ASSEMBLAGES INTIMES : L’HANDICAP, L’INTERCORPORÉALITÉ, ET LE TRAVAIL DES SOIGNANTS

Attendant care provides an opening to consider the social and political implications of a relational ethics of intercorporeality and exposes the problematic foundation of independent living models that assert a normative encounter between autonomous and sovereign selves. In relation, both the disabled person and the attendant experience a leaking of their identities, a mingling of their sexualities, and multiple intimate slippages of selves as the attendant participates in the daily work of feeding, bathing, shopping, facilitating sex, and numerous other activities. The assemblages formed in such interactions have ethical implications for how we come to understand bodies, labour, and care. This article explores some aspects of the disabled- abled intimate care assemblage to discern its inventive and productive contributions to how we think through and with care. I argue that such an approach to the care assemblage complicates the usual ways in which the attendant is considered an employee. Drawing from the life experiences of disabled lesbian Connie Panzarino and through the example of attendant facilitated sex, I argue that independent living models, in their push for autonomy and independence, and in their formal approaches to employment and care, cannot lead to substantive emancipation for disabled people or others. Instead, I posit that it is through a relational ethics of intercorporeality that we can conceptualize care in a way that benefits disabled people and their attendants. Finally, I draw out the tensions involved in this assemblage to tend to the contradictions and quandaries that the desiring and labouring body faces when intimate care is put to work. Keywords: disability, assemblage, attendant care, labour, intercorporealityLe travail des soignants fournit une façon d’aborder les implications sociales et politiques des éthiques relationnelles de l’intercorporéalité, soit la condition humaine de « vivre via le corps d’un autre », et souligne les bases problématiques des modèles de la vie indépendante qu’assertent un rencontre entre les sois autonomes et souverains. Ceci dit, la personne handicapée et le soignant subissent un coulage de leurs propres identités, une mélange de leurs propres sexualités, et plusieurs glissements de leurs propres sois tandis que le soignant participe au travail quotidien, soit le nourrissement, les bains, le magasinage, la facilitation du sexe, et d’autres diverses activités. Les assemblages formés dans ces interactions ont des implications éthiques pour comment nous parvenons à comprendre des corps, le travail, et le soin. Ce discours aborde quelques aspects de l’assemblage d’un handicapé—soignant par rapport au soin, afin de visionner les contributions inventives et productives à la manière dont nous pensons au soin. Je constate qu’une telle approche à l’assemblage handicapé—soignant rend plus compliquées les façons normales dont le soignant est considéré comme un « employé ». En utilisant les expériences personnelles de Connie Panzarino, une lesbienne handicapée, et via l’exemple du sexe facilité par un soignant, je constate que les modèles de la vie indépendante, avec leurs orientations positives envers l’autonomie et l’indépendance, et leurs approches formelles au travail et au soin, ne mènent pas à une émancipation substantive pour les handicapés et les autres. Au lieu de ceci, je constate que ce n’est que via les éthiques relationnelles de l’intercorporéalité que nous pouvons conceptualiser une nouvelle forme de soin ayant des bénéfices pour les handicapés et leurs soignants. Enfin, je souligne les tensions interpersonnelles contenues dans l’assemblage afin d’aborder les contradictions et dilemmes auxquels le corps « désirant » et le corps « travaillant » font face avec la mise en œuvre du soin intime. Mots clés : handicap, assemblage, soin, soignant, travail, intercorporéalit

Cripping Concepts: Accessibility

Editorial V12i

The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Disability: Towards Emergent Intracorporeal Practices

