The impact is structural diablism and cruel optimism

We seek theory that connects with the lifeworld of these young people. More generally, we will explore how the theoretical lexicons of affect and disability can be plundered in order to help us understand disability in the world. 4. Feeling disability Disability can and should be an entry point into studies of affect. We might want to think about the ways in which affect economies draw disabled people and those close to them into particular ways of feeling and emoting. Like Ahmed (2004) and Pedwell and Whitehead (2012) we are wary of those affect theorists who claim that their work constitutes a brand-new field on inquiry in relation to emotion and feeling. Just as feminism can claim a long historical alignment with affect through ‘the personal is political’, so critical disability studies can also point to a body of literature that has been engaged with the affective experiences of disability (Goodley 2016). Critical disability studies is a nascent field of scholarship and activism that explicitly engages with transformative fields of inquiry including queer, postcolonial, indigenous and feminist studies. Theories of affect sit at the intersections of these different spaces of theorisation. In the following, we make some novel connections of theoretical orientations and trajectories from affect theory and critical disability studies. 4.1. Ontological invalidation in neoliberal-able times How come you are in a wheelchair? What happened to you then? I never think of you as disabled? DISABILITY & SOCIETY 207 You are so brave, you know. (Common comments and questions made by non-disabled people to disabled people; see Goodley 2016). It must be so difficult for you, having a disabled child, but it’s a good job it happened to you, I don’t think I could cope. (Personal comment made to one of the authors, no date) A lot of people [friends] will ask, ‘Does Shaun’s willy work?’ (Hannah, non-disabled wife of Shaun, a man with Spinal Cord Injury [SCI]; see Liddiard 2017) The British feminist disability scholars Thomas (1999, 2001, 2002, 2007) and Reeve (2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) have created a theoretical space for thinking creatively about the psyche. As Goodley (2016) argues, both are sceptical about psychologisation but share an interest in what Reeve describes as the ‘barriers in here’ that are often ignored by radical structuralist sociologists who are more focused on the ‘barriers out there’ (2008, 1). The psycho-emotional register is progressive because it seeks to consider what ‘disabled people can be’ rather than what ‘disabled people can do’. But this approach is also sensitised to an exploration of indirect and direct forms of psycho-emotional disablism. Direct forms can be found in discriminatory interactions, acts of invalidation, patronising responses of others and hate crimes such as the destruction of group symbols and hate literature (Sherry 2000). Indirect forms of psycho-emotional disablism are less overt but just as damaging. They may emerge as side effects of structural disablism (a feeling of dislocation in a building that is largely inaccessible) or unintended actions, words or deeds (such as stares of curious others, patronising attitudes, need-freak requests for assistance) (see Liddiard 2014). How are disabled people, their partners, families and allies meant to respond emotionally to these questions? By accommodating non-disabled people, perhaps offering a smile, a short answer and a response that will not make the non-disabled person even more uncomfortable. Anger, violence or rejection on the part of the disabled person would no doubt be understood by the non-disabled inquisitor as a rude emotional response of someone with a ‘chip on their shoulder’. Ironically, it would at the same time serve to embody the stale ableist trope of the angry, bitter crip. Liddiard (2014, 124) recognises both the complex management of feeling and the relational politics inherent to responding in the right ways as forms of skilled emotional labour, as disabled people come to take on the diverse roles of teacher, negotiator, manager, mediator, performer and educator’ in negotiating their reactions and responses – enacting forms of skilled inter-personal labour desired by the very western labour markets from which they are largely excluded (see Exley and Letherby 2001). Hochschild (1983) is clear: there are appropriate affects to display in these moments of interaction. Families with disabled children and disabled children themselves have described the affective labour that they are forced to engage with to manage the emotions of others (Runswick-Cole 2013). Disabled people have articulated the emotional work and labour required within their loving and sexual relationships with close others, showing that such labour can reach the most intimate spaces of life and self (Liddiard 2014). 