Body Politics w/ Jasbir Puar
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson speak with Jasbir Puar about the violent global effects of settler colonialism and how they shape our understanding of what we mean by “disability” and “debility.” We discuss how events like the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the bombings in 2014 are often described through the number of dead, when they also entail mass disablement and mass debilitation, and how colonial occupation itself can be understood through a theory of debility.
This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on November 21st 2022. We are re-releasing it today, alongside a new transcript of the conversation, because in the past few weeks we have found Jasbir’s work tremendously useful in understanding the enormity of what’s happening in Gaza.
Jasbir Puar 0:00
For me, it was also important to think politically about this, which is like what can debility galvanize, if we all understand ourselves in some relation to debility, and it's not contingent upon a self/other binarization of disabled/non-disabled. There's no pure debility and there's no pure capacity, right? That we are, as bodies, kind of moving in and out of these realms all the time.
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:54
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Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:15
So today, Jules and I have a really special interview for you. Jasbir Puar, author of the truly pathbreaking books, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, originally published in 2007, and The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, also published by Duke University Press in 2017. Now I think people often overuse the word pathbreaking, like a kind of buzzword when you want to say that something is really important, but Jasbir's work is truly pathbreaking. This is not an exaggeration, and I'm not just saying this to be nice. I am very hardcore serious about this. And I'm honored to have her here today to join us in discussion so that the three of us can revisit her book, The Right to Maim.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:58
Jasbir, welcome to the Death Panel. It's so wonderful to have you here.
Jasbir Puar 2:02
Thank you so much. It's absolutely wonderful to be here with both of you. And I really thank you for this opportunity to talk with you.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:09
Now, The Right to Maim is an incredibly thoughtful, complex and nuanced examination, which if I had to really distill it down to one sentence maybe, I would say that this book is about ideas about bodies and the way ideas about bodies are deployed by, among other things, US imperialism. Though it's often talked about as, this is a book about Palestine, or this is a book about queerness and disability, or homonationalism and ablenationalism. And I think you're quite clear throughout the book that this is first and foremost about, in many ways, American empire and the violent global effects of settler colonialism. It's also a book I think about how some of the exceptionalist ideas about health, debility, disability capacity, and what all those mean to a so-called "nation," and how those justify, but can also obscure the ongoingness of imperialism and the ongoingness of settler colonialism, and especially the role that the US has not just as a space of sort of neoliberal, civil rights aspiration, but as a global force which is productive of debility. And in the book, you have said that this often manifests as a misreading of structure as event, or the idea that as Lauren Berlant has put it, we sort of misread the endemic as epidemic, we use language of crisis and exceptionalism to frame things either as a aberration, a deviation from the norm. And your work really challenges readers to reckon with that kind of habit. And it's one of the main reasons actually that Artie and I chose to situate Health Communism within the context of COVID in the introduction, but we categorically and intentionally locate our analysis beyond COVID quite forcefully, because I think what your work really taught us is that materially speaking, one of our greatest challenges with regard to COVID is to understand it in the context of social murder, which we've talked about on this show in the past with Nate Holdren, as a kind of necessary precondition for capitalism that is built or baked in, whatever metaphor you prefer to use, it's a kind of prerequisite. But your work is really important because it reminds us that death, while positioned as a kind of ultimate consequence and final outcome, is also a kind of exceptionalized endpoint, which really hides the crucially productive role of maiming to capital and states. And so I'm really excited to talk to you about this book. And I know it's been five years since it came out and more since you wrote it, and that it's also a sort of continuation of the project in your first book as well. So I hope today we can sort of revisit it, think about it, think about what it's made you think about since and I was hoping that before we get into some of this nuance of debility, capacity, disability, biopolitics, homonationalism, ablenationalism. For context, can you start us off by talking a little bit about how your work led to the arguments in Right to Maim and where are you sort of situate your own analysis, or, you know what you wake up in the morning mad about, what you write through and against?
Jasbir Puar 5:27
Well, I wake up in the morning mad about many things. [ Bea and Jules laugh ] But first of all, just that, thank you so, so much for that very generous introduction to the book and framing of the book. And I really appreciate the care with which you distinguish it from being a book just about Palestine, which I think has been a way in which people have dismissed or decided not to read it. Since, you know, teaching and reading about Palestine can get difficult in the US Academy, you know, you've really foregrounded what I think is really important, which is it's an American Studies book, it is engaged with a transnational American Studies kind of methodology and frame. And it also -- I think of it as a piece of kind of accountability to US settler colonialism, you know, and for myself as a settler in the United States, and also as a kind of solidarity project, as well, as someone who sees the importance of scholarship as a contribution to solidarity movement organizing. So these things that you've mentioned, kind of all matter to me about the book. I'm an interdisciplinary scholar, I have an Ethnic Studies background and Gender Studies background and have done most of my work in teaching and transnational feminist kinds of framings. And this project really came out of the work in Terrorist Assemblages, in particular, through an absence in Terrorist Assemblages, I would say that was addressed -- in the years following its publication -- was addressed by critical Disability studies scholars, in particular, David Mitchell, Robert McRuer, Sharon Schneider, who were writing about ablenationalism, and started seeing the connections between homonationalism and ablenationalism, and kind of noting the ways in which I hadn't paid enough attention to, if at all, you know, what homonationalism demands, which is, of course, white racial privilege, class mobility, and cisgender identity, access to certain kinds of resources, reproduction of a kind of normative familial structure, but also, you know, able-bodiedness. And so that was an important recognition for me in the years following the publication of Terrorist Assemblages and a really important conversation that I was having with folks in Critical Disability Studies. And it was important, for me, given the wide audience that Terrorist Assemblages quite unexpectedly garnered, it was really important for me to kind of follow the lead of the interlocutors at that time to understand where the book was resonating, and where it fell short or where it could be further extended. So I think that was one of the formative conversations that drove The Right to Maim. But the other also was -- there's two other things. One was conceptual, that I was kind of working through the kind of debates between biopolitics and necropolitics, and really starting to -- and even in Terrorist Assemblages -- starting to understand biopolitics as what I call a debility-capacity machine. And what I mean by that is that this kind of biopolitics in this bio-necro collaboration, which is how I describe it in Terrorist Assemblages, not only -- it, you know, measures bodily states and kind of measures corporeality, but also modulates bodily capacity and debility and prescribes bodily capacity and debility by creating theories of -- not the distinction between abnormal and normal, but a kind of continuum of normativities, right? That then start creating a kind of constellation around, well, how close to the statistical norm are you? Or how much aspirational capacity do you have to arrive at a kind of biopolitical -- the kind of center of the interest of a kind of biopolitics. So biopolitics really started emerging to me as something that was not only measuring and tracking fertility, death rates, you know, illness, all sorts of other parameters of bodily life, but was also prescribing their meanings, and modulating their social positioning and their standing and also modulating bodies more generally. And then I would say the last thing that really drove this book was 2014, with the Black Lives Matter protests, and the Gaza to Ferguson, or Ferguson to Gaza, organizing that was going on, and also Operation Protective Edge that was happening in Gaza in 2014. Those political events really started for me crystallizing what was at stake and thinking about biopolitics, not just through the framings of life and death, but through kind of targeted impairment and what I eventually came to call the right to maim.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 10:54
I really appreciate the the way that in the book, in particular -- when we talk about biopolitics, often it's kind of talked about as a theory of how in some ways political relations are dictated through different ways of administering or regulating the life of populations. And a lot of people engage with sort of a couple of these different frames that are under the umbrella of biopolitics, looking at ways that, you know, life is sustained, life is multiplied, life is removed. But I feel like one of the things that you're really engaging with is this kind of idea of biopolitics as a regime of putting life in order and this kind of statistical management of the population and really trying to question what these frames are toward. I don't know if that's a sort of misreading of your engagement with biopolitics but I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about sort of how you see biopolitics as an idea and sort of what your specific intervention or development of that idea is?
Jasbir Puar 12:08
Well, I think I started feeling the kinds of limitations around the Foucauldian frame -- and those framings from Foucault have been rightly criticized by any number of people around the lack of addressing colonial rule, European colonial rule in the context Foucault was writing about. But I also was curious about this kind of life/death binary, that, as I think you already mentioned, Bea, that talks about death as a kind of ultimate endpoint or the way I think about it death as a kind of ultimate assault on life. And that's just not -- I think that just didn't sit necessarily right with me. For a number of reasons. But I also, you know, in 2014, when Israel was bombing Gaza, the discourse on the number of deaths was something that galvanized people, there were huge protests during that summer all around the world. And, you know, the death toll was announced every day. I was watching this unfold every day, for 52 days. And at this point, in 2014, I was already heavily immersed in these conversations and in, you know, for myself kind of taking up a position as a scholar in Critical Disability Studies. And I was like, there's something missing about this conversation. And when I started tracking beyond the death toll numbers, realized that thousands of people were being disabled every day, during these during these numerous days and not reported on at all.
Beatrice & Jules 14:00
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 14:00
And so I started really thinking about the utility of that. The political utility of not reporting on the disabilities, the economic utility of that, the ideological, you know, the kind of cultural and ideological capital that comes from not reporting on that. And I think to take it outside of the context of the book, we continue to see, and we're able to continue to try to understand what are the political, economic and ideological benefits of not talking about disablement as an active state practice. For example, with the Uvalde shootings. We don't hear about the almost two dozen children that were disabled in the shootings that killed almost as many people. And so I really started wondering, who is benefiting from not talking about this? And also what kinds of discourses continue to minimize the impact of disablement in favor of this life/death binary that continues to produce death as something that we should mobilize around. While disablement is not necessarily something that would galvanize people to come out to the streets, right? So part of the impetus around the book was, well, there has to be -- or I wanted to see -- could there be a politics, an anti-imperial politics, that was galvanizing not just around the kind of, you know, mass killings, but also around mass disablement, as well. And that impetus seemed to go against the grain of Disability Studies at that time. And for sure, Disability Rights organizing, but also, just more generally, I just didn't see that kind of attention, in kind of the US context of organizing being paid to the consequences of kind of constantly defaulting to death as the primary form of collateral damage.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 16:13
Yeah, and I think that's super important to consider in the context of COVID, as well, and the discussion around sort of how we're perceiving what it is going to be, that's going to be what quote, unquote, makes people in power care about COVID. For many, many months, early on in the pandemic, there was a big debate over whether or not kids got COVID, or had bad outcomes from COVID. And that's something we covered with exhausting specificity on this show. And as the evidence began to pile up that yes, in fact, kids could get COVID -- and that it did terrible things to children's bodies and could produce symptoms for many months afterwards, giving many more children an experience of sort of ME/CFS-like symptoms in a sort of extreme concentration of time that we haven't seen in many years, particularly in the United States -- this kind of idea emerged of like, well, there's a threshold of dead kids that we'll reach when people will care. Right?
