The Disability Drive by Anna Mollow A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the ...

171 Pages·2015·1.16 MB·English

by  Anna Mollow

The Disability Drive
by
Anna Mollow

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
English
in the
Graduate Division
of the
University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:
Professor Kent Puckett, Chair
Professor Celeste G. Langan
Professor Melinda Y. Chen

Spring 2015
The Disability Drive
© Anna Mollow, 2015.
1
Abstract
The Disability Drive
by
Anna Mollow
Doctor of Philosophy in English
University of California Berkeley
Professor Kent Puckett, Chair

This dissertation argues that the psychic force that Freud named “the death drive” would more
precisely be termed “the disability drive.” Freud‟s concept of the death drive emerged from his
efforts to account for feelings, desires, and actions that seemed not to accord with rational self-
interest or the desire for pleasure. Positing that human subjectivity was intrinsically divided
against itself, Freud suggested that the ego‟s instincts for pleasure and survival were undermined
by a competing component of mental life, which he called the death drive. But the death drive
does not primarily refer to biological death, and the term has consequently provoked confusion.
By distancing Freud‟s theory from physical death and highlighting its imbrication with disability,
I revise this important psychoanalytic concept and reveal its utility to disability studies. While
Freud envisaged a human subject that is drawn, despite itself, toward something like death, I
propose that this “something” can productively be understood as disability. In addition, I contend
that our culture‟s repression of the disability drive, and its resultant projection of the drive onto
stigmatized minorities, is a root cause of multiple forms of oppression.

“The Disability Drive” opens with a question: “What makes disability so sexy?” This is a
counterintuitive query; after all, the dominant culture usually depicts disability as decidedly
unsexy. But by performing a critical disability studies analysis of Freud‟s writings about
sexuality and the death drive, I theorize sex as an intrinsically disabling experience and suggest
that fantasies of disability may have an unrecognized sexual appeal. These possibilities lead me
to introduce a new interpretive framework, “the sexual model of disability,” which I posit as an
alternative to disability studies‟ prevailing analytic paradigm, the social model of disability.
While the social model defines disability as a system of oppression that isolates and excludes
disabled people, the sexual model of disability goes deeper than this, locating the impetus for
these exclusions in our culture‟s repression of the disability drive. Because disability may
provoke an erotic excitement that the ego cannot bear to acknowledge, ableist culture is often
torn between an urge to witness disability (e.g., by staring at disabled people) and an impulse to
hide disability from view (e.g., by confining disabled people to institutions).

The sexual model of disability has the potential to make interventions not only in disability
studies but also in a range of other disciplines. In Chapter 1, I bring my account of the disability
drive to bear on signal texts in queer theory. In doing so, I proffer an answer to a question that
has long troubled disability scholars: given the many similarities between ableism and
homophobia, why have queer theorists often been reluctant to engage with disability studies?
Observing that founding texts in queer theory repudiate “feminist identity politics” and liken this
discourse to madness and to figurative states of blindness and paralysis, I argue that these texts
2
project the disability drive onto feminism, thus allowing queer theory to portray its own erotics
as mobile, playful, and physically and mentally able. In Chapter 2, I show that the sexual model
of disability can subvert a foundational concept in psychoanalysis: the disease category
“hysteria.” Analyzing Freud‟s case history Dora, which was published in 1905, in conjunction
with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was published in 1920, I argue that Freud‟s notion of
hysteria adumbrates his later theorization of the drive. The diagnostic category of hysteria, I
contend, constitutes a projection of the disability drive onto people with what I call
“undocumented disabilities,” that is, nonapparent impairments for which mainstream western
medicine cannot identify biological causes. One effect of this projection is that people with
undocumented disabilities are figured as epistemologically disabled; that is, we are seen as
distinctively lacking in the capacity to know ourselves.

The social position of people with undocumented disabilities differs from that of the
paradigmatic subject of disability studies: while people with undocumented impairments are
often denied recognition of the disabling suffering that shapes our lives, people with disabilities
that are visible and/or documented are frequently subjected to unwanted displays of pity. For this
reason, “no pity” has long been a rallying cry of the disability rights movement. But is it possible
to proscribe pity? In Chapter 3, I argue that instead of seeking to banish the affect of pity,
disability scholars might do better to attend to the complex ways in which this affect can be
incited and expressed. Toward this end, I propose a distinction between what I call “primary
pity” and “secondary pity.” The term “secondary pity” accords with the everyday understanding
of pity, in which a person who feels pity is assumed to occupy a position of superiority in
relation to a person who is pitied. Primary pity refers to a very different affective process, which
is profoundly destabilizing to the ego of the person who feels pity. Derived in part from Freud‟s
notion of “primary narcissism,” my concept of primary pity occupies a liminal position between
the erasure of the ego that primary narcissism entails and the buttressing of the ego involved in
secondary narcissism. Because primary pity involves a complex process of identification, in
which the subject and the object of pity risk becoming fantasmatically indistinguishable, this
emotion threatens the ego‟s belief in its self-sufficiency and autonomy. I argue that primary
pity‟s threat to the ego can be understood as a manifestation of the disability drive, and I suggest
that the “no pity” position taken up by disability activists and scholars may be invested in a
fantasy of overcoming the disability drive.

