The Maryland State Constitution enfranchises any person over the age of eighteen who has proven residency and registered to vote, though it specifies the General Assembly may "regulate or prohibit the right to vote of a person convicted of infamous or other serious crime or under care or guardianship for mental disability." In the same breath, the provision links criminality with mental disability by delineating an internal boundary between those who can and cannot take part in the project of representative government. The disenfranchisement of criminals and persons under guardianship are cited as specific exceptions to the franchise, yet these provisions are hardly exceptional. In 48 states, there is some restriction placed on persons convicted of criminal offenses. 1 In 39 states, there is some sort of restriction based on cognitive disability. 2 And, in most cases, these two forms of disenfranchisement are authorized or enacted within the same provision, if not — as in Maryland — within the very same sentence.

The exclusion from suffrage of criminals and "mentally disabled" persons was established primarily during the mid-nineteenth century, a period of tremendous political, economic, and social upheaval. In response to the problems secessionist movements posed, every state in the Union made substantial alterations to franchise restrictions. 3 Such restrictions, often referred to as civic disabilities, were shaped by changing conceptions of criminality, disability, and race during that period. Understanding the meaning of such disabilities and the ways in which they continue to define and maintain the racial boundaries of the American polity requires attention to the way lingering notions of disability, criminality, and race shape each other in concert.

Through a close reading of one particular moment in the history of Maryland's disenfranchisement provisions for any "person convicted of larceny or other infamous crime" and for "lunatics and persons non compos mentis," I show how these restrictions could buttress prevailing racial hierarchies. Delegates to Maryland's nineteenth century constitutional conventions explicitly understood disenfranchisement as a practice that managed the boundaries of full citizenship through the courts' power to determine criminal guilt and mental competence. In defining "exceptions" to the franchise, the delegates were additionally shoring up the increasingly unstable conception of whiteness. The figure of the "free negro" was persistently invoked to do this work, marked through criminality and insanity as civically disabled in order to both reduce the threat that s/he posed to the standing of white workers and to shore up the purity of whiteness itself as innocent, able, and fit to rule.

In so far as disenfranchisement is an instrument of racial oppression (and intersects with other forms of oppression), it continues to operate racially not just in spite of color-blind liberalism, but also precisely through its ability to disarm claims of racial animus. It is neither intentional nor accidental that U.S. jails and prisons have once again become Jim Crow asylums, filled primarily with persons of color, a shockingly high number of whom are mentally ill, and nearly all of whom are stripped of the vote. The openly racist, sexist, and ableist norms that drove the adoption of disenfranchisement in the nineteenth century continue to ground these exclusions to the vote, meaning that the ideal figure of the American citizen continues to be compulsorily white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied. To bring an end to this legacy of social and political hierarchization that remains in disenfranchisement provisions of all forms, we must, I argue, both remove all disenfranchisement provisions, effectively including the millions of persons who are currently stripped of their vote, but also move beyond the logic of inclusion, and rethink the vote itself, working to divest it as a location that finalizes, essentializes, and fixes the boundaries of the polity.

Part one of this paper places my analysis within the broader context of disability studies, and insists that understanding disenfranchisement as a "civic disability" itself underscores the limits of the social model of disability and requires that we turn instead to the model of "critical disabilities studies." The reason for this is made clear in part two, which sets the historical stage for my reading of the Maryland debates. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the ideas of blackness, criminality, and mental disability were brought into close connection, mutually supporting each other under a regime of biopolitics. Importantly, these three ideas required each other in order to make sense. Part three gives a limited reading of the debates of Maryland's 1864 Constitutional Convention, demonstrating how suffrage exclusions were central to the production of whiteness as civic ability, through the affinities described in part two. But more importantly, it shows how the production of this ability/disability pair was only possible through naturalizing contingent difference. The paper closes by questioning the dangerous assumptions that it could be possible, given such a history, to successfully identify the "proper" terms of exclusion or inclusion. Instead, I ask how we should think about "the vote" itself, and question the sufficiency of aggregative modes of democratic practice. These four parts move together to argue that both our politics and our analysis must embrace a critical "both/and" approach. This is true both with respect to the case at hand (the specific genealogy of disenfranchisement provisions in Maryland) and to the status of disability theory, moving beyond (rather than simply against) the social model.

