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One key difference between a conspiracy theorist and an activist, for lack of a better word, is that the conspiracy theorist holds that the best defense is more and better knowledge (read my website, listen to my explanation, investigate what you know) and the activist holds that the best defense is creating another world. An anti-oppression approach might start on the level of the epistemic, but it always leads toward action in the world, to speculative ontological commitments to different futures. The point is to change the world, this world, and so the point is complicated, compromised, and impossible to conceptualize, let alone achieve alone. People doing movement work usually get lots of things wrong, which might not be such a problem—if the purpose of the work isn’t to be right. Instead, our purpose is to contingently make it be that something that deserves a future has one. Almost all the people I know who are doing activist work, effective or not, are trying to move beyond the epistemic and into the ontic—we are attempting to prefigure something.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 235)

The shimmer here between the necessity of imagined tomorrows and control of the too-quickly-arriving tomorrow is the space of the kind of creativity signaled by prefigurative political practice. Delany repeatedly emphasizes the sense in which, as he writes:

Science fiction is not “about the future.” Science fiction is in dialogue with the present. We SF writers often say that science fiction prepares people to think about the real future—but that’s because it relates to the real present in the particular way it does; and that relation is neither one of prediction nor one of prophecy. It is one of dialogic, contestatory, agonistic creativity. In science fiction the future is only a writerly convention that allows the SF writer to indulge in a significant distortion of the present that sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the reader’s here and now. (176)

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 226)

I suggest that we can think about postidentity disability politics in a similar way. Identifying into critical disability praxis doesn’t rely on a fixed experience, or a stable identity. We know that the category “disabled” is already so heterogeneous that there has never been a set of defining characteristics capable of encompassing the scope of disabled lives and how to live them. Nor has inhabiting any given disabled identity produced any particular politics. The strand of disability work I follow rejects the idea that what we’re looking for is just a better set of diagnostic or definitive criteria. And we know that the social categories practiced at all these sites are more tangled when we hold in mind other vectors of vulnerability and empowerment, oppression and privilege. Further, we know that disability theory and practice can and often has involved people who don’t identify as disabled, who worry they’re not disabled enough to “count,” who understand themselves to be enabled by systems of oppression but whose lives are shaped and entangled with disabled lovers, friends, comrades, or family, and so on. Identifying into disability praxis means that everyone, however situated, can shape their life’s practice in a way that contributes to self-determination and coproduced freedoms.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 208)

In this chapter, I argue that speculative fantasizing about disability futures can attune us to the possibilities for imagining worlds not identical to the world we’re currently in. We can pursue SF modes, to follow LaBare’s terms, that open practices of what Angela Davis calls identifying into a new world, shaping ourselves toward that world such that we call it into being as a prefigurative practice. I argue that we can do this however we are currently identified in terms of disability.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 202)

Worlds to Come Imagining Speculative Disability Futures

How do we craft a practice for imagining and living a future that does not simply replicate and intensify the present? My thinking here is cued by Octavia Butler’s comment in the context of a panel discussion on science fiction: “It’s dangerous to assume that whatever we’ve been doing, we’re going to keep doing that. You know: the future is more of the same, only more advanced. . . . It’s dangerous to assume that we can actually see the future by only looking at the technological advancements we’ve made so far” (Octavia Butler: Science Future, Science Fiction 2008).

I think her point holds as well for the idea that it’s dangerous to assume that the future is more of the same in terms of the social relations we experience now and project as a possible “then.” Imagining and practicing futures that are not “more of the same” is difficult, necessary work. In this chapter, I frame a usable futurity in terms of queer disability prefiguration—living in the present a world we want to create, and crafting that world through our living—as a form of speculative fiction, a practice of world-making creativity.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 200)

One might think that since the prevalent scholarly view in trans and queer studies is thoroughly grounded in a sophisticated social constructivism, and since voluntarism implicitly relies on the concept of a self-grounding will (contra constructivism), we could simply look beneath surface rhetoric to discover what people actually mean when they say something like “each person has the right to express their gender in any way that feels most comfortable.” However, I believe that it is not mere literalism to theoretically assess some of the politically strategic language we use to argue for more expansive freedoms. While arguing for individual rights to expansive expressions of gender and sexuality is politically effective, our rhetoric carries other political (side) effects. Among other things, arguments from individual liberties leave us open to anti-trans screeds that charge trans people and their allies with being interested only in individual liberties and not with collective liberation. Worse, since how we think about things in some ways determines our practices, we might begin to practice harmful voluntarism. A core danger here would be attending more to individual access to the tools of liberation than to the collective transformation; this is dangerous not because people shouldn’t have tools for liberation, including hormones, clothing, and surgeries, but because of the distribution of access under social relations of oppression. Since possessive individualism comes freighted with histories of capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and racism, we ought to be particularly careful about invoking it for liberatory ends.

Liberalism will not save us.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 180)

Now, it might look as though I am arguing that in order to take up a relational ontology of responsibility, recognizing that to be is always to be-with, we ought to all move to an exclusion zone and care for our world even though this care would kill us. I do not think that opening freedom to others, in Beauvoir’s sense, involves collectively moving to Fukushima Prefecture to eat radioactive mushrooms and bear witness to unexplained white spots forming on radiation-affected cattle. The power-saturated, inseparably ethical and political practice of responsibility that Haraway calls for in staying with the trouble signals a perpetual attempt to open freedom in a condition in which that freedom is bounded and limited, and thus the condition for distributed collective moral response. And when I say that I do not think we should all move to the exclusion zone, part of what I mean is that of course there is no exclusion zone, or that we are already living in one—we already live in this world thoroughly connected with all of the suffering that individualist practices of purity attempt to manage.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 167)

To close this chapter, I return to an example that brings together these considerations about the ethics of eating, using energy, and contamination: the cows of Fukushima. Masami Yoshizawa and Naoto Matsumura, formerly farmers, now care for animals left in the wake of the nuclear meltdown that followed on the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Among these animals are cattle too radioactive to eat but which they refuse to kill. These cattle had been declared “walking accident debris,” according to a newspaper article about Yoshizawa—“officials from the Ministry of Agriculture ordered them to be rounded up and slaughtered, their bodies buried or burned along with other radioactive waste” (Fackler 2014).

Yoshizawa says about his care-as-protest work: “The government wants to kill them because it wants to erase what happened here, and lure Japan back to its pre-accident nuclear status quo. I am not going to let them.”

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 163 - 164)

Kim Q. Hall characterizes the attempt to manage the ills of the world through changes in personal eating behavior as it manifests in the “mainstreamed alternative food movement” as “a neoliberal hygienic eating project fixated on the achievement of virtue, health, and good citizenship through appropriate consumer choices at the table and in the (farmer’s) marketplace” (Hall 2014, 183). If we orient toward eating as though we can personally exempt ourselves from ethical or physical ill-effects, we’re engaging in a perpetually failing purity project.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 139)

An ethical approach aiming for personal purity is inadequate in the face of the complex and entangled situation in which we in fact live. Individualism, in the context of relations perceptible through considering embodiment, is an ethical problem because it constitutes ethical success as personal purity. A central argument of this book is, of course, that personal purity is simultaneously inadequate, impossible, and politically dangerous for shared projects of living on earth. While personal purity may be a winnable aim in some ethical situations, it is impossible in situations such as energy use, climate change, and eating.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 130)