Discourse Kritiks - DDI 2013 SS

8/10/2019 Discourse Kritiks - DDI 2013 SS

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sexuality, the words we use for rage and longing these words construct images in our heads, in our culture, and in our lives.

We have an obligation to rethink how we speak as part of building a more pleasurable, safe, just and egalitarian world.


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ExtThe K turns the entirety of the K. Our discourse matters. Nothing happens outside of the round

but the language used by Bronx normalizes sexual violence against women. The aff never

happens and the alt never solves anything, which means the only thing you can default to is this

K. Words matter. We have a responsibility, a moral imperative to draw a hard line between thelanguage of sex and the language of contempt. Their constant use of the f word not only

normalizes sexual violence but also guts alt solvency. Language travels with them. They cant

sever what they said which means that in the world of the alternative, women are suppressed,

unheard, and dominated over. The neg reinscribes patriarchy and sexual violence into their

alternative. Most importantly, use of this word is the only prior question in the round because

they allow patriarchy to infiltrate the educational space of debate and exclude women.

Flashback to NDCAs and the women in debate movementthis is a real issue and inexcusable.

Here is why you vote these assholes down, maybe youll teach them some goddamn respect.

Even if they win coloniality is the root cause of patriarchy or the alternative solves it, it does not

matter. Rather this framing links back to their characterization of hegemony and colonialism as a

constant cycle of exceptionthey kick the can down the road and cause women to be

completely excluded from the debate space they try to open up, this is a real impact and you

must only evaluate it in the context of how they affect debate. We agree none of these impacts

happen in the real world, thats why you evaluate what they do to the debate community first.


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1NC

Link/ViolationThe aff engages in ableist discourse in attempting to Listen to

the Global South, or allow the Global South to speak for itself

And that independently reinforces linguistic colonialism and turns the aff

Edwards 12(R.A.R Edwards Edwards Intro New York University Presshttp://nyupress.org/webchapters/edwards_intro.pdf //Abs)

Paddy Ladd, in his ground-breaking work Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood, has theorized the cause of the

Deaf as part of a larger struggle against linguistic colonialism .He points rightly to both oralism and

artificial sign systems as assaults on signed languages, such as ASL, and on their users. As Ladd puts it, modern-day users of

artificial sign systems, the descendants of methodical signs, are in fact covert oralists.9 In the mid-nineteenth century, signing in

English word order appealed to certain hearing educators precisely because it promised to undermine the newly emerging Deaf

culture. With a language of their own, American Sign Language, Deaf people became a community of their own. With methodical

signs, they would not become Deaf at all. Rather, they would remain culturally hearing. Arguments over manual language systems

were not arguments about pedagogy at all. Much as Ladd would have predicted, such arguments were instead arguments over the

emerging sense of Deaf identity. The oppression of American Deaf people is intimately linked to theoppression of their language, American Sign Language.In the end, methodical signing paved the way fororalisms entry into deaf education. As methodical sign supporters made clear their uneasiness with Deafness, they increasingly

shared the cultural concerns of the first generation of oralists. The continued use of such signs allowed oralists

to ask, Why stop with signing in English word order? Why not demand that the deaf speak,

and not sign, in English?Speaking in English would seem to guarantee their transformation

into culturally hearing people even better than methodical signs. Chapter 7 accordingly explores the

fight to found an oral school in Massachusetts, one of the first in the nation s history, the Clarke School for the Deaf. The threat

that Deaf culture posed to the ableist status quo had to be countered immediately and in the

strongest possible terms. The bilingualbicultural manualist era can now be seen as the brief historical moment when deafpeople were able, with the help of hearing collaborators, to shape their own understanding of deafness and, in turn, Deafness

before other hearing people raised concerns about this entire cultural project. These concerns harkened back to far

older and deeper trends in Western history, as far as deafness goes. For in the West, speakinghas long been privileged over other forms of communication, and the inability to speak has

long been seen as an indicator of a persons general inferiority and lack of intelligence. So bilingual-bicultural manualism represented a brief period of countercultural rebellion, with oralism constituting a return to the

cultural status quo. The brief challenge of Deafness was beaten back and, with it, the prospect of similar rebellions by disabled

citizens generally4444444. The disabled community today still faces many of the same challenges the

Deaf community faced in the nineteenth century. In this way, the example of the Deaf community

has much to teach us about the ways in which American culture has handled questions of the

body, disability, and diversity over the course of its history. Like Krentz, I wish to make clear thatnineteenthcentury deaf people were the first disabled American group to receive special education, the first to organize in a

widespread way, the first to contest lack of access, prejudice, and pathological views of their difference.10 This work is but

a chapter in a larger American narrative about disability history. For the story of nineteenth-

century deafness, and its transformation into Deafness, is a story about the possibilities andlimits of living a disabled life in the United States, a story we need to know more about as we

try to understand what limits still impose themselves in our society today.44

___ Ableist discourse strengthens systems of oppression and undermines community

movements


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Wheelchair Dancer 08(April 28th, 2008 On Making Argument: Disability and Language,http://cripwheels.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-making-argument-disability-and.html)

If you are feeling a little bit of resistance, here, I'd ask you to think about it. If perhaps what I am saying feels like a burden -- too

much to take on? a restriction on your carefree speech? -- perhaps that feeling can also serve as an indicator of how pervasive and

thus important the issue is. As a community, we've accepted that commonly used words can be slurs,

and as a rule, we avoid them, hopefully in the name of principle, but sometimes only in thename of civility. Do you go around using derivatives of the b*ch word? If you do, I bet you check which community you arein.... Same thing for the N word. These days, depending on your age, you might say something is retarded or spastic, but you

probably never say that it's gay. I'd like to suggest that society as a whole has not paid the same kind of

attention to disabled people's concerns about language. By not paying attention to the literal

value, the very real substantive, physical, psychological, sensory, and emotional experiences

that come with these linguistic moves, we have created a negative rhetorical climate . In this

world, it is too easy for feminists and people of colour to base their claims on argumentative

strategies that depend, as their signature moves, on marginalizing the experience of disabled people

and on disparaging their appearance and bodies. Much of the blogosphere discourse of the previous weeks has

studied the relationships between race, (white) feminism and feminists, and WOC bloggers. To me, the intellectual

takeaway has been an emerging understanding of how, in conversation, notions ofappropriation, citation, ironization, and metaphorization can be deployed as strategies of

legitimation and exclusion. And, as a result, I question how "oppressed, minoritized" groups

differentiate themselves from other groups in order to seek justice and claim authority.Must

we always define ourselves in opposition and distance to a minoritized and oppressed group

that can be perceived as even more unsavory than the one from which one currently speaks?

