HUANG He*

 

Abstract: Posthumanism overturns the humanistic construction of rational subjects with sound body and mind, refreshes people’s cognition of human beings, and brings an opportunity for the reinterpretation of disability. From the perspective of post-humanism, disability is a universal human experience and is created in the interactive relationship between humans and the environment. At the same time, it is constantly changing, presented in newly-shaped forms. The interpretation of the universality, relationality, and mobility of disability constitutes the posthumanism approach to disability, which is of great enlightening significance for advancing disability studies and formulating disability policies.

 

Keywords: post-humanism · disability studies · universality · relationality · mobility

 

 

Reviewing the historical development process of the cause of disability rights, it is not difficult to find that the human understanding of disability has gradually evolved and deepened. The medical model regards disability as a kind of physiological impairment or defect and focuses on the correction and healing of disability, while the social model believes that disability originates from social construction and thus emphasizes the extension of social rights of the disabled. From the former to the latter, the perception of disability has always profoundly influenced a series of issues about disability rights protection, ranging from the disability discourse to disability policies. Disability studies, which began in the 1970s, echo the rise of the disability rights movement in the West. Unlike traditional disability or impairment studies which only focus on individuals with disabilities, disability studies are committed to understanding disability from broad social, political, historical, and cultural perspectives, thus greatly enriching people’s understanding of disability, and deeply contributing to shaping the modern disability rights cause. Both the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) launched by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities fully incorporate the new ideas on disability proposed by disability studies. Especially, since the 1990s, disability studies have gradually turned to critical disability studies under the influence of the post-modernism trend. Based on interdisciplinary perspectives such as the theory of cultural criticism and biopolitics, these studies focus on exploring disability issues in contemporary social life, with the aim to uncover the power and cultural factors behind the disability experience, so as to promote social change in favor of disability more thoroughly.

 

With the rapid development of contemporary science and technology, such as information technology, life science and technology, and neurocognitive science, the boundary between human life and the external environment has been blurred, and the post-human condition it brings has become increasingly prominent. As a result, the posthumanist thought of rethinking and re-examining the status and existence of human beings in the world has risen rapidly and become one of the hottest trends of thought in today’s ideological circle. Disability researchers found that the posthumanist condition has also brought many new opportunities and problems to persons with disabilities and that disability studies need to examine the phenomenon of disability in the posthuman condition and be a voice for the disabled community on post-human issues such as biopolitics, technological media, and scientific and technological ethics.Therefore, the application of posthumanist thought to the interpretation of disability and analysis of disability issues has become one of the most cutting-edge projects in the field of critical disability studies.

 

Dan Goodley, et al., introduced the concept of posthumanism into the empirical study of intellectual disability, showing how intellectually persons with disabilities develop their “distributed competence” in the complex social network.¹ After the interview with the disabled with life-limiting impairments, Kirsty Liddiard, et. al, found that their understanding of life and death “has expanded the possibility of the posthuman era, and showed the social knowledge and ideas different from humanism.”² Stuart Murray viewed disability in contemporary literature and film texts from a post-humanistic perspective, and believed that “the disability perspective is central to the conception of the posthuman condition,” because starting from the disability perspective, we can better understand “the current choices faced by the disabled and non-disabled in the posthuman era.”³ These studies have fully demonstrated the broad space of interpretation that can be opened by using posthumanism to analyze disability issues, but they failed to delve into the core issues of applying posthumanistic thought to disability studies: What new insights can posthumanism bring to the understanding of disability? How can these new insights help advance the cause of disability? This paper tries to summarize and address the basic proposition of how posthumanism understands and defines disability and briefly discusses the implications of the new posthumanistic view on disability for the development of disability studies and the formulation of disability policies, and for a better understanding of the significance of the post-humanism approach to disability for improving the status and protecting the rights of the disabled.

