!!
!!!!!!!CRIP!POSTHUMANISM!AND!NATIVE!AMERICAN!INDIAN!
POSTANTROPOCENTRISM:!KEYS!TO!A!BODILY!PERSPECTIVE!IN!SCIENCE.!!
Laura!Moya!and!José!Angel!B ergua!
University!of!Zaragoza!(Spain)!
Abstract
From its origins, the dominant thought in the Western Culture, put the soul first and
despised the body, generating distinctions and hierarchies in which the spiritual or
immaterial was considered superior to the corporal or material. But the bodies, far
from conforming to this, have not allowed themselves to be reduced to these
dichotomous patterns. The queer, turning their complex identity around, discovered
the body, worked with it, but returned to the field of immateriality in which the
identity is lodged, although populated with hybridizations and transversalities. The crip
movement have completed the gesture of the queer entering fully into the field of the
body, denaturalizing categories that were anchored to him, such as deficiency or
disability, and interpreting it as radically interdependent. However, in the absence of
tradition in dealing with the body, both in reflection and politics, we are inspired by
other cultures that always put corporality in the foreground to go in search of the body
that the West Culture lost. The Native American Indians are explicit in terms of
contrast between humans and non-humans, it follows that for them there is a unique
culture with multiple natures, as opposed to Western, because it believes in plurality
of cultures and in a uniform nature. In order to coexist with this diversity, the West has
invented "cultural relativism" and "multiculturalism", while the Native American
Indians have developed a "multinaturalism" with their "perspectivism". We propose to
denominate perspectivism a modality of science and politics that could manifest the
radical influence of bodies in the world.
Key words: perspectivism, science, politics, post humanism, postantropocentrism
1. INTRODUCTION
Rorty's "linguistic turn" (1967) began a certain postmodernity (Lyotard, 1982)
suggesting that truths are not absolute but instead the result of certain language
games. The second cybernetic (Von Foerster, 1991), on the other hand, underpinned
another particular constructivism, asserting that there is no outside world
independent of the observer but instead invented by observation based on distinctions
and indications (Spencer Brown, 1991). Geertz (1988) also stated that knowledge of
other cultures is between difficult and impossible because the most qualified
professional, the anthropologist, is unable to see and interpret outside the intellectual
categories provided by his society, so that "others" are only a mirror and the
reflections that it inspires actually speak of us. Finally, the network actor theory
(Latour, 2005) has added the idea that the natural objects that science deals with are
constructed by the complex interrelationship of a broad set of actors that mobilize a
large amount of resources in different ways. In short, according to these and other
lines of reflection, we discover that the world that our civilization imagined as exterior
and objective has actually been invented by us. Well, to this linguistic, cultural,
neuronal and social shift that has changed our idea of the world, we have added a
complete change in direction that aims to awaken our relationship with its sensitive
side. With the first movement there was only a change of hierarchy in the subtle scope
or ideas, whereas with the second one we have made our way to the sensitive or
material slope. If the first gesture is post-modern, since it only alters or destroys the
idea of objectivity, the second is post-western because it questions the protagonism
that since Greek times was given to the soul and subordination that was adjudged to
the body
1
.
In this article we are going to explore the second gesture using two novel
approaches to corporality. On the one hand, crip theory, the continuation at another
level of corporal awakening that promoted the queer theory. On the other hand, the
complex corporal experience that the Native American Indians practice according to
Viveiros de Castro´s analysis (2006, 2010, 2013). We believe that the corporal
awakening that the crip theory promotes from a particular area, although forceful,
lacks the experience and encouragement that the Native American Indians can provide
to deepen the attempt and to extend it to more social scopes and corners.
From a post humanist point of view Braidotti (2015, p. 83) has suggested that
"if the decay of humanism started post humanism by exhorting the humanized and
racialized humans to emancipate themselves from the master-slave dialectic
relationship, the anthropos crisis paved the way for the demonic emergence of the
naturalized others. " In our view, the post-human component of the crip movement,
which is responsible for promoting the definitive overflow of a certain kind of subject
(the corporally normalized one from a closed set of functionalities), can be expanded
through the particular Native American Indians experience in relation to the treatment
with those that our civilization considers as animals. Such is the relationship we seek to
establish between such seemingly distinct discourses. It will be up to the reader to
judge the success of this attempt.
2. QUEERS AND CRIPS.
The body is the space of social integration par excellence, but at the same time
it is also of social exclusion (Planella, 2006). The representation of difference as a
deviation and the discourses that legitimize such a process, are the keys to the
incorporation and subordination of bodies.
