• DOI:10.1215/10642684-9-1-2-79
• Corpus ID: 35873982

As Good As It Gets: Queer Theory and Critical Disability

@article{Mcruer2003AsGA,
  title={As Good As It Gets: Queer Theory and Critical Disability},
  author={Robert Mcruer},
  journal={GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies},
  year={2003},
  volume={9},
  pages={105 - 79}
}

• R. Mcruer
• Published 10 April 2003
• Art
• GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

In queer studies it is at this point a well-established critical practice to remark on heterosexuality’s supposed invisibility.1 As the heterosexual norm congealed during the twentieth century, it was the “homosexual menace” that was specified and embodied; the subsequent policing and containment of that menace allowed the new heterosexual normalcy to remain unspecified and disembodied.2 Although as early as 1915 Sigmund Freud, in his revised “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,” declared that “the exclusive sexual interest of the man for the woman is also a problem requiring an explanation, and is not something that is self-evident and explainable on the basis of chemical attraction,” such observations remained— indeed, as Freud’s comments literally were—mere footnotes in the project of excavating deviance.3 Heterosexuality, never speaking—as Michel Foucault famously said of homosexuality—“in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged,” thereby passed as universal love and intimacy, coextensive not with a specific form of opposite-sex eros but with humanity itself.4 Heterosexuality’s partners in this masquerade have been largely identified; an important body of feminist and antiracist work considers how heteronormativity reinforces dominant ideologies of gender and race.5 However, despite the fact that homosexuality and disability clearly share a pathologized past, and despite a growing awareness of the intersections between queer theory and disability studies, little notice has been taken of the connection between heterosexuality and able-bodied identity, perhaps because able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things. In what follows I lay the groundwork for understanding how able-bodiedness and heterosexuality are intertwined. Bringing together queer theory and what I will call “critical disability,” this essay challenges how our culture continues to accommodate, despite and indeed through the shifting crises surrounding them,