 

 

The rise of posthumanism is not only a response to the rapid development of contemporary science and technology but also a reflection on the worsening ecological crisis, social crisis, and ideological crisis faced by human beings. Although posthumanism has many thought threads, it mainly aims to criticize the definition of human beings by humanism which has dominated modern thought since the Renaissance, and points out that the humanistic assumption of “human individual initiative and integrity” creates the myth of human beings, which gives human beings the status beyond other species and materials under the guise of autonomy and rationality and leads to anthropocentrism, which is the ideological root of the numerous crises in contemporary society.⁴ Based on criticism, posthumanism advocates a new understanding of human existence in a holistic, relational, and generative way of thinking, and points out that human beings are always “embodied and embedded in the biological and technological world,” interdependent and co-evolving with the external world.⁵ Posthumanism is a change in the cognitive paradigm, which has driven the humanities such as media studies, cultural studies, and human rights studies to “extricate themselves from the empire of humanists” and “deal with the external and even global major issues such as the development of science and technology, development of ecological society and multiple challenges of globalization in a post-anthropocentric way.”⁶

 

As a discipline that studies the phenomenon of disability and aims to promote the well-being of persons with disabilities, disability studies have a natural intrinsic relation with posthumanism. First, both disability studies and posthumanism take the relationship between the human body and mind and the external environment as their core issues. From the examination of the physical and mental functioning of persons with disabilities in the medical model to the focus on the oppressive social barriers faced by individuals with disabilities in the social model, and then to the connection of disability studies with identity politics in the subsequent critical disability studies, “questioning people has always been at the core of disability politics.”⁷ To investigate the special human existence state of persons with disabilities, it is naturally required to think about the human body and mind, behavioral function, and adaptation to the external world in disability studies, which are also the basic propositions about human beings that post-humanism needs to elaborate. Secondly, like post-humanism, disability studies are characterized by interdisciplinary research. Disability issues cover a wide range of fields, including policy, law, culture, education, and even engineering, which means that interdisciplinary and multi-perspective research is “the only way of disability studies.”⁸ This natural connection between disability studies and post-humanism has attracted the attention of both posthumanist thinkers and disability studies scholars. They found that disability studies and posthumanism share the same theoretical standpoint and critical orientation, and they are both committed to revealing how the modern ideological discourse with humanism as the core achieves the construction of an “idealized, sound or standard human body” by degrading the physical and mental state of “otherness” of the disabled.⁹

 

Posthumanist thinkers found that as persons with disabilities are marginalized by humanistic social ideology and disability is devalued as a “non-human” state of being, “disability studies have long contravened the traditional classical humanist conception of what it means to be human” and “rejected to see an unconventional human body as a deformity.”¹⁰ The object of disability study is the phenomenon of physical, perceptual, or psychological deviation and its influence. Adhering to the poststructuralist philosophy, posthumanist thinkers take disability, the phenomenon of physical and psychological deviation, as the starting point to expose the illusion of independent and self-sufficient rational human subject created by humanism when challenging humanism, based on the idea of breaking or subverting the modern grand narratives. In discussing the classic posthumanistic image of a cyborg, Donna Haraway, a pioneer of posthumanist theory, pointed out that the disabled may have the “most intense” relation to the existence of a cyborg that features close interactions between human beings and non-living things.¹¹ A cyborg is a mixture of biology and inorganic substances, which crosses the boundary between life and non-life. It is complete hybridity, and surpasses the binary opposition between humans and non-humans, with the potential to subvert anthropocentrism. In this sense, the disabled, who often need wheelchairs, prosthetics, hearing aids, and other tools to live, are the pioneers of cyborgs.

 

Another posthumanist theorist, Rosi Braidotti, not only saw the potential of disability studies to subvert the traditional ideas of humanism, but also argued that disability studies can reveal how the disabled, who are degraded as “non-humans” by humanism, generate new subjectivity in the interaction with the external world, and thus “to provide an adequate expression of what bodies — as both embodied and embrained — can do and think and enact”¹².In other words, disability studies can provide a reference paradigm for the new post-humanistic subject and ethical relationship advocated by post-humanism. Therefore, Braidotti took disability studies as an important field of knowledge production under the paradigm of post-humanistic thought.

