Manifest Disablement
Cripping the Frontier Thesis of American History
Sony Coráñez Bolton
Manifest Disablement
In this essay, I examine permutations of the colonial discourse of Manifest Destiny to understand the ways that colonial capitalist expansion deployed settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to augment white property. This multivalent mode of comparative and parallel racial dispossession has been explored by a number of scholars in the fields of critical race theory and critical ethnic studies.1 The outgrowth of U.S. colonialism through westward expansion across the continental United States transformed land and persons into property by racially marking bodies that were to be utilized as resources. The geopolitics of this expansion, the borderlands of colonial encounter, and the American “frontier” consolidated whiteness as a legal, political, and racial category of property and propertied liberal subjecthood.2 That is, the law transformed whiteness into legal property to be protected from others and constitutively produced a liberal subject that could own properties, lands, and people as a contract-wielding citizen.3 This is a central theoretical discourse animating much conversation, inquiry, scholarship, and activism destabilizing what has been called the possessive investment in whiteness.4
I depart from and add to these critical ethnic studies conversations by way of a genealogical engagement with a foundational framework in American studies: Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis.” In engaging with Turner’s essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), which auspiciously heralded the advent of American imperialism in the twentieth century, I home in on the property logics of whiteness as they were articulated in the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and within the incipient shadow of U.S. transpacific expansionism.5 Turner’s frontier holds particular importance in the development of American Progressivist discourses that postulated the rehabilitation of colonized subjects as an effect of their dispossession.6 Such is the case with the Progressivist discourse of “Benevolent Assimilation,” which rationalized imperial conquest of the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba following the Spanish–American War (1898).7 So-called benevolent empire is a logic whose antecedents can be located in the Turnerian frontier. The Caribbean and the Pacific were the new frontiers after the traditional frontier in the western United States was supposedly won—a historical and epochal shift that is canonized for us by Turner’s founding of the project of American history as a scholarly endeavor at the Wisconsin Historical Society in the late nineteenth century.8 The proximity of Turner’s thesis with these imperial developments is a springboard for engaging the idea of the American frontier in a global context. Thus, what is presented in this paper is transpacific in thought and method.9 As such, I consider this critique of the so-called frontier thesis as a contribution to Filipinx American studies and to potentiate this field’s critical contributions to crip theory. As a Filipinx American critic, I reverse engineer the supposedly benevolent colonization of the Philippines migrating back to Turner’s frontier to understand the logics of racial dispossession and its, to invoke a disability framework imagined by Eunjung Kim, “curative violences.”10 In tow with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideological imagination that the human being and body could be perfected through reform, I see the intersection of geopolitical expansion, rehabilitation, and racial capitalist dispossession as an “archive of liberalism” in which the analysis of disability finds a telling racialized colonial genealogy.11
Recent scholarship in disability studies attempts to make more explicit connections between colonialism, race, and disability as part of an effort to articulate what Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk provocatively call a “crip-of-color critique.”12 Part of this work reflects on the ways that oppressive forces like colonialism or racism have caused literal impairments, as well as the ways that their logics influence political systems that impair capacity. Colonial systems disable their populations in order to subjugate them or by making them “available for injury.”13 Worth noting is that impairment and disability are typically distinguished from one another in disability studies as introduced by scholar and disability activist Mike Oliver.14 Impairment is the literal description of the disabled body that furnishes a difference from the norm. Disability is the social arrangement and power structure that orders bodies that may or may not be medically understood to be impaired. However, where race is concerned this binary definition distinguishing the impaired material body from discursive disability is not always the most instructive. I add to the urgent and important calls of opening up disability analysis, which has traditionally been a very Eurocentric and white field, to consider other global or postcolonial contexts that tell alternative stories about the body.15 Where these interventions get complicated is in those instances where disability might not be exclusively about the phenomenological experience or supposed fact of disability but rather when certain colonial and racial discourses systematize disablement. Indeed, what constitutes a disability is shaped by social, historical, and political environment rather than being a transhistorical fact about the human body. By the term disablement, I attempt to get at the discursive reality of disability that certainly inhabits the body but also exceeds its boundaries. One might be physically able-bodied but live under a colonial system structured by privations, which diminish human flourishing. For instance, in postcolonial studies, while literal physical violence is never minimized, the epistemic or discursive violence of colonialism is just as deleterious.16 Colonial reality influences the ways in which we have historically understood racial fitness for political sovereignty and the perceived mental capacities required to effectively carry out the responsibilities of liberalism.17 The proliferation of scientific racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is another case in point. Pseudosciences like phrenology, craniology, and ethnology were all part of systems of knowledge production measuring (sometimes literally as a function of volume) the cognitive capacity of supposedly lesser races.18 These scientific logics disabled what they deemed to be inferior races even if they were not disabled in fact. In the same ways that political systems might be colonially structured even if they are not literal colonialism,19 the logic of disability persists irrespective of the fact of the presence of an impaired body that would produce anxiety in the able-bodied person who would appraise it.20 These more epistemological injuries shape ideas around the body and predispose it to particular harms, thus constituting an important avenue of study for disability theorists. The discursivity of violence in this sense speaks to the discursivity of disability. In this essay, I understand race as a mode through which disability attains definitional parameters. To study race is to inevitably study disability. Similarly, engaging disability as a form of extranormative embodiment unavoidably means paying attention to how race is enmeshed with the human body.
