Disability comes from the rejection of political purity

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Ableist normalcy’s exclusionary praxis makes ongoing eugenics and extermination inevitable

1AC vs K

Disability is perpetually omitted from academia – excluded from united movements and marginalized – the affirmative forefronts the discussion to challenge the erasure of crip bodies in education

Erevelles, 2000 (Nirmala Erevelles is a Professor in the Social Foundations of Education and Instructional Department of Education Leadership, Policy, and Technology Studies at the University of Alabama.[1] She publishes about various topics related to disability, in particular the ways social oppression is pervasive due to differences in race, socioeconomic status, and bodies. Erevelles earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Stella Maris College in 1985. She earned an M.S. in special education from Syracuse University in 1989, and a Ph.D. in 1998 from Syracuse University in the Cultural Foundations of Education, 2000, EDUCATING UNRULY BODIES: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, DISABILITY STUDIES, AND THE POLITICS OF SCHOOLING. Educational Theory, 50: 25–47. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00025.x/full)

Yet, even though critical theorists of education have privileged the theorization of the body along the axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality, they have consistently omitted any mention of the “disabled” body. Such omissions reflect the historical practices within American public education that continue to marginalize the issue of disability by maintaining two educational systems -one for disabled students and one for everyone else. Based on these discriminatory educational policies, more than five million students with disabilities have experienced segregation in special education programs that are, in effect, both separate and unequal. This has contributed to the continued unemployability of disabled people in a highly competitive market economy and thus the conditions of poverty in which many of them live. In light of this oppressive context, it is indeed ironic that critical theorists of education are silent regarding issues of disability, especially since these theorists claim to be “united in their attempts to empower the powerless and to transform social inequalities and injustices.”⁵

Disability scholarship is beyond identity politics – it is the identity of imperfection, of access to the collective struggle of difference

Shotwell, 16 (Alexis Shotwell is an Associate Professor in Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology and cross-appointed with the Department of Philosophy. She works in social and political theory, with a current focus on complicity and complexity as a ground for ethical and political action and also engaged in a SSHRC-funded research project on the history of AIDS activism, “Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times”. Dec 06, 2016. University of Minnesota Press, https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/book/48892/)
This kind of refusal of a certain mode of identity politics is important to me because I see in it a refusal of purism—a clear delineation between who counts as holding a model disability identity. McRuer and Mollow aspire to a postidentity disability politics, “in which what is interpretable as disability need not be tethered to a disabled identity.” Such a politics, they argue, “enables sitings of disability in multiple, often unexpected, locations, rather than solely in the bodies and minds of a few individuals” (13). I like very much their invocation of Roderick A. Ferguson’s discussion of 1970s women of color feminism and its “gestural” conception of identity politics, “pointing away from the self to the complex array of relations that constituted the social” (12). And yet there is a danger that pointing toward the complex array of relations that constitute us as individuals within a social world ends up presuming or arguing that because we are shaped by the same normalizing forces our various experiences of identity are, in some real way, also the same (as when being Fat or trans are framed as equivalent or equal to being disabled). I am interested in a form of nonidentification that maintains a thick historical awareness of the significant and constitutive differences between us while simultaneously—or, better, necessarily causally—orienting us toward a collective struggle as a matter of our deepest identities and subjectivities. This approach to understanding identification is consonant with key features of the above accounts of nonidentification. Consider the concept of “identifying into” politics. When I was a grad student, I had the honor of working with Angela Davis. She frequently argued, in classes and conversations, for a mode of being, an identity politics, which she framed as the grounding of our identities in our politics, instead of taking our politics from our identities. I have been struggling with what this might mean—in theory and practice—for a long time. I take it that from this stance, which I see as part of a broader politic, identity is contingent and situated. It is not essential, pregiven, or natural. If we take our identities from our politics, we collectively craft identities, ways of being, based in the specific political context we encounter and the political commitments that shape our response to those contexts. In a recent speech, Davis talks about the notion of “identifying into.” She says: We are interested not in race and gender (and class and sexuality and disability) per se, by themselves, but primarily as they have been acknowledged as conditions for hierarchies of power, so that we can transform them into intertwined vectors of struggle for freedom. When we identify into feminism, we mean new epistemologies, new ways of producing knowledge and transforming social relations. As scholars and activists, we realize that categories always fall short of the social realities they attempt to represent, and social realities always exceed the categories that attempt to contain them. (Davis 2012, 197) I read Davis here as offering an understanding of identity politics resonant with speculative futurity. So, to start from the first point: Davis argues that the important thing about social relations of oppression is not that they have some inherent meaning—we are not interested in them by themselves—but instead because of what they manifest about conditions for hierarchies of power. And that in turn is important to those of us struggling for multifaceted liberation because we aim to transform the conditions for harmful hierarchies of power into intertwined vectors of struggle for freedom. On this view, sites of oppression can be or become sites of liberation—but the social relations that determine what makes that difference will be dynamic and shifting. When we think about identity without conceiving of a fixed self that will produce predictable politics, we need to be able to encompass this dynamism in order to track potential vectors of freedom. Davis is talking specifically about identifying into feminism as an uneasy but usable political move. Necessarily, the feminism one identifies into cannot be the same as identifying completely with already existing feminism, because feminism as a body of work—not only the world it aims to transform— is imperfect and frequently a huge problem. And to be explicit: feminism’s problem arises most particularly in terms of its normalizing orientation toward the lie that it is possible to “just talk about gender” and concomitant political practices that have sacrificed people of color, Indigenous people, disabled people, and undocumented migrants on the alter of gender parity. But we can identify into feminism in the sense of aiming with and through it toward new epistemologies, new ways of producing knowledge and transforming social relations. Since social realities always exceed the categories that aim to represent them, we work with the flux of changing vocabularies and shifting social practices, leveraging intertwined vectors of freedom. I suggest that we can think about postidentity disability politics in a similar way. Identifying into critical disability praxis doesn’t rely on a fixed experience, or a stable identity. We know that the category “disabled” is already so heterogeneous that there has never been a set of defining characteristics capable of encompassing the scope of disabled lives and how to live them. Nor has inhabiting any given disabled identity produced any particular politics. The strand of disability work I follow rejects the idea that what we’re looking for is just a better set of diagnostic or definitive criteria. And we know that the social categories practiced at all these sites are more tangled when we hold in mind other vectors of vulnerability and empowerment, oppression and privilege. Further, we know that disability theory and practice can and often has involved people who don’t identify as disabled, who worry they’re not disabled enough to “count,” who understand themselves to be enabled by systems of oppression but whose lives are shaped and entangled with disabled lovers, friends, comrades, or family, and so on. Identifying into disability praxis means that everyone, however situated, can shape their life’s practice in a way that contributes to self-determination and coproduced freedoms. As praxis, this identifying into brings together theory, its dynamic stretch to better account for and understand the social world, with practice, the in-the-moment enactment of life. As Robert McRuer argues, “We need a postidentity politics of sorts, but a postidentity politics that allows us to work together, one that acknowledges the complex and contradictory histories of our various movements, drawing on and learning from those histories rather than transcending them” (McRuer 2006, 202). A disability politics praxis is practical: I’m talking about how we engage one another’s bodies and minds, how we move through public space, how we talk together, how we have sex, how we plan events. But it’s also theoretically informed, and it matters what bigger view we hold. I’m thinking, for example, of Harriet McBryde Johnson’s well-known account of debating Peter Singer about his eugenicist views; she describes asking him to move her arm slightly so that she can continue eating dinner, and the political complexity of engaging with him as a helper of her body, a body he argues should not exist (Johnson 2006). I’m insisting on a praxis as the sign under which we talk about identifying into because it matters both what understanding we hold (our theory) and what we do (our practice). Holding those together shapes a praxis of speculative futures—finding ways to create a world other than the one we’re in while keeping our feet in the mud.

