Global Corporealities

Abstract

In this chapter, the queering of corporeality in the mode of disability will be continued primarily through using the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which will be brought together with some crucial elements of feminist theory, and placed in critical conjunction with the context of globalisation. In previous chapters, a number of illuminating pairings have already emerged from those dimensions, but in focusing on the context of the traditional West — or in global terms, the socio-economic North — little has been said of how the problematic of disability, subjectivity, and sexuality plays out in the wider world. In part I have exercised a cautious reticence against claiming too much, but given our increasing awareness of the influence of global forces on all aspects of life, it makes sense to at least offer some more extensive speculations. My starting suggestion is that if the more usual approach to the nexus of disability — usually traced through personal and local socio-political experience — is opened up to take account of global interconnectivity then a very different form of analysis is needed. In the face of a limited but consistent literature that takes a traditionally materialist and pragmatic outlook on the intersection of disability and global politics,¹ I shall instead turn once more to the insights offered by Deleuze and Guattari, and by postconventional feminism, in order to expose the conventional approach to a theorisation that more fully accounts for heterogeneity and differential embodiment.

This chapter is based in part on work done together with Janet Price and published as ‘Deleuzian Connections and Queer Corporealities: Shrinking Global Disability’ (Shildrick and Price 2005–2006). The ideas arose from extended discussion and writing over several months that refined an original joint plenary presentation to the Women’s Studies Association annual conference in 2004, but the form given here is my own development of that collaboration. It is impossible to quantify Janet Price’s contribution to the wider process;suffice it to say that any acknowledgement would be insufficient.