At the very end of class on Monday, I mentioned that a lot of what we were talking about for Chapter 3 reminded me of an episode from a show on Netflix, Black Mirror. A summary of this episode is: A man joins the military and gets an implant that all soldiers have. The military trains the soldiers to find and kill what they call ‘roaches’ which are monsters that kind of look like people with scary faces that cannot communicate in ways other than screeching. One of these ‘monsters’ disables the main character’s implant, which allows him to see what is really going on. The monsters are not actually monsters: they are people. The implants distort the soldiers’ visual and auditory perceptions, so that they see these people that they were instructed to kill as monsters. The soldier tries to save a few of these people from his peers, but eventually gets caught. He learns that the reason that the military wanted soldiers to see these people as monsters is because soldiers are emotionally damaged after killing people, so making them think they were killing non-humans helped them kill easier and be better soldiers. Finally, the main character learns that the ‘roaches’ are people with a genetic make up that carried hereditary illnesses and disabilities. Eventually, he decides that he cannot handle the fact that he actually had killed real people and not monsters, so the soldier decides to have his implant fixed and his memory wiped.
This reminded me a lot of the utopian feminist story that Kafer talks about in her book, where in the utopian future, there is no disability. It seems like the Black Mirror episode and the utopian future book were kind of opposite for each other, the episode violent and dark, while the story was hopeful, but they both had a similar approach to ability and impairment. They both are asking ‘what is the ‘best’ future like and who gets to be in it?’ and that is an incredibly dangerous and terrifying determination. If the only way that a society can be at it’s ‘best’ or greatest or utopian is if it eradicates/erases people(s) then it is not best or good or utopian at all.
I’ve been thinking a lot of about social Darwinism and natural selection and that scares me. History has shown that those movements led to widespread harm and suffering through targeting people who are perceived to be inferior. We can find real life examples of what these two fictional media portray – erasure of or intentional violence towards a certain type of people. I think real life is a lot scarier than what media shows us, but they provide an interesting mode of understanding what is happening.
Unruly Bodies 
Your observation seems to be spot on. People always imagine a utopian future as one without X group. For a long time gays, blacks, and other minorities would nor have been included in that future. However, that is changing, even though disability has remained a constant factor to be eliminated. To me, it is odd that people still hope and strive for a utopian society. They put their hopes in dreams in an ideal future, but do not realize that they actively exclude Others from that vision. As you said, that idealization is harmful to those groups being targeted, but isn’t it weird that people still think a Utopia is a good and possible thing, even though it seems to be inherently flawed? I guess this boils down to a basic question I mull over a lot: why do people strive for “perfection?” It never works out in the end, yet people always ignore the present and its possibilites, in the hopes of making a “better” future.
I think this has definitely brought to light problems in the idea of utopia. In utopia, people often imagine it to be without sickness and disease, but they don’t ever think to address what they consider to be sick or diseased. This is assumed to be anything outside of a ‘healthy’ body, but again ignores how ‘healthy’ is constructed. Without understanding how the idea of health is constructed, utopian dreams will always miss the fact that utopia is in fact just a construction. It is a thing that can never be perfect for everyone, but only perfect for those the utopia has been constructed for. Summary: utopias aren’t real and that is fine.