Jules Gill-Peterson 17:18
Mhm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:18
And I think it's often held up as death is almost like this ultimate proof of wrongdoing by state or political apparatuses or by structural theories. And that ultimately this example of, you know, what's happening to children beyond the children who die in school shootings, who we never hear about, which is something I had not thought of before, but as soon as you said it, I was like, oh fuck. Yeah, absolutely.
Jasbir Puar 17:45
Mhm. Mhm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:45
But you know, I think it's it's tremendously damning that you never ever hear discussion of the kind of collateral impacts beyond the loss of life from things like gun violence in the United States.
Jasbir Puar 17:58
Yeah, it's interesting you just mentioned that because there was an article, a recent article in the Washington Post, that's actually finally kind of looking just on a base level on like, statistically speaking, that far more people are disabled by police brutality and police violence than are killed. So there's also something important here about the spectacle-ization of killing, and how maiming and disablement and -- first of all, injury, maiming, disability, disablement, they're hard to measure. And death is constructed as a extremely finite event, even though -- and another limitation to the Foucauldian frame is that, of course, life does not begin in the same way or the same place or the same moment for everybody. Life does not end in the same way in the same moment in the same forms for everybody. So we have all sorts of other cosmologies that we can think about in terms of, you know, when does life actually transition into something called death? Or what does death actually mean that might actually be continuous with life or a version of life? So that's not even accounted for, at all.
Jules Gill-Peterson 19:16
Well I think one of the things that, you know, is so galvanizing about the way you're sort of drawing our attention from the get go in the book is kind of asking us to see how we become so affixed to what we think is exceptional. And that that can actually, you know, kind of work in contradictory or contrary ways. So disability imagined as exceptional, if it's a sort of tragedy narrative where the intent was to kill but it failed, and so death didn't happen, and that's what makes you know, disability this thing we have to be affixed to. Or, in the contrary sense, disability as a kind of exception that can lead to a "human rights" formation to make certain demands on the state for repair. And that in both cases, that exceptionalizing move is about subtracting -- maybe even empirically, demographically, materially? -- almost the majority of what's going on.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:11
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 20:11
Yes.
Jules Gill-Peterson 20:11
And so there's something missing, right? And I wonder if maybe, you know, one way to get into talking about this disability and disability, versus disability or debility, or this kind of nexus that you work with in the book is to really sort of tell us a little bit more about kind of, yeah, how has disability been approached or theorized, or how was it being theorized at the time you were writing, that kind of, you know, reinforced that exceptionalism? In some ways, I think about it as like almost drawing our attention to a smaller and smaller phenomenon. And kind of like reinforcing, you know, this category of disability in a way that sort of by proxy is asking us not to think about what it's connected to, or what it might rely on, right? That is sort of distinguished or differentiated from it. So yeah, what were some of those sort of dominant ways at the time or dominant ways, often still, whether theoretical, political, of thinking through or understanding disability that you felt you really wanted to dig into and complicate?
Jasbir Puar 21:18
Yeah, that's a great way of kind of laying out the stakes here. And to respond to the earlier part of your comment, just this idea that death didn't happen, becomes a kind of "humane" approach to violence, right?
Jules Gill-Peterson 21:34
[ laughs ] Right.
Jasbir Puar 21:35
And again, you're supposed to be grateful that death didn't happen. And we can talk about this, if you want, later. But this is connected to kind of newer work that I'm doing on nonlethal weaponry and crowd control weaponry, and just the way in which our discourses -- our humanitarian and our human rights discourses and our discourses about what is humane -- are all kind of driving this problem, I would say, because it's always about a kind of gratitude towards not being killed. And that, you know, maiming is this kind of "humane" alternative to killing. And then the other part of that problem is, you know, where is disability in all of this? Well, it's either, you know, in this kind of life/death, binary, the empowerment discourses, like here's a life worth living. And then, in some formulations of kind of necropolitics, it's like, you know, debilitation and disability, disablement, are kind of on the way to death. They're part of a deathworlds, this is obviously a reference to Achille Mbembe's work. And then again, this kind of alibi for a kind of humanism, like death didn't happen. And so all of these things are kind of keeping our attention from actually writing histories from the vantage of injury and maiming and disablement, I think. If we're talking about kind of writing histories of violence, if we started from, you know, not the question of killing always being the ultimate symbol and sign and evidence of violence, right? And of course, there has been ongoingly a lot of acknowledgment that the binary of disability -- or disabled and non-disabled is a very murky one, it's constantly being undermined, it's not necessarily lived out as a binary for so many of us, who are kind of moving back and forth in between these categories. That these categories also are not fixed states of our bodies, they're not attributes necessarily, they change across geopolitical space, across state regimes of designation, you know, who's disabled, who's not disabled, across institutional processes, you know, in terms of all sorts of things from getting accommodations to forms of evaluation, they're modulated across historical time. And human rights regimes as well. And so a lot of these apparatuses that claim to be, you know, recognizing disability are actually producing it as a category, right?
Jules Gill-Peterson 24:34
Mm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:34
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 24:34
And so that's the biggest problem, right, is that there's been -- even as there's been attention to complicating this binary, I think there's been a politics that's arisen out of the binarization around the category and so that politics is then a kind of reattachment to the binary itself and to disability as an identity. And then from that arises a lot of discussion about, well, who's really disabled? Who's not really disabled? What is a disability? What's not a disability? And a lot of these discussions focus on both identity and the body in ways that stabilize, I think, both, right? And so instead of, you know, "what is disability?" I think the book is really invested in, you know, what do these categorizations of disability do?
Beatrice & Jules 25:32
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 25:32
You know, what is their function? What is their function as part of a taxonomy? What is the function of this categorization, in relation to biopolitics? And, you know, for me, I was really also reading a lot from what is now called Southern Disability Studies. And in particular, you know, I center Helen Meekosha's work in the book and continue to center her 2011 article called Decolonizing Disability because I think that even though that piece is widely cited -- it's kind of like Marta Russell, as well
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:13
Yes.
Jules Gill-Peterson 26:13
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 26:13
Like Marta Russell's work: widely, widely cited. But when you look at what she's calling for, what Meekosha's calling for, so little of that has actually been followed through upon, you know? And I wanted to take seriously that this distinction that is often made between disability and impairment, say in [a] North American context, is not something that makes a lot of sense to a lot of people working in these fields in Southern Disability Studies and in the Global South. So that was another reason why I was interested in what do these categorizations and these modalities of categorizing disability, what do they do? What's their imperial function? What's their function in economic and capitalist terms? What's their productive function in terms of state violence. And the other the other thing I'll say is that there's also been -- in academic discourse, but I also think, in organizing spaces -- this kind of distinction between disability as a political identity versus disability as a descriptive, you know, modality.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 27:32
Yeah.
Jasbir Puar 27:32
And I also think this is a problematic distinction, you know? When I -- in terms of the work that I've done, and Palestine, you know, largely, I have found that disability does operate as a descriptive identity. But that by no means indicates that people don't have a political relationship to disability. But it's not a political identity of disability. And so I really saw that some of these efforts to kind of complicate this binary, were actually then being undermined or that binary was being resutured or bolstered again, by some of these other kind of backdoor, you know, analyses and contributions.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:19
I really love the way you put that, because it does feel like a reanimation of something that is being critiqued often. And sometimes this even extends to discussions amongst disabled people as to what the valid disability-informed critique of a particular event or political perspective even is.
Jasbir Puar 28:44
Mhm. Mhm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:44
And this is, I think, one of the things that talking to colleagues in the Global South who work with disability and think about disability, that's one of the things that's most alienating to them, when they're working is to think about the amount of people that are particularly working in the United States who are so ready to sort of declare what is valid disability critique and what is invalid disability critique, without any realization of what is influencing and shaping the parameters that they're setting up for what qualifies or disqualifies something as being quote unquote, "good disability crit" or bad, you know, quote, unquote, "unproductive" rhetoric or so to speak, or difficult rhetoric. And I think this is something that we see really often kind of mobilized partially in a mode to put the United States sort of up on a pedestal in some capacity. I think there's a lot of attachment to some of the legislative victories that we've had in the United States that, as it's been taken up -- and this is why I think your work is so important because you're really looking at both how these things exist, but also how they're sort of taken up by international frameworks of charity in some capacity or --
Jasbir Puar 29:58
Mhm. Mhm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 29:59
-- you know, the way that for example the WHO talks about disability is incredibly influenced by the Americans with Disabilities Act, the British and American social model of disability movement. And then that's going to shape and influence how the rest of the world is sort of given certain types of funding to study disability or certain types of global data projects are initiated or not initiated, or targeted, or sort of what these definitions become. And what it begins to do is also really hide the way that the US empire is a massively productive force in terms of quote, unquote, making new disabled people through its ongoing imperialist engagement with the rest of the world. And this is something that I think not a lot of folks in the United States have really like reckoned with so much. And, you know, I think part of that comes from an attachment to the idea of trying to work with some of those civil rights protections that we have earned and trying to sort of find ways to bridge this gap. And what it essentially becomes is, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore put this so well when I interviewed her -- she was talking about something else, but it totally applies here -- "capitalism, saving capitalism from capitalism," where you think about the ADA, what actually is going on in the Americans with Disabilities Act is this is a enfranchisement of a population that was excluded from an idea called the dignity of risk, into the dignity of risk, which is fundamentally a sort of idea not about who should be supported within society, but about how someone makes themself worthwhile and valuable to society. And this was a fundamentally conservative bill, it was pushed by conservatives, it was passed during the Bush administration -- the first Bush administration. And I think it's no coincidence that in a way, a lot of these liberal Disability Rights frames not only kind of collapse the southern perspective on disablement, but they often also really hide in a lot of ways, the role the United States, and the war on terror has had in the global sort of disabled community.
Jasbir Puar 32:27
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And, you know, when you're talking about wanting to move into these categorizations of being seen as worthwhile and being fundamental, like through the ADA, it's also about legibility. As well, right.
Jules Gill-Peterson 32:43
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 32:44
Which becomes the most important parameter in a lot of ways with these kind of global NGO projects. So for example, you know -- and the work that I've done in Palestine, in the refugee camps, around disability is extremely limited. So I say this, you know, provisionally. But the funding networks that are varied, they came from Oslo in the past, they've come from the UN, from UNRWA, they come from, you know, other independent NGO organizations, but they're all involved in standardizing this language of disability. And, of course, you know, people trying to access this funding have developed all sorts of strategies for, you know, mimicking, or manipulating or deploying a kind of strategic relation to these categories, this kind of lexicon, the empowerment lexicon, that are kind of prevalent and rife in these networks. But just to speak to very concretely to what you're talking about. There's researchers, Rita Giacaman in particular, in the West Bank --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 34:01
[ laughs ] I was just thinking of Rita, yeah.
