Wow, what an incomprehensible title!
So, I'm starting a new job within an agency that offers individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) and 'mental retardation' (MR) which each have a degree of functionality levels. The whole thing is very medical, even though the institutions (incorporated non-profits) are funded through (partially) public education budgets. I'll be assisting children (11-22), since this is the age to which free care is provided. The law which allows these institutions to service concerns free, compulsory education up until 21. Therefore, when a child is deemed 'mentally retarded [a medical term whose signification has become so pejorative that the DSM-V, released next year, is changing the term to 'intellectual disability']' a set of public institutional representatives (the committee on special education, the school board, the school psychologist) meet with the parents of the child 'in need' and agree to a legally binding contract creating an IEP (individual education program) regarding the degree of care will be necessary for the child's legally obligated educational/developmental needs. Therefore, since both medicaid and the school funding are at stake for the benefit of the child, there sometimes becomes a conflict of interest between what the school budget will allow and what the child needs in regard to its development.
As a worker in this industry, I'm learning everyday, more and more, I must become an advocate for people with DD, since their acceptance in society isn't too high. Of course, there's the default Christian guilt everyone barely believes in to pity the disabled, but it has no consideration of their social circumstances; their pity concerns itself with how hard that individual's life is personally because of its difference from 'everything normal, natural and expected' that they fear. They cannot empathize with those with DD because, as able-bodied minds, their 'ability to reason' is superb and incommensurable. With such difference, dominant culture's resistance to considering disability as a natural part of life and, as such, that integration (even with dependency and care needs) would not be so impossible. People are literally afraid of persons with DD when we take them on day trips to public areas. Most stare, I had a co-worker in high school tell me her secret, that she became a little sick when seeing them in the store. I could never understand her perspective, because I accepted them as people, and had worked with a few people with DD when in martial arts. Regardless of their function level, they are people with interests, skills, personalities, subjectivities, and perspectives that are both socially relatable and psychologically, freeing-ly different. They could perceive the world in ways I couldn't, and I always appreciated the ability to be exposed to a multitude of perspectives.
Academically, I will begin writing on the inclusion of DD into the 'canon' of disability, queer, feminist, and even fat theory. This will eventually lead into a broader range of inclusion that I will hope to accomplish surrounding mental illness and the intersection of all three (developmental, intellectual, physical disability) to show the multiplicity of phenomenological experiences extremely embodied within an othered subjectivity. Colonized by medicalization, and yet reliant on care ethics and therefore medical aid, the relationship that these individuals have to the institutions they interact with and rely on are complex and arguably problematic at times. My goal in problematizing the system that cares for these individuals is in line with the goal of these institutions: the empowerment of this social group that has faced oppression while getting them the help required for them to live happily, or even self-sufficiently if possible. By including mental illness in my analysis we will see the intersection of different medical gazes, which are of course industrial, such as psycho-pharmacology, neurophysiology, psychology, psychiatry, occupational therapy, speech pathology, and the entire major medical industrial complex with its investigation of the body in every objectifying manner. Understanding how perception works has been a predisposition of continental philosophy since the beginning, of queer theory, poststructuralism and 'postmodern' feminism with Freud and Lacan, critical race theory and postcolonial theory with Franz Fenon in The Psychology of Oppression, existentialism, and even the other other other side of the pond: Anglo-American Philosophy! AHHHHHHHHHHH
I propose an idea only rumored by philosophy nerds that continental philosophy should at least communicate with philosophy of mind, and therefore the whole lot of analytic philosophers. Though both hold strict to their linguistic differences, even on topics of linguistics, there can be an interesting clash and resistance to motivate writing on technology, social politics, and the mind. The psyche. Ego. Self. self. 'I'. whatever we decide to call it, we can all talk about the mind and, at minimum, shut Steven Pinker the fuck up about his ignorance on feminist and queer realities. Read "How the Mind Works," the second half to see what I'm alluding to, but read the first half if you want to learn about computational theory of the mind. And, where they lack any notion of consciousness, ergo ego, or "qualia" as they call emotional experiences, I believe there could be a more neurological approach to psychoanalysis' freedom to understand desire before 'natural, genetic behavioral pre-dispositions.' This would mean that social constructionist theory would actually get a point back at the science and medical community for their lack of observance in the effects, funding, or purpose of their research. To be against the agenda that science doesn't even know it has, aside from Alfred Nobel who was so horrified at what he did in creating dynamite, does not mean I hold an anti-science view. I am critical in the association it has with capitalism, industrialism, and power, but within itself (though as a means of violence in methodology, ethic as objectifying and believing itself to be removed from a subjective experience, even of the the facts they study. When I say that science or medicine has colonized the bodies of every oppressed group in history I do not believe it was intentional on the independent thinking of medical professionals throughout history. Power operates across vast spectrums to totalize (or attempt to totalize) its structure; medicine, government, popular and folk media all had equal share in the production of constructions of bodies as they saw fit to oppress because power was on their side.
Over the next few months, I will be reading and even deconstructing at times Foucault's History of Madness while learning about and interacting with people with DD on a daily basis. This auto-ethnographic approach to seeing 'non-institutionalized madness' (since most people mistaken call them 'crazy' and not having impairments or disabilities) will allow me to include Foucault's psycho-social analysis of power and institutions in the framework of a nearly privatized industry that regulated the bodies of a highly othered and forgotten group. Yet, in the potential spirit of queer optimism, the consequence of trendy-problematizing (overcritique without often a social alternative, often justifiably because an alternative is unthinkable given the current contingencies of power structures) leaves the very real, practical, embodied people in need of dependent care simply in bad places without real change. The method of change that these connected industries are susceptible to are not of simple 'social work' methods of patching up existing wounds constantly re-opened by the power structure we cannot escape. It doesn't recognize structural roots to the issues they solve reactively, and since the pervasiveness of institutions-- of power-- must be opposed while trying to alleviate the inevitable result of current power difference, simple psychology will also not suffice under a financial system that only treats the petty psychological illness of those who can afford it. My goal will be to explore what 'neurotypical' aka 'normal' and 'natural' are in terms of phenomenological, psychological and anthropological/sociological lenses.
On an unrelated, fragmentary note check out the new pre-performance audio of the gypsy caravan's "broken glass"
Coming Soon:
More on Neofuturism, apocalypse myth that dominates 'tea party' politics and the 'history' channel, and projections of present fear by constructing totalalized dystopias vs. critical resistance .
Histiography of 'mental retardation' and developmental disability: how people with DD experience a unique and complex, intersectiional oppression in fields such as sexuality, will in regards to resistance or political awareness at all, race, class, gender and of course physical disability.
Friendship: Aristotle's happiness for other's happiness, the notion of homosocial corporate spaces pre-and-post queer theory, membership, and power at the level of male bonding qua masculinity constructing gender/sexuality/racially exclusive spaces.
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