Wish You Were Here;or, An Accessible World Is Possible
This talk was delivered as part of the opening roundtable, ‘In Whose Interest? The World Bank and Disabled Persons,’for the sixteenth annual meeting of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS), held in Bethesda, Maryland, June 11-15, 2003. The theme of the annual meeting was ‘Disability and Dissent: Public Cultures, Public Spaces.’
Like most conference hotels, this space seems so abstract: the immediate setting for ‘Disability and Dissent,’the sixteenth annual gathering of the Society for Disability Studies, could be the immediate setting for the fifteenth, or the fourteenth; a Hyatt Regency meeting room in Bethesda, Maryland doesn’t look all that different from one in Oakland, California or Winnipeg, Manitoba, or for that matter, all that different from a Sheraton, or a Hilton. However, just as the specters of Students for a Democratic Society’”an unlikely group of young activists daring to imagine, and willing into existence, what they called participatory democracy’”forever circulate around the letters ‘SDS'(in, hopefully, a generative conversation with the newer SDS’”what could be more participatory than ‘nothing about us without us,’right?), this seemingly-abstract space in Bethesda is haunted. Somehow, you can still sense AIDS and disability activists storming the National Institutes of Health, just a few blocks from here, demanding access to the drugs they knew were in the pipeline, demanding access to treatment, and demanding that it be equitable’”that it take into account the impact that the epidemic was having on people of color, and on women (among their demands was the formation of a Women’s Health Committee in the AIDS clinical trial system at the NIH). ‘For the sick, for the poor,’they screamed on May 21, 1990, when they descended on the NIH, effectively shutting down business for the day, and ultimately changing the course of the AIDS epidemic in this country.
In tribute to those specters and the many others that make it possible for us to gather here today, then, I begin with another abstraction, and I expect to find out that it, too, is haunted. The larger region we now inhabit has lent its name to a supposed-consensus that currently structures our world’”the ‘Washington Consensus,’also known as neoliberalism. The Washington Consensus fetishizes a narrow understanding of economic growth, and posits that such growth is self-evidently beneficial for all.1 The consensus holds that government interference in the market should be minimized, that agents or players in the market (‘individuals,’ostensibly, but most often corporate entities) should be given as much latitude and autonomy as possible, that international markets should be ‘opened up’to what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called ‘that single, unconscionable freedom’’”Free Trade,2 that privatization (of health care, education, roads, dams, electricity, water) and a concomitant shrinking of public (and publicly-funded) services is crucial to economic growth for all, and that the benefits from economic growth at the top will ‘trickle down’to those at the bottom. Structural adjustment programs, the programs administered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), tie aid to ‘developing nations’to the privatization of public services and impose ‘user fees’for education, health care, and other needs or rights (the education user fee has been reversed of late, but ‘cost-sharing’for health care remains a staple of World Bank policy). Structural adjustment programs (also newly-christened Poverty Reduction Strategies), in other words, are basically highly-conditional loans designed to make sure developing nations pledge allegiance to the neoliberal consensus.
It is in opposition to this ‘consensus,’and to the ballooning debt that they argue has resulted from it, that the World Bank’s opponents (including a never-insignificant selection of disability groups or disabled individuals) take to the streets. Activists continue to insist that this consensus remains the problematic common sense upon which international financial institutions (IFIs) are built, regardless of two things: 1) individual or local IFI initiatives that, from a liberal (though not necessarily radical or progressive) perspective, might lead to some limited improvement in the quality of life for some poor people, or some people with disabilities, and (more ominously) 2) World Bank/IMF appropriation of activist rhetoric: for example, these institutions themselves now speak of ‘globalization from below,’or ‘the World Bank’s new policy of disclosure.’ These are slogans or demands that originated in the streets, and their recent appearance in World Bank/IMF rhetoric speaks to a remarkable, even stunning, linguistic and cultural efficiency. I call this appropriation ominous, however, not simply because the terms appear the same but shift in meaning in their new homes, but rather because they at times appear to mark a shift in policy even though the neoliberal consensus or foundation remains in place. To illustrate the rhetorical moves I’m critiquing and that activists are protesting: a giant AIDS ribbon on the World Bank building does not change the fact that many people understand structural adjustment programs in Africa as contributing to, not stemming, the spread of HIV/AIDS. I passed this giant ribbon, by the way, every day last December as I went to teach an Introduction to Disability Studies, and I never lost the sense of moving through bizarre, spectacular space’”I found it hard, in other words, gazing at this enormous red cloth, not to be haunted by Guy Debord insisting, ‘the spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: ‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.’’3
Keep this confrontation in the background, then: on the one side, the IFIs; on the other, activists in the streets shouting ‘more world, less bank'(and I haven’t personally tripped across the appropriation of that particular slogan, but I expect to, any day now’”seriously). With that backdrop, I want to consider three disability snapshots or postcards from Mexico (a location I choose only somewhat randomly). Imagine these, if you will, as disability postcards sent to us here in this seemingly-abstract location.
