“[…] as soon as one perceives a monster […] one begins to domesticate it, one begins […] to compare it to the norms, to analyze it, consequently to master whatever could be terrifying in this figure”
(Derrida cited in Shildrick, 2009, 121)
Categorising people into specific populations attempts to create order within perceived disorder. Although it is asserted that the cultural category of ‘youth’ is a post-war
concept reflecting changing political circumstances, the scientific/psychological category of ‘adolescence’ was already a widely accepted ‘biological reality’ (Bennett, 2008; Berk, 2010) (see Chapter One). Previous chapters show that attempting to categorise and define youth results in messy discourses of youth.
85 Foucault (1979) explores the process of categorisation. As introduced in Chapter Two, Foucault argues that nineteenth-century moves from punishing to disciplinary power meant not only increased and new forms of power-knowledge about individuals, but also “[g]overnments perceive[ing] that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population”” (Foucault in Rouse, 2007, 101). Rather than emancipate, Foucault maintained that liberal policies concerning constituted populations were a technique of power, leading us further into a surveying society (Rouse, 2007). Shildrick relates these arguments to disability:
“In focusing on singular behaviour, the state-sponsored model of disability promotes individuals failing above any attention to environmental factors. The DLA pack rigidly constructs and controls the definitional parameters of what constitutes disability in such a way that those who need to place themselves within that definition are obliged to take personal responsibility in turning a critical gaze upon their own bodies… power/knowledge relies on self-surveillance”.
(Shildrick, 1997, 51)
Once a label is given, the label can be normalised and made ‘safe’. Categorisation is therefore an attempt to order and control. Foucault (1977) also teaches us, however, that power is not linear, but cyclic: power and knowledge inseparable; nobody outside power- knowledge. Power-knowledge discourses are not imposed top-down but “co-constituted by those who support and resist” (Rouse, 2007, 112). We saw in Chapter Three that one producer of the ‘youth-thing’ was the beauty industry. Yet, we learnt in Chapter One that they are not the sole producer of youth: the media and politicians, for example, create other discourses of youth; and young people resist and define youth in their own terms (Bennett, 2008). Similarly, disabled people are continuing to challenge dominant
discourses of disability (Hughes, 2001). Research question three asks what disability and the lived-experiences of young disabled people can teach us about youth, and research question four wonders what youth and the lived-experiences of young disabled people teach us about disability. We see throughout Section Two that young disabled people, living at the intersection at youth and disability help me to answer both these questions as they reshape discourses of both youth and disability. Labels also make up the artillery of the resistance. Essential to the game of identity politics is an identity to base politics upon. We are left in a paradoxical situation; although there is a politically strategic necessity for the public recognition of identity labels, such categorisation at the same time, leads to dangerous pathologisation (Shildrick, 2009).
86 My own research situated within CDS is illustrative of these debates within British DS. The social model separation of impairment (a physical, sensory or intellectual difference) and disability (societal oppression placed upon disabled people) brought disability into the world of identity politics: making disability an identity on which to base political struggles upon (Davis, 2002). I follow others, however, in stepping away from the British social model approach to research. My postconventionalist approach moves away from grand narratives to rather question what we take as ‘natural’, including disabled/non- disabled binaries. Arguably, this means the loss, or at least dilution, of a ‘disability identity’. Whereas an identity political approach to ‘youth’ and ‘disability’ would focus predominantly on the material barriers young disabled people face in their transition to adulthood, research questions three and four require me to use disability to disrupt discourses of youth, youth to trouble conceptions of disability, and both to help us rethink how we live in the world (see Chapter Two). Critics worry, however, that by deconstructing naturalised assumptions around disability/impairment and exposing the myth of the ‘able-body’, CDS is denying the reality of the oppression of disabled people’s lives and losing its value as a political tool.
