ABSTRACT
As the title suggests, Tanya Titchkosky’s article, which opens this special issue, is all about “The Ends of the Body.” More specifically, the article critiques the ways in which disability, in particular, is always and everywhere made to figure “the end.” “An array of cultural processes,” Titchkosky insists, “make ‘disability’ represent limit without possibility. Disability is made to serve as a signifier of an end without appreciable difference and without future” (Titchkosky this issue, 82). Titchkosky brings forward the “eugenicist orientation” (87) of Peter Singer to exemplify these cultural processes, not only as that orientation is legible in Singer’s well-known, highly-public questioning of the value of disabled lives (especially the lives of disabled infants, whom he suggests might be better off dead), but also in his 2008 New York Times obituary for Harriet McBryde Johnson, the disability activist and disability rights lawyer who repeatedly challenged his views, sometimes in an open debate. Titchkosky notes that Singer’s obituary for Johnson focuses on an incident about which he “thought nothing”—a moment when Johnson asked for assistance at a dinner because her elbow had slipped out from under her and she needed help bringing it back to the table. Titchkosky argues that to “think nothing” of the moment was, for Singer, to do little more than reaffirm the “functionalist reduction” (87) that animates his oeuvre in general: disability signifies, conclusively, the end of “normal” or appropriate functionality; given that conclusion, disabled lives (or at least the lives of disabled infants) should perhaps be brought to an end; and that, for Singer, is the end of the issue. Given his consent to the myriad of cultural forces that mark the end of disability and disability as end, Singer is free—or, rather, able—to think nothing of what Titchkosky calls “differing conceptions of disability” (87), conceptions that might value intersubjectivity or trans-corporeality. 1
