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'Grandpa lives in paradise now': Biological precarity and global economy of debility

Publication at Faculty of Humanities |
2015

Abstract

This paper examines the relations and the tensions between debility and disability in global contexts defined by complex forms of bio-social precarity. My focus is Baan Kamlangchay, in Thailand, a care-home providing care for older people with dementia and Alzheimer's disease from the global North.

I treat Baan Kamlangchay as one concrete example of emerging circuits of transnational care/reproductive labour in order to investigate the interrelations between disability and wider global biopolitical inequalities. Using the concept of biolegitimacy, I discuss the power dynamics in the relationships between the racialised and gendered care-workers in the centre and (white) disabled residents.

I argue that debility, understood as the flexible gradation of dis/ability and in/capacity, allows us to better understand these novel forms of embodied precarity and their political implications in a global context.