A similar poststructuralist turn is visible in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) politics. The 1980s saw horrific losses of life as the AIDs crisis hit. In the face of government apathy and increased homophobic stigmatisation, previously fractioned LGBT groups came together to demand public recognition (Hall, 2003). Queer
juxtaposed fine distinctions made between ‘non-normative’ sexualities and celebrated difference from the status quo, whilst simultaneously attacking the existence of a status quo. This was displayed through a new wave of ‘in your face’ activism; from flamboyant drag acts to public kiss-ins (McRuer, 2006). The word from the street was clear: ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it’. Queer’s infiltration into the academy, however, was not immediate. A decade later queer theorisations began in cultural studies and English departments, adding depth and credence to what was happening on the streets (Hall, 2003). Drawing on feminisms animosity towards the natural status given to gender, queer theory theoretically addressed, questioned and disrupted hetronormativity alongside the flamboyant dressing up it was receiving from activists. Queer became the term that allowed movements to begin working at the site of ontology: sexuality, they argued, was not just a pleasurable bonus, but an everyday part of being human (Case, 1991); diverse sexual desire an intrinsic part of life. Queer attacked natural/unnatural dichotomies, defined boundaries and transgressed categories.
87 Yet, like concerns around CDS, critics worried that queer left LGBT movements with little identity to base identity politics upon (Hall, 2003). Furthermore, by rejecting the categorisation of sexuality, the terms queer and queer theory themselves resisted containment – being utilised outside LGBT politics (Shildrick, 2009). Whereas the aggressive queering of naturalised categories can, on the one hand, result in broad allegiances between oppressed groups, some worried that it was leading to a dilution of the very movements queer came about to enhance. These concerns again relate to CDS. Davis (2002), for example, warns us that when doing intersectional work, it’s all too easy, yet unhelpful, to declare ‘we are all disabled’: women, disabled by a patriarchal society; people of colour, disabled by a racist society; gay people, disabled by a homophobic society. The potential delicate nature of borrowing from other disciplines can be seen in the ‘is youth queer?’ question outlined earlier.
Yet queer has been utilised in other transformative contexts. Sherry (2004) and McRuer (2006) utilise queer theory within CDS. Queer theory has also broadened to include experiences of race, ethnicity and, more recently, embodiment (Shildrick, 2009). Are these expansions further diluting a movement, or playing upon and creating allegiances? Is bringing queer into disability diluting political movements? If so, which one: LGBT movements? Disability movements? Both? Is bringing youth into this tangle of identities unhelpfully complicating things or a reflection of the complexity of life? Is looking at intersections helpful in creating allies and working generally towards a less oppressive society? Or stifling to any number of separate identity movements? Butler argues:
“If the term “queer” is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes, and perhaps also yielded in favour of terms that do that political work more effectively”
(Butler, 1993a, 19)
Butler argues that if queer is about defying boundaries, queer theory itself must refuse to be boxed in. Imperative to queer theory is the discursiveness of the term, not queer theory, but queer theories (Hall, 2003). Furthermore, sexuality is about performativity; it is not necessarily that one is queer, but that one queers; making others think differently (Butler, 1993a). By asking ‘is youth queer?’, I reach out to queer theory to help me
88 consider youth productively within the lifecycle. Youth is often thought of as an
awkward between-time, uncomfortably wedged between child and adult, young people portrayed as risky and rebellious (Youth as Active) or lazy and unproductive (Youth as Passive). Research question one asks: what dangers do young disabled people face if normative discourse remains unquestioned? Over the previous chapters, we have begun to see potential dangers of portrayals of youth to disabled youth. Young people are portrayed as incomplete-adults, a notion it becomes tempting to reject when we consider the normative ableism surrounding adulthood. However, rather than reject the
‘becoming’ status of youth, I propose in this chapter that it could be more productive to play upon this; considering youth not, as it is often portrayed, as a time of deficiency and lacking that precedes adulthood, but as a productive period within the continual
becoming of life. Queer’s rejection of dichotomy and normativity means queering is “an exercise in thinking otherwise” (Shildrick, 2009, 168). I propose that disabled youth can help us in this politicising, queering, cripping, exercise of thinking-otherwise.
