Collective Biography: Using Memory Work to Explore the Space-in-Between Normativity and Difference/Disability

Embodying the Monster and the Hegemony of Normativity

Shildrick (2002) argues that normative subjects reject the monstrous other in a project of self-identity-making, or the ruse of identity, through which we each create an illusion of being both normal and distinct from others. She begins with feminist theory’s critique of the normative white male body that establishes itself as having integrity by abjecting the monstrous feminine. This normalizing/abjecting process is neither rational nor consciously chosen, but the process through which those who occupy the ascendant term in any binary (male ascendant in relation to female, abled ascendant in relation to disabled) take on a normative identity that requires the abjection of the qualities of the subordinated other. As Goodley (2001) observes, “Disability is a construction of culture and modes of production, in ways that provide a metaphorical crutch for the construction of ‘abled.’ Disability can only be understood in relation to the ‘normate,’ normalcy and ableism” (p. 17).

Normative understandings and practices of gender, age, social class, race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and bodily ability are accomplished through binary logics dividing us into ascendant and subordinate categories. Those categorized as nonnormative, in the subordinate half of whichever binary is at play, are at risk of social exclusion—of both individuals and communities (Benincasa, 2012). Crucial to Shildrick’s argument is that the work of maintaining oneself as a member of a normative, ascendant category is necessitated by the fact that normative selves cannot ever guarantee their own borders, as accomplishing oneself as “normal” involves ongoing intra-active processes.

A disability studies perspective critiques and deconstructs the binary thinking that divides abled from disabled, and normal from abnormal (Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009). In this article, we problematize the complex onto-epistemologies through which disability is constituted as less than normal. As Sherry (2008) observes, “Disability is always a sexed, gendered, racialized, ethnicized, and classed experience [that] operates within a framework of multilayered and complex patterns of inequity and identities” (p. 75).

One of those complex patterns arises in today’s schools from the tension between the current policies and practices of inclusion and the neoliberally driven intensification of the search for perfect embodiment. Such generic perfection is increasingly sought, for example, through gene therapy, plastic surgery, personal therapy, workouts at the gym, diets, and medication, and is integral to the ruse of identity. None of us escapes, or can ever fully disassociate ourselves, from the press toward that generic ideal. It impacts on normative and nonnormative subjects alike: “The value of a disability-free future is taken as self-evident to the [extent that] disability has been linked to a life of ‘suffering,’ ‘unhappiness,’ ‘dependency,’ ‘poverty,’ ‘disadvantage’ and ‘incapacitation’” (Fritsch, 2015, p. 46).

These processes we are all caught up in, on one or other side of the abled/disabled binary, are not necessarily consciously chosen, indeed their power in part lies in their illegibility. As Butler (1997) observes, the “normative exercise of power is rarely acknowledged as an operation of power at all. Indeed we may classify it among the most implicit forms of power, one that works through its illegibility” (p. 134). In normative social settings, the presence of the “monstrous other” might be experienced as disturbing the conditions of intelligibility, and as unsettling what can count as acceptable performances of (normalized) identity. The sight and sound of the monstrous other potentially challenges the taken-for-granted search for generic perfection, and threatens, in Shildrick’s (2002) words, “to expose the vulnerability at the heart of the ideal model of the body/self” (pp. 54-55). Human monsters, she suggests, “both fulfill the necessary function of the binary opposite that confirms the normality and centrality of the acculturated self, and at the same time threatens to disrupt that binary by being all too human” (p. 55).

This disturbance has, historically, provided a motive for eliminating nonnormative beings from normative social settings. As Wilton (1998) observes, spatial division is “both the outcome of, and integral to the production of, social difference. Spatial separation facilitates the maintenance of social boundaries since it reifies perceived social differences between same and other” (p. 174). That separation cements the claims of normative subjects to their own “moral superiority” (Davies, 2008). Despite the multiple ruses of identity-making, all subjects are continually made vulnerable to those ongoing intra-active processes through which the self affects and is affected by others.

