[Readings: Licia Carlson, “The Human as Just an Other Animal: Madness, Disability, and Foucault’s Bestiary”; Kari Weil, “Killing Them Softly: Animal Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Struggle for Ethics”; Cary Wolfe, “Learning from Temple Grandin: Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes after the Subject” from What is Posthumanism?]
The last group of readings for the course explores connections between the fields of disability studies and animal studies. In the intersections that the authors find in each of the texts, the impetus of the investigation is aimed at, not necessarily finding a definitive answer to how we might understand or define the “human animal” beyond the limiting boundaries of liberal humanism, but at identifying and posing questions, and seeking out new directions for study. In this blog post, I’d like to take note of the important ambiguities that each of these texts explores, since the answers to questions of subjectivity and identity entertained by both animal studies and disability studies are far from straightforward.
Carlson
In “The Human as Just an Other Animal: Madness, Disability, and Foucault’s Bestiary,” Carlson seeks to understand the contradictory way in which discourses of animality are employed, that is, in both critical and positive terms. Carlson notes:
…on the one hand, the disability critique challenges associations between the ‘cognitively disabled’ and non-human animals, and calls for us to humanize our view of disability; on the other hand, the critical discourse on non-human animals calls in to question the ontological and ethical privileging of the human over the non-human animal, and calls for us to ‘reassert our human animality,’ i.e., to recognize our own animal nature. (118)
Carlson parses Michel Foucault’s text Madness and Civilization to determine whether we might read in Foucault the same ambiguous discourse. She notes that, in revealing how the figure of the “madman” as a non-human animal becomes discursively constructed over several historical and epistemological periods, resulting in the dehumanization of those classified as “mad” or “insane,” Foucault “does not explicitly argue that we must sever our ties with our animal nature altogether” (126). This leads Carlson to ask, “in studying the mask of the beast worn by the madman, does Foucault unmask some dimension of our animal nature as human beings?” (126).
While madness may be constructed as animality, Carlson notes through Foucault (via Pascal) that the hegemony of reason — “the Reason that silences and excludes madness” — can, itself, be regarded as a form of madness and, thus, animality (126). Carlson interprets that Foucault’s goal here is not to resolve this tension, but to reveal how these two positions can co-exist and how the tension between them is made possble. Carlson suggests that knowledge of the assumptions that support the perceived otherness of the animal or “madman” might dissolve this tension, might allow for a more nuanced understanding of various subject positions.
Weil
The notion of a model of subjectivity not based on language is the subject of Weil’s text “Killing Them Softly: Animal Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Struggle for Ethics.” Her central concern is the significance of the human animal in relation to the death of the non-human animal. Through the examples of Temple Grandin and J. M. Coetzee’s character David Lurie, Weil observes that “killing animals brings us face to face with the inadequacies of our language, or at least with the rational and logical thinking it enables. Death is the place where the conceptual and ontological distinctions that language makes possible break down, including the distinctions between human and animal” (91). The moment of death represents a moment where the human recognizes in the animal a shared vulnerability to mortality.
However, this position is also problematic, since it involves the suffering and sacrifice of the animal; as Weil notes, for Grandin and Lurie, communion with the animal leads to animal sacrifice, rather than a condemnation of this killing (95). In Weil, the central ambiguity, then, is the notion that empathy is always “contradictory and contentious” (96). Even Wolfe’s notion of “ethical pluralism,” defined by Weil as a sense of responsibility for those different from us, is nonetheless problematic in the light of animal killing. Her final question sums up this problem: “is the ability to kill softly enough?” (96).
Wolfe
Generally, Wolfe’s text What is Posthumanism? seeks to destabilize the foundations of the liberal humanist subject and elucidate a new posthumanist model of subjectivity. In the chapter “Learning from Temple Grandin,” Wolfe notes that disability studies and animal studies are in ideal positions to do just this, in the sense that both “[pose] fundamental challenges” to “the liberal justice tradition and its concept of rights, in which ethical standing and civic inclusion are predicated on rationality, autonomy, and agency” (127). These fields encourage “new lines of empathy, affinity, and respect between different forms of life, both human and nonhuman,” allowing for new relationships and possibilities to emerge (127-8). As mentioned, both Carlson and Weil, too, focus on affinity as a central way whereby diverse life forms might form compassionate connections — not in the sense of particularities, but in terms of the more general condition of mortality.
Wolfe uses the example of Temple Grandin to explore the decentering of liberal humanist ability that prioritizes the organization and mastery of space by reframing this “ability” as, actually, an impairment to connecting with and understanding the experiences of nonhuman animals (131). As Wolfe explains,
…disability becomes the positive, indeed enabling, condition for a powerful experience by Grandin that crosses the lines not only of species difference but also of the organic and inorganic, the biological and mechanical. In a kind of dramatization of the category meltdowns identified canonically in Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto,’ disability here positively makes a mess of the conceptual and ontological coordinates that Grandin’s rendering of the passage surely reinstates rhetorically on another level. (136)
Wolfe is centrally concerned with pointing out that the liberal concept of subjectivity, even as it attempts to accept and incorporate uniqueness or difference, nonetheless imposes upon these identity categories the expectations of its normative model. Even some disability studies scholarship celebrates the empowerment of disabled people and validates this subject position by appealing to the language and ideals of the “normal” subject (138).
Overall, Wolfe’s assertion in this chapter is the importance of an overall tolerance of ambiguity that disregards classification and instead encourages biodiversity across species lines and “an ethics based not on ability, activity, agency, and empowerment but on a compassion that is rooted in our vulnerability and passivity” (141).
PatientsLikeMe
These three articles all highlight the ways in which ability (in the liberal humanist sense) is, at a very basic level, a measure of an individual’s “rationality, autonomy, and agency,” all of which define the degree to which we might consider that individual a fully human subject. In this tradition, “inhuman” qualities — those that reject Reason and identify more readily with so-called basic primal behaviour — are aligned with a sort of animality. The drive to maintain hierarchies and boundaries between the human and animal worlds reinforces a conception of the “human” that is both exclusionary and limiting. It is exclusionary in the sense that those whose physical or mental states do not conform to the aforementioned ideals are understood in animalistic terms; it is limiting in the sense that potential positive relationships or affinities between human and non-human animals are restricted.