Aligned with this theoretical trajectory of combining race critique with disability analysis, I propose that we crip the frontier thesis. Crip is a disability analytic that enumerates the ways that institutions, ideologies, and violence shape our ideas of normative embodiment.21 Much like queer theory is a critique of normativity, crip theory similarly demonstrates how the able body and mind are epistemologically and ontologically assumed in the ways we structure society, history, and scholarly inquiry.22 Disability is not a compelling dimension of difference robustly considered in intersectional models of analysis because we do not wish to be disabled.23 It is a maligned form of embodiment to be avoided, shunned, or rehabilitated—a “master trope of disqualification.”24 However, it is through a disability analysis that I strive to show that it is not only a possessive investment in whiteness that operationalized colonial property logics in U.S. empire but also a possessive investment in a uniquely racialized American ability forged in the colonial frontier. A white American “bodymind” emerged as not only an enlightened steward of lands that he could judiciously (and legally) possess but also the legal franchise of property bore out a masculinist pioneer body that adroitly traversed land, forded rivers, and climbed mountains.25 White property envisaged a white able body that could competently cross into the frontier and a rational mind that could expertly develop such supposedly ownerless lands. Moreover, the project of territorial development requires robust physical capacities in order to perform the labors of working the land. The rational mind and the physical body are not separate entities but profoundly interconnected. The able mind is the vessel of capitalist ideology actualized by the work of an able body—a body that is coded as white. Colonial property is produced through the legal regime of propertied whiteness; nevertheless, I claim that white property is managed by a liberal mind and pioneer body, both crystallized through an unprecedented American racial ability.
Crip and queer critique align in revealing the ableist dimensions of U.S. imperialism—dimensions that I theorize as “manifest disablement.” Manifest disablement necessitates two interconnected forms of coloniality. The first is the dispossession of nonwhite bodies of the ability to be owners or sovereign agents in relation to land, which augments the physical and mental ability of the white able body.26 The second is the presumptive heteronormativity of colonial property logics. These taken together define manifest disablement as a form of colonial ableism that productively organizes the development of land through the implantation of the heteronormative homestead. As we will see on the granular level in Turner’s frontier thesis, the able-bodied pioneer is also significantly and tediously heterosexual; the pioneer is the rugged head of the heteronuclear household built on the lands that he surveyed, lands that he cultivates to further the reproduction of a heteronormative racial state. We can identify what crip theorist Robert McRuer calls the heterosexuality of “compulsory able-bodiedness” within white supremacist property logics.27 Nevertheless, the constitutive reality of propertied ableism is the manifestation of disablement in colonial others, thus expressing the political discourse of Manifest Destiny as an intractable desire for a white able body. The desire for Native land as property and Black bodies as chattel entrenches within imperial logics an ideology of ableism. American frontier logics is a historical arena in which these intersections of race, property, and body are elaborated. If ableism is a colonial logic that manifests the frontier, then it seems logical that to shore up the parameters of the able body implicates the production of disability as a racialized logic of dispossession. In short, disability is a colonial logic of capitalist dispossession. Following David Harvey’s definition of capitalism as “accumulation via dispossession,” I similarly propose not only that the colonial bodymind accumulates land and property via dispossession but also that, in the project of racial capitalism, the white able-bodied property owner accumulates ability via racialized disablement.28 This ableist accumulation is manifest disablement. There are bodies that are able to own and cultivate land and there are bodies that are unfit to hold deeds to property or are only fit to be property themselves. The habilitation of a white imperial body constitutively instantiates the disablement of Indigenous and Black peoples whose exclusion from the regimes of white property marks their exclusion from American normative ability.
In short, property is ability manifest. Much like whiteness, ability discursively functions as a form of property. The frontier disables the racially dispossessed in order to augment white ability as a function of colonial property relations. The augmentation of white property and proliferation of white property logics as normative, contractual relations manifested through an ideology of ableism. U.S. American civilization is built as much upon the idea of an able body as it is built on the ideal of a white, male body. In other words, the U.S. American who conquered the frontier needs to be white, male, straight, and able. As I elaborated above, the expansion and assumption of property through territorial conquest was reliant on the mythos of a white able-bodied male pioneer who could cross, traverse, and tame the wild nature of the frontier. The frontier, as Turner argues, was the singularly most important variable differentiating American identity from simply being an extension of European institutions and culture. While various European countries were certainly invested in the global construction of extractive franchise colonies, they did not have the cultural and geographic imposition of a frontier. Turner reasons that this imposition and (literal) horizon of desire were unique to the American experience.
The Frontier Prosthesis
Legal theorist Cheryl I. Harris explores how “economic hegemony over Black and Native American peoples” demonstrates the ways that property and race are conceptually inextricable. Specifically, whiteness is a form of property whose definitional borders were drawn around “a right to exclude.” I am interested in this “conceptual nucleus” that Harris theorizes in which whiteness and property coconstitute each other through the economic privations exacted on populations excluded from whiteness through the dispossession of land, as was the case with Indians, and the transformation of human beings into property, as was the case with enslaved Africans.29 Excluding people of color from whiteness rationalizes the argument that whiteness historically developed as a form of property. To wit, Harris writes:
The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination. Even in the early years of the country, it was not the concept of race alone that operated to oppress Blacks and Indians; rather, it was the interaction between conceptions of race and property that played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination.