Jasbir Puar 34:03
Of course! Who -- and who you should totally interview, by the way, I can help you figure out how and where. She's kind of hard to get.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 34:12
Oh my god I would love that.
Jasbir Puar 34:14
Yeah, I mean. I would actually love to be on an interview with her as well. I've obviously spoken with her many times. But you know, her team and her work at the Public Institute of Health at Birzeit University, they are now understanding the effects of many decades of overdiagnosis of PTSD and other kinds of mental disabilities that worked in the service of not having to deal with the complexity of the occupation and kind of subject formation and subjectivity and resistance and health and all of these things. And so it becomes easier to produce a binary between you know -- the disabled / non-disabled binary -- than it does to actually address what kinds of social suffering are happening because of the occupation, right? So that's one really concrete example of the way in which US imperialism, through this mechanism of aid and care and humanitarian circuits, winds up actually reproducing a kind of really problematic binary in order to obfuscate an accountability to the occupation as a political problem, and as a political solidarity, you know, a kind of need for political solidarity. And she's written a great deal about some of her interactions with these NGOs. But the other thing I wanted to say is that disability itself, as a category, if we're looking at the North American and Euro-American context, you know, it's often said that disability, you know, needs to be part of a kind of intersectional -- any kind of intersectional analysis, right? We have to take into account disability. But disability itself is already anchored as a category in whiteness, in Imperial formations, in --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:25
Official state recognitions and citizenship.
Jasbir Puar 36:28
Absolutely. Yeah, if we go to Fanon, you know, we are looking at medicalization of colonialism. You know, we're already -- so the category of disability itself. It kind of works three ways. It's like it needs to be part of an intersectional analysis, it needs to be intersectionalized itself.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:50
[ laughs ] Yeah.
Jules Gill-Peterson 36:51
[ laughs ]
Jasbir Puar 36:51
But then also as its own geneological formation is so wedded, already, to the very forms of violence that it portends to be addressing. And so these are some of the things I was trying to get at in the book, that there's a kind of political and an epistemological problem going on here.
Jules Gill-Peterson 37:16
There's a wonderful line in the preface -- I mean, I wish you all could see my notes from the preface, because I just started creating this really elaborate starring system [ Beatrice laughs ] to like, be like, okay, well, this line is so important then some lines have, like, seven stars beside them. [ Beatrice and Jasbir laugh ] But, but just to pull one --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:37
Mine's just full of post-its and then bookmarks, and then dog eared corners, all sorts of stuff. Yeah.
Jules Gill-Peterson 37:46
A beautiful, beautiful assemblage. I mean, there's, one of the lines you write Jasbir: "disability is everywhere and yet, for all sorts of important reasons, not claimed as such." And this sort of way in which, you know, then disability -- the idea that claiming the things that have not been claimed as disabilities as disabilities would somehow be the solution is exactly, you know, symptomatic of the problem that you're trying to help us understand.
Jasbir Puar 38:14
Mhm. Absolutely.
Jules Gill-Peterson 38:14
But you know, I think one thing that's so important is that, this critique of the disabled / non-disabled binary isn't meant to be replaced by, you know, even a binary or any other prescribed relationship between disability and debility. And I'm wondering if we can sort of move towards talking about, you know, what debility does in relation to disability, but just sort of digging into debility or debilitation? Because, you know, we've been talking a lot about how disability gets framed, as an exception as a discrete event, that's something to be standardized, to be taxonomized, to really kind of be sort of made legible, even though it can take many different, you know, definitions in different contexts. Nevertheless, its sort of point is to be turned into something really kind of tangible.
Jasbir Puar 39:06
Mhm. Mhm.
Jules Gill-Peterson 39:06
Whereas debility takes us towards, you know, "the endemic." The things that are so structural to the conditions of life for entire populations, that they would never become so discrete in the first place. But part of what you're bringing us towards understanding is that relationship between what we think is the exception, what we think is spectacular, and this endemic kind of every day, this sort of massified logic and forms of violence that operate, you know, at different speeds or at different scales, right, and kind of, I guess, network or connect a bunch of things that we wouldn't really pay attention to if we were sort of so dialed in to the exceptional category of disability. So you sort of set up this really, I think, important, I think especially for readers reading from the global north, this really important kind of question to understand, you know, not just why is the degree and scale of injury and maiming and violence, you know, throughout the Global South or throughout the globe, frankly, when it comes to US imperialism, you know, the problem is not like, oh, "why isn't all of that understood as disability" as if to understand it that way would be, you know, the solution. But actually, you know, understanding it as debility takes us to sort of consider a different set of operations or calculations and a kind of centrality or productivity, too, to all of this violence. Again, that it's not just sort of senseless, or, you know -- not derivative, right? Like collateral damage is a really interesting concept when it has an end unto itself. So, yeah. Could you tell us a little bit about how you work with debility to kind of open up all of those sorts of different questions that kind of stand in contrast to disability, before we even then can kind of ask you to tell us about how to understand the relationships between disability and debility. But for you, what does debility help us apprehend a little differently than disability?
Jasbir Puar 41:20
Well, I think, first of all, I wanted just to flag Julie Livingston's work, because that's where I first started thinking about the term debility, and it's from her, I think it's a 2005 book called Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. And Julie, you know, she deploys debility a little bit differently than how I eventually start thinking about it. But she's talking about a broader sphere that includes disability in it, which I ultimately try to refine a little bit. But one of the most important things that she writes is that she's interested in bodily infirmities that are not regarded as disability, because she writes, they are "expected impairments" and understood as such. They are understood as "normal," or what we're calling endemic, right. So there's nothing exceptional about these expected impairments. And she's looking at miners who are returning from the mines usually amputated, right? And that -- in that context. So, you know, here's a kind of literature from her work and related works from Global South literatures that's actually not following the kind of Euro-American models of disability and disability studies, or the UN models, or the NGO models, or whatever. She's actually -- like, actually this is a kind of lived reality here, which is, this idea of disability is not operative as a form of sociality. Right? Because these are expected impairments. So what kind of sociality is that? Right? Where impairments are not exceptionalized, and people have -- communities have -- all sorts of modes for accommodating those impairments, for understanding how we live with them, you know. So there's a whole other kind of sociality that's organized around these, you know, quote, unquote, expected impairments. So that seems really important. That seems really important to me, just from the context of like ethnographic work and work from the Global South. What happens for me around, you know, debility is a couple things. Jules, you mentioned many of these things already. And for me, debility is kind of intersecting with Lauren Berlant's notion of slow death. But one of the things that I wanted to do with that idea of slow death is -- you know, because you've got the temporal aspect in here. That's so important. It's the ongoingness. And I think slow death also, first of all, I wanted to infuse the understanding of slow death or the conceptualization of slow death with a kind of geopolitics and biopolitics that understands not only the uneven effects, or the uneven distribution of slow death, say across classed populations, but I was really thinking about it geopolitically, right? And in terms of empire and imperialism. You know, what is the imperial machine in terms of creating ongoing, longstanding, debilitation? Debilitation that's not organized around a spectacular event? That destabilizes the notion of an event, or the notion of a disabling event, or disablement. Which again, I think that the language of disablement and disabling, often still concretizes an event, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 45:15
Yeah.
Jasbir Puar 45:15
For me, debility really looks at, you know, even when there is this kind of disabling event, there's an awareness through debility of the sociopolitical and geopolitical and historical conditions that give rise to that event, right? And then also the conditions that inform the aftermath of that event, should there even be an event, right?
Jules Gill-Peterson 45:39
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 45:39
But, you know, to kind of foreground the biopolitics of the statistical likelihood of being what I call "made available for injury." And so, whereas Julie's defining disability within a broader frame of debility, I'm really thinking about how they need each other in a particular way. They're conceptually kind of codependent on each other because they have important functions as a relation. And I think debility is not an identification, it's a process, but in particular, disability is a kind of exceptionalization of injury, of bodily condition of illness, within the context of kind of widespread disenfranchisement or what I wind up calling debilitation, right? So this obfuscation of debility is -- one thing that the category "disability" does is erase structural debilitation.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:49
Yeah.
Jules Gill-Peterson 46:50
Yeah.
