In May 2014,
Toronto city councillor and recent mayoral candidate Doug Ford attended a
resident’s meeting to discuss the emergence of The Griffin Centre, a home for
autistic children in Toronto. Many of
the residents were angry that the home opened, and according to news reports,
were quoted as saying, “This is not a place for mental people. This is a
residential area” and “This is a community for people, not for that.” Doug Ford,
further, added to the turmoil by telling Griffin Centre staff that they had
“ruined the community.” (Shephard, 2014).
Utilizing
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s (1997) assertion that a poststructuralist
apprehension of “the complexity of social power relations can readily transfer
to analysis of disability” (p.20) and specifically the importance of Michel
Foucault’s biopolitical considerations of “the population as a political
problem” (Foucault, 1976, p.245) this paper will address the recent
disqualification of so-called non-people by Toronto community members (and
councillors alike) to question how human value is articulated, both in public
forums and the media.
Specifically,
this paper will demonstrate that “discourse transmits and produces power” for
it to seem acceptable for city residents and councillors to publicly
discriminate against mentally challenged children but also the local media’s
outraged reaction to this event also “exposes it, renders it fragile and makes
it possible to thwart it” (Foucault, 1978, p.101). In conclusion, this paper
will argue this recent highly publicized event provides a larger paradigmatic
model to apprehend ability and disability and conceive of who count as people
or what counts as human in contemporary Toronto.
Colin Barnes’s (1992)
work on the cultural and philosophical foundations of disability discrimination
argues that Social Darwinism has an “understandable appeal to a society
dominated by a relatively small elite of property-owning, ‘rational’
individuals” (Barnes, 1992). If concepts of natural selection can be applied to
human societies and the social domain, at least in the perpetuation of
favourable human traits, it seems that “a relatively small elite of
property-owning, ‘rational’ individuals” in Etobicoke (a former Toronto
municipality) vehemently expressed the desire deselect developmentally disabled
children from their community in order to sustain an imagined sense of
residential order and, moreover, categorize autistic teenagers as socially
invalid. Irrespective of Doug Ford’s mediated involvement in the fracas (as a
councillor seeking municipal election) and his subsequent comment about a
community being ruined (stated as an opportunistic attempt to appeal to
potential voters) Etobicoke community members clearly discriminated between two
types of people, the us and the them, the acceptable and the unacceptable or
more specifically people and non-people.
Michel Foucault
argues that individualizing categories of people acts to maintain power
relations and, moreover, Foucault (1977) also states, “the child is more individualized than the
adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent
more than the normal and the non-delinquent,” (p.193). Therefore, developmentally
disabled potentially delinquent children in
professional care have the capacity to be more individualized than others.
Furthermore, leading Disability Studies scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson
(1997) claims “the complexity of social power relations can readily transfer to
analysis of disability” (p.20) in the sense that Foucault (1977) establishes
that “discipline makes individuals” (p.170) and the power of normalization (as
a disciplinary technique) individualizes by measuring the differences between
those deemed to be so-called normal and abnormal and subsequently qualifying
“membership in the homogenous social body,” (p.184) which the Etobicoke
community, in particular, demonstrated by disqualifying individuals with
disabilities from their homogenous social body and categorizing them as
abnormal, “mental” or even “non-persons” (Shephard, 2014). Consequently, if power holds over the life of
living beings and biopolitics deals with the problematic elements in a human
population, not only through disciplinary techniques of individualizing but
also regularizing populations accordingly, (Foucault, 1976) these two
techniques of biopolitical power, discipline and regulation, both function
through the application of norms because, “the norm is something that can be
applied to the body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to
regularize” (Foucault, 1976, p.253). Therefore, the vocal pronouncement (or
application) of desired norms (“this is a community for people”) and undesired
abnormalities (“this is not a place for mental people”) at an Etobicoke
meeting, then, functions to discipline developmentally disabled individuals (by
individualizing them as “mental” and dividing them from the so-called “non-mental”
community members) and also thereafter regularize a local Toronto community
population. The following desire to regularize an Etobicoke community according
to its resident’s wishes, then, provides the basis for an application of
preferred location specific norms, which provide the basis for, what linguistics
scholar Ruth Wodak (2004) calls, an “us and them discursive strategy “or the “the
positive self and the negative other presentation” (p.207) that make it seem
acceptable (at least to those in the meeting) to discriminate against (or
discipline) autistic children.
However,
if a thorough analysis of individualizing the developmental disabled and their
subsequent subjugation (in Etobicoke) is provided by a Foucauldian apprehension
of the complexity of power relations it is first important to conceive, as Foucault
(1978) articulates, that “power is not an institution nor a structure,” whether
it is the institution of Etobicoke residents or the structure of the city
municipality but instead “a complex strategical situation in a particular
society,” (p.93) which in this case is the discursive strategy of transmitting,
sustaining and justifying specific power relations by publicly declaring
specific individuals (with disabilities) as having less value than others (who
do not).
For statements
like “This is not a place for mental people. This is a residential area” and “This
is a community for people, not for that.” (Shephard, 2014) to be articulated in
a public space in order to potentially discipline individuals and regularize
populations it is apparent that “discourse transmits and produces power”
(Foucault, 1978, p.101). Furthermore, as Stuart Hall (1997) argues, individuals
are subjected to discourse or “thus become its subjects by subjecting ourselves
to its meanings, power and regulation” so that “all discourses, then construct
subject-positions” (p.80). Thus, the construction of mental people or so-called
non-persons who don’t belong in communities as subjects of knowledge, then,
provides a clear definition what philosopher Ian Hacking (2002) calls “making up
people.” Consequently, as Hacking argues, the process of naming (only one
element in a Foucauldian constitution of subjects) to make people up provides
“a particular medico-forensic political language of individual and social
control” (p.104) because as subjects of knowledge “who we are is not only what
we did, do, and will do but also what we might have done and may do” (p.107).
