Imagining Disability Futurities

Abstract

This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which "the future" is normatively deployed in the service of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness (Kafer 2013), a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites of "no future" (Edelman 2004). By re-storying embodied difference, the storytellers illuminate ongoing processes of remaking their bodily selves in ways that respond to the past and provide possibilities for different futures; these orientations may be configured as "dis-topias" based not on progress, but on new pathways for living, uncovered not through evoking the familiar imaginaries of curing, eliminating, or overcoming disability, but through incorporating experiences of embodied difference into time. These temporalities gesture toward new kinds of futures, giving us glimpses of ways of cripping time, of cripping ways of being/ becoming in time, and of radically re-presencing disability in futurity.To watch the stories presented in our article, go to http://projectrevision.ca/videos/. Following the prompts, type in the password "futurities." Please note: these videos are intended for readers only and are not for public screening.In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Ranci ere asserts that art can be political when it helps us imagine a world wherein things are arranged and meaning is made differently (Ranci ere 2006). Ranci ere is speaking back to the argument that aesthetics is pure and purely about satiation of the senses by positioning art as possessing the potential to become political. For Ranci ere, art, like politics, centers on ways of reconfiguring the world. When art reveals ontological reconfigurations, disrupting the

Story‐Making as Methodology: Disrupting Dominant Stories through Multimedia Storytelling

“…In Re•Vision's first six years, we have run close to 100 storytelling workshops across Canada for diverse projects involving people with disabilities and health‐care providers on changing conceptions of disability in health care (Rice, Chandler, and Changfoot ; Rice and Mündel forthcoming; Rice et al. , , ); racialized and nonracialized youth with mental health issues, police, and mental health workers on system responses to youth with mental health issues (Ferrari, Rice, and McKenzie ); Indigenous and non‐Indigenous students, teachers, and parents on what is needed to decolonize public schools (Rice et al. ); with academics on the values underpinning, and their relationship to, their research programs (Rice et al.…”

Unsettling aging futures: Challenging colonial-normativity in social gerontology

“…First, several scholars reveal and redress absences in recognizable futures for certain subjects, or the positioning of Others' (nonnormative) futures as failed, miserable, or non-futures (e.g. Edelman 2004; Jones 2011; Rice et al 2017). Such analyses interrogate the ways in which overlapping systems of power create silences, omissions, and invisibilities that position queerness and disability as antithetical to futurity -that is, LGBTQ2IA+ people and people living with disabilities are viewed as having no futures, or certainly not positive ones (Kafer 2013;Shepherd 2016).…”

“…Indeed, Sandberg and Marshall contribute to a wider project of making legible a multiplicity of positive futures -futures among groups whose lives Western 6 societies do not typically value as worth preserving into old age. This project of queering and cripping aging futures is thus imperative in making spaces for lives lived outside of constricting success-versus-failure binaries (for more reflections on livable crip and/or queer futures, see Fabbre 2014;Jones 2011;Rice et al 2017;Shepherd 2016).…”

Queering Aging Futures

“…Current examples of this include Fabbre's study of late-life gender transitions [54], Jones' exploration of positive images of bisexual futures [55], and Rice et al's [56] feminist arts-based project on disabled futures which imagines the "possibility of a desired futurity where before there was no possibility or only abjected possibility" (p. 27). As they summarize the possibilities of a theory of feminist crip time, it is to "offer a glimpse at the generative possibilities of replacing a fixed, linear understanding of a "future perfect" with multiple, shifting, affective understandings of temporality that make space for, imagine and enact futures .…”