Disorderly, Dissenting, Disabled

Disorderly, Dissenting, Disabled

Helen Rottier

 

On Thursday, May 2, 2024, in response to widespread protests on college campuses across the US (and internationally), President Biden said, “Dissent must never lead to disorder.”  This sentiment was echoed by university administrators as they scrambled to preserve order in an academic system where an orderly reputation is tremendous currency. Amid mass mobilizations of students and their communities, the establishment of encampments and Popular Universities for Palestine threatened to disorder the usual rhythms of final exams and commencement ceremonies. University leaders were willing to allow expressions of free speech within university guidelines or in designated free speech zones. Of course, guidelines for how and where one can protest often serve to restrict protests that would disrupt “business as usual.” This willfully disregards the purpose of protest – to garner attention, to disrupt, to make it difficult or impossible to ignore ongoing struggles and demands. As many have articulated, a protest with permission is a parade. Disorder is the point. 

Half joking, I posted on social media, “There’s a whole critical disability studies dissertation to be written on ‘disorder’ as pejorative for disrupting the political status quo.” While I already have one dissertation to write, I was grateful for the invitation from Alice Wong to expand upon this thought. I owe so much to people who responded to my post with sources and solidarity, and want to acknowledge the many scholars and activists exploring this topic and adjacent ideas around rejecting normativity. Disorder as disrupting the status quo entangles societal ideals around bodyminds, behavior, power, and compliance. Thus, this essay has been written in circles – dissent as disorder as disability as disruption as dissent – an ouroboros of how we understand disability as political and disorder as maligned. I argue that understanding disorder as dissent and as disability is essential to critical disability praxis. 

Throughout history, dissent and disruption has been attributed to disability in a derogatory manner ; there are countless instances of pathologization across politically disenfranchised communities rising up for justice. Black Americans have been pathologized for escaping or attempting to escape enslavement, for resisting Jim Crow discrimination, for protesting police brutality, and so on (read more in Dr. Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics). Queer and trans identities are pathologized, and gender-affirming care is still distributed or withheld by gatekeepers within the medical-industrial complex. Even the history of hysteria as a diagnosis inflicted upon women who rejected patriarchal standards points to disability and illness as an explanation for unexpected, unacceptable, and dissenting behavior and an excuse to cast aside the people who behave as such. Deeply rooted ableism makes all pathologized subjects disposable and as Talila “TL” Lewis explains, “You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.” It becomes clear, then, that our liberation is bound up in one another’s. If ableism is and can be weaponized against one community, we are all in danger of being labeled “disordered” and facing disposal.

At the same time, disability identity and community is often depoliticized, with ableist assumptions that innocent disabled people cannot or would not organize for political change. For this reason, disability is often not included in ongoing attacks on DEI and “wokeism” in the United States that target minoritized racial and queer identities as overtly and threateningly political. Mainstream disability organizations play along with bland requests for “niceness” towards disabled people, rather than advocating for systemic change or challenging the violence enacted upon pathologized subjects. Disability is described as a bipartisan issue, something everyone can claim to support while creating little actual change. To be politically disabled is to simultaneously uphold and subvert ableist ideas about dissent. Yet, as my dear friend Cavar explains, to embrace our crip/Mad existence is always and already political.

My medical chart lists the diagnosis Bipolar 1 Disorder (among other disorders, syndromes, and conditions). I often omit “disorder” when referring to my identity – I am and have bipolar 1. Mainstream disability studies, disability activism, and neurodiversity tells me that “disorder” is a dirty word. We are not disordered, we are disabled! But what does it mean to embrace disorder as part of our disabled solidarities? What does it mean to actively resist inclusion and to continue to disrupt the status quo?

Truthfully, disability disrupts the political status quo because we live in an ableist society  that fails to anticipate, accept, or adapt to disability. My life is disorderly. I write and work and eat and sleep contrary to expectations, often contrary to my own carefully laid and still disordered plans. My kinship with other disabled people is disorderly, resisting assumptions about what we can offer to one another, valuing interdependence, and rejoicing in our being and becoming over our doing and producing. My emotions are disorderly, certainly disruptive, in the best and worst ways. I feel intensely, cry easily, and break all the rules for acceptable behavior, even when I try my hardest to mask and comply. I fail. I disrupt. 

The world demands participation in heinous systems – late capitalism, white supremacy, oppression, violence – and insists that we dispose of the people who refuse or are unable to comply. We are held to impossible expectations where resistance feels even less possible. It is not easy to dissent. And yet, we must. Subverting, resisting, or failing to adhere to these demands is only a transgression in so much as we are socialized to comply. Our failure to comply is an affirmation of our fragile and precious humanity, just as the noncompliance of our bodyminds is a reminder of the beautiful messiness of life. Our disabled lives are perceived as disorder, perceived as dissent, by those in power. I don’t see any reason, then, to continue participating in the status quo. The order is oppressive; let’s dis it.

About

 

Helen Rottier is a white, queer, mad, disabled scholar. She is currently a PhD candidate in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. She lives with her fiance on the ancestral land of the Ho-Chunk people known as Teejop. 

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