 

Following in the footsteps of posthumanist thinkers, disability studies scholars also acutely realized the applicability of posthumanism to the analysis of disability issues. On the one hand, they found that the posthumanist perception of transboundary hybridized embodied human subjects had made the disabled the best manifestation of this new paradigm of posthumanist subject existence. This recognition means that disability is no longer an anomaly of existence, and persons with disabilities are no longer on the margins of society, which is in line with the claim of disability researchers that the disabled body is “not an exception, but a dominance,” thus laying an ideological foundation for improving the status of the disabled and promoting the protection of their rights.¹³ On the other hand, they recognized that post-humanism “rethinks interactions between humans and non-humans on a relational and planetary scale,” and advocates that human beings should respect and depend on each other with others and engage in “community-based shared practice” with them. This claim could provide guidelines for the practice of disability studies.¹⁴

 

It can be said that the encounter between posthumanism and disability studies has brought great ideological enlightenment to disability studies, and provided new conceptual tools and investigation perspectives. What is more valuable is that, under the paradigm of post-humanistic thought, disability studies have found the possibility to step out of their own disciplinary space and contribute the wisdom of the disabled to other humanities and even the whole ideological field.

 

 

Disability is not a special condition for a few people, nor is it a defect or disease, but a universal state of human existence, “a universal human experience.”¹⁵ Although this cognition has been reflected in disability studies, only after posthumanism completely deconstructs the humanistic myth about man, and reinterprets the existing state of the human body and mind and the generation process of subjectivity can it have a definite theoretical basis.

 

Post-humanism holds that the humanist definition of man is wrongly based on a “universalist posture and binary logic”.¹⁶ That is to say, humanism presets a transcendental image of a rational man and takes it as the measure of all things. This image pits an unwarranted “common humanity” against otherness, which humanism sees as “inhuman” or “subhuman”, and vilifies differentiated others as “aberrant, malformed, cruel and bestial”, which not only means that humans have a central position above everything else in the world, but also breeds a series of hegemonic positions that oppress women, colored people, and people with disabilities by denouncing them as inhuman or incomplete.¹⁷

 

The subversion of humanism by post-humanism starts from the recognition of the existing state and subjectivity of the human body and mind. According to this recognition, disability is no longer an abnormal state of a human being degraded by the humanistic discourse, but a universal state of human existence, firstly because post-humanism breaks the binary opposition between disability and non-disability created by the humanistic ideology, refreshes people’s cognition of a “normal body”, and makes people realize that there is no absolute sound human being and that all human beings are a mixture with other substances in the environment. The development of modern technology has allowed human beings to have a deeper understanding of themselves. They found that man is not a pure and fixed entity, but a mixture of man and external substances and information. The image of a “cyborg”, a mixture of organism and machine, is the original conception of posthumanism for this kind of posthuman hybrid. N. Katherine Hayles further pointed out that even without any modification in our bodies, we are already posthumans cyborgs, because research in the field of cognitive science and artificial life technology clearly shows that “the posthuman subject is a mixture, an aggregation of heterogeneous components, and an information organism whose boundaries are constantly constructed and reconstructed.” The hybridity of humans shows that there is no transcendental, intrinsic common humanity and that a human being is just a node in the network of connections with external substances. Since there is no stable and clear boundary between man and the external world, and the integrity and certainty of the so-called “normal body” are but an illusion, “uncertainty and instability are no longer unique to abnormal bodies, but the state of existence of all bodies.” In other words, disability is common to all bodies and is a universal existence.

 

Posthumanism highlights the universality of disability because it fundamentally denies human autonomy and reveals the fundamental dependence of man on the external world. Humanism holds that autonomy, namely, the ability to exercise free will, is the measure of whether a person is normal or not, and that persons with disabilities are often considered burdens and problems because they are not in control of their bodies and minds. “If a person is not healthy in some way, he is not a normal person.”¹⁸ According to posthumanism, humanism upholds the credo “I think, therefore I am” and believes that human subjectivity arises from the rational self, creating the illusion of human autonomy. Posthumanism argues that human subjectivity does not originate from the autonomous self, but is “formed in the assemblages and interfaces between humans and animals, machines and the environment.”¹⁹ The subject keeps forming new embodied thoughts and embrained actions in the complex relationship network consisting of the human body, consciousness, and external environment. Subjectivity emerges from these concrete thoughts and actions, showing a wide variety of patterns. Therefore, post-humanism reveals that the independent initiative and autonomy of human beings are just an illusion created by humanism, by pointing out the interactivity generated by human subjects. Human beings have never been autonomous, but have always lived in the interaction between the inner body and mind and the assemblage and interface with the external world, where they bring a kind of “dependent initiative” into play.²⁰ In this way, all human beings are disabled and cannot exercise their free will. If “unavoidable dependence is a basic human characteristic,”²¹ disability can also be seen as a basic human characteristic and a universal existence in human society. In life, people are constrained everywhere in their actions, and all need to rely on external support. Disabled people in the traditional view are only a more typical and prominent manifestation of the non-autonomy and dependence of humans.

