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Abstract
Disability scholars have increasingly worked to imagine the field beyond its historic focus on white subjects. This dissertation investigates how such interventions came to be necessary, how disability came to be white. I contextualize the whiteness of US disability studies as it emerges from the whiteness of disability as a category in the US. I argue that disability as a category comes to overwhelmingly describe white subjects by both excluding and relying on blackness. I specifically foreground how racist ideas of Black womanhood structure dominant ideas of disability. Disability, then, is not an exceptional or emerging identity. Rather, disability operates as part of US anti-blackness as white subjects define themselves through blackness as a fungible site of meaning. I use Black feminist frameworks and Black women’s literature as theoretical touchstones to detail disability’s dependence on blackness from American post-WWII ‘problem films,’ to rhetoric used by the disability rights movement, through to disability analytics.
The first half of the project investigates how disability in the US became a category of whiteness. Chapter one argues that the erasure of Black people’s disabilities subtends white disability prior to the emergence of the disability rights movement. I analyze how the 1949 film Home of the Brave sets up blackness and disability as mutually exclusive against the backdrop of the Pacific War. The second chapter argues that able-bodiedness and normalcy are also racialized and gendered categories. Able-bodiedness is denied Black women like Caster Semenya and the protagonist of Thylias Moss’ neo-slave narrative-in-verse Slave Moth (2004). These women’s abilities are rendered abnormal to justify their medical exploitation and to uphold disability as a white category.
The second half of the dissertation investigates how disability’s conceptual reliance on blackness inflects US disability scholarship, particularly scholars’ focus on identity and representation. The third chapter investigates how critiques of disability metaphor, cripping up, and narrative prosthesis mobilize disability’s categorical reliance on blackness to delineate between symbolic references to disability and real, white, disabled subjects. The final chapter investigates more recent attempts to remedy the whiteness of disability by expanding the scholarly scope of disability to include chronic illness. I use Bettina Judd’s poetry collection Patient. (2014) to trouble this turn, revealing how such scholarship often falls into the trap of producing white disability by exploiting Black women as sites of meaning for disability. The dissertation concludes with a coda that proposes a renewed focus on scholarly practices and methods, rather than disabled subjects as objects of analysis. Robin Coste Lewis’ long poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus” (2015) suggests how such a caring methodological approach to injured Black women might be taken up by disability scholars.
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