This dissertation argues that rather than seeking to overcome the disability drive, cultural critics
and activists should work to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the drive determines us. It is
important to recognize and acknowledge one‟s determination by the disability drive because
denying or repressing the ways in which this psychic force governs us will inevitably lead to the
drive‟s being abjected onto groups of stigmatized others. In Chapter 4, I argue that in
contemporary US American culture fat people constitute one such group. This chapter focuses on
the drive to eat, a compulsion that I define as inseparable from the disability drive. Dependence,
(on food), loss of mastery (over the intensities of the pleasures of eating), and failures of control
(over what, and how much, one eats) combine to make hunger a fundamentally disabling drive.
But instead of acknowledging that we are all disabled by the drive to eat, our culture abjects this
drive onto fat people, whom it depicts as being driven, in ways that thin people are assumed not
to be, by an out-of-control compulsion to eat. US American culture‟s projection of the disability
drive onto fat people is intensified by racially inflected assumptions about “primitive” versus
3
“civilized” forms of embodiment and by heteronormative constructions of “perversion.”
Resisting fatphobia therefore necessitates an intersectional analysis of the disability drive, an
approach that takes measure of the ways in which repressing the drive reinforces multiple forms
of prejudice.

The central aim of this thesis is to show that the disability drive is a force that we must
understand if we are to effectively challenge the many intersecting and overlapping modalities of
oppression that define present-day cultural and social relations. “The Disability Drive” offers an
invitation, to scholars and activists in a variety of cultural locations, to consider the ways in
which our own beliefs and practices may be implicated in a hegemonic cultural endeavor whose
goal is to overcome the disability drive. Because denying the drive results in the reentrenchment
of oppressive social structures, I maintain that it is imperative to develop political strategies that
resist the impulse to overcome the disability drive.
i

For Jane
ii
Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Sexual Model of Disability……………………………………………….1-33
Chapter 2: From Dora to the Drive………………………………………………………34-65
Chapter 3: Primary Pity………………………………………………………………......66-87
Chapter 4: Hunger and Love………………………………………………………….….88-123
Afterword: Done with the Drive? ………………………………………………………124-126
Notes……………………………………………………………………………….……127-142
Works Cited………………………………………………………………………..…....143-159
iii
Acknowledgements
This dissertation could not have been written without the dedication and hard work of a
magnificent team of helpers. Because my disabilities prevent me from typing, using a computer,
or writing by hand, I have composed this thesis by dictating each line of text to assistants, who
have transcribed and typed my words. I wish to express my deep gratitude to Nicole Green, my
Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor at the California Department of Rehabilitation (DOR);
without Nicole‟s strenuous advocacy on my behalf, I would not have been able to hire the group
of talented helpers who enabled me to complete this project. Each of the assistants with whom I
worked, both through the DOR and independently, offered superlative transcription and word
processing skills; they also brought caring, attentiveness, and enthusiasm, which nurtured me
throughout the process of writing this dissertation. Although writing is often described as a
solitary and lonely endeavor, the kindness and commitment of my helpers meant that I never felt
alone while composing “The Disability Drive.” My heartfelt thanks to Evan Clinton, Nikki
Dohn, Judy Elliott, Jennifer Nicole Herman, Chandler Jennings, Josieda Lord, Rachelle Manel,
Dana Morrison, Terriann Tomlin, and Eden Trenor.
I have been privileged to work with an extraordinary dissertation committee. My chair,
Kent Puckett, is one of the best teachers with whom I have ever studied; I thank him for his
generosity of time, good humor, and unfailingly smart advice. Helping me analyze the minutiae
of Freud‟s theories about sexuality and the death drive, strategizing with me about the structure
of my chapters, and encouraging me through the vicissitudes of research and writing, Kent has
had a transformative effect on this dissertation at every step of the way. My second and third
readers, Celeste Langan and Mel Y. Chen, each provided extensive and thoughtful comments on
the entire manuscript; my dissertation benefitted immensely from their feedback. I also thank
Kent, Celeste, and Mel for going out of their way to accommodate my disabilities; they all
cheerfully agreed to meet with me outdoors when my environmental illness prevented me from
meeting inside.
Many friends and colleagues have sustained me in my work. I am especially grateful to
Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer. Crip comrades, cheerleaders, and steadfast friends, Lisa
and Robert have each generously extended themselves to me in countless ways; their love has
ensured that, even when disability access barriers stood in the way, I have remained connected to
vibrant queer and disabled academic and political communities. For invaluable support and
encouragement, I am also indebted to Elizabeth Abel, the late Chris Bell, Mel Y. Chen, Jeanne
Córdova, Nirmala Erevelles, Sara Fishman, Sonia Hofkosh, Mycroft Masada Holmes, Judith
Jenna, Kjerstin Johnson, Alison Kafer, Irwin Keller, Georgina Kleege, Danielle LaVigna, Julia
McCrossin, Ma‟ayan Simon, Susan Schweik, Katherine Sherwood, Sondra Solovay, Marilyn
Wann, and Joshua J. Weiner.
I thank my parents, Marie Ashe and Benjamin Mollow, for loving, supporting, and
believing in me. My father paid for many years of my graduate education, and both of my
parents have enthusiastically followed my progress. Just before I filed this dissertation, my
mother flew across the country to visit me in California, where she spent a week working
intensively on the typing, proofreading, and finalizing of this manuscript. Without the love and
generosity of my parents, this dissertation could not have been completed. Warm thanks to my
aunt, Adrienne Wortman, for rooting for me and coming to California to celebrate my
graduation.
The Andrew Vincent White and Florence Wales White scholarship, from the University
of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), and the U.C. Dissertation-Year
iv
Fellowship, from the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley, provided
financial support during the writing of this thesis. I am grateful to Suedine Nakano at UCHRI
and to Solomon Lefler in the Graduate Division of U.C. Berkeley for patiently answering my
many questions about the administration of these fellowships. Warm thanks also to Lee Parsons
for the kindness that he showed me during his tenure as Graduate Assistant in the U.C. Berkeley
Department of English.
How can I ever thank my wonderful niece, Jennifer Nicole Herman, for everything that
she has done for me? Three and a half years ago, when I longed to return to graduate school but
had no financial means of doing so, Jennifer devoted many hours of her time to helping me
secure funding; the months that she spent researching fellowships and word processing drafts of
my fellowship applications made it possible for me to reenroll at U.C. Berkeley and write my
dissertation. Since then, Jennifer has been a loyal and dedicated typing and transcription
assistant. Jennifer, the way that your face lights up each time that I succeed, your unwavering
belief in the value and importance of my project, and your own formidable strengths as an
activist and leader have inspired me more than you can know.
My wife, Jane Arlene Herman, is the kindest and most generous person whom I have
ever known, and I feel immeasurably lucky to be blessed by her love. This dissertation has been
at the center of both my life and Jane‟s life for as long as I have worked on it, and throughout
this time Jane has supported me in every possible way. Jane‟s gifts to me are far too many to
name in this short space; without her graciousness and devotion, this project could not have been
begun, much less completed. Thank you, Jane, for working so hard to enable me to write this
thesis, and for bringing me so much joy every day. You are the love of my life and the light of
my life. To you, I dedicate this dissertation.