I see this type of mentality, certainly, at work on the PatientsLikeMe site, where affinity, especially, involves the search for others whose experiences (physiology, mental states, medical history) are the same as one’s own. As I have discussed, the very naming of the site positions users in a realm separate from everyday, “normal” (perhaps, fully human) spheres of activity. Underlying the language of the site is intense anxiety over the threat posed by deviations from “rationality, autonomy, and agency.” Particularly important here is the preoccupation with categorization, which divides and organizes in order to impose control. In the context of animal studies, these categorizations and hierarchizations are what limit our possibilities for connection and interaction; moving in a more positive direction involves the approach that Derrida endorses: that “there is not one opposition between man and non-man; there are, between different organizational structures of the living being, many fractures, heterogeneities” (qtd in Wolfe 139).
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Binaries and boundaries
[Readings: Elizabeth Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit” from Freakery; Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Gender Systems: Toward a Theory of Human Sexuality” from Sexing the Body; Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” from The New Media Reader]
The three writers that I discuss in this post — Elizabeth Grosz, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Donna Haraway — are all concerned in their respective texts with the presence of boundaries that structure our definitions of human identity and subjectivity. The writers examine these boundaries particularly in terms of binary conceptions of sexuality, but more broadly, they are concerned with what Grosz calls “the psychical, physical, and conceptual limits of human subjectivity…, marking the threshold, not of humanity in itself, but of acceptable, tolerable, knowable humanity” (55).
Grosz analyzes the figure of the “freak” for the role this identity category plays in reasserting stabilizing notions of “normalcy.” Grosz sees the freak as significant (both fascinating and repulsive), since he or she
is an ambiguous being whose existence imperils categories and oppositions dominant in social life. Freaks are those human beings who exist outside and in defiance of the structure of binary oppositions that govern our basic concepts and modes of self-definition. They occupy the impossible middle ground between the oppositions dividing the human from the animal…, one being from another…, nature from culture…, one sex from the other…, humans and gods…, and the living and the dead. (Grosz 57)
In discussing hermaphroditism, Grosz notes the practice among medical practitioners, despite recognition of the complex factors that constitute a subject’s sexuality, to surgically correct “the subject’s nonconforming sexuality so that it comes to approximate one or the other category of sexual identity (61). Grosz points out that, in popular discourses, it is not “sexual profusion” (the presence of clear-cut male and female parts) but “sexual indeterminacy” (the presence of neither male nor female genitalia) that seems to be intolerable (61).
The presence of this ambiguity that disrupts binary thinking is also manifest in the example of conjoined twins who are “undecidably singular and plural, individual and collective” (64). The drive here is to separate the twins so that they can each live happy, healthy, “normal” lives. Overall, Grosz suggests that “freak” figures, represented in her discussion by the hermaphrodite and conjoined twins, serve as mirrors that reflect back to us our insecurities about the instability of our own identities; the freak is the “monstrous being” within our own psyches that we must reject in order to “make the bounded, category-obeying self possible” (65).
In “Gender Systems: Toward a Theory of Human Sexuality,” Fausto-Sterling also wishes to explore ambiguity in the context of sexual identity. She calls for a more complex understanding of human sexuality that rejects binary thinking in favour of ambiguity; even her method, after philosophers John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, involving the practice of “see[ing] together . . . much that is talked about conventionally as if it were composed of irreconcilable spheres,” rejects the separation of nature from nurture or genes from environment (Dewey and Bentley qtd in Fausto-Sterling 235).
Much of Fausto-Sterling’s discussion focuses on the ways that “the changes that occur throughout the life cycle all happen as part of a bicultural system in which cells and culture mutually construct each other” (243). While gender and sexuality are often understood as inborn and only superficially constructed by social experience, the writer argues, through the example of smiling, that human behaviour develops in a much more complex way. In the example of smiling, “at the same time that the muscles and nerves that govern smiling develop and become more complex, so too do the functions and social contexts that elicit smiling… Thus, a physiological response becomes ‘socialized’ not only in terms of intentional use but also in terms of the actual body parts (which nerves and muscles are used and what stimulates them) themselves” (245-6).
The drive to find a universal explanation for sexual behaviour and gender acquisition is, according to Fausto-Sterling, futile and unproductive. Instead, the focus should be on examining individual difference, studying sex and gender as part of a developmental system, and being more thorough and exploratory in investigations of environmental components of sexual development (246).
Fausto-Sterling is also interested in how “individuals interpret sexual physiology in the context of institutional and individual gender” (250). Citing Judith Lorber, the author notes that gender, as a social institution, is interested in establishing social statuses for the designation of individual responsibilities; in this process, gender creates the binary positions of man and woman, thus imposing particular power relations (250).
This last point regarding the institutional components of gender is particularly salient in the context of Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” wherein the writer seeks to expand, beyond the restrictive prescriptions of social institutions, the possibilities for human identity, thought, and action. One central thrust of the ironic political myth that Haraway elucidates in this piece is the goal of disassembling boundaries that have been imposed upon human identity by various forces, including Christian and Oedipal narratives and origin stories–myths of “original unity, fullness, bliss and terror” (Haraway 517). The “three crucial boundary breakdowns” at the centre of Haraway’s piece are the separations of human from animal, animal-human from machine, and physical from non-physical (517-8). In the cyborg world that Haraway envisions, “people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (519). The “freak” that Grosz cites in her piece is, perhaps, a version of the cyborg figure that Haraway envisions. The two writers use similar language to describe the hybridizations and ambiguities that these figures contain.
