Michael Rembis's edited book Disabling Domesticity covers a breadth of issues surrounding disability, domestic labor, care relations, support networks, and interdependence through a disability studies lens. While focusing on the particularities of disability oppression and resistance in the United States and Canada, the book aims, as Rembis explains in the introduction, to transform Global North conceptions of domesticity. The scope of disciplinary backgrounds of the contributors, which include History, Architecture, Family Studies, English, and Women's and Gender Studies, make for an engaging range of analyses informed by feminist, crip, queer, and critical race theory and which recognize "that the subversive potential of disability and disabled experiences must always be measured dialectically in relation to their own shifting materiality and to the social structures and societal forces that shape them" (p. 6). The book names as its goals creating politicized and intersectional theoretical analyses of heteronormative and ableist constructions of domestic life and centering the lived experiences of disabled people, advancing a conceptual and practical shift from "the independent living movement [to] the interdependent living movement" (p. 8). The book is divided into three sections, with the first organized thematically around the idea of "home," followed by sections on "care" and "family." For the sake of space, I discuss in greater detail a few chapters that, to my mind, offer particularly salient insights grounded in critical disability theory and compellingly advance the collection's aims.
The chapters in Part 1 center around how disability, class, and gender inform notions of "home" as architectural (Tauke & Smith), ideological, discursive, and cultural space. Jennifer Thorn uses literary analysis of Mary L. Day's 19th century memoirs Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl and The World As I Have Found It to suggest the value of narrative in historical recovery work that challenges classed and gendered notions of childhood, disability, and domesticity. Andrew Marcum's chapter in this section provides a cogent discussion of how the construction of the American "dream home" as a nondisabled, heteronormative space has informed disability history and the disability rights movement. The ideological construction of ideas of "fitness" and "health" as white and non-disabled plays out in discourses that write non-white and cognitively disabled people as threats to families and neighborhoods. Rejecting the institutional settings that the disability rights movement has long challenged and proliferating segregated "intentional community" settings, Marcum emphasizes the need to challenge a political economy that facilitates housing segregated by race, class, and ability and fight for accessible housing that promotes "access to home and community for people with disabilities" (p. 106). Laura Micheletti Puaca details the little discussed history of the rehabilitation of disabled homemakers in the post-World War II period. The chapter suggests that these efforts both reinforced racialized, classed, and gendered notions of domesticity and able-bodiedness and challenged them, namely through the insistence by vocational rehabilitationists on recognizing housework as labor.
Part 2, "Care," presents analyses of disability in relation to care labor, citizenship, the state, and sexuality. Laura Mauldin draws on science and technology studies to consider how technological development (re)shapes experiences of disability and the labor of caregiving. Grace Chang's chapter offers a much-needed discussion of the exploitation of care workers— largely poor immigrant women of color— and the exploitation and abuse of disabled people, as both receivers of care and through sub-minimum wage employment. Chang explicates some of the political tensions between care workers and disabled people who use support services in the U.S. Consequent of the exploitation of disabled people's labor and inadequate state expenditures for support services, Chang notes, some disability rights activists have argued that raising the wages of home care workers beyond current poverty wages threatens community-based living by surpassing the cost of institutional settings. Drawing on interviews with care workers and disability rights activists, Chang suggests that— while the capitalist state pits the interests of people with disabilities and immigrant women of color care workers against each other— similar ideologies, policies, and structures render their oppression and exploitation possible. Their construction as non-workers and non-citizens, for example, has justified both groups' exclusion from the Fair Labor Standards Act and other labor protections. Without denying the very real political tensions that have arisen between these groups within the capitalist state, Chang points to uneasy yet hopeful alliances that have formed— such as unions of personal care workers that have fought to close institutions— to suggest space for further alliance in future organizing around care, work, and citizenship. These coalitions and connections seem particularly pressing considering how the precarious and debilitating conditions under which immigrant women of color live and labor produce an uneven topography of disablement along lines of race, nation, gender, and sexuality. Les Gallo-Silver, David Bimbi, and Michael Rembis highlight the lack of privacy and self-determination experienced by queer and transgender people with attendant care dependent mobility disabilities, emphasizing that state and home care companies often repress sexual expression and prohibit sexual activity. Katie Aubrecht and Janice Keefe's chapter analyzes interviews with adults living in nursing homes to reveal how assumptions about dementia in nursing homes reveal a social order legitimized by notions of "reason" and "rationality" ascribed to recognize personhood or deny autonomy.
The third and final section, "Home," challenges dominant understandings of home life through discussions of disabled parenting, pathologizing psychological frameworks, raced and classed notions of motherhood, and compulsory able-bodiedness and heterosexuality in the family unit. Kelly Fritsch details how dominant discourses of disabled mothering reinforce conceptions of disability as an individual burden to be overcome by inclusion through conformity to gendered, neoliberal forms of parenting, erasing the political and relational barriers to disabled parenting imposed by the capitalist state. Expanding on experiences of disabled mothering, Allyson Day's chapter offers a thought-provoking comparative analysis of two women's HIV memoirs, highlighting how motherhood is differently mobilized within personal narratives to reinforce or contest deeply racialized, classed, and gendered logics of the deserving/undeserving disabled. Day considers the different effects and political interventions achieved by the distinct orientations toward labor evidenced in the two women's writing. Drawing on critical race theory— an analytic lens notably lacking in several of the collection's chapters— Day foregrounds how racism shapes dominant notions of motherhood and femininity, and how these intersecting axes of identity situate one within the capitalist structure. Jeffry J. Iovannone's chapter stands out in offering a discussion of colonial violence through literary analysis that explicates how "queer, disabled, and traumatized characters transform domestic spaces" (p. 283). Priya Lalvani turns to critical psychology to challenge clinical psychology's legacy of reinforcing raced notions of "functional" and "healthy" families as heteronormative and non-disabled, a theme taken up by Zachary A. Richter. In the closing chapter, Richter suggests that "resistant practices of autistic subjectivity" disrupt the normative heteropatriarchal family, emphasizing the role of charities, behavioral psychology, and educational institutions in reproducing compulsory able-bodiedness, or the presumed superiority of able-bodiedness and concomitant punishment for failure to achieve able-bodied norms (p. 336).
Taken together, this collection offers original contributions to the field of disability studies, expanding the scope of disability theory and making interventions informed by the work disabled activists and scholars in a number of other fields. True to the aims professed in the introduction, the well-researched contributions contest the capitalist state's reduction of disability to a private or individual medical issue and push readers to rethink dominant notions of domesticity.
