1. Thread on the ableist fetishization of so-called intelligence in academia. I just read yet another article that glorifies so-called intelligence, which is a social construct rooted in eugenics.
2. In an ableist culture (such as ours) in which so-called intelligence is so idolized that it’s a condition of citizenship & personhood, everyone will have anxieties about whether they’re ‘intelligent enough.’
3. Intelligence is a disciplinary apparatus that mobilizes people into a regime of compulsory (able-minded) intelligence, which conveniently justifies capitalism as a ‘meritocracy’ that both produces and rewards the most ‘intelligent’ (nondisabled) citizens.
4. Capitalism is vindicated by its ability to produce intelligent citizens, who are, coincidentally, from the wealthiest & most elite families!
5. And this capitalist regime of compulsory intelligence also punishes & persecutes the (disabled) ‘unintelligent’ by pushing them out of the economy, forcing them into public dependency, politically disenfranchising them…
6. and making them a spectacle of horror for the ‘intelligent’ able-bodied majority, who are compelled to avoid ‘unintelligence’ (in themselves & their offspring) at all costs.
7. Academia is deeply complicit in this charade, and this can be seen seen in the ubiquity of ‘impostor syndrome’:
8. academics have so internalized compulsory able-mindedness that they never feel ‘smart enough’ no matter how many degrees they rack up or how much they alienate themselves from the public by their ascetic intellectual regimens.
9. We subject ourselves to rarefied philosophical defenses of human supremacy and, relatedly, the supremacy of (Eurocentric) ‘intelligence’ above all other human faculties…
10. to the point that we - or many of us - internalize this bullshit as scripture and live the rest of our lives in constant fear of being (seen as) ‘stupid.’
11. Crip theorists consistently debunk the fetishization of intelligence in academia and society in general, and underscore its roots in the capitalist-eugenics regime that uses ‘intelligence’ to uphold racial-patriarchal institutions…
12. and hence we are, unsurprisingly, marginalized and silenced. So is the toxic culture of the neoliberal-ableist university.
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