Our argument here, then, is that we require new ways of thinking and being that are open to ambiguity, and that enable us to recognize and not be threatened by our own porous boundaries in our intra-active encounters with difference/disability (both our own and that of others). It is to this end that we have engaged in the work of collective biography (collaboratively working with memories) in which we explore the space-in-between normativity and difference/disability. We thus take up “a more critical, socio-cultural orientation than the traditional ‘inspiration in the face of personal tragedy’ motif” (Ferguson & Sauer, 2014).

Ambiguity, Categorization, and Ethics

When we categorize anyone as “the other,” we discursively constitute a boundary that separates us. The practices of diagnosis lend scientific validity to the processes of categorization, making it all the more difficult to remain open to difference; they close down openness to ambiguity and ambivalence. But openness to ambiguity and ambivalence is integral to ethical encounters with the other, where ethics “is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think” (Davies, 2014, pp. 10-11). This new materialist take on ethics is central to our argument here.

Ethics is not so much a matter of rule-following, according to Deleuze, but a matter of being open to difference as it emerges in encounters between one being and another, where “knowing, being and doing (epistemology, ontology and ethics) are inextricably entangled” (Davies, 2014, p. 11). Ethics in this sense requires everyone of us to confront assumptions about difference/disability, assumptions that place limits on the lives of those who are categorized as different. Failure to question and revise those assumptions can have deleterious consequences, foreclosing on the emergence of the capacities for thinking and for being of those who have been categorized as somehow lesser beings insofar as they lie outside the norm.

Biklen and Burke (2006), in a counter move to binary thought, explore the concept of “presuming competence,” not a specific competence, but a presumption that persons who are categorized as intellectually disabled can and will evolve through their encounters with the world, and that they will, in open-minded encounters, demonstrate complexity of thought and action that could not necessarily have been anticipated. Difficulties in performance, or differences in performance, are for Biklen not presumed as evidence of inability, or of intellectual incapacity.

At the same time, however, as we work on finding ways not to be caught in the very illegibility of our own conditions of intelligibility, we are face-to-face all the time with the use of categorization as a tool of bureaucracies. Within bureaucratic modes of intelligibility, categorization is a precondition for accessing specific resources of an educational, therapeutic, and medical kind. To accept the bureaucratic benefits of a diagnostic category is not, however, to deny, normalize, or ignore the negative consequences. Categorization is not either helpful or harmful. It is a matter of “and” rather than “or.” There are politically hard-won benefits and dangerous epistemological-ontological-ethical consequences to categorization. It is the latter that we wish to explore.

The processes of categorization are both discursive and intra-active. Discursive categories preexist subjects but play intra-actively on the emergent intra-acting multiplicity of human subjects. Through the ruse of identity-making, normative subjects become what they ought to be according to the subject positions that are made available within the circulating conditions of possibility. One of the conditions of possibility that is relevant to our thinking here, is that produced by neoliberal discourses of productivity, which link education to the economy, implying that access to education can only be legitimated by subsequent economic productivity. Part of the necessary work in the field of difference/disability is to make legible those illegible processes of power, and to produce alternatives.

Through our work with collective biography, we want to open up an alternative approach to identity, where being in the world is experienced as both multiple and mobile, with meanings circulating in multiple directions. We are interested in opening ourselves, all of ourselves, to what Fritsch (2015) calls emergent intracorporeal multiplicity. We work with difference/disability as movement, as becoming, and as openness to ethical encounters.

None of us exist simply on one side or the other of the deeply problematic binary of abled/disabled. Our borders are much more porous than we usually imagine they are. We are interdependent on our intra-actions with each other, always affected by and affecting each other. As Barad (2008) explains,

What often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all. Like the diffraction patterns illuminating the indefinite nature of boundaries—displaying shadows in “light” regions and bright spots in “dark” regions. (Barad, 2008, p. 122)

The relations between us, she points out, are “not a static relationality but a doing—the enactment of boundaries—that always entails constitutive exclusions and therefore requisite questions of accountability” (p. 122).