The world Haraway envisions blurs boundaries so as to negate their existence; this blurring is a repudiation of the disciplinary control that seeks to contain bodies, but is it also an ultimate denial of, perhaps valid and important (minority) subject positions? While the ability to decide boundaries, to categorize and to label, is certainly a privilege of those in heteronormative positions of power, isn’t there also some power that comes from asserting a minority identity? At the same time, it may be argued that this only supports hegemonic structures. In blurring boundaries, however, is Haraway not, also, paradoxically erasing difference? Her goal is to sabotage power relationships that have actually created difference, as well as to open up multiple, limitless possibilities for identity. I am, perhaps, misunderstanding Haraway, but it seems to me that there is something within the cyborg figure that also seeks to homogenize (if that makes sense?); or, maybe this is simply a drive for equality — for a level playing field.
Lastly, somewhat tangentially, it also seems strangely optimistic to expect that if humans were “unafraid” to hybridize, to abandon the categorical structures of the liberal humanist subject, that there would not still exist social hierarchies. Would difference simply be enacted in other ways and according to new criteria? Of course, Haraway’s imagined cyborg world is not intended to be taken so literally, but simply to call into question the myths on which we have formed identities and social structures…
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[Readings: Judith Butler, “Critically Queer” from Bodies that Matter; Robert McRuer, “Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence” from Crip Theory]
The pair of readings that I discuss in this post both work to develop theories that address cultural expectations of compulsory heteronormativity. First, Judith Butler analyzes the reappropriation of the term “queer” by LGBT individuals and develops a theory of gender performativity; applying Butler’s conceptual framework for queer theory to the field of disability studies, Robert McRuer later adapts the notion of gender trouble to understand what he calls “ability trouble.”
According to McRuer, queer theory, in its central concern with the deconstruction of compulsory heterosexuality, relies on the same basic notions regarding disciplinary power and the normative as does disability studies; not only this, but McRuer also theorizes that “compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness, and vice versa” (2). Finding links between systems of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality that work to produce both disability and queerness, McRuer suggests that the introduction of “normalcy” gives birth to both of these interrelated compulsions.
Just as Butler argues that heterosexual identity is, in fact, always an elusive categorization, able-bodied identity, too, is an “inevitable impossibility” (10). Along these lines, McRuer notes an important gap in relation to disability that echoes Butler’s differentiation of “virtually queer” and “critically queer” identities. He observes:
Everyone is virtually disabled, both in the sense that able-bodied norms are ‘intrinsically impossible to embody’ and fully in the sense that able-bodied status is always temporary, disability being the one identity category that all people will embody if they live long enough. What we might call a critically disabled position, however, would differ from such a virtually disabled position; it would call attention to the ways in which the disability rights movements and disability studies have resisted the demands of compulsory able-bodiedness and have demanded access to a newly imagined and newly configured public sphere where full participation is not contingent on an able body. (30)
The focus here is not necessarily on demystifying dichotomous ways of thinking that distinguish able bodies from disabled bodies, but on rejecting the narrative of normalization and attitudes that seek to “fix” disabled bodies. The compulsions that both Butler and McRuer identify must be resisted because they represent manifestations of an overall emphasis on “discipline, regulation, [and] punishment” (Butler 232) and derive from what McRuer locates in neoliberalism as “the appropriation and containment of the unrestricted flow of ideas, freedoms, and energies unleashed by the new social movements” in favour of “the unrestricted flow of corporate capital” (2).
One point that I found quite interesting in McRuer’s chapter was his reminder: “…think, after all, of how many institutions in our culture are showcases for able-bodied performance” (9). Certainly, physical excellence in athletic endeavours is valued in contemporary North American culture; physical fitness is now, more than ever, a cultural obsession, as reflected by the growing number of reality television shows that seek to “fix” problems of obesity and physical undesirability. In considering McRuer’s point, the tradition of the Special Olympics came to mind. Arguably, even in this cultural forum, where disability is, perhaps, the “norm,” extraordinary feats of physical ability are celebrated; disabled athletes are applauded for their efforts to train their bodies to do things that “normal” bodies can do.
McRuer usefully adapts and expands upon many of Butler’s arguments regarding compulsory heternormativity. I wonder how the notion of performativity might fit into discussions of disability and compulsory able-bodiedness? How are ability and disability performative? That is, how do they “[echo] prior actions, and [accumulate] the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices” (Butler 226-7)? While McRuer doesn’t state explicitly that he’s referring to performativity, I suppose this connects to his discussion of “flexibility,” in the sense that able-bodied individuals define themselves through and against the foil of disabled individuals (as in the example of Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good As It Gets); able-bodiedness means the ability to adapt to multiple and various situations, while disability means flexibly accommodating and validating able-bodiedness by functioning as its “other” (McRuer 30).
I suppose I’ll have to conclude this post with a question. Despite understanding McRuer’s discussion of “flexibility,” I’m still not entirely clear on how able-bodied or disabled identities are actively performed. I understand how one can act “like a girl” or “like a boy,” not, as Butler notes, by way of choice, but resulting from the “forcible citation of a norm”; as she goes on to say, subject formation is dependent on, first, the existence of “legitimating gender norms” (232). But, how does one repeat or cite “a prior, authoritative set of practices” that makes one able-bodied or disabled? What, exactly, are these practices?
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[Reading: Shelley Tremain, “On the Subject of Impairment” from Marian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Studies]
In her book chapter, Shelley Tremain analyzes “how the sort of biomedical practices in whose analysis Foucault specialized have been complicit in the historical emergence of the category of impairment and contribute to its persistence” (33-4). While the impairment-disability differentiation has traditionally been used in the same way as the sex-gender distinction, relying on the notion that impairment (like sex) is biological, while disability (like gender) is socially/culturally created, Tremain explores how (like sex) impairment cannot be understood as a purely descriptive term. Quoting Judith Butler, she notes that “there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body” (34). Tremain wishes to emphasize that even physical states that may appear to be linked to nature are nonetheless subject to interpretations that limit their meanings.