In this dissertation I link the contemporary biopolitical production of disability to the neoliberalization of social, political, and economic practices, policies, and discourses that capacitate some disabled bodies while leaving others to wither. While ableism insidiously functions to exclude and marginalize individuals through rendering disabled bodies as abnormal, I argue that neoliberal capacitation does not always function to normalize disabled subjects. Instead, neoliberal modes of capacitation and debilitation work alongside and also cross ableist categories to include enhanced and capacitated abled-disabled bodies and subjects. As opposed to producing clear-cut lines by which to demarcate disability and disabled bodies, the relationship between capacitating and debilitating and ableism shift and slide in relation to each other. I further explore the ways in which practices of neoliberalization economize all aspects of life and disability relations. I find that disability emerges through the neoliberalization of disability relations as an individual object and problem to be solved, whether by way of the future-oriented promises and enhancements of biocapitalist technoscience, through processes of self-care, or through the good feelings of inclusion. Neoliberalization does not just simply construct barriers and reproduce forms of ableist oppression for disabled people, but also informs the solutions proposed by disabled communities to these barriers. Mapping out the power relations of the neoliberal material-discursive practices surrounding disability moves us away from positioning disability solely as a problem of exclusion to interrogating how worthiness as the basis of inclusion itself is produced within neoliberal biocapitalism. To move away from a neoliberal approach that includes only worthy disabled persons while also disrupting other ableist representations of disability requires going beyond including more disabled people within the exploitative and individualized relations of neoliberalism. To that end, I mark disability as an intracorporeal emergence of the world whereby the relations of disability extend beyond the human and are contingently practiced, emphasizing a relational approach that decentres the economized disabled subject

Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-corporeal Reconfigurations

Challenging the undesirability of disability is a shared responsibility that requires us to imagine disability differently. In order to imagine disability differently, we need to understand how the neoliberal hegemonic social imagination—key to processes that create good disabled and able-bodied neoliberal subjects—works to curtail who is perceived to have a desirable body. In order to desire disability differently, we must begin with marginal, heterotopic imaginations whereby disability is not something to overcome, but rather is part of a life worth living. In this article, I build on Foucault’s concepts of heterotopia (1998), milieu, and the government of things (2007), and Karen Barad’s agential realism (2007), as well as draw on the work of Mel Chen (2012) and Rod Michalko (1999) in order to argue that the heterotopic imagination reconfigures how we consider disability to emerge, with whom, and where. By mobilising the heterotopic imagination, we can come to recognise that disability does not emerge as an individualised human body, but rather is an intracorporeal, non-anthropocentric multiplicity. To desire disability differently through the heterotopic imagination is not simply to allow the current formulation of disability to become desirable, but rather to radically alter how we desire disability, in addition to altering what disability is, how it is practised, and what it can be

Equivariant Topology of Configuration Spaces

We study the Fadell-Husseini index of the configuration space F(R^d,n) with respect to different subgroups of the symmetric group S_n. For p prime and d>0, we completely determine Index_{Z/p}(F(R^d,p);F_p) and partially describe Index{(Z/p)^k}(F(R^d,p^k);F_p). In this process we obtain results of independent interest, including: (1) an extended equivariant Goresky-MacPherson formula, (2) a complete description of the top homology of the partition lattice Pi_p as an F_p[Z_p]-module, and (3) a generalized Dold theorem for elementary abelian groups. The results on the Fadell-Husseini index yield a new proof of the Nandakumar & Ramana Rao conjecture for a prime. For n=p^k a prime power, we compute the Lusternik-Schnirelmann category cat(F(R^d,n)/S_n)=(d-1)(n-1). Moreover, we extend coincidence results related to the Borsuk-Ulam theorem, as obtained by Cohen & Connett, Cohen & Lusk, and Karasev & Volovikov.Comment: 40 pages; J. Topology, to appea

Peroxiredoxin 6 Fails to Limit Phospholipid Peroxidation in Lung from Cftr-Knockout Mice Subjected to Oxidative Challenge

Oxidative stress plays a prominent role in the pathophysiology of cystic fibrosis (CF). Despite the presence of oxidative stress markers and a decreased antioxidant capacity in CF airway lining fluid, few studies have focused on the oxidant/antioxidant balance in CF cells. The aim of the current study was to investigate the cellular levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS), oxidative damage and enzymatic antioxidant defenses in the lung of Cftr-knockout mice in basal conditions and as a response to oxidative insult