In the collective biographies our broader research group has participated in, we have generated a variety of strategies to dismantle the abled/disabled binary. We have generated a number of onto-epistemological and ethical strategies for analyzing our conditions of intelligibility as normative and nonnormative subjects. The broader research group that has participated in several collective biographies as well as in several reading groups, includes persons categorized as disabled or who have family members similarly labeled. We locate persons with a difference/disability as central actors in the research process through their participation as members of the collective biography workshops and collaborative writing, as well as through their central role in each memory story.

Collective Biography Meets Disability Studies

Collective biography is a posthumanist, new materialist research strategy (Davies & Gannon, 2006, 2009, 2013). It works with the memories of the participants, and those participants are also the authors of the analytic work that subsequently emerges. The memories are generated specifically in response to the research question that the participants set out to study, in this case the space-in-between normativity and difference/disability. Disability is often assumed to be unequivocal, and is interpreted as problematic and tragic, and as inherent in particular individuals. The further assumption is then made that the task of those positioned as normal is to counter the deficit in the disabled individuals, to repair, cure, or solve it—that is, to bring them closer to normative modes of being. From a disability studies perspective, we understand that the “category itself is an extraordinarily unstable one” (Davis, 1995, p. xv) and our work serves in part to further destabilize it. This particular collective biography works at that unstable border “generating the means to see how we become subjects” (Davies & Gannon, 2006, p. 15) and the means to question those very processes of subjectification insofar as they mobilize the abled/disabled binary.

In the work of collective biography, knowledge emerges out of multiple intra-actions: out of the memories that are generated in the collective biography workshop; out of the processes of telling, listening, writing, and reading out loud; out of the researchers’ embodied selves in the workshop as they are affected by and affect each other; and out of the collaboratively written analyses of those memories (Davies & Gannon, 2006).

In our research process, each participant, with the generation of each memory, works in intra-action with others toward the possibility of new understandings: “. . . bodies are the product of complicated cultural processes and practices that shape thinking about bodies (and mind) within a particular historical moment and context” (Mallett & Runswick-Cole, 2014, p. 47). Our collective biography process thus involves a movement beyond the individual of liberal humanism. It involves not just telling individualistic memories evoked by the topic of research, but a very specific form of emergent telling/listening/writing/reading/analysis. Through this intra-active process of talking and listening, of writing and rewriting, the social and cultural forces that register themselves as bodily intensities of the collaborating researchers become palpable and analyzable. The intra-active encounter in collective biography enables us to listen differently, and to contest moral judgments and the power of normative discourses (Davies et al., 2013).

Through the memory work and the conceptual analysis undertaken in collective biography workshops, concepts, memories, and the virtual bodies of the collective participants are brought into a diffractive relation with one another “reading insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge” (Barad, 2007, p. 30). It works not so much as a method to be followed, but as a set of emergent possibilities generated first in a workshop spanning several days, followed by an intensive collaborative writing practice. In this sense, it is experimental, enabling us to “move out of the grooves of the normal and self-evident”, pushing us “toward the new and different” (St. Pierre, 2015, p. 84).

Our Way of Working

In preparation for our 3-day collective biography workshop, we read Shildrick’s (2002) book, Embodying the Monster: Encounters With the Vulnerable Self, as well as articles previously written by some of us using collective biography (Davies et al., 2013; Davies & Gannon, 2006). We used Shildrick’s concept of the monstrous other to trigger questions to explore remembered encounters with difference.