The hyper-exploitation of Black labor was accomplished by treating Black people as objects of property. Race and property were thus conflated by establishing a form of property contingent on race—only Blacks were subjugated as slaves and treated as property. Similarly, the conquest, removal, and extermination of Native American life and culture were ratified by conferring and acknowledging the property rights of whites in Native American land. Only white possession and occupation of land was validated and therefore privileged as a basis for property rights. These distinct forms of exploitation each contributed in varying ways to the construction of whiteness as property.30
In other words, whiteness came to stand in for liberal personhood, legally recognized as a property of white people.31 Blackness connoted an annihilation of such personhood and thus whiteness constituted a “shield from slavery.”32 Blackness then ontologically meant enslavability. The political economic system of slavery “linked the privilege of whites to the subordination of Blacks through a legal regime that attempted the conversion of Blacks into objects of property. Similarly, the settlement and seizure of Native American land supported white privilege through a system of property rights in land in which the ‘race’ of the Native Americans rendered their first possession rights invisible and justified conquest. This racist formulation embedded the fact of white privilege into the very definition of property.” Thus, whiteness as a conceptual legal definition, which only whites possess, “is valuable and is property.”33 Whiteness entitled white people to land and chattel. Critical ethnic studies scholar Iyko Day similarly argues that these forms of dispossession worked in tandem to augment white property.34
While Day makes a similar argument to Harris, it is not predicated exclusively on the legal precedents shaping propertied whiteness. Instead (and in addition), she significantly does work to reconcile seemingly incommensurate theoretical interventions in Afropessimism and settler colonial studies. A conservative version of the latter arguing that, irrespective of involuntary migration history, the presence of non-Natives problematically annihilates what Patrick Wolfe calls “native alternatives,” meaning that even the descendants of enslaved people further the project of settler colonialism.35 While this is a challenging critique, which, as Day argues, underestimates the impact of voluntary versus involuntary migrations, what I think is useful is the emphasis on settler coloniality being just as much an effect of structure rather than siloed to intent. Afropessimist thought, as it is characterized by Day, however, seeks to understand Blackness as the foundational negation of humanity—an ontology that supersedes and fundamentally structures all other forms of dehumanization. While Native genocide is certainly a crucial history not to be underestimated, even Native identity would fit in a white supremacist power structure conferring even marginal privileges that would never be available to Black people. Some corroborating empirical evidence can be found in work by historian Tiya Miles.36 While problematic racialized labor relations have certainly had deleterious impacts on many communities, it seems historically sound to argue that anti-Blackness has served a foundational role in organizing labor in relation to race. Foundational Latin American theorists of mestizaje, for instance, clarify that American independence and nation-building (perhaps inclusive of the United States) possess an understated link to transatlantic slavery even as this theory of racial hybridity is understood to incorporate Indigeneity into national identity. Many theorists establish that this incorporation reifies anti-Blackness.37 While distinct from a U.S. American milieu, Indigenous incorporation partially as a function of anti-Blackness is not too far off what the Turnerian frontier attempts.
The formation of the U.S. American racial state was predicated on, as Harris and Day explicate, the consolidation of whiteness as a form of property and also, I would add, the integration of whiteness into the idealized form of the able-bodied pioneer. In a moment where Harris clearly articulates her main argument, I detect a discursive shift into thinking through the legal discourse of propertied whiteness and its attendant articulation to a physical body assumed to be able-bodied:
Whiteness defined the legal status of a person as slave or free. White identity conferred tangible and economically valuable benefits and was jealously guarded as a valued possession, allowed only to those who met a strict standard of proof. Whiteness—the right to white identity as embraced by the law—is property if by property one means all of a person’s legal rights. . . .
Property is the product of a delegation of sovereign power. . . . Indian custom was obliterated by force and replaced with the regimes of common law that embodied the customs of the conquerors. The assumption of American law as it related to Native Americans was that conquest did give rise to sovereignty. Indians experienced the property laws of the colonizers and the emergent American nation as acts of violence perpetuated by the exercise of power and ratified through the rule of law. At the same time, these laws were perceived as custom and “common sense” by the colonizers. The Founders, for instance so thoroughly embraced Lockean labor theory as the basis for the right of acquisition because it affirmed the right of the New World settlers to settle on and acquire the frontier. It confirmed and ratified their experience.38
I want to suggest through an engagement with Harris’s foundational essay that white property is the realm in which race and disability politically and empirically intersect. Also, disability functions as the dividing line between property and dispossession. Above, Harris defines for us the ways that property is a social relation that is produced through “a whole host of intangibles that are the product of labor, time, and creativity.”39 Harris’s invocation of the “frontier” in the above passage demonstrates the extent to which “Lockean” understandings of labor reify whiteness into property as a function of work. If work and socially necessary labor time are foundational realities for white property, labor definitively implicates a physical body that can satisfactorily perform the work of property. The transformation of the wild frontier into ordered property evokes a tangible white body that can enjoy the intangibles of his labor. Turner’s foundational frontier thesis introduces a complication to this able-bodied laborer above that potentially contravenes the purity of whiteness that seems operative in Harris’s theory. In a particularly evocative part of Turner’s essay, he describes the body that physically crosses into frontier lands:
[The frontier] finds him (the American pioneer) a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.40
This passage points to one of the main political tensions at the heart of Turner’s intellectual project of founding what today would be called American studies. Was America its own distinct culture and entity with its own separate history, or was it merely an extension of European culture and institutions? Turner’s answer lies in the ways that the “American pioneer” is arrayed in “the hunting shirt and the moccasin” and finds himself dwelling in the “log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois.” This description of the American pioneer transforming himself into an Indian demonstrates that the most important factor that differentiated “European . . . thought” from that of America was the frontier. The frontier’s harsh conditions, which are “at first too strong for the man,” showed that the completely white European was not equipped to handle the rough conditions of frontier life. He must adapt and racially transform himself into an Indian to attain the capacities that are requisite to “[plant] Indian corn” and “[plow] with a sharp stick.” He can then thrive, rather than “perish,” as he “follows the Indian trails.” Unlike the enslaved person that performs labors on behalf of the white capitalist cultivating and proliferating “cotton culture,” as Turner calls it, here a peculiar form of racial drag materializes in which the white body does and does not perform its own work.41 Is this body Indian or white? Both? It is clear from Turner’s writing that this “part-Indian” pioneer is cultivating lands that he will own—the lands are ownerless because they lack this cultivation and are thus “primitive,” requiring much-needed development via colonial capitalism. His whiteness, in contradistinction to the Indian whose land claims are nullified, grants him a legal status as property owner. Nevertheless, his European civilization is also inadequate to the physical tasks that are required to navigate the frontier or to perform the creative labors required to transform Indian lands into developed U.S. American homesteads.
