Disability and Domestic Citizenship: Voice, Gender, and the Making of the Subject
The figures of the diseased and the disabled have been at the center of analysis in conceptualizing certain postmodern forms of sociality. Paul Rabinow (1996) formulated the concept of biosociality to suggest the emergence of associational communities around particular biological conditions. Many others (Ginsburg 1989;Rapp 1999) have theorized that major transformations in biotechnology have led to new forms of community in which people with disability or impairment have formed associational relationships in order to act in civil society and to influence, on the one hand, the decisions of the state, and on the other, the course of scientific research. But while such political mobilizations are extremely important in changing the environment of the disabled, they locate the subject positions of the disabled firmly within a liberal political regime. Issues of sexuality and reproduction can only be addressed in such a framework in terms of the legal rights guaranteed by the state to its community of citizens. As Anne Finger (1992: 9) states the issue, “It is easier for us to talk about—and formulate— strategies of discrimination in employment, education, and housing, than talk about our exclusion from sexuality and reproduction.”
In this essay, we propose to analyze notions of impairment and disability through a reconfiguration of the domestic sphere, offering ethnographic vignettes from the fieldwork we have conducted in different kinds of locations in Delhi. We hope to show that the domestic, once displaced from its conventionally assumed reference to the private, becomes a sphere in which a different kind of citizenship may be enacted—a citizenship based not on the formation of associational communities, but on notions of publics constituted through voice. The domestic sphere we present, then, is always on the verge of becoming the political. A focus on kinship not as the extension of familial relations into community, but as the sphere in which the family has to confront ways of disciplining and containing contagion and stigma yields startling revelations about disability and impairment as located not in (or only in) individual bodies, but rather as “off” the body of the individual and within a network of social and kin relationships.
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Notes
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the stimulating comments made by Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler on an initial draft of this essay that helped both to clarify our thoughts and carry some of them further. The editorial board of Public Culture provided a close reading of the paper that is deeply appreciated. We also want to thank Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta for many conversations on the issues discussed in the essay.
- Translation from Hindi here and in other quoted passages by Renu Addlakha. Quotation marks indicate words originally spoken in English.