new techniques. A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a division or
incision between those who must live and those who must die. The biological continuum of the human
species is fragmented by the apparition of races, which are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified
as good or inferior, and so forth. The species is subdivided into subgroups that are thought of as races. In a
sense, then, just as the continuum of geometry becomes divisible in Descartes,39 the human continuum is
divided, that is, made calculable and orderable, two centuries later. As Anderson has persuasively argued,
to suggest that racism has its roots in nationalism is a mistake. He suggests that the dreams of racism
actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity
among rulers and to blue or white blood and breeding among aristocracies.40 As Stoler has noted, for
Foucault, it is the other way around: A discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of races.41
But it is a more subtle distinction than that. What Foucault suggests is that discourses of class have their

what is diferent is the

biological spin put on the concepts.42 But as well as emphasizing the
biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive, to live,
one must be prepared to massacre ones enemies, a relation of war.
roots in the war of races, but so, too, does modern racism;

As a relation of war, this is no different from the earlier war of races that Foucault has spent so much of the

when coupled with the mechanisms of mathematics

and medicine in bio-power, this can be conceived of in entirely
diferent ways. Bio-power is able to establish, between my life and the death of
the other, a relation that is not warlike or confrontational but biological:
The more inferior species tend to disappear, the more abnormal
individuals can be eliminated, the less the species will be
degenerated, the more I not as an individual but as a specieswill live, will be strong, will be
course explaining. But

vigorous, will be able to proliferate. The death of the other does not just make me safer personally, but
the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the degenerate or abnormal, makes life in general
healthier and purer (FDS, 22728). The

existence in question is no longer of

sovereignty, juridical; but that of the population, biological. If
genocide is truly the dream of modern powers, this is not because of
a return today of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population (VS, 180; WK, 136). If the power of normalization wishes to exercise the
ancient sovereign right of killing, it must pass through racism. And if, inversely, a sovereign power, that is
to say a power with the right of life and death, wishes to function with the instruments, mechanisms, and
technology of normalization, it must also pass through racism (FDS, 228). This holds for indirect death

this biological sense

of power is based on evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial
relations, the necessity of wars, criminality, phenomena of madness
and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth . The link to colonialism is central:
the exposure to deathas much as for direct killing. While not Darwinism,

This form of modern state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The theme of the political enemy is
extrapolated biologically. But what is important in the shift at the end of the nineteenth century is that war
is no longer simply a way of securing one race by eliminating the other but of regenerating that race (FDS,

Wars are no longer waged in the

name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on
behalf of the existence of all; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale
slaughter in the name of life necessity. Massacres have become vital [vitaux understood
in a dual sense, both as essential and biological]. It is as managers of life and survival,
22830). As Foucault puts it in La volont de savoir :

of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to
wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. (VS, 180; WK, 136)

We must reject actuarial logic and prioritize everyday acts

of violence it is the largest proximal cause of genocide
and interstate war
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004 (Nancy, Professor of Anthropology at
University of California Berkeley, Philippe , Professor of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania,
Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)

Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and

distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close
attention to the "little" violences produced in the structures, habituses,
and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of
class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic
tendencies of "violence studies" that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into
complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human

in this anthology we are positing a violence

continuum comprised of a multitude of "small wars and invisible
genocides" (see also Schcpcr-Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces
integrity and dignity. Thus,

of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry

The violence continuum also

refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the
socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the
license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in
offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues.

referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are ying in the face of a tradition of genocide
studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to
restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian
1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary ,

it is absolutely
necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking
violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of

our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the
concept of "genocide" into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find
it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogcnocidal
practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by "ordinary" good-enough citizens.

Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished

communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal
industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing
race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the
"small wars and invisible genocides" to which we refer. Tins applies to African American
and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland. California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City.

These are "invisible" genocides not because they are secreted away
or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the
things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before
our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu's partial and
unfinished theory of violence (sec Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to

By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden

in the minutiae of "normal" social practices - in the architecture of homes, in
gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to
reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially
the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political
terror and state repression. Similarly, Basaglia's notion of "peacetime crimes" - crimini di
our task.

pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests

the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied
systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during
peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and
naturalization border raids on "illegal aliens" versus the US government-engineered genocide in 1938,
known as the Cherokee "Trail of Tears." Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence
make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal "stability" is purchased with the currency of
peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied "strangle-holds." Every day forms

It is an easyto-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public

secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace . Most
subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United
States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken
place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil
disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new
mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the
Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient
of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic "peace" possible.

prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it
possibly mean when incarceration becomes the "normative" socializing experience for ethnic minority

it
is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity
among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise
a defensive hyper-vigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and
even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in
genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions),
youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end

perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore,
all expressions of radical social exclusion, dchumanization, depersonalization, pseudospeciation, and
rcification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for
alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin's view of late
modern history* as a chronic "state of emergency" (Taussig, Chapter 31).

Ablist Language is an act of dehumanization

Anna, DisabledFeminists.com writer, 10

(Feminists With Disabilities for a Way Forward, The Disabled, June 18, 2010,
http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/06/18/awp-the-disabled/, Accessed:7/6/12)
Doug S, its almost like people treat having a disability like its

this horrible thing, and that people with disabilities arent

human. Thats the subtext I see in comments about how all words that

describe intellectual disabilities are going to turn into insults. Of course they
are people treat people with disabilities, mental or physical,
like theyre subhuman. Part of asking people to consider their
language (and really its a request. No one can make you not use these
words) is asking them to consider that people with disabilities
exist. When I see comment after comment elsewhere saying I hadnt even
HEARD of Ablism!, I wonder where the heck theyve been hanging out that
there are NO progressive people in their circles talking about people with
disabilities. (Then I remember the confusion people look at me at when I go
to progressive-focused meetings and ask for things like wheelchair
accessible locations, and transcripts of videos for the Deaf. *sigh*) Part of

bringing up the ablist nature of language is reminding people I

would expect to be our natural allies that we exist, were not
your pity cases, were not here to make you feel better or support

whatever notion of Good Charity you want. Most of us our living our
lives. All we want is some respect for those lives. Maybe we dont
want to be turned away from voting. Maybe we dont want to be told that our
doctor-prescribed medication is banned from our graduation. Maybe we dont
want to be told that if we get a job, well lose all of our benefits that pay for
the care we need to live. Maybe we dont want to be unable to leave our
home because the elevator has been shut down for the next three hours, and
no one thought to warn us. Maybe we want some bloody curb cuts. Maybe

we dont want to be your go-to insult. Pointing out ablist

language is part of the advocacy of pointing out we exist.