CareNET Research Seminar: "From cruel optimism to the power of failure"

Program

Seminar: "From cruel optimism to the power of failure: neoliberalism, disability and ableist culture"

For this seminar, what interests us most is the possibility of thinking about disability as a singular experience that destabilizes what is commonly understood to be success and happiness. To do so, I would like to dig deeper into a couple of texts that I wrote over the last year:

1. Contra el pensamiento positivo: neoliberalismo, discapacidad y capacitismo (Against positive thinking: neoliberalism, disability and ableism)

2. Los fracasos de la discapacidad: desear hij*s san*s (The failures of disability: the desire for healthy children)

To delve further into this topic, my intention is to use disability as a pretext to discuss an affective, ableist and therapeutic economy. Featuring strongly in this economy there is a neoliberal rationale that promotes a new entrepreneurial spirit – one which thrives on a success-focused, narcissistic and resilient mentality – and meritocratic narratives that teach us to judge certain bodies as 'unhappy', a repugnant way of thinking.

In what ways does the common meaning of happiness make disability an object of deception and how might cultural narratives of failure tend towards a policy of affection towards 'crips', contradicting the optimistic rationale of neoliberalism? What expectations and objects, such as the promise of a happy and successful lifestyle, keep the body fully productive? What do inclusion and visibility mean within a neoliberal rationale, where, through optimistic expectations, the disabled individual is removed from the inequalities of gender, race and nationality? When and for whom is optimism a guarantee of inclusion or the precursor to a subtle extinction?

In addition, a rift opens here, allowing us to ethically, politically and somatically exercise critically disabled positioning that questions our daily material conditions: unemployment, poverty, violence and segregation. The aim is to understand and perceive the insecurity surrounding our uncertain and unstable future, while resisting the idea of a reproductive and rehabilitative future that conceals certain extinction with a veil of full inclusion.