The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public

An attempt to form an understanding of the work of Susan Schweik.

Thesis

In this article, Schewick suggests that nation, race, and ability are intersecting identities that have been constructed in conjunction with one another to justify discriminatory laws under the guise of protection and safety.

Summary

Schweik begins this article by outlining the rhetoric around both the immigrant and the visibly disabled and how they are often constructed as one in the same. Not only that, but laws policing both communities were created in conjunction with one another. These laws also used language that constructed the identities of these individuals based on physical attributes and identity performances. Schweik specifically articulates the perceptions of the Chinese, Jewish, and Italian immigrants. She does so by providing literary and newspaper evidence of the way that these groups were talked about and understood in the specific time period. The Ugly Law provided a framework for this understanding. Schweik describes the Ugly Law by saying that it “...offered a compact package of medicalized and moralized language with which, at any given moment and location, to define a particular ethnic and racialized difference, to saturate that difference with significance, and to convert social inequity into seemingly natural occurrence.” (171) These different groups all became associated with language that was read as ugliness and were then blamed for bringing it to the United States.

Method & Methodology

Schweik utilizes legal, literary, and news examples to demonstrate the ways in which nation, race, and abilitied otherness are reliant on each other in that they assist in constructing identities to be policed and monitored. By understanding the intersections of this construction, it becomes evident that the social categorizations that are created for these individuals as well as the monitoring done by the institutions and systems that established them are all mutually constituted and directly linked to normative violence.

Analysis

Schweik discusses the ways that the United States social, medical, and legal system constructed the identity of the disabled immigrant as well allows this identity to be socially and legally shamed and policed. This is similar to the work that Luibhéid has done in considering the ways that the U.S.- Mexico border has constructed the identity of lesbian as well as created and maintained ways to police that identity. Both of these examples point out the ways that the United States serves the role of creating those identities in order to marginalize and other them. Within the contexts of Schweik’s research, the U.S. was quick to find ways to pair immigration status with folks with disabilities to make sure that they were not held socially responsible for individuals that they deemed unfit for their society. However, in this process the U.S. still got to exercise the policing and monitoring of these bodies so that the image was given to the majority identity inhibitor that the U.S. is willing and ready to protect them from the unseemly. This is also true for Luibhéid, in the sense that the U.S. was able to bar any person that they deemed “lesbian” out of the country under the guise of protection. When really they have been constructing these identities themselves, based on physical appearance and identity perception.