Jasbir Puar 46:50
Or structural, deep-seated disenfranchisement that I'm now calling debilitation. And that's a really important way of understanding what disability as a taxonomy does, is that it then moves our attention away from the non spectacular the non consolidatable, the non legible. And so we lose the thread of what is potentially a very galvanizing kind of conceptual and lived reality of debility that goes beyond a kind of identity. So for me, it was also important to think politically about this, and I, you know, which is like: what can debility galvanize? If we all understand ourselves in some relation to debility. And it's not contingent upon a self-other binarization of disabled / non-disabled, which we may well move in and out of, or have as an identity, but we're also connected to others who understand themselves in some relation to debility, then where's the kind of political mobilization potential in that? And to go to just the context of teaching I initially, after kind of working with, you know, some of this literature that was talking about debility, I also just saw the relevance of this in my own classrooms where the disabled body -- the disabled student was always imagined to be either visibly present in the classroom, right, because of the way that disability is so cohered around the visible disability, and visuality. And if that wasn't the case, then that disabled student was always understood as outside of the classroom. And in the meantime, I had so many students going through accommodations, you know, dealing with medicalization and kind of dealing with pharmaceuticals and applying for accommodations and all of them embedded in these processes of administrating disability. But still understanding disability as kind of somehow outside of the space of the classroom, which I really, I do really see the classroom as a space of debility -- where we're constantly navigating debility and capacity, right? Of various kinds. And it's temporal. And it's bodily, and it's cyclical, you know, all of those things around temporality are really important. You know, "debility" also really helped me because I think it, along with destabilizing the binary, it also helped me understand that there's no pure debility and there's no pure capacity, right? That we are, as bodies, kind of moving in and out of these realms all the time. And so there's two things in relation to that movement and one is the debility is kind of intrinsically -- you know, you don't have to argue for its relevance in terms of intersectionality. It's intrinsically intersectional. Because debility / capacity, you're always kind of in a relation of acknowledging your advantages, your privileges, and at the same time acknowledging where you don't have those privileges, where you don't have those advantages, where you are structurally set up biopolitically in devastating ways. But then also in terms of assemblage, because I see debility and capacity kind of always in flux, and always in motion. And always, you know, moving. And I think that leads to why I think it's so important to think about these things, not just in terms of political mobilization, and kind of solidarity organizing, and how we can kind of galvanize in relation to each other, regardless of our particular bodily situations in any particular moment, right, is to think about societies of control. Which work absolutely through, not this self-other binarization, but work through modulation of bodily capacity and debility, right? Biopolitics as a capacity -- you know, debility / capacity machine. So, you know, the last question that started getting raised for me around all of this was, you know, we talk about, in relation to Marta Russell's, work, you know, how disability becomes profitable. It becomes profitable through the ADA, because you can incorporate disabled workers and pay them less or get kickbacks from the state, or, you know -- you're reproducing the demands of capitalism through the ADA. And that's a kind of thing that Russell lays out. But then there's also the profitability of the disabled body that cannot work. So your profit comes from being in a bed, or the care economy that is extracting and exploitative around that. But I also started thinking, well, debility is also extremely profitable for capitalism. And how do we think about that? Because that's not how we're thinking about disability. Or, we are thinking about the profitability of disability. But I think we also have to think about what disability erases in relation to debility and how profit is made from that erasure, actually.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:35
I wonder if you could actually speak more on that tension a little bit, because I think it's one of the most important things to understand here. There's a tension, obviously, that's important with the category of disability, right, that some people will never qualify as disabled, circumstantially. Disability is an identity that is denied, officially, to more than it is given. And that's, I think, a thing that, you know, we often don't talk about so much, of disability as about recognizing validity and thinking about things expansively and we don't actually talk about how the state and the kind of national security apparatus often will control, minimize, and sort of optimize debility, keeping people out of that social role of the sick, of the disabled, out of that sort of official status. And that that in and of itself, is one of the most important ways that the money model of disability that Russell theorized actually exists in society, it's like without the frame of disability is where it's actually most apparent. It's in the people who are denied that subjectivity or for whatever reason, it would be unsafe for them to identify as disabled. And there are so many people who are in this position where, you know, they experience debility, but they don't count as official or qualified, certified disabled. I mean, someone told me in 2019, because I was invisibly disabled, I was not disabled enough to represent disabled people. And that kind of idea of like, well, you know, sort of who is the subject, right of even our theorizing, of extraction and of healthcare and sort of, of this way that the state tries to manage bodies and sort of, you know, create these ways of understanding both politically and socially what the role of debility is in society is by translating structural processes into individual groups of people with differential diagnoses, who are sort of grouped under the umbrella of, you know, experiencing enough debility that can be documented on a medical chart to qualify for disability and a lot of times we talk about this in terms of like medicalization, and the social model. And all of that's fine, but it really doesn't get into like the actual meat of what's going on and how bodies relate to the reproduction of capital and also to the kind of maintenance of the "control" part of a control society. And I think that's part of why it's really important to understand disability, capacity, disablement debility, these are not like synonyms. Oftentimes, in the kind of like NGO speak, you think of things as being like, oh, this is just a bunch of different words for something and some are more politically correct than others. And so often the language that we use around disabilities in that register of like, well, what's the right term to use? And what's the proper term to use, which really reflects this kind of negation and rejection of so many aspects of debility that people live with who will never, ever experience being marked as officially disabled?
Jasbir Puar 56:00
Yeah, I think that's why it's so important to think of debility and disability as kind of codependent modality -- you know, codependent frames, and frames that are in relation. And I remember, you know, when I was thinking about, okay, well, what is debility? I was reading -- I was thinking about [Gayatri Chakravorty] Spivak, going through Spivak, and her idea of the subaltern and, you know, she's, as with all of us and our contradictions and the things we say over the years that contradict other things we've said, you know, she has been all over the map in terms of like, what the subaltern is. But I think ultimately, the most helpful expression of that from her was like, it's a relationship. It's a relationship to legibility, it's a relationship to interpolation, it's a relationship to identity and how it's policed. And so it's so important to continue to think about debility as not a description necessarily, but a relationship to disability. So all of the things that you're describing, Bea, are already kind of part of that relationality. Right? The ADA itself already sets up "the good disabled" from "the bad disabled," right? And so in some ways, that's what we're talking about, right? Like, when I think about, you know, yes, unsafe to identify as disabled. When I think about, you know, what happens in in Gaza. You know, when we think about the "shoot to cripple" or "shoot to maim" policy, and we saw this in full force, after the book came out, so that was kind of, you know, heart wrenching for me, because I was like, okay, this is playing out exactly -- and even worse than I ever could have thought it could play out in terms of the right to maim. But the targeting of over 7,000 lower limbs of protesters in the Great March of Return, right, who remain in the space of the "cripple," or remain in the space of the debilitated unless they have access to certain kinds of resources and discourses that then, you know, allow them to produce themselves as an empowered, visible, disabled subject. And so you can kind of see the distinction between the way those protesters were taken pity upon and then a whole humanitarian aid economy is generated around all of the pictures that came out, and then, you know, mainstream press in North America, and then like something like the the Gazan soccer team, you know, of amputees, right? That, you know, or the BBC documentary on the Paralympics and the Paralympic Gazan disabled athletes, like that kind of thing. So there's always that kind of messy economy that, you know, for me this identifying -- I think we can see all the ways in which identifying and being able to be declared disabled or being able to prove that one is disabled, can operate as, what are the ways in which there's a kind of beneficial economy around being able to identify as disabled, being able to be recognized as such. And at the same time, disability is used to pathologize raced and colonized bodies, right? And so I think there's always that split economy going on that I was trying to attend to as well and that the problem with this split economy is also that there's just an aspirational push all the time. Yes, I want to be recognized, yes, I need -- in order to get, you know, access to x resources, I want to be recognized. And of course, then you don't even get into, like, well, are there resources?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:00:17
Right.
Jasbir Puar 1:00:18
You know, which is the biggest question around a place like Gaza, where the medical infrastructure so decimated, right? What does it even take for a crippled body to become a disabled body? Right? That's a question we should be asking.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:00:32
Yes.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:00:33
And on the inverse, right, I think part of what's so important about thinking through the debility / disability nexus, too, is that debility prompts recognition beyond individual, and even human, entirely human, kinds of objects of study. You write in the fourth chapter about how crucial infrastructure is being maimed in Gaza, things like hospitals, ambulances, roads, and food supply chains. And that that creates, again, this sort of "endemic," you know, the structuring of everyday life, rather than the interruption of everyday life or the exception to everyday life.
Jasbir Puar 1:01:19
Mhm.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:01:19
And in the coda [you] really, I think, dig into such, you know, and it's in part reporting, conversations, from fieldwork and talking to people, and a couple of key moments that really jumped out to me, numerous interviewees articulating the tension between, you know, seeking, as you're just saying, seeking accommodation within the conditions of occupation, versus, or / and, understanding the occupation itself as debilitating. When it comes to something like crossing a checkpoint. And so this kind of shift that you introduce there, you know, "rather than" -- this is a quote -- "rather than saying Palestinians with disabilities are twice disabled, this frame posits that everyone is debilitated to some degree, or in other words, no one is able bodied."
Jasbir Puar 1:02:08
Mhm.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:02:08
And that's because the production of debilitation is really central to colonial rule, right? Again, it's not incidental, it's not a sort of byproduct of some other goal. That actually, the production of debilitation which can include -- which does include -- shooting people, but also includes the destruction of medical care, the destruction of any sort of infrastructure, the destruction of food supply chains and roads. And ultimately, I can't think of a more concrete example of both the riddle here, but at the same time, the real affordance of moving to think in this way, right? I mean, I keep having this sense, both as I was rereading the book, but as we're talking today, too, of: I think it can be so challenging to expand the landscape of -- that's bad metaphor -- [ Jasbir laughs] to expand the domain, right, of what it is we're trying to understand.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:02:08
Yeah.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:03:12
And sometimes I think it's like, okay, you know, people have done all this work to introduce and elaborate and critically mobilize disability and adding in another concept, you know, like debility, right? The point is not to make it feel too heavy or unwieldy. And it's not some sort of nihilistic critique that is just meant to, you know, fuck up everything and then walk away, [ Beatrice and Jasbir laugh ] but actually there's this critical moment -- I mean, I think that's great, too. But, you know, there's this moment, [ Beatrice and Jasbir continue to laugh ] and I think it works really --
Jasbir Puar 1:03:44
It's my general tendency.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:03:47
[ laughs ]
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:03:47
You know I love it. But there's this way that over the course of the book, you kind of arrive in the coda, having moved through each of the really thoughtful and elaborate case studies and kind of arrive then on the ground with you doing this field work and hearing from folks and hearing from people who are confronting this conundrum, right, you know, as the exhaustion and as the condition of life, right? And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, okay, that's why it's so helpful. Because don't we want to be confronted with what is actually happening?
Jasbir Puar 1:04:24
Yeah.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:04:24
Which is not to say, then get some sort of bird's eye view. That's not the point. Right? But there is a kind of dynamic, you know, I don't know I just I think things feel more, I don't want to say alive, because that's another bad metaphor, but you get a sort of sense of the aliveness, the deathly liveness, or just sort of the moving parts are like really moving and you realize how much we've been asked, you know, if we're just coming from a disability point of view, or if we're, you know, told only think about the Global South on its own terms or only think about the United States --
Jasbir Puar 1:05:00
Yep. Yep.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:05:00
You know. That you're just really being asked, on purpose, not to consider what is actually happening! Right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:07
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 1:05:07
Yeah.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:05:06
And that I think is just such a, you know, it takes, I think it should take, you know, the length of a book to really come to that kind of moment. But for me, it was just such a kind of clarifying, and yet sort of galvanizing, I don't know, there's just something I haven't quite been able to find the words for it, but that sort of moment of, okay, we're not in the before and after event of becoming disabled, but thinking about ongoing, you know, ongoing kind of quotidian problems in which populations are like moving in and out and through and experiencing both debilitation and incapacitation. And that that happens, you know, in a larger global context, you know, where wherever we are sitting and reading this book we're implicated in, but not in some sort of flat, undifferentiated way, but actually in a way that you can then start to dig into with much greater nuance. Um. Well, that didn't arrive at a question.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:20
[ laughs ]
Jasbir Puar 1:05:44
Well, but that's a super -- it's super helpful. And I appreciate you saying all of that, because I think you're right, I think it goes against what we'd like to see, you know, what we'd rather see, which is okay, here's something that I can kind of apprehend and I have an approach to, you know? And I think so much about, you know, the way that those images of the protesters that were shot in Gaza, you know, start circulating, and the reality is, is that there's a focalization on the sniping and the shooting of the lower limbs. And very few questions about the political situation that's come to this place, and even fewer still questions about what happens to people after this disabling event? Right. And so I think your sense of, well, here's actually what's happening is what I really wanted to get at, on a larger scale.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:11
Yeah.