Disability studies scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder analyze the ways that literary and expressive cultures, particularly the novel, facilitate the development of character protagonists through an ideology of ableism. Cultural and literary representation are not benign symbolism but actively shape the discourse through which bodies are imagined and are, indeed, made to signify. Significantly, for them “the body is first and foremost a linguistic relation which cannot be natural or average . . . a theoretical premise from which all bodies must, by definition, fall short.”42 The body is an abstraction up against which the material body fails to measure up. This introduces an inherent variability in embodiment that produces an anxiety managed through the demonization of disability—a dimension of difference that unabstracts the body in ways that are too uncomfortable for Western society’s trenchant belief in individualism, independence, and sovereignty. Often these are domains of liberalism that are secured through the dispossession of others. In much of the canon of Western Anglophone literature, Mitchell and Snyder observe that in order to shore up the narrative anxiety around the potential impairments that should never affect the protagonist, who must be normative, “narrative prosthesis” is deployed to manage bodily anxiety and to ensure an illusory corporeal wholeness. They write that a “body deemed lacking, unfunctional, or inappropriately functional needs compensation, and a prosthesis helps to affect this end.” Impairments, disabilities, or other deviations from ideal embodiments “extract one from a social norm or average of bodies and their corresponding social expectations.”43 A “prosthetic device” is articulated in narrative to bear the burden of the physical and cognitive disabilities that the protagonist overcomes, supersedes, or even rehabilitates to find bodily and narrative wholeness. Functionally, the protagonist with whom the reader identifies holds the vaunted corporeal normativity that is idealized and desired, while a secondary character suffers the social exclusions of disability—this character is the prosthetic ensuring the wholeness, fitness, and desirability of able-bodied protagonism, thus “return[ing] the body to the invisible status of normative essence.”44
In the above passage, the white European body, by Turner’s own admission, is impaired by the frontier. He “strips off the garments of [European] civilization.” This body requires the body of the Indian to secure a wholeness and able-bodied acumen necessary to conquer the frontier, thus transforming it into property that can be legally owned by him because of his propertied whiteness. This Indian is transformed into a prosthetic device for the pioneer protagonist of American history. This tracks with the settler colonial theory of “elimination” in which, as Patrick Wolfe argues, the complete eradication of the Indian counterintuitively contravenes the assertion of settler sovereignty. Wolfe argues that “the erasure of indigeneity conflicts with the assertation of settler nationalism. On the one hand, settler society required the practical elimination of the natives in order to establish itself on their territory. On the symbolic level, however, settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and, accordingly, its independence from the mother country.”45 Thus the Indian palimpsestically remains as a phantasmal presence in white settler society, never completely eradicated but not completely or corporeally present either. Wolfe calls this a “logic of elimination,” differentiating it from full-blown genocide, and yet it is a corollary logic that accompanies it. The Indian is differentially included in settler society through the preservation of a Native culture in the form of symbolism, iconography, and folktales not unlike the one presented to us by Turner of the heroic pioneer. The white pioneer body with its Native prosthesis aiding the conqueror’s passage through “Indian palisade[s]” confirms the insight that “settler colonialism does not simply replace native society tout court. Rather, the process of replacement maintains the refractory imprint of the native counter-claim.”46 The curiosity that the frontier inspired in American backwoodsmen was possessed and actualized by a dexterous Indian body. Settler independence and ingenuity require a surreptitious rehabilitation of an unfit European body through the crip presence of an Indian prosthesis.
This backwoodsman is the product of what I call Turner’s “frontier prosthesis.” Drawing on the analysis above clarifies that manifest disablement describes the racial process of capitalist dispossession through which an able body obtains ownership through the social contract of property. The transformation of Indian land into American property produces robust ability for the pioneer and disables through dispossession the Native who is affixed as a prosthetic device. Rather than the Indian being placed into the American landscape, as some suggest, the sociopolitical environment of the frontier occasions a corporeal sublimation of the Indian as a physical capacity to be deployed by a white body.47 Reading through this framework, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” constructs an American manly identity through the proliferation of an ideology of ability.48 Disability theorist Tobin Siebers defines an “ideology of ability” as “at its simplest the preference for able-bodiedness.”49 It also “defines the baseline by which humanness is determined, setting the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human status to individual persons.”50 Importantly, one of Siebers’s greatest insights is that the disabled body becomes the invisible center around which our judgment of human ability and bodily preference revolve. Ableism, then, is a liberal formulation that simultaneously invisibilizes the body as an ideological apparatus in itself and consolidates the unstated desire for its perfectibility. I extend Siebers’s explication to claim that U.S. empire is a historical articulation of ableism in its colonial desire for the perfectibility of the American body. A white able body is imagined figuratively as physically capable of crossing frontier land, adroitly traversing hostile terrain, and manipulating the environment to suit his needs.