As Brenda Brueggemann has succinctly noted, disability is so puzzling and yet also so powerful because, "Disability stabilizes most in its instability. The definition of disability always begins (and probably ends, too) in its ambiguity, in its indeterminate boundaries." 4 As will be seen below in my reading of the 1864 Debates of the Maryland Constitutional Convention, understanding disability in this way can help us understand how a seemingly stable white polity can be purchased through the instability of legal, judicial, and popular judgments about the limits of otherwise unstable designations of civic disability.

1. The (in)stability of disability and civil exclusion

Taking the fundamental instability of the normative order as an analytic starting point is characteristic of the critical disabilities studies movement, and other post-structuralist approaches to social and political practices. 5 As Robert McRuer puts it, this approach "emerges from cultural studies traditions that question the order of things, considering how and why it [the order of things] is constructed and naturalized; how it is embedded in complex economic, social, and cultural relations; and how it might be changed." 6

Critical disability studies emerged as a response to the shortcomings of the "social model" of disability which argued (counter to medical and biological accounts of disability) that, "it is society which disables people with impairments, and therefore any meaningful solution must be directed at social change rather than individual adjustment and rehabilitation." 7 The social model rests on the separation of the fact of "impairment," a defect of an organ or mechanism of the body, and the production of a "disability," the disadvantage caused by social organization that ignores impairments. 8 This distinction between a fact of "nature" and its social and cultural form is directly analogous to the sex/gender distinction, frequently embraced in structuralist and "second-wave" feminist accounts of gender. 9 From the point of view of the social model, "disability is not a medical or personal problem but a set of physical and social barriers that constrain, regulate and discriminate against people with impairments." 10 As such, disability is by definition a form of exclusion and unjust social oppression against persons who are impaired. 11

As Iris Young notes, the social model has been incredibly powerful for grounding the civil rights claims of disabled persons, "because it shifts attention on issues of justice for people with disabilities from the 'needs' of people with disabilities to others who assume that a certain background of structures and practices is given." 12 Proponents of the social model therefore have focused their attention on the institutions and practices that have systematically excluded impaired persons from cultural, social, and political life, demanding that such persons should be enabled through inclusion, dismantling both formal and informal barriers to participation in all spheres of life. This has manifested itself in a broad endorsement of political inclusion of multiple forms of difference, drawing on the work of political theorists who have described how political commitments of equality can easily ignore, suppress, and marginalize difference to construct a "political space" devoid of the very pluralism that defines humanity. 13

While the social model is surely correct to identify disability as a product of diverse social practices, it has nevertheless dangerously reified impairment as "some objective, transhistorical and transcultural entity which biomedicine accurately represents," according to Shelley Tremain. 14 In its very attempt to escape the determinism of medical and individualist models of disability, the social model's strict separation between impairment and disability subscribes to what Tremain calls a "realist ontology" that presumes that the descriptions of impairments are value-neutral, in order to ground the claims for inclusion made by persons disabled by social, political, and economic institutions and practices. But as Tremain notes, "it seems politically naïve to suggest that the term 'impairment' is value-neutral, that is, 'merely descriptive', as if there could ever be a description which was not also a prescription for the formulation of that to which it is claimed innocently to refer. Truth-discourses which purport to describe phenomena contribute to the construction of their objects." 15

The critical disability studies movement challenges the returns to essentialism that so have so often characterized progressive social movements, which insist upon the "biological," "natural," or "given" fact of difference as a ground for claiming greater social rights. Nevertheless, a critical-theoretical approach to disability does not deny the materiality of the world and of bodies, but instead notices how the materiality of the world is always already interpreted through discursive regimes of power/knowledge. As Tremain describes the "foundational" quality of "impairment" under the social model, "The testimonials, acts, and enactments of the disabled subject are performative insofar as the allegedly 'natural' impairment that they are purported to disclose, or manifest, has no existence prior to or apart from those very constitutive performances." 16