Inclusionism is the normative approach for disabled bodies in the educational space and will always leave disabled bodies behind

We must move beyond the tolerance of disability to challenge internalized ableism and self-hatred caused by societal views of disability

Campbell, 08 (Fiona Kumari Campbell works at the School of Education & Social Work, University of Dundee. She was Program Convenor, Human Services in the School of Health & Wellbeing at the University of Southern Queensland. She writes on disability and specificially—ableism, Sri Lankan disability, jurisprudence, technology, and South Asian disability. March 2008, “Exploring Internalized Ableism Using Critical Race Theory”, Disability and Society, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687590701841190?scroll=top&needAccess=true)

Having considered the dynamics of internalised racism, this section addresses a hitherto underdeveloped concept within disability studies scholarship, namely internalised ableism or disabled self-hatred. In examining sites for the internalisation of racism, Burstow makes it clear that we should not be looking at a single event or site of impact, rather internalisation occurs through the accumulative, residual and reoccurring experiences of racism. Burstow sharply remarks: “the point is oppressed people, are routinely worn down by the insidious trauma involved in living day after day in a sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, and ableist society” (Burstow, 2003, p.1296). Within ableism the existence of disability is tolerated rather than celebrated as a part of human diversification. I contend that internalised ableism utilises a two-prong strategy, the distancing of disabled people from each other and the emulation by disabled people of ableist norms. Tactics of Dispersal The experience of disablement can arguably, be spoken of not in terms of individualised personal tragedy, but in terms of communal trauma where the legacies of ableism pervade both conscious and unconscious realms. Although the prevailing trope has been the individualisation of disability by the domination of biomedical realism, nonetheless histories of catastrophe, negative ontologies of disability and an absence of oppositional role models saturate the lives of disabled people collectively. Unlike other minority groups disabled people have had fewer opportunities to develop a collective conscious, identity or culture let alone interrogate cultures of ableism. The connection between epistemologies of ableism and the production of internalised ableism can be seen in Social Role Valorisation Theory (SRV) as articulated by Wolf Wolfensberger (1972). His strategy of ‘conservatism corollary’ explicitly discourages fellowship amongst persons with disabilities and other minorities. Clearly this is a precursor to a strategy of dispersal, predicated on the belief disabled people should not draw attention to each other via ‘mixing’ (with culturally devalued people) (Szivos, 1992). This ‘dilution of deviancy’ or mitigation campaign rings familiarly in the histories of other marginalised populations such as indigenous, coloured, gay and lesbian peoples. Dispersal consequences generate internalised ableism because congregating with other people with impairments is interpreted as a negative, inadvisable choice. Tactics of dispersal have not only received credibility through SRV, but ensure another form of biopolitics for governing the population. The work of Schwalbe et al (1996) on the injuries of racism supports this point. He argues that for Asian-American’s to deflect stigma and have imputed the characteristics of their ‘ethnicity’, they often engaged in “defensive Othering”. Defensive Othering occurs when the marginalised person attempts to emulate the hegemonic norm, whiteness or ableism, and assumes the “… legitimacy of a devalued identity imposed by the dominant group, but then saying, in effect, ‘There are indeed Others to whom this applies, but it does not apply to me’” (1996, p.425). This attitude readily taps into a State supported system of diagnostic apartheid and evaluative ranking of bodies according to type and severity of impairment. Dispersal policies are only permissible because the integration imperative exists and receives, albeit critically, tremendous support from the disability services sector and is based on the belief that mainstreamed institutions and methods are superior to separate settings (O’Brien & Murray, 1996). Separation however should not be confused with segregation. As Watts – Jones (2002) points out ‘within group’ processes can act as a sanctuary for healing internalised oppression. Emulating the norm The ‘naturalness’ of the notion of the abled-bodied liberal individual coupled with the negation of a disabled sensibility makes many disabled people queue for the chance to be anointed as ‘people first’, whilst simultaneously disavowing their previous embodied positions as ‘gimps;’ and ‘cripples’. Ironically, disabled people who achieve ‘people first’ status are not achieving full normative status but are only legitimizing an able-bodied resemblance through their desire for normality. (Overboe, 1999, p. 24) The desire to emulate the Other (the norm) is contemporaneous with a process of colour and/or impairment disavowal. It attempts to establish and maintain a wide gap between that/those which are loathed and that which is desired. The linkage between internalised racism as a ‘rational’ response to oppression makes it possible to examine the operation of dishonour. Watt-Jones notes two levels of shame; first is linked with being a person of colour, the second tier relates to a shame induced by being consciously aware of one’s shamefulness. Steven Kuusisto’s autobiographical extract, Planet of the Blind, captures this sense of shame for people with disabilities: Raised to know I was blind but taught to disavow it, I grew bent over like the dry tinder grass. I couldn’t stand up proudly, nor could I retreat. I reflected my mother’s complex bravery and denial and marched everywhere at dizzying speeds without a cane. Still, I remained ashamed of my blind self, that blackened [sic] dolmen (Kuusisto, 1998: p.7). Shamefulness is magnified in culture where the rhetoric of being a survivor, a non-victim, is powerful and being a victim is to be “passive or deficient” (Watt-Jones, p.594). For ‘enlightened’ disabled people such shame taps into a wellspring of discourses of residual disability deficiency. The emerging counter-discourse of the disability survivor mitigates against exploring the personal costs of disability subordination and normalisation. In my own scholarly community the few faculty with disability teaching disability studies report privately struggling with demands to perform, live up to leadership challenges and mentoring expectations. An isolated minority within a marginal teaching area, there are few opportunities to find a sanctuary for healing/sheltering from the forces of ableism. In Australian there is an awareness that many of our disability rights movement leaders are suffering ‘burnout’, have had emotional collapses or just moved on in order to cope with the realities of living in a hostile world. This cognizance has not to my knowledge, been translated into theoretical explorations. In the case of disability subjectification internalisation of negative ontologies of disability contributes to the formation of a docile and readily pliable disabled body, continuing various ways to inhibit performances of disability acceptance and rehabilitation so demanded by the inclusivist impulses of liberal contract theory. Internalised ableism can mean the disabled subject is caught ‘between a rock and a hard place’; in order to attain the benefit of a ‘disabled identity’ one must constantly participate in processes of disability disavowal, aspiring towards normativity, a state of near-ablebodiedness, or at very least to effect a state of ‘passing’. As Kimberlyn Leary (1999, p. 85) puts it: Passing occurs when there is perceived danger in disclosure.…. It represents a form of self-protection that nevertheless usually disables, and sometimes destroys, the self it means to safeguard. The workings of internalised ableism by way of ‘passing’ are only possible when viewed broadly, moving focus from the impaired individual to the arena of relationships. In the interactivity with the norm (such as an ableised able-bodied person) another form of erasure is required. Ableist passing is not just an individual hiding their impairment or morphing their disability; ableism involves a failure to ask about difference ie. disability/impairment. For internalised ableism to occur there needs to be an existing a priori presumption of compulsory ableness. Such passing is about keeping the coloniser happy by not disturbing the peace, containing the matter that is potentially out of place 1 . An example of ‘passing’ under these circumstances would be the conundrum encountered by some university academics with impairments who experience trepidation about revealing their impairment status fearing stigma and tenure discrimination despite the fact that many argue that they and others would benefit from disability focused mentoring and networking arrangements (see Bishop 1999; Monaghan, 1998). Whilst successful rehabilitation may be measured in terms of personal care management, employment retraining and placement, the benchmark of successful inclusion is the acquisition of new skills for performing the part(s) of a disembodied abled self. Though there can be no denial of an injured body by rehabilitation professionals and the injured client, a way out of the strictures of injury is to adopt and emphasize those aspects of self and subjectivity that are able to mimic the qualities of ableist personhood. The corporeality of the disabled body is constantly in a state of deferral, in a holding pattern, waiting the day it will be not just repaired but made anew (cured). Until then the conditions of fabrication, of mimicking the abled-body are usually of a disembodied kind; because it is assumed that flight from the body will act as a distraction towards those assimilating qualities of social conduct and deportment. In time, rehabilitation personnel will be able to re-create corporeal normalcy by way of rebuilding or morphing the injured body to a form that for all practical purposes replicates the old (whole) form (see Campbell, 2004). Developments in new technologies have the effect of re-conceptualizing impairment in terms of provisional or tentative disability (Campbell, 2005, 2007).

