Disability and Dismantling: Four Reflections in a Time of COVID-19
Disability and Dismantling: Four Reflections in a Time of COVID-19
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残疾与解体：COVID-19 时代的四个反思
DOI：
10.1080/19428200.2020.1761213
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Kochhar, Rijul
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kochhar, Rijul
首先，残疾的身体如何应对新型冠状病毒？再多的消毒也不能忽视这样一个事实，那就是手是存在的--它们接触轮子，它们感觉到世界的物理结构，是的，它们在轮子上移动时捡起东西。现在有大量关于如何应对这种新型病毒的信息，从社会疏远到自我孤立，再到祈祷未来的疫苗。但这一论述的大部分内容都是健全的--它首先涉及的是能够采取这些“基本措施”的机构。关于其他机构应该如何处理这一问题，几乎没有人参与。对于残疾人来说，感染和外来病原体渗入身体的想法是每天都会出现的幽灵。它必须提醒我们注意现在到处都在建议的“安全措施”的奢侈，包括呆在家里。那些没有家或不能留下来的人怎么办？这不再是一个无聊的问题，而是一个事关存亡的问题。残疾人只能希望说明，自主的个人身体的想法总是一个极具伤害性的虚构。人们都是相互联系的，这既是因为始终困扰着我们的微生物和人际脆弱性，也是因为可以帮助治愈破碎身体的社会和集体护理基础设施。新冠肺炎时代的残疾问题揭示了一个个人主义者的贫穷和残忍，而不是对健康、脆弱以及现在的生存的社会重新表述。在我的整个成年生活中生活在微生物的危险中，提醒了我第二类担忧：围绕结构变化的沉默。我要回答两个问题。经历了数十年解体的医疗体系令人震惊的崩溃，如今暴露出它是推动当前公众和流行病恐慌的根本逻辑。如果全球许多国家没有在20世纪乃至现在的21世纪把时间花在错误的优先事项上--放松市场监管、医疗保健、卫生设施和真正的医疗创新等公共基础设施的消失--如果许多国家没有倡导一种奇怪的集体迷恋，用瞬息万变的乌云、人工智能和其他形式的社会混乱来“设计”未来，或许社会会为大流行做好更好的准备，或者肯定不会那么恐慌。但政府领导人浪费了这些时刻，就像浪费了很多过去的碎屑一样。如果个性化的护理形式曾经受到拥护，而今天正在走向灭亡，那么许多国家将见证一种强制出现的(卫生)保健系统的阵痛，如果它对一个人有效，那么它现在必须为所有人工作。
First, how does the disabled body deal with the novel coronavirus? No amount of sanitizing one’s hands can ignore the fact that those hands are lived on—they touch wheels, they feel the world’s physical structures and, yes, they pick up things as they wheel along. There is now a torrent of information about how to deal with this novel virus, from social distancing to self-isolation to praying for a future vaccine. But most of this discourse is able-bodied—it concerns bodies capable of these “essential measures” in the first place. There is little engagement with how other bodies should deal with this issue. For people with disabilities, the idea of infection and foreign agents spilling over into ones’ bodies is an everyday spectre. It must alert us to the luxuries of “security measures” now being advised everywhere, including staying at home. What of those who do not have a home, or cannot stay? This is not an idle question anymore, but an existential one. The disabled body can only hope to illustrate that the idea of an autonomous individual body was always a deeply injurious fiction. People are all interconnected, both by the microbial and interpersonal vulnerabilities that always haunt us and by the social and collective care infrastructures that could minister to heal broken bodies. The question of disability in a time of COVID-19 reveals the poverty and cruelty of an individualistic, as opposed to a social, reformulation of health, vulnerability and, now, being. Living my entire adult life with microbial dangers alerts me to a second order of concerns: the silence around structural changes. I address two. The appalling collapse of healthcare systems suffering decades of dismantling now reveals itself as the fundamental logic motoring the current public and epidemiological panic. If many countries around the globe had not spent years of the 20th and now 21st centuries on the wrong priorities—deregulating markets, vanishing public infrastructures of health, care, sanitation and real medical innovations—and if many countries had not championed a weird collective fascination with “engineering” the future with ephemeral clouds, artificial intelligences and other forms of social disruptions, perhaps society would have been better prepared for a pandemic or, certainly, less panicked. But government leaders frittered those moments away like so much detritus from the past. If individualized forms of care were once championed and are, today, dying, many countries will witness the birth pangs of a forcedly emergent system of (health) care that must now work for all if it works for one.