Employing Foucault, Tremain’s central contention is as follows:
Inasmuch as the ‘impairments’ alleged to underlie disability are actually constituted in order to sustain, and even augment, current social arrangements, they must no longer be theorized as essential, biological characteristics of a ‘real’ body upon which recognizably disabling conditions are imposed. Instead, these allegedly ‘real’ impairments must now be identified as the incorporated constructs of disciplinary knowledge/power that they are. As effects of an historically specific political discourse — biopower — impairments are materialized as unitary and universal attributes of subjects through the iteration and reiteration of rather culturally specific regulatory norms and ideals about human function and structure, competency, intelligence and ability. As universalized attributes of subjects, furthermore, impairments are naturalized as an interior identity or essence on which culture acts in order to camouflage the historically contingent power relations that materialized them as natural. (42)
Here, Tremain mobilizes the Foucauldian concept of biopower to suggest that the category of impairment actually “persists in order to legitimize the disciplinary regime that generated it in the first place” (43). The very material nature of these conditions relies on a particular understanding of a healthy, normal, or able body that, in effect, works to produce impairment, just as the social model proposes that normative discourses create disability. Indeed, Tremain points out that “only people who have, or are presumed to have, an impairment are counted as disabled. Thus the strict division between the categories of impairment and disability which the social model is claimed to institute is in fact a chimera” (42). In the end, “impairment has been disability all along” (Tremain 42).
Tremain’s deconstruction of the language used to categorize and understand disability works toward revealing how “deviance” is policed and regulated in contemporary societies. In response to this highly theoretical discussion of disability, I think the question remains as to whether or not this reading skirts the practical, physical, embodied side of disability. The contention that impairment exists as a culturally-relative value judgment is certainly well-founded; however, merely for the sake of being contrary, I wonder if there are, indeed, identifiable physical or cognitive states, definable as impairments, that transcend specific historical, social, or cultural moments? This is perhaps tangential, but I find myself wondering if this chapter forgets that impairments actually do cause real barriers to everyday living and that, even with sufficient accommodations, impairments can still impair?
I’m not sure how to phrase this without sounding completely ignorant or naive, but I also wonder about normativization (or rehabilitation?) in general. We might consider that people who identify as “impaired” or “disabled” or “sick” and who seek out “solutions” or accommodations that will make their lives more easy or more “normal” recognize a desire to work toward a particular ideal of living. This may be because they have no other option — because a normative living environment is not well-suited to their particular condition. While it is important to view disability, not as a problem to be solved but as another mode of embodiment, one that, as Titchkosky notes, our society needs, I also can’t help but think that there are certain conditions that no person would ever (or should ever) desire. (This is particularly clear to me after reading so many forum posts on the PatientsLikeMe ALS discussion board; disability (or disease, if that is a more apt descriptor) like that absolutely needs a cure.) This series of questions is quickly degenerating, but these are the questions that have cropped up throughout readings by disability scholars and activists… many of which are, perhaps, unanswerable.
Overall, I realize that Tremain is not arguing that impairments are not real physical conditions, but instead that their labelling as “impairment” is imposed by a disciplinary regime that seeks to regulate difference. At the same time, I wonder how people with impairments would respond to this idea? I also wonder how this argument adds to what Corker and Shakespeare in their introductory chapter identify as the need for disability studies to remain grounded in activism and the goal of emancipation for people with disabilities. What can we do about this situation? Will a change in language result in a better understanding of disability, or is our language always already tainted by the interests of the hegemonic regime out of which it emerges?
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Tags: "On the Subject of Impairment", biopower, disability studies, Foucault, postmodernity, regulatory control, Shelley Tremain
[Reading: Marian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, “Mapping the Terrain” from Marian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Studies]
This week’s text, Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Studies, seeks to situate disability studies scholarship within various movements progressing from modernism to postmodernism, discuss key postmodern texts through which disability studies can develop, and reflect on the ways in which postmodern theory can work toward a better (more complex, nuanced, fair) understanding of disability.
The first chapter by the editors of the collection does an excellent job of outlining various theories of postmodernist thinkers. Mainly for my own selfish purpose, this post will simply synthesize some of the key concepts that Marian Corker and Tom Shakespeare explicate in their introductory chapter.
At the heart of postmodernism is poststructuralism, which reworks the modernist concept of the subject to reveal that subjects do not autonomously create themselves or their worlds. “Rather, subjects are embedded within a complex set of social relations. These relations in turn determine which subjects can appear, where and in what capacity. The subject is not something prior to politics or social structures, but is constituted in and through specific socio-political arrangements… [P]oststructuralism contends that modernism’s focus on the individual as an autonomous agent needs to be deconstructed, contested, and troubled” (Corker and Shakespeare 3).
Corker and Shakespeare identify the following theories, relying mostly on postructuralist deconstructions of language and culture, to be of particular interest for the study of disability:
- Jean-François Lyotard identifies in the postmodern turn “the decline of the legitimating power of meta-narratives” that “presuppose an ahistorical standpoint from which to understand the human mind, knowledge, society, and history” (Corker and Shakespeare 5). Rather than understanding culture or history through “a rational knowing subject and a universal mind, we imagine multiple minds, subjects and knowledges” (Corker and Shakespeare 5). The importance of this perspective is that it promotes tolerance toward social differences, local specificity, ambiguity, and conflict.
- Jean Baudrillard also rejects epistemological and ontological truths, but to a greater degree; Baudrillard sees “postmodernity as a ‘post-industrial’ society, where the primacy of the mode of production in defining social relations is replaced by the primacy of the mode of information and its transmission through technology” (6). Because we live in an age of hyperreality, there is no distinction between signifier and signified; therefore, social ‘differences’ like disability are merely captured in processes of simulation… leading Baudrillard to refuse the fetishization of difference or minority status.
- Jacques Derrida‘s concept of différance, to denote meaning that includes both identity (what it is) and difference (what it isn’t); in this sense, meaning is continuously deferred. Therefore, from a Derridean perspective, “‘normativism’ needs ‘disability’ for its own definition: a person without an impairment can define him/herself as normal only in opposition to that which s/he is not — a person with an impairment. Disability is not excluded from ‘normativism’; it is integral to its very assertion” (7). This deconstructionist approach reveals how our thinking is always necessarily rooted in binary logic.