Ableist normalcy’s exclusionary praxis makes ongoing eugenics and extermination inevitable

Brown 11 (Rebecca Dosch Brown is the Program Coordinator of MN LEND (Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and related Disabilities) and a Senior Academic Advisor at the University of Minnesota, 10/03/11, “‘Screw normal’: Resisting the myth of normal by questioning media’s depiction of people with autism and their families”, University of Minnesota, https://wayback.archive-it.org/338/20111003144814/http://blog.lib.umn.edu/gara0030/iggds/Screw%20Normal_FINAL_Dosch%20Brown.pdf)

The one societal need in our society that is often unacknowledged, silenced, and left unexamined is that humans have, as Michalko quoted Cornel West, the “deep, visceral need to belong” (Michalko, 2002, p. 81) — all of us struggle with full acceptance of ourselves and our desire to be seen as acceptable or welcome in a society that loves to label people. The media creates walls between its ideals and the people it views as Others, such as when the media views people with autism as “abnormal mysteries”. We are being taught that differences occurring from autism are wrong, and sadly too many families depicted in the media perpetuate this negative view of their own children. When thinking of “normal” henceforth, let‘s consider what Michalko wrote about society and his blindness. He explained that, although society might have found ways technologically for him to participate (he is a professor), he is still seen as “strange” because he is blind. He said the difference in his blindness must be grappled with inside his being in “a space between nature and culture” and “normal and abnormal” (2002, p. 83), and it is within this confusing, unmarked space where he has had to build his own identity. By moving through the world with his “body of blindness,” Michalko has projected himself into the “social space,” just as my son must project his own self, by moving through the social space with his ‘mind of difference‘; thus, society reacts to people who have disabilities who cannot live up to the mythical norms with “help,” “pity,” “ridicule,” “unease,” and “curiosity” (2002, p. 88), and it results in an unequal power structure that creates treacherous terrain for all of us who have been Othered. Michalko (2002) noted that mainstream Western society views all disabilities as abnormal, and it thus approaches people with disability as tragic people who live lives “not worth living”; they are seen as the Other, as objects of pity, both “vulnerable and fragile” (p.68). The complexity, diversity, and range of differences of all human beings in this world are erased, denied, and ignored under a banner of ‘sameness’ or ‘normalcy’ and those who cannot or will not conform are silenced and lumped into the category of Other, and dealt with suspicion for not conforming to social construction of what is acceptable in appearance, behavior, and experience. Eugenics, the academic Phil Smith (2008) has concluded, is still very much present in societal attitudes toward disability. Eugenics formalized “the Normal, a cultural landscape outlined in order to support the hegemony of its inhabitants, a liberalist bourgeois class of white, able-bodied men” (P. Smith, p. 419). By silencing those with perceived disabilities (or those with a particular perceived race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, etc.) and deeming them as lesser than ‘normal‘ humans—society is able to continue to deny that ‘being normal‘ is actually a socially constructed myth (Michalko, 2002, p. 69). Phil Smith further pointed out that not so long ago those who committed the war crimes by killing or sterilizing people they had deemed of inferior intelligence in the Nazis T-4 project were consistently given less severe convictions and higher acquittal rates (P. Smith, 2008, p. 421)—revealing, indeed, that as a society we devalue the lost lives of those considered too different from the mythical norm, which we will demonstrate later is a devaluation of human life very much alive in media depiction of autism. Society rarely has ears for the voices or rooms reserved for those with differences who think otherwise, and it rarely realizes that indeed people with differences also have value and critical roles to play in society. The media maintains this gaping silence as well. Society, Michalko has argued, either expects those deemed “abnormal” will “get through” their differences by adapting to the dominant rules, so as to be less noticed, or it expects them to “get out” by removing themselves from view, by being silent and isolated (Michalko, 2002, p. 75); and some experts, doctors, educators, and therapists make a sizable income from attempting to enforce these societal expectations on families.

