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Crip teleportation: the animal that therefore I am—or I am not

Authors

  • Francisco B. Trento University of the Arts Helsinki

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23925/1984-3585.2020i22p91-104

Keywords:

Animal studies, Neurodiversity, Neurodivergence, Crip studies, Demirhetoric

Abstract

This paper examines how disabled body-minds are discursively dehumanized or superhumanized. It draws on Critical Disability Studies and the Crip Studies scholarship and focuses on invisible mental disabilities, mainly those of the neurodiversity spectrum. The efforts of animalization and super-humanization draw on a mechanism that resonates with Parmenides’s Zeno paradox. As the autistic scholar Melanie Yergeau (2018) discusses, a neuroqueer body-mind is always in constant motion, being relocated from one identity category to another, from humanity to animality and vice-versa, subject to an excessively strict rhetoric model. Concomitantly, animals in slaughtering facilities are humanized to make their deaths seem smoother. To short-circuit the models that evaluate how fit human and animal bodies are for the neoliberal guidelines of productivity, the paper also brings Jasbir Puars’s intersectional approach on capacity and debility into the discussion.

Author Biography

Francisco B. Trento, University of the Arts Helsinki

Francisco B. Trento é pesquisador de Pós-Doutorado no cerada, The Center for Educational Research and Academic Development in the Arts, na University of The Arts Helsinki. Francisco é doutor pelo Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados em Comunicação e Semiótica da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo.

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