Debility challenges exceptionalization and pathologization of disability, highlighting ongoingness and structural nature of debilitation.
Debilitation is central to colonial rule, encompassing destruction of infrastructure, healthcare, perpetuating oppressive systems.
Debility disrupts disabled/non-disabled binary by recognizing invisible debility and fluid nature of disability.
Debility sheds light on ongoing structural impact of violence, emphasizing societal erasure and systems that profit from it.
Deep dives
Debility and Disability as Codependent Modalities
Debility and disability are codependent frames that are in relation to each other. Disability is often anchored in whiteness, imperialism, and official state recognition. Debility challenges the exceptionalization and pathologization of disability by emphasizing the ongoingness and structural nature of debilitation. Debility recognizes that there is no pure debility or pure capacity and that bodies constantly move in and out of these realms. Debility highlights the intersectional and assemblage nature of bodily conditions and challenges binary categorizations. It also reveals how debility is profitable for capitalism and how disability can erase structural debilitation, perpetuating oppressive systems.
The Productiveness of Debility in Imperialism
Debilitation is central to colonial rule and is a product of imperialism. It goes beyond individual identification with disability and encompasses the structural processes and conditions that create ongoing debilitation. The production of debility includes the destruction of infrastructure, healthcare systems, food supply chains, and other forms of harm caused by colonization. Debility reflects the endemic and everyday violence perpetuated by imperialism. Understanding debility helps shed light on the ways in which capitalism benefits from the erasure of structural debilitation.
Debility Challenges Binary Understanding of Disability
Debility disrupts the disabled/non-disabled binary by emphasizing the relationship between disability and debility. It recognizes that disability is not always visible and that many individuals experience debility without being officially recognized as disabled. Debility highlights the tension between seeking accommodation within oppressive systems and understanding the structural debilitation caused by those systems. It pushes for a recognition that no one is entirely able-bodied and that disability is an ongoing and fluid experience.
Debility Reveals the Hidden Realities of Disabling Events
Debility helps us understand the ongoingness and structural impact of disabling events. It highlights the often overlooked consequences and aftermath of violence, such as the shootings in Gaza, which resulted in many lower limb injuries that went unreported. Debility challenges the narrow focus on death as a consequence of violence, emphasizing the widespread disablement and ongoing debilitation caused by structural and geopolitical forces. It encourages us to critically examine the erasure of debility and the societal systems that profit from it.
Debility as an Analytical Framework
Debility, as explored in the book, offers a new way to understand and analyze disability. It shifts the focus from positing disability as a collective experience of aging and inevitable frailty to understanding debility as a tactical practice deployed to create and maintain populations in a state of precarity.
The Normalization of Overworking in Academia
The tenure track and academic work in general often leads to the normalization of overworking. The pressure to constantly produce and the lack of boundaries between work and personal life can take a toll on one's health.
The Physical Toll of Academic Work
Academic work is not purely intellectual or detached from physical effects. The long hours spent sitting at desks, staring at screens, and the stress that comes with it can have significant physical and mental health implications.
Debility and Collective Experience
Debility offers a way to think about disability as a collective experience rather than an individual category. It emphasizes the uneven distribution of debilitation and the way it is deployed to control and maintain populations in precarious conditions.
This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on November 21st 2022. We are re-releasing it today, alongside a new transcript of the conversation, because in the past few weeks we have found Jasbir’s work tremendously useful in understanding the enormity of what’s happening in Gaza.
Episode description: Beatrice and Jules speak with Jasbir Puar about the violent global effects of settler colonialism and how they shape our understanding of what we mean by “disability” and “debility.” We discuss how colonial occupation itself can be understood through a theory of debility, colonial constructions of who is labeled a "terrorist," and some of the most important insights from Jasbir's 2017 book The Right to Maim.
Transcript:
https://www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/jasbir-puar-body-politics
Find our book Health Communism here: www.versobooks.com/books/4081-health-communism
Pre-order Jules' new book here:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/733966/a-short-history-of-trans-misogyny-by-jules-gill-peterson/
Death Panel merch here (patrons get a discount code): www.deathpanel.net/merch
As always, support Death Panel at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod
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