Therefore we advocate curricular cripistemologies – to embrace the failure of crip students to be normate – to engage the cripistemolgical pedagogy of education

Mitchell, Snyder, and Ware, 14 (David T. Mitchell is the executive director in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has a PhD in Disability Studies at the University of Chicago. Sharon L. Snyder is a researcher in the fields of disability studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. Together they have written and/or edited four books, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), The Encyclopedia of Disability (vol. 5): A History of Disability in Primary Sources (2005), and Cultural Locations of Disability (2006). Their most recent book, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism and Peripheral Embodiment (forthcoming) analyzes crip/queer subcultures as social spaces of differentiation for the construction of non-normative identities. They also founded the disability production film house Brace Yourselves Productions, which has created four internationally award-winning films: Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1995), A World Without Bodies (2002), Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer (2005), and Disability Takes on the Arts (2006). Linda Ware (ware@geneseo.edu) is Associate Professor in Education at the State University of New York in Geneseo, New York, where she teaches disability studies in education, Women’s Studies, and a disability studies writing seminar. She has published widely in leading journals that evidence her interdisciplinary interests in disability—Hypatia, Equity and Excellence, National Women’s Studies Journal, Disability Studies Quarterly, Journal of Teacher Education, Learning Disability Quarterly, Research in Disability Studies, International Journal of Inclusive Education, and the Review of Disability Studies. 2014, ‘“[Every] Child Left Behind” Curricular Cripistemologies and the Crip/Queer Art of Failure’, George Washington University, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/558369)

Odysseus’s experiences on Phaeacia provide an historical example of the insights awaiting those who undertake pedagogical practices informed by curricular cripistemologies. Curricular cripistemologies involve the development of teaching pedagogies that deviate from core teachings by foregrounding crip/queer content as fortunate failure. This pedagogical “incoherence” offers important social options for constructing alternative ethical frameworks for living. An alternative ethical framework results in the creation of useable crip/queer maps that, from a curricular cripistemological standpoint, are otherwise absent from normative teaching approaches. One overarching goal of such content is to provide opportunities for crip/queer embodiments to better speak to the political dilemmas of contemporary experience. The pedagogy of curricular cripistemology depends upon the insights of human interdependency illustrated in the examples above. It is neither a discourse of “specialness” wherein we learn to value disabled people as “human” too, nor tolerate their incapacities when we discover them scraping out an existence alongside others; nor do we find the value of disability guaranteed in overcoming social barriers wherein crip/queer peoples’ incapacities are offset by the compensatory qualities of an otherwise “extraordinary body” (Garland-Thomson 5). Nor do we discover disability as an opportunity for political correctness wherein all bodies are valued for “diversity” in a relativistic equation of multicultural differences. We witness this philosophical tendency even in disability studies, for example, in the universalist cast of arguments that “everyone’s disabled” featured in Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson’s “embodied ontology” (27) and Lennard Davis’s “dismodernism” (273). Relativistic valuations of difference often lead to a process explained by Lee Edelman as neoliberal normativity’s “tenacious will to sameness by endlessly turning the Other into the image of itself” (59). Instead of these various strategies for culturally rehabilitating disabled people’s experiences into recognizable normativities, curricular cripistemologies cultivate ways of realizing failure as an appropriate response to the finite goals of inclusionism. For instance, curricular cripistemologies critically assess how communities place limits on the facilitation of crip/queer people’s participation. Such forms of inclusionism often result in false perceptions of absence as a “chosen” exile and a naturalized condition of non-normative existence. While social spaces superficially appear open to all who wish to navigate them, curricular cripistemologies unveil architectural, aesthetic, and moral spaces of inclusion that, paradoxically, strictly police ways of being different for the bodies they include. Consequently, there is no inclusionism that does not come replete with a strategy of making estranged bodies better fit normative expectations. Paradoxically, then, curricular cripistemologies necessarily promote failure of rehabilitative regimens as a worthy goal. One’s rehab is another’s resistance, particularly when rehab requires classroom pull-outs to perform yet another battery of the MMPI (diagnostic assessment tests). Curricular cripistemologies reject the form-fitting mold of neoliberal normativities as substantively under-performing. Likewise, in The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick A. Ferguson explores the impact of educational diversity strategies of cultural incorporation in public schools. Ferguson identifies late 1960s inclusionist practices as institutional ways of robbing minority students of alternative insights while seeming to embrace them (190). Similarly, inclusionist practices place crip/queer bodies in the compromising position of making normative practices more desirable: of course, they want to be like us, the story of institutional normalization goes, because our ways naturally enshrine that which all human beings desire. In this sense, curricular cripistemologies actively explore alternative modes of navigating the world as crip/queer embodiments. In effect, cripistemological pedagogies