From Fictive Ability to National Identity: Disability, Medical Inspection, and Public Health Regulations on Ellis Island

Impairment on the move: the disabled incomer and other invalidating intersections

“…Eugenics massaged the myth of an intersectional threat to the health and purity of the population: 'non-white races were routinely connected to people with disabilities, both of whom were depicted as evolutionary laggards or throwbacks' (Baynton 2001: 36). These groups -conflated beyond recognition into an undifferentiated identity of degeneracy -were consigned to the moral margins, helping, simultaneously to sketch out both the vice of peripheral lives and the virtues of the normate core of citizenship and nationhood (Galusca 2009). Though often associated singularly with the irrationality of Nazism, eugenics was not only attractive to 'racists and extremists' but was, 'an implicit part of Western cultural assumptions' (Marks 1999: 35).…”

“…The American dream is a dream of success and social mobility but it is also based on an 'imaginary nation' of white, able bodied, citizens. The story of the policing and expulsion of disability at Ellis Island provides a case study of citizenship shaped by the intersection of discriminatory fantasies (Galusca 2009) Neo-liberalism and parasite identities In the neoliberal era, anxiety in relation to the incomer draws on the bank of negative, intersecting scripts that history has lodged in the archive of disability invalidation. The moral majority, in the heartlands of neo-liberalism, has come to resent, above all else, those suspected of making little or no contribution to the commonwealth.…”