Following the theoretical conversation on white property elaborated by scholars like Harris and Day, it is important to also emphasize the ways that this habilitation of the white body through the elimination of the Indian, what I call the “frontier prosthesis” above, works in tandem with the political economy of slavery. I claim that the ways that the frontier prosthesis inculcates the imprint of Native culture into white property is through the reification of enslaved Black people as property. Teleologically, the frontier is overdetermined in Turner’s formulation as the singularly most important historical variable disarticulated from the slavocracy that gave the movement west its initial impetus. The frontier eclipses all other political and economic considerations, particularly with regard to the “slavery question”:
The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the subjects of tariff, land, and internal improvement, as subsidiary to the slavery question. But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident. In the period from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the Civil War slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance.51
The question of slavery as the element that marked the United States’ political environment in the mid-nineteenth century is represented as an obstacle that causes misunderstanding of the true nature of American identity. Therefore, according to Turner, the American frontier “as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian . . . has been neglected.”52 The American frontier perhaps marks one of the earliest historiographical attempts to entrench whiteness and imperial capitalism by amplifying the curious historical absence of Blackness. In a similar turn characteristic of the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism, the question of slavery is likewise overshadowed by the frontier. I suggest that the very prosthetic transformation in which the white able body sublimates his desire for the Native body’s capacities finds its underlying mode of production in the equally invisibilized labor of the Black body.
In a stunning display of transposition, the white American nuclear family and the attendant gendered divisions of labor constitutive of rugged pioneer life eclipse the political economic realities of the slavery question. The American bodies that perform and adhere to the gendered labor divisions of American heteronormativity are affixed with Native prostheses. The eclipsing of the Native prosthesis and slavery reifies the pioneer able body as the seductive symbology of the historiographic frontier. White heteronormativity crystallizes the unique American character of the family as a cornerstone of civilization even though Germanic germs find possible contamination due to contact with Indian tribes. As we will see, Indian identity and land claims are used to minimize the importance of slavery to the American political economy. A previous rupture and crisis in U.S. racial capitalism activated by the Civil War is resolved through the en vogue frontier naturalism of a Great West hard-won through various Indian Wars.53 Nevertheless, the gendered work of the heteronormative frontier family constitutes colonial capitalist labors surreptitiously scaffolded by Black bodies.
Heteronormative Homestead
Literary scholar Amy Kaplan’s essay “Manifest Domesticity” was one of the formative theoretical interventions into what would be consolidated as studies of U.S. empire.54 This work introduced a key feminist theoretical lens to the critique of U.S. imperialism. While somewhat undertheorized in Kaplan’s particular intervention, still she demonstrates how empire brings with it clear heteronormative logics that gain power through colonial racism. In this section, I aim to demonstrate that the crux of racism and heteronormativity lie within ableist property relations as well. A critique of the colonial logics of property is incomplete without a thorough consideration of the normative straightness of the able-bodied pioneer. I claim that the frontier prosthesis not only shaped a colonial “normate” body in the American imaginary but also envisioned that body emplotted on a heteronormative homestead itself constructed through gendered divisions of labor.55 Kaplan poses fundamental questions regarding the supposed separation of the U.S. domestic sphere from its territorial expansions abroad. Indeed, the “out there” of U.S. foreign policy and the “right here” of U.S. domestic politics exist in a dialectical relationship.
Manifest Destiny was not just racist. It was heteronormative. Women’s domestic labors were a foundational aspect of U.S. empire building. The ideology of “separate spheres” cleaving the domestic space of women’s work from the male public space of political discourse in the early to mid-nineteenth century “contributed to creating an American Empire by imagining the nation as a home at a time when its geopolitical borders were expanding rapidly through violent confrontations with Indians, Mexicans, and European empires.”56 Later in the essay, Kaplan provocatively argues that “women’s work at home . . . performs two interdependent forms of national labor; it forges the bonds of internal unity while impelling the nation outward to encompass the globe.”57 In short, two interdependent manifestations must converge for the success of the U.S. imperial project: manifest domesticity and destiny. Thus, identifying what is supposedly foreign to American culture is indissociable from the gendered domestic work of creating the American home. The domestic space, specifically the white American home, of U.S. empire turns on the cultural distillation of a sex-gender system rooted in racial ideology. Recall that Turner’s pioneer becomes the Indian that he dispossesses, appropriating the Indian’s robust capacities that are not germane to European embodiment. Nevertheless, the pioneer does not lose his constitutive relationship to propertied whiteness. The discourse of manifest domesticity and manifest disablement intertwine in the perpetuation of colonial property as a heteronormative institution.
I suggest that what stabilizes the connection of property to whiteness in the frontier is a colonial form of heteronormativity. This is particularly evident in Turner’s extended citation of John Mason Peck’s A New Guide for Emigrants to the West (1837), which describes progressive stages of settlement by three different kinds of settlers, giving the reader a taxonomy of pioneers. This taxonomy is unfolded through a description of a heteronormative family dynamic. The initial, indeed chronologically first, class of settlers is particularly illuminating with regard to the question of imperial domesticity. It is not only the rugged individualism of the American pioneer that wins the West but also the propagation of the American family as a political economic rationality:
Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the “range,” and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a “truck patch.” The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers, and potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and corn-crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or “deadened” and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the “lord of the manor.” With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new country, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants.58
In Turner’s essay the “pioneer” frontier family connotes not so much barbarity but rather a naturalization of heteronormativity as the civilizing ethos central to pioneer life. While his implements for cultivation are “rude” and it is “immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil,” he, his family, and the “other families of similar tastes and habits” ready the range for “the next class of emigrants.” In Turner’s taxonomy, the rudeness of the initial wave paves the way for higher, successive forms of civilization with encroaching waves of immigration. What is striking is the multiple mentions of the family as the node around which migration, development, and cultivation revolve. What earlier in the essay is an odd racial drag of the white pioneer prosthetically enhanced as Indian that might connote an abdication of civilization, Turner goes to great citational effort to show that such racial performativity does not make the pioneer an atavistic subject. Rather, he is the instrument of colonial development who maintains his civilization because of his dedication to the American family. Put succinctly, heteronormativity is what shields the frontiersman and his family from the brutality of their return to the state of nature. Heteronormativity is also the ideological matrix through which the white able body owns its own labor and thus also owns the land subjected to the development of those labors. And indeed, such imperial norming is that which renders the white body self-same rather than unrecognizably Indian—a racial coherence fundamental to the ableist logics of property. The heteronormative family living on the colonial homestead offers the much-needed civilizational anchor that the pioneer might lose after “going Native.” In a similar way that whiteness serves as a shield from enslavability, as Harris and Day argue, heteronormativity serves as a shield from racial primitivism even as such normativity facilitates the extraction of the vaunted physical abilities of the Native who must be disappeared. The heteronormative family and property relations seemingly ensure the appropriation of Native culture repackaged as rugged frontier life. It is this family unit that makes the body and the labors that the able-bodied pioneer performs also forms of white property. Heteronormativity and the institution of the family are what facilitate the prostheticization of the Indian, on the one hand, and consolidation of whiteness as property, on the other.