Furthermore, as feminists, queer activists and queer theorists have argued, sexuality is “not a potentially pleasurable bonus enjoyed by a pre-established subject” but “an uncertain process that infuses all aspects of the materiality of living in the world […] a core element of […] self-becoming” (Shildrick, 2009, 126). Therefore, if I am to consider youth as a productive time of becoming, it seems essential to include sexuality in this discourse. Queer theory allows me to do this whilst forcing me to question normative/non-normative positionings of sexuality. A focus on disability, traditionally equated with asexuality (Garland-Thomson, 2002), makes this consideration even more imperative (considered further in Chapter Eight).
‘Kids are kids’: Postcolonial theory, disability and developmental
discourse
To avoid perpetuating ableist and adultist stereotypes, disability is a vital component in any theorising of youth. Research question one asks what dangers young disabled people face if normative discourse remains unquestioned. I continue to address this question over Section Two, as we see potential dangers young disabled people face if normative discourses of youth are left unquestioned. However, I propose that by taking seriously disabled youth’s negotiations of adultist and ableist worlds, we can begin to think otherwise about youth and disability; thus, challenging normative discourse. As outlined above, queer theory allows me to consider sexuality within discourses of youth in ways
89 that avoid perpetuating normative stereotypes of sexuality and gender. Of equal use, however, is queer’s “practice and ambition that unsettles, disturbs and challenges normative ways of living” (Goodley, 2011, 34). Normative ideas surrounding age and development are deeply engrained into society (Burman, 2008a). As I utilise theory in analysis over Section Two, we see the importance of theories challenging normativity for my research.
The extent to which discourses of age are naturalised within my own thinking became apparent when I was in discussion with another doctoral student towards the beginning of my research. She was doing research into the provision for children with autism in
schools, and seemed to be taking a fairly ‘social model’ approach; the problem was the school not accommodating the child, not something located within the child. This led me to question why she was focusing particularly on autism, rather than taking a non-
impairment specific stance, looking generally at the in/exclusion of disabled children in school. She spoke about the specific needs of children with autism. In an attempt to ‘problematise’ impairment categories (but with the more likely effect of ‘normalising’ them), I found myself protesting with the expression “but kids are kids”. It is a phrase I have used similarly before, and heard used by other feminist/CDS/activist-y types. To this day, I have never been challenged for it. If, however, I was to say, “but, at the end of the day, gays are just gays”, “Asians are just Asians” or “women are just women”, the response would not be favourable (or, more accurately, it would not go unnoticed, and rightly so). Why is it that I do not question sweeping statements surrounding childhood, yet would jump to contest assumptions about other constituted populations? As
Nodelman (1992, 33) highlights, “even those adults who happen to be feminists tend to talk and think of children of both sexes in terms of metaphors redolent of traditional assumptions about feminine weakness and passivity”. If developmental psychology is one of the “last bastions of modernism in psychology” (Burman, 2008b, 47), childhood is a grand narrative that remains distinctly unquestioned; the implicit Other to the adult self.
Self/Other thinking led me to postcolonial theory. Colonialism is the process of subordinating another group of people in order to perform a takeover. The coloniser rationalises a takeover by constituting the colonised group as Other, distinct from itself. Constituting the group as Other justifies colonisation as a process of reform: civilising the uncivilised, making them like us. Postcolonial theory aims to contest this
90 colonialism. Despite possible connotations of preceding the term ‘colonialism’ with ‘post’, postcolonialism does not mark colonialism as a historical phenomenon. Rather, it is a way of theoretically challenging colonial power and its legacies (Sherry, 2007). Young (2003, 74) writes that postcolonialism “offers challenge rather than solution […] and allows its audiences themselves to interpret its new spaces with relevant meanings of their own”. Research question two asks: how can disability researchers share the stories of young disabled people in order to reposition them as active and politically resilient? Postcolonial theory could be useful in thinking about and challenging normative developmental discourse, and therefore repositioning disabled youth. I therefore now introduce postcolonial theories that have caught my attention, before explaining how they help me rethink youth and disability.
