Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper explores the paradigm and concept of performativity in relation to the intervention of technology in the discourse of persons with developmental disorders. The ambit of performativity is such that it allows within it, issues that are fabricated through discourse, practice, psychic structures, and power structures. In the Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler writes, “precisely because our bodies are formed and sustained in relation to infrastructural supports (or their absence) and social and technological networks or webs of relation, we cannot extract the body from its constituting relations, this means that vulnerability always takes an object, is always formed and lived in relation to a set of conditions that are outside, yet part of, the body itself”. The idea of embodiment in the discourse of disability is centered around ideas of conditioned lived experience, social infrastructure, authorities of biopower, the juxtaposition with the ‘able’, prospects of accessibility, inclusion, acceptance of the ‘artificial’, and so on. This paper focuses on how bodies with developmental disorders are performative and are not static realities: it does so by delving into the transforming normative, with the cue of technology playing an extremely important role in today’s discourse. The paper uses micro case studies of two applications HOPE and Kirana, where technology is accommodated within a cultural context and has successfully challenged the conditions of ‘disorder’, alongside social infrastructure. The paper concludes by highlighting a present reality where technology is redefining the theoretical especially in the context of disability.