actively leave behind the goal of arriving at identities domesticated of their defining differences. Such approaches to the teaching mission force an encounter with the often discomforting content of living interdependently with others. “Every Child Left Behind,” or the Crip/Queer Art of Failure Most indicators point to the fact that inclusionist practices have resulted in new kinds of exclusion as opposed to integration. For example, while students with disabilities make up 13% of student populations, those labeled with intellectual disabilities receive a diploma only 36.6% of the time; 22% drop out. The rest (59%) finish their schooling but receive no diploma and, over the course of their education, spend time with non-disabled peers only in art, gym, or music classes (Smith 4–5). In other words, inclusionism’s primary purpose of molding crip/queer bodies into tolerated neoliberal normativities scores a less than passing mark. This article may be understood, then, as a companion to recent disability studies in education (DSE) efforts regarding the ongoing critique of inclusionist practices that leave all children behind. If one can be included only by passing as non-disabled then much of the value of crip/queer experiences is lost in traditional pedagogical practices. In undertaking this exposure of pedagogical heteronormativities we seek to accomplish three specific tasks: 1) engage disability studies in a dialogue with Judith Halberstam’s important recent work on “the queer art of failure” (147); 2) draw out how queer theorizing of the last decade can be productive for disability studies even though, as Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow point out, a more direct engagement with disability has been slow in coming within queer studies (3); and 3) pursue what may seem, at first, to be a counter-intuitive argument in the best interests of actively promoting a certain kind of failure in the context of curricular cripistemologies. All of these objectives emerge in our recent teacher training projects to more effectively address shortcomings foundational to inclusionist methodologies now operative in most public schools across the U.S. To accomplish the alternative crip/queer goals of curricular cripistemologies we intend to explain why failure is necessary when educational inclusion operates as an exclusionary undertaking in, perhaps, the most entrenched, neoliberal, and common sense institution of all: public education. By neoliberal we mean to define education as part of a newly emergent “tolerance” of multicultural differences. In particular, our critique centers on inclusionism as a neoliberal gloss of diversity initiatives that get some disabled students in the door while leaving the vast majority of crip/queer students behind. Neoliberal educational practices cultivate further funding opportunities by advancing claims of successful normalization rather than drawing upon crip/queer differences as sources of alternative insight. Curricular cripistemologies, in contrast, openly advocate for the productive potential of failing normalization [practices (if they were ever obtainable in the first place) because such goals entail erasing recognitions of the alternative values, practices, and flexible living arrangements particular to crip/queer lives. Whereas the administrative platform of former President George W. Bush pushed for U.S. educational reforms around the promotion of standardized testing to “leave no child behind,” we, in turn, present an argument for recognizing standardization of curricula as ultimately “leaving every child behind,” or at least promoting a certain type of norm-fulfilling child in whose name most students turn up wanting. This curricular abandonment of difference in the name of assimilation occurs primarily through an incapacity (or, perhaps, unwillingness) to adapt the lessons of systemically in-built accommodations and crip/queer content designed to address the range of learning differences comprising today’s classroom demographics. The neoliberal school attempts to resolve the accommodation of disability through downplaying rather than drawing from people’s differences. Through the promotion of active abandonment of crip/queer differences, neoliberal standards guide educational reforms saturated in the questionable values of ableism and normalization. In order to double back on this process, practitioners of curricular cripistemologies undertake critical examinations of “compulsory able-bodiedness” (McRuer 31) and “compulsory able-mindedness” (Kafer 16). Thus, what appears on the surface as disabled students’ incapacity to keep up with their normative peers, turns out to be a purposeful failure to accomplish the unreal (and, perhaps, unrealizable) objectives of normalization. Within the multiplying paradoxes of neoliberal inclusionism, crip success is, paradoxically, to fail to become normate. In The Queer Art of Failure Halberstam advocates a concept of “failure [that] allows us [crip/queer people] to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods” (3). This queer studies inversion of ways to read non-normative lives as failing standards of heteronormative expectations enables crip/queer people to pursue other modes of existence as alternates to sanctioned social roles. These alternative strategies of living pass by largely undetected because educational assessments measure only the degree to which students clear the bar of normalization. By applying this crip/queer deployment of “failure,” curricular cripistemologies undertake pedagogical practices suppressed (or, at least, devalued) by normative neoliberal educational contexts. In adopting a strategically counter-intuitive slogan such as “every student left behind,” then, the critique of inclusionism acknowledges the increasingly disciplinarian nature of public education’s normalizing objectives. Inclusion has taught teachers a dangerous lesson in what appears to be a failed model of adaptation: crip/queer students cannot effectively compete with their non-disabled peers. The pedagogical assessment of the distance that exists between crip/queer and normal students by standardized testing regimes is now part and parcel of the wider cultural abandonment of non-normativity.

The cripistemolgical pedagogy of education is the curriculum of the crip body – fore fronting the discussion of disability in educational spaces is key to challenging the normativity of inclusion that devalues crip bodies

Mitchell, Snyder, and Ware, 14 (David T. Mitchell is the executive director in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has a PhD in Disability Studies at the University of Chicago. Sharon L. Snyder is a researcher in the fields of disability studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. Together they have written and/or edited four books, The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), The Encyclopedia of Disability (vol. 5): A History of Disability in Primary Sources (2005), and Cultural Locations of Disability (2006). Their most recent book, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism and Peripheral Embodiment (forthcoming) analyzes crip/queer subcultures as social spaces of differentiation for the construction of non-normative identities. They also founded the disability production film house Brace Yourselves Productions, which has created four internationally award-winning films: Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1995), A World Without Bodies (2002), Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer (2005), and Disability Takes on the Arts (2006). Linda Ware (ware@geneseo.edu) is Associate Professor in Education at the State University of New York in Geneseo, New York, where she teaches disability studies in education, Women’s Studies, and a disability studies writing seminar. She has published widely in leading journals that evidence her interdisciplinary interests in disability—Hypatia, Equity and Excellence, National Women’s Studies Journal, Disability Studies Quarterly, Journal of Teacher Education, Learning Disability Quarterly, Research in Disability Studies, International Journal of Inclusive Education, and the Review of Disability Studies. 2014, ‘“[Every] Child Left Behind” Curricular Cripistemologies and the Crip/Queer Art of Failure’, George Washington University, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/558369)

