Embodied Antinomies: Feminist Disability Studies Meets Third World Feminism

Abstract

Since September II, 2001, it has been very difficult to engage issues of social difference because the obsessive focus on the Self in the United States has obscured the violence against the Other that has continued in its wake—first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now in a number of other countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as in the United States. I have found that many of my left-leaning colleagues and students, while eager to discuss the impact of this violence from the rather limited local standpoint of a specifically US-focused progressive liberalism, are, on the other hand, usually reticent, sometimes even hostile, and more often than not uninformed when urged to expand the locus of their discussions to engage the global contexts where much of this violence is both enacted and materialized. Part of the problem is that, to many of them, the local and the global exist as distinct and different entities such that any attempts to articulate analyses that foreground their commonalities run the risk of being viewed as metanarratives that are thought to consume all difference. In this chapter, I expose the dangers of this cavalier dismissal of the global. Rather, I invoke the global to foreground the complex ways in which the lived experiences of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in the national context of the United States exist in dialectical tension with similar lived experiences of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in global contexts.

Refugees are the rest of the world …

Those left to defend their human decency

Against conditions the rich keep their animals from …

Those who are forgotten in mean times

“Of Refuge and Language,” Suheir Hammad