Monica J. Casper’s research while affiliated with Arizona State University and other places

This entry traces the development of feminist disability studies (FDS), including its mutual emergence from feminist studies and disability studies. It explores tensions between the two fields and the ways that “disability” is often elided within feminist studies and “gender” and “women” are often left out of disability studies. Pointing to connections between feminist disability studies and fields such as critical body studies, symbolic interaction, critical race and ethnic studies, and fat studies, the authors show how FDS makes possible new analytical strategies and representations. Importantly, they explore how FDS can benefit from sociology, including attention to structural constraints on lived embodiments and representations. Encompassing both early and new feminist disability studies scholarship, the authors note potential connections and disjunctures between academia and activism. They also raise questions about new trajectories in FDS, including connections to queer theory and transgender studies.

Hurricane Katrina and its effects are often talked about in terms of what has been made visible, as if the hurricane swept through and stripped away our structural blinders along with the levees, revealing social disparities within. Here, we focus instead on whom and what Katrina and its aftermath have rendered invisible. We are concerned with how the seen and the not seen have influenced the ways the purported tabula rasa of New Orleans has been (re)constructed and marked since 2005. We engage with recent debates in political science about power, agency, structure, and culpability, arguing that efforts to prioritize the pursuit of culpability over critique in power analyses, such as the approach advocated by Steven Lukes, risk perpetuating structural violence. We employ the concepts of an ocular ethic and social triage to understand why the storm of the century that was supposed to reveal all has in the end left much concealed, with shocking levels of human devastation unaddressed. Only through careful excavation of the ruins can we begin to comprehend the sedimented inequality and layers of vulnerability that structure violence.

p>In this essay, we explore possible affinities between disability studies and trauma studies. We suggest that a fruitful engagement between these fields should start with the meanings of trauma and disability in their embodiment. We offer theoretical provocations alongside a comparative cultural analysis of traumatic brain injury and obstetric fistula. Ironically, while many disability studies scholars have worked to dislodge definitions of "abnormal" from the body, a conceptual focus on stigma still keeps the disabled body partially in view. Yet wounds, impairment, and pain are erased, and in many framings, the object of analysis is an individual being, whose now-disabled body is socially constructed, and whose agency is posited as being in struggle and resistance against the normative culture. We suggest that the body itself provides a link between disability studies and critical trauma studies, arguing both for the significance of representations as well a materialist understanding of breach, for a notion of the organic, fleshy body as it is damaged, sometimes profoundly, in its operations of life. Keywords: Disability studies; Trauma studies; Traumatic Brain Injury; Obstetric Fistula; Theory</p

We recently called for a new “ocular ethic” for making sense of the relationship between visibility and invisibility of human bodies in the twenty-first century (Casper and Moore 2009). Drawing on six diverse but interrelated case studies ranging from infant mortality to HIV/AIDS in Africa to Lance Armstrong’s testicular cancer, in Missing Bodies we ethnographically mapped the processes by which we see or do not see certain bodies and what this “witnessing” has to do with power and the politics of gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship, age, and geography. We have begun to employ our theoretical/methodological project to investigate new sites where (in)visibility matters. Committed to feminist and sociological methods, our critical attention to visibility and the ocular ethic is based on empirical research and is deeply attentive to social structures. We focus our analytical lens here on connections between national security, arms control, and the shifting gender politics of laboring bodies. We are specifically interested in how an international treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), reflects a strategic rationality aimed at eliminating deadly weapons but uses the abstract language of states with very little textual reference to human bodies (see also Dawes 1999). And yet implementation of the CWC, as we show, relies on, among other things, the invisible work of men at hazardous disposal sites. What does it mean, we ask, when ideals of global security and safety are achieved by risking some bodies for the sake of others? Who can be (made) safe in a world with chemical weapons, even as these noxious munitions are being slowly eradicated? Will obliteration of chemical weapons make everybody safe and secure, as the treaty’s architects seem to imply? And how do global treaties and the domestic practices they instigate both reveal and extend structural inequalities? We show that safety and risk operate in juxtaposition, such that concepts as broad and vague as “homeland security” may mean safety for some but only at the expense of others. Inspired by Foucault (1979/2010) and contemporary scholars of biosecurity and human security (e.g., Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow 2004; Berman 2007), we interrogate the (dis)embodied qualities of the CWC. We reveal it principally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, as an instrument of governmentality in the service of global arms control. That is, through the CWC policy makers seek to produce secure—but not inevitably safe—global subjects who will adhere to and ostensibly benefit from some version of peace; of course, this works only if certain people are subjected to bodily risks in the name of security. Ideals of security, then, do not necessarily translate into safety for all human beings. Indeed, by bringing workers into our analytical frame, by making them visible, we illustrate how embodied labor facilitates success of the CWC and its policy goals. In short, the collision of disembodied rationality with lived experiences represents a hierarchy of abstract goals over situated practices. The lofty ideals and rhetoric of security trump the practical realities of community relations; basic human safety in the workplace; and the needs and rights of citizens to live in clean, safe environments. In what follows, we investigate and interpret the ways in which human bodies are simultaneously erased in bureaucratic governmental treaties and used in the nitty-gritty of executing the treaty’s provisions. After providing a historical overview of chemical weapons in the United States, we describe our fieldwork and data-gathering strategies. Moving through our analysis of the consequences of creating a treaty without specific consideration of and engagement with human bodies, we then examine our ethnographic data to interpret how men actually work in chemical weapons disposal and what this means in terms of masculinity and security practices. We conclude with observations about the broader implications of “safety” as both ideology and practice and how this relates to governmentality and arms control, rhetorics of national/global security, and the dangerous work of human bodies. Alarming enough on their own, taken together the words “chemical” and “weapons” can strike terror into people’s hearts, and with good reason. Who of a certain age has not seen chilling World War I...