Postcard #1. Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesperson of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas, Mexico, famously told a reporter: ‘Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.’4 The Zapatistas came to international attention on January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented. They rose up to protest the exploitation of Chiapas and its people, specifically NAFTA and the neoliberal ‘economic revolution’and ‘agrarian reform’sweeping Mexico. NAFTA included a ban on subsidies to indigenous farming cooperatives, so these reforms virtually guaranteed that the land of Chiapas would be used to advance the understanding of ‘development’held by IFIs and multinational corporations and that the largely-indigenous, landless peasants of Chiapas would remain landless. In 1996, the Zapatistas hosted in Chiapas the ‘first Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism,’and since that time, Marcos has regularly dispatched communiqués from the mountains of Chiapas addressed ‘to the people of Mexico,’or even ‘to the people of the world,’urging them to resist neoliberalism and struggle for humanity (with ‘neoliberalism’and ‘humanity’always understood, in his letters, as completely opposed). These communiqués have often directly named IFIs, as when Marcos called for resistance to those who would squelch the creativity of the people, ‘taking their cue from international bodies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organisation.’5
You’ve noticed, of course, that disability is not among the identities claimed by Marcos in the famous assertion of who he is, but disability is nonetheless unquestionably among the identities Marcos and the Zapatistas are willing to take on. In another communiqué, for instance, Marcos claimed affinity with ‘the workers in the countryside and the city, the indigenous, the settlers, the housewives, the teachers, the students, the retired persons, the small businesspersons, the professionals, the employed, the disabled, the sero-positives, the intellectuals, the artists, the investigators, the unemployed, the homosexuals, the lesbians, the women, the children and the elderly, all of those who, with different names and faces, give name and face to the people.’6 I started with the more well-known quotation, however, because I want to underscore not identification with but identification as, in the context of the Zapatista movement. The assertion ‘Marcos is disabled,’in other words, is entirely imaginable. Thus, my first disability postcard, from the mountains of Chiapas, presents us with a fair-skinned, apparently able-bodied, man in a black ski mask, claiming to be disabled.
Postcard #2. A perhaps more recognizable snapshot. In 2001, President Vicente Fox, friend to neoliberalism and international finance, a man who believed he could address the Chiapas uprising in such a way that ‘an indigenous person will disappear and a businessperson will be born,’7 called upon the international community to combat poverty and social exclusion. He informed the United Nations General Assembly that ‘it is important that all citizens be involved as stakeholders; the world [cannot] become more just if certain groups are excluded from this process.’ Fox then proceeded to call for a special committee ‘to study the question of a new international convention on promoting and protecting the rights of persons with disabilities,’which resulted in a United Nations General Assembly Resolution, #56/168.8 Keep this glossy picture in mind; I will return to Fox momentarily.
Finally, postcard #3. From Chiapas in the south, to the Distrito Federal in the central section of the country, to the northern border state of Tamaulipas. Soledad lives in a shantytown in Nuevo Laredo, and works for Sony’s Magneticos de Mexico, which has a maquiladora, or plant, in an export-processing zone (EPZ) along the border. These zones were created several decades ago as part of the Border Industrialization Program (BIP) to ‘attract foreign capital to the area . . . and to relieve a labor surplus in the region.’9 The maquiladoras on the Mexican border have grown exponentially over the course of the past few decades, in tandem with structural adjustment programs and loans to Mexico from IFIs and ‘austerity measures'(cuts in services and the imposition of user fees) put in place by the Mexican government. In 1970, there were 120 plants in the borderlands employing 20,300 workers; by 1998, there were 4,050 employing 994,397 workers.10I quote at length from Soledad’s story:Soledad took one month’s leave before giving birth to her first child, Manuel. Because her husband’s intermittent work as a day laborer was insufficient to provide for the family’s basic needs, Soledad was forced to return to work almost immediately. When Manuel began to [experience] severe respiratory problems only a few months later, Soledad wanted to remain at home to care for him. . . . financial constraints compelled her to keep working, for her job gave her access to the state-run, employer-financed national health program, el Seguro Social, without the assistance of which Soledad could not have afforded health care for Manuel, who required frequent hospitalization.