In working with our memories of monstrosity, as Shildrick characterizes it, we sought to open up for analysis the process of abjection, not to judge it as a morally unacceptable practice, but to understand it. We wanted to be able to see the encounter with difference/disability in all its shifting, contradictory multiplicity and fragility, and also to see the ongoing and constitutive force of multiple discourses and practices that come into play. But our work was not only epistemological; collective biography works ontologically, with material bodies as they are colonized by cultural discourses and practices. We agree with Danermark and Gellerstedt (2004) when they write,

. . . injustices to disabled people can be understood neither as generated by solely cultural mechanisms (cultural reductionism) nor by socio-economic mechanisms (economic reductionism) or by biological mechanisms (biological reductionism). In sum, only by taking different levels, mechanisms and contexts into account, can disability as phenomenon be analytically approached. (p. 17)

The three authors of this article lived together for the 3 days of the collective biography workshop. We were in Chicago on our way to the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Our specific project, which informs this article, was to work with memories of encounters with Shildrick’s “monstrous other.”

Our memories were first told to each other, then written and read out loud, always avoiding clichés and seeking the fine detail of the embodied moment. That telling and writing and reading out loud involve a collective practice of emergent listening, a listening that opens each listener to others’ memories ontologically, epistemologically, and ethically (Davies, 2016). Each participant listens to each memory story to imagine the story lived out on their own bodies. Each questions the storyteller whenever they cannot quite bring the story to life in their own embodied imagination. Their questioning generates further details of the storyteller’s embodied experience, and a reexamination of the words being used to evoke the embodied specificity of the moment captured in the story. The participants are thus positioned as emergent, as mobile, as multiple, and as “mutually implicated” with others in their “differential becoming” (Barad, 2008, p. 147). It is a diffractive process with multiple intersecting movements and intensities, affecting each other.

The process of working together on memories is, in collective biography, always open to revision, and always searching for the philosophical concepts that will tease the memories open to new insights and understandings. In this particular workshop, we plugged our thinking in and out of Shildrick’s (2002) conceptual framework. The encounter with those concepts enabled us to see ourselves in all our shifting, contradictory multiplicity and fragility, and also to see the ongoing, constitutive force of the multiple discourses and practices through which we take up our existence.

At each moment in the process of working with memories, it is vital to be aware of the ethics of the encounter, both with each other and with the people who emerge in our memories. A Deleuzian (1980) approach to ethics requires of us that we remain open to difference and to multiplicity—both in ourselves and in each other in every mo(ve)ment within the emergent, unfolding encounters; it requires much more than the following of procedures for informed consent (Ellis, 2007). Integral to our process is the collaborative work after the workshop, when the memories that have emerged in the collaborative work are discussed with the people whose lives are touched on in those stories. We shared the second story that we tell here with the mother of Kobe and gained her consent for its use in our research. We were unable to consult Kobe as he is no longer living. For the same reason, we could not include May and her family in our process.

The collaborative process of our work continued through into the writing of this article for publication, rather than the more usual process in other methodologies of a single author taking sole responsibility (Gannon, 2001). For this article, that meant that we had different rounds in which each author worked with the insights that had emerged through the process of memory work and through the subsequent writing. More memory stories were generated in the workshop than could be used in any one article. Each story contributed to the emergent collective understanding of our topic, though not every story made its way into the article. ¹

The task of choosing which stories to work with in our writing of any article is always a difficult one, as the choice of stories inevitably has a major impact on the analysis that takes place. In choosing the two stories for this article, we decided to take two markedly different stories, one where the narrator abjects the monstrous other, and one where the narrator encounters the monstrous other as someone she loves and respects. The first story, of May, is significant insofar as it enables us to open up a historical dimension of our work. As Gilman (2014) observes, assumptions about disability are not only social and cultural but also historical. The storyline of our article thus moves from an encounter where normativity reigns to an encounter, decades later, that reveals over and over again the ambivalent pleasure (and difficulty) of being open to difference.

To engage in thinking differently, to develop the methodology further, and to multiply the intra-active and intracorporeal complexity of our task, some of us animated our own and each other’s memories through artwork. Some of that artwork we present here, and we discuss the way in which the artwork enabled the storyteller to bring the monstrous other to life in a nonjudgmental way that had not previously been available to her. Working with materials, as well as words, we could enter our own stories’ materiality in unexpected ways as the intracorporeality of people and things became more vivid. In the chosen stories, we thus animate encounters with disability in all their emergent, multiplicity, and intracorporeality.

