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Lange Zeit haben sich kaum Analysen finden lassen, in denen postkoloniale Studien innerhalb der Disability Studies zum Einsatz kammen. Dies hat sich in den letzten Jahren deutlich verändert. Die Fokussierung ist auch deswegen besonders spannend, weil rassistische Bio- und Körperpolitiken, die selten durch die antikolonialen Kämpfe thematisiert wurden, eine wichtige Perspektiverweiterung anbieten und die Analysen auch zum Neokolonialismus radikalisieren (vgl. etwa Choi 2001; Quayson 2002; Jarman 2005; Sherry 2007; Barker/Murray 2010).

— Postkoloniale Theorie by María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan (Page 316)

Diese Missbilligung lässt sich auch innerhalb postkolonialer Studien nachweisen, wo die Thematisierung von Geschlecht häufig als ein gefährliches Ablenkungsmanöver von den eigentlich relevanten Kategorien ›Rasse‹ und Ethnizität verstanden wird. Westlicher Feminismus wurde von antikolonialen Nationalisten geradezu systematisch verteufelt, um die Grenzziehungen zwischen weißen und indigenen Frauen zu stabilisieren (vgl. Gandhi 1998: 96 ff.), weswegen der koloniale Zusammenstoß ohne Weiteres als ein Kampf zwischen konkurrierenden Männlichkeiten gelesen werden kann (vgl. ebd.: 98). Sowohl der Imperialismus als auch der antikoloniale Nationalismus erweisen sich im Wesentlichen als heteronormative und gewalttätige sexistische Projekte, die ihre spezifischen Männlichkeitsvorstellungen durchsetzten, indem sie den jeweils anderen Mann als ›verweiblicht‹ und/oder homosexuell repräsentierten (vgl. Castro Varela/Dhawan 2005).

— Postkoloniale Theorie by María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan (Page 314)

It was difficult work, trudging through the mire of one's past, excavating memories, bringing them into the light where others could see their ugliness, where all the facets of them were exposed. Ranami had done this work too, but every time she thought she'd finished, a word, a smell or a sound would bring yet another terrible remembrance bubbling to the surface.

— The Bone Shard War by Andrea Stewart (Page 68)

I agree with Biss and Chen that the discourse of toxicity attempts to secure a rhetorical space for individual purity that would allow us to imagine that we can succeed in not being altered and shaped by the world. The practices that come out of this -- in the overdeveloped world including all the filtration money can buy -- replicate the redistribution of externalities away from some bodies and toward others. Rich people have an easier time enacting the kind of redistribution or avoidance of poison in their bodies than poor people. But, as Chen and Biss help us understand, these practices are temporary and illusory; we cannot in the end be separate from the world that constitutes us. Corporeal exceptionalism cannot be sustained because interabsorption is the way things actually are.

Where do we find normative guidance for orienting ourselves toward meeting the future organisms we are becoming in constitution with complex ecological situations that range from pH-altering elements in the rain to the slag heaps of nickel mines to endocrine-disrupting compounds in our waterways? What approaches might we take that do not revert to antidisability or human-centric political orientations? Whatever answer we give, it cannot rest with some wholesale approval of pollution, contamination, or toxicity. Whatever answer we give, it has to reckon with the differential distribution of harm. Whatever answer we give, it should not treat frogs and toads as mere indicators, or as mattering only because of human concerns.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 106 - 107)

Her book Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars made substantial interventions in debates about "false memory" syndrome, responding particularly to the ways that understanding memory as dynamic and relational has been critiqued by "false memory" sceptics. Campbell observed that women who recovered memories of past abuse were often discredited by people -- often in courts of law -- who claimed that their memory was unsound because they had fashioned their memories in conversations with therapists. In these cases, women are rendered unreliable or sullied rememberers through, among other things, storehouse, individuated conceptions of memory. Campbell's claim here is that memory is not a storehouse, nor individual. So it is not a failure of memory that we need others to articulate and understand our past experiences; others are necessary to our memory.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 76 - 77)

Memory is held not only, or perhaps even not primarily, in our skull. Rather, it might be best understood as "held" within precisely the complex network of relationships that shapes affect and personhood. In thinking about Campbell's claim that we need a relational view of memory, recall her argument that having a discursive community can help us express free-style feelings and that expression is in key ways involved in having feelings that do not fit into preset, well-established emotions. Campbell frames memory as collaborative, too.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 75)

Living well might feel impossible, and certainly living purely is impossible. The slate has never been clean, and we can't wipe off the surface to start fresh -- there's no "fresh" to start. Endocrine-disrupting soap doesn't offer a purity made simple because there isn't one. All there is, while things perpetually fall apart, is the possibility of acting from where we are. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we might wish to get back to, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is not a preracial state we could access, erasing histories of slavery, forced labor on railroads, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothing we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webs of suffering.

This book champions the usefulness of thinking about complicity and compromise as a starting point for action.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 11 - 12)