Disability as performance/curriculum: The subversives mechanization of teaching/performing disability

Abstract

In this article, there is a cripped arugmentation towards and away from performance as curricular. In other words, what we are trying to more fully grapple with is how curriculum within the school and otherwise becomes and is embodied within the body as a performative action towards and away from “dis”ability as a means of essentializing, normalizing and reifying means of “dis”ability as disability—curriculum as a way of interpreting and enacting “dis”ability within the social as a continual re-performance of normed accesses and “real”ity. Moreover, this argumentation is not only about a curricular and performative connection within the realm of “dis”ability and the like, but in a more robust determination, the article is an issuance of “dis”ability itself as performance, as construction, as imposed “real”ity, rather than something that is simply empirical and taught to “others” for some sense of understanding. Further, such determinations of “dis”ability as performance and as curriculum within educational spaces and outside of them are intimately intertwined with crip theory and a constant questioning of regimentations of power that are subversive and insidious—unspoken, unseen narrativizations of “real”ity that instantiate reality in hegemonizing ways continually and differently.

Introduction

“Dis”ability ¹ as we understand human difference in our present moment has of course existed in some sense throughout the anthropocene—though shifting in contextual/linguistic meaning throughout the history of its termifications (the times in which we had a word/ideal/model/sign of what “dis”ability may be within a social frame) (Foucault, 2001; Stiker, 2019). In this article, however, coming from a teaching background and a theoretical instantiation, I want to position “dis”ability within the realm of curriculum and performance (a knowledging that is taught and understood through performance)—something that is constantly constructing knowledging, a space of the spectacle as determined and played out within and of various performances, taught and retaught to students, and reified within a social realm. To begin the article, I will start with a slow construction of terminology and background with Foucault, Debord, and others followed by a discursive discussion of curriculum, performance, and “dis”ability. I will then make explicit connections among performance studies looking towards Ellsworth, Debord, and Butler, curricular studies using Anyon, Flinders, and Thornton (within contextualizations of curricula), and Postanarchical/necropolitical understandings of “dis”ability (re)construction and (re)signification with Foucault, Bey, Mbembe, and others. Within this piece, I not only want to position “dis”ability as a tenet of school curricula broadly defined by Anyon, Flinders, and Thornton within the United States, not only do I want to reconsider the constant (re)construction and call to performance of “normal”ity with specific connections to “dis”ability within the school (challenging the social reasonings of “schooling” folks with disabilities), but I also want to challenge the terminologies and processes of subject/objectification (taking away the ability to be “human” within the continual process of subjectivization/objectification in schooling and social environments) that seem to necessitate an “abnormal” within the environment or idealized space of the classroom—arguing that performance is knowledging of the curricula that creates and recreates the “dis”abled ² within the classroom and the like: not necessarily speaking to knowledging but constantly recreating a knowledging through the use of performance and re-performance, attending to performance as curricula and vice versa (Goodley, 2012).

Alongside foucault’s madness

To begin this particular exploration, I want to start with a brief consideration of Foucault’s foundational work in Madness and Civilization as well as within The Archeology of Knowledge. One of the primary pieces of Foucault’s argument throughout these works is delving into the meaning of signifiers, their conceptualizations and physicalizations within the social—and how we may understand the real without fully being able to contemplate and make use of the real (Foucault, 1972, 2001). For instance, though Foucault begins in the Middle Ages in Madness and Civilization, his substantive analysis of what can be considered a rightful genealogy begins in the 17th century with the opening of the L’hopital Generale in Paris (Foucault, 2001). In this moment, Foucault distinctly inscribes this construction (interrelated with the ideas of the mad) within the confines of the bureaucratic and the administrative, a way of controlling populations in a continuously “modernizing” city—confining those experiencing houselessness, ones without families, and those who were impoverished within a singular space—where a pseudo-monarchical government could effectively keep control of its citizens and various kinds of “unrest.” However, Foucault does give credence to the term madness in this moment, considering sloth and other sins of the social that could be seen as heretical and “absolute forms of rebellion” (2001: 57) as exemplifications of termed madnesses, thereby insinuating a distinct connection between what would be considered an illness with an inability or refusal to uphold a social and economic mindset of socio-cultural existence in 17th and mid-eighteenth-century France.