Collective Biography Stories

We turn now to the memories we generated in our collective biography workshop. In response to the trigger question, “What is your earliest memory of a monster,” participants told their own remembered stories. In what follows, we have two stories with which to open up this space-in-between normativity and disability. One is of a girl growing up in the 1950s who lived next door to a woman with an intellectual disability. This is a story about keeping the borders intact; about a normalized self who struggles with the monstrousness of the other. We include in the analysis of this story some of the drawings that became one of the workshop strategies for delving into the affective flow that kept the girl separate from the girl-woman next door. Our second memory story is of a day spent with a boy who the narrator was working with as a support worker where the withness of boy and young woman, along with family members, is elaborated in loving detail. In the first story, the names are changed. In the second, the participants have agreed to have their actual names used in the article.

The Girl-Woman Next Door

In the dreamy space between sleep and waking, there is a sudden shriek next door that startles me into wakefulness. I don’t sit up and look, because I know that I can’t see through the rambling chaos of the vast hedge that separates us, but I know it is May Harding. She is wailing and roaring. It is a frightening sound. How can anyone make that noise? I shrink further under my bedclothes. I hear the sound of heavy feet pounding on a board floor and someone running after her. The door slams. A sound of thumping. May Harding screams again, the door bangs again, then silence.

After a while, the wood-chopping begins, and I know it will go on for a long time. It is her way of calming down. Chop, chop, whack, the bits of chopped wood are thrown onto a pile, chop chop, whack, a steady calming rhythm. I imagine the Hardings must have a huge woodpile, though I’ve never seen it.

May Harding is 21 years old. My father says she was kicked in the head by a horse when she was 3 years old, and she has arrested development. Why doesn’t anyone help her, I wonder. It’s 18 years, I calculate on my fingers, since the horse kicked her. How come they haven’t figured how to teach her anything in all that time? Lying there in my warm bed, I imagine that I will leave this town, and I will go somewhere where people know things, and I will learn how to teach people like May Harding.

The child-narrator cannot imagine an engagement with May Harding other than one in which she becomes the teacher who can help May Harding and others like her to normalize themselves. She lives May Harding’s rebellion in her own body, hearing the scream, the door slamming, the wood chopping, imagining them vividly as her own and abjecting them at the same time as unlivable, unbearable. The memory enables us to catch the moment of abjection, a moment not willfully chosen, nor even ignorantly enacted (De Schauwer, Van de Putte, Claes, Verstichele, & Davies, 2016).

The narrator then recalls an earlier memory:

May sits down under the pointed tiled roof over our front gate. There is a small brick bench there where she can sit. We never use the front gate, so it’s really quite private. She sits there inside our gate with her little preschool bag and smokes her cigarettes. I don’t want to approach her, but my older sister wants to see her up close. She dares me and our brother to come up close to her. It feels wrong to disturb May Harding in her safe place. But when we draw closer she opens her little bag and pulls out some coins and holds them out in her grubby hand, asking my sister, in her strange nasal voice, whether there is enough there to buy a “packacigarettes” at the corner store. I don’t understand what she says, but my sister does. She counts the money and tells her she doesn’t have enough to buy them at the corner store as they are more expensive there. She should go down to the city and buy them there. I can see on May Harding’s face that that is not an option open to her. Should we get some extra money I ask, but my sister’s scathing look tells me this is a stupid suggestion. I don’t know how my sister knows so much. I guess that when I too am 10 I will know everything. Now we are up close I stare at May Harding’s bra strap falling down over her big chunky arm. Her dress is made out of the same floral material as the dresses of very old teachers at school. Her slip hangs down below her dress. Her socks and sneakers look old and worn out. I guess she must walk a lot.