One day, Soledad requested leave to take her son to the hospital. She received verbal permission from a supervisor [but] returned to work to find herself accused of taking a day off without permission. The supervisor who had granted her permission denied ever having given it, and Soledad was docked one week’s pay and threatened with firing. Aware of her precarious position, Soledad sought an interview with another maquila, whose managers promptly informed her Sony employers of her action. Soledad’s supervisors now harassed her incessantly at work. After weeks of this harassment, Soledad finally ‘consented’to ‘resign.’ Her forced resignation made her ineligible for severance pay and health benefits.
Pregnant with her second child, Soledad eventually found work, at a third of her former wage, cleaning for a school teacher. She received no medical benefits from this informal work. She and her husband were unable to accumulate any savings on their meager wages. Without access to medical care, Soledad was ineligible to deliver her baby at the Seguro clinic, and the couple could not afford the fees at Nuevo Laredo’s private hospital. Soledad’s employer, aware of the family’s difficulties, made only one ‘gesture of support’’”an offer to purchase Soledad’s child at birth.11
The story I am relating, based on interviews conducted by contributors to the book Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor does not make clear whether Soledad is depressed, but a 1992 study reported that, in Mexico’s border region, 40 percent of electronics workers and 54 percent of garment workers were experiencing significant depression.12 I relate this statistic only to avoid the impression that the workers in this story are able-bodied while disabled people, such as Soledad’s son Manuel, are at home. It’s important to recognize that disability is showing up in many locations in this snapshot. Disability studies, after all, has taught us, in the words of Douglas Baynton, ‘disability is everywhere in history [including, certainly, the history we are currently living through], once you begin looking for it.’13
What, in the end, to make of these three postcards? I was quickest with the snapshot of Fox, so let’s start there. I know that the scenario I described took place in New York, but it’s recognizable, as I suggested, and could as easily take place in Mexico City. Indeed, it’s recognizable in such a way that it’s not hard to imagine Fox making the announcement, or similar announcements, surrounded by people with disabilities. And regardless of where the scene takes place, there is truly something remarkable about it: it is unquestionably a testimony to the success of various disability rights movements. Disability need not be perceived through the lens of loss, lack, pity; disability can be understood as an identity, perhaps’”indeed’”the largest minority identity in Mexico, or in the United States. Arguably, Fox (and Bush for that matter) gets it here, and in this announcement at least, he repeats it not just perfunctorily but generously.
In contrast, there are ways in which Marcos’s claim, inefficiently, falls flat. If for rhetorical flair you are going to claim to be disabled or gay or something else that you are, at least apparently, not, then it behooves you to get it right. Marcos, however, arguably gets it wrong from the start: ‘Marcos is gay in San Francisco,’he begins, seemingly oblivious to the fact that San Francisco is hardly ground zero for a generic gay oppression. On the contrary, despite the fact that I would never minimize violent and anti-gay attacks that do happen in and around the Castro, in general we’re speaking of a highly-commodified space where a fairly-sanitized version of gay identity is produced and sold. And we’re speaking of an area where some gay and lesbian people have been comfortable enough to oppress others, as when some gay and lesbian homeowners opposed a shelter in the Castro area that would serve homeless queer youth. If Marcos wanted to get it right, he should have said, ‘Marcos is gay in Laramie, Wyoming; a queer homeless girl in San Francisco.’
And yet, I will take the risk here of finding the snapshot of a disabled Marcos more convincing and truer to the most generative and transformative aspects of a global Disability Rights Movement than the Fox photo op. And, in some ways, it is the final picture, of the maquiladora worker, who may or may not identify as disabled, who may or may not understand her son as disabled, that convinces me. Neoliberalism can accommodate, and even capitalize upon, some disability identities, but’”and a disabled Marcos recognizes this’”it cannot accommodate Soledad and Manuel. On the contrary: Soledad and Manuel, and the vast majority of people with disabilities like them around the world, are being asked to accommodate neoliberalism.