- Michel Foucault reveals how ‘truths’ about identity or normativity or nature are produced by discourses that create “dominant and subjugated subjects” (7). Particularly important for disability studies, “Foucault shows us that social identities are effects of the ways in which knowledge is organized,” while also revealing connections between knowledge and power. “Modern power is not ‘sovereign,’ a result of coercion from outside, but ‘disciplinary’ because of the ritualized and institutionalized action of the techniques of power and their normalizing effect on modern life” (8). Shelley Tremain’s chapter provides an in-depth look at how Foucault’s theories of knowledge and power are applicable to the concepts of impairment and disability (see next post).
- Jacques Lacan‘s theories, in the context of disability, suggest that “the entire order of disabling culture divides us into two states — impaired and ‘normal’, in the form of a hierarchy that privileges the latter. It does so through linguistic structures that are so deep that the ‘tyranny of the normal’ not only breaks up the impaired/’normal’ dyad, but does so to the degree that any possibility of relationship to the normal is repressed in the unconscious as the imaginary. The entire concept of identity takes place through this repression of impairment, in such a way the people with impairments cannot affirmatively identify with others like themselves” (9).
- Judith Butler‘s notion of performativity, developed through the “‘queering’ of the Foucauldian concept of ‘the docile body’… [uses] the phenomenological theory that social agents constitute ‘reality’ through social practice. She criticizes the commonly held idea that femininity and masculinity are the cultural expressions of material fact, namely the female or the male body. Instead of the notion of gender as an expressive act, she proposes viewing it as a performative one. Thus, the idea of gender, ‘race’ and disability as corporeal styles makes it possible to examine how individuals live in their bodies and, in this process, constitute gender, ‘race’ and disability in social relations” (10). This does not mean that the performative act is deliberate or singular, but is instead “the ritualized practice by which discourse produces the effect it names” (10).
- Donna Haraway‘s interest in complicating what counts as nature or natural appeals to posthumanist ways of thinking about embodiment. “Acknowledging that there have always been bodies that create ontological anxiety in their failure to conform, Haraway also points to technological practices such as xenotransplantation, genetic engineering, transsexual surgery and cloning, and the way in which they blur the boundaries of the fixed human body” (12).
Corker and Shakespeare argue that these and other postmodern theories can strengthen the conceptual power of disability studies scholarship. They identify the need for a more comprehensive social theory of disability than the social model, while also recognizing the need for disability studies to have a practical, as well as an activist, orientation. The goal of disability studies should be “the development of inclusive societies“; to “benefit from the new theoretical toolbox” that postmodernism and poststrucuralism offer, disability studies must conceive of theory as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself (15).
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[Readings: Tania Titchkosky, Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment; Rebecca Garden, “Disability and narrative: new directions for medicine and the medical humanities”]
Texts never just get it right or get it wrong insofar as they are also a ‘doing’ — right or wrong, texts are always oriented social action, producing meaning. Texts do not just talk about the world, even though that might be their self-proclaimed intention. Texts, insofar as they appear, are our world. That is, for any word on disability to make sense, it needs to gesture at a whole world that allows for such a sensibility. (Titchkosky 21)
In this post, I’ll focus mainly on Tania Titchkosky’s Reading and Writing Disability Differently, since Rebecca Garden’s article about disability studies in the context of the medical humanities is also rooted in the same goal of revealing the problems created by the medicalization of disability. This concept has been brought up in previous posts. It essentially refers to the understanding of disability as a biomedical problem to be solved, rather than a complex set of social, cultural, environmental, and other factors that influence an individual’s way of being. Escaping from the preoccupation with trying to define disability, Titchkosky seeks to identify the meanings of disability within contemporary Western culture (12).
Titchkosky argues that conversations in mainstream media and bureaucratic realms regarding disability or using disability metaphors (conversations that address such phenomena and activities as “storms, war, genetic testing, accidents, physician-assisted suicide, unsafe work environments, and mass ultrasound projects” (Titchkosky 6)) preclude the possibilities of viewing disability as “a desired status” or “as a difference that the collective needs” (Titchkosky 6). Titchkosky wishes to examine the ways in which readers, on a daily basis, encounter textual constructions of disability and interpret them in normative ways that reinforce the notion of disability as a problem. For Titchkosky, disability does not represent aberrance from some agreed-upon norm; disability is a concept created by and between people. It is “made meaningful by the ways we say it to be and live its being” (Titchkosky 12). In other words, disability is “textually enacted”; we encounter disability through texts and our sense of its weight and substance within society and culture is a process of intertextual interpretation (Titchkosky 17). Disability is, therefore, an interpretive issue that implicates understandings of embodiment in general. In her examples of print media from popular Canadian news sources like The Globe and Mail, National Post and CBC, Titchkosky reveals how “disability is made present as the space of provocation where we might begin to reread how culture puts our embodiment to text and textures all of our lives” (9).
In her book, Titchkosky hesitates to propose a sweeping solution to remediating social attitudes toward disability, since even so-called “solutions” proposed by medicine (i.e. eliminating genetic mutation), government (i.e. campaigns for inclusivity), and popular culture (i.e. narratives of overcoming disability) continue to paint disability as an undesirable, problematic state of being that would best be eliminated (141-3). Instead, her goal is to communicate the necessity of “developing self-reflective and critical responses to textual constructions of disability” (Titchkosky 26).
Citing Joan Scott, Titchkosky asserts the idea that “we do not discriminate because we have noticed a difference. Rather, within a hierarchicalized techno-bureaucratic capitalist culture, we discriminate and thereby enact difference” (24). Throughout the book, Titchkosky notes instances of these discriminations and reveals their basis in texts that create a reality, rather than just serve to represent one. In the example in Chapter 3 of a young girl’s “medical mystery,” specifically, her parents’ choice to follow through with the pregnancy knowing that their daughter will be born disabled, Titchkosky argues that “the condition of the text’s emergence is empowered by, and simultaneously empowers, the genre, or language game, of medicine” (83). As Titchkosky goes on to say,
the sensibility of the text reflects that which has conditioned its existence just as much as the text activates a form of medical language that seduces the reader into a taken for granted relation to this language use. In the context of the text resides an ongoing activity of not only making up meaning of people and issues, but also constructing the appropriate relations between these people and those issues. I am speaking here of the issue of ‘governmentality’ or, as Foucault puts it, the conduct of conduct, which governs our governing of our selves. (83)
This activity occurs in the sample text through various writing conventions; namely, the appeal to the authority of the medical establishment and its technologies as producing otherwise unknowable truths; the movement from the detection of abnormality to the depiction of disability as a “simple biological mistake” that leaves the victim “short-changed” (Titchkosky 90); the implication that a woman’s choice to bring an “abnormal” pregnancy to full term is “unruly” or “monstrous” and results in the child’s victimization (Titchkosky 94-5); and the use of skewed statistics and “authoritative” medicalized discourse to reinforce the problem of disability.