Jasbir Puar 1:07:11
Sure, every binary has a third, right? There's always three people in bed, according to Lacan, you know? [ Beatrice laughs ] So I'm like, all right. So what's the third that's being repressed? You know, in this binary, right? I'd say it's a post structuralist mode of analysis that I'm very constantly attuned to, you know, the kind of triangulation and sometimes even more kind of what else is being repressed in the name of this binary? Right, what's being hidden away in the name of this binary. Okay, so that's a conceptual mode. But, you know, I also wanted to say something about what people are living through. And I think that that last, that coda, I think, is what a lot of, or some people in, you know, Critical Disability Studies, kind of objected to. And I'm like, here's actually what people are saying about their lives. You know. It's not a question of, is a disabled life a life worth living? Yes, it is. Is a life under colonialism a life worth living? Yes, it is, you know?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:11
Yeah.
Jasbir Puar 1:07:53
And that's the broader question and stake here. So even when you have this idea that, you know, Disability Justice should make sense in a place like Palestine. Well, not necessarily. Because there's an anti-imperial politics and struggle and resistance organizing that's happening on a much larger scale than what is, you know -- I guess I should just go back to Helen Meekosha where she was just like, you know, everyone is concerned about this relationship between the medical and the social model, whereby we don't want to, quote unquote, return to the social model, right? But if you're looking at something called a political model, or a geopolitical model, you don't have that bifurcation.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:09:13
Yeah.
Jasbir Puar 1:09:13
In part because what is pathologized is the colonial body writ large. It's not only the disabled body that's pathologized and seen as inferior. It's the entire body politic, right. This is, of course, Fanon again. And so that's what's being resisted. And that's not to say that there aren't, you know, phobias and ableism and all sorts of other things going on in Palestine, but that the politics, the anchoring of solidarity and politics has to be more nuanced around what are these frames that we expect to be kind of translated and imported and taken up elsewhere? Right. They don't always make sense.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:09:56
Mhm. Absolutely. And I think you give such a good example of that in the coda where you talk about, you know, if we sort of look at things through the kind of narrow lens of medical model versus social model as being the two sort of dichotomies that we're supposed to make some decision about, which is the superior one to use, to resist, right, that sort of puts us in a position of saying, like, okay, our analysis about debility and Palestine and disability should center around removing the aspects of occupation, for example, that result in impairment, that result in harm, in a kind of permanent injury that gets jacketed in this kind of like -- it's like a kind of mercy jacketing is what I wrote in the margins where you have like, you know, deliberate maiming dressed up as a international mercy framework and a kind of grace that reflects positively on the occupying nation and the nations inspired by the occupying nation and supported with weapons and funding and, you know, the sort of social sanctioning of the occupation. And what does it mean to say that we should remove the, you know, quote, unquote, "disabling" aspects of settler colonial occupation and not the occupation itself? Right.
Jasbir Puar 1:11:19
Right. Right.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:11:21
Which is -- it's just such a crucial, small detail that I think a lot of times is just completely collapsed in the kind of idea of just this being a mere issue of the medical and the social sort of butting heads in the realm of the economic.
Jasbir Puar 1:11:37
Yep. Yep.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:11:37
And that's just, that's only applicable in a very narrow sense, I think, if you're seeking certain types of analysis, it can be very productive. But it also, you know, is not necessarily going to, as you're saying, be universally applicable. And I think so much of how we talk about disability is framed as, well, we may have all these human differences, but disability is the one thing we're all going to have in common one day, and we're all going to -- you know, the kind of "pre-disabled" framework that you're very critical of, in a really great way, in this book. And it's always one of those things where if I'm talking to someone, or I'm being interviewed, you know, sometimes people say things about disability, and I will let it slide because I don't want to like disrupt what they're saying, or derail the conversation, or it's a correction that I don't think is something that I want to make right in that moment. But if the pre-disabled framework comes up, I'm always really quick to sort of shut that one down, because this idea of permanent disability, of disability being this kind of endpoint that really is exceptionalized and is also put in this hermetic kind of contextual box where we're expected to talk about disability as almost being the same internationally. And it's just, it's not an analysis that builds us toward any kind of solidarity, for one, but also in terms of people's actual lived experience, if we want to think through how, you know, our suffering, our resilience, our experiences of sustained violence, repression, surveillance, criminalization, how occupation changes the way you've experienced your life, right, we have to break open the ways that we're talking about our experience of even, you know, just symptoms or accessing care to really be thinking about these broader ways of sort of undermining that universality that is intended to collapse. And that is intended to also really whitewash things. And again, sort of mercy jacket all sorts of things. Because as you put it in the coda, I think you say, like, permanent disability is another word for a health condition that's not going to receive the fair -- or receive treatment that it needs. Right. And when we think about permanence and disability and the idea of a kind of transition to disability being marked by permanence, I mean, obviously, this relates to the kind of ideas that you engage with in chapter one, talking about the kind of relations and tensions between transness and disability both historically, legally, and sort of productively, looking at these kinds of ideas also, in thinking about how permanence factors into the way that we value death more than maiming, as a kind of event phenomena or you know, giving it this kind of ultimate meaning that has almost implied like more weight to it, you know, than the maiming aspect. And yet also, a lot of times when we talk about disability, we talk about it as a "living death." So it's like that exceptionalization of death, which perpetuates debility, as leveraged as a kind of control society phenomenon of population management, of sorting, of making bodies available for certain types of extraction that are incredibly profitable to very specific, narrow aspects of the global population. This is a kind of, I think, really important, just -- you know, it's like cutting something open and just pulling out all the pieces and trying to look at them for what they are, which really does, I think, add so much if you are someone who identifies as disabled to sort of look through these things and think about, okay, like, how is this idea of permanence or finality or value within these different states, sort of working within my own life, these are all really important things to think about. And I think one of the things that, you know, I really hope that folks who are newly experiencing debility, especially people who are experiencing it as a result of long COVID, feel that this maybe helps to fix some of the rhetorical things that they've maybe been struggling with around disability in the way that we talk about disability because with COVID discussed as a, quote, unquote, "mass disabling event," right, this is a kind of implication of a particular planned outcome. And that in some ways, talking about it that way, is kind of talking about that process of disablement that is occurring as a result of not COVID itself, but the way that we've responded to COVID, through organized abandonment as the kind of priority that's centralizing a lot of our responses to the pandemic, that this really does, when we talk about COVID as a mass disabling event, it can often lend itself toward forcing that individualistic frame that again, kind of hides the structural in these identity categories.
Jasbir Puar 1:17:03
Yeah. And I -- this is all so well said, and it makes me really happy to -- it's just, I really appreciate having a conversation about how complicated the argument is in the book, all the rest of it. Because I think it's -- there's been some kneejerk reactions that have been kind of disheartening, I think. You know, ironically, this whole thing about disability being part of the diversity of the human, of humankind, right, and something that we should accept, and something that we will all face at some point or another, ironically, that's actually the discourse and the ideological kind of approach that makes it not possible for us to understand the diversity of human experience, right, that actually shuts down what it means to be in unintelligible liminal spaces, that actually shuts down our understanding, as Jules was just saying, of what's actually happening in the occupation, and of the kind of vast contradictions that we're all living with all the time, right? You know, the NGO provides a wheelchair, the NGO is also denying its culpability in the occupation like -- you know?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:18:20
[ laughs ]
Jasbir Puar 1:18:20
It's like, those kinds of lived realities -- And so that's what I was really trying to kind of get at, at the coda, that there's so much more to say here than, you know, disability is something that we will all, if we haven't already, encounter in our lives. And I do think that, you know, the argument in Health Communism -- one of the many arguments in Health Communism that's been so helpful for me is to understand health as the handmaiden to capitalism, right? And that that kind of galvanizes all of us to think about ourselves as laborers, as vulnerable, as, you know, relational in terms of our well being, as opposed to the individual body and will the individual bodies survive or not survive? Or, you know, is the individual body afflicted or injured or not? -- All of these things that wind up becoming part of our own subjectivities and identities, and thinking more collectively. And, you know, so for me ultimately thinking through debility is really about taking the gradation and the modulation of control societies and saying, no, we can do something else with that, like we can think relationally and solidaristically around gradations of debilitation and not accept this binarism that's going to keep us from each other, you know?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:18:20
Right.
Jasbir Puar 1:18:23
And so I think that's one of the most important things about, you know -- control societies only can control insofar as we're not recognizing how they work, you know?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:20:09
Right.
Jasbir Puar 1:20:09
When we recognize that part of the endless kind of fragmentation is part of the way that -- both the endless fragmentation and also then the kind of covering up of that endless fragmentation into these binaries, right? -- if we can address that tension, then we have an actual, you know, relationship to each other that's not contingent upon "I am this" and "I am not that," you know, and so the one thing that can and has happened in some refugee camps in Palestine is a kind of collective relationality around debility and disability as a consequence of resisting the occupation, right? As a kind of political ontology, not something that becomes a kind of phenomenological experience of an individual body. And I think that that's really powerful. And what that does is also not just, you know, kind of have people living relationally in terms of multiple debilities, multiple disabilities, but also to understand that everyone is navigating what Celeste Langan calls "mobility disability," whether one has a kind of physical, descriptive relation to mobility disability or not, right, because mobility is one of the key components of keeping colonized people in place. Immobilizing is like a prime logic of the occupation. And so when you start thinking more expansively about well, what is mobility disability, you know, you have this resistance to the collective punishment of mobility that cuts across the disabled / non-disabled binary.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:22:06
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's so important, also, how you sort of position how a lot of these binaries almost rhetorically, ultimately reinforce that frame that we don't necessarily want to reinforce, that the idea of the binary of disabled and able bodied in and of itself often is more reinforcing of the concept of able bodied-ness --
Jasbir Puar 1:22:30
Yep.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:22:30
-- than it is descriptive of what disability is, is for, how it's instrumentalized, what the experience of it is. And so much of our discussion around disability often is relegated to discussion of what makes disability different from able bodied-ness. Where does the boundary exist between able bodied-ness and disability. And I really like how you -- this is actually, I think, my favorite paragraph in the whole book. It's from the introduction, and you're sort of talking about this "pre-disabled" framework here. You write:
"The biopolitics of debilitation is not intended to advocate a facile democratization of disability, as if to rehash the familiar cant that tells us we will all be disabled if we live long enough. In fact, depending on where we live, what resources we have, what traumas we have endured, what color our skin is, what access we have to clean water, air, and decent food, what type of health care we have, what kind of work we do ... we will not all be disabled. Some of us will simply not live long enough, embedded in a distribution of risk already factored into the calculus of debilitation. Death's position. Others, at risk because of seeming risky may encounter disability in ways that compound the debilitating effects of biopolitics."