It is 2002. The US Central Intelligence Agency has captured Abu Zubaydah, believed to be a high-ranking member of al Qaeda involved in planning the attacks of September 11, 2001. The CIA wants to know if its plan for interrogating Zubaydah—involving a combination of “walling,” facial holds and slaps, confining him to a box, putting insects in the box with him, sleep deprivation, “wall-standing” (standing a few feet from a wall with one’s arms stretched and one’s fingers on the wall), using various “stress positions,” and “waterboarding”— would violate a federal law prohibiting torture. Two doctors of jurisprudence in the Attorney General’s Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee and John Yoo, draft a memo explaining precisely why the CIA’s planned “enhanced interrogation techniques” do not constitute torture.1 Much has already been written about this “torture memo” and others released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.2 But one aspect of Bybee and Yoo’s argument is especially salient here.

In this selective review of the literature on medical sociology's engagement with technology, we outline the concurrent developments of the American Sociological Association section on medicine and advances in medical treatment. We then describe theoretical and epistemological issues with scholars' treatment of technology in medicine. Using symbolic interactionist concepts, as well as work from the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, we review and synthesize critical connections in and across sociology's intellectual relationship with medical technology. Next, we discuss key findings in these literatures, noting a shift from a focus on the effects of technology on practice to a reconfiguration of human bodies. We also look toward the future, focusing on connections between technoscientific identities and embodied health movements. Finally, we call for greater engagement by medical sociologists in studying medical technology and the process of policy-making--two areas central to debates in health economics and public policy.

This is a collection of essays that explores Oprah Winfrey’s broad reach as an industry and media brand. Contributors analyze a number of topics touching on the ways in which Oprah’s cultural output shapes contemporary America. The book examines how Oprah has fashioned a persona—which emphasizes her rural, poverty-stricken roots over other factors—that helps her popularize her unique blend of New Age spirituality, neoliberal politics, and African American preaching. She packages New Age spirituality through the rhetoric of race, gender, and the black preacher tradition. Oprah’s Book Club has reshaped literary publishing, bringing Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy to a broad number of readers. Oprah’s brand extends worldwide through the internet. In this book, writers analyze her positions on teen sexuality, gender, race, and politics, and the impact of her confessional mode on mainstream television news. The book also addresses twenty-first-century issues, showing Oprah’s influence on how Americans and Europeans responded to 9/11, and how Harpo Productions created a deracialized film adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 2005. Throughout, it challenges readers to reflect on how Oprah the Industry has reshaped America’s culture, history, and politics.

This chapter draws on Oprah’s “Christmas Kindness” (2005) episode, released as part of The Oprah Winfrey Show: 20th Anniversary DVD Collection, to interrogate her philanthropic activities in Africa. It analyzes Oprah’s holiday adventure and her efforts to convince viewers of the “joy” of giving to needy Africans. The chapter suggests that while Oprah is “doing good,” she is simultaneously displacing political engagement on the part of viewers/consumers with a weak and ultimately ineffective version of action. Oprah-style philanthropy may bring in dollars through appeals to emotion, but it precludes direct, sustained political engagement and thus ultimately lasting structural change.