Lynne, I think it's a good thing that you have questioned your work and you
should be applauded for it. I am not in a position to criticise anyone and I
have been interested in the work of representation and semiotics also. I
think this type of work has been called the analysis of 'poetics' in that it
looks for meanings, the differences between the signifier and signified,
semantic networks, metaphors etc.
Recently, I have begun to question if this sort of study has any particular
value other than artistic. If there is a danger, perhaps it is that by
applying any sort of 'science' like this to one group of people rather than
another, we are making a statement. We are making a division and an
assumption. I remember when I was in a rehabilitation centre many years ago,
and a group of psychology students were sent to practice on us. Even though
what they were doing was harmless, asking us about interests and questions
that were looking for levels of intelligence and what ever it is
psychologists look for, they also made a statement by the very simple fact
that we had been chosen as the object of their analysis and not other
people. I think this could be described as a dividing practice, whatever the
validity of their exercise the only effect it had on me was to make me feel
different.
But that is, maybe, an unfair analogy. I suspect, however, that looking at
representation is like looking at a picture of a gas chamber. We can read
into this picture many cruelties and unfairness, in fact we could read into
it anything we like. When the real problem is politics. And I have recently
come to believe that politics is more transparent than we might think.
Perhaps it is too transparent for our complex brains that we seek to mystify
and code it into something more complex than it actually is. In other words
laughing at the image of someone in a wheelchair is cruel, perhaps it
doesn't need any mystification and can be condemned at face value. I do not
believe that trying to discover what is going on in people's heads is going
to help us much.
What we should be analysing, in my opinion, is all the practices that have
'disabled people' as their object of scrutiny, and ask why. What is so
fascinating about the material that has been labelled impaired or disabled
that people keep wanting to gaze at it? Even the social model, as Shelley
Tremain has so eloquently made me understand, needs to be analysed. We could
look at the material which is the 'impaired' body as surrounded by a space
that wants to be filled, and like other material it gets filled and refilled
by different notions and truths. The material is problematic because of what
is in the space, as simple material it is potentially anything.
It is perhaps of little surprise that this material becomes devalued and
other, when what fills its space are notions of impairment and disability
etc. Therefore if we want to stop the cruelty we have to attack the problem
at the level of politics, in the battle that is going on to fill this space.
What we are being asked to do, as I see it, is to regard impairment as a
natural and neutral fact and believe that disability is manifested through
an oversight or a deliberate act by a thing called 'society'. The fact that
society doesn't exist makes it difficult for us to ask it to act
differently. We can however ask people to act differently and we can ask
academics, human scientists and a host of others to stop gazing at us and
objectifying us. Because it is beginning to give us an inferiority complex.
That's how I see it at the moment anyway.
Regards,
Adam
----- Original Message -----
From: Lynne Roper {PG} <[log in to unmask]>
To: Deborah Marks <[log in to unmask]>; 'Adam Greenow'
<[log in to unmask]>
Cc: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2000 11:09 AM
Subject: RE: conference on body
> I'd like to respond to Adam as a non-disabled researcher in the area of
> disability and the body. Adam, your concerns are something I've already
> thought about closely, because the last thing I want to do is to make the
> situation worse. The area I'm researching is the television
representations
> of the body, and I'm using a comparison of 'traditional' impaired bodies
and
> so-called 'normal' bodies where these have been altered through diet and
> exercise (body-builders, Gladiators etc) and through 'cosmetic' surgery
> (e.g. Baywatch babes). What I hope to acheive through this is the 'making
> strange' of 'normal' bodies, or to put it another way, to show why some
> deliberate 'disfigurements' are acceptable, whereas others are not.
Without
> this kind of research, how can we demonstrate the inequalities in society
> and the wrongness of the negative connotations associated with some
> impairments? I accept that in looking at 'bodies' I am in some way
> objectifying the people to whom those bodies belong. But I think that that
> is the case for all 'images of' work, since the images I am analysing are
> neither 'real' nor purely representations. They are representations of
> reality, which undergo many mutations during the process of
representation.
> Therefore it's this process which is, in the end, under scrutiny. Also,
any
> form of cultural representation does not exist in isolation, it is
informed
> by, and informs, the science you mentioned.
> regards,
> Lynne
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