My first tiptoe into postcolonial theory was at a seminar introducing the work of Bhabha. Bhabha’s theories were introduced as one postcolonial attempt to challenge the
continuing occidental view of the “irrational, unreasoned, propertyless, uncivilised class of people” which are required to maintain the ideal vision of “the rational, reasonable, civilised” Western European or North American individual (Goodley, 2011, 38). The seminar had nothing to do with age, developmentalism, youth, or disability, but got me thinking: irrational? Unreasoned? Uncivilised? Thinking back to Chapter One, this sounds like rhetoric surrounding Youth as Active. I came to Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry (1984) and hybridity (1994). Bhabha draws on Foucault’s theories of power- knowledge to argue that a colonial identity is not simply imposed by a coloniser, but arises from the complex relationships between coloniser and colonised (Childs & Williams, 1997). In order to remain dominant, the dominant agent attempts to stagnate power-knowledge relationships. The coloniser wants to ‘fix’ the colonised, keep them known and predictable; an unchanging stereotype of an ignorant, uncivilised and
uneducated Other (Childs & Williams, 1997). Once the colonised peoples are constructed as ‘lesser beings’, the coloniser justifies entering a nation under the pretence of reform, justifying takeover on the moral grounds of cultivating, refining and enlightening the Other population by teaching them the ways of the self (Young, 2003).
For me, Bhabha’s theories resonated with the positioning of disabled youth. We know (and will witness over Section Two), that disabled youth are not Youth as Passive. In Chapter One, I argued that Youth as Passive portrays young people in a pre-social state; given the right conditions they can be shaped to become ‘suitable adult-citizens’ (Wyn &
91 White, 1997). As we saw in Chapter Two, however, although this leaves society with a certain degree of responsibility towards disabled youth, this construct also leads to the less paternalistic and more demonising depiction of lazy, ignorant and apathetic young people. If we employ Bhabha’s theories, we see the coloniser, in this case, those advocating normative adulthood (such as our friend, Mr Reasonable), attempts to stagnate a discourse of disabled Youth as Passive in order to maintain the vision of their normatively embodied, adult selves. Bhabha reasons, however, that justification of reform is a façade. To remain as the dominant agent current power-knowledge
relationships must remain inline; the colonised must remain the static, knowable Other. A ‘successful civilising process’ of making ‘them like us’, would realign power-
knowledge relationships, closing the gap between coloniser and colonised. Colonisers therefore “desire [...] a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite”; (Bhabha, 1984, 85), a concept Bhabha calls ‘mimicry’.
Bhabha uses British missionary efforts in India to exemplify mimicry. Although entering India under the pretence of introducing Christian morals, for the ‘good of the Indian people’, only a partial diffusion of these morals was safe for the British colonial mission. If a complete reform took place the self and Other would no longer be distinct, there would be no Other by which to define the self, and no longer a justification for
colonisation. A partial reform, however, results in mimicry of Christian values, whilst still ensuring a safe distance remains between the self and Other. In other words, although there is a façade of reform, civilising the uncivilised, making them like us, the coloniser must ensure a gap remains between the two parties: to ensure the self is upheld, the Other must remain distinct. Furthermore, whilst the colonised fails to meet colonial ideals, there remains legitimacy (in the colonisers’ eyes) to repeated colonisation, discipline and reform – the Other still needs to be civilised.
We saw in Chapter Two that disabled youth are considered outside normative discourse of youth as becoming-adult. Considered ‘at risk’ of not conforming to adulthood
normativity, they are subject to intervention which aims to carve them into suitable adult citizens (Kelly, 2006). Colonisation, however, depends on its own strategic failure. I argued in Chapter Two that normative adulthood benefits those already in power, at the expense of those excluded from it. To stabilise and justify the existence of a normative adulthood, young and disabled people are scapegoated as burdensome; support and assistance which would enable them to become the independent, economically
92 productive citizen of normative adulthood removed. For them to embody normative adulthood would threaten those already in power. For ableist adulthood to retain its pedestalled position, the gap between self/Other, disabled youth/non-disabled adult, must remain distinct. The attempt is to root disabled youth in a discourse of passivity. I argue through research question two (how can disability researchers share the stories of young disabled people in order to reposition them as active and politically resilient?), that the construct of disabled Youth as Passive must be challenged. We see over Chapters Seven