Don’t get me wrong: I can sustain the contradiction of wanting ramps into the World Bank even if I would prefer that the institution be, in the words of activists marching or rolling through the streets, ‘smashed.’ My goal here is to deny neither that a given World Bank program might be beneficial to specific communities of people with disabilities nor that the World Bank is setting a place at the table for some. When disabled antiwar activists, however, started disseminating earlier this year the slogan ‘An Accessible World Is Possible'(along with other chestnuts like ‘Nursing Homes = Weapons of Mass Destruction’and ‘Just Another Disabled Lesbian for Peace’), I think they had something else in mind. ‘An Accessible World Is Possible’deliberately, and brilliantly, reworks ‘Another World Is Possible,’the slogan associated with the Porto Alegre, Brazil conferences that have been held annually over the past few years to imagine alternatives to neoliberalism and the consensus put forward by the World Bank and other IFIs. In my mind, linking ‘access’to the Porto Alegre motto implies that there are rich, democratic, heretofore-unimagined meanings of ‘accessibility’; it is not that we are simply asking for access to the structures that sustain things as they are, and we are definitely not seeking more access for multinational corporations and IFIs. Rather, we are seeking the access Naomi Klein imagines when she writes of ‘a very old and recurring story, the one about people pushing up against the barriers that try to contain them, opening up windows, breathing deeply, tasting freedom.’14 The ‘very old story,’of course, is a disability story, and ‘More World, Less Bank,’disability theory.
An article in Indian Country, an American Indian news source, reports on a 2001 caravan to Mexico City, where the Zapatistas were heading to insist, in petitions to the legislature, that indigenous people’s ‘inherent rights to autonomy, dignity, work, land, food, schools, and health care,’be respected (not to mention their right not to be magically turned into businesspeople). The Indian Country article talks about a blind man on the bus, joking with a woman using a walker, ‘It is hard to be a revolutionary where you are old and disabled.’15 Yet maybe the Grey Panthers, Disabled Global Action, ACT UP, WinVisible (or Women with Visible and Invisible Disablities), South Africa’s TAC (or Treatment Action Campaign), and many others would suggest that the joke’s on neoliberalism’”it would seem, after all, that disabled revolutionaries can show up just about anywhere. Maybe even at SDS, if ‘Disability and Dissent’at all implies dissent from the supposed consensus of our historical moment. Having a fabulous time in Bethesda, we might write . . . wish you were here.
Robert McRuer is assistant professor of English at the George Washington University and co-editor of _Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies_ (Duke UP, 2003).
Notes
1. The following discussion of the Washington Consensus and structural adjustment programs is indebted to Joyce V. Millen, Alec Irwin, and Jim Yong Kim, ‘Introduction: What Is Growing? Who Is Dying?’ Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. Ed. Jim Yong Kim et al. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000.
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party.’ The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978, p. 469.
3. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995, p. 15.
4. Quoted in Naomi Klein, ‘Rebellion in Chiapas.’ Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. New York: Picador USA, 2002, pp. 211-212. The following overview of the Zapatista Movement is indebted to Klein’s piece.
5. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, ‘Do not forget, ideas are also weapons.’ . Accessed 11 July 2003.
6. Marcos, ‘Some reflections on the FOBAPROA, some support and a call.’ . Accessed 11 July 2003.
7. Quoted in Marcos, ‘A Letter to President Vicente Fox.’ . Accessed 4 June 2003.
8. Fox’s speech is described in ‘Overview: Arab Regional Meeting on Norms and Standards Related to Development and the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.’ . Accessed 1 June 2003. The quotations in this paragraph are taken from the summary of Fox’s comments.
9. Joel Brenner et al., ‘Neoliberal Trade and Investment and the Health of Maquiladora Workers on the U.S.-Mexico Border.’ Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. Ed. Jim Yong Kim et al. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000, p. 261.
10. Ibid., p. 265.
11. Ibid., pp. 262-263.
12. Ibid., p. 287.
13. Douglas C. Baynton, ‘Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.’ The New Disability History: American Perspectives. Ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. New York: NYU Press, 2001, p. 52.
14. Naomi Klein, ‘Preface: Fences of Enclosure, Windows of Possibility.’ Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. New York: Picador USA, p. xxvii.
15. Quoted in Brenda Norrell, ‘Days of indigenous heroes, en route with Emiliano Zapata.’ Indian Country Today 28 March 2001. . Accessed 11 July 2003.
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