Portions of Chapter 2 appeared previously as “Criphystemologies: What Disability
Theory Needs to Know about Hysteria,” in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability
Studies 8.2 (Summer 2014): 185-201. Reprinted here with permission.
v
Anna Mollow

EDUCATION:
University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D. in English 2015
Tufts University; B.A. in English & French, Minor in Women‟s Studies 1992

BOOK:
Sex and Disability. Co-edited with Robert McRuer. Duke University Press, 2012.

ONLINE JOURNAL:
DSM-CRIP. Special issue of Social Text Online. Co-edited with Merri Lisa Johnson.
October 2013.

ARTICLES:
“Fattening Austerity.” Body Politics. Co-written with Robert McRuer. Forthcoming
2015.
“Disability Studies Gets Fat.” Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy, “Feminist
Conversations in Disability Studies.” 30.3 (Fall 2014): 199-216.
“Criphystemologies: What Disability Theory Needs to Know About Hysteria.” Journal of
Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (Summer 2014): 185-201.
“Bellyaching.” Social Text Online, DSM-CRIP (October 2013):
<www.socialtextonline/periscope>.
“Mad Feminism.” Social Text Online, DSM-CRIP (October 2013):
<www.socialtextonline/periscope>.
“Fat Liberation is Totally Queer.” Bitch. <bitchmagazine.org/post/fat-liberation-is-
totally-queer.> Reprinted on Huffington Post, <www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/03/fat-
liberation-_n_3540220.html>. Reprinted on Autostraddle,
<robotmonastery.tumblr.com/post/57390427437/autostraddle-fat-liberation-is-totally>.
“Sized Up: Why Fat Is a Queer and Feminist Issue.” Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop
Culture. 59 (Summer 2013): 17-19.< http://bitchmagazine.org/article/sized-up-fat-
feminist-queer-disability>.
“Is Sex Disability? Queer Theory and the Disability Drive.” Sex and Disability. Ed.
Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow. Duke University Press, 2012. 285-312.
“Introduction.” Co-written with Robert McRuer. Sex and Disability. Ed. Robert McRuer
and Anna Mollow. Duke University Press, 2012. 1-34.
“No Safe Place.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 188-
99.
“„When Black Women Start Going on Prozac...‟: The Politics of Race, Gender, and
Mental Illness in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah‟s Willow Weep for Me.” MELUS: Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States 31.3 (Fall 2006): 67-99. Reprinted in The
Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions. Routledge,
2006, 2010, and 2013.
Contributor to “Guidelines for Disability Studies.” Ed. Linda Chen, Cathy Kudlick, and
Corinne Kirchner. Disability Studies Quarterly 24.4 (Fall 2004).