 

Therefore, by bringing forward a subversive interpretation of the definition of man, posthumanism replaces common humanity with a universal disability, pulls man down from the altar of the measure of all things, and shows humans as they are, which will help humans shake off the shackles of anthropocentrism, realize the handicapped existence of interdependence and symbiosis with the external world, and ensure the steadiness and sustainable reproduction of human beings.

 

 

Disability is not an intrinsic characteristic of man itself but arises in the relative relationship with the external world, which is another prominent characteristic of disability pointed out by posthumanism. Although the social model of disability studies separated disability from the disabled themselves long before the emergence of post-humanism, stating that disability is not a physical or mental defect believed in the medical model, but the product of oppressive social relations, the cognition of disability in the social model fails to get rid of the set pattern of binary opposition thinking, nor does it fully understand the relationality of disability. Instead, it “focuses too much on the social constructiveness and politics of disability, and ignores the trouble that impairment brings to the individual”, thus falling into the paradox of “disembodiment.”²² The social model mainly makes a distinction between the concepts of impairment and disability. It believes that the former is a physical or mental defect of an individual, while the latter is a functional disorder caused by society. Disability studies need “accept impairments and remove disabilities.”²³ This distinction inherently assumes that impairment is an inherent physical or mental defect, a natural occurrence that cannot be changed. However, even what people see as internal physical and mental impairment cannot be separated from social and cultural construction. Human body and impairment “concern both nature and culture (power)”, which are the product of many complex factors in nature and social culture.²⁴

 

Posthumanism shakes off the thinking shackle of binary opposition between nature and society, man and environment, body and mind, and re-recognizes the existence of humans, thus overcoming the one-sidedness of the social model in thinking about disability, and understanding the relationality of disability more profoundly and thoroughly. From the perspective of posthumanism, the relationality of disability is determined by the internal relationality of the subject. According to posthumanism, the subject is not an atomized isolated entity that humanism assumes, but has open boundaries and is inseparable from others. These relations are the core elements that constitute the subject. Therefore, in the view of posthumanism, the subject has “ontological relationality” which “works in an embedded, embodied, rooted, multi-dimensional and multi-layered way.”²⁵ In other words, relationality is the essential attribute of the subject, which determines the subject’s cognition and action in a complex ecology of relations with itself, others, and the world. This understanding of subject relationality fundamentally negates the possibility that the subject can exist as an individual in isolation and exert subjective initiative independently and deeply embeds human existence in the real material and technological world.

 

Posthumanism further proposes that initiative is distributed, that is, the initiative is not an intrinsic characteristic of human beings, nor does it come from any existing driving force (such as rationality), but is generated in specific human activities, and distributed in the functional system formed by humans and the external environment during the activity. Such functional systems are “matrices of discrete but interconnected processes.” They do not operate at the center of the subject, nor are they constrained by any component, but generate activities of the subject holistically.²⁶

 