As I watched the discussion about who among the feminist and WOC bloggers has power and authority and how that is achieved, I

began to recognise a new power dynamic both on the internet and in the world at large. Feminism takes on misogyny. The WOC

have been engaging feminism. But from my point of view, a wide variety of powerful feminist and anti-racist

discourse is predicated on negative disability stereotyping. There's a kind of hierarchy here: the lack of

awareness about disability, disability culture and identity, and our civil rights movement has

resulted in a kind of domino effect where disability images are the metaphor of last resort:

the bottom, the worst. Disability language has about it a kind of untouchable quality-- as if thehorror and weakness of a disabled body were the one true, reliable thing, a touchstone to which we can turn when we know we

can't use misogynistic or racist language. When we engage in these kinds of argumentative strategies, we

exclude a whole population of people whose histories are intricately bound up with ours.

When we deploy these kinds of strategies to underscore the value of our own existence in the

world, we reaffirm and strengthen the systems of oppression that motivated us to speak out

in the first place.
http://cripwheels.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-making-argument-disability-and.htmlhttp://cripwheels.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-making-argument-disability-and.html


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AltVote neg to reject the ableist discourse of the 1ACwe endorse a complex use

of language

May and Ferri 05(Vivian M. May and Beth A. Ferri Fixated on Ability Questioning AbleistMetaphors in Feminist Theories of Resistance Prose Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1&2 April-August2005,

http://www.academia.edu/227091/Fixated_on_Ability_Questioning_Ableist_Metaphors_in_Fe

minist_Theories_of_Resistance //Abs)

In questioning ableist analogies, our goal is not to find the most correct language use,

ultimate analogy, or perfect metaphor:we arenotadvocating the policing of languages boundaries or the

creation of a morally superior linguistic orthodoxy. We recognize languages fluidity and playful potential andlike Simone de Beauvoir (129),we find possibility in ambiguitya call to continuously take up the worlds possibilities rather than a

nihilism or fatalism about lived complexities.The core problem, whether we are talking about refusing

comparisons to disability or embracing them for their utility, is that most analogies to

disability are often limited, careless, and overly fixed.Disability is rarely conceptualized as a constructed

outcome of power, nor is it regarded as a political identity forged in and through systems of domination. In other words, theintersectionality of identities (Crenshaw) and the necessarily coalitional focus of instigating social change disappears: the presumed

stasis of disability remains unchallenged in efforts to examine womens social construction and social constraints. Moreove r,

because it only enters the discourse in its metaphoric sense or as a medical or bodily fact, disability is not comprehended as a lived

reality or point of view, nor is it seen as an analytic category. The fact that power is itself a human accomplishment, situated in

everyday interaction (Ng 132) gets elided as well. Thus disability has been, implicitly and explicitly, interpreted as an entirely bodily

and/or medical state of deficiency. Facile dismissals of disability as merely bodily or simply medical

obscure how bodies are inculturated, phenomenological, and located. Medical-model understandings ofdisability also deny the myriad ways that science and medicine are inside culture, not pure, objective sets of practices im mune

from any imprint of power, culture, identity, or time/place. Ironically, by conflating disability with stigma or stuckness many

feminists also construe disability in opposition to the feminist subject. In other words, disabilitys facticity is presumed, its

concreteness assumed: it has no meaning except as illustrative to and for others. Given these dynamics, we find ourselves compelled

to examine the ubiquitous use of ableist metaphors in contemporary feminist discourses aimed at critiquing andtransforming the

status quo. We have identified several interrelated rhetorical strategies common in femi nist and other liberatory theories. Perhaps

the most evident use of disability can be found in the over reliance upon metaphors of madness, crippling, and more to characterize

and locate objects of remediation, in this case dominant ideologies, practices, and politics. In this paper, we outline two particularways in which feminist theorists use disability to locate objects of remediation: first, the construction of disability in opp osition to

knowledge and second, the use of disability to highlight the subtle workings of power and privilege. In addition, we

question the use of ableist notions of mobility and movement to define and imagine

liberation, resistance, and transformation. All of these rhetorical uses of disability reinscribe

normative and exclusionary paradigmswithin otherwise libratory feminist theories. We assert that such normativeuses of disability highlight the need for new metaphors and frames of reference to more adequately theorize multiplicity and to

more fully realize social transformation.More importantly, we argue that transforming the ways we use

language in order to more fully realize its paradoxes and playfulness will help to develop more

intersectional analyses and more fruitful political coalitions that do not originate in an

exclusionary subject-object or figure-ground dualism in which people with disabilities are

regularly characterized as staticor, conversely, romanticized and embraced for their difference. In other words, by

taking a strong stand about ableist language use, ourgoal is to raise consciousness about the very limited and deterministic waysdisability is characterized and put to use. However, rather than curing linguistic pathologies, we advocate a

more complex use of language and a more multifaceted approach to politics and subjectivity


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Specifically their authors ignore the disabled by coopting language with ableist

discourseturns the aff by inhibiting possibility for a new intersectional politics