Still more, as Foucault’s analysis enters the early 19th century, he notes a considerable change when it comes to how the signifier of madness gets taken up. Although not directly considered alongside the medical within the moment, madness begins to be considered along the lines of unreason in specific regards to the effects of the Enlightenment (rather than the heretical), and as such, those who were considered mad (defined within a specific signifier and qualifier of humanity) were treated as if they were animals: “For classical man, madness was not the natural condition, the human and psychological root of unreason” (Foucault, 2001: 84). In other words, Rationalism (re)defined those signified as mad within the realm of unreason—something outside the consideration of rational beings—and thus defined within the L’hopital Generale as such (Foucault, 2001). In this process, not only does Rationalism and its effects define and redefine the conceptualizations of reason against the backdrop of what would be considered unreason—the actions of schizophrenia and the like—but they also come to instill reason as a property of being and subjectification, arguing that consciousness and thereby humanness was always already intimately implied in an ever specified version of reason dependent upon the thinker and theoretical space they seemed to be taking up.

Foucault’s continued analysis considers how madness can then be seen within the significations given to it in recent moments. For instance, one of his focuses in the following chapters is how the physicality of the mad in coordination with the medical and empirical can be explicated given various regimes of truth within given spaces that were always already developing within these historical moments. In particular, Foucault takes interest with the idea of “fibers”—a conceptualization of how the signifier may come to interact with the “real.” Compared to the operation of muscles and physical reaction, Foucault sites several thinkers that considered madness in the same way within this Enlightenment period, such that one may trigger a mental “fiber” signaling a response and summarily causing a reaction of the body that is then seen by others within the moment and space as “symptomatic” of madness in general—defined under reductive, classed, raced, and gendered significations such as melancholia (Foucault, 2001: 117–121). However, as Foucault continues in this exploration of particular significations of madness, as he begins his analysis of the 20th century, Foucault then starts to (re)understand and portray madness as becoming of the psychological along with various pieces of his genealogical history, connecting social and economic ineptitude within the illness as well as redefining the signifiers as a way of categorizing, scientifying, and psychologizing the signifiers of madness—creating disseminations as defined by diagnoses, reifying how a medicalized establishment of the state and the social could thereby p(re)define pieces of humanity as always already irrational, mad, outside of the social, and contrary to modern ideas of what a human is and can be (Foucault, 1972, 2001). And while Foucault notes the ways in which madnesses were folded into the social, he also goes on to demonstrate the ways and means with which madness as pieces of the social could then be utilized and definitionalized of the “normal” within the realm of the psychologic, scientific, medicalizing and human—a piece of ideology and the social that is still subsumed within our regimes of power today both continually discursively and subversively recurricularizing and redefining performances (Foucault, 1972, 2001).

Even more so, Foucault later claims, “Madness was free [and a] problem, [which] embarrassed the legislator who, unable to keep from sanctioning the end of confinement, no longer knew at which point in the social sphere to situate it – prison, hospital, or family aid” (Foucault, 2001: 234 and Gutting, 2005). Although Foucault notes the ways in which we may be able to think about the realm of madness within our moment as liberalized, considering the specific genealogy that he has proposed throughout his oeuvre brought up herein, he is also attempting to demonstrate the subversive nature of the psychological subsuming the realm of the mad within the idea of the social, illustrating the ways in which psychiatry becomes its own positivistic and empirical science of the human as social and scientifized control, begininning to show us how the significations (defined, in part, by the signifiers) of madness change over time to coincide with the conceptions of the real as the real—thereby operating within and of the legislators ineptitude of classifying the mad with particular laws, creating newer empiricized ways of calling towards those who will be and are considered “ill” within the realms of psychiatry, psychology, etc. (2001). Thus, within our own moment, as social beings, we are simultaneously hailed to uphold the realm of the mad as a way of interpreting peoples’ connection to the social and their humanity, playing at free labor and perpetuating the logicisms of the state and social with our actions and languages picked up and taught throughout the realm of the school, all the while predefining such social beings—the mad, the “ill”—as endeavors to reify human behavioral, emotional, physical, and cognitive differences under the guise of the scientific and the psychological (Foucault, 2001; Madigan, 1992). However, as we will go forward in this analysis, I will attempt to challenge this empiricist and scientifized (re)presentation of “dis”ability, then reforming this “reality” as a piece of social constructivism that has been made inherent within and of the school, its curriculum, and its performances—as hinted above though more substantively dealt with in the following sections (Dudley-Marling, 2004).