In response to this textual construction, Titchkosky encourages the questioning of hegemonic ways of knowing (particularly those that appeal to medicalized discourse) in favour of a more reflective mode that “attempts to understand all stories and all truths as engaged in and accomplished through the social action of interpretation” and that understands individuals (readers and writers) as creators of meaning (102). Here, Titchkosky proposes a practice whereby “readers can read their readings” and be aware of alternative interpretations (103).
Reading Titchkosky’s text has helped to open up some questions regarding the PatientsLikeMe social networking site, discussed previously. In the context of the user profile, individual users’ experiences become narrated primarily through a highly medicalized discourse. What is the effect of this profile information and its use of (pseudo-)medical language upon the types of conversations that happen in other places on the site, where communication is less scripted? I have yet to examine the discussion boards, where probably some of the most valuable exchanges (for individual users, anyway) are happening. I anticipate that the narratives told here communicate a much different emphasis, where perhaps the focus is not so much on tracking and evaluating levels of normalcy or well-being, but instead, sharing more personal and complex stories about what it means for individuals to live with particular conditions. I wonder, too, if these discussion board contributions depart from the fixation on defining oneself according to a disease or condition, and instead, work to explore other facets of identity? How far do these discussions stray from the imperatives of the site or the intended uses imagined by the site’s creators?
I think an exploration of this aspect of PatientsLikeMe will provide important texts through which to explore how meaning is created on the site; how do the site’s users reinforce or subvert the interpretations imposed by the user interface? Do users question the “normative violence” of their representation through the user profile? Does their social action in other areas attempt to complicate the medical discourse that dominates some parts of the site? These are some questions I will keep in mind as I continue to track the ways in which PatientsLikeMe users mobilize the affordances of the site to meet their own needs and interests.
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Tags: disability in print media, disability studies, governmentality, medicalization of disability, Reading and Writing Disability Differently, Tania Titchkosky, textual enactment
Continuing from my previous post (longer than expected — sorry!), I want to address Ato Quayson’s chapter “A Typology of Disability Representation” from his book Aesthetic Nervousness. This text seeks to read disability “as a fulcrum or pivot out of which various discursive details emerge, gain salience, and ultimately undergo transformation within the literary-aesthetic field” (Quayson 34). Quayson argues that a typological understanding of disability representations is important, since it helps us to examine literary texts in full, rather than simply interrogating the aspect of the narrative that implicates the disabled characters. Disabled figures must be understood “in the relationship to other characters and to the images, social settings, and broader spatiotemporal concepts that are manifest within the text” (Quayson 34).
From this perspective, Quayson elucidates nine different ways in which disability functions in world literature. They are as follows:
1. Disability as null set and/or moral test (37): Quayson uses the example of the Loathely Lady’s ambiguous representation across various texts; “it was never self-evident from the many variants of the story which of these two interpretations [of sovereignty] was correct, so that the difference between the Lady’s repugnant exterior and the obvious beauty that this exterior concealed came to represent an ethical conundrum as such” (37).
2. Disability as the interface with otherness (race, class, sexuality, and social identity) (39): The text cites the example of the masculine adventure narrative, which “placed the male protagonist in an extrametropolitan setting in which the difference he encountered was supposed to trigger a process of self-discovery that ultimately affirmed his superior status” (39).
3. Disability as articulation of disjuncture between thematic and narrative vectors (41): Through the example of Finding Nemo, Quayson illustrates how disability functions to represent disjunction; “even though her [Dory’s] disability makes her central to the process by which the main protagonist is aided in his quest, it is precisely that which discursively allows her to be effaced out of the memory of the action” (40).
4. Disability as moral deficit/evil (42): The example of Richard III demonstrates how “in Shakespeare disability also acts as a metaphor to mark anomalous social states such as those involving half-brothers and bastardy… In Richard III, the disability is placed at the foreground of the action from the beginning and brings together various threads that serve to focalize the question of whether Richard’s deformity is an insignia of his villainy or the primary cause of it” (42).
5. Disability as epiphany (45): Quayson uses the example of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird to reveal that, “sometimes, in texts in which disability is a marker of a moral conundrum the impairment is concealed until a particular ethical impasse is arrived at within the text. Here its use as a signifier of moral disorder or deficit is more in terms of a sudden epiphany for the nondisabled character than a slow process of unfoldment about the disabled character’s problematic sense of his or her own identity” (42). In the case of Tom, “the sudden disclosure of the disability is meant not to raise doubts about the moral stature of the disabled character but to dispel them” (45).
6. Disability as signifier of ritual insight (47): The example of Eshu’s limp in Yoruba folklore reveals the trope of disability as “the paradigm of access to multiple realities of both the real world and that of the gods. He represents a disabled character/god who provides superior insights into the phenomenal world…” (47).
7. Disability as inarticulable and enigmatic tragic insight (49): Using the example of various female literary figures, such as Rebeca in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Quayson suggests that each of these women replicates “the apparently inarticulable burden of tragic ethos, what we might term the Cassandra-Io complex of disability… It seems to me that it is female figures that exemplify it best, not because they are women, but because the dialectical coupling of tragic insight with loss of articulation seems to be a structural feature generated through the prism of gender as opposed to prisms of race and class” (48).
