Cripping Austerity w/ Robert McRuer‏

“Theorists of neoliberalism, from David Harvey to Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, have placed dispossession at the center of their analyses of the workings of contemporary global capitalism and of a global austerity politics. Disability, however, has not figured centrally into these analyses. Even as Kevin Floyd gives David Wojnarowicz (a frequently-homeless artist and writer who died from complications due to HIV/AIDS in 1992) pride-of-place in his theorization of “the violence of neoliberalism” in The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, disability is displaced from consideration—displaced, arguably, by queerness, as Floyd provides a textured argument about the ways in which queerness both fuels and impedes neoliberalism. Attending in his own presentation to what he will term “crip displacements,” McRuer examines Livia Radwanski’s photos of the redevelopment of a Mexico City neighborhood (and the displacement of poor people living in the neighborhood) to trace how disability haunts theories of neoliberal dispossession and is central to a global austerity politics.”

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