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:23:52
And it's -- first of all, this is beautifully written and always gives me that feeling of like, you know, when you read a paragraph, you really love it, it makes you feel angry and sad and like ready to write yourself. [ Beatrice and Jasbir laugh ] And this I think connects a lot to Ruthie Gilmore's construction of racism as "group differentiated vulnerability to premature death," right, this idea --
Jasbir Puar 1:24:16
Absolutely. Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:24:17
-- this distribution of risk, this distribution of suffering is factored into the calculus of global capitalism. This is not disaster capitalism that is happening in Palestine, that is happening in the context of COVID, that is happening in the Global South, that is happening in poor communities in the United States. This is factored into the structural components of our political economic sort of reality of the actual liminal space we all live in. Right? This is not some sort of moment of seeing a aberration, an interruption in nor -- quote unquote "normal" programming, right, this is not a disaster, this is a necessary component, as it's currently constructed for not only the distribution of risk and the distribution of resources, but the distribution of life chances and who will become and who will never become disabled.
Jasbir Puar 1:25:17
Mhm. Mhm. Well, you said so much there, I'm really glad that that paragraph, you know, speaks to you. You mentioned something about this kind of able bodied-ness and the kind of constantly trying to push for this distinction. And I think it's an incredibly punishing distinction. It's an incredibly punishing distinction, even for people who we could call "able bodied." I think it's like such a punishing idea, because it doesn't, again, it's one of those things where, if we accept that disability is part of our diversity of humankind, you know, that's supposed to allow us to kind of be in the world in a better, more full way. But actually, what it does is reify this category of able bodied in this in an incredibly punishing way, because so many of us feel like there's this kind of aspirational able bodied-ness that we are supposed to constantly maintain or aspire to, or, you know, claim, or feel like we can live up to. And the reality is that many of us just can't and don't, you know, but we have this fantasy that that's how everyone else is operating. And I think Health Communism, for me, really made me see that that's a fantasy. It's a fantasy, we're all upholding with each other, too. You know, whether we identify as disabled or able bodied to whatnot, and I've seen with friends, even with myself, how punishing it is to feel like, well, I am supposed to be functioning as an able bodied person because of this binary. And I just don't know how to do that. You know, and this is, again, kind of one of the things about Health Communism, where it's just kind of like: we're all feeding into the productivity machinery of capitalism, even through this understanding of able bodied-ness -- especially through this understanding of able bodied-ness -- but the binary that this idea rests upon, right?
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:27:26
I mean, one thing that that was making me think, and just sort of listening to some of what both of you have just been saying, and I feel this way in the experience of reading Health Communism, and also, you know, becoming a part of --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:27:39
Aw, guys.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:27:39
Yeah! [And in] becoming a part of this community, too, of folks is like, all that self punishment, also as the predicate to our romance narratives about political change. And in some ways, I think, you know, when we have become so invested in the idea that injury is legible, injury is shared, injury is this flat, sharable thing that then tells us how to righteously demand transformation, you know, maybe the inelegant, you know, liberal version of that is identity politics, but there is a more, you know, sort of rhetorically left, somewhat more sophisticated version of it, that claims it's materially responsible that says, you know, well, we don't like the state, we don't like the US, we don't like war machines, we don't like capitalism, but then imagines that, you know, there are these discrete groups of people, you know, disabled people, queer people, trans people, who have been harmed in some way that is shared as if that gives us this kind of romantic solidarity. And this often becomes the slogan version of resistance, that I just, you know -- it's like, for so long for me, it's like, I've always felt affectively, like, I can't go there, I can't buy into that, that doesn't feel right. And you know, Jasbir, your work, but also, your training -- since we're both in academia, and you're one of my one of my mentors -- the sort of coming to understanding race and empire's priority in all of that being so fundamental. But you were saying something that I think is so important, that the thickness and the connectivity of those relations, of all that relationality, that those collectivities, sure they involve degrees of injury, but they're constantly shifting and modulating, that that control society isn't stable enough for the romantic fantasy of this is how I was harmed, and I'm doing in exact reverse some sort of, you know, righteous politics, but instead but instead, I actually think and it's the same feeling I get, you know, reading Health Communism -- I feel great relief! Because I would much rather be embedded in a thick, live, collective set of relations that are just -- you know, there's just so much there. There's so many people, there's so many non-human actors, there's so much there, there's so much to be mobilized, there's so much that's actionable. But when you drop both that pressure to self flagellate, to find through injury or self punishment, the justification or the ethical virtue for some sort of, you know, reverse politics, I just think it puts us in a place that is really, really relieving. And I also think that, you know, all three of us here are people who are trying to find ways to speak out into the world, and to speak to people who we care about, who we're in solidarity and struggle with, by sort of rejecting the premise that we have to subtract complexity from that, and that we're not allowed to be really complicated about it, or that the critique, you know, shouldn't take too long to make or that, you know, all of these sorts of pressures that I think, you know, everyone works under these days, I just, you know, I really appreciate this conversation today as having given us a chance, I think, to just sit with, like, well, what would that look like? Really concretely, right. Here are a couple of examples, and you have really done this work, you know, in bringing debility into relation with disability and then placing those in the context of imperialism and political economy, and I just, whatever it feels like, it's not catharsis and that's such a relief to me, to handle the pressure to feel catharsis anymore in the world, it just like, is too much. And I just really appreciate, you know, that complexity here, there's a kind of honesty about it, but it does have a sort of, I don't know, I just to me, it's like, my posture, softening a little bit, sitting back in a chair and feeling [ Beatrice laughs ] held up by other people, and not just sort of straining, you know, in my own brain, or in my own body to make sense of my place in the world, or what I would like it to be so, you know, partially, I just wanted to thank you for that. But I think it's this conversation to my mind, and, and really the way, you know, that The Right to Maim and Health Communism speak to each other, I'll say, as someone who has been delighted to read them both recently. I mean, that's really exciting to me, and I think that that, you know, is furnishing something that doesn't just sort of speak to the moment, but something that has become, of course, I think, really important, I mean, just really immediate for those of us who are trying to figure out how to mobilize the ideas and training that we do have, our life experiences and our collectivities, to offer something to everyone else who wants to join up with that without having to sacrifice those critiques and without having to sacrifice really important building blocks that we need to be accountable to.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:33:00
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I really appreciate the way Jasbir that you put "health" as a thing that we're supposed to live up to, because I think that that's the ultimate way of thinking about it in order to understand how it's instrumentalized, right? If we think about well, why does it matter that health is instrumentalized? Why does it matter that health is a fantasy? You know, what is it? What, like, who cares? It's like, what is the point of making that statement? Right, like, Right to Maim taught Artie and I what that fantasy is for. It's not a construction of the state -- like, health is not the state -- health is a theory that's leveraged in all of these different ways against all sorts of types of self determination of, you know, saying, I'm living a life of joy, where I'm, you know, seeking and demanding my desires, right? And this is something that, you know, in many ways, these kinds of desires, and I appreciate really, especially the way that you situate your work within not just a critique of imperialism, but a critique of the very idea of what terrorism is. Because this is a really important thing about Health Communism that I've been very surprised that people haven't picked up on as much, which is, you know, why are there two chapters on SPK? Why is that included, and important, has been a kind of question, and some people have given us similar criticisms to things you've received in the past about Right to Maim, which is like, well, this is just bringing together a bunch of stuff that doesn't relate and you're like, no, this is interdisciplinary analysis, like, sit down and buckle up bitch, but --
Jasbir Puar 1:34:43
[ Laughter ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:34:43
-- the kind of idea right about that desire for the kind of lives that we want and the kind of world that we want, the way that that is framed as "terror," right? Against the state and against the control state, in particular --
Jasbir Puar 1:35:01
Mhm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:35:01
-- our desires, and this is speaking also Jules to the wonderful interview you and I did earlier this year for The New Inquiry about your work, which is this kind of idea of imagining possibilities for each other as really important as a kind of political praxis, not just imagining the ways that we're alike, but just wanting to realize that there are, you know, as you said, Jules, there are no limits on what we're allowed to want. And that wanting is what we deserve to do. And that that, in and of itself, is an active process that is never final. And, you know, it's like, really, if we think about what this fantasy of health that is used for, and what it even matters, that this is something that's instrumentalized, towards the reproduction of capital, it's ultimately, often in framing those kinds of desires as a type of "terror" against the state, against the nation, which is this kind of "benevolent protector," right, who has the kind of "mercy" to merely maim us, and not to kill us.
Jasbir Puar 1:36:11
Yeah, I mean, this is also, you know, I think this is kind of foundational to the right to maim kind of going forward. And I'm working on a chapter called "injury as future violence." It's a piece that's kind of tracking, you know, the beginnings of COVID. And the increasing realization that only some people were going to die, right. And this was happening as the George Floyd protests were taking off. And then there was this conversation about crowd control weapons and rubber bullets being used to shoot journalists in the eyes, you know, which is, again, something that's constituted as a "humane" form of violence, right? These non lethal weapons are -- it's a huge industry, you can read someone like Paul Rocher's work, who is tracking the development of this industry, and a lot of that discourse around non lethality was, you know, in earlier decades, kind of like, well, is this weapon non lethal or not non lethal? [ Beatrice laughs ] You know? And if it's used properly, it's non lethal. But if it's used improperly, would it still be non lethal? You know, so all of these, these technical, scientific and legal definitions around non lethality, right? But, you know, when you move away from those technical conversations, what you're looking at is non lethal weaponry as a way not to minimize violence, right? But to expand its acceptance.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:37:55
Mm.
Jasbir Puar 1:37:55
And expand its acceptance in humanitarian terms, right, again, to go back to this, "at least you weren't killed." And so now the discussion is finally shifting to okay, so non lethal weapons are not supposed to kill you. But they are disabling. They're massively disabling and they can also eventually kill you. And the industry around non lethal weaponry is just enormous at this point. It's just growing really, really -- it's not the purview of a handful of states, or the most powerful global superpowers, etc. It's actually something that's being universalized in crowd control tactics. So Chile had three hundred ocular trauma injuries in its uprisings in 2019, Kashmir has had like an epidemic, what is called, quote unquote, "epidemic of blindness" through the use of pellet guns. France had these incidents around rubber bullets, the United States, obviously. So I, you know, I think it's important to keep thinking about the proliferation of the right to maim well beyond the Global South, the way in which it's couched in humanitarian terms. So it has an alibi. So that makes it very insidious. And I think, you know, what's happening now is a kind of greater recognition of the ways in which non lethal weaponry is, you know, claimed as a way of minimizing violence when it's actually an expansion of its use as well as its acceptance as well.
