Matching Items (2)
Description
Deeply entrenched eugenic values overdetermine who is treated with care and dignity and who is treated with violence. These eugenic values inform and are informed by settler colonialism, patriarchy, and ableism. Carceral locales such as nursing homes, hospitals, and jails enact specific kinds of harm onto disabled people and rely on their convoluted and self-serving bureaucratic processes to evade responsibility. Given my interest in the indivisibility of carceral logics, spaces of capture, and ableism, my focus in this dissertation is both the real-life contexts of the individual incidents and the systemic, cross-institutional patterns evident in each of the three incidents analyzed.I take a modified case study approach to three incidents in which disabled people in carceral locales experience tremendous harm. The first incident is about the gross medical neglect and rape of a San Carlos Apache disabled woman at a skilled nursing care facility in Phoenix, Arizona. The second incident occurred at a hospital in Austin, Texas where doctors worked hastily to killing a Black disabled man within only days of his arrival and change his code status to Do Not Resuscitate against his family’s will. The third incident focuses on duty of care violations and disability-based discrimination against a white disabled man at a Chicago jail. These situations, when analyzed individually and with/against one another, identify important connections relating to institutional power and cross-institution patterns of harm. I find that the paternal dynamics of medical[ized] facilities, the pervading anti-disability sentiments in US society, and bureaucratic violence make accountability and justice impossible.
ContributorsPeer, Victoria (Author) / Swadener, Beth B (Thesis advisor) / Vega, Sujey (Committee member) / Gomez, Alan E (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
2023 has been a record-breaking year for legislation aimed at restricting and even criminalizing access to gender affirming care for minors. In response to these legislative efforts, many advocates rely on invocations of medical authority to defend the right of individuals to access gender affirming care. However, this reliance on the pathologization of transgender identity both reaffirms stigmatization of transgender identity as mental illness as well as forecloses on opportunities to affirm access to gender affirming care otherwise. The purpose of this research is to use disability justice scholarship, predominantly crip theory, to analyze these legislative efforts in-depth beyond the predominant critique offered by the medical-model. I demonstrate that these legislative moves to ban access to gender affirming care are part of a larger effort to prevent a trans future more broadly. Trans childhood has become a particularly fruitful site for this political action due to the ways in which normativities relating to time, biological plasticity, and capacity shape the way that their bodies are understood. I term those individual bodies which have such characteristics of non-normative temporalities, plasticity, and capacity/incapacity grafted onto them become “bodies of normative intervention” and explore how they become the laboratory sites for producing population-wide normative interventions. This legislative effort to restrict access to gender affirming care for minors represents a broader effort to legislate a trans future out of existence through the strategic targeting of trans children. This robs society of valuable trans knowledge and experience.
ContributorsMills, Raegan Lenore (Author) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Brian, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Hlava, Terri (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023