For the purposes of developing a curricular cripistemology, the most critical yet least well understood aspect of DSE is the reform of pedagogical content. Why is curricular reform the first step rather than a later evolution in making crip/queer content integral to educational lessons? To address this question, we argue that curricular reform must come first because it changes faculty and students’ facility with crip/queer ways of knowing. Such an approach leaves normative educational goals of disability assimilation behind and espouses the implementation of curricula that forward productive alternatives provided by crip/queer cultures, histories, and art. Even the most normative curriculum offerings come replete with “fantasies of otherness and difference, alternative embodiment, group affiliations, and collective desires” (Halberstam 119). Halberstam’s insight is critical to curricular cripistemologies too, because it identifies crip/queer bodies as integral to education rather than as an auxiliary student population in need of “special help” (i.e., normalization). While the pedagogical projects cited here as the basis for our findings have occurred in diverse venues, we consistently adopt three basic principles critical to deepening curricular cripistemologies as a productive experience: 1. Our approaches can be adapted to any existing educational content because crip/queer experiences exist as a latent realization and our pedagogies are insufficiently honed to analyze them; 2. Training teachers to recognize and adapt pedagogy that draws out crip/queer content works most effectively as an active collaboration with crip/queer practitioners of DSE; 3. The architectural modifications and technological fix-it approaches of today’s inclusionism, while important, continue to perpetuate access to heteronormativity as the most worthy goal and, therefore, cannot overcome deficiencies of content not re-imagined to represent crip/queer experiences and histories. Each of these principles requires a significant level of educational re-invention to implement in an impactful manner. They effectively ask contemporary educators to fail in the implementation of foundational “best practices” long believed central to pedagogical inclusionism. In achieving this failure, curricular cripistemologies fashion a more rigorous educational experience for all students, including crip/queer students. Curricular cripistemologies leave the empty goal of normalizing disabled students behind by shifting the educational emphasis with respect to crip/queer findings in four palpable ways. First, the application of disability content to existing curricular materials asks us to take experiences of embodiment seriously rather than remove ourselves to the more ethereal realm of “ableist rationality.” Second, not requiring the purchase of new materials to address the insufficiencies of current texts and lesson plans avoids the oft-levied charge of expense as an excuse for neglecting the meaningful integration of crip/queer subjects. Third, the open acknowledgement of crip/queer lives as a discrete sociological content area requires us to leave behind certain founding precepts extant in contemporary disability and LGBTQ rights movements—namely, that crip/queer bodies are medical conditions that must be secreted to the greatest extent possible within a neoliberal moment characterized by HIPPA protections (the act of teaching crip/queer students to leave their medical histories behind). And, finally, by recognizing that the flexibilities of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in pedagogy situate crip/queer students at the foundation of our teaching methods rather than as failed exceptions to the rule; or, perhaps better yet, they are failures because they take exception to the rule of heteronormativity as the ne plus ultra of education. Our efforts actively bring crip/queer insights as alternative curricular content to education. A key contribution of DSE has been the development of crip/queer readings performed with respect to “classic” fiction and non-fiction texts. For instance, the queer divinings of Sumerian priests regarding the productivity of harvest cycles based on interpretations of “deformed” calves’ livers and aborted disabled fetuses (Mitchell and Snyder 52); the reliance on disability-based characterizations in Biblical writings, such as blindness, deafness, mobility impairment, madness, while other normative physical descriptors (i.e., height, weight, complexion, hair and eye color, etc.) are comparatively absent (Schipper 4); discussions of Sir Thomas Moore’s crip Utopia (1516), where he imagines social orders predicated on the provision of adequate healthcare for all citizens (Dorn); exploring Darwin’s arguments about “the reappearance of long-lost characters through reversion” in Descent of Man (109) as evidence of crip/queer evolutionary links between human ancestry and animals (Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations, 13); W.E.B. Dubois’s arguments in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) regarding the “talented tenth” and the cognitive disablement of Negro rural folk due to inadequate access to education and racist inopportunity (Lukin 312); the framing logic of the “Eugenic Atlantic” for interpreting Benjy’s castration and institutionalization as a person with Down Syndrome in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations, 168); the origins of Nazi genocide in German psychiatric institutions as documented in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and the documentary film A World without Bodies (2000). This list (which could, of course, be much longer) identifies some crip/queer analyses developed by DSE scholars with respect to often-taught writings in public education. The catalogue is not exhaustive but intended to suggest the trans-historical, cross-cultural, and multi-disciplinary reach of curricular cripistemologies. A more active relationship to latent crip/queer content in traditional texts effectively leaves behind prior practices of pedagogical avoidance (Bolt). Curricular cripistemologies make crip/queer-based content central to, rather than absented from, heteronormative pedagogies. Importantly, the goal of such teaching is not to find “positive” examples of crip/queer differences in cultural materials. Instead, we have a more far-reaching objective: to draw out a complexly nuanced human constellation of meanings for crip/queer lives akin to other marginalized histories. In particular, crip/queer experiences are those marked by what Nirmala Erevelles refers to as the “compounded interstices of multiple differences” (22). In