Possibilities of queer and disability theories

Yesterday I started reading Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory, a book I’m enjoying quite a bit. McRuer presents a relatively nuanced set of arguments that try to work through the connections between disability and queerness in contemporary American culture. The book covers a wide range of issues and topics, and it’s impressive the way that McRuer is capable of moving across such a range of topics.

His introduction is especially intriguing for its efforts at unpacking the relationship between neoliberal policies about workers (the realm of political economy) and representations of “flexible” bodies (following Emily Martin’s excellent book of medical anthropology, Flexible Bodies) that are by definition expected to be heterosexual and able-bodied.

The question I return to, and the one I will return to in more detail, deals with the physical body in McRuer’s work. It’s not as if that issue is absent from his thinking. However, I return to a question that I’ve been working through recently with other work, most particularly that of artist and writer David Wojnarowicz: the question of physical pain. I’m turning to McRuer’s fifth chapter, where he discusses the work of writer and performance artist Bob Flanagan (The Pain Journal), in hopes that it reveals some of the ways to think through the complications of the queer-disability connection.

My general perception (this is a gross generalization) is that queer theory tends to thrive on the celebration of pleasure. Disability studies might as well, but critics such as Tobin Siebers (in “From Social Construction to the New Realism of the Body”) have pointed to the importance of dealing with the physical pain present in some disabled lives, pain that might run at cross purposes with pleasure. Flanagan’s performance might be a way of confronting pain but also linking it to pleasure, but that isn’t possible for each and every disabled life.

In the same article, Siebers links pain and the material body to the need for assistance, a need that is a fact for many disabled bodies (while the supposed lack of assistance–or the fiction that no assistance is needed–is required of the fiction of able-bodiedness) and that is something that McRuer wants to stress in order to connect queer and disabled lives: that queer and disabled lives might share a habit of noncompliance, but also organized around community connections rather than the more heteronormative couple system.