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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)

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)