In contrast to herself, the girl’s sister wants to see May Harding up close. She hangs back but her sister compels her and her brother to come forward. Up close the girl sees the detail of how it is that May Harding is an impossible subject. She is an adult, but she cannot count her own money, she cannot manage her clothes, she cannot go to the city even though she is fully grown. She carries a schoolbag that only preschoolers carry. She sits inside her neighbor’s front gate without ever being invited to do so. Although her sister can successfully interact with May, the girl cannot overcome her abjecting gaze. May cannot be made to fit inside the adult-child binary.

The workshop participants decide to extend the possibilities of this encounter with May Harding with drawings, thus letting the narrator loose from the words that hold the binaries intact. In animating the story in this way, the narrator opened up the linear, causal, or moral storyline by drawing. In searching for words—poetic and philosophical—with which to animate the complex intersecting emplacements in one historical moment, the narrator sought not to represent something that happened once, but to make it live. It shifted through the drawings from a single storyline, to a multiple storyline, opening up the complexity of the event, the place. The narrator made three attempts to draw May Harding and then wrote about her drawings from her position now as adult narrator:

In the first two drawings I am still protecting my own bodily integrity, setting myself apart. In the first she is a cartoon figure. Her mouth is a downturned U. It is a childish drawing much as the child in the memory might have drawn it. In the second drawing I worked harder on her face, to give it more detail but the picture is still very taken up with the bulkiness of her as it appears in my abjecting gaze. Her face still begins with the round circle of a childish stick figure resembling the limitations of my intra-action with the memory of May: “The ways in which we affect each other, and are affected, cannot be separated from thought any more than it can be separated from bodies. Thought and action are mutually entangled” (Davies, 2014, p. 11).

In the third drawing, I let go of her body and just focus on the face. I also let go of representation of her face—of the possibility that the drawing could be a mirror-image of her. Instead I go for a diffractive reading. To help me move beyond the earlier simplistic images, I look back at the way Picasso drew faces, as I’d seen them the week before in the Art Institute, to help me in this move. I allow the face to appear on the page as a feeling of sorrow. This drawing is no longer May as other or monster. It no longer holds us separate.

This drawing is a diffractive movement among Picasso’s drawings, the story of May Harding and my ontological state as a child, then, and now, as I write the story, thinking of the helplessness and the lack of help. It is “a shift away from will, intentionality, and repetition, towards receptiveness to the not-yet-known (of self and other), and toward emergent possibilities of thought and being” (Davies, 2014, p. 36).

Through these successive drawings, my story finds a place on the edge of an event—a global change in which it began to matter, materially and ethically, how disability/difference might be treated. As Barad says, the past, this past with May Harding, is never just the past—it is still to come. Any beginning “is always already threaded through with anticipation of where it is going but will never simply reach and of a past that has yet to come” (Barad, 2010, p. 244). You can always start and restart in order to make sense of what seemed incomprehensible before. Dwelling in this memory, and working with it collectively, I enter the space of possibility of engaging “with the different intensities that are being offered by persons with a disability and their environments. These are experiences that cannot be plotted beforehand, experiences that are unexpected, experiences that make us experience difference-in-itself” (Mercieca & Mercieca, 2010, p. 89).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Abjection.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

A mo(ve)ment.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Emergent possibilities.

The memory stories and the drawings generated in the collective biography workshop are not objects of reflections. Instead, they are diffractive, mobile, and intra-active; always open to change, to new thoughts; they show that despite all our efforts to protect and defend our boundaries, we are multiply entangled in our encounters with each other.

Our second memory story takes us into of the space of being-with, enabling us as listeners, as readers, to know from inside itself the experience of difference, manifested in the being of Kobe, a boy who was 8 years old.