Distributed initiative means that people’s physical and mental functions cannot be separated from the relationship with the external world, but rely on the relationship to bring an active role into play. This fundamentally refutes the view that a disability is a physical or mental defect. Since “ability” is formed in the relationship between the subject and others, “disability” does not refer to the “disability” of the person with disabilities, but to the failure of the distributed initiative due to the failure of the functional system where the subject conducts its physical and mental activities. More importantly, in case of the “disability” of the distributed functional system, the subject and others in the system can adapt to each other and evolve together to promote the operation of the functional system and give full play to the distributed initiative, thus turning “disability” into “ability” or even “super ability.” Persons with disabilities do differ physically and mentally from others, but this does not mean that they are inferior to others, because they can still adapt themselves and achieve survival in their cognitive and behavioral functional systems like all other people. The most common examples, such as braille reading, moving in a wheelchair, and using hand gestures, are sufficient to indicate that persons with disabilities are fully capable of promoting the functioning of the surrounding systems in the mutual adaptation with others, and completing their physical and mental functions like any other person. Some persons with disabilities can even have supernormal functions. For example, persons with disabilities fitted with carbon fiber prosthetics can break sprint world records, and visually impaired persons have a sharper sense of hearing, so they are more competent in related jobs. In other words, “Having a disability, whether congenital or acquired, changes but does not break one’s immersion in the world reality, and it may equally herald the opening of new horizons, which should not be viewed negatively.”²⁷

 

The posthumanistic cognition of the relationality of disability not only overturns the definition of disability in the medical model but also transcends the limitations of the social model in interpreting disability. It does not simply view disability as a social product that is separated from the body and mind of the person with disabilities but believes that disability is generated in the relationship between the disabled and the external world, as an embodiment of the disabled body in the complex network of material relationships. Like all forms of embodiment, embodied disabilities are “diverse, intersecting and interdependent” and require a wide network of relationships to support their existence.²⁸ Therefore, the relationality of disability makes it clear that disability is a difference, not a defect; disability is a phenomenon, not an identity; disability is transcendence, not a regression.

 

 

Disability has long suffered from the stigma of “deviance”. Disability studies are committed to revealing the social mechanism behind the “stigma management” and analyzing how individuals are disciplined and social norms are maintained through the building of identity opposition between normality and deviance.²⁹ The stigma of disability can be refuted more thoroughly from a posthumanistic perspective because posthumanism believes that all things, including human beings, do not exist in a fixed form, but constantly generate new and different forms in an eternal flow. This deconstructs the binary opposition between normality and deviance, since there can be no normality or deviance for anyone who is always in a state of flux from one form to another. In this way, it is clear how fallacious it is to stigmatize disability on the pretext of deviance.

 

Posthumanism rejects the essentialist cognition held by humanism. It does not regard man as a fixed entity but believes that the human subject is an open multi-system being. In each system, a variety of mixed elements interact with each other and with other external elements, constantly generating new forms, and creating new ways of self-being. Therefore, the human body and mind present a kind of “virtuality” that is open to the external world and keeps changing. This virtuality does not deny the reality of human existence. Instead, it sets human beings in a more profound and realistic relational changing state, because only this kind of virtuality can accurately reveal the heterogeneous, complex, and mobile characteristics of human existence.³⁰ Therefore, posthumanism advocates using “becoming” instead of “being” to emphasize the diversity and non-fixity of subjects, as well as the potential of becoming in the future. “Becoming” is derived from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming. The philosophy of becoming opposes the concept of “being” in Western traditional metaphysics and holds that “being” pursues the essence of immobilization, ignores the process of things, emphasizes unity and consistency, and obliterates the diversity of a diverse world. “Becoming” means that things are always in the process of generation. In this process, the subject embraces different others and creates infinite potential during its interaction with others. The “becoming” rather than “being” of the subject determines that the human subject is a kind of “nomadic embodied subject” which is “mobile, inconstant and nomadic.”³¹ In other words, the subject “can be understood as an internal process of becoming” in an “eternal flow” that intersects with the external environment³².

 

The mobility of the subject determines that the disability attached to the subject is not a fixed existence, but keeps changing across various areas, and participates in shaping and generating new forms. One of the most basic yet most often overlooked facts about disability is that it can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime. The vast majority of disabilities are acquired, not congenital. Everyone is likely to become disabled at some point in his life, let alone the age-related changes in a person’s abilities. “The cycle of life runs in actuality from disability to temporary ability back to disability, and that only happens if you are among the most fortunate, among those who do not fall ill or suffer a severe accident.”³³ The universal vulnerability of the human body and mind means that people are always moving between disabled and non-disabled states. In addition, people who are already disabled are affected by their changing disabilities. The human body, mind, and external environment are constantly changing, which determines that disability is “rarely static, but dynamic and accidental. It is influenced by many external factors and usually changes over time.”³⁴ Even congenital or seemingly immutable disabilities are mobile, rather than remain in a constant state. Disability researchers such as Dan Goodley and Griet Roets conducted a “cartographic” analysis of the so-called “nomadic subjectivity” of intellectually disabled people. They found that the subjectivity of the disabled shows different forms in different space-time scenes and relationships and that disabled people are always “creatively reshaping and reinventing themselves” to meet the needs of their daily life, and their disability also shows strong uncertainty along with the flow of the subject self and remains “in the process of being constantly shaped and reshaped.”³⁵