May and Ferri 05(Vivian M. May and Beth A. Ferri Fixated onAbility Questioning AbleistMetaphors in Feminist Theories of Resistance Prose Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1&2 April-August

2005,

http://www.academia.edu/227091/Fixated_on_Ability_Questioning_Ableist_Metaphors_in_Feminist_Theories_of_Resistance //Abs)

Examples such as these, which construct disability in opposition to rationality or which romanticize disabilitys differences , led us to

examine further the paradoxical ways that critical race and gender scholars unconsciously reinforce

normative and exclusionary paradigms. In particular, we have noticed the inexorable use of

disability metaphors to identify and critique problematic ideologies, practices, and politics. Forexample, in hopes of changing the tenor and genre of much contemporary theory, Iris Marion Young describes the critical nature of

some feminist discourse as paralyzing (16). Similarly, in order to assert the necessity of intersectional approaches to lib eration,

Martnez reminds us that sexism can cripple political work (147).In other words, when questioning exclusionary, violent, or

hierarchical ways of thinking and being, many feminist scholars use ableist metaphors for emphasis. This is particularly evident in

feminist critiques of the insidious nature of power in which unearned or unacknowledged privileges are analogized to or equated

with disability. Consider the following examples:.Christine De Stefano argues that mainstream postmodernist theory (Derrida,

Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault) has been remarkably blind and insensitive to questions of gender in its own purportedly politicized

rereading of history, politics, and culture (in Harding 300)..Spelman also asserts that one can be deeply disfigured (

Fruits111) by privilege..Norma Alarcon therefore suggests that the Anglo-American subject of consciousness cannot come to

terms with her(his)own class-biased ethnocentrism. She is blinded by her own construction not just as a woman but as an Anglo-

American one (364)..With the aim of transforming such racist, n ationalist, and presentist practices in the field of Womens

Studies, Robyn Wiegman refers to the blind spots of both white feminism and the disciplines (10, 40) and discusses the paralysis

plaguing current debates about the field (4, 13)..Similarly, Luce Irigaray (in Young44), Kathleen Blee (177), Trinh T. Minh-ha

(163),Betty Sasaki(44),Kathleen Cleaver(39),Chandra Mohanty(inAlcoff69),and Rachel Lee(83) all critique the blind spots of power

or the blinding effects of privilege on perception and understanding..Because power can negatively impact our perceptions,

Kelly Oliver advocates what she calls the loving eye which is a critical eye, always on the lookout for the blind spots that close off

the possibility of response-ability and openness to otherness and difference (20)..Mab Segrest, in thinking about the early stages

of capitalism as deeply marked by and connected to racial hierarchies, writes, its cost I can only describe as a maniacal decimation

of other peoples and resources across the globe (246). A few pages later, Segrest adds, the Spanish and Portuguese, like the British

after them, seemed drivenby a psychosis of domination (248)..In an effort to characterize the pervasive nature of white

supremacy within U.S. society, Trina Grillo and Stephanie Wildman explain that, like cancer, racism/white supremacy is an illness

(45), a characterization that Adrien Wing concurs with in her critique of the use of analogy in feminist discourse. Ironically, Wingwrites, Whites can use analogies to give them greater comprehension about the illness of

racism, but such analogies can create the danger of false understanding (8).All of these

rhetorical uses of disability to identify and critique systems of domination rely on concepts of

disability that are negative, simplistic, and utilitarian. This precludes any possibility for

recognizing complexity and nuance in people with disabilites phenomenological and political

identities and experiences.Stereotypical notions of blindness, mental illness, and paralysis are invoked in the examplesabove in order to underscore the workings of privilege and power without acknowledging disability as also constructed in and

through power. Not only do people with disabilities disappear: ableism as a systemic form of

domination and privilege with its own ability to skew perceptions and perpetuate inequity is

not even implicitly included in the analyses.Disability, in other words, is not really considered as

part of an intersectional politics or a core aspect of coalition-building for change: it has

pedagogical value for highlighting the negative repercussions of unearned privileges otherthan those associated with ableism

Only the alt solvesrethinking language is the only way to enact the social

transformation we seek

May and Ferri 05(Vivian M. May and Beth A. Ferri Fixated on Ability Questioning AbleistMetaphors in Feminist Theories of Resistance Prose Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1&2 April-August


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2005,

http://www.academia.edu/227091/Fixated_on_Ability_Questioning_Ableist_Metaphors_in_Fe

minist_Theories_of_Resistance //Abs)

Rather than advocating a cure for wayward language use, we are suggesting the need for

more nuanced uses of language and metaphor that do not characterize people with

disabilities in stereotypical, one-dimensional ways. Because language does not merely reflect

reality but constructs it, we must be thoughtful about the politics of our words if we want to

enact the kinds of social transformation we say we do. In order to promote changed social

relations, we must continue to create new ways of linking our experiences and recognizing and

accepting our differences in ways that retain and encourage an ambiguous, intersubjective

ethic between self and other.


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democracy, but only as a promise: any realization of thepotential of the law depends on its continual

reinterpretation. For the meaning of the word, just as Wittge nstein wanted us to believe (in order that we might be undeceived about howour words work), lies in its use in the language. Similarly, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975 (origina lly the Education for All

Handicapped Children Act) was not some kind of breakthrough discovery whereby children with disabilities were found to be rights -bearing citizens of

the United States after all, and who knew that we'd had it all wrong for 199 years? On the contrary, the IDEA invented a new right for children with

disabilities, the right to a "free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment." And yet the IDEA did not wish that right into

being overnight; the key terms "appropriate" and "least restrictive" had to be interpreted time and again, over the course of fift een years, before they

were understood to authorize "full inclusion" of children with disabilities in "regular" classrooms. Nothing about the law is set in stone. The only

philosophical "foundation" underlying the IDEA and its various realizations is our own collective political will, a will that is tested and tested again everytime the Act comes up for reauthorization. Jamie Brub currently has a right to an inclusive public education, but that righ t is neither intrinsic nor

innate. Rather, Jamie's rights were invented, and implemented slowly and with great difficulty. The recognition of his human dignity, enshrined in those

rights, was invented. And by the same token, t hose rights, and that recognition, can be taken away. While I live, I pro mise myself that I will not let that

happen, but I live with the knowledge that it may: to live any other way, to live as if Jamie's rights were somehow intrinsic, would be irresponsible. Of

course, many of us would prefer to believe that our children have intrinsic human rights and human dignit y no matter what; irrespective of any form of

human social organization; regardless of whether they were born in twentieth-century Illinois or second-century Rome or seventh-century central Asia.

