Andrea Smith's (2006) essay, in discussing "Three Pillars of White Supremacy," provides useful methodological guidance in attending to how specific axes of oppression are both maintained and disrupted. In identifying distinct logics of oppression, she also discusses the possibilities for coalitions on the basis of shared complicity in the victimization of others.
Smith's piece in some ways answers a question I posed a few weeks ago in class when we talked about Visweswaran's (1994) book. In thinking through what "critical regionalism" with the "coalitional subject" looks like, I wanted to know how to avoid replicating patterns of patriarchy within coalitions. This question came up again for me when reading Clifford's (2001) article on how articulation theory could be used for Native Pacific Cultural Studies.
Smith's answer is that coalitions can and should be based on "where we are complicit in the victimization of others" (2006, p. 69). In this way, groups that have been victimized and/or marginalized must also be sensitive to where the logics of white supremacy have been internalized.
However, Smith goes on to suggest that there might be additional logics of white supremacy. Identifying disability as a part of the matrix of domination (Hill Collins, 1999) with its own distinct logics of oppression, but very much related to other axes of oppression, could be an important step in practicing feminist methodologies, at least in my own work.
Douglas Baynton (2001) argues that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, disability was used as justification to maintain inequality for women, people of color, and immigrants. While his article reveals the central role of disability within history, it also allows us to think about the ways in which disabled embodiment (or em-mind-ment) remains underutilized as an analytical lens outside disability studies. Indeed, we might better speak of "compulsory ablebodiedness" (McRuer, 2006) instead of disability to name the dominant logic that is so entwined with white supremacist heteronormativity.
Having made this claim, however, I need to continue to take seriously the ways that disability studies, on the whole, has not taken intersectionality seriously, as theory or methodology. Chris Bell (2006) has stated that disability studies should call itself White Disability Studies in an effort to be accountable to the very fact that disability studies has largely ignored and marginalized people of color, in addition to queer studies.
Smith's piece reminds me that in understanding disability as a part of the matrix of domination, disability scholars must attend to the ways in which disability has both been used as justification for inequality, even as disability studies has been complicit in contributing to the victimization of other groups through the logics of white supremacy laid out. Also, though, thinking through the possibility for coalitions is important. The best example that I know of is a group called People In Search of Safe Accessible Restrooms (PISSAR). Chess et al (2008) discuss this coalition in which queer, genderqueer and disabled people united around bathroom politics. The distinct but connected concerns that queer, genderqueer and disabled people express demonstrates the possibilities for liberatory praxis.
Bell, C. (2006). Introducing white disability studies: A modest proposal. The disability studies reader, 275-282.
Chess, S., Kafer, A., Quizar, J., & Richardson, M.U. (2008). In That's revolting! Queer strategies for resisting assimilation (M. B. Sycamore, Ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press.
Hill Collins, P. (1999). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.
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