Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the ways in which the biopolitics of disability in settler– colonial Australia is harnessed to maintain racialised population management regimes that are both gendered and gendering. The racialisation of internal population mangement regimes across white settler–colonial societies is well-established. The work of postcolonial theorists such as Fanon, Spivak and Chibber, alongside Indigenous scholars, has revealed both the historicity of settler–colonial population management techniques of Indigenous populations and their enmeshment through bourgeoning settler–colonial regimes of population stratification across time. Povinelli remarks that even though white settler– colonial nation states and their more recent national narratives of inclusive nationalism appear to delink from their past trajectories, once examined in closer detail, the spectral presence of past regimes continue their haunting with their continual duplicity in biotechniques and practices of racialisation. Nascent racialised discursive positions pivot around the historiography of settler–colonial eugenic imaginaries, albeit disguised under discourses of disparity, deprivation and dysfunction. Indigenous scholar Maggie Walters argues that the continuity of settler–colonial rule is made invisible through the population foci of Indigenous inequality, disadvantage and deviance. United States (US)-based disability scholars have argued, settler–colonial population management regimes in white settler societies are similarly grounded in white settler–colonial imaginaries of ablenationalism. The spectrality of settler–colonial ablenationalism was also hinged against the biopolitical techniques of disability population management. Strategies of enclosure and containment for internal disability population management were developed in concert with the enclosure and containment of Indigenous populations within the settler–colonial state. Moreover, eugenic genocidal practices of First Peoples and disabled peoples coincided with unique techniques of medicalisation, control and segregation.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Legacies of Institutionalisation: Disability, Law and Policy in the ‘Deinstitutionalised’ Community |
Editors | Claire Spivakovsky, Linda Steele, Penelope Weller |
Place of Publication | U.K. |
Publisher | Hart Publishing |
Pages | 116-126 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781509930746 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781509930739 |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Keywords
- Aboriginal Australians
- colonialism
- people with disabilities