A Response to Bardach and Hannabach

First let me thank both discussants for their attentive and incisive discussions of the paper “Dangerous Discourses,” which is itself part of a wider book project of the same name. The opportunity to rethink some of my formulations in that context—as well as to respond here—promises to be very productive and I welcome any dialogue. What their varying comments have impressed on me among other things is the need to unpack the intersectional implications of these initial speculations. Questions of race, gender, and trans sexuality— which Cathy Hannabach (this issue) identifies as having strong resonances with the concerns of the original essay—will all be taken up in the wider discourse, and I will be further developing some other broad issues, such as the significance of a phenomenological understanding of the body, that the two discussants call attention to. For the purposes of this reply, however, I shall focus briefly on the points that have pushed me to reassess, and sometimes reconfirm, some of my own assumptions.

I shall not, then, spend much time on Joan Bardach's (this issue) irrefutable point that disabled people often—perhaps usually—de-fine themselves in relation to normative standards that engender loss of self-esteem, and yet a simultaneous opposition to those values may have a demonstrably ameliorative effect. The discourse of psychoanalysis is just one of those domains that, because of its