Beatrice & Jules 1:39:37
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 1:39:37
And so we see a very concentrated example of that in Palestine, in Gaza, in particular and also in Kashmir, but we're seeing these discourses and these rationales being used everywhere now, right, being globalized. So that's just something to think about in terms of the future of right to maim, that it's actually, the more democratic -- this is Paul Rocher's argument -- but the more democratic a state claims to be, the more it will enact this right to maim, right? In the name of that liberal democratic frame.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:40:15
Absolutely. I just have to say I have so deeply appreciated this conversation, this has been like an absolute dream to be able to talk to you both about this wonderful book that I feel like has taught me so much. And that is, frankly, just so fucking under appreciated.
Jasbir Puar 1:40:35
Thanks. I know I feel that way too. [ laughs ] [ Jules laughs ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:40:38
It's so true, though! I mean, this is one of the most important books that I've ever read, like I put this one right up there on the shelf next to Golden Gulag, and Ruthie's work. It's so crucial. I mean, I was thinking back just now to the conversation I had with Danya Qato, specifically about public health and Palestine. And Danya's work is fantastic, highly recommend that episode. And a lot of her work is focusing on, and inspired by, her experience in studying Pharmacy and understanding also sort of how these spatial conditions relate to broader understandings of debility and disability and this kind of mobility disability extension that you were talking about as well. And one of the things that Danya and I were talking about was, you know, you cannot invoke a "right to health," you know, and this is something that so often is invoked, "we have a right to healthcare," "we have a right to Equity," capital "E," "we have a right to public health," and "we need, like, funding for this." And that's kind of often the demand, right? And we cannot actually invoke a right to health without accounting for sustained, persistent, and as Danya says, overwhelming terror and violence as it is differentially distributed according to different, almost predetermined, baked in understandings of how risk is going to be levied on the population. And I think that's why even now, not just for the fact that this is an under appreciated, absolutely fantastic piece of analysis that you wrote, you know -- during the context of COVID, as this continues, and as we continue to try and adapt our organizing, and our theorizing, and our scholarship and our conversations and our lived experiences to understanding what it means to do all of those things with COVID as also part of our lives, and with the organized abandonment that characterizes the global COVID response. It's just an even more crucial time, I think, to try and approach this text, if someone hasn't read it before, and you're listening to this, highly recommend. I mean, there are parts of this book that we have not even had a chance to touch on in this conversation. And it's not, you know, a super long book, and a lot of what you might read about this book is that it's unapproachable, or aggressively "too critical of the social model" and all of this other bullshit that, you know, has nothing to do, actually, with any of the work that you did, in Right to Maim, and has everything to do with the kind of ways that these concepts like the social model are instrumentalized in the kind of justification of the continuation of the right to maim as a population management strategy that, you know, is not just something that's located elsewhere in an other or a specific country, you know, that this is something that also primarily is crucial and central to the construction of the United States and how the US operates. And I feel like a lot of those critiques are often trying to kind of distance things and remove the US from this context and place it in a kind of exceptionalized position. And it's, you know, it's funny to see the critiques that the book makes kind of weaponized against it over the years. But I feel like as time has gone on, what is really borne out is that, you know, the work that you're doing Jasbir, it's very important, but it also really pushes us and challenges readers in a way that some people don't like. And ultimately, I think that's a really, really good thing. But I'm biased, obviously, because all three of us are kind of in that boat, [ Jules laughs ] but I think it's really truly so important to be having these conversations, as difficult as they are, as complex and overly nuanced as some people could say this could be, this to me, is just kind of the most wonderful and affirming way to think through my own experience of debility, my own understanding of my disabled identity, and sort of what it even means to be doing the work that I'm doing. So I just wanted to say I really appreciate -- that despite, like, the hate, that you haven't let it stop you.
Jasbir Puar 1:45:16
Oh well, I really appreciate all this. I don't know how much hate there is because I kind of check out. [ laughs ] But, you know, I know there was a kind of early like, oh, well, "this is very negative about disability" and, you know, disabled people have have lives and they continue and they resist and, you know, that was never my intention to kind of -- and certainly that's why there's, kind of towards the end, this conversation about how disabled Palestinians, some disabled Palestinians, are feeling about their lives and their thoughts about their lives. So there was never an intention to dismiss all sorts of important things that come out of, you know, disabled people's lives, and, you know, thinking and resistance and all of that stuff. But I think you've hit on something really important. And I think that this goes back to the erasure of Helen Meekosha's work or, you know, the kind of citational, gestural, citational stuff that happens with Meekosha's work, it's like, overwhelming terror and violence, right? Overwhelming terror and violence. Like this is a day to day reality in so much of the world of overwhelming terror and violence. And the capacity to delimit something that's a disabling event, or a quote, unquote, crisis that has a beginning and an end is the purview of very few in the world. And I think that's part of what happens here is that the kind of Southern Disability Studies scholars are not heard in that, you know, exhortation to be understood about what the kinds of priorities are, when you are living, you know, in a quote unquote, "conflict zone," right, which is another way of not saying "imperial," you know, "colonial" occupation, right? So I do do this work with Disability Under Siege, which is an organization that focuses on Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, and thinks about, you know, well, what is disability and war? What is disability lived in war zones? What is disability lived in conflict zones? You know, how is it different from the way we would think about disability otherwise, and, you know, where is disability in relation to all of the other struggles that, you know, living in those spaces might entail? So there's often like a response to this literature of, well, we cannot, you know, we have to avoid pathologization, we cannot go back to the medical model. This is very negative about disability, disabled people offer valuable contributions, etc, etc. And that refusal, absolute refusal, to understand that that kind of overwhelming terror and violence is a bio-necro imperial reality for much of the world, right? And it's part -- and we're implicated in that. And so when Disability Studies is like, well, you know, we have a whiteness problem, and we need more analyses of race and disability, and we need more disabled people of color writing in the field, etc., all of that is true. But there's still such a dearth of work that's addressing US empire and addressing empire and imperialism and settler colonialism more broadly. You know, and it's a particular kind of imperial relation, because Disability Studies without, you know, tackling this head on, becomes a kind of handmaiden to US Empire.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:49:11
Mhm.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:49:11
Mm.
Jasbir Puar 1:49:11
Because on one hand, it's creating all of this disability elsewhere. And not only a north / south thing, and not only US imperialism, obviously, we have to pay attention to all sorts of local circumstances, the Palestinian Authority is refusing to, you know, give payments to people who are supposed to get disability insurance in Palestine, etc. We can point to all of that. But you have that kind of production of disability and then you have the kind of field formation that's driven by the elaboration of northern disabled subjects, subjectivities, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:49:11
Mhm.
Jasbir Puar 1:49:53
And so what is happening here, right? It's a kind of perpetuation of that imperial violence through the erasure of these voices, you know, these exportations from other scholars who are saying, no, it's not an inclusion that we're asking for. It's a shifting the models of what you're talking about to a different center, actually, which is 80% of the world's disabled people, right, which is a statistic that gets commonly thrown around. But anyway, I I know we've been talking a lot, did you want to talk, to kind of close off, about writing through, like writing and working on this?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:50:41
If you both have time, I don't want to push it -- Artie has already given me the green light to give him a difficult editing task of essentially a longer than usual episode. [ Jasbir and Jules laugh ] This is a conversation that he and I have been waiting to facilitate on the show for years. This is one of the reasons why it's so wonderful to be collaborating with Jules, is to be able to do something like this, you know.
Jasbir Puar 1:51:05
Yeah. I just -- I mean, I guess I was just thinking about this, what we put our bodies through when working, because I do think it's important. So maybe just a few minutes on that.
Jules Gill-Peterson 1:51:16
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:51:16
Cool. I think I can sort of set us up for that. So one of the things maybe as a final topic that we could just quickly get into, and this is something that the three of us had sort of talked about in planning the episode and just personally in our work. One of the kind of themes that's gone almost unsaid in this interview is what the kind of embodied experience of doing this work can be like, and the kinds of things that we put our bodies through when doing this kind of labor. In the very last line of Right to Maim, in the coda, you say that the book is sort of in service, it's a labor in service of a free Palestine. And when we work with these difficult and traumatic source materials, when we think about how our own pain and suffering and experiences of debility, disability, otherness, just any kind of legal categorization begins to shape and influence rhetoric and arguments, one of the things that sort of became primary was discussing sort of how experiences of pain and working through pain towards something can shape and deepen some of our analysis. And maybe this is a kind of, like closing note that we could talk about for a second.
Jasbir Puar 1:52:42
Yeah, I mean, I will admit that I -- the question really, or the conversation about that, I kind of surprised myself a little bit when we were talking about it, what we put our bodies through when working because I think that, like my own history -- first of all, there's the material and the topics like from, you know, all the stuff around the war on terror, the Abu Ghraib torture documentation, the kind of imperial violence, you know, and then, similar with The Right to Maim, in terms of Palestine, I mean I've often longed for a non traumatizing, non traumatic -- I've often longed for something that wouldn't keep me up at night, you know. Longed for something to work on that just wouldn't, you know, kind of devastate me on the daily kind of thing. So there's just that. There's the kind of, you know, what gets absorbed or what, you know, happens in that relation that many of us have, you know, when working on these topics, but I was also just thinking about what happens to health during the tenure track. I think that there's -- there's just this normalization of, I mean, I remember the first medical leave I took from Rutgers was the year after 9/11. And of course, like many of us, you know, I was doing like, triple quadruple duty, in terms of organizing and community and family and teach-ins and all the rest of it. And so, you know, it's kind of not surprising, but I remember someone saying to me, oh, yeah, well, you know, you're a woman of color, of course, you're going on medical leave during your tenure track, and I was like, okay, I guess that's just the price you pay, you know? And so the way that that gets normalized is so -- in retrospect -- so horrifying to me. And you know, what tenure track does is it really disciplines oneself into accepting our own training into overworking. You know, it's not like you get tenure and then you're like, I'm not going to work like that anymore. It's too late. It takes a lot. I mean, I'm still working on untraining myself from that you know? I mean, I also had a sense of like, when I finally got tenure, I was, like I gave -- I quote, unquote, "gave up my health" in order to do this work, you know, and I still feel like, one of the things that's so under acknowledged about academic work is how debilitating it is. And I think often, it's because we continue to play out this fantasy about this distinction between intellectual and physical labor, as if our labor is not, in some ways -- I mean, our labor is not not physical, right? We're sitting at desks, we are, you know, staring at screens all the time, you know, not to mention any other array of kind of physical forms of laboring, you know, the idea, the whole, now, kind of a greater understanding of brain fog is precisely about that, right? Like, our labor is actually physical in a way that is manifested through something called brain fog when we cannot think and so there is a kind of, for me, I was thinking about, you know, not just this normalization of scholars of color, invariably getting sick while they're working. And we have so many examples of that, but that there's a kind of missing piece, in terms of building movements across workplaces. There's still this kind of intellectual versus physical, you know, binary around creating labor solidarity. So the discourse, you know, in terms of unions is largely like, well, tenured faculty need to show up for adjuncts, because they can, and they have jobs security, all those things are true. But it often still relies on this distinction between this labor of love that we get to do that's intellectual, and then, you know, our support of people who are doing, you know, kind of more quote unquote, physical or manual labor. And so there's still a kind of romanticizing of academic work, as purely work of the mind or intellectual as if there's not physical effects of the work that we do. We're seeing so much of that now, in terms of like, chronic pain issues, and just all of the kinds of manifestations of physical debilitation that actually come along with our work that are just buried. They're absolutely kind of buried in our conversations about academic work.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:57:31
Yeah. And I think one of the things that is so useful about Right to Maim if we're thinking about how it could modify someone's understanding, who's maybe already read Health Communism, is that debility as you formulate it really offers us an out from a lot of these very standard and reductive ways of talking about labor, exertion, disability, and worth and value and productivity because it's a kind of out from the surplus / worker binary, right, to think through debility being a precondition of work in all capacities, and to think of work more expansively than simply waged labor, but as a more totalizing process of both mitigation, translation of your experience and survival from a sort of material standpoint. Whether that's work that you're doing to fulfill the administrative burdens that are foisted on you, in order for you to access your certification as disabled -- like I was just officially "recertified" by the United States as disabled. And to think about how that labor that I have to do in order to maintain certifications or that so many other people have to do in terms of administrative burdens, whether that's, you know, Georgia being like, ready to start rolling out Medicaid work requirements in the middle of a pandemic, or the fact that when the pandemic emergency declaration ends, millions of people will be kicked off of Medicaid, whether that's sort of the debate around who is valid worker within the labor movement, and who is not that is putting service workers under the bus. This is why debility is really important, because the worker / surplus binary, as it exists is a kind of rhetorical trap, right? It puts us in a landscape where we're pitted against each other against this kind of false divide that you allegedly transition across at some discrete point, which is not fucking real. Like that's not how it actually happens for so many of us outside of the exceptionalized moment of a kind of accident or that kind of way of understanding disability as instantaneous, right? And that's why I think Right to Maim is actually one of the most important books about disability that has ever been written is because it actually pushes back on disability and opens it up towards debility as this really important analytical framework for understanding not just our relationship to, you know, ourselves, but our relationship to the idea of work and what work is for.