But this is just a parent'sor a philosophical foundationalist's-wishful thinking. For what would it mean for Jamie to "possess" rights that no o ne on

earth recognized? A fat lot of good it would do him. My argument may sound either monstrous o r all too obvious: if, in fact, no one on earth recognized

Jamie's human dignity, then there would in fact be no human perspective from which he would be understood to possess "intrinsic" human dignit y.

And then he wouldn't have it, and so much the worse for the human race. In one respect, the promise of the IDEA, like the promise of the ADA, is clear:

greater inclusion of people with disabilities in the social worlds of school and work. But in another sense the promise is un specifiable; its content is

something we actually cannot know in advance. For the IDEA does not merely guarantee all children with disabilities a free appropriate public

education in the least restrictive environment. Even more than this, it grants the right to education in order t hat persons with disabilities might make

the greatest possible use of their other rights-the o nes having to do with voting, or e mployment discrimination, or with life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness. IDEA is thus designed to enhance the capabilities of all American children with disabilities regardless of their actual abilities-and this is why

it is so profound a democratic idea. Here again I'm drawing on Nancy Fraser, whose theory of democracy involves the idea of " participatory parity," and

the imperative that a democratic state should actively foster the abilities of i ts citizens to participate in the life of the polity as equals. Fraser's work to

date has not addressed disability, but as I noted above, i t should be easy to see how disability is relevant to Fraser's account of t he politics of

recognition and the politics of redistribution. This time, however, I want to press the point a bit harder. Fraser writes as if the promise of democracy

entails the promise to enhance participatory parity among citizens, which it does, and she writes as if we knew what "participato ry parity" itself means,

which we don't. (This is why the promise of disability rights is unspecifiable.) LET ME EXPLAIN. First, the idea of participatory parity does double duty in

Fraser's work, in the sense that it names both the state we would like to achieve and the device by which we can gauge whether we're getting there.

For in order to maintain a meaningful democracy in which all citizens participate as legal and moral equals, the state needs to judge whether its policies

enhance equal participation in democratic processes. Yet at the same time, the state needs to enhance equal participation among its citizens simply in

order to determine what its democratic processes will be. This is not a meta-theoretical quibble. On the contrary, the point is central to the practical

workings of any democratic polity. One of the tasks requiredof democrats isprecisely this: to extend the promise of

democracy to previously excluded individualsand groups some of whom might have a substantially different understandingof "participatory parity" than that held by previously dominant groups and individuals. Could anything make this clearer than the politics of disability?

Imagine a building in which political philosophers are debating, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the value and the purpose of

participatory parity over against forms of authoritarianism or theocracy. Now imagine that this building has no access ramps, no Braille or large-print

publications, no American Sign Language interpreters, no elevators, no special-needs paraprofessionals, no in-class aides. Contradictory as such a state

of affairs may sound, it's a reasonably accurate picture of what contemporary debate over the meaning of democracy actually looks like. How can we

remedy this? Only when we have fostered equal participation in debates overthe ends and means of

democracy can we have a truly participatory debateover what "participatory parity" itself means. That debate will beinterminable in principle, since our understandings of democracy and parity are infinitely revisable, but lest we think of deliberative democracy as a

forensic society dedicated to empyreal reaches of abstraction, we should remember that debates over the meaning of participatory parity set the terms

for more specific debates about the varieties of human embodiment. These include debates about prenatal screening, genetic discrimination, stem-cell

research, euthanasia, and, with regard to physical access, ramps, curb cuts, kneeling buses, and buildings employing what is now known as universal

design. Leftists and liberals, particularly those associated with university humanities departments, are commonly charged with being moral relativists,

unable or unwilling to say (even after September 11) why one society mi ght be "better" than another. So let me be especially clear on this final point. I

think there's a very good reason to ex tend the franchise, to widen the conversation, to democratize our debates, and to make disability central to o ur

theories of egalitarian social justice. The reason is this: a capacious and supple sense of what it is to be human is better than a n arrow and partial sense

of what it is to be human, and the more participants we as a society can incorporate into the deliberation

of what it means to be human, the greater the chances that that deliberation will in fact be

transformativein such a way as to enhance our collective capacities to recognize each other as hu mans entitled to human dignity. As Jamiereminds me daily, both deliberately and unwittingly, most Americans had no idea what people with Down syndrome could achieve until we'd passed

and implemented and interpreted and reinterpreted a law entitling them all to a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment.

I can say all this without appealing to any innate justification for human dignity and human rights, and I can also say this: Without a sufficient

theoretical and practical account of disability, we can have no account of democracy worthy of t he name. Perhaps some of our fellow citizens with

developmental disabilities would not put the argument quite this way; even though Jamie has led me to think this way, he doesn't talk the way I do. But

those of us who do participate in political debates, whether about school funding in a specific

district or about the theory and practice of democracy at its most abstract, have the

obligation to enhance the abilities of our children and our fellow citizens with disabilities to

participate in the life of the United States as political and moral equals with t heir nondisabled peers-both for their own good, and for t he goodof democracy, which is to say, for the good of all of us.