Drawing on Foucault's nominalism and Butler's account of performativity, this approach forces us to note that it is through discursive practices such as disenfranchisement that the meanings of lunacy, non compos mentis, idiocy, or mental impairment can be naturalized and fixed. At one level, the restriction of voting rights for mentally impaired persons is a paradigmatic case for the social model, showing precisely how an impairment (e.g. lunacy or idiocy) is transformed into a disability through formal exclusion (a specifically civic disability). At a deeper, level, however, the social model risks inscribing difference as fixed rather than contingent, or asserting lunacy or idiocy as natural facts rather than contingent deployments of power/knowledge.

If we accept the point of view of the social model, mental disability continues today to be produced in part by continuing exclusions for persons deemed mentally incompetent to vote, and as such, reveals the disenfranchisement of mentally impaired persons as a form of oppression. The social model thus pushes towards political inclusion, but it nevertheless fails to account for the ways in which impairments themselves are produced. From the point of view of the social model, the disenfranchisement of criminals and the mentally incompetent can be read as the moment when an impairment is converted into a disability. When constitutional delegates exclude these persons from the vote, they do so by identifying an essential character that marks them as lacking the ability to take part in government, marking them as impaired. This means that these impairments are not themselves produced, but instead are facts upon which disability is produced. This could lead us to claim that the delegates simply misidentified some persons as impaired who are not, just as they also misidentified all women, blacks, and foreigners as impaired. That is, the social model too easily displaces the difference it seeks to explain onto form of difference taken to be "natural." This would be to assume, just as the delegates did, that all the disenfranchise-able impairments are empirical and natural facts about persons.

This approach is insufficient because, as will become clear in my reading of the debates, each and every one of these possible "impairments" were themselves discursively produced concomitant with the civic "disability" of disenfranchisement. Insofar as the social model helps us to understand disenfranchisement as a disability separate from and laid out over an underlying empirical impairment, it also, however, leads us to understand a wide variety of political markers (criminality, race, gender, etc.) as impairments, and ascribes foundational and essential qualities to these categories as well—precisely what proponents of the social model sought to avoid in their critique of the medical/individual models of disability. 17 As Tremain puts it, "Impairment has been disability all along." 18

2. Figures of Dependency: Blackness/Criminality/Idiocy

While there has been increasing attention paid to disenfranchisement both of criminal offenders and of persons declared mentally incompetent (especially since the contested 2000 U.S. Presidential election), most of this attention has focused on either one exclusion or the other. The majority of accounts of the disenfranchisement of "mentally incompetent" persons have centered on the voting rights of the elderly, and this issue has been treated as either a medical 19 or legal question. 20 That there has been so little attention paid to the discursive connection between felon disenfranchisement and the disenfranchisement of "mentally incompetent" persons is surprising, not only because, as noted above, the exclusions frequently occur within the same sections of legal code, but also because the exclusion of one group is often used to defend the exclusion of the other. 21 For instance, in two lower-court decisions upholding disenfranchisement, the courts bolstered their rulings with explicit comparisons between the two groups. In Shepherd v. Trevino, the Fifth Circuit Court stated that: "A state properly has an interest in excluding from the franchise persons who have manifested a fundamental antipathy to the criminal laws of the state or of the nation by violating those laws sufficiently important to be classed as felonies. … Such persons have breached the social contract and, like insane persons, have raised questions about their ability to vote responsibly. 22 And in Kronlund v. Honstein, the U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia ruled that:

A State has an interest in preserving the integrity of her electoral process by removing from the process those persons with proven anti-social behavior whose behavior can be said to be destructive of society's aims. For this reason, a State may prohibit idiots and insane persons, as well as, those convicted of certain offenses from participating in her elections. A State may also legitimately be concerned that persons convicted of certain types of crimes may have a greater tendency to commit election offenses. 23

