Reimagining Disablist and Ableist Violence as Abjection by Ryan Thorneycroft

Author:Ryan Thorneycroft [Thorneycroft, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Services, Research, Social Work, People With Disabilities
ISBN: 9781000097368
Google: Kf3vDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-07-26T03:51:24+00:00

Within this context, not only is Roger out of place in society (because of his disabled subjectivity), he also feels dirty because he is involved in an act—male/male rape—that is doubly out of place amongst social norms. Various dimensions of abjection have compounded and pressed upon him; he is disabled, raped by a man, and presumed gay. For Roger, ‘feeling dirty’ may be an effort to abjectify himself in order to preserve his own subjectivity. That is, Roger must cast out that which he finds repulsive in order to re-establish his sense of bodily integrity. In this sense, Roger has experienced abjection, but also abjectifies/expunges the remnants of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘homosexual sex’ lingering from the encounter, and from which it remains ‘dirty’.

When Roger was asked how the incident came to the attention of the police, he speculated that someone had seen them in the toilet block or the man had told the police himself. After all, this man was apparently in trouble with the law for several other incidents. Sensing that we had reached a point where Roger had told me all he wanted about the incident, we moved to another topic. At the end of our fourth interview, Roger asked me not to ask him any more questions about this event in our last interview. His wishes were obviously respected, and I appreciated his candour nevertheless. Rather than ‘cast it off’ and abjectify himself or the event, Roger kept it inside him at a distance. In this sense, his memories of the event occupy an abject space in his mind that he separates from himself.

As stipulated by the judge’s order, after a month in prison, Roger checked into another asylum. He stayed there for about five months, and it is clear that Roger did not cope well:

I used to play up in there, and knock my hands around, cut me wrists, and Christ knows what, run away a couple of times, and, yeah.

These violent actions of self-harm are explicit examples of self-abjection: trying to cast out that which he perceives intolerable. Roger’s description that he is ‘play[ing] up’ also points to ways in which his self-abjection has been normalised and minimised. He is embodying social attitudes about his disabled subjectivity—that have worked their way through all of the institutions Roger has occupied—and he is abjecting himself because he is outcast.

While Roger was initially a voluntary patient, he was eventually certified. Again, how this happened remains unclear. The asylum was only designed for temporary stays, so Roger was moved to another institution where he lived for somewhere around five years. Upon his eventual release, Roger was again struggling emotionally:

when I came out, I found it really hard…I was fairly, really suicidal, I was hearing voices, or what I thought was hearing voices. Um, I didn’t know anybody. I was alone in the world. Um, had no money to go see me mother. So I sat on the, on the, on the bridge…I sat on the, on the bridge there with my legs dangling over.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.