“Dis”ability, madness, and sub/objectifying

In a preliminary note and critique, as Foucault uses the terms madness, hysteria, etc. to describe the signification of human “difference” within specific moments, the modern tongue progressivistically delineates such language as well. For instance, in our contemporary moment, the signifier, madness, has then already become defined as outside the progressivistic, rhetorical vocabulary (Freeden, 2009). Still, this modification of language is only ever masquerading as a way of humanizing folks with “dis”ability, when in reality the logics undergirding the turn to this specific terminology are much more insidious. In particular, we have the medicalization of the term “dis”ability, the psycho-socialization of the term, and the (de)subjectivization of “dis”abled folks.

What Foucault begins to discuss in Madness and Civilization is the medicalization of the ideal of disability, madness, and mental illness. From the end of the 19th century and to the turn of the 20th century, the field of psychiatry is in this process of validification—a process of scientifying the realm of psychiatry and psychology—the study of the mind as a behavioral measure. In other words, psychiatry as a field of understanding the human through the conceptualization of the mind as an instructive piece of flesh began substantively in the 20th century (Foucault, 2001 and Weheliye, 2014). However, within the realm of this scientification of the mind (transferring legitimacy away from the soul given Rationalism’s rupture) and towards some kind of empirical understanding of matter, incurs a necessary understanding of categorization, hierarchization, and comparison (Brewer, 2007; Cohen and Lefebvre, 2005). To put it another way, psychiatry, as scientific, is forced into the position of comparison and contrast such that the field must then define “normal”ities and ab“normal”ities—what is “natural” and “unnatural.” As the idealization of the human and the human body beca(o)me a piece of science, it not only medicalized and put outside such significations of humanity (within the significations), but it also made such determinations inherently social and of the human always already (Weheliye, 2014 and Hayes and Hannold, 2007). In contrast, with this idea of madness as outside of the social space of the human (nonhuman, irrational), the medicalization of the terminology of madness could then be deconstructed within a subversive regime of power defined as the human subject (Conrad, 1992 and Christensen, 2018). For instance, while in the realm of madness, the human was then defined as nonhuman, irrational, and sent away (exiled and ostracized outside the realm of the social) to remove them from the social spaces that were considered tenable for “proper” humans. However, with the terminological redetermination towards the “dis”abled, we have the field of psychiatry to subsume the reality of the mad, the conditioning of the mad, into a medicalized and empirical space (Braslow and Messac, 2018). Further, psychology and psychiatry are predefined as observational sciences of the human brain and behavior (Kaplan et al., 1994), and as such, the de(re)humanization of the mad are ways in which we could then (re)define/refine the sense of “normal”ity within “empiricized” sciences while maintaining a connection to the social as issuance of power and control. To medicalize the mad, the fields of psychiatry and psychology humanize and socialize the mad, understanding the mad as human within such a terminological determination, while doing so particularly within the realm of redefining “normal”ity of what it is to be human, thereby constantly recreating a hierarchy of humanity and sociality within seemingly concretized scientific and positivistic underpinnings (thus to compare what it is to be human and the realm of humanity, the fields of psychology and psychiatry inherently had to recast the mad as a piece of the social, definable as pieces of humanity although always already disrupted and desubjectivized through the scientific objectification of such humans—having the nonphysical or multiphysical, segregated spaces of the mad (the ever-new social) to then “deal with” the reified and empiricized aspects of the mad as scientific and for the “betterment” or normalizability of those deemed mad) (Rapley et al., 2011).

“At the same time all individuals' reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent upon them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only insofar as it is not actually real” (Debord, 2012). As the individual appears to be human, the fields of psychiatry and psychology could then subjectivize while desubjectivizing the idea of the “dis”abled—those with a “dis”order—something (one) that (who) could claim humanity and a sense of subjectivity only to come up against the realms of actual and full human existence (Burman, 1992 and Code, 2011). In turn, this (re)identification of the mad as constitutive of the human, psychiatry and the medical field broadly located—designed within a realist, empirical, and positivistic aspect—could then subversively (re)uphold “normal”izing apparatuses within the realm and idealizations of rationalism, deigning what could be a natural and fully human mind while contrasting such with a mind that would then be determined as “dis”abled (able to be determined human in particular ways yet unable to fully grasp what it means to be human, to fully act as human, and to fully participate within the human)—using nonphysical spaces of the social spectacle operationalized by the performances dictated within social environments and elsewhere to then teach and track particular students/indiviudals as normal and “ab”normalized.