Thus, developmentally disabled teenagers at The Griffin Centre were categorized
as potentially dangerous autistic children because of what has been done (there
were visits to the centre by the emergency services (Shephard, 2014) and also
what they may do, because they are constructed as subjects of knowledge or
“made up” as mental non-persons (in a public meeting) who pose an imagined
threat to Etobicoke community residents.
Moreover, Charles
E. Rosenberg, a historian of medicine, submits that medicalized categorization
or diagnosis, which includes the diagnosis of autism, can be tyrannical,
especially when it is used “to perform the cultural work of enforcing norms”
and define and manage social deviance and subsequently engender “fitting
idiosyncratic human beings into constructed and constricting ideal-typical
patterns” (Rosenberg, 2002, p.251). The tyranny of diagnosis seemingly enforced
on the teenage autistic residents of The Griffin Centre (as social deviants),
then, is also compounded by the fact that not only is autism conceived as a
problematic social category (in a community meeting) but also that adolescents
are often also reified as “a homogenous, problematic and potentially
pathological group.” (Ortega and Choudry, 2011, p.329). Therefore, despite being discursively
categorized as mental people or non-people that don’t belong in certain Toronto
municipalities the children at The Griffin Centre are also constructed as
problematic social subjects according to how both autism and adolescence is
sometimes conceived as socially dangerous and then subsequently negotiated as
such in knowledge, which, thus, contributes to their discursive construction as
humans with less value.
As Stuart Hall
(1997) argues, when detailing the Foucauldian constitution of subjects
“discourse produces subjects – figures who personify particular forms of knowledge”
(p.80) and if autistic and adolescent figures are personified as problematic
individuals, both with the process of naming and the associations of naming,
the adolescent and the autistic or the mental or the non-person are subjected to
its constructed meanings, (of social deviance) subsequently disciplined (in a
public meeting) and regulated accordingly (through categorization).
However, despite
the apparent power differentials between a community group, their
discriminatory discursive strategies and the subjugated children, who have been
individualized as unwanted social deviants, this recent social event also
demonstrates, as Foucault argues, that discourse does not transmit a consummate
application of power. For discourse can also be “a hindrance, a stumbling
block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy,”
(Foucault, 1978, p.101) because this social event also generated an indignant mediated
response, both to the “spectacle of intolerance” evident at the public meeting
and particularly the “inappropriate, deeply offensive and unforgiveable”
comments made by Doug Ford (Hume, 2014). In fact Doug Ford was also
subsequently singled out in the public domain as a public figure that should
have known not to discriminate against autistic teenagers. This affronted
process of selection was prompted both by a Scarborough father of an autistic
child who suggested the “unbecoming” Ford should “apologize, take sensitivity training
and, ultimately, resign” (Armstrong, 2014) and later by a student with
Asperger’s syndrome, (which is on the autism disorder spectrum) who questioned
Ford on the Mayoral campaign trail to ask why he “reduced people like me to
animals and common criminals” and does not explain himself or apologize (Spurr,
2014). Nevertheless, despite Doug Ford’s high profile and problematic
involvement in this event and the media's tendency to focus on Ford as the main culprit in an instance of public disability discrimination, when
most of the more discriminatory statements were made by
Etobicoke community members, a collective mediated response appeared to counter the comments made in the
meeting, which could, as Foucault (1978) argues, function to undermine the original
discursive strategy, that “exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible
to thwart it.” (p.101). The Toronto
Star, for example, described the event as “ugly as it was ignorant” (Hume, 2014),
former Canadian politician Bob Rae stated that “this is opposite of leadership
on mental health” (Jones, 2014) and current Toronto mayor John Tory (then
unelected) designated the incident “deeply regrettable and from another age”
(Moore, 2014).
In conclusion,
what this highly publicized social event demonstrates is that despite community
rhetoric that publically disqualifies particular kinds of people and a mediated
counter rhetoric that opposes the disqualification, the linguistic elements at
play reveal a larger paradigmatic model (of the use of terms, social divisions
and oppositional rhetorics) to apprehend ability and disability and conceive of
who count as people or what counts as human or even non-human in contemporary
Toronto. Consequently, as Foucault (1978)
argues, “we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted
discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the
dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that come into play
in various strategies,” (p.101) because power is exercised at multiple points
to also include “a plurality of resistances” (p.96). According to the Toronto Star this
unfortunate incident may have “made Torontonians cringe” (Hume, 2014) but if
what counts as human in contemporary Toronto relies on the play of multiple publicized
discursive strategies we should constantly pay attention to who is being
disciplined and regulated, so-called people and non-people alike, what subject-
positions are constructed, why are certain names being used, how are they
opposed and for what end, and fundamentally “explain what people are actually
doing with language when they speak to each other,” (Billig, 2009, p.162) so
that processes of social control and categories of human worth are unveiled, which
are seemingly disguised by the illusion that language is transparent. Furthermore,
only by unveiling “ugly and ignorant” discursive processes of categorization,
like these, for what they are, problematic episodes of discrimination and social
control, can they indeed be seen to be “deeply regrettable and from another
age,” (Moore, 2014) - hopefully by all.
References
References
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