Alongside this juridical connection, it is worth noting that the highest rates of mental illness in the U.S. are found not inside hospitals, but inside jails and prisons. As state run mental institutions run out of funding, the criminal justice system has become the nation's de facto mental health institution. By 2006, more than half of the country's inmates had documented mental health issues. 24 A report issued by the National Sheriffs' Association in May 2010 stated that there are now "three times more seriously mentally ill persons in jails and prisons than in hospitals." 25 In Arizona and Nevada, the odds of a seriously mentally ill person being in jail versus a hospital are nine-to-one. 26 The Sheriff's report concluded that the U.S. is in the same place it was during the 1840s, when inadequate treatment of incarcerated mentally ill persons in jails and prisons helped launch a reform movement that established a state hospital system. 27

The suffrage restrictions put into place in the nineteenth century must be read through the increasingly tight nexus established between these terms, made possible by a dramatic redefinition of race through discourses of criminality and disability that occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our understandings of race, ability, and criminality are enabled by one another through a triangular relationship of meaning, in which the specific "threat" posed by disability and criminality were threats of racial degeneration. That these groups have been systematically marked for exclusion from the franchise is hardly surprising, given that they have each been figured as fundamentally and statically unable to care for themselves, to take part in collective rule, and to participate in self-government.

Over the nineteenth century, argues Ladelle McWhorter, the concept of "race" could transform from a marker of primarily morphological difference to one of biological difference by linking notions of phenotype to rapidly changing theories of disability and criminality. 28 In the process, whiteness itself could be established through the ruthless identification of all forms of abnormality as instances of "arrested development." On the account developed by French medical and psychiatric authorities in the early 1820s, "idiocy" was no longer considered a disease or illness, but instead reflected a stable and heritable lack of human development. 29 This notion made its way to the U.S. at least by the middle of the nineteenth century by way of American doctors and social reformers who studied in France and relied extensively on their authoritative accounts. 30 When Samuel Gridley Howe, a notable social reformer and strident abolitionist, delivered his report on "Idiocy" to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1848, he identified the French conceptions of idiocy as "under-development" as some of "the most acceptable definitions" available. His own definition went further, defining idiocy as "that condition of a human being in which, from some morbid cause in the bodily organization, the faculties and sentiments remain dormant or underdeveloped, so that the person is incapable of self-guidance, and of approaching that degree of knowledge usual with others of his age." 31 The key terms of his definition — relative age, underdevelopment, an incapacity for self-guidance, and some undetermined "morbid cause" — all indicate a person utterly dependent and incapable of rule over her or his own life. The bulk of Howe's report focused on how "morbid causes" of idiocy were heritable, markers of an "idiot's" parents "sins" against nature. 32 An individuals' arrested development was entirely transmittable, discernible in racial degeneration:

So a race of men, abusing the power of procreation, may rush on in the path of deterioration until, arrived at a certain point, a new principle develops itself, the procreating power is exhausted, and that part of the human family must perish, or regain its power by admixture with a less degenerate race. 33

By the end of the nineteenth century, the logic of arrested development and the dangers of hereditary pollution could be transposed to the bodies of morphologically raced individuals. 34 Development could vary both within and between human races, accounting for infinite variations among persons based on their relative degree of human faculties. As McWhorter puts it, "Racial difference was, essentially, developmental difference. Appearance was simply a manifestation of a development process. Members of 'lower' races and sub-races bore the stigma of arrested development just as criminals and mentally deficient individuals did." 35

The dubious link between cognitive disabilities and societal danger had been well established by the middle of the nineteenth century in Isaac Kerlin's definition of the moral idiot:

The degenerate offspring of an intemperate or otherwise offending parent. His cognitive disability involved impairment of the moral faculty … If not appropriately disciplined and trained, the moral idiot was likely to be a thief and a liar, an arsonist, and possibly even a murderer. 36

Or, as Howe put it, such persons were destined to be criminals because they lacked a fundamental ability to follow any law or prohibition, stemming from their arrested cognitive development. Moral idiocy was "that condition in which the sentiments, the conscience, the religious feeling, the love of neighbor, the sense of beauty, and the like, are so far dormant or underdeveloped, as to incapacitate the person from being a law unto himself, in any thing like the degree which is usual with others of his age. … Idiots of this character are not to be found in our almshouses, but they are often found in our prisons." 37 Such moral idiots were thus dangerous not only because they were certain to violate the law, but also because of the heritability of their "criminal" traits; they would pollute an otherwise healthy population with their "morbid conditions."