Moreover, the irony with “dis”ability is the way in which the fields studying it had to first define such idealizations as within the human (the subject) while then dictating such differentiations as to (re)understand what “normal” humanity is and what it cannot be (defining empiricized “symptoms” of mental “dis”orders to then create the “dis”order wherein the “dis”ability as socially defined could then realize itself—thereby empowering and disempowering (creating realms of subjectivization while within the same sentence also classifying some subjects as being lesser abled to maintain the classification of the subjectivized))—always already having to be determined a subject by others around you that are taught to both interact and not interact with levels of (de)subjectivized “dis”abled folks through their own “educations” (Ewert, 2017; Scully, 2013). Foucault noted, “This community (the psychiatric and medicalizing) acquired an ethical power of segregation, which permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social uselessness” (2001: 58). Thus, “dis” abled folks exist within this in-between (this other world within the world)—definitionally they are constructed as of the social to dictate the realms of social usefulness in contrast to varying degrees of “dis”ability while simultaneously desubjectifying/objectifying the “dis”abled as outside the realm of the subject—an object of production (a material)—a perpetual commodity to be again and again manufactured and performatively designated in schools, medical offices, and on sidewalks (Keith and Keith, 2013).

“Normal”ity within the school as curriculum/performance

As we move into the school more explicitly within this critical exploration, we too have to (re)understand the space as one of scientific inquiry, constantly being (re)constructed, and necessarily performed (a performance of the social and the school that Foucault, Ellsworth, Butler and Anyon can bring together for us). For instance, beginning with this connection to scientific inquiry, the school (in our present moment and the recent past) has always already been understood as an ongoing experiment of the nation-state, of science and of efficiency (Katchergin, 2017). Perpetually within the realm of educational thought, we categorize the subjects found within the school (or rather we subjectivize through the process of categorizing) (Florian and McLaughlin, 2008). Thus, our scientifying realm of understanding and elaboration necessarily foundationalizes the concept of categorizing social phenomena and then coming to terms with those named differentiations (the process of thereby co-creating difference) and likenesses (also co-creating similarities) within observable and empirical data (Larina and Markina, 2020). The scientifying of educational studies and making inherent the logics of understanding the school from the realm of categorizations then co-constructs the identities that we then idealize as pieces (or rather constructions) of subjectivity, thereby negotiating a process of ever-partial subjectivizing individuals within the school—a performance foundationalized on signifiers and their significations. In other words, by co-creating the realms of “proper” and empirical subjectivity within and as a consequence of scientific programs (subjectivities that can then be understood and reified within and of research—subjectivities that could be articulated and spoken of) educational researchers-practitioners thereby negotiate explications of such subjectivities and identities, operating through observational data, stereotyping, generalizing, and commodifying in particular and ever-new ways delineated by the ever-newer empirical, scientific article; therefore, defining, redefining, and recreating performances, school spaces, and what can be measured as such becomes the spectacle/curriculum—in a constant reproduction of “dis”ability in light of ever-more progressive determinations that then dictate particular aspects of a changing curriculum and how students are then taught to take up space and not take up space, dependent upon the performative and diagnostic procedures of the spectacle within schooling and educational spaces (Sayers et al., 2011). The very realm of educational research and its fundamental practice, though not completely responsible for such a turn, inherently and currently presuppose ideas/performances of subjectivity and look for ways to realize and actualize such terms of humanity through their work that they then also co(re)-construct as “viable” constructions of particular subjectivities (the black girl in school, the “dis”abled toddler, and the hyperactive teen as a few of the countless examples) (Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992). Furthermore, in the attempt to understand phenomena that we consider empirical or natural of the social (something that I argue to be the construction of the social space and curricula themselves in their performativities informed by such thoughts—and a then “natural”izedable occurrence within the social), researchers and consequently practitioners thereby co-create the (pre)necessity of performance and the ironic gesture of educating through and of the performance/spectacle, such that teachers and other constitutive elements of the school (such as students and administrators) simultaneously embark on a mission of co-creating the performative subject/s while also then understanding the subject/s and student/s as a collection of such performances (whether real or manufactured) (Keddie, 2016).

