" Mentální retardace" a afektivní politiky zřeknutí se

• Authors: Kateřina Kolářová

Title variants

EN

" Mental retardation" and affective politics of abandonment

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

This text explores the affective politics of race and disability that underpin the postsocialist developments in the Czech Republic. Firstly, I interrogate “mental retardation”, as a discursive and material practice of differentiating human life according to presumed value. To make the argument, the text follows practices of “mental retardation” through several discursive and material locations: cultural imaginations of “ferality”, controversy spiked by the use of “protective”/“cage” beds in institutional care and the concept of lege artis, i.e. the principle of necessary and (medically) possible care. Travelling through these locations, I argue, secondly, that racialised and ableist notions of worthy human life have been central to the post-socialist affective politics of abandonment. In other words, the text shows how the politics of re-negotiated belonging and attachment to liberal democracy in the post-socialist Czech Republic were predicated upon structures of abandonment and the de/valuation of disabled and racialised lives. And lastly, the text lays out the legacies of colonial domination even in the contemporary intersectional comminglings of race and disability as it is echoed in the current practices of “mental retardation”.

Keywords

EN

intersectional feminist theory; post-socialism; coloniality; disability; race; discourses of mental retardation; lege artis

Discipline

• SOCIOLOGY: SOCIOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 128-154
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Kateřina Kolářová

• Gender a výzkum / Gender and Research Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i. / Institute of Sociology CAS, Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic

Identifiers

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.13060/25706578.2017.18.2.374