Through a queer of color lens we can see that such a supposedly primitive, even tribal family unit introduces the heteronormative gender relations of the American family as the mechanism through which gendered divisions of labor secure pioneer masculinity. Turnerian frontier logics make heteronormative labor more central, thereby making the slavery question subsidiary to the frontier thesis, thus mystifying Black bodies’ contributions to the political ecology of colonial frontier life. Queer of color theory allows us to reassess the frontier thesis as the entrenchment of colonial forms of heteronormativity and racism that critique must undo. Sociologist Roderick Ferguson, in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, problematizes the ways that leftist theories arguing for economic liberation collude with bourgeois heteronormativity.59 Marxist analysis might critique the class-based values of ruling elite capitalists in economic terms but leave undertheorized the ways that racial, gendered, and sexual normativity shape the bourgeois values that they supposedly decry. Queer of color critique understands and centers this unexpected collusion of leftist and capitalist ideology in their mutual denigration of the supposedly sexually perverse.
The home, and the nationalist ideologies that underpin it, mechanizes an instrument of nationalist exclusion. The figuration of a domestic sphere of bourgeois heteronuclearity renders subjects that are incommensurate with or, perhaps, unhousable within the homestead. I mark a colonial imaginary in the Turnerian frontier that underwrites the property logics of domestic exclusion of queers and queers of color. This is a fundamental critique of liberal capitalism that is formative of queer of color critique more generally. Ferguson, citing Chandan Reddy, decries “the silences that both Marxism and liberal pluralism share” in their surreptitiously cooperative “expulsion of queers of color from literal homes [and] from the privileges bestowed by the nation as ‘home.’”60 Directly quoting Reddy, Ferguson puts forward:
Unaccounted for within both Marxist and liberal pluralist discussions of the home and the nation, queers of color as people of color . . . take up the critical task of both remembering and rejecting the model of the “home” offered in the United States in two ways: first, by attending to the ways in which it was defined over and against people of color, and second, by expanding the locations and moments of that critique of the home to interrogate processes of group formation and self-formation from the experience of being expelled from their own dwellings and families for not conforming to the dictation of and demand for uniform gendered and sexual types.61
Naturally, the “demand for uniform gendered and sexual types” revolves around normative constructions of the family. The theme of home and the queer “homeless,” so to speak, is an essential element that carries through to Ferguson’s intervention of a “queer of color critique” that reads “racial formations, as they are constituted nonnormatively by gender and sexual differences, [which] overdetermine national identity, contradicting its manifold promises of citizenship and property.”62 This comes to a head in the immanent queer of color critique of leftist ideology, particularly in Ferguson’s meticulous reading of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s German Ideology in which he problematically reifies colonial racist ideologies as constitutively part of his revolutionary disidentification with capitalism. Ferguson tracks the ways “Marx universalized heteropatriarchy as he theorized property ownership . . . within the tribe” by citing the following compelling passage:
The first form of ownership is tribal . . . ownership. . . . The division of labor is at [this] stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore, limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe, finally slaves.63
Indeed, Ferguson discovers that Marx himself relied on colonial anthropological definitions of the family in order to naturalize patriarchal divisions of labor as “tribal” and therefore naturally derived organizations of human work along gendered and heteronormative lines. The male is at the head of the household, while women assume the duties of the domestic space. Patriarchy ineluctably shapes Marxian understandings of just ways to cultivate human labor capacities. However, since colonial racism undergirds political understandings of the exploitation of such capacities, the conscientization of a proletarian class as the only morally just historical movement toward a reorganization of society carries with it some risks—namely, the reification of an unspoken coloniality structuring Western capitalist societies and proposed communist alternatives to such societies. Put more simply, the proletarian class derive their class consciousness in contradistinction to the bourgeois class partly by disavowing capitalism’s role in colonialism. Turner and Marx, then, are not that distinct in their reproduction of a heteronormative racial state, whether that is in Europe or the frontier. It matters little whether the dialectic traversing the state is that of the capitalist versus the proletarian or the colonial pioneer and his property. Both dyads would be systems in which neither the Indian nor the enslaved person own their own labor—labor that can be cultivated free from exploitation. Or, as Marx poetically put it: uncompromised labor in which the “Realm of Freedom” is divested from the “Realm of Necessity.”64
The pioneer family and the pioneer head of household obtain their prominence in the political economy of the frontier in its relation to the decoupling of slavery from American history. Heteronormativity as a frontier construct is what underwrites different racial parameters for understanding U.S. expansion. Put another way, colonial heteronormativity is one of the main mechanisms through which the frontier prosthesis actualizes its consumption of Native culture and thus habilitates a white able body to transform frontier into property. The white homestead constructed, cultivated, and coordinated by the pioneer is an institution of the U.S. racial state. Because this homestead is shaped through clear gendered divisions of labor and around the heteronuclear family, sexual politics are an inherent aspect of the Turnerian frontier. The frontier prosthesis in which both land and ability become propertied aspects of the American subject, on the one hand, and the appropriation of the Indigenous body, on the other, also is an instantiation of what theorist Scott Lauria Morgensen calls “settler sexuality.” He defines this as “a white national heteronormativity that regulates Indigenous sexuality and gender by supplanting them with the sexual modernity of settler subjects.”65 While Turner does not explicitly write about Indigenous sexuality, the prostheticization of the Native body as a scaffold for the white able body facilitates the ability of the pioneer to comply with and enact the heteronormative colonialism central to the implantation of the homestead. So, the relative primitivism of the Indian is, indeed, supplanted “with the sexual modernity of settler subjects” whose own civilization is never really threatened by the harsh realities of the frontier because of the presence of white heteronormative relations. Supposed primitivism is kept at bay because the land is made straight. In a compelling way, this is part of the answer to theorist Mark Rifkin’s question of “when did Indians became straight?”66 A partial answer being: when ability manifested as a form of white property and when this property became the colonial site for the heteronormative American family. The Indian becomes straight insofar as he is coupled with and augments the ability of the pioneer able body whose capacities sustain and reproduce colonial logics of heteronormativity. Because the Indian is a prosthetic device articulated to the settler body and this settler body is coded as straight, in a rather direct way, the exploration of the presumed heterosexuality of the Indian is inseparable from a disability analysis. Dis/ability is an indissoluble part of the ways that both sexual and racial logics shape regimes of the colonial.