Statistical evidence was thought to easily "confirm" this relationship. As Charles Henderson argues shortly after the turn of the century:

There can be no doubt that one of the most serious factors in crime statistics is found in the conditions of the freedmen of African descent, both North and South. … The primary factor is racial inheritance, physical and mental inferiority, barbarian and slave ancestry and culture, "two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil" (Lincoln), sudden and unprepared change of economic and political status. 38

Any statistical difference in criminal rates between whites and blacks following the civil war was explainable through heritable "race traits" that marked Blacks as underdeveloped moral idiots, rather then, as W.E.B. Du Bois had noted, the dramatic change in the application of a criminal justice system to a population that had previously been "policed" through the slave system. 39 The link between crime and blackness that had been supported largely by popular conception up until reconstruction, could now be "demonstrated" by statistical evidence, effectively "writing race into crime," as Khalil Muhammad has described it, making, "blackness … a more stable racial category in opposition to whiteness through racial criminalization." 40

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, by various techniques and modes of knowledge, criminality, disability, and blackness were drawn together in mutually supportive discourses. Indeed, these three groups were mutually implicated as fundamentally dependent, but in a way that also always sought to manage whiteness as an unstable category of superiority and privilege. As developmentally arrested, and therefore naturally non-autonomous, persons marked as criminal, idiotic, or black were assumed to be unable to work or even think independently, and therefore could not take part in the practice of self-government. This is the point that Howe insists upon in noting the absurdity of allowing "idiots" near the ballot box:

The persons put down in this report, as simpletons … are persons the highest of whome should be considered unable to take any responsibility, to contract matrimony, or to vote. … Several cases have occurred where the taxes were paid for simpletons, and they voted—until the opposite party showed that they had a greater number of fools whom they could qualify and bring to the polls, and then the poor creatures, who had been used to violate the purity of the ballot and to defraud an election, were thrown aside in contempt. 41

These "poor creatures" could be identified as permanent children by virtue of their arrested development, and therefore fit paternal rather than political forms of rule. Twenty years after Kerlin introduced his theory of "moral idiocy," he revised it as a "radically incurable" condition of "juvenile insanity" 42

To demonstrate how these tightly knit discourses of race, crime, and disability have been deployed to shore up the boundaries of the polity, I turn to the recorded debates of the 1864 Constitutional Convention in Maryland as an exemplary instance to observe how the figures of permanent and incurable criminality and lunacy were embedded rhetorically in the body of the "free negro," justifying a continuation of paternalistic and despotical rule. The delegates who drafted, debated, and adopted these qualifications and exclusions to the franchise were self-consciously deliberating on the notions of rule and equality. In this sense, I read the debates rhetorically rather than definitively, and discursively rather than determinatively. 43 In what follows, I offer a representative sampling of these debates that focuses on the internal logic of two "problems" faced by the delegates who drafted the 1864 Constitution for Maryland: the problem of the elective franchise and the problem of "free negroes" in the state following emancipation. While the delegates treated these two problems separately, they mutually informed each other, and ultimately shed light on how white citizenship could be stabilized as capable through the figures of criminality, blackness, and disability. The delegates, in restricting the franchise simultaneously through a series of uncontested qualifications and a set of specific disqualifications, produced the very categories of (dis)qualification that could negatively define their own subjectivities. In so far as forms of these disqualifications continue to exist today in disenfranchisement provisions, they necessarily force us to reckon with the continuing work of these exclusions in producing and maintaining the normal American citizen.