The subjects are examined, classified, ordered, named and defined by the
marks that have been attributed to their bodies from the comparison with a certain
idea or norm of a body that acts as a general equivalent
2
, allowing them to project
meaning and value onto the concrete bodies, in addition to deciding the position of
the subjects that carry them (Louro, 2003). Such marks have defined these subjects in
their entirety through concepts that derive from dichotomous categorizations whose
central axis are abstract and universal norms that, on the other hand, need to be
1
!Which!had!many!consequences.!One!of!them!is!the!separation!and!later!e xclusion!of!animals!for!
not! reaching! our! level! of! intelligence! (Simondon,! 2008).! Descartes! closed! the! operation! even!
depriving!them!of!instinct.!
2
!This! hierarchical! way! of! proceeding! should! not! be! surprising! since! the! devices! responsible! for!
thinking!and!ordering!the!sexuality!hierarchy!and!give!meaning!to!the!erogenous!zon es!apart!from!
the!general!penis!equivalent,!in!the!field!of!coins!the!same!thing! happ ens!with!the!general!dollar!
equivalent,!in!classical! organizations! with!the! equivalent! general! boss,! in! the! traditional! families!
with!the!equivalent!general!father,!etc.!(Goux,!2000).!
reiterated to produce what they name. One of the results of the operation will be the
production of normal and abnormal bodies. However, this order never ends because
bodies are never completely reduced to the norms, categorizations and projections of
sense or value that they receive. With varying intensity and regularity, they tend to
overflow all of these complex construction norms, denouncing in this way, in fact, their
fiction and, at the same time, illuminating the possibility of inventing other
fundaments for corporality.
The bodies that because of their difference to the norm have been
hypercorporalized and excluded are defined as ugly, dirty, impure, sick or, in short,
abject, and belong to the category of "others", which are necessary to construct the
social order and generate effective plans in the exercise of standardizing and
sanctioning the different (Young, 2000) (Platero and Rosón, 2012). But these bodies,
far from resigning themselves to supposed victimization of their subordinate position,
claim precisely what the dominant culture has taught them to despise and thus the
bodies that have been regulated according to their non-normative sexuality or those
that have been cataloged according to their "abnormal" organs or capacities, have
"subverted the stigma using the negative denomination that has been assigned to
them to dominate it, display it and to turn it into a symbol of pride" (Shakespeare,
2008, p. 74).
2.1. Queer bodies
This is what happens with the term queer, initially used in a derogatory way, as
an insult, towards people with sexualities not included in the correct social order, but
later used by the same recipients of the stigma to make it a stronger term. Queer
means "strange" or "weird", and has been translated into terms like "poof", "fag",
"bent", "faggot", etc. Due to the difficulty of finding a term that does not refer only to
the sexualities or not only to men, the term queer is used without translation, this is
the reason why in Spanish it loses the meaning of an insult that does exist in the
common use of the English language and also the ingenious reappropriation which the
stigmatized body has been subject to (Guzmán and Platero, 2014). However, in recent
years this term has undergone an increasing process of commodification and is also
becoming a kind of rule, so it runs the risk of generating new exclusions, thus
disfiguring the specific conditions of oppression of transsexual, transgender, disabled
or racialized bodies. In order to avoid this (repeat) fall in the nefarious effects of the
norm, at present it tends to speak of transfeminisms (Preciado, 2008) (Medeak, 2014).
The prefix "trans" refers to something that is going through what it names. Applied to
feminisms, it is a transit, a transformation that has micro political implications (Sayak-
Valencia, 2014). The subjects of transfeminism can be understood as a kind of queer
multitudes luck that, taking advantage of their intersectionality conditions, achieve
non-standardized local agendas capable of breaking up the ways in which subjectivity
is produced today on a planetary scale (Sayak-Valencia, 2014).
The history of this intellectual and political gesture began at the end of the
1980's, when some groups (lesbians, chicanas, blacks, transsexuals, etc.) reacted
against gay identity policies that demanded integration into a heterosexual dominant
society, "using the street as a space for public theatre to show exclusion and using
insulting language to claim resistance to the heterosexual norm" (Preciado, 2008,
p.236) (Louro, 2001). At the same time, criticism also reached feminism, due to the
fact that from its dissenting slopes the political subject of feminism, women,
understood as a predefined biological reality and, above all, the feminine feminism of
more institutional (white, western, heterosexual, abled and middle-class) is
questioned, as well as the categories that are understood and considered obvious. In
fact, if gender is nothing more than imitation and ritualized repetition of what has
been divided and hierarchized by calling it "feminine" and "masculine," as we know
from Simone De Beauvoir, and sex is a normative ideal, a regulatory practice which
produces and differentiates the bodies it governs, as Foucault and Butler showed us
among other things, therefore sexuality (homo, hetero, etc.) cannot and will not be
anchored to any naturalized category (Butler, 2002). In this way the sex-gender-
sexuality equation is broken and with it the identities that allowed it to construct
explode (first the classic male-masculine-heterosexual and female-feminine-
heterosexual- but later others male-feminine-homosexual, female-masculine-
homosexual etc..) and become complicated and coimplicated (Britzman, 2002) (Morris,
2005) (Louro, 2001). In short, the categories of sex, gender and sexuality, which are
basic in the construction of any instituted order, are disconnected, constructing a
scattered and heterogeneous space in which identity becomes terribly problematic,
not to say useless.