Conclusion: A U.S. Empire Studies of Disability
In this essay, I have attempted to show that the imperial bodymind that emerges from the crucible of manifest domesticity and destiny is one fertile, critical genealogy of U.S. empire studies captured by manifest disablement. That is, I have attempted to show that U.S. empire studies, and American studies more broadly, should pay critical heed to the ways that logics of ableism and colonialism mutually inform and constitute each other. While not developed within the space of this essay, I wish to emphasize that I have come to this analysis as a Filipinx American critic. It is from this positionality that I make concluding remarks about future critical orientations that take seriously the colonial and racial life of disability. A more critical Asian American studies most certainly should understand how the time in which the Pacific entered American imperial vocabulary coincided with Turner’s authorship. He wrote during a time of great crisis in American masculinity. This crisis provoked a turn toward the Pacific wherein “the meeting point between civilization and savagery” would play out with other “indios” and Indians to be similarly consumed, appropriated, and dispossessed.67 Might U.S. empire be a systematic imposition of racialized disablement around whose organizing locus is a white masculine able body?
Because the “boundedness” of home is inextricably tied to the “boundlessness” of empire, the domestic figuration of the heteronormative homestead as a feature of white property depends on the propertied dispossession of Indigenous, Black, and (later) Asian subjects.68 The linkages of manifest domesticity with that of the imperial drive of Manifest Destiny intersect in the figuration of racialized subjects that cannot inhabit Euramerican Enlightenment rationality and thus cannot be “a subject without properties” endowed with deeds to property.69 American civilized whiteness and the primitivity of the frontier can exist in logical noncontradiction because racialized white able-bodiedness is coupled with the able-mindedness of the Enlightenment subject whose sovereignty is unquestioned. As my crip analysis has shown, the autology of the white pioneer body exists as a self-determining agent because of its appropriation of a Native body—a process that I captured as a form of frontier prosthesis.
The “manliness” of civilization, as it has been characterized by historian Gail Bederman, sees an epistemological flashpoint in the frontier historicism of Turner.70 Manliness required rehabilitation—an infusion of vitality whose proving ground would be the epistemological invention of the frontier. As Turnerian theory cultivated a safe space for masculinity, it did so by binding the frontier with the contractual obligations of property whose stewardship required a sound mind and robust body to ensure the transformation of the wilds to a truly American civilization. Turner authored this particular American social contract to circumvent an epochal crisis for masculinity as the “frontier line” had been removed from the 1890 Census “mark[ing] the closing of a great historic movement”—the frontier had ended.71 It should not surprise the reader that the late nineteenth century was one of tremendous racial and transnational transition for the United States, whose imperial century of transpacific expansion was about to begin in earnest. The Philippines and other territories became objects of U.S. conquest partially as a result of the ableist invention of and need to extend the frontier. This crisis in masculinity, as various feminist historians examine it, resulted in a reinvigorated martial masculinity contradistinguished from the effeminate masculinities of “little brown brothers.”72 The debilitations of the frontier, the prosthesis of Indigeneity as a suture to American white masculinity, the crystallization of American civilization through the prophylactic of white frontier heteronormativity, and the contractual capacities central to the moral justifications of imperialism all set the discursive stage for the rehabilitative powers of empire.
Manifest disablement describes how the frontier thesis projected the frontier as a westward march of civilization whose movement dispossessed through racialization and thereby accreted ability as a function of property ownership. Reading the intersection of disability and imperialism not only reorients the frontier’s relationship to American embodiment but also nuances the spatial expanse of the frontier as an interminable horizon of opportunity. The frontier is a kind of futurity for a body that is corporeally and spiritually whole. This is in contradistinction to the kinds of temporalities that are theorized by crip theorists. So-called crip temporalities speak of disabled existence not as a form of living that is mortgaged on their deviation from the wholeness of the able body, which, naturally, is assumed to have the best prospects and greatest chance of happiness.73 Instead, crip theory envisions futures that do not malign interdependence and that look with suspicion upon uncritical endorsements of self-determination—definitions of which have clear, if often obscured, colonial antecedents. Such liberal independence is defined by a form of individualism in which the human is radically independent and self-reliant. However, this liberal human’s individual sovereignty is defined tacitly in relation to a capitalist society to which they can contribute productively. What might we gain in a critical ethnic studies project that orients its imagination of a socially just futurity toward the kinds of crip temporalities that similarly imagine alternatives to neoliberal individualism? Might the ethical question for the contemporary moment be to theorize more judiciously whom we center, even provisionally so, as the subject of social protest to be sure that the project of critique does not reify historical sedimented logics of ableism? When marginal voices vie to reclaim agency, upon which logics precisely is such agentive subjectivity articulated?