8. Disability as hermeneutical impasse (50): Quayson notes that “the lack of closure implied in this kind of representation may also have ethical implications, yet it is the problem of interpretation that remains paramount” (49). In the example of The English Patient, “the English patient’s acute burns ensure that he remains a ‘skinless’ and identityless being throughout the narrative. And precisely because of this he is the centre of much interpretative interest. Each of the three other characters trapped in the bombed-out villa try to read meanings both into and out of him” (49).
9. Disability as normality (52): In this last category, “the disabled characters are completely normalized and exist within the full range of human emotions, contradictions, hoped, fears, and vague ideas, just like any other character” (51). Quayson uses the examples of memoirs and autobiographies: “since in the (auto)biographies of persons with disability the representation is conducted consistently from the point of view of the persons with disabilities and their caregivers, the opportunities for a ‘collapse’ of the dominant protocols are curtailed. The textual dominant is that which is pertinent to the exploration of the full complexity of living with a disability… [D]isability is used as a pointed critique of social hypocrisy and indeed of social institutions as such” (51-2).
Interestingly, Quayson’s last category seems to respond well to the series of questions at the end of my last post. His reading would suggest that positive representations of disability can emerge, most effectively when writers speak from experience, through a depiction that explores disability as a complex state of being, and represents disabled figures in fully human ways.
While Quayson clearly states that these typologies are not rigid and may exist alongside one another in a single text, what he does not address is the extremely ambiguous, sometimes contradictory way in which most literary figures of disability are represented. The use of such straightforward categories would suggest that characters’ roles can be easily slotted into each of these functions.
I recently read One Hundred Years of Solitude for a course on Inter-American literature and chose to focus specifically on representations of illness and disability throughout the text (of which there are many, from individual “magical” ailments to cognitive disabilities to physical abnormalities to plagues). Rachel, in particular, is a character whose disability (or psychological trauma?) seems to be a negative marker of otherness, since its symptoms manifest themselves shortly after she arrives, orphaned, at the house of her adoptive family, the Buendias. At the same time, it also represents a more positive individuality as she attempts to explore alternatives to the solitude and degeneration that seem to afflict the Buendia clan. I use this example to suggest that, although Quayson’s categories are useful guidelines, the multivalent ways in which disability is represented across world literature, and the various cultural ends to which these figurations are employed, would (I think) make it extremely difficult to actually employ the typologies in a constructive way. However, his observations are certainly instrumental to understanding how disability, as a rhetorical device, resides at the heart of many narrative structures.
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[Readings: David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “Representation and its Discontents: The Uneasy Home of Disability in Literature and Film” from The Handbook of Disability Studies; Ato Quayson, “A Typology of Disability Representation” from Aesthetic Nervousness]
Because disability in the real world already incites interpretation, literary representations of disability are not merely reflecting disability; they are refractions of that reality, with varying emphases of both an aesthetic and ethical kind. (Quayson 36)
It’s rare to come across a piece of fictional writing or film that doesn’t include, at least in a minor role, a figure that is characterized — and, most likely, in the text defined — by a disability. The two texts that I work through in this post both address the various issues, ambiguities, and opportunities that these representations pose, as well as explore different methods for assessing the ways in which texts figure disability.
In “Representation and its Discontents,” David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder conduct a survey of the progression of disability studies methodology from its origins in the analysis of the negative imagery of disability to more contemporary approaches that seek to transgressively resignify these representations (208). The text effectively demonstrates how methods in disability studies have also helped to reshape the medicalized understanding of disability, working toward a conception of disability as socially, culturally, politically, and environmentally inscribed. The authors’ self-proclaimed goal in performing this overview is “to provide a governing logic for the necessity of the humanities to the evolution of disability studies in general” (Mitchell and Snyder 196).
From the outset of disability studies (I’m not entirely sure when this is; the authors don’t mention time frames, but the publications they reference date from the late 1980s), the focus for scholars was on assessing how disability in literature represented “a restrictive pattern of characterization” that did not allow for the full development of disabled figures, both protagonists and villains (Mitchell and Snyder 196). Essentially, this line of inquiry viewed all literary representations of disability as one-dimensional and distorting. Mitchell and Snyder note that these critics took issue with “the metaphoric opportunism of literature,” through which texts used stereotypical or superficially informed notions about disability to work to the advantage of its plot or rhetorical goals. One of the important outcomes of this scholarly approach was the conclusion that “by depicting disability as an isolated and individual affair, storytellers artificially extracted the experience of disability from its necessary social contexts” (Mitchell and Snyder 198). The perhaps limited “negative imagery” approach nonetheless supported the foundational concept that disability is socially produced (Mitchell and Snyder 199).
Disability studies evolved from this position to a social realist approach, which focused more on remediating social views of disabled people. As Mitchell and Snyder note, “if the negative image resulted from associations of disability with personal failure, tragic loss, and excessive dependency, then social realists searched for more accurate images that could effectively counterbalance this detrimental history” (199-200). The goal of this method was not to replace negative images with so-called “positive” ones that would romanticize disability; instead, they sought out representations that reflected, as David Hervey argues, “the refusal to deny, disavow, or suppress the site of struggle and oppression that characterizes a contemporary understanding of disability” (Mitchell and Snyder 201).
Despite its focus on changing public opinion and its continued importance to recent theories of disability, some later theorists, specifically those of the new historicist persuasion, identified key problems with the social realist approach. These included the notions that social realism viewed literary and filmic instances of disability as “concealed rather than persuasive”; relied on an ahistorical paradigm that disregarded temporally-based ideological influences; denied the possibility of disability perspectives in informing so-called inaccurate portrayals; and “projected its own contemporary desires” onto the images it critiqued (Mitchell and Snyder 201-2). New historicists focus on the role of historical disability representations as cultural-cognitive tools for working through “problems” of abnormality and difference. Mitchell and Snyder suggest that “even after the professionalization of modern medicine, literature continued to serve an important explanatory function in the cultural understanding of disability” (203). New historicism soght to understand how disability “could be mobilized in a variety of directions,” not always counterproductively, and how representations were manifestations of dominant cultural ideologies (Mitchell and Snyder 204). Further, this approach took physical and cognitive difference to be, not occurrences of an individual or isolated nature, but “the rule . . . of historical experience” (Mitchell and Snyder 205).