Jasbir Puar 2:00:34
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Jules Gill-Peterson 2:00:35
Yeah. And anything less than -- I mean, you know, as you were describing that situation of the tenure track and the aftermath of being tenured, which I can certainly identify with, in so many ways, I was thinking about, you know, just how many of the grammars and habits of how we're coached to imagine something like a hierarchy, a labor hierarchy, or institutional privileges or material benefits, you know, really, in so many ways are a series of missed opportunities and deferrals and avoidances of the real meat, you know, of what we could be digging into and what something like solidarity as a principle looks like, when it's enacted with an actual understanding, yeah, for example of how debility structures all kinds of laboring conditions, but precisely unevenly, and it just seems, what -- what a terrible missed opportunity for anyone in any position within that system, to not, you know, to even the kind of stoicism I think that accrues to academics so often, or that we're invited or interpolated into where it's like, well, you know, a couple of things went really well in your life. So it's your job to be quiet and suffer and resolve anything going on on your own time. [ Jasbir laughs ] Right, especially if you're a woman of color. But like, just what a missed opportunity, you know, like there's really just so much right here, right between us to work with and to put towards other ends, and I just, you know, that that, to me, again, that feeling of relief that I keep coming back to, I just think it's such a relief to not -- you know, to give up that kind of, ultimately, totally bullshit, you know, white dude fantasy that you know, when it feels like everything is on your shoulders, part of the fallacy of that is like, it's not. That's not how the world works, everything is not on your shoulders, you are being made to experience your labor that way, in part to you know, obfuscate, in fact, how the world is distributed and organized. And it's just, you know, I just continue to think like, anytime I've been a part of union organizing or just other kinds of organizing, I just always, I find I never get tired of that feeling of relief. Where I can just give up that punishing, you know, stoic kind of structure. And instead, you know, think about how things are shared unevenly, but precisely, much more realistically, and honestly, and I just think that that's, oh, my goodness, I just keep wanting to --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:03:17
We could have a whole conversation about this stoicism thing that's like a whole other podcast episode. [ laughs ].
Jules Gill-Peterson 2:03:22
A whole other episode.
Jasbir Puar 2:03:24
It's also -- it's been disappointing to see the union kind of fall off of this, you know, where they're kind of like, we still have to advocate for masks "for people who are medically compromised." And I'm like, this wasn't where you were at a year ago, you understood this to be a collective project --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:03:42
Yeah.
Jasbir Puar 2:03:42
-- and you understood something about, you know -- so just to see that fall, but I mean, I think there are so many potential lessons from COVID that have so easily fallen to the wayside. And it's, you know, it's really distressing to see, like Union solidarity discourse kind of switched back into this normativity around health: you either have it or you don't. You know, and we'll protect those who don't in the name of: you don't have it, you know?
Jules Gill-Peterson 2:04:13
[ laughs ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:04:13
Yeah.
Jasbir Puar 2:04:13
-- as opposed to, we're all managing this and the more you decide that you're the one who has it, the more you don't actually get to live who you are, when you don't have it, you know, or you don't get to live who you are, as someone who just, you know, understands that it's not something to be had, you know, and so there's, there's just like a real lack of curiosity on some level about what bodies are and what they go through, you know, when you keep reproducing that structure, that discourse of separation out, right.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:04:47
No and it's such a crucial lesson that I feel like is being made so obvious in real time through the current situation with COVID and the shift from masking as a collective phenomenon and understanding risk as a kind of collective experience with COVID to this very individualistic frame. And, you know, one of the things that I think you write about in chapter two even is that debility, while it might sort of complicate certain things to think about this this way, this also offers that kind of shift toward understanding of collective experience around disability, that I think a lot of people who have been working with disability for a long time and thinking about disability have been really going for, you know, for decades, the kind of goal around disability as a concept has been to try and frame it as a collective experience in some kind. And you write that one of the most important sort of goals of a lot of disability scholars has been to de-individualize disability, and to, you know, sort of put it in this context, but that by doing that, through asserting that disability itself, which as we've been saying, throughout this whole conversation is a very narrow, technical identity in a lot of ways that has a lot of boundaries, borders, constraints and qualifications and sort of systems of official controls that really create the disabled subject in a very narrow series of parameters that what debility can do as a concept of thinking about workplace risk, as you write about, is really important because it actually pushes us towards that collective experience that many disability scholars are going for, which is ironic that so many were kind of shitty about receiving this book and the lessons that it had to teach us. And you write,
"It shifts [us] from positing disability as a collective experience (of aging, of inevitable frailty and illness) to nuancing that observation through attention to populations and their differential and uneven precarity. Rethinking disability through the precarity of populations not only acknowledges that there is more disability within disenfranchised and precarious populations, but also insists that debilitation is a tactical practice deployed in order to create and precaritize populations and maintain them as such."
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:07:27
And I think that's --
Jasbir Puar 2:07:28
Damn. Damn, that's good. [ laughs ]
Jules Gill-Peterson 2:07:32
[ laughs ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:07:32
Yeah! I mean, this book is fire. I mean, bottom line.
Jasbir Puar 2:07:36
No, I've so internalized the disgruntlement that I just haven't -- this has just been such a, like, so meaningful to me to revisit this stuff, I really appreciate it because I really was just like, alright, I wrote one first good book and the second book, okay, whatever. [ laughs ] You know? Like it didn't go over so well. So I really, I just appreciate the attention and the love, really, truly.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:08:01
Well, this fantastic piece of work really deserves the love and much more love than it has gotten.
Jules Gill-Peterson 2:08:09
Mhm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:08:09
I mean, if we want a way out of this kind of zero sum austerity mindset that characterizes a lot of our organizing right now. And also a lot of the critique of our organizing and the critiques of the critiques of our organizing and the ways that we are all experiencing extractive abandonment, which -- I found this really hilarious note that I had written in too light of pencil to be able to read, where in the margin of this, next to that quote, where I wrote "extractive abandonment is actually the collective experience that many mistake for disability," which --
Jasbir Puar 2:08:44
Yeah. Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:08:45
-- I forgot to include that in the book! [ laughs] But this is -- debility, and the right to maim, and more importantly, what any of all of this is for, most importantly, thinking through those things is our way out of that cyclical discourse which only silos us and divides us and undermines any kind of attempt to de-individualize a lot of the things that we are fighting that don't live in the individual but live in the structural.
Jasbir Puar 2:09:19
Yeah, this has also just been super helpful for me, to listen to both of you and to kind of think through and talk through this because of course, like a very early defense of mine was, well, I'm not -- you know, I'm not against disability identity, or I understand the politics, you know, politics that are routed through disability identity, like I don't want to malign that I'm not trying to take it away from you or anything, but I think -- I mean, I really think as COVID has evolved, I'm like, wait a second, this is not gonna work. You know, like, I can see now more clearly, you know, what I couldn't get to in The Right to Maim which was like, there is no collectivity that's going to happen if we continue this way, you know?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:10:09
Well I like to think that Jules is right that we've come into a vibe, and that now is a moment for these types of analyses.
Jasbir Puar 2:10:18
Yeah, no you -- Death Panel is incredible. So. I mean I feel like, yeah. It's a movement.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:10:26
Well, couldn't be incredible without your work and I'm not -- I'm being very serious. I really have appreciated this conversation so much, this has been absolutely wonderful I encourage people who have listened to go ahead and read Right to Maim. Also Jasbir's first book is really great as well. And in many ways, the kind of conversation around pain, too, and working through pain, is so present in that work. Which, you know, I know you don't do podcasts, but we might have to peer pressure you into doing another one maybe in a couple of years revisiting that book, who knows. [ Jasbir laughs ]
And patrons, we all would like to thank you so much for the support of the show. We couldn't have done any of this without you, really seriously. And I hope you appreciated this sort of very extended discussion that I'm sure a lot of you are going to be thrilled to see in your feeds. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod, to get access to our second weekly bonus episode, and entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism at your local bookstore or request it at your local library and follow us @deathpanel_. And Jasbir Puar is the author of the pathbreaking books, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, and the one that we've been discussing today, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, and Disability. Jasbir thank you so much for joining us, and as always. Medicare for All now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
[Outro music fades in]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:12:13
[laughs] Sometimes it can feel funny to say "Medicare for All now" after a conversation like this because its so locked into a nationalist project but "parts for the whole," right?
Jasbir Puar 2:12:27
[laughs] Yes, totally.
Jules Gill-Peterson 2:12:28
Yeah.
Jasbir Puar 2:12:28
Strategic essentialism. That's what we've got to do.