Abstract
This article explores the human through critical disability studies and the theories of Rosi Braidotti. We ask: What does it mean to be human in the twenty-first century and in what ways does disability enhance these meanings? In addressing this question we seek to work through entangled connections of nature, society, technology, medicine, biopower and culture to consider the extent to which the human might be an outdated phenomenon, replaced by Braidotti’s posthuman condition. We then introduce disability as a political category, an identity and a moment of relational ethics. Critical disability studies, we argue, are perfectly at ease with the posthuman because disability has always contravened the traditional classical humanist conception of what it means to be human. Disability also invites a critical analysis of the posthuman. We examine the ways in which disability and posthuman work together, enhancing and complicating one another in ways that raise important questions about the kinds of life and death we value. We consider three of Braidotti’s themes in relation to disability: (i) Life beyond the self: Rethinking enhancement; (ii) Life beyond the species: Rethinking animal; (iii) Life beyond death: Rethinking death. We conclude by advocating a posthuman disability studies that responds directly to contemporary complexities around the human while celebrating moments of difference and disruption.
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Notes
Useful overviews of the emerging field of critical disability studies (and related themes and debates) are provided by Meekosha and Shuttleworth (2009), Shildrick (2012) and Goodley (2013).
Indeed, this article emerges in part from our discussions with research partners of organisations of disabled people and their allies who are involved in a current Economic and Social Research Council funded project ‘Big Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities and civil society, (ES.K004883.1)’, www.bigsocietydis.wordpress.com/. One key question to emerge for us is: What kind of idealised citizen lies at the heart of current policymaking by the British government? Clearly questions about citizenship parallel debates about the human.
The Academy of Medical Sciences (2012) publication ‘Human enhancement and the future of work’, reported on a joint workshop hosted by the Academy of Medical Sciences, the British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society. The disability scholar Jackie Leach Skully is referred to in the report as raising a number of ethical dis/ability issues in relation to the use of enhancement technologies.
An example of a disability assemblage – spanning children and parents – is beautifully but also tragically captured by the Blogspot, www.mydaftlife.wordpress.com.
RES-062-23-1138 Economic and Social Research Grant, ‘Does Every Child Matter, Post-Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods’. http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/res-062-23-1138/read.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the anonymous reviewers for the generosity of time they gave to responding to our original paper with constructive and hard-hitting critique. Thanks also to Isabel Waidner for support with the rewriting of the paper.
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Goodley, D., Lawthom, R. & Runswick Cole, K. Posthuman disability studies. Subjectivity 7, 342–361 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.15