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More Listening LinksThe listening metaphor is uniquely ableistit knowingly excludes those who arent

capable of participating in a conversation

Lacey 10(Teacher, MA in English, The Conversations Metaphor and Ableism, 9/6,http://equality101.net/?p=1886 Accessed 2/10/11 GAL)

In mylast post,I discussed how I might use the seemingly elementary activity of show-and-tell to introduce students to a

foundational concept of college-level composition: the Burkean Parlor metaphor. Frequently expressed asthesimpler

conversation metaphor, this metaphor illustrates what thinkers, researchers, scholars and , most importantly,

writers do: we listen to a conversation; we form our own opinions about this topic of conversation

as a result of listening; we eventually add our own voices (opinions)to the conversation; and our

voices become part of the conversation that others listen to and use to form their opinions. AsI prepared for one of my classes today, I came across the following passage in a chapter called Reading Rhetorically: The Writer

as Strong Reader: The goal of this chapter is to help you become a more powerful reader of academic texts, prepared to take

part in the conversations of the disciplines you study. To this end, we explain two kinds of thinking and writing essential to your

college reading: Your ability to listen carefully to a text, to recognize its parts and their functions, and to summarize its ideas

Your ability to formulate strong responses to texts by interacting with them, either by agreeing with, interrogating, or activelyopposing them (Ramage, Bean, and Johnson, Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing, 5th ed., pg. 109) Clearly, the conversation

metaphor is a useful and important frameworkthat has the capacity to help college students understand college-level writing

in a new and more applicable way. This metaphor has helped me explain why we do research at all and how composition classes

are relevant outside of the required course structure at the university. But after reading this passage, it struck me thatthis

metaphor built on the notions of listening and speaking might actually be

ableist in effect. It might leave out many students who can still participatein

composition meaningfully but who dont have the ability to listen (or hear) or to speak.Im not sure why this never occurred to me before. Ive taught the conversation metaphor to students with hearing difficultie s

without thinking twice about what I was saying. Despite the ableist languagein the metaphor used to present this concept, I

think the concept itself is still valuable. So how can we modify this metaphor to accommodate for all students?The easy

answer is to change the language and comparison involved.We could use the more situation-neutral

language of rhetoric:the rhetor(who can be a speaker, a writer, an artist, a thinker anyone

who puts a message in some form out to an audience) takes in the messages about a

particular topicof the rhetors around him/her, uses those messages to learn and to

develop an opinion, and then adds his/her own responseto the collection of messagessurrounding this topic for other would-be rhetors to take in. This conception is rather vague, though, and lacks the benefit of a

realistic setting to deliver the metaphor and to demonstrate that what we do as composers in college reflects what we do as

workers, family members, citizens, and activists beyond the college classroom. Perhaps a more updated version of this

metaphor would use the setting of an online chat room. Instead of entering a parlor which is an outdated term anyway to

listen and speak to people already engaged in conversation, perhaps you enter a chat room where you read and learn more

about conversations that have been ongoing since before other chat users were in the room. While this is a more realistic

setting for the concept of participating in a discourse community, there are still touches of ableism (being able to read

though many individuals with visual impairment use devices to allow them to read either print or Braille from their computers)

and classism (access to the Web and time to participate in chat rooms). As the composition field continues to become more

relevant as students engage with all kinds of texts and participate in all kinds of discourse communities, we who promote these

foundational concepts must remain cognizant that we are considering all of our students.While communication is

a human endeavor, we dont all communicate in the same ways, and it is vital that

composition/rhetoric make that basic fact a part of the daily work of teaching

students how to critically engagewith texts and contribute to their communities.
http://equality101.net/?p=1886http://equality101.net/?p=1809http://equality101.net/?p=1809http://equality101.net/?p=1886


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AT: Perm

1. The perm links

2. The permutation is a token gesture -- tacking on the question of interrogatingdisability after the fact participates in the structures of ableist privilege we

criticize

Campbell, Griffith Law School Faculty, 9(Fiona Kumari, Griffith University Australia, Disability Advocacy & Ableism: Towards a re-

discovery of the disability Imagination, Keynote Address, 2nd Strengthening Advocacy

Conference, Nov 17-

18,http://griffith.academia.edu/FionaKumariCampbell/Papers/118483/Disability_Advocacy_and

_Ableism_Towards_a_re-discovery_of_the_disability_Imagination, p. 1-2, accessed 7/6/12 sl)

Working models(often called conceptual frameworks) are very important as they help us work out which

questionsto ask, help us interpret and process things and events. Weall haveconceptual frameworksthat shape our beliefs as to why thing happeneven if we do not use that language. In a keynote speech I made

at a DPI conference in Adelaide 1984 I said it was important for disabled people to understand the nature

of social change so that we will not be fooled by anytoken one off gesturesor initiatives handed out

by governmentand disability agencies (1984, 91). I still hold to that idea and add that we always need to test new ideas byasking what is this proposal or idea saying about disability, does it assume that disability is terrib le, or that diversity and difference

are terrible or is the idea on about celebrating and bringing out difference? From the perspective of political activism, the

necessity to have a theory of disability before decidingstrategiesofpolitical actionwas wellunderstood as early as 1975 by the Union of Physically Impaired Against SegregationUPAIS in the UK whose minutes of a debate

between 2 advocacy groups produced a document calledThe Fundamental Principles of Disability . They decided that disability

should not be understood medically as a broken down body, mind or heart, rather society and the way that it is organized had

something to do with us becoming disabled.

Second ableist discourse has already tainted their movementtheir attempt to

break away from coloniality failsthey reinforce linguistic coloniality and

forcibly exclude the disabled from the discussion of oppression. We have

indicted their scholars unconscious use of metaphors as another instance of

societys ignorance towards the disabled. That destroys their advocacy

Disabling language perpetuates ignorance and misconceptions in regards to the

lived experience of people with disabilities

Ben-Moshe, Doctorate in Disabilities studies, 5

(Liat, 4-1-05, The Graduate School, Syracuse University, Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts:Incorporating Disability in the University Classroom and Curriculum,

http://www.syr.edu/gradschool/pdf/resourcebooksvideos/Pedagogical%20Curb%20Cuts.pdf,

accessed: 7-5-2012, p.109, CAS)

We learn about disability through everyday use of language. In the same way that racist or

sexist attitudes, whether implicit or explicit, are acquired through the normal learning

process, so too are negative assumptions about disabilities and the people who are labeled as


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having them. Our notions of people who are blind, deaf or labeled as mentally retarded come

into play when we use disabling phrases, and these notions are usually far from accurate.