other words, cripistemologies develop foundational experiences of embodiment that cannot be simplified down to the practices, modes of existence, and privileges of a narrowly conceived normality. Differentiating (in) the Non-Normative Classroom In addition to curriculum-first applications, the above projects all attended to the experiential proximity of crip/queer instructors delivering DSE content. Such pedagogical exchanges expose classrooms to crip/queer bodies rarely encountered in positions of educational authority. We do not make a claim for an automatic relationship between crip/queer experiences and the expertise of leading effective DSE classrooms. However, the opportunity to employ crip/queer educators plays a key role in failing the not-so-flexible standardizations of the inclusive classroom. As theorized in the literature of coming out crip/queer as a teacher, classroom discussions about bodies that do not fit into a “minoritizing logic of tolerance” (Sandahl 26) or considered in proximity to institutionally fragile “strained subjectivities” (Brueggemann and Moddelmog 312) play a key role in developing alternative interpretive relations to crip/queer embodiments. This point, however, is made only while acknowledging the serious professional consequences commonly reported by crip/queer teachers in receiving disproportionately negative teaching evaluations and/or denials of tenure/promotion. The delivery of disability content as a crip/queer-identified teacher comes replete with epistemic risks as well as benefits.2 However, our studies consistently find that the participation of crip/queer teachers lends credence (even without direct address) to the reasons why pursuing crip/queer pedagogies prove so socially necessary. While placing crip/queer instructors in front of the classroom enables one kind of educational change, the evolving participation of crip/queer students in the classroom also results in critical insights heretofore only marginally realized. If the overwhelming emphasis of today’s inclusion practices rely on receiving a passing mark as synonymous with passing (i.e., approximations of able-bodiedness), DSE’s anti-normative-based instruction emphasis consistently results in more students coming out as crip/queer during the semester. As Tobin Siebers explains, publically held norms of able-bodiedness require masking the disruptive visibility of disability in order to keep its shameful embodiments out of view (97). This practice proves no less common in the normatively inclusive classroom. The approximation of able-bodiedness treats crip/queer embodiments as a matter of stealth differences disguised at the core of passing’s successful performativity. In other words, mitigation of disability treats crip/queer bodies as levels of deviance to be avoided. However, in the alternative parlance of curricular cripistemologies, the avoidance of this trap requires “leaving every child behind.” Accordingly, our findings show that avoiding the myriad stigmas associated with crip/queer bodies results in less desirable educational outcomes. When students spend time leaving behind crip/queer identifiers, they also find their embodied differences further devalued. In fact, the dictates of the normative classroom draw crip/queer students into complicity with a wider social devaluation by teaching them to downplay the existence of alternative lives. The destructive requirements of leaving behind non-normative modes of being effectively reifies the desirability of heteronormativity at the expense of the crip/queer body’s consignment to “dustbins for disavowal” (Shakespeare 284). One result is that crip/queer bodies become constitutive of heteronormativity while deflecting the pivotal role they are made to play in the advocacy of normativity. Curricular cripistemologies argue that there is too much at stake in this unequal exchange of consecrated normativities and disavowed non-normativities, thus leaving every child behind is necessary to transform existing inflexibilities extant in neoliberal educational standardization. The crip/queer classroom produces a more meaningful system of differential values wherein shame about one’s body as inadequate, medicalized, and pathological (the current terms of normalization within inclusionism) are abandoned. In their place, curricular cripistemologies insert the creative alternatives of interdependency, the politics of atypicality, and a more critical assessment of neoliberalism’s founding in(ex)clusions.3 Consequently, curricular cripistemologies encourage the identification of personal expertise with crip/queer lives as a reservoir of knowledge. When the classroom conversation gives credence to the authority of crip/queer experience, crip/queer student subjectivities gradually sense a thaw in the labor required to keep their differences at bay. Instead, they begin actively cultivating personal experiences with alternative ways of being crip/queer into fertile ground for classroom contributions. The transformation can be profound. Students can be witnessed suddenly operationalizing ways of drawing from the authority of their experience rather than removing a formative aspect of their knowledge from conversation. In this manner crip/queer bodies shift from liabilities to be secreted away into active vectors of insight from which one may engage in classroom models of collective understanding. Through such developments, crip/queer subjectivities become a way of knowing the world; embodiments akin to other forms of discredited knowing such as femininity, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on (yet, importantly, containing all of these differences at the intersection of what makes bodies crip/queer). The non-normatively embodied classroom that emerges within curricular cripistemologies becomes a place in which diversity operates as a nuancing agent of knowledge. This open exploration of subcultural differences in the non-normative classroom provides what David Halperin explains in relation to gay subcultures as “a social space for the construction of different identities, for the elaboration of various types of relationships, for the development of new cultural forms” (67). Likewise, curricular cripistemologies promote the classroom as a place of productive differentiation—both in relation to creating more flexibility within majoritarian norms and within crip/queer subcultures themselves. In Halberstam’s words, the differential space of crip/queer classrooms fails to cohere into a univocal identity of difference. A curricular cripistemology, in other words, leaves no body behind.

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