ABSTRACT
While we agree with the critique of nuance theory in feminist analyses that ignore the real experiences of black women, we argue that CRF scholars deploy a similar analytical tactic through their unconscious non-analysis of disability as it intersects with race, class, and gender oppression. Disability, like race, offers not just a “nuance” to any analysis of difference. For example, one could argue that the outrage emanating from a heaving, black body wielding a knife sent a nervous (and racist) police officer into panic when confronted by his own racialized terror of otherness. But what about the other ideological terrors that loomed large in this encounter? Could the perception of Eleanor Bumpurs as a dangerous, obese, irrational, black woman also have contributed to her construction as criminally “insane” (disability) because her reaction to a “mere” legal mat-
ter of eviction (class) was murderous rage? And did our socially sanctioned fears of the mentally ill and our social devaluation of disabled (arthritic and elderly) bodies of color justify the volley of shots fired almost instinctively to protect the public from the deviant, the dangerous, and the disposable? We, therefore, argue that in the violent annihilation of Eleanor Bumpurs’s being, disability as it intersects with race, class, and gender served more than just a “context” or “magnifier” to analyze the oppressive conditions that caused this murder.