They do not convey the complexity of living in a society that regards people with disabilities as the Other

on thebasis of perceived mentally or bodily difference. The use of disability as a metaphor perpetuates false

beliefs about the nature of impairment and disability. People whoare blind, for example, do not lack inknowledge; they simplyhave different ways of obtaining it. Paralysis does not necessarilyimply lack of mobility, stagnancy ordependence since there areaugmentative instruments, such as wheelchairs and personal aids,that secure independence andmobility. The continued use of disabling languagein the classroom perpetuates ignorance and

misconceptions in regards to the lived experience of people with disabilities.


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AT: Re-appropriation

Using disabling language de-values people with disabilities

Ben-Moshe, Doctorate in Disabilities studies, 5(Liat, 4-1-05, The Graduate School, Syracuse University, Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts:

Incorporating Disability in the University Classroom and Curriculum,

http://www.syr.edu/gradschool/pdf/resourcebooksvideos/Pedagogical%20Curb%20Cuts.pdf,

accessed: 7-5-2012, p.110)

Using disability as a metaphor to represent only negative aspects of a situation is problematic.

It is made worse by the fact that blindness, deafness, paralysis, etc., are not floating signifiers, but have

real referents behind thempeople with disabilities. When using disabling language, we do not only

de-value the lived experience of people with disabilities, but we also appropriate these lived

experiences for our own use. This means that disabled people have been presented as socially

flawed able-bodied people, not as people with our own identities.As responsible instructors, we must ask

ourselves, when was the last time we discussed disability in our classrooms, not as metaphors, but as lived experiences?


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AT: But You say DisabledNo contradictiondisabled as we reference it really isa positive use of re-

appropriation

Mason 92 [ Micheline, British Council of Organisations of Disabled People, Disability in the classroom:a human rights issue, http://www.worldofinclusion.com/res/deinclass/text_only.pdf]

My disability is a fundamental factor in the being that is " me". I do not want to deny

this by calling myself1"a person with special needs" or any other such euphemism,

nor do I want to deny the collective identity we have achieved for ourselves.

Therefore I am a disabled person, and proud of it. I was bom with a condition called OsteogenesisImperfecta, or "Brittle Bones" I am neither ashamed nor particularly proud of this as it was not of my choosing What I am very proud

of is the kind of person that dealing with this challenge has enabled me to become I think I am a wiser, deeper, richer and more

competent person than I would have been had I not had this challenge put before me I have also had the privilege of close contact

with many others who have had similarly enriched experiences of life - my friends at school, my sisters and brothers in the Disability

Movement, my own wonderful daughter I treasure.Our aim is to alter the way people feel about the

word "disabled" from a negative attitude to a positive attitude, in exactly the same

way that "Black" has to be a positive assertion of identity in a racist societyBlack people arenot "people whose skin tone is slightly different to that of the dominant culture", nor are they people who achieve things, "despite

blackness" The term " Black" is a politically motivated identity of a group of people who

recognise that (a) they are proud to be the way they are, including their skin colours,

cultures, languages, etc, and (b) they belong to a group of people who are

systematically oppressed by the dominant culture which is whitei.e by racism

Disabled people feel the same way.
http://www.worldofinclusion.com/res/deinclass/text_only.pdfhttp://www.worldofinclusion.com/res/deinclass/text_only.pdf


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Ableism Before Race(?)

Disability cant be fully explained by whiteness

Smith 4[Phil, Executive Director, Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council, Whiteness,Normal Theory, and Disability Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly Spring 2004, Volume 24, No.

2, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/491/668]In ways similar to those in which marginalized racial groupings have been forced to live outside the boundaries of normalized white

landscapes, segregation into literaland virtual disability ghettos has been the norm in modernist

Western culture(Groch 1998; Smith 1999b). People with disabilities are denied even basic health care ,so that those labeled as having so-called mental retardation have a life expectancy that is as little as two-thirds or lessthat of the

total population (Horwitz, Kerker, Owens, and Zigler 2000). Andpeople with disabilities are at significant risk for

violencein the form of sexual, physical, mental, emotional, andverbal abusein their lives (Horwitz, Kerker, Owens, and Zigler2000; Sobsey and Doe 1991; Smith 2001c; Sullivan and Knutson 2000). Some have suggested that the creation of the institutional

framework of special education itself has served "...to provide an education for 'normal' students unimpeded by students who are

troublesome, in the widest possible sense" (Tomlinson 1995, p. 127). Groch (1998) has pointedly noted that both racism and

ableism are ideologies, "with most Americans seldom questioning their legitimacy" (p. 202). By "most Americans," I

understand her to mean "most white, able-bodied Americans." The clarification is significant, I believe, because it begins to explorethe invisibility of ability, what some see as "normal," for those who define others as disabled. Doing so denies the normality of

disability, the ways in which what is portrayed as outside boundaries of normative landscapes by the ideology of eugenicist ableism

is, from critical theory and disability studies perspectives, in fact normative. Others have also pointed out the

invisibility of ability, of being able-bodied. For example, "there are few names that refer to that

status except those in currency within the disabled communitysuch as 'able-bodied', 'nondisabled,' and'abled" (Gordon and Rosenblum 2001, p.13). In the same way that people of "color" may see whiteness better than Whites, so

people labeled as having a disability may be able to see normality better than those who are

only, at best, temporarily able-bodied. There is one difference between the status of whiteness

(or, for that matter, masculinity) and thestatus of able-bodiedness: "Whites do not worry about

becoming black ; men don't worry about becoming women. Disability, however, is always a potential

status..." (Gordon and Rosenblum 2001, p.16). It is probable, therefore, that significantly greater anxietyperhaps

terroris a better wordattends what is thought to be the dark specter of disability, and why

eugenicismagain, perhaps genocideis a better wordremains a real possibility in the lives of

people with disabilities.

