IN THE DISABILITY MOVEMENT, a long-standing activist and rhetorical strategy has been to speak in one’s own voice, to resist the active desubjectivization that has been a central component of the history of disability for the past few centuries. In an age of normalization, disabled people have been cast as objects to be diagnosed, studied, corrected, pitied, feared, and at times eliminated. The global demand of the disability rights movement—“nothing about us without us”—captures well this refusal of objectivization, as do slogans such as “disability rights are human rights” or “piss on pity.” Even naming oneself as disabled is a reclamation of the word from the subjective position of disabled people of themselves. Defiant terms, such as crip or disca, of course perform similar work, with crip serving as a rejection of the stigmatizing connotations of cripple, and with disca now proudly circulating in Spanish-speaking locations, arguably offering a way of articulating disability [discapacidad] that doesn’t center/subjectivize (and even actively cuts from center stage) ability [capacidad]. Innumerable specific renamings of disabilities have occurred over the past half-century, as when AIDS activists insisted they were not AIDS victims and only occasionally AIDS patients; they were, instead, “people living with AIDS.”
Alexandre Baril’s work, however, joins important (indeed, indispensable) work that theorizes how difficult it is for many to refuse desubjectivization. Mad pride and antipsychiatry notwithstanding, Michel Foucault’s work has long pushed us to understand that the discourse of madness and irrationality has generally been a discourse of rationality about something labeled “madness.” More recently, M. Remi Yergeau’s important work on autism has demonstrated how, in the dominant imagination, autistic voices cannot be heard because discourses of autism presume that speaking rationally and subjectively automatically materializes a nonautistic subject position. Something similar might be said about addiction—the addict as addict cannot speak because speaking addiction means acceding to the compulsory demand that addiction must be overcome (indeed, the Americans with Disabilities Act enshrines this in law, only recognizing addicted subjects who are actively in recovery).
Baril masterfully puts before us, however, the subject (or anti-subject) who is perhaps the extreme limit case for these theoretical questions: the suicidal person. And because it is so important for us to think at the limits, Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide should be necessary reading in disability studies and crip theory (and queer and trans theory). My own work in crip theory has long seen that theoretical project as being deeply committed to thinking about those subjects who don’t neatly fit into our existing categories or who, on the surface, do not seem to be candidates for our most cherished theoretical and activist moves. But again, in the context of Undoing Suicidism, we are actually thinking about anti-subjects, on a few levels. First, the suicidal person is imagined as one who must be cured, transformed, brought back to subjectivity, which of course can only be subjectivity because it is nonsuicidal. Second, perhaps inescapably, in Undoing Suicidism, Baril invites us to think with or alongside many who actively desire a form of anti-subjectivity. Can the suicidal subject speak? Baril asks, concluding in many ways that the answer is no. Suicidism, the system, precludes that voice in so many ways. Through this coinage, Baril means a form of oppression that comes from discursive and material violence enacted because of someone’s presumed suicidal ideation: You can’t be thinking this, you must want to get better, we all know that choosing life is the only option. Yet now, Undoing Suicidism the book exists and lays before us ethical ways of thinking otherwise, of listening to that contradictory, logically impossible being: the suicidal/subject. And it lays those ethical ways of thinking before us in such richly intersectional ways, queering, transing, cripping, and maddening our ways of thinking about suicide. I have long insisted, especially in disability studies with cripping, that the verb forms of what we do are always in a process of invention. Baril offers us perhaps the most comprehensive study to date of what it might mean to think of queering, transing, cripping, and maddening as active ways of imagining otherwise.
When my own closest cousin killed herself in 2014, I found myself caught up in a familial network of suicidism, compounded by a deep religiosity (not my own). The only conversation my mother could possibly have with me about my cousin for years afterward involved the following questions: Why? But did she ever give you a reason? Was there anything that you could have done? Why? Why? I had no answers, of course, and the questions (as the only allowable questions) in many ways got in the way of hearing the subject who was no longer a subject. And, of course, I desperately wanted to hear her again. The memorial service, as I knew it would be, was grounded in talk about Jesus, and mercy, and heaven, and about seeing my cousin there (in other arenas, this focus was matched by equally unsavory religious rhetoric, as one former friend felt compelled to inform me that my cousin probably wasn’t eligible for heaven because of what she had done). There wasn’t much room to speak at the service, but I knew that I wanted at least the tiniest of queer/crip affirmations far off to the side of the compulsory religiosity. And so I named disability, reminding those gathered that I work in disability studies and pointing out that depression can arguably be understood as one of the most common disabilities in contemporary society. Alongside that, without naming it as queer, I affirmed my cousin’s wicked, irreverent humor (not mentioning what perhaps no one else knew—that she had had at least one short affair with a woman). The moment of joy for me afterward came from talking with the queers and crips, unrecognized as queers and crips by most of those gathered there, who came to the side to thank me for that—the female friend who told me that she and my cousin used to text from their beds, saying they just couldn’t get out of bed today; the gay friend who likewise wanted to talk about how bawdy and wild she really was. We were involved in the impossible project of listening to her one more time and of attempting to honor her in some way.
Alexandre Baril’s work is a rich resource that I believe can nurture such difficult but necessary queer, crip, trans, and mad ways of being-in-common. It is not an easy book, and that arguably bespeaks its importance. On the contrary: Undoing Suicidism is a challenging book on painful subjects. It’s also an intensely personal book. But, most importantly, it’s a book about loving expansively enough to listen to all those who might otherwise be disqualified beneath the sign of mad, crip, queer, or trans.