Disability haunts our contemporary
orientation to embodiment so much so
that is a risk that we must continually
guard against.
 
 
The specter of disability is also spectral: it's gradations provoke
anxieties about a past that threaten
to taint or even become the future.
Trauma, toxic exposure, historical and
interpersonal violence and oppression;
these experiences mark bodies of the
past and haunt futures yet to come. And
yet, can a disability haunting enable us
to grapple with the effects of the past
and the present in such a way that
provokes a different, more collectively
just, future? Can we know and experience
disability differently, and can spectrums of risk provoke the possibility of
disability justice?
In this article we draw on legacies of eugenics and the
institutional history of the sperm bank
to consider how spectrums of risk
constrain and expand possibilities for
disability justice. We do this by
examining the discourses surrounding the
case of Xytex sperm donor 9623 which
caught our attention back in 2016. He was described as the perfect donor: an IQ of
160, spoke four languages, was a talented
musician.
 
Yet seven years after the birth
of their child, a Canadian couple
discovered that Donor 9623
had a criminal record, a diagnosis of
schizophrenia. We trace how the parents
haunted by the dread of disability
marked the fate of their donor conceived
child on a graded spectrum of genetic
and psychiatric risk. The gradations of
risk here are speculative and
individualized, treatment is customizable,
and surveillance perpetual, by necessity.
 
Through this case we seek to better
understand how disability is being
reorganized as risk is mapped onto a
spectrum. Whether emanating from the
realm of biomedical diagnosis, popular
culture, critical scholarship, or activism,
the trouble with the spectral lies in
the ways in which it upholds disability
(or a more severe or more intense form of
disability) as an object of dread. This
orientation, we argue, obscures the
relational possibility of disability
risk and also fails to substantially
alter material, social, or structural
inequalities toward disability justice.
 
We end the article by exploring the
possibility of the spectrum of
disability, which we argue lies in the
ways in which it exposes an inherent
relationality and interdependency
between bodies and their social and
physical environments. The notion of a
relational and responsive disability
spectrum promises that we can together
make a world that can embrace variegations
of embodied difference such that
confronting the biosocial limits of
ourselves is met with collective
commitments to creating infrastructures
of access, care, and supports for
flourishing. Embracing disability and
disability culture enables us to offer
both the disability to come and the
disability already here something more
than dread, monitoring, intervention, and
individual overcoming, foregrounding new
possibilities for building more
accessible futures and improving the
life chances of historically oppressed people.
 
