Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-dvmhs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-16T21:47:54.488Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Post‐Raciality and Post‐Spatiality of Calls for LGBTQ and Disability Visibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2014

Carly Thomsen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article, I consider the ideologies that emerge when disability and LGBTQ rights advocates' ubiquitous calls for visibility collide. I argue that contemporary visibility politics encourage the production of post‐racial and post‐spatial ideologies. In demanding visibility, disability and LGBTQ rights advocates ignore, ironically, visible markers of (racial) difference and assume that being “out, loud, and proud” is desirable trans‐geographically. I bring together disability studies and queer rural studies—fields that have engaged in remarkably little dialogue—to analyze activist calls for LGBTQ and disability visibility. The discourses evident in such calls transcend movements and virtual spaces and emerge as some of the LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest whom I interviewed discuss their relations to (their own and others') LGBTQ sexuality and disability. I analyze several cases to illustrate how visibility discourses compel the erasure of material bodies, and in the process, render certain (spatialized and racialized) experiences obsolete. I close by considering how my critique of visibility discourses might influence critical discussions of identity politics more broadly.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies , Winter 2015 , pp. 149 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Thank you to Kim Hall and to the Hypatia reviewers for critical feedback that significantly improved the article. I benefited from workshopping previous iterations of this article with Alison Kafer, Matt Richardson, and Siobhan Somerville. Robert McRuer's insights were particularly generative. Conversations with and feedback from the following people greatly enriched the text: Ayisha Ashley Al‐Sayyad, Heather Berg, Leigh Dodson, Eileen Boris, Avery Gordon, Maryam Griffin, Aly Patsavas, and Leila Rupp. Many thanks to all.

References

Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2006. Visible identities: Race, gender and the self. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Azndc. 2008. Couple Stock Photo 5155514. http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/couple-5155514?st=19b74aa (accessed September 17, 2014).Google Scholar
Bell, Christopher. 2012. Blackness and disability: Critical examinations and cultural interventions. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.Google Scholar
Cho, Sumi. 2009. Post‐racialism. Iowa Law Review 94 (5): 1589–649.Google Scholar
Claudia. Interview by Carly Thomsen. In‐person semi‐structured interview. Central Minnesota. September 29, 2011.Google Scholar
Cooper, Davina. 2014. Everyday utopias: The conceptual life of promising spaces. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbett, Jenny. 1994. A proud label: Exploring the relationship between disability politics and gay pride. Disability and Society 9 (3): 343–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corker, Marian. 2001. Sensing disability. Hypatia 16 (4): 34–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Disaboom. LGBT and Living with a Disability: Where to Find Support. http://www.disaboom.com/disability-dating-and-relationships-general/lgbt-and-living-with-a-disability-where-to-find-support (Site discontinued, accessed July 13, 2012).Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1978/1995. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Visalia, Calif.: Vintage Press.Google Scholar
Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Avery, and Newfield, Christopher, eds. 1996. Introduction. In Mapping multiculturalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Gray, Mary. 2009. Out in the country: Youth, media, and queer visibility in rural America. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, Kim, ed. 2011. Feminist disability studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Herring, Scott. 2010. Another country: Queer anti‐urbanism. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Howard, John. 2006. Of closets and other rural voids. GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 13 (1): 100–02.Google Scholar
Jarman, Michelle. 2012. Dismembering the lynch mob: Intersecting narratives of disability, race and sexual menace. In Sex and disability, ed. McRuer, Robert and Mollow, Anna. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Colin R. 2013. Just queer folks: Gender and sexuality in rural America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, E. Patrick. 2008. Sweet tea: Black gay men of the south. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Jung, Karen Elizabeth. 2011. Chronic illness and educational equity: The politics of visibility. In Feminist disability studies, ed. Hall, Kim. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, queer, crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Kay. Interview by Carly Thomsen. In‐person semi‐structured interview. Eastern South Dakota. December 19, 2011.Google Scholar
Linda. Interview by Carly Thomsen. In‐person semi‐structured interview. Western South Dakota. October 26, 2011.Google Scholar
Lipsitz, George. 2007. The racialization of space and the spatialization of race. Landscape Journal 26 (1): 10–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKittrick, Katherine, and Woods, Clyde. 2007. Black geographies and the politics of place. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.Google Scholar
McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
McRuer, Robert, and Mollow, Anna, eds. 2012. Sex and disability. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nair, Yazmin. 2010. Legalize gay: Or, so you think you're illegal? Against equality: Queer critiques of gay marriage, ed. Conrad, Ryan. Lewiston, Maine: Against Equality Publishing Collective.Google Scholar
Patsavas, Alyson. 2014. Recovering a cripistemology of pain: Leaky bodies, connective tissue and feeling discourse. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8 (2): 203–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reddy, Chandan. 2008. Time for rights? Loving, gay marriage, and the limits of legal justice. Fordham Law Review 76 (6): 2849–72.Google Scholar
Samuels, Ellen. 2003. My body, my closet: Invisible disability and the limits of coming‐out discourse. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9 (1‐2): 233–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Joan. 1991. The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry 17 (4): 773–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the closet. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Solis, Santiago. 2007. Snow White and the seven ‘dwarfs’—Queercripped. Hypatia 22 (1): 114–31.Google Scholar
Somerville, Siobhan. 2000. Queering the color line: Race and the invention of homosexuality in American culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomsen, Carly. Forthcoming. In plain(s) sight: Rural LGBTQ women and the politics of visibility. In Queering the countryside: New directions in rural queer studies, ed. Gray, Mary, Johnson, Colin, and Gilley, Brian. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Vayner, Mia. 2012. Hey New York gay community you can ignore us, but we the gay and disabled do exist. Posted at Disabled Access Denied? http://disabledaccessdenied.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/hey-new-york-gay-community-you-can-ignore-us-but-we-the-gay-and-disabled-do-exist/ (accessed September 16, 2014).Google Scholar