ablenationalism

English

WOTD – 3 December 2024

Etymology

From able +‎ nationalism, modelled after homonationalism. The word was coined by Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell in a 2010 journal article:^[1] see the quotation.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌeɪbl̩ˈnæʃənəlɪz(ə)m/, /-ˈnaʃənl̩ɪz(ə)m/, /-ˈnæʃn̩(ə)lɪz(ə)m/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈˌeɪb(ə)lˈnæʃ(ə)nəˌlɪzəm/
• Hyphenation: able‧nat‧ion‧al‧i‧sm

Noun

ablenationalism (uncountable)

1. The attitude that considers the qualifications of citizenship to be such that people with disabilities are exceptions. [from 2010]
   • 2010, Sharon L. Snyder, David T. Mitchell, “Introduction: Ablenationalism and the Geo-politics of Disability”, in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, volume 4, number 2, Liverpool, Merseyside: Liverpool University Press, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, pages 113–114:

     The historical development of ablenationalism results in the modern formation of disability as a discrete, sociological minority. In order to locate people with disabilities under market capitalism one must often look beyond the margins of surplus labor to those classified as “deserving poor” by national regimes. In emphasizing severity of incapacity as primary to a devalued identity, discourses of policy, economics, health, rehabilitation, and citizenship support practices of charity as voluntary instances of conspicuous contributions to sustain them and the bureaucratic provision of supports and services. Whether nation-state or market-supplied, ablenationalism’s calculated provision (and non-provision) of services based on principles of detecting and qualifying bodies as “too impaired” for meaningful labor underscores the degree to which the category of “deserving poor” is a highly guarded space of ostracization.

   • 2015, David T. Mitchell, with Sharon L. Snyder, “Introduction”, in The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michgan Press, →ISBN, page 21:

     [O]ur analyses seek to explore the strange agencies that neoliberalism has set into motion under the banner of ablenationalism: first in a discussion of a backlash against the homogenizing implications of universal disability access design in cities and national monuments addressed by the contemporary European art theorist Paul Virilio, and in the complaints about paving over U.S. national parklands by American desert environmentalist Edward Abbey.

   • 2023, Laura Mauldin, “Disability, Ableism, and Care during COIVD-19 in the United States”, in Mignon Duffy, Amy Armenia, Kim Price-Glynn, editors, From Crisis to Catastrophe: Care, COVID, and Pathways to Change, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, →ISBN, part 1 (Crisis):

     A disability analytic reveals how ableism and ablenationalism are central to the design of care infrastructures and policy. Ablenationalism is one of the reasons disabled people are far more likely to be institutionalized in some way than nondisabled people, whether in a nursing home, a rehabilitation center, a smaller congregate care setting, and so on.

   • 2024, Andrea J. Pitts, “The Apparatus of Addiction: Substance Abuse at the Crossroads of Colonial Ableism and Migration”, in Shelley Lynn Tremain, editor, The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, London: Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, part II (Mechanisms of Oppression):

     [T]he distinctions between persons who are "disabled already" and "disabled because of" no longer appear as morally or politically meaningful. Rather, the desire to produce and materially benefit from violence present in narco-trafficking and inflicted through the nation-state to curb the possession and trafficking of illicit drugs thereby renders obvious and inevitable the market demand to maim, torture, and traumatize. Accordingly, ablenationalism when taken to this extreme, perpetuated through the war on drugs and its financial and enfleshed circulation of violence, reconfigures what [Jasbir] Puar (2017) calls the "right to maim."

Related terms

• ablenationalist

Translations

attitude that considers the qualifications of citizenship to be such that people with disabilities are exceptions

Finnish: ablenationalismi Macedonian: please add this translation if you can

References

1. Sharon L. Snyder, David T. Mitchell (2010) “Introduction: Ablenationalism and the Geo-politics of Disability”, in Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, volume 4, number 2, Liverpool, Merseyside: Liverpool University Press, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 113:

   A key conflation of nation and able-ism has been emerging since at least the late eighteenth century in countries enduring processes of industrialization and post-industrialization. With a nod to Jasbir Puar’s influential formulation of homonationalism, we call this convergence “ablenationalism”—the degree to which treating people with disabilities as an exception valorizes able-bodied norms of inclusion as the naturalized qualification of citizenship.