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Death Panel

Teaser - Body Politics w/ Jasbir Puar

Death Panel

Death Panel

News

4.8588 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2026

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/156085527/ Beatrice and Jules speak with Jasbir Puar about the violent global effects of settler colonialism and how they shape our understanding of what we mean by “disability” and “debility.” We discuss how events like the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the bombings in 2014 are often described through the number of dead, when they also entail mass disablement and mass debilitation, and how colonial occupation and imperial violence can be understood through a frame of debility. Runtime 2:19:29 MERCH STORE IS BACK! Patrons get a code for 10% off all orders. Find it at www.deathpanel.net/merch We're testing out a new Bookshop.org page (still under construction), where you can find books by past guests and book recommendations from the hosts. Find it here: bookshop.org/shop/deathpanel Show links: Get Health Communism here: https://bookshop.org/a/118130/9781839765179 Find Tracy's book Abolish Rent here: https://bookshop.org/a/118130/9798888902523

Transcript

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0:00.0

To hear the full episode, become a patron at petrium.com slash netpanel pod.

0:06.4

We've been talking a lot about how disability gets framed as an exception, as a discrete event,

0:12.7

that's something to be standardized, to be taxonomized, to really kind of be sort of made legible,

0:19.2

even though it can take many different, you know, definitions and

0:22.7

different contexts. Nevertheless, it's sort of point is to be turned into something really kind

0:27.4

of tangible. Whereas debility takes us towards, you know, the endemic, the things that are so

0:35.2

structural to the conditions of life for entire populations that they would

0:39.9

never become so discreet in the first place. But for you, what does debility help us apprehend

0:46.6

a little differently than disability? First of all, I wanted just to flag Julie Livingston's work,

0:52.7

because that's where I first started thinking about the

0:56.8

term debility. And it's from her book called Dability and the Moral Imagination in Botswana.

1:03.5

And but one of the most important things that she writes is that she's interested in bodily

1:10.8

infirmities that are not regarded as disability because she writes is that she's interested in bodily infirmities that are not regarded as disability

1:13.8

because she writes, they are expected impairments and understood as such. They are understood as

1:22.4

normal or what we're calling endemic. So there's nothing exceptional about these expected impairments.

1:29.3

And she's looking at miners who are returning from the mines, usually amputated, right?

1:35.6

In that context. So, you know, here's a kind of literature from, you know, her work and related

1:43.1

works from Global South's

1:45.6

literatures that's actually, you know, not following the kind of Euro-American

1:52.6

models of disability and disability studies or the UN models or the NGO models or

2:00.8

whatever.

2:01.4

She's actually like actually these are,

...

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