 

Posthumanism sees the subject as open “virtuality” and “becoming” in relationships, which allows people to “reimagine disability as a changing category which all of us can and will get in and come out of”.³⁶ On the one hand, it can completely destigmatize disability, because the mobility of disability means that disability is not deviance of a specific individual or group, let alone a stigma or shame. On the other hand, it also reminds us that we should abandon the stereotyped and fixed view of disability and treat disability as a dynamic becoming process that keeps changing, so as to find the possibility that disabled people constantly create diverse nomadic subjects in specific social connections, thus to explore the positive value of disability.

 

 

Posthumanism proposes a series of creative understandings of human existence, refreshing the cognition of disability. From the perspective of posthumanism, disability fundamentally gets rid of the negative meaning and presents a new positive outlook. Posthumanism overturns the humanistic imagination of complete, self-sufficient, and healthy humans, and reveals the correlation between humans and the external world as well as the universal dependence on the external world, which makes the disabled the paradigm of a universal being. In addition, the posthumanistic understanding of the relationality and becoming of the human subject also shows the uncertainty and relativity of the disabled being. What is more valuable is that disability is clearly productive under this understanding, because it is the disability that inspires the initiative of the subject to adapt itself and relate with others, and the subject creates a new form of self-presentation while overcoming obstacles. The productivity of the disabled means that “the disabled can turn their disabilities into abilities, potentials, and possibilities.”³⁷ Their creative ways of living and thinking are filled with wisdom and hope, which can provide a reference for the survival of all humans. Disability is not to be feared, nor is it a defect. It is in the interaction with obstacles that humans continue to evolve and achieve their continuity. From the perspective of epistemology, post-humanism brings an opportunity for the reinterpretation of disability. From the methodological point of view, posthumanism can provide rich implications for advancing disability studies and formulating disability policies, and better promoting the development of disability rights.

 

 

Posthumanism reveals the universality of disability, making disability researchers and policymakers realize that the cause of disability rights and the object of disability studies should not only involve the group of disabled people as previously but also be extended to all the people affected by disability. In addition to the disabled in traditional cognition, this group also includes a wider range of young children, the elderly, patients with acute and chronic diseases and psychological trauma, and all other people who experience social life impairments due to internal and external factors. Thus, the cause of disability rights and disability studies make a shift from the marginal cause and studies focusing on minority groups to the mainstream cause and studies involving the majority of people which benefits the whole society. Although the shift is a little radical and there may be some doubts about whether it will take the focus off the cause of disability rights and studies, the generalization of the disability vision does not mean that the disabled group is deprived of opportunities. Instead, it facilitates their free integration into social life, because in the expanded disability vision, the disabled are no longer the special group of persons with defects, but a state of being in the “ability-disability” continuum, a component of the functional system of disability. Through the analysis of factors that lead to the disability of the functional system, disability studies bring forward non-differentiated methods of adaptation, which can eradicate discrimination against persons with disabilities and enable society to see disability not as a burden, but as a necessary process to maintain its operation. Meanwhile, by focusing on disability issues with universal influence and proposing universal disability policies, the cause of disability rights can make people more aware that these policies “concern and are in the interests of the whole society.”³⁸ This is more conducive to building social consensus and encouraging society to invest more resources in building a disabled-friendly society, thus better benefiting all persons with disabilities including the handicapped, and promoting the development of human rights in China as a whole. For example, in China, currently, the promotion of barrier-free environments is not only a measure to benefit the group of people with disabilities, but also a requirement of the national strategy to deal with the aging population; the establishment and improvement of the health and rehabilitation system for the disabled by the state can benefit the whole national public health service; and so on.

