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
> ----------
> From: Adam Greenow
> Reply To: Adam Greenow
> Sent: Monday, June 5, 2000 10:25 pm
> To: Deborah Marks
> Cc: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: conference on body
>
> Hopefully Deborah will forgive me for taking up this opportunity of
> responding to her post to try and raise a discussion that I feel needs to
> be
> raised in the interests of a struggle. It isn't meant as a personal
> attack,
> it just happens to be a convenient time for me to air my thoughts on this
> subject and hopefully provoke some debate. I am myself, in a sense, a
> member of one of the 'sciences' that I am about to attack. But I am also
> in
> a strange position of being one of the objects of these sciences also.
>
> Perhaps I am at heart a cynic, but these conferences, that are continually
> advertised on this list, seem to be the problem rather than the solution.
> These human practices that desire the status of science are a self
> fulfilling prophecy that see disabled people or some other varied group of
> people as the target of their work. But in reality the thing that they
> have
> problematicised and chosen as their object of scrutiny does not in fact
> exist in reality except to the extent that it has been created by these
> objectifying practices. Instead of studying the object of these practices
> (which is a cycle of inquiry with no end), should we not as people who are
> seeking some sort of liberation (?) be analysing the practices themselves
> and how through some particular historical formation they have come to
> claim
> some sort of sovereignty over our lives? Surely these practices are the
> very
> enemy that have created us, made us into objects; into things that have an
> existence when before we did not exist or were comfortably invisible to
> their gaze?
>
> Yet, we persist in using the paradigm of the oppressive regime and
> continue
> to objectify ourselves as well as allowing others to objectify us in a
> particular manner. Is it not time that we assigned these gurus of the
> disabled, sick and abnormal to their rightful place alongside TV
> evangelists
> and other quacks? This is not to have a go at anyone in particular who
> attends these conferences but it is to ask a question of the gurus who
> claim
> some unique insight into the condition of those it has chosen to sustain
> in
> the first place. It is to ask disabled people also (as they have been so
> designated) to turn away from this bizarre formation of human sciences
> that
> lay claim to some hidden truth of something that is only in reality just a
> mental simulacra. Namely the false designation of a multitude and variety
> of
> people as disabled or mad or abnormal.
>
> What ever we are as 'disabled people' (or cripples or whatever the buzz
> word
> might be) it is varied and multiple to the extent that we do not exist as
> a
> category in reality except at a particular moment when these sciences
> through their function designated us, herded us, objectified us and coded
> us
> as objects of their inquiry. To try and discover a truth in an object that
> doesn't exist is like trying to find gold in the middle of a rainbow. It
> is
> like asking for some significance in a gust of wind. In short it is a
> complete and contingent nonsense. But more than this it is a technology
> that
> continues to delineate and divide. It creates a space for us that is on
> the
> edge, but worse an enclosed space on the edge that we cannot even escape
> to
> enter into a new domain. In the new domain where the abnormal could be
> normal and the disabled non disabled? Not even that, but where these false
> oppositions and categories did not even exist. In this utopia there can be
> no room for false dichotomies and labels. That which doesn't exist cannot
> be
> studied; indeed generalisations cannot be studied for generalisations are
> merely a semantic thing rather than a tangible reality. What is abnormal
> is
> part of what it means to be normal; a unity that we have chosen to divide
> in
> the name of a strange science. We are in short a people who have been
> oppressed by semantic word games that have become reified to the extent
> that
> they have become the truth. Perhaps we cannot see that which is so
> obvious.
> Perhaps having a broken leg means that one has a broken leg; perhaps
> having
> difficulty with hearing, simply means having difficulty with hearing. Is
> that possible? Is it necessary to then take these conditions and analyse
> them as part of something larger, something that is the domain of
> particular
> sciences with the result that this myth constructs someone with a broken
> leg
> as not simply someone with a broken leg but someone who is sick,
> oppressed,
> in need of therapy etc. And so these practices make a truth out of the
> disabled condition that the problem naturally seems to be in the domain of
> the object rather than in the practice that created the object (people) in
> the first place. And thus the object people cannot see that liberation is
> simply to deny the part of their reality which was constructed *for them*.
> It is perhaps to refuse the techniques and language of these sciences, to
> spit at labels and to be simply someone with a spinal injury or a
> difficulty
> in speaking.
>
> To put it succinctly, why should we allow these sciences ownership over a
> problematic part of our lives that they created in the first place? That
> is
> the question I would like to pose to the list. Is it possible to escape
> from
> a trance that we believe to be a reality? Can we imagine a time when we
> are
> not categorised and studied and would that time be preferable to the
> present?
>
> Adam
>
>
>
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