Lex's post on Stoler

This week, Ann Laura Stoler gives us a methodological tool by asking questions that seek to disrupt understandings of the current "ecology of belief" (2006, 130). Stoler, in rethinking conceptualizations of current imperial conditions, suggests that the concern should not be with using the term" empire" correctly, but HOW it matters that empire has been relegated to a temporal period long past. I take both Stoler's methodological and substantive arguments to be useful for my own work within disability studies.

In asking how historical material and representational formations of empire depend on a caricature of empire, I can also use Stoler's work to examine how disability was and continues to be woven into imperial formations, as well as ask the question, why have current understandings and valences within disability been taken up, and others have not? For instance, exploring the differences between the "British model" of disability studies vs. the "American model" requires me to know something about the differences and similarities between Great Britain and America, but it also requires that I not fall into the trap of taking a myopic view of empire, as Stoler notes. Instead, by understanding America not as the exception to empire but an instance of empire that operates through its identity as a "state of exception," I can expand the rubric of imperial formations to question other limits of knowledge.

Stoler also offers the methodological tool of exploring the "scaled genres of rule" which comprise empire. Indeed, her use of the terms "weight" and "currency" ask us to play with scales, to reconsider previously unweighted objects or concepts against others that have not been previously compared. In "reassessing the limits of what has been assumed" (Stoler, 2006, 146), we can seek explanations of social life that are in part driven by what matters, what is resonant. 

This tool allows me to get at a question that drives my work: HOW does it matter that disability has historically (and arguably currently) been seen as primarily "bad and sad"? How do I get at the "everyday" cultural valences that disability holds for folks, even while they do not claim to hold any views about disability? I can look to the places where disability quite literally begins: prenatal genetic testing, for example. By looking at both the commercial components of this new technology as well as clinical interactions between parents and physicians, I can "weigh" the individual comments against (and with) the larger industry-driven landscape. I need to be able to take both into account to better describe how cultural meanings about disability are both transmitted and produced within these contexts.

Taking seriously the development of various strands of disability rights, culture and studies while also contending with the rationalities that exist in tandem with imperial formations allows me to begin to articulate both a rationale for my project as well as a methodological tool.

In class, I'd like to talk about the relationship between Stoler's piece and Ferguson's article. Are they doing the same thing? How and where do they clash? Who was more convincing? How does diaspora relate to both of these pieces?