Continuing, the conception of the “dis”abled as empirical and medicalizedable is then the primary performative and empirical understandings and (re)conceptualizations of the “normed” human rationality within the social space as a social space—the performance of “normal”ity and therefore ab“normal”ity are manufactured and “natural”ized within the school as such curricula is broadly defined by Anyon, Fiddler, and Thornton: a performance that is mandated by inscriptions of discipline, ostracizing, and concurrent performances of the deemed-“normal”/ab“normal” which demand performative and spectaclized responses (Fleming et al., 2017). To begin putting it yet another way, although Sainsbury to a particular point homogenizes and scientifies the experiences and social realities of those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (to take an example of a cognitive and social “dis”order) in some sections of her book, she explicitly speaks to the ostracizing of students with ASD, noting that they were less likely to be picked for teams, called upon in class, eat with other students during lunch, and be invited to social events outside the institutionalized space of the school (2009). Moreover, a study by Little in 2002 in particular, noted that students with ASD had a four times greater chance of experiencing bullying than their peers, while they also indicated that 90 percent of parents surveyed in the study reported that their child had experienced bullying during their time in schools. Further, the same study noted that the intensity of bullying in these situations reached another level of shunning and hostility, indicating that one in 10 students with ASD was the victim of a physical peer group attack (Little, 2002; Rieffe et al., 2012). With all of this in mind, the school and its broadly conceived of and enacted curriculum/performance/spectacle act as a space where “dis”ability is taught primarily through normative regimes of power and truth—such that the curricula is performance of the spectacle and vice versa. Thus, in ostracizing the student with ASD—either the teacher not calling upon them or their peers avoiding them within communal spaces—the school (the students, the teachers, the realms of logic both of and towards the school) abides a curriculum of imparting specific knowledges when thinking about students with “dis”abilities or such stain, thereby teaching what is “normal,” explaining strategies to enact regimes of “normal”ization, imparting a social lens of understanding made-inherent within the logics of exclusion, and demonstrating the performance/spectacle/curricular conditioning dictated by various parties within the school and beyond (“aiding” students/“dis”abled students in social interactions by (pre)defining “proper” realms of action, reality, identity, etc.) (Bailey and Mobley, 2019; Holt, 2007). Even more, as we go forward into this analysis with a deeper focus on what is being termed curriculum/performance, I should also note that these analyses are not meant to homogenize teachers, administrators, and/or students as implicated in the upholding of such determinations of performance, “dis”ability, and power; rather, I would like to use various studies in the field of “dis”ability studies to describe a systematic and curricular naturalization of “dis”ability as performance and performance as reality within the schooling space—leaving space also for the ever-newer performative and spectaclized performances of the empiricized schooling space that ever-segregate the “normal” and “abnormal” for reasons of (ob/de)subjectification (Debord, 2012).

Curriculum/performance of difference

Finally, I would like to take a constitutive moment to explain what I mean by the word curriculum in these contexts of the school, giving a bit more specific examples of how this kind of curriculurization takes place in educational spaces. By just dropping the word without guiding how to interpret the signifier, you have a particular vision of what I mean by curriculum, which is in and of itself a particular performative act of the “normal”izedable (Anyon, 1980 and Eisner, 1985). However, by using curriculum, I am pulling on critical pedagogy studies, relying on Anyon’s (Anyon, 1980) description of the hidden curriculum and Eisner’s (Eisner, 1985; Flinders et al., 1986) explication of the null curriculum. Thus, not only are we looking towards the actual teaching of various standards, (which also ignore speaking towards “dis”ability or even noting the many folks that “had” (necessarily noting the realist and materialist descriptions of contemporary teachings of history) such “dis”abilities) (Provenzo et al., 2011), not only are we speaking to the ways in which teachers act with students they know who “have” specific “dis”abilities, not only are we speaking to the ways in which the apparatuses of the social segregate those with “dis”ability and those deemed “normal,” not only are we coming to terms with how neurotypical and “abled” students are hailed to interact with neuro-atypical and “dis”abled students, but we are also looking towards such regimentations of power and interrelated subversive, curricular regimes of truth that co-construct what I have been and continue to term as school curriculum/performance in regards to the “dis”abled (placing the emphasis on the process of becoming a stagnating being who are then demanded to perform within this very space of the school) (Perryman, 2006).