Extending from historical revisionism, one movement of disability studies has been to analyze artists and writers throughout history who were disabled or closely tied to disabled individuals. Mitchell and Snyder explain that “this scholarly work seeks out the inevitable impact of disability on the creator’s worldview” (205). The potential problem with this method is the risk that critics (particularly those, like Philip Sandblom, who belong to the medical field) will rely too heavily on a psychologization of disabled writers and artists that brings to bear “all the distance, prejudice, and misconstruence engendered by an objective posturing” (Mitchell and Snyder 206). The importance, however, of pursuing this line of inquiry is the perspective it provides on disability consciousness during given time periods; the literary archive provides other writers with, not only a record of stigmatization, but also “an imaginative refuge for alternative ways of seeing” (Mitchell and Snyder 208).
The last category of scholarly work that Mitchell and Snyder identify is that of “transgressive resignifications”; “rather than rail against or bemoan the unjust social exclusion of cripples, scholars have begun to attend to the subversive potential of the hyperbolic meanings invested in disabled figures” (Mitchell and Snyder 208). This work involves, among other pursuits, the “ironic embrace” of slanderous terminology about disability and the location of counterproductive reactions of fear and pity in the realm of human psychology. The latter of these approaches facilitates an understanding of powerful or emotional reactions to disability encountered in literature and film as experiences that force audiences to recognize the imaginary nature of a perceived threat. The transgressive nature of these representations “breaks down the assumed distance between spectator and object by violating the cultural dictum of silence that surrounds bodily deviation” (Mitchell and Snyder 210).
Overall, Mitchell and Snyder conclude that, across all approaches to studying disability, one reality remains consistent: “representation inevitably spawns discontent” (212); since all literary or artistic depictions necessarily lead to a search for greater meaning, the act of portrayal is “an inevitably fraught and inherently political activity” (Mitchell and Snyder 212). The discontent that results from these representations is, nonetheless, productive. Not only do representations of disability complicate and reconfigure interactions between individuals and their environments in ways that engender reflection and provoke discussion, they also represent one of the only ways that disability studies can construct a more positive disability identity — not by replacing inaccurate portrayals with “better” ones, but through a reactionary repudiation of negative representations (Mitchell and Snyder 214).
The overview provided in Mitchell and Snyder’s chapter is extremely useful to understanding how disability studies, as a mode of scholarly inquiry, has developed alongside and influenced certain paradigms in social views of disability. Their assessment reveals how critical inquiry is equally as, if not more important than, literary or artistic production in the development of social, cultural, and political meaning, since it has the ability to contextualize ideas within particular historical and ideological moments, assess the rhetorical and cultural work that a text performs, and identify instances of both stereotypical and subversive representations. An understanding of the development of disability studies thinking is certainly essential to continuing in a direction that produces constructive dialogue about how contemporary societies understand physical and cognitive difference.
One series of questions I have pertains to Mitchell and Snyder’s supposition that “disability culture remains largely reactionary because no adequate representational antidote exists” (214). I wonder how true this statement is now, ten years after the publication of The Handbook of Disability Studies? Further, if disability culture is always positioned in a defensive stance, simply responding to incomplete or inaccurate portrayals of disabled persons, does it not remain in an unnecessarily passive place of subjection? Are there no positive (in the sense of accurate, fully developed, complex) literary representations of disabled individuals? I’m thinking of one text that I’m reading now, Ian Brown’s memoir The Boy in the Moon that details his experience with his son Walker who was born with cardiofaciocutaneous syndrome. I know there are many more like this. Further, some postmodern fictional representations of disability seem to present more fully fleshed-out disabled characters, such as Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, narrated from the perspective of a boy with autism. I would think that postmodern texts are especially well-equipped to effectively present “alternative” narratives and representations.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding Mitchell and Snyder’s contention; however, in my experience, and as awareness of the minority status of disabled individuals grows, there seems to be greater sensitivity to avoiding stereotypical representations; contextually speaking, portrayals of disability are, perhaps, more compelling and more instrumental to narratives the more fully they reflect actual social conditions and attempt to navigate debilitating attitudes within this type of context.
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Tags: cultural construction of disability, development, disability studies, methodology, Mitchell and Snyder, negative imagery, new historicism
Continuing from my discussion of the readings below, specifically Simi Linton’s “Disability Studies/Not Disability Studies,” I thought I’d jot down some questions I have in relation to disability studies as a scholarly field.
Linton suggests that nondisabled researchers in disability studies potentially, though not necessarily, pose a threat to the goals of “inclusion, self-determination, and self-definition” for disabled individuals (136). She seems interested in emphasizing the idea that who talks about disability is just as important as how one talks about disability; or, perhaps more accurately, she highlights how these two are quite closely related. Linton states that
whether disabled or nondisabled people create scholarship has particular consequences for the scholarship produced and for disabled people’s lives. Both disabled and nondisabled people can perpetuate or work to ameliorate the objectification of disabled people, the lack of subjectivity, the absence of voice, and the absence of self-definition and self-determination… Nondisabled people, though, have a particular responsibility to engage consciously and deliberately with these issues in their scholarship and teaching to avoid contributing to the problem. (152)
While I fully agree to the importance of being conscious of one’s position in relation to one’s subject matter, I also wonder how Linton sees this type of approach functioning in a practical way. Does this mean that the ideas and perspectives of disabled scholars on disability become more valued or credible than those of nondisabled individuals? It seems to me that some objectivity in scholarly writing is necessary to writing in a rhetorically effective way. While Linton’s arguments support the purpose of activating the voice of disabled scholars, I suppose I’m inclined to question why identity matters in this context, particularly if scholars adopt approaches that work actively against objectification. I do understand how transparency about identity can open up some meaningful avenues of discussion, as well as a productive sort of self-reflexivity in scholars; but I wonder also, what are the negative repercussions of discussing personal experience or subject position in scholarly work?
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Exploring Theories of Disability 