Arseli Dokumaci – Micro-activist Affordances: Disability, Disorientations and Improvisation

In this talk, I present “a theory of activist affordances” developed through a critical disability and performance studies lens. Drawing parallels between the creative space of aesthetic performance and the performance of everyday life lived with disability, I propose the concept of “micro-activist affordances” as a way to describe micro, ephemeral and improvisatory acts of world-building, with which disabled people literally “make up,” and at the same time “make up for,” whatever affordance fails to readily materialize in their environments.

Experiencing disability is inherently disorienting. The environment, as years of disability activism have shown us, is built with a very limited conception of the human being in mind. But the environment, and its available spaces for action can also narrow down when experiencing chronic pain and disease or be deliberately narrowed down by a biopolitics of debilitation. I argue that disability, in all of its various manifestations, is experienced as the shrinking of the environment, and its readily available affordances, regardless of regardless of the cause of the shrinkage. But precisely at such moments of shrinking, something else happens. When the environment is narrowed down in its offerings, I propose that it is the creative space of performance (on or offstage) that opens up to make it afford otherwise. The crux of my theory is: when currently utilized affordances of the world leave no room for disabled people’s atypical bodies and minds, when the world becomes most unresponsive to the impairments, diseases and pains they live with, and when the world’s offerings become unreachable in states of deprivation and debilitation, disabled people may make up and at the same time make up for whatever affordances that are not readily provided with. They invent, in short, what I call “micro-activist affordances.”