 

 

The current mainstream disability policy is established based on the humanistic hypothesis of autonomous, rational man, which seeks to reduce the “disability” of individuals with disabilities by passively receiving rehabilitation treatment, so as to become the subject with the ability to participate in social activities independently again. In practice, however, this will isolate the disabled from society, “forcing them to become a dependent social role and weakening their independence.”³⁹ In the view of posthumanism, this goal is unattainable, because a person is never an individual with autonomy, but a node existing in a network of relationships, giving play to the distributed initiative in the functional system composed of him and others in the external world. Therefore, rehabilitation policies that truly benefit persons with disabilities should focus on analyzing how these persons adapt themselves and survive in various networks of people, material and informational, in the forms of their families, communities, and society,“recognize, respect and improve the networks”, and build social rehabilitation networks that better empower persons with disabilities and enable them to develop their potential fully.⁴⁰ This shift means that the rehabilitation for the disabled should change the practice of isolation and separation of persons with disabilities, and enable them to enjoy services such as education, culture, and health in a more inclusive and supportive social environment, become the subject of their family and social functional networks and participate actively and fully in professional production and family life, thus truly achieving the goal of functional rehabilitation. Disability policies should fully guarantee and promote the participation right of the disabled as the subject of rehabilitation.

 

 

The rise of posthumanism stems from the relaxed boundary between humans and non-humans brought about by the advances in science and technology, and the rehabilitation of science and technology for the disabled is undoubtedly one of the most significant areas that reflect this relaxing. From carbon-fiber prosthetics that enable amputees to walk again, to brain-computer interfaces that help people with cognitive impairment to restore their cognitive function, science and technology have brought tangible benefits to the disabled. However, the advance in science and technology that is out of control may also undermine the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities as human beings, and bring high ethical risks. For example, some people with disabilities use human body enhancement technology that pushes the limits of human speed and strength. Have they become superhuman beings? With the development of the metaverse, people with disabilities can live in virtual reality without barriers and indiscriminately. Does this mean that society no longer needs to pay attention to their disability in reality? Gene editing promises to radically eliminate embryonic aberrations at the chromosomal level. Does this represent the hope that humans will get rid of disability completely, or is it an extreme manifestation of the eugenic discourse that demeans disability with the help of contemporary science and technology? These problems are not only the ethical problems faced by the disabled but also the issues of overall significance that concern the nature of human existence. They are universal issues that all humans should consider in the context of the rapid development of science and technology. Disability researchers should consider these issues from the standpoint of the disabled, clarify their understanding, and make their voices heard.

 

 

Today, the development of science and technology has brought great changes to human society, and the surging trend of posthumanism has brought a new opportunity for disability studies to broaden their horizon and transform the research paradigm. Also, posthumanistic disability studies fully prove that “disabilities can yield extraordinary insights in the grand project of understanding the human condition.”⁴¹ Starting from the new cognition of human beings in posthumanism, this paper briefly discusses the universality, relationality, and mobility of disability from the perspective of posthumanism. These characteristics constitute the core of the posthumanism approach to disability, which can serve as a theoretical basis for further clarifying the posthumanistic understanding of disability, and provide a new opportunity for promoting the development of the cause of disability rights. The posthumanism approach to disability not only broadens the scope of the cause of disability rights but also provides a feasible way to promote the protection of disability rights and build a disabled-friendly society. As the CPC Central Committee proposes to unswervingly follow the path of China’s human rights development to better promote the development of China’s human rights cause, the posthumanism approach to disability is of great enlightening significance for China’s disability cause to “innovate the discourse system and promote the symbiotic evolution of new ideas and new institutions about disability.⁴²

 

(Translated by SHEN Jinjun)

 

* HUANG He ( 黄贺 ), Lecturer and Doctor of School of Foreign Studies, Beijing Information Science & Technology University.

 

1. Daniel Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole, “Becoming Dishuman: Thinking about the Human through Disability,” 37 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 1 (2016): 10.

