Wounded/monstrous/abject: a critique of the disabled body in the sociological imaginary

Contemporary sociology has made sense of bodily difference by mobilising a number of tropes. ‘Wounded’ (or vulnerable), ‘monstrous’ and ‘abject’ stand out by virtue of their ubiquity though they do not exhaust the repertoire. These categories highlight the conceptual tensions between the sociology of the body and Disability Studies. In this paper, I will examine the value of these tropes to Disability Studies and suggest that while they can help to clarify the processes that bring about the misrecognition of disabled people, understanding the nature and scope of the lives of disabled people in modernity requires a more embodied language rather than one that has been generated from a sociological imaginary that is strongly influenced by a non‐disabled subject position in which repulsion for the other – which one must become – is never fully resolved. Disability has had little impact on sociological theories of the body and when sociology ventures into disability it has tended to conflate it with an ontology of human frailty or gloss it with tropes that may be instructive about the generic or gendered modernist structure of exclusion but it tells us little about the specific forms of invalidation experienced by disabled people.     

A strange tale

We are going through such challenging times that dealing with reality is sometimes easier through fiction. Therefore, we tell the tale of a faraway land where poor women — mostly black — who make a living as domestic servants are particularly impacted by the COVID‐19 pandemic. Their abject bodies are part of a form of necropolitics that separates those who must live from those who can die. Their bodies do not matter, as they are perceived as mere working tools. And what sounds like a strange tale is the true reality of millions of women during the pandemic, in a land that is not so far away as it seems.     

Narcissism and abject aesthetics

In this article, we explore the tendency of a number of television and art shows to challenge the usual cosmetic surgery industry’s focus on the before and after images and instead bring to central stage the time of surgery itself, when the body is immobilized, cut open and remoulded. In this context, we refer to the television series Nip/Tuck and also to the art shows of Jonathan Yeo’ You’re Only Young Twice and Anthony C. Berlet’s I Am Art: An Expression of the Visual & Artistic Process of Plastic Surgery. What these television series and art shows have in common is an interest in what we call abject aesthetics, in which the anesthetized, immobile (docile) bodies are fully exposed to the viewer’s gaze as they are cut open to allow intrusion of blood into the diegetic space, creating a breakdown of bodily borders as faces and bodies are opened up and skin is pulled from side to side. We argue that the manifested and enjoyed aggressivity towards bodies is an expression of an increased level of social narcissism, which besides producing an obsession with (adulation for) an ideal body image it simultaneously fosters a strong feeling of aggressivity towards the very ideal, hence the creation in fantasy of scenarios in which the overly restrictive and deadening ideal is torn apart to reveal its abject underside. Finally, we explore the workings of this economy of revealing and concealing, by foregrounding the concept of the abject and by staging an encounter with the grotesque in order to offer a critical perspective on the beauty ideal.     

Whose Crazy Investment in Sex?

By probing the processes of exclusion of transsexuals from the political sphere, this article offers contributions to social and political theory through an examination of the processes of exclusion from the category “human.” This article considers how the erasure of investment in their own embodied sex constructs a platform from which to blame others for sex/gender variance, as well as to justify that blaming. Bringing together Giorgio Agamben, Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, and Nikolas Rose with transphobia, medicalization in psychiatry, law, and ethopolitics, this article questions whose investment in sexed embodiment counts and why that investment might be seen as “crazy.”