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Where to begin. "The right to maim" is the production of certain populations--racialized, occupied, exploited, disposable--whose availability for injury is necessary to sustain capitalist narratives of progress, neoliberal racial orders, settler colonialism, and US imperialism. https://twitter.com/slooterman/status/1298310819634192385
The Harriet Tubman Collective: "Among differing socially-constructed racial categories, the Black community has the highest prevalence of disability–with almost a full quarter of the Black population having some form of a disability." https://harriettubmancollective.tumblr.com/post/150072319030/htcvision4blacklives
Also from Harriet Tubman Collective: "60-80% of the people murdered by police are, in fact, Disabled and/or Deaf people."
"The solution for the state—killing and maiming—manipulates the hinge between injury and death, in each case weaponizing death as the ultimate assault on life." https://thedisorderofthings.com/2018/12/15/the-right-to-maim-a-reply/
"Disability is a product--not a by-product, but a deliberate product--of exploitative labor conditions, racist incarceration and policing practices, militarization, and other modes of community disenfranchisement." R2M p. 65
To work in the U.S. is to be subject to maiming" "laboring is an inverted from of warfare against a disposable population ensnared as laborers-consigned to having an accident." R2M p. 64. The "shelter-in-place" class can outsource illness to essential laborers.
Nirmala Erevelles: "the very category of disability operates as a commodity fetish that occludes the violence of the socio-economic system."
Helen Meekosha: Disability studies is a "form of scholarly colonialism" in that it does not address the "role of the global north in 'disabling' the global south."
Ervelles and Meekosha, among others, note that one reason why it's so difficult to foreground issues of violent disablement is because of the tensions between "pride, celebration, and prevention." (Meekosha)
So much important work on disability and [US/settler] state violence: Liat Ben Mosche, @zoewool, Dian Million, Louise Tam, Omar Dewachi, Marta Russell, Ravi Malhotra, Robert McRuer, Lezlie Frye, Mel Chen, @sinsinvalid @miamingus, so many others.
on targeted maiming: Palestine, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/israel-maim-gazans-silence-190326085728986.html
on targeted maiming: Kashmir: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/india-crackdown-in-kashmir-is-this-worlds-first-mass-blinding
on targeted maiming: Chile: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41433-020-01146-w?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eye%2Frss%2Fcurrent+%28Eye+-+Issue%29
on targeted maiming: U.S.: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-02/police-using-rubber-bullets-on-protesters-that-can-kill-blind-or-maim-for-life
End: Rethinking disability thru precarity...not only acknowledges that there is more disability w/in disenfranchised populations, but also that debilitation is a tactical practice deployed in order to create and precaritize populations + maintain them as such. R2M p73
PS: It bears repeating that maiming practices attempt to stigmatize bodies as responsible for being disabled + unworthy of state/social/political support + healthcare (Alison Kafer). We can demand an end to maiming while also refusing to stigmatize disability
PPS: additional resources: incredible Palestine public health + disability advocacy work: Rita Giacamen http://icph.birzeit.edu/about/faculty-staff/rita-giacaman. Disability Under Siege works in conflict zones. https://more.bham.ac.uk/disabilityundersiege/; @GhassanAbuSitt1 on destruction of medical infrastructure in Gaza