3. Maryland's 1864 debates concerning suffrage exclusions.

None other than Alexis de Tocqueville praised Maryland for their early embrace of "universal" suffrage by 1810, when the state dropped its stiff property requirement, limiting suffrage to "every free white male Citizen of this State above twenty-one yeas of age" who could establish their residency. 44 The Constitution of 1851 retained these qualifications, but for the first time identified a pair of exclusions to the elective franchise, permanently stripping the voting rights of any person "convicted of larceny or other infamous crime, unless he shall be pardoned by the Executive." The same section further held that no persons "under guardianship as a lunatic or as a person non compos mentis" would be allowed to vote. 45 While the 1864 Constitutional Convention was notable for abolishing slavery in Maryland, the delegates never considered extending the franchise to women or non-whites: the words "male" and "white" both remained in the 1867 Constitution as well, and were not formally removed from the constitution until 1971 46 (as the 15th and 19th Amendments to the US Constitution were assumed to have modified these terms). 47

The major restriction of the franchise introduced in 1864, however, focused squarely on the Civil War. All persons who had served in the "so-called Confederate States of America" or who had given "aid, comfort, countenance or support to those engaged in hostility to the United States" were stripped of the vote. Election judges were empowered to demand that any prospective voter swear under oath that he had always been loyal to the Union. The only substantive alteration to the elective franchise made in the subsequent 1867 Constitution was to remove this provision, which had effectively disenfranchised most Democrats. 48

The exclusion of rebels, criminals and "lunatics" adopted in 1864 was based on the qualification for voting that had remained unchanged since 1810. The debates centered on new exceptions that would be applied to persons already otherwise qualified to vote: free, white, male, residents of the State who were twenty-one or older. For each exception, delegates produced a knowledge of "stable" markers that fixed unflattering race and gender characteristics to rebels, criminals, and "lunatics" that could demonstrate such a potential voter's incapacity to take part in collective self-government, privileging the capacity of a male, mentally "able," white citizen with the authority to judge over his own life and thereby the life of the polity.

4. "Crippin'" the voting booth? 62

At one level, the "problem" of disenfranchisement captured in the 1864 debates and which continues to plague us today is that it has been applied inappropriately, excluding persons from full political membership who should not have been excluded. Without doubt, as restrictions against women and non-whites have been removed and the scope of disenfranchisement of criminals or mentally disabled persons have been "modernized," we have moved closer to some notion of "universal" suffrage. But in so far as the project of suffrage continues to focus on expanding the rights and obligations of citizenship to the right persons, the logic of exclusion persists, and the work of subject-formation performed by suffrage proceeds without being fully interrogated. If we are to move beyond treating disenfranchisement as this variety of "problem," then we must be willing not only to move past it, but also to recognize the limits of inclusion. Inclusion, even in an extreme form that draws no boundaries whatsoever on who is allowed to vote, is necessary but insufficient to address the deeper problem revealed by the 1864 debates in Maryland: an overarching desire to fix and stabilize identities in the name of producing a community of equals who are fit to rule over themselves and others. In so far as restrictions on the franchise and the franchise itself support the construction of an idealized and normal citizen, and given the particular history of the franchise in the U.S., we might ask to what extent the "normal" and "ideal" citizen continue to be figured as white, innocent, and able-bodied today.

The true challenge presented by disenfranchisement is to not simply expand the boundaries of the polity by extending the right to vote to all, but to ask why suffrage so effectively does the work of normalizing, fixing, and stabilizing political activity itself. Lennard Davis has shown how the concept of the "normal" emerged during the nineteenth century in part as a solution to resolve what he calls the "paradox of representation" in democratic regimes. 63 Representation assumes both a set of unique individuals and a collective body that can be represented, and the concept of the norm was able to bridge this gap, allowing a group of otherwise different persons to be aggregated and collapsed into a unitary collective projected as a "normal citizen." Voting, therefore, enables us to signify the collective by "representing" what is "normal," rather than a plurality of individual variations. As a result, Davis argues, "Representative democracy is normalcy, or, to try a neologism, normocracy." 64 Such a political constitution would be predicated on the fungibility of human bodies, on the interchangeability of able-bodied citizens that necessarily suppresses difference even as difference is expressly included in the polity.