The ab“normal”izing of a particularity—of lived experiences—occurs in a variety of ways in and out of particular schooling environments, but the two primary ways I would like to focus with in this piece are the segregation of deemed “normal”s/deemed ab“normal”s and the inequitable punishment of “dis”abled folks while also noting the correctional nature of teacher/student performances within such interactions. First, though there are many thoughts on the equitable and liberalistic nature of school segregation (i.e., noting the many ways that having various forms of education have been argued to better suit ab“normal”ized folks with “dis”abilities while also noting the inherently unequal character of school segregation), such ideas also need to be put into context with the inherent-curriculurization/performance of these kinds of segregation (de Bruin, 2019; Elder et al., 2019). In particular, the ways in which we construct this segregation is both made visible and invisible to a certain extent within the school—bringing back Foucualt’s implications of social usefulness and uselessness (both ab“normal”izing particular human experiences within the realm of the social while also maintaining the hegemony to make invisible again what is periodically brought to the surface). In other words, the segregation of students with varying human experiences and minds not only purports to ab“normal”ize (while touting its progressive nature), but it also harks to a bureaucratic and totalitarian control over the ways in which and the times in which those deemed ab“normal” may demonstrate/perform/learn their varying experiences with humanity in front of students broadly defined (as intimated and analyzed in Foucault’s work on madness and the L’hopital General—not beginning to mention the vast array of psychological traumas that also take place as a result of such perpetuated, situated, and demanded performance/curricula and made-reality of neuro-atypical and “dis”abled students that are necessarily ever-beyond analysis) (Handler, 2007).

Furthermore, we should also touch on the myriad ways in with teachers and other students control and correct students deemed ab“normal” within classrooms (punishment and discipline thereas defined)—when such “unthinkable” integration is allowed. “Dis”abled students are one the most institutionally punished populations while also being the population that experiences the most brutal forms of punishment within the school both sanctioned and unsanctioned (Kupchik and Alleyne, 2017 and Suarez, 2017). Moreover, not only should we note the institutionally recorded realms of punishment, correction, and control that are so easy to find within journal articles and interconnected statistical frames, but we should also realize the more subversive explications of power that are interplaying within the classroom. For instance, students with “dis”abilities are ignored more often by both the teacher and other students in classrooms when compared to students deemed neurotypical (Pavri and Luftig, 2001); students with “dis”abilities are often physically/emotionally/psychologically exiled from a “main” cohort of neurotypical/“abled” students in classroom spaces and otherwise (Holzbauer, 2008); students with “dis”abilities are significantly more likely to be considered less intelligent and less teachable by merely considering their diagnoses by teachers, fellow students, and administrators (Lalvani, 2015); etc. (of which the list of such performative/curricular and spectaclized acts seems perpetually re/de/constructed, such that once we end listing the ways in which the student deemed “abnormal” and “normal” are hailed to enact their thereby differentiated (de)subjectivities there are once more ever-newer ways and means in which such practices are called upon in these educational spaces that are found within and outside of the school).

