Gill, M. and Schlund‐Vials, C.J. (eds) Disability, Human Rights and the Limits of Humanitarianism. Dorchester: Ashgate. 2014. 252pp £58.50 ISBN 978‐1‐4724‐2091‐6 (hbk)статья из журнала
Аннотация: With the rise of international disability rights and increasing ratification by nation-states of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), disability has become mainstreamed into human rights discourse. However, while this has brought more attention to disability, many activists and scholars question what that attention actually means for disabled people in diverse contexts at a global level. International scholarship critiquing human rights has long recognised how the global North, especially the USA, deploys human rights rhetoric to justify military intervention, violence or humanitarian aid based on unequal power dynamics. As Helen Meekosha and Karen Soldatic (2011) ask, ‘is the discourse of human rights so crowded with hegemonic meanings that counter-hegemonic meanings are not possible?’ This book, edited by Michael Gill and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, takes this question up directly and explores the distortions and limitations, but also the potentials, of human rights initiatives to effect change. This collection rightly pairs discourses of human rights with humanitarianism to pose serious questions about how disabled people are made abject and their lives decontextualised in the name of progress. Several contributors critique the ways that international humanitarian initiatives regularly situate disabled people as quintessential victims, or expose the ways that disabled bodies and narratives are appropriated to signify nation-state underdevelopment, neglect or abuse. Gill's and Schlund-Vials's edited collection makes a valuable contribution to global disability studies scholarship by investigating how global policies and representation impact on people's lives, but more importantly, to centre the voices and potent activism of disabled people to resist distorted framings of disability and to ‘effect sustainable change in their lives’ (p. 7). A number of authors contributing to this collection focus on the stark realities people with disabilities are facing, especially in that economic models driven by neoliberalism and austerity. Drawing upon his long-standing work in disability advocacy, Mark Sherry offers a sobering account of the material effects of neoliberalism in the USA and Australia, calling out the ‘remarkably hollow’ (p. 15) rhetoric of human rights and human dignity in the face of decreasing governmental support, social isolation, minimal employment opportunities, and exhausting bureaucratic systems. He poses a crucial question for disability justice: can the promises of the CRPD be realised against global austerity measures and neoliberal practices? Sherry insists that lofty goals of human rights – while always worthy of pursuit – must be critically examined in the face of material and economic realities, and ultimately, that human rights discourse must ‘break free from the shackles of neoliberalism’ (p. 25). Echoing Sherry's condemnation of neoliberalism, Maria Berghs critiques the dominant imagery of several non-governmental organisations ostensibly working to address poverty and disability. Rather than framing issues in terms of justice and rights, they employ individualised stories of suffering or objectifying images to position people as victims in need of rescue rather than active agents in their lives. Anna Mae Duane develops a related critique of global markets of benevolence through an incisive reading of The Hunger Games, arguing that the science fiction world where a few clever young individuals are able to win against a rigged system might be more factual than fantasy. Like Berghs, Duane underscores the relentless use of hungry poster children to attract sponsorship as but one telling marker of the neoliberal lie that private benevolence, prayer and charity will contain poverty, hunger and social injustice. This relationship between representation and material reality is also taken up by Armineh Soorenian. Her chapter turns the lens to austerity measures in the UK and the corresponding anti-disability media campaigns that ramped up stereotypes of disabled people as ‘shirkers’ (p. 44) cheating the system. Soorenian pays particular attention to disabled women who have been victims of targeted hate crimes and who, due to multiple cuts in social supports, are predicted to bear 70 per cent of the loss in benefits and services. In this case, the media has actively reinforced neoliberal policies, and each of these chapters expose the chasm between humanitarianism and the material conditions of disability. The chapters by Tanya Titchkosky and Eunjung Kim stand out in the collection by mapping out new critical disability frameworks for understanding international humanitarianism and human rights policy. Titchkosky questions the widespread celebration of the CRPD as a ‘paradigm shift’ (p. 125) and argues instead that we should be mindful of the processes of ‘discernment’ (p. 126) required by such human rights monitoring programmes. In other words, when we engage in drawing lines between the social and the biological, we perpetuate a process that situates disability outside the human. Ultimately, Titchkosky argues for a radical humanism focused on questioning and remaking the category of the human itself – where disability is not used as a bright line of demarcation. Eunjung Kim offers several examples of Western humanitarianism driven by depictions of non-Western sites of violence, with particular uses of disability, as ‘spectres of vulnerability’ (p. 137). Moving from Afghanistan to New York City to South Korea, Kim works against these constructs; instead, paying attention to material histories and the racialised and gendered nature of violence and impairment, she interprets disabled people in these spectacularised spaces as resistant and transgressive. Citing a specific protest by disabled activists in South Korea, Kim demonstrates that endurance in the face of ongoing state neglect and indifference is much more powerful than pleas for aid, and staging vulnerability as protest provides radical resistance to proliferating humanitarian distortions of disabled lives. Turning to the promises of human rights, a few contributors seriously consider the potential of the CRPD to extend rights protections. Ethan Levine's chapter explores the applicability of the CRPD to address global inequities and discrimination against intersex individuals and communities. Looking at employment in Australia, Harris, Owen and Fisher consider the gaps between employment goals and the barriers disabled people continue to face concerning accommodation and employer attitudes. Drawing upon interviews with disabled people, the authors demonstrate the need for employer education and government provision of accommodations to effectively address persistent unemployment. Janet Lord explores another potential application of the CRPD: to revise older international humanitarian law which still situates disability solely as medical deficit. Other chapters turn to specific disability injustice issues in South Africa, India and the USA to explore opportunities for reframing local strategies in relation to local and global rights movements. Jennifer Bronson, for example, looks to international human rights to address an enduring race and disability issue in the USA: the overrepresentation of students of colour (especially African-American males) in special education. By decentring national and global North perspectives, Bronson provides provocative insights to a persistent site of injustice and oppression in the USA. The collection as a whole productively decentres the USA and global North hegemony. Throughout the collection, non-Western and global South frameworks are brought into focus and used to inform and critique neoliberal policies embedded within humanitarian and rights initiatives largely driven by the global North. The final chapter by Nirmala Erevelles provides a powerful bookend to the collection and brings this transnational, materialist critique to post-humanist theories taken up by leading disability studies scholars in North America and Europe. Tracing connections between the history of slavery in the USA, the global trafficking of body parts and care relationships between Western elites and immigrant caregivers from the global South, Erevelles insists upon materialist frameworks in disability studies that recognise and address transnational inequities, especially at the intersections of race, gender and sexuality. Like Erevelles, most authors in this collection engage with a politics of impairment informed by global South perspectives. This decentring of the global North, especially as contributors develop critiques and analyses of these dominant nations and their policies, is a notable strength of the collection as a whole. Ultimately, while some chapters stand out as more developed than others, taken together, this collection demonstrates the importance of critically engaging with disability, especially as a tool to interrogate neoliberal promises within discourses of human rights and humanitarianism.
Год издания: 2015
Авторы: Michelle Jarman
Издательство: Wiley
Источник: Sociology of Health & Illness
Ключевые слова: Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics
Открытый доступ: bronze
Том: 38
Выпуск: 3
Страницы: 515–517