Disability, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Death: Interpreting MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) Through a Critical Disability Studies Lens

Abstract

If there is nothing natural about death, in what ways do we socially organize death? Given that disability is regarded as a memento mori, what might disability studies tell us (i.e. what can we learn) about this social organization of death through interpretive disability studies methods? How does our language reveal and represent the appearance of death and the ways in which death is socially accomplished, limited, and made possible within the context of cultural knowledge production? Achille Mbembe tells us in his work Necropolitics: “sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (Mbembe 2019 [2003], 80 [27]). How does our knowledge production speak to the power and capacity to define the value of people into socially constructed, “self-evident categories” (Kafer 2013, 10) and what are the consequences of limiting the possibilities for expanding our concepts that designate the meaning of a human life—specifically within the context of Health Canada’s (2024) Fifth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, 2023. This paper considers how we, in contemporary Western society, interpret the meaning of death through close reading analysis of select cultural representations that ask us to consider: (i) the ways in which death might be socially accomplished, and (ii) how our words—our language—limit the possibilities of death. In this way, we might begin to reveal and examine normative conceptions of life, death, and disability—to consider the ways in which our concepts require expansion.