Ultimately, how I would like to center this discussion of curricular transference is not the disciplining of students with “dis”abilities directly or even the inherently dehumanizing nature of segregated education, but rather, I would like these analyses again put into context with the process of curricularization/performance—the important place all of these phenomena hold when deconstructing the spaces within schools as they pertain to those deemed ab“normal.” In other words, I want to center what is taking place on varying levels of discourse and “real”ity: throughout the punishment of “dis”abled students, throughout the demanded performance of the “dis”abled and “able”d student (again placing emphasis on the ever-present process of becoming disabled), and throughout the segregating of students deemed “normal” and ab“normal” (dependent on location, gender, race, etc.). All of these and those that are ever-not listed are necessarily educative/performative processes always already defined within the school that not only redefine and define “ab”“normal”ity but also imbue such termifications of the spectacle and social realness (Perryman, 2006; Troman, 2008). Within these institutional codifications and the subversive regimes of power implicated within the treatment of those deemed “dis”abled outlined and noted above, the creation of a null, hidden, and explicit curriculum is taking place—a curriculum/performance with specific political, experiential, and power-ridden aspects. “Normal”ized students within the school and ab“normal”ized students within the same consciously differentiated social space are learning the made-inherent and ever-present made-inherent differentiations between neurotypicality and neuro-atypicality “dis”ability and ability—repeating performances/curricular lessons that uphold such social definitionings as intimated above in discipline and segregation as merely two examples—thereby creating not only a mass of bodies deemed neurotypical/abled students but also continuously (re)creating the regimes of mental, physical, psychological, cognitive, and emotional “normal”cy (Garland-Thompson, 2005). More explicitly, these processes are founded and found within schools (a particular social-institutional space) to simultaneously subjectivize students with “dis”abilities in certain ways (within certain codes) and to desubjectivize such students within the same sentence (as intimated above within the conversation of “dis”ability’s subsumption under psychiatry and psychology: deigning upon them such medicalized subjects/objects the ability to have human experiences only to ultimately demonstrate the limits of that human experience, signaling that there is a divide between deemed ab“normal” and deemed “normal” human experiences—attributing a value ethic to such a division in the process) (Mackessy, 2020 and Bansel, 2018). As Foucault argues the concept of madness with psychiatry and psychology:

“[this] Plunges man into a natural world that is immediately resumed in a social world . . . cast[ing] man into a void that dominates nature in a total absence of proportion and community, into the endlessly repeated nonexistence of gratification” (Foucault, 2001, pp. 283, 284).

In other words, the school participates in, co-creates, and substantiates the always already diminutive de (ob)subjectivization of students with “dis”abilities to create their socialized understanding of being “human,” while all the while constructing curriculums/performances that are both subversive and institutionalized that desubjectivize those deemed ab“normal (while also demanding their performances and others’ within the space to validify and thereby socialize and medicalize such differentiations) to maintain the idealization and privilege of “normal”ized performances/curricula of ever-increasing social human experience.

Conclusive remarks

The institution and regimentation of the school is “a machine geared toward the elimination of certain classes of human beings located at the interface of the human and the nonhuman, or the human, the commodity, the object” (Mbembe, 2019: 159). Using a unique conglomeration of performance studies, power studies and poststructural/anarchafeminist understandings of power, I have demonstrated ways in which the school as an institution and the school as a collection of regimes of truth within socials operate to construct a curriculum/performance of “dis”ability: an education including what “dis”ability can be defined as, how to perform “dis”ability, how to perform with people that are labeled “dis”abled, how to “correct” those performances if such social transgressions were to take place, how to organize our bodies in relation to the “dis”abled, etc. etc. (Goggin et al., 2017 and Cuthbert, 2015). Moreover, this necessarily socialized and performative curriculum demonstrates the ways in which our social reality and the socialization that we operate within goes to (re)define and reify the forms and bodies of the “dis”abled, illustrating in countless ways how the body—as a totality (beyond a mere Cartesian understanding that is separable or mitigatable)—can be manipulated as matter, socialized, naturalized, subjectivized, desubjectivized, and controlled simultaneously within the singularizable and multiplicitous space of the school only to then be called upon again and again in an ever-repeating fashion that perpetuates an ever-becoming of the “ab”“normal”ized deemed “ab”“normal” in ever-newer and ever-more “progressivistic” realms of (dis)/non/“understanding” (Albanesi, 2016; Chapple, 2019 and Davis, 1997). Ultimately, “dis”ability is something that we teach/perform/enact/act in our classrooms; it is a socially constructed definition of existence and nonexistence that is perpetually being redefined and reenacted; it is something that we construct/act/perform/curricularize in our schools every day; it is a curricular standard made ever-important in regards to the incommensurable amount of energy and resources put into segregating, punishing, not-teaching, ignoring, etc. the idealizations of the “dis”abled; and finally (though not finally), it dehumanizes/rehumanizes/unhumanizes/nonhumanizes particular folks in the approach of whatever the “real” might be within that continuous moment, in the never-ending commodification of the body/human, and in the constant (re)education of a “proper” “human”—thereby defined and simultaneously mutable.