208 D. GOODLEY ET AL. In our respective work, each of us has previously drawn on Hochschild’s work to explain the ways in which disabled people engage in disabling forms of emotional labour (Goodley 2016; Liddiard 2014; Runswick-Cole 2010, 2013); as disabled people, their partners and their families find themselves caught up in interactions with non-disabled people that are governed by a number of well-known social scripts (Goodley 2016; Runswick-Cole 2013). These scripts invite non-disabled people to interact with disability that permits, for example, the asking of inappropriate, demeaning and highly personalised questions and commentaries we outlined at the start of this section. Affect is deeply embedded in cultural norms. Hughes (2009, 2012, 2015) points out that disabled people are associated with a cultural history of disgust, pity and fear. This renders disabled people as objects of ambivalent feelings from wider non-disabled society such as resentment and hatred. Disabled people risk being ontologically invalidated by the disabling worlds that they inhabit. Hughes (2009, 408) argues that: The role of fear … is hugely underplayed in personal tragedy theory. So to is the role of disgust, a mediating emotion in the relations between disabled and nondisabled people that is in need of considerable development. Hughes’ work builds sociologically on the psychological and psychoanalytic analysis of Marks (1999a, 1999b, 2002) that sought to probe unconscious responses to disability. Marks powerfully argued that being subjected to the damaging pathologising projections of others risked being internalised by disabled people: where the projections of societal norms of dependency and bodily imperfection are internalised, only to sit ambivalently, often shamefully, with one’s psychical position in a disabling world. (Marks 1999a; 21) Such feelings of emotional and ontological invalidation risk self-harm and self-hatred (Marks 1999b, 615, also see Hughes 2009). Goodley too has deployed social psychoanalytic concepts to explain further the generation of fear, disgust but also attraction in relation to disability displayed by non-disabled culture (Goodley 2011, 2014, 2016). This analysis was indebted to the writings of Marks (1999a, 1999b, 2002) and Watermeyer (2013) who as therapists trained in the psychoanalytic tradition are far more skilled in deploying this theoretical language. Both were keen to understand the ontological damage done to disabled people whilst living in a society that veers from not recognising disabled people as valued members of society to conceptualising disability solely in terms of deficit and lack. Marks and Watermeyer are keen to take seriously the emotional lives of disabled people and do so with a keen interest in the socio-cultural conditions in which one’s psycho-emotional life thrives or fails. Clearly, living in such a dismissive atmosphere risks causing feelings of invalidation. Also, we know that a precarious sense of self becomes heightened in times of austerity (Flynn 2017). Goodley’s (2011, 2016) interest in deploying psychoanalysis was less with disabled people and more with non-disabled people. In particular, he DISABILITY & SOCIETY 209 played around with the idea of the psychopathology of the normals, which considers the ways in which the precarious nature of living with being non-disabled (or able-bodied or able-minded) inevitably plunges individuals into emotional turmoil (Goodley 2014). One easy route out of any psychic trouble is projection: finding failings in others. We therefore might understand feelings of disgust or fear (or attraction for that matter) as symptoms of the underlying neurosis on the part of non-disabled people. Hence, disability becomes disavowed by normative culture: it is rejected (because it symbolises lack) and adored (because of its association with dependency which is the human condition desired by most of us caught in the terrors of adult autonomy). While some affect theorists consider the field to be in part a rejection of the psychoanalytic ownership of the affective register, psychoanalysis may be critically reappropriated to make sense of wider cultural formations of emotion. Indeed, Gorton (2008) and Duschinsky, Greco, and Solomon (2014) draw on related concepts of attachment and fantasy in their interrogation of affective culture. Duschinsky, Greco, and Solomon (2014, 232) note that the idea of attachment might well be the best way to engage with a vital question left behind by Foucault: why we emotionally invest in the cultures and institutions which discipline our identities and limit our potential to flourish. For Duschinsky, Greco, and Solomon (2014) this is the root of Berlant’s affective notion of cruel optimism: ‘an optimistic attachment is cruel when the object/scene of desire is itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it: but its life-organising status can trump interfering with the damage it provokes’ (Berlant 2011, 227). The consequence of such cruel optimism risks causing emotional distress, as one fails to match up to the labour and consumption demands of late capitalism. One route out of such distress is to unconsciously view and locate failure in others. This might help us explain the cultural disavowal of young people with LL/LTIs and their families. We might understand the broader cultural politics of emotion or affect economy (Ahmed 2004) – against which interactions such as those already described take place – as one being framed by ableism (Campbell 2009; Goodley 2014). Ableism is associated with the broader cultural logics of autonomy, self-sufficiency and independence. These logics are unquestionably and uncritically linked to psychological contentment and the affect of happiness. Ahmed ([2007] 2008) urges us to shake up our taken-for-granted ideas around happiness. Indeed, her critique of the pursuit of happiness, which is promulgated by psychological therapies and the self-help industry, fits well with a critical disability studies rejection of neoliberal-ableism. The latter discourse similarly propels the individual citizen towards an end of point of supposed contentment through the never-ending performances of labour and consumption. Happiness is to be bought, and so is able-bodied and able-mindedness. Here we can see further connections with Berlant’s (2007, 2010, 2011) cruel optimism: the mistaken desire and belief that we will reach personal fulfilment and happiness through working and shopping hard enough. Happiness, for Ahmed ([2007] 2008), can be understood as a promise or aspiration, a habit.