 

2. Kirsty Liddiard et al., “Working the Edges of Posthuman Disability Studies: Theorizing with Disabled Young People with Life-limiting Impairments,” 41 Sociology of Health & Illness 8 (2019): 11.

 

3. Stuart F. Murray, Disability and the Posthuman: Bodies, Technology, and Cultural Futures (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 27.

 

4. Tony Davies, Humanism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69.

 

5. Cary Wolf, What is Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv.

 

6. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, translated by Song Gencheng (Zhengzhou: Henan University Press, 2015), 253.

 

7. Dan Goodley et al., “The Desire for New Humanisms”, Journal of Disability Studies in Education 1 (2021): 135.

 

8. Zhang Wanhong and Gao Wei, “Multidisciplinary Research on the Disability Rights — The More the Better”, Human Rights 3 (2017): 34.

 

9. Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014), 140.

 

10. Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019), 85.

 

11. Donna J. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 61.

 

12. Rosi Braidotti, “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities,” 36 Theory, Culture & Society 6 (2019): 21.

 

13. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 7.

 

14. Dan Goodley, Rebecca Lawthomb and Katherine Runswick Cole, “Posthuman Disability Studies,” 7 Subjectivity 4 (2014): 350.

 

15. Zou Guangwen and Ning Quanrong, “On Disability Culture and Its Contemporary Perspective,” Disability Research 3 (2013): 7.

 

16. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, 20.

 

17. Ibid., 98.

 

18. Fiona Kumari Campbell, “Stalking Ableism: Using Disability to Expose ‘Abled’ Narcissism”, in Disability and Social Theory-New Developments and Directions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 214.

 

19. Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism, 80.

 

20. Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 98.

 

21. Eva Feder Kittay, “Centering Justice on Dependency and Recovering Freedom”, in The Disability Studies Reader (The Fifth Edition) (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 306.

 

22. Bao Yu and Huang Yingying, “From Deviation to ‘Embodiment’: A Sociological Understanding of the Meaning of ‘Disability’”, Social Sciences of Beijing 5 (2015): 62.

 

23. Tom Shakespeare, “The Social Model of Disability”, in The Disability Studies Reader (The Fifth Edition) (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 197.

 

24. Rouven Schlegel, “Beyond Judgment: Towards Critical Disability Studies”, 28 Disability & Society 5 (2013): 107.

 

25. Dan Goodley et al., “The Desire for New Humanisms”, 31.

 

26. Robert Pepperell, The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain (Portland: Intellect Books, 2003), 25.

 

27. Margrit Shildrick, Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 36.

 

28. Abby Wilkerson, “Embodiment,” in Keywords for Disability Studies (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 198.

 

29. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Translated by Song Lihong (Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2009), 176.

 

30. Cary Wolf, What is Posthumanism, xxiii.

 

31. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002), 56.

 

32. Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 36.

 

33. Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), 60.

 

34. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (Twentieth Anniversary Edition) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 13.

 

35. Dan Goodley and Griet Roets, “The (Be) comings and Goings of ‘Developmental Disabilities’: The Cultural Politics of ‘Impairment’,” 29 A Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 2 (2008): 247-248.

 

36. Barbara E. Gibson, “Disability, Connectivity and Transgressing the Autonomous Body,” 27 Journal of Medical Humanities 3 (2006): 193.

 

37. Dan Goodley et al., “Provocations for Critical Disability Studies,” 34 Disability & Society 6 (2019): 988.

 

38. Irving Kenneth Zola, “Toward the Necessary Universalizing of a Disability Policy,” 83 The Milbank Quarterly 4 (2005): 21.

 

39. Lin Yaqiang and Xu Meng, “Experiencing Disability and Recovery: Social Responses to Disability,” Medicine & Philosophy 3 (2020): 15.

 

40. Daniel Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole, “Becoming Dishuman”, 13.

 

41. Dan Goodley, Disability and Other Human Questions (London: Emerald Publishing, 2021), xiii.

 

42. Zhang Wanhong, Ding Peng, “From ‘Handicapped’ to ‘Physically Challenged’: The Discourse Transformation in China’s Cause of the Physically Challenged in the New Era”, Human Rights, No. 3 (2018), p. 97.