(In)conclusion

We have worked with our memories and the philosophical concepts of monstrosity, diffraction, and multiplicity to develop new ways of thinking about, and being intra-actively engaged with, disability/difference. In patient observations, in telling, retelling, writing and rewriting, and in drawing our memories out in a collective biography workshop, and in the collaborative writing of this article, we startle parents, teachers, support workers, researchers . . . (including ourselves) into becoming aware of how easily we get trapped in reductionist, “simple,” one-dimensional observations of people who are labeled as different/disabled. Through working with our own memories, we look at these processes from inside themselves, thus opening up the possibility of exploring how normativity works on us and through us. We are, on one hand, looking for new ways of thinking disability/difference through our collective biography work, and on the other hand, we are making more legible the conditions of possibility that work against that opening up. Our article has worked at the space in between policies and practices of including difference/disability on one hand, and on the other, the neoliberally driven intensification of a generic ideal. The methodology helps researchers and practitioners reflect upon their own (past) experiences of entanglement in the normalization and abjection processes involved in exclusion of those who are constituted as potentially (economically) unproductive (Davies & Bansel, 2007). The diffractive reading of the stories, and the drawings, makes it possible to engage in deconstructing binary thinking, and, in line with disability studies, opens up possibilities of inclusion and participation. This work moves us away from the researcher as individualized human subject, and puts emphasis on the collective work of telling, reconceptualizing, and writing our way into new insights that affect all of us.

We have taken up the challenge of this special issue to work with new methodologies that make visible new possibilities of becoming, where we are each “bound together in a mutual entanglement of becoming with each other” (Davies, 2014, p. 16). We have pursued the value of openness to difference, not just for the sake of the disabled other, but for the sake of our own capacity for engagement with life in all its multiplicity. We have further extended that work by, wherever possible, engaging the persons and the families of those who appear in our stories in our discussions about the ideas emerging in our thinking-being as collaborative researchers. Our collective biography methodology thus enables an inclusive, collective process of knowledge-building that works beyond the abled/disabled binary.

We have argued that research (and indeed life) lies in the capacity to affect and be affected, a capacity that enables each of us to go on reaching beyond ourselves and beyond the constraints of any given conditions of possibility. The human subject can actively crack open its own boundaries, welcoming its own vulnerability as that which makes it much larger than itself, creatively evolving, capable of taking itself beyond itself, and also capable of recognizing its own limiting practices, and modifying them. Such openness to the not-yet-known makes us vulnerable. That vulnerability is not something to be avoided, we have argued, but an embracing of the realization “that the self and the other are mutually engaged” (Shildrick, 2002, p. 78). As Davies (2014) notes,

Being open, and being vulnerable to being affected by the other, is how we accomplish our humanity; it is how the communities, of which we are part, create and re-create themselves. We are not separate from the encounters that make up the community but, rather, emergent with them. (p. 10)

Central to our thinking in this article is the claim that going beyond the categories and forces of normalization that contain us cannot be accomplished alone. We can only ever emerge in relation to others:

Opening up to encounters is what thought needs—to unsettle it, to disturb it, to move it. It is hard, demanding work, requiring the capacity to let go of the already-known, and of tired clichés and explanations—archaic attachments. It involves hard epistemological and ontological work to enable the not-yet-known to emerge in the spaces of encounter. (Davies, 2014, p. 5)

This poststructuralist, new materialist research creates knowledge about practices through which people emerge in all their multiplicity, where persons with a disability can be, as we all are, human beings in constant motion, emergent in our collective, intracorporeal multiplicity. Through working with the particular concepts we have mobilized here, through our close and detailed analysis of our memory stories, we have opened up a way of moving beyond the inability to deal with the ambiguous and with the not-yet-known, and beyond the tendency to abject those who are not entirely captured by the illegible forces of normativity. In this collective biography, we searched for an ethical practice that would enable us to work in creative ways, to open up our stories in such a way that we could move beyond binary thought, beyond clichés, beyond judgmental thinking, and beyond abjection. We have thought our way through to dismantling the singular subject created through the ruse of identity, to welcoming our own vulnerability to the other, to recognizing our indebtedness to the other, and to opening ourselves to the diffractive entanglements through which self and other are made.