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Non-Compliance:
Gary Fisher and the Queer Limits of Rehabilitation
Robert
McRuer
Department
of English
George
Washington University
(Estados
Unidos)
“Non-Compliance” puts forward a
disability studies critique of rehabilitation through a consideration of
the journals of Gary Fisher, an African American queer writer who died
from complications due to HIV/AIDS in 1993. Fisher at one point described
his voice as that of a “black, queer sociopath.” This
self-description, presumably, alludes to the sexual fantasies and
activities detailed throughout Fisher’s writing. In the excerpts
published posthumously in Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of
Gary Fisher, most of the sexual activities described are wrapped up in
sadomasochistic fantasies; they are also often anonymous and consummated
in public or semi-public spaces. In Don Belton’s interpretation, Fisher
“did not write for publication” and was in fact quite “ambivalent
about the machinery of publication.”
As Fisher apparently perceived it, the
available forms for publication could not comprehend his identifications;
in particular, the proud and sustaining consolidation readable in “black”
at the end of the twentieth century could be understood as inimical to the
disintegration put into motion by Fisher’s self-proclaimed “queer”
and “sociopathic” identities. Put differently, as Fisher himself well
knew, almost thirty years of collective action had made available (through
various machineries of publication) understandings of black identity that
specifically resisted white conflations of “blackness” with anything
“sociopathic” or “queer” (broadly and negatively understood).
In this paper, through a consideration of
the disability critiques legible in regards to rehabilitation proper in
Fisher’s writing (that is, in regards to the therapeutic treatment
Fisher undergoes for HIV disease) and a consideration of his writing on
sexuality, I excavate the ways in which a “rehabilitative logic” is at
work in late twentieth century consolidations of ethnic, sexual, HIV
positive, and disability identity and analyze how Fisher’s will to
degradation troubles that rehabilitative logic.
About Robert McRuer
Robert McRuer is an Associate Professor in
the Department of English at The George Washington University. He is the
author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and
co-editor of Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies
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