____ Exclusion of disabled bodies underlies all forms of oppression and mass

death especially racism.

Siebers 2010 (Tobin, professor of English, University of Michigan, Disability

Aesthetics, pgs 23-28)Disqualification as a symbolic process removes individuals from the ranks of quality human

beings, putting them at risk of unequal treatment, bodily harm, and death .That people may be subjected toviolence if they do not achieve a prescribed level of quality is an injustice rarely questioned. In fact, even though we may redefine what we mean by quality people, for

example as historical minorities are allowed to move into theirranks, we have not yet ceased to believe that non quality

human beings do exist and that they should be treated differently from people of quality .HarrietMcBryde Johnson's debate with Peter Singer provides a recent example of the w idespread belief in the e xistence of non quality human beings (Johnson). Johnson, a disability

activist, argues that all disabled people qualify as persons who have the same rights as everyone else. Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton University, claims to the

contrary that people with certain disabilities should be euthanized, especially if they are . thought to be in pain, because they do not qual ify as persons. Similarly, Martha

Nussbaum, the University of Chicago moral philosopher, establishes a threshold below which "a fully human life, a life worthy of human dignity:' is not possible (181). In

particular, she notes that the onset of certain disa bilities may reduce a person to the sta tus of former human being: "we may say of some conditions of a be ing, let us say a

permanent vegetative state of a (former) human being, that this just is not a human life at all" (181). Surprisingly little thought and energy have been given to disputing the

belief that nonquality human beings do exist.This belief is so robust that it supports the most serious and


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characteristic injustices of our day. Disqualification at this moment in time justifies

discrimination, servi- tude, imprisonment, involuntary institutionalization, euthanasia, human

and civil rights violations, military intervention, compulsory sterilization, police actions,

assisted suicide, capital punishment, and murder. It is my contention that disqualification finds

support in the way that bodies appear and in their specific appearances-that is, disqualification is justified

through the accusation of mental or physical inferiority based on aesthetic principles. Disqualification is produced by naturalizing inferiority as the justification for unequal

treatment, violence, and oppression. According to Snyder and Mitchell, disability serves in the modern period as " the master

trope of human disqualification."4 They argue that disability represents a marker of otherness that establishes differences between humanbeings not as acceptable or valuable variations but as dangerous deviations . Douglas Baynton provides compelling examples from the modern era, explaining that du ring the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States disability identity disqualified other identities defined by

gender, race, class, and nationality. Women were deemed inferior because they were said to

have mental and physical disabilities. People of color had fewer rights than other persons

based on accusations of biological inferiority. Immigrants were excluded from entry into the United States when they were poor, sick,

or failed standardized tests,even though the populations already living there were poor, sick, and failed standardized tests. In every case,disability identity

served to justify oppression by amplifying ideas about inferiority already attached to other minority identities. Disability is the trope by which theassumed inferiority of these other minority identities achieved expression. The appearance of lesser mental and physical abilities disqualifies people as inferior and justifies

their oppression. Thanks to the work ofBaynton and others, it is now possible to recognize disability as a trope used to posit the inferiority of certain minority populations, but it

remains extremely difficult to understand that mental and phys ical markers of inferiority are also tropes placed in the s ervice of disability oppression. Before disability can be

used as a dis qualifier, disability, too, has to be disqualified. Beneath the troping of blackness as inbuilt inferiority, for example, l ies the troping of disability as inferior.Beneath the troping of femininity as biological deficiency lies the troping of disability as deficiency . The mental and physical p roperties of bodies become the natural symbols

of inferiority via a process of disqualification that seems biological, not cultural-which is why disability discrimination seems to be a medical rather than a social p roblem. If we

consider how difficult it is at this moment to disqualify pe ople as inferior on the basis of their racial, sexual, gender, or class cha racteristics, we may come to recognize the

ground that we must cover in the future before we experience the sa me difficulty disqualifying people as inferior on the bas is of disability. We might also recognize the work

that disability performs at present in situations where race, sexuality, gender, and class are used to disqualify people as physically or mentally inferior. Atthe current

time we prefer to fix, cure, or eradicate the disabled body rather than the discriminatory

attitudes of society.Medicine and charity, not social justice, are the ans wers to the problems of the disabled body, because the disabled body is thought to bethe real cause of the problems. Disability is a personal misfortune or tragedy that puts people at risk of a nonquality exis tence-or so most people falsely believe. Aesthetics

studies the way that some bodies make other bodies feel. Bodies, minimally defined, are what appear in the world. They involve manifestations of physical appearance,

whether this appearance is defined as the physical manifestation itself or as the particular appearance of a given physical manifestation. Bodies include in my definition

human bodies, paintings, sculpture, buil dings, the entire range of human artifacts as well as animals and objects in the natural world. Aesthetics, moreover, has always s tressed

that feelings produced in bodies by other bodies are involuntary, as if they represented a form of unconscious communication between bodies, a contagious possession of one

body by another. Aesthetics is the domain in which the sensation of otherness is felt at its most powerful, strange, and frightening. Whether the effect is beauty and pleasure,

ugliness and pain, or sublimity and terror, the emotional impact of one body on another is experienced as an

assault on autonomy and a testament to the power of otherness. Aesthetics is the human science most concerned withinvitations 'to think and feel otherwise about our own influence, interests , and imagination. Of course, when bodies produce feelings of pleasure or pain, they a lso invite

judgments about whether they should be accepted or rejected in the human community. People thought to experience more pleasure or pain than others or to produce unusuallevels of pleasure and pain in other bodies are among the bodies most discriminated against, actively excluded, and violated on the current scene, be they disabled, sexed,

gendered, or racialized bodies. Disabled people, but also sex workers, gay, lesbian, bisex ual, and transgendered people, and people of color, are tortured and killed because of

beliefs about their relationship to pain and pleasure (Siebers 2009). This is why aesthetic disqualification is not merely a matter for

art critics or museum directors but a political process of concern to us all. An understanding of

aesthetics is crucial because it reveals the operative principles of disqualification used in

minority oppression. Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That oppression involves"groups," and not "individuals:' means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it

appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances . Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority-what some call

