Abstract
S.K. Sabada’s autofictive essay, “Troubling Cure and Cripping Futurity: Queering Narratives of Diabetes” positions diabetes identity against the theory of the Symbolic Child, carving out a place for diabetics to grow sideways. In settings like diabetes camp and charity fundraising events, Sabada identifies oppressive forces that they felt constrained their upward development as a human. They complicate diabetes identity by describing what it would look like to desire a diabetic body and diabetes embodiment. To end their chapter, Sabada calls readers from all backgrounds to “examine collective diabetic embodiment as a relatively untapped resource of knowledge and culture, [and] to fully embrace our power as disabled people capable of destabilizing ableism.”
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Notes
- 1.
JDRF, formally an acronym for Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, is a nonprofit organization that claims to provide research and support to the type one diabetes community but mainly just works to serve the medical establishment. I consider JDRF to be a detriment to collective building among diabetics namely because it operates from the medical/tragedy model of disability, situating diabetes as a condition that needs to be contained and cured, when this is not what most diabetics, particularly within the United States, have been asking for. Namely, what diabetics, myself included, actively advocate for, are financial and medical support.
- 2.
In my own experience at a camp that was first only funded but later owned and operated by the JDRF, while junior counsellors and senior counsellors were often diabetics who were former campers at the same camp, those involved in the management of non-cabin spaces, like the arts, water, climbing and horseback riding programs were largely not diabetic. Nobody on the medical staff was diabetic.
- 3.
I reclaim the language of fatness here, not in an attempt to echo the fat positivity movement, because I do not recognize being fat positive as doing enough to dismantle fatphobia and especially how fatphobia relates to ableism. I situate fatness alongside the ways I situate disability: we cannot construct or identify fat embodiment as being a counter-construction of non-fat embodiment. Fatness, beyond its physical manifestation, is a political orientation and one that I use here to resist fatphobia as it relates to this discussion on diabetes.
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Sabada, S. (2021). Troubling Cure and Cripping Futurity: Queering Narratives of Diabetes. In: Frazer, B.C., Walker, H.R. (eds) (Un)doing Diabetes: Representation, Disability, Culture. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83110-3_20
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