A Thomason Model Structure on the Category of Small n-fold Categories

We construct a cofibrantly generated Quillen model structure on the category of small n-fold categories and prove that it is Quillen equivalent to the standard model structure on the category of simplicial sets. An n-fold functor is a weak equivalence if and only if the diagonal of its n-fold nerve is a weak equivalence of simplicial sets. This is an n-fold analogue to Thomason's Quillen model structure on Cat. We introduce an n-fold Grothendieck construction for multisimplicial sets, and prove that it is a homotopy inverse to the n-fold nerve. As a consequence, we completely prove that the unit and counit of the adjunction between simplicial sets and n-fold categories are natural weak equivalences.Comment: More details added. 23 new pages for a total of 77 pages

Control of CD1d-restricted antigen presentation and inflammation by sphingomyelin.

Invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells recognize activating self and microbial lipids presented by CD1d. CD1d can also bind non-activating lipids, such as sphingomyelin. We hypothesized that these serve as endogenous regulators and investigated humans and mice deficient in acid sphingomyelinase (ASM), an enzyme that degrades sphingomyelin. We show that ASM absence in mice leads to diminished CD1d-restricted antigen presentation and iNKT cell selection in the thymus, resulting in decreased iNKT cell levels and resistance to iNKT cell-mediated inflammatory conditions. Defective antigen presentation and decreased iNKT cells are also observed in ASM-deficient humans with Niemann-Pick disease, and ASM activity in healthy humans correlates with iNKT cell phenotype. Pharmacological ASM administration facilitates antigen presentation and restores the levels of iNKT cells in ASM-deficient mice. Together, these results demonstrate that control of non-agonistic CD1d-associated lipids is critical for iNKT cell development and function in vivo and represents a tight link between cellular sphingolipid metabolism and immunity

Measurement of Branching Fraction and Dalitz Distribution for B0->D(*)+/- K0 pi-/+ Decays

We present measurements of the branching fractions for the three-body decays B0 -> D(*)-/+ K0 pi^+/-$and their resonant submodes$B0 -> D(*)-/+ K*+/- using a sample of approximately 88 million BBbar pairs collected by the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric energy storage ring. We measure: B(B0->D-/+ K0 pi+/-)=(4.9 +/- 0.7(stat) +/- 0.5 (syst)) 10^{-4} B(B0->D*-/+ K0 pi+/-)=(3.0 +/- 0.7(stat) +/- 0.3 (syst)) 10^{-4} B(B0->D-/+ K*+/-)=(4.6 +/- 0.6(stat) +/- 0.5 (syst)) 10^{-4} B(B0->D*-/+ K*+/-)=(3.2 +/- 0.6(stat) +/- 0.3 (syst)) 10^{-4} From these measurements we determine the fractions of resonant events to be : f(B0-> D-/+ K*+/-) = 0.63 +/- 0.08(stat) +/- 0.04(syst) f(B0-> D*-/+ K*+/-) = 0.72 +/- 0.14(stat) +/- 0.05(syst)Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

Measurement of the quasi-elastic axial vector mass in neutrino-oxygen interactions

The weak nucleon axial-vector form factor for quasi-elastic interactions is determined using neutrino interaction data from the K2K Scintillating Fiber detector in the neutrino beam at KEK. More than 12,000 events are analyzed, of which half are charged-current quasi-elastic interactions nu-mu n to mu- p occurring primarily in oxygen nuclei. We use a relativistic Fermi gas model for oxygen and assume the form factor is approximately a dipole with one parameter, the axial vector mass M_A, and fit to the shape of the distribution of the square of the momentum transfer from the nucleon to the nucleus. Our best fit result for M_A = 1.20 \pm 0.12 GeV. Furthermore, this analysis includes updated vector form factors from recent electron scattering experiments and a discussion of the effects of the nucleon momentum on the shape of the fitted distributions.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, 6 table