Author Profile
Sony Coráñez Bolton is an associate professor of English and Spanish at Amherst College. His book Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines was recently published by Duke University Press. His other work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Periphērica, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias.
Notes
Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 102–21, https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.2.0102; Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1,707, https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015); Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Harris, “Whiteness as Property”; David Lloyd, “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review 13, no. 1–2 (1991): 62–94.
Martha Craven Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (London: Harvard University Press, 2011); Stacy Clifford Simplican, The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018).
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History . . . : (From Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin) (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1894).
For an analysis on how these logics manifest in the American imperial museum, see Sarita Echavez, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 2017).
William McKinley, “Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, December 21, 1898,” in The Schlager Anthology of Westward Expansion: A Student’s Guide to Essential Primary Sources, ed. Jennifer Koshotka Seman, 199-201 (Dallas, Texas: Schlager Group Inc., 2021); Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982).
Frederick Jackson Turner and John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
Much of my thoughts on “transpacific” critique are derived from Asian Americanist scholars of the Cold War Pacific. While not the central aim of this essay, I am suggesting that the American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century was an epochal moment in the global U.S. orientation toward the Pacific, which cannot be completely explained by the Cold War. For more on this phenomenon, see Allan Punzalan Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016); Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Eunjung Kim, Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).
I take the idea of an “archive of liberalism” from Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents.
For the original coining of the term crip-of-color critique, see Jina B. Kim, “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?,’” Lateral, May 15, 2017, http://csalateral.org/issue/6-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-crip-of-color-critique-kim/. More recently, Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk extend thinking on this concept in “Reclaiming the Radical Politics of Self-Care: A Crip-of-Color Critique,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (April 4, 2021): 325–42, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8916074. For further reading on the racial politics of disability, see Julie Avril Minich, Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014); Samantha Dawn Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018).
Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).
Mike Oliver, “The Social Model of Disability: Thirty Years On,” Disability & Society 28, no. 7 (2013): 1,024–26.
Chris Bell, “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 275–82 (New York: Routledge, 2006); Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, “Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 3 (2010): 219; Sony Coráñez Bolton, “Cripping the Philippine Enlightenment: Ilustrado Travel Literature, Postcolonial Disability, and the ‘Normate Imperial Eye/I,’” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 2, no. 2 (2016): 138–62, https://doi.org/10.5749/vergstudglobasia.2.2.0138.
For more on the concept and theorizations of epistemic violence, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Rosalind C. Morris, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents; Stacy Clifford Simplican, The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities.
Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Peruvian sociologists Aníbal Quijano and Michael Ennis call this “coloniality.” See Aníbal Quijano and Michael Ennis, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 3 (2000): 533–81.
Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
McRuer, Crip Theory; Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Julie Avril Minich, Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014).
Crip theorist Lennard J. Davis captures this anxiety around disability and impairment in his concept of “dismodernism.” See Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2015): 268–84.
Of course, this dispossession of nonwhite bodies functions neither uniformly nor monolithically for all racialized groups.
Robert McRuer, “Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,” in Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 1–32.
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1,714.
Harris, 1,716.
Here property has the dual meaning of “an economic good” and “a trait,” both of which are things that one can possess.
Harris, 1,720.
Harris, 1,721.
Day, “Being or Nothingness.”
Patrick Wolfe, “Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 257, 258.
Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). Miles explores the case of Cherokee Indians enslaving Black people.
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015; Quijano and Ennis, “Coloniality of Power,” 533; Fernando Ortiz and Harriet de Onis, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1,726, 1,727–28.
Harris, 1,728.
Turner, Significance of the Frontier in American History, 2.
Turner, 52.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 7.
Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6.
Mitchell and Snyder, 8.
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 389.
Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 389.
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).
Turner and Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner.
Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 8.
Siebers, Disability Theory, 8.
Turner, Significance of the Frontier in American History, 48.
Turner, 33.
I take the language of rupture as delineated in transnational feminist critique. See Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 3 (1998): 581, https://doi.org/10.2307/2902710.
My use of the term normate comes from Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies. In Garland-Thomson’s novel intervention, she theorizes the normate as a particular kind of normative embodiment shaped through ableism.
Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 583.
Kaplan, 587.
Turner, Significance of the Frontier in American History, 44–45, emphases added.
Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 2.
Ferguson, 2–3. The quote from Reddy is taken from Chandan Reddy, “Home, Houses, Nonidentity: ‘Paris Is Burning,’” in Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary Marangoly George, 356–57 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997).
Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 18.
Ferguson, 6.
Karl Marx, Samuel Moore, and Edward B. Aveling, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2011).
Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1 (2010): 106.
Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Turner, Significance of the Frontier in American History, 32.
Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 588.
David Lloyd, “Race under Representation,” Oxford Literary Review 13, no. 1–2 (1991): 62–94. I take the phrase “subject without properties” from Lloyd, by which he means an unmarked, white male subject as the unspoken universal center of history and theory. They are “without properties” because their universality is taken for granted. Other subjects are more peripheral because they unmistakably have the property of “race.”
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Turner, Significance of the Frontier in American History, 31.
Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); Victor Román Mendoza, Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip.