Excessive Childhoods, Self-Reliant Citizens: Discursive Constructions of Care for Disabled Children in India During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Disability in the Time of Pandemic
ISBN: 978-1-80262-140-2, eISBN: 978-1-80262-139-6
Publication date: 26 January 2023
Abstract
Purpose
In this chapter, we examine how the media in India constructed the lives, needs, and desires of disabled children in India during the tumultuous pandemic.
Methods/Approach
Through critical discourse analysis, we address how children's bodies and needs have been explicitly discursively constructed as “excessive,” while implicitly drawing upon neoliberal, ableist logics of loss and productivity.
Findings
We foreground how the framing of COVID-19 as a disaster in the Indian context obscures state neglect, suggesting that inequality has been the result of the pandemic rather than the limits of state care under neoliberal ableism. Despite the recognition of gaps in the care received by disabled children, neoliberal, entrepreneurial solutions have emerged as a new, widely touted form of care during the pandemic.
Implication/Value
Through our analysis, we highlight how disabled children have been neglected by the state and constructed as burdensome and vulnerable. We argue that this occurs when disabled children's bodyminds do not conform to an ideal of the self-reliant, independent citizen under the logics of neoliberal ableism. Our work demonstrates how children with disabilities are discursively rendered absent from conceptualizations of normate citizenship, unless seen as contributing to current or future aspirations for state productivity and growth.
Keywords
Citation
Fernandes, K. and Sarkar, T. (2023), "Excessive Childhoods, Self-Reliant Citizens: Discursive Constructions of Care for Disabled Children in India During the COVID-19 Pandemic", Carey, A.C., Green, S.E. and Mauldin, L. (Ed.) Disability in the Time of Pandemic (Research in Social Science and Disability, Vol. 13), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 95-112. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-354720230000013006
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023 Kim Fernandes and Tanushree Sarkar. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited