Resumen de Disability, Anonymous Love, and Interworldly Socials in Urban India
This essay considers disability studies scholars’ investment in “the social” as a site of rehabilitation, recuperation, and cure in order to argue that in urban India, the case is otherwise: the public often engages with disability through “anonymous love,” which produces opportunities for the concretization of disability as a category, for disabled people to exist socially, and for validation of an existing social. I argue, however, that this conceptualization and enactment of the social is empirically unfulfilling and analytically limiting. I then turn to ethnographic research conducted in deaf churches in order to consider what other forms of engagement might emerge when we include the interworldly—engagements with God, the Divine, or the Spirit—in our analysis of disability worlds. This essay argues that including the interworldly offers an alternative animation of the social as a concept. Overall, attending to the interworldly leads to the creation of nonliberal and nonsecular alterworlds where alternative renderings of the social that are not premised on the politics of biosocial recognition are made possible.
