Between abjection and fetishization. Challenges of writing about emotional othering in Disability Studies

Abstract

This paper traces the challenges of writing about an emotional othering of disabled people – between abjection and fetishization. These challenges can firstly be characterized as conceptual challenges. To date, theory-building in Disability Studies about emotional reactions to disability has mainly relied on disabled scholars’ ruminations on an emotional foundation for the discriminatory behaviour they experience. Further challenges arise within the ethical realm. When writing about an emotional othering, one risks reproducing the underlying violence. To navigate these challenges, I locate emotional reactions to disability in a social imaginary, which I further characterize as dis/ableist in the structural sense. After all, alleged reactions to disability reveal less about disabled people (as subjects or a collective) than about the respective socio-cultural context in which these reactions are acquired.

Keywords

• emotions
• abjection
• dis/ableism
• fetishisation
• othering