But in this journey through turbulent waters of identity initiated by feminism
and culminated by post-feminism, queer activism and transfeminism there is a
problem. It is the emergence of the body, recognized as fundamental in the problem
identification of identity, but not yet seen as a gateway to another way of
understanding individual and collective existence. The crip theory appeared to make
this leap.
2.2. Crip Bodies.
Crip, in slang is a diminutive of the term cripple, used as an insult to people
with functional diversity
3
, which has been translated as "crippled" but can refer to
other words with a similar, though more specific, meaning used in everyday culture,
such is the case of "lame", "one-eyed", "humpbacked", "dwarf", etc. (Guzmán et al.,
2014). This term, crip, which initially denotes hostility, has helped by means of its re-
appropriation of stigmatized subjects, generate culture, make jokes, etc. And in a
similar way as the queer movement did in its re-appropriation of the insult (and blacks
making the contemptuous nigger its own), it has facilitated the creation of a sensibility
that destabilizes the values and normativity of the organically and functionally
standardized body (Platero et al., 2012). Although this term does not appear in the
academic scope in reference to the theory until the 2006 publication of the book "Crip
Theory: Cultural signs of Queerness and Disability", written by Robert McRuer,
3
It refers to people with different biophysical characteristics and given the environment conditions
generated by society, must perform the same tasks or functions as the rest of society in a different way.
Same function, but different way of doing it. "This term considers the difference of the person and the
lack of respect of the majorities, which in their social and environmental constructive processes does
not take into account this functional diversity" (Romañach and Lobato, 2005, p.4). This term was coined
by the Independent Living Forum (Spain) in 2005 and is currently used to refer to disability in our
context.
precursor of this theory, the use of the term crip was certainly already being used in
the 1990s, as can be seen in the documentary "Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back".
Starting from the unsacred towards the medical model of disability (that uses
rehabilitation to resemble an ideally healthy and capable body, which is considered
universal) and emphasizing the huge social model gaps (that treated disability like a
constructed social category but forgot its group, its diversity and its multifunctionality),
the crips or cripples began to generate criticism of body patterns in the 1990's. If the
disability is only the result of social and environmental restrictions that incapacitate
certain bodies and the deficiency is a simple and aseptic statistical deviation to which
meaning has been granted through the use of naturalization (which is normal in the
legitimation of so many conventions - from the nation to the family - taking care of
biological aspects), vulnerability can no longer be associated to a list or catalog of
naturalized characteristics. The disability-deficiency relationship is thus broken, and
autonomy, which was believed to be immanent to human beings, no longer finds
categories in which to anchor itself. Thus, there is an understanding of the human
being as radically interdependent, in need of others and the environment.
2.3. Genealogy of the organic and functionally normative body
The body, bearer of differences, became something to be regulated, an object
of knowledge and control in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, (Rodriguez &
Ferreira, 2010). At that time, in which a certain ideal of being human is naturalized,
living was distributed in a domain of value and utility (Foucault, 1976). For this, the
norm, understood under the criteria of qualification and coercion, is imposed on the
bodies (Canguilhem, 1972). The body is tied to two forms of regulation, a medical one
and another aesthetic of perfection one, which makes the body, or a certain ideal
body, something that every human being should imitate (Ferreira, 2008; Ferreira,
2009). In order to regulate particular bodies and control the differences with reference
to a normative corpus, positive techniques will be applied to classify, divide and
subdivide them in order to individualize them (Focault, 2007).
The tare, the difference that from this time is understood as a deviation from
the norm, is regulated, and the body that carries it, classified as disabled, will be
disciplined. In view of the new relations of production / reproduction and referring to
health as a norm, the health-deficiency dichotomy will be generated, categorizing
bodies from an organic ideal, naming them or classifying them according to a state of
health regulated and disciplined by the expert (medical) opinion that erects organic
norms or normality (unlimited, unrestricted and efficient) (Rodriguez and Ferreira,
2010). On the other hand, referring to capacity, the dichotomy is generated between
efficient functioning or capacity and inefficient functioning or disability, without
considering less habitual forms of functionings that develop those capacities and that
due to normative procedure confuse capacity with functionality. In turn, these
categories generated the dichotomy organism (health-deficiency) - functioning
(efficient-inefficient) (Toboso & Guzmán; Toboso & Guzmán, 2010).
Both the organic ideal and the functional ideal, constructed from the norm, are
inscribed and have their interconnection in the body, which takes the place and
practice of the medical-ableist discourse, which incorporates the representations and
practices that at an organic and functional level participate in the production of the
normative body respectively (Toboso and Guzman, 2009) (Toboso and Guzmán, 2010).