Quotes from David T. Mitchell

The challenge of the politics of atypicality becomes particularly pressing within neoliberal biopolitics, particularly in that much of disability's social oppression is based on medical classifications that overindividuate bodies within categories of pathology while turning labeled subjects into generic representations of their medicalized condition group.

Can we keep ourselves open to the experience of nonnormativity as something other than inferiority, deviancy, and intolerable aberrancy (a mere ableist projection of the pathologizing fantasies of normativity)?

Doing so, however, reinforces a problematic "we" that discounts those with disabilities by suggesting all of us occupy failed embodiments in some way without an ability to attend to crip/queer materiality's nuances of experience.

After all, if disability brings nothing but likeness to others into the world as its primary contribution to questions of lived embodiment, what value will it have to help us reimagine ways of artfully living less productive, less consumptive, and less exploitative lives?

As a pedagogical approach, disability studies provides ways of legitimating the lives of those occupying peripheral embodiments as offering insightful alternative modes of nonnormative being-in-the-world. These two disability-centered approaches dovetail into what we call curricular cripistemologies. SONG