``...He did not mention economics in his presentation, he just showed historic pictures (art engravings) of disabled persons. Maybe he was reluctant to make a strong presentation there.
How would Stiker explain this cultural product of France: ('Right Not to be Born' Upheld in France By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)
`Campaigners for the disabled were outraged today at a decision by France's highest appeals court that gives a child born with a handicap the right to compensation if the mother was not given the chance of an abortion.
The judgment confirmed a decision last November that was widely described as establishing in law a disabled child's `right not to be born....' '' Marta Russell
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Stiker put a legal appendix at the end with a very thin outline of major French laws or legal constructs around disability in the twentieth century. This is a real patch work quilt that is hard for me to figure out, since I don't have the vaguest idea what these laws mean in concrete terms.
In the above cited article for example, I can't see who or what is supposed to compensate the disabled child's denial of the right not to exist. In other words who pays? Is this just a sleazy way for the state to shuttle cost back onto the parents or is this an extension of children's rights to compensation from the government?
(Adapting Stiker here) The more general problem is that at some point a discourse of political rights is completely inadequate to deal with the radical tear that difference imposes on a social fabric constructed on similitude to a pattern of identities. The claim to compensation for the denial of the right not to exist certainly illustrates the rational limit to a discourse of human rights.
(I say, only in France. Only after the Enlightenment, the Terror, and Cauchy's Cours d'analyse, could such logic of the non-existent exist.)
One can elaborate rights around archetypes or identities that are constructed as patterns of normality. However, what are the rights of difference? Or translated into political economy terms, it is obvious that equal pay for equal work only exists if all workers can be made the same---a similitude to the maximally productive identity. Any variance is then translated into a terminology of merit, which can be measured out in cash which then partitions society into a hierarchical schema or caste of such collective identities as economic classes. Somewhere near the bottom where most similitudes or identities dissolve into a morass of un-reconciled differences, a line is drawn and the state resorts to institutionalization or it hands out just enough cash to fend off dying immediately. But what does equal pay mean in a collection of only differences where there are no archetypes to enforce similitude?
Anyway, what's the use of reading Stiker?
He re-casts the entire discourse on disability into different historical and representational forms that unravel themes on disability from the societies of antiquity, the middle ages, the renaissance, the revolution, the rise of capital, and then within the french tradition of sociology and cultural anthropology. He does this by providing the kind of conceptual frames that make disability already part of the discourses he surveys. So, disability appears in psychoanalytic, mythological, symbolic, religious, ethical, scientific, historical, social, economic, political forms.
What makes him important in my mind is he provides a broad collection of means to inject disability into just about every other discourse---particularly those where culture, ethics, and political economy intersect. Where don't they in a radical critique?
So far, it seems to me, that disability discourse has been restricted to the concepts of political rights, at least in the US. You want to extend that into considering the political economy. Stiker doesn't add directly to that political economy program, but he does add something by extending the kinds of discourses used about disability--and that can be used to extend its scope into the political economy by others.
Chuck Grimes