The Able Body and the Pursuit of Power

Abstract

This chapter argues that able power is and has been embodied in what Plato called “those of the best,” men who claim to ennoble the world with their eugenic superiority. Able power, legitimated by this view of congenital superiority, represented the disabled body in a pejorative language of humiliating tropes, the most common of which, in the terminology of antiquity, were deformity, defectiveness, and monstrosity. In modernity, able power absorbs scientific and pseudoscientific ideology into its agenda of legitimation by superimposing on top of the ancient and debilitating ideological categories medical terms that pathologize disabled people and ethnic others who are caught in the civilizing web of White European colonialism. The colonizing predilection of Western able power and its racist representations of non-Western ethnicities as inferior and defectively embodied is explored in a “historical sociology” of disability. Antique and modern imperialisms are examined. In these two moments, able power deploys economic and military might to subdue inferior persons abroad while simultaneously oppressing “dysgenic” bodies at home. The focus is on these two sociological moments because they, it is argued, represent the policies and practices of able power and the “ideology of able-bodiedness” at its most aggressive and violent.