The Body is an Open Field: Intersections of Disability and Caste
Monica Bodd, MD/MTS (c), Duke University SOM, Duke Divinity School
Disability studies in India draws attention to the inseparability of disability from caste and gender, thereby complicating current individualistic models of care. In India, as many as 80% of persons with disabilities live in rural areas or urban slums (~18 million persons),1 and the prevalence of impairment is four times higher for those living below the poverty line.2 The caste system compounds this socioeconomic impairment: Dalits, the “so called ‘ex-untouchable’ sections...[are] twice as likely to be poor, unemployed and illiterate as non-Dalits.”3 How might we develop a thick definition of healing that acknowledges oppressive and liberatory power structures? By grounding disability and religious studies in an example within the slums of Andhra Pradesh, this paper explores disability at co-constituted levels: 1) power structures’ marginalization of persons with disabilities and 2) an anthropology delineated by living conditions. It then offers an imagination of care that accounts for the interconnectedness between persons and structural power.
Disability does not exist in isolation, but rather in a deeply social, classist, gendered care web that disables total human flourishing. The caste system, and its economic mandate, is a form of violence which marks “power, capacity, and weakness...the way a culture grapples with deviance and difference...with the vulnerabilities of the body.”4 In order to sustain transformative healing in disability justice, we must “challenge broader social patterns of ableism” and commit to social-structural transformation. Questions of access should be reconsidered within a specific history: caste is power, and more than 80% of the Indian population is Hindu. The faith of practicing Hindu communities is marked by connectedness to past, to future, and to other: classical Ayurveda “describes the body not as a relatively self-contained unit but as an open field.”5 How does the care of persons with disabilities in India relate to this Hindu anthropology? Drawing on Dalit theology, how could we imagine a liberatory transformation of care? Can caste- and religion-based understandings of personhood radicalize and expand [our] current care practices? How might an account of care from the underside of history move us towards health and equity?
Care, as a deeply joyful collective responsibility, as attitude or virtue, can uncouple autonomy from dignity. On an individual level, this might mean “more care, more of the time,”6 – a care marked by community, sustainability, and slowness. On a systemic level, a faith-based ethic of care “provides a strong justification for such [positive] provisions as entitlements insofar as care requires carrying out responsibilities we have for another’s flourishing.”7 By witnessing the embodiedness and embeddedness of persons with disabilities, we begin to dream alongside them – of a vision of collective responsibility, of emancipatory justice, of disability as beauty, of deep access.
1 Mehrotra, "Disability, Gender and Caste Intersections in Indian Economy,” 301.
2 Staples, "Decolonising Disability Studies? Developing South Asia-Specific Approaches to Understanding Disability," 37.
3 Mehrotra, "Disability, Gender and Caste Intersections in Indian Economy,” 300.
4 Belser, “Violence, disability, and the politics of healing: The Inaugural Nancy Eiesland Endowment Lecture,” 190.
5 Staples, 35.
6 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha, 53.
7 Kittay, “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability,” 55.
Disability does not exist in isolation, but rather in a deeply social, classist, gendered care web that disables total human flourishing. The caste system, and its economic mandate, is a form of violence which marks “power, capacity, and weakness...the way a culture grapples with deviance and difference...with the vulnerabilities of the body.”4 In order to sustain transformative healing in disability justice, we must “challenge broader social patterns of ableism” and commit to social-structural transformation. Questions of access should be reconsidered within a specific history: caste is power, and more than 80% of the Indian population is Hindu. The faith of practicing Hindu communities is marked by connectedness to past, to future, and to other: classical Ayurveda “describes the body not as a relatively self-contained unit but as an open field.”5 How does the care of persons with disabilities in India relate to this Hindu anthropology? Drawing on Dalit theology, how could we imagine a liberatory transformation of care? Can caste- and religion-based understandings of personhood radicalize and expand [our] current care practices? How might an account of care from the underside of history move us towards health and equity?
Care, as a deeply joyful collective responsibility, as attitude or virtue, can uncouple autonomy from dignity. On an individual level, this might mean “more care, more of the time,”6 – a care marked by community, sustainability, and slowness. On a systemic level, a faith-based ethic of care “provides a strong justification for such [positive] provisions as entitlements insofar as care requires carrying out responsibilities we have for another’s flourishing.”7 By witnessing the embodiedness and embeddedness of persons with disabilities, we begin to dream alongside them – of a vision of collective responsibility, of emancipatory justice, of disability as beauty, of deep access.
1 Mehrotra, "Disability, Gender and Caste Intersections in Indian Economy,” 301.
2 Staples, "Decolonising Disability Studies? Developing South Asia-Specific Approaches to Understanding Disability," 37.
3 Mehrotra, "Disability, Gender and Caste Intersections in Indian Economy,” 300.
4 Belser, “Violence, disability, and the politics of healing: The Inaugural Nancy Eiesland Endowment Lecture,” 190.
5 Staples, 35.
6 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha, 53.
7 Kittay, “The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability,” 55.