Disenfranchisement, it must be remembered, is the exclusion of those who would otherwise have be included in the polity, whose full "citizenship" was assumed until they were otherwise deemed to have deviated too far from the norm to be permitted the franchise. Consequently, as the base qualifications for full citizenship have been extended to include non-whites and women, the usage of disenfranchisement has become more important in maintaining the representable normal citizen. Even if barriers to the vote continue to fall, there is no automatic reason to assume that suffrage will not continue to do this normalizing work, demanding that variation be reduced to simplified choices. "In the midst of this system," Davis notes, "the person with disabilities is only one casualty among many. Under normalcy, no one is or can be normal, just as no one is or can be equal." 65 I would readily add "the criminal/felon" to the list of casualties, not simply because this figure is similarly situated as the "disabled," but also because these figures are so often one and the same.

It is telling that Iris Young's own defense of inclusion entails a move away from aggregative theories of democracy. We must instead, she insists, reshape the kind of democratic practices that we engage in. Her critique of aggregative theories of democracy implies that inclusion is only a prior condition of a mode of politics that looks less expectantly at the ballot-box for answers. 66 Not surprisingly, Young endorses a "both/and" position toward the social model of disability and a critical disability studies approach that challenges presumptions of fixed bodily identity. "I would propose," she writes, "that the assertion of a 'postmodern' approach to disability studies not be concerned as a displacement of the social model of disability…. The social model of disability seems necessary for activists to maintain in their arguments with employers, educators, legislators, and judges." 67 But we should also embrace a "skeptical attitude towards any assumptions about persons positioned as disabled as obvious or given, and a determination to fashion a genealogy of such assumptions that will change the way we all look at the social constraints and particular capacities of many people relatively ignored in theories of subjectivity." 68

We must therefore be skeptical of the idea that by simply removing the barriers to the right to vote that continue to plague the U.S., we will also move beyond the notions of criminality and ability that underlie and continue to enforce such barriers. We must confront a political moment in which the radical inclusion of the voices of those precisely thought to have been unfit and unable becomes an opportunity to engage in new political deliberations, overturning fixed notions of subjectivity and ability. The point of including radical forms of difference must never be to suppress, normalize, or marginalize that difference yet again, but to have a kind of inclusion without aggregation or norm, a plurality within political subjects, refusing to allow oneself or others to be fixed or stabilized.

Instead, we should engage in political practice with an eye toward communication with others who are differently situated, even radically so, not for the limited sake of arriving at a consensus or aggregate decision, but instead to open ourselves (even dangerously) to the wonder of new possibilities and instabilities. As Young puts it:

A respectful stance of wonder toward other people is one of openness across, awaiting new insight about their needs, interests, perceptions, or values. Wonder also means being able to see one's own position, assumptions, perspectives as strange, because it has been put in relation to others. … I cannot assume that because last week I understood her standpoint, I can do so today. Respectful listening thus involves attentive and interested questioning. But answers are always gifts. The transcendence of the other person always means that she can remain silent, or tell only part of her story, for her own reasons. 69

Inclusion is necessary but insufficient for this kind of politics. More than simply including others (be they criminals, mentally impaired, or even children and "foreigners") in the right to vote, we must also redirect our politics toward meaningful, respectful, and wondrous engagement with others, precisely if we wish to address systemic injustice, and recognize the dangers of relying on narratives of "fixed" and "given" basic structures of political life.

What we should know by now at least, is that when we note the struggles for certainty that plagued even the delegates to the 1864 convention, we are often not far enough away from them, continuing to ground and fix assumptions of the reasonableness, the goodness, and the able-ness of our selves in order to solidify untenable positions of superiority that deny our own differences and vulnerabilities, our own rebelliousness and criminality, our own impairments and disabilities, and our own practices and selves.