Queer Pleasures

Abstract

As a fairly recent arena of academic growth, critical disability studies is committed to a questioning of the doxa of disability activism and scholarship in the interests of taking full advantage of the theoretical developments that have invigorated other areas of enquiry such as feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and even critical legal theory. One part of my own project is to explore the possibilities of a Deleuzian approach, although there is as yet limited overlap between the material concerns of Deleuzian scholars and theorists of disability. What is by now well-established and growing, however, is a turn by many of the latter to the possibilities and insights of queer theory as an effective methodology for opening up a better understanding both of the relation between bodies, and of the constitution of corporeality in general.¹ The binary of disabled and non-disabled undoubtedly lingers within that approach, but it is increasingly destabilised by the intimation that all forms of embodiment are subject to reconstruction, extension, and transformation, regardless of the conventionally identified vectors of change and decay. What is more interesting, however, is the scope for a further productive move. The strong take up of queer theory within disability studies will lead, I suggest, to a reappraisal of the significance of Deleuzian notions like ‘desiring machine’, ‘assemblage’, and ‘body without organs’, all terms that have the potential to radically disrupt the devaluation of the disabled body.