Date of Award
Summer 8-24-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Organizational Unit
College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, English and Literary Arts
First Advisor
Kristy L. Ulibarri
Second Advisor
Juli Parrish
Third Advisor
Tayana L. Hardin
Copyright Statement / License for Reuse
All Rights Reserved.
Keywords
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Neoliberalism and disability, Biopolitics of debility, Cultural production and disability, Economic governance and human rights
Abstract
Using the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as a unifying text, my dissertation explores the relationship between cultural production and the neoliberal crafting of humanity, the term I use to describe how social dimensions—including the construction of the textual and material body—become reorganized and governed through market relations. While many disability scholars and activists frame the ADA’s failures through social misunderstandings of disability, few have seriously attended to the limits of the ADA as a neoliberal fusing of economic governance and classical liberal individualism.
Tracing convergences between the ADA and earlier US disability legislation to socioeconomic and political reforms enacted after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreements, (Dis)Invested Bodies asks: How might the timing of the ADA—following the Cold War and immediately preceding the first Gulf War—allow us to theorize a relationship between the neoliberal crafting of humanity and labor, war, and capital production? How can the ADA—as the first comprehensive law to prohibit disability discrimination, and the model by which other states and the United Nations (UN) developed their own human rights laws—help us to understand relationships between economic governance and debilitation both in the US and elsewhere? How might producing “encounters” between the ADA and bodies constructed in cultural productions like literature, photography, and film facilitate access to the neoliberal crafting of disability, debility, and capacitation?
To answer these questions, I primarily apply Jasbir Puar’s biopolitics of debility to contemporary transnational American cultural productions. These include, for instance, Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (2019), Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly (2004), and disability technology produced by the government and private, government-contracted companies. I argue that these cultural productions expose how the neoliberal crafting of humanity involves contradictory processes of investments and disinvestments that unevenly (re)capacitate and produce debility and death. By demonstrating how contemporary economic relations simultaneously construct and depend upon a currency of bodies deemed expendable in the US and elsewhere, my dissertation adds to recent attempts to pivot from prevailing directions within disability studies that negate or elide historical-material processes of debilitation and death.
Copyright Date
8-2024
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Rights Holder
T. Wesley
Provenance
Received from Author
File Format
application/pdf
Language
English (eng)
Extent
261 pgs
File Size
1.6 MB
Recommended Citation
Wesley, T., "(Dis)Invested Bodies: The Neoliberal Crafting of Disability" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2459.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/2459
Included in
Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Disability Law Commons, Disability Studies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Philosophy Commons, Political Economy Commons, Sociology Commons
