Theory & Event

Abstract:

“Madness and criminality,” Michael Rembis writes, “are called into being.” If, as his analysis demonstrates, madness and criminality must be thought together—if ableism is inextricable from racism, sexism, cis-sexism, colonialism, classism, and the many biopolitical apparatuses that join them—then the question of what presents itself to thought as ability, how ability is figured, where ability is sited and situated, and who represents it is a question whose stakes involve arrest and capture. My aim in this essay is to explore how logics of carcerality involve conceptions of ability just as logics of ability involve conceptions of carcerality.