"in-built" or "biological" inferiority; Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of th e group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of

biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why

the study of oppression requires an understandin g of aesthetics-not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how

oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation ofbodi~s are openly discussed. Two additional thoughts must

be noted before I treat some analytic. examples from the historical record. First, despite my sta tement that disability now s erves as the master trope of human disqualification,

it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems. In

disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to

be integral at the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general.In every oppressive syste m of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is

represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. "Racism" disqualifies on thebasis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and p hysical features. "Sexism" disqualifies on the bas is of sex/gender as a di rect

representation of mental and physical inferiority. "Classism" disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and s ocioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status.

'Ableism" disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them asdisabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence,

weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. Second, it is crucial to remember the lessons of intersectional theory. This theory rightly focuses on how oppressive

systems affect the identity of the oppressed individual, explaining that because individuality is complex, containing many overlapping identities, the individual is vulnerable to

oppressive systems that would reduce the individual to one or two identities for the purpose of maintaining power and cont rol (Collins 208),5 Intersectional theorists restore a

complex view of the individual and fight ag ainst creating hierarchies between different identities. For example, the debate whether it is worse to be bl ack or female is viewed as

divisive and unproductive. My tactic here is similar. I want tolook at identity not from the point of view of the oppressed

individual but from the point of view-limited as it may seem and significant because limited-of oppressive

systems. Disability is the master trope of human disqualification, not because disability theory is superior to race, class, or sex/gender theory, but becauseall


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oppressive systems function by reducing human variation to deviancy and inferiority defined

on the mental and physical plane . Intersectional analysis shows that disability identity provides a foundation for disqualification in cases whereother minority identities fail because they are known to be s ocially constructed for the purposes of domination. It is not clear why disability has proven so useful a trope for

maintaining oppression, but one reason may be that it has been extraordinarily difficult to separate disability from the naturalist fallacy that conceives of it as a biological

defect more or less resistant to social or cultural intervention. In the modern era, of course, eugenics embodies this fallacy. Eugenics has been of signa l importance to

oppression because eugenics weds medical science to a disgust with mental and phys ical variation, but eugenics is not a new trend, only an exacerbation of old trends that

invoke disease, inferiority, impairment, and deformity to disqualify one group in the s ervice of another's rise to power. As racism, sexism, and c lassism fall away slowly as

justifications for human inferiority-and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression the prejudice against disability remains in full

force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. Thi s usage will continue, I expect, until we reach a

historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority.


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AT: Case O/W

Their choice of rhetorical tools short-circuits their claims to solvency

Vidali 10 [Amy, Dept of English U of Colorado-Denver, Seeing What We Know: Disability and Theories

of Metaphor,Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, v4, #1, pp33-54]

Failure to interrogate the role of disability in our academic theories and

methodologies can result in unknowing adoption of ableist theories to make

disability-progressive arguments. In "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," Audre

Lorde claims that using the master's tools"may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they

will never enable us to bring about genuine change" (112). While Lorde is speaking

about a racist feminismthat excludes the perspectives of women who are poor, lesbian, Black, older, international, and

1 would add, disabled, her point is also relevant to Disability Studies, which endorses underlying ableist

perspectives ("tools") by adopting theories such as Lakoff and Johnson's (on Lorde and disability, see Barager). Ableist

artifacts cannot be analyzed with equally ableist theoretical and methodological tools:a disability approach to metaphor is needed.


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(Feminists With Disabilities for a Way Forward, The Disabled, June 18, 2010,

http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/06/18/awp-the-disabled/,Accessed:7/6/12)

Doug S, its almost like people treat having a disability like its this horrible thing, and

that people with disabilities arent human. Thats the subtext I see in comments about how

all words that describe intellectual disabilities are going to turn into insults. Of course they arepeople treat people with disabilities, mental or physical, like theyre subhuman. Part of

asking people to consider their language(and reallyits a request. No one can make you

not use these words) is asking them to consider that people with disabilities exist. When Isee comment after comment elsewhere saying I hadnt even HEARD of Ablism!, I wonder

where the heck theyve been hanging out that there are NO progressive peoplein their circles

talking about people with disabilities. (Then I remember the confusion people look at me at

when I go to progressive-focused meetings and ask for things like wheelchair accessible

locations, and transcripts of videos for the Deaf. *sigh*) Part of bringing up the ablist nature

of language is reminding people I would expect to be our natural allies that we exist,

were not your pity cases,were not here to make you feel better or support whatever notion

of Good Charity you want. Most of us our living our lives. All we want is some respectfor those lives. Maybe we dont want to be turned away from voting. Maybe we dont want to

be told that our doctor-prescribed medication is banned from our graduation. Maybe we dont

want to be told that if we get a job, well lose all of our benefits that pay for the care we need to

live. Maybe we dont want to be unable to leave our home because the elevator has been shut

down for the next three hours, and no one thought to warn us. Maybe we want some bloody

curb cuts. Maybe we dont want to be your go-to insult. Pointing out ablist language is

part of the advocacy of pointing out we exist.
http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/06/18/awp-the-disabled/http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/06/18/awp-the-disabled/http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/06/18/awp-the-disabled/

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