Education Supplement Fall 2005
>Body Politics
>The wheel world: Is disability studies academia's next frontier?
>
>by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
>August 2nd, 2005 12:52 PM
Activist Simi Linton: “Disability studies is us looking out at the
>world and seeing how that looks to us.”
>photo: Ruth Morgan
>Education Supplement Fall 2005
>
>Lest America divide too neatly into red/blue, NASCAR/latte blocs, one
>constituency can be counted on to muck up the dichotomy. People with
>disabilities defy political pigeonholing. The group considers itself an
>oppressed minority, and its civil rights agenda grew out of 1960s
>radicalism. But on issues such as euthanasia, disabled people find
>themselves allied with "culture of life" enthusiasts. As disability
>activist Simi Linton says, "A lot of disabled people justifiably feel
>vulnerable to ideas held by their family and the medical establishment that
>our lives are less valuable. . . . That is why I'm categorically opposed to
>physician- assisted suicide, because I think some people are more likely to
>be assisted than others." For secularists, this argument is a bit harder to
>dismiss than "because God said so."
>Now disabled people have gotten into the business of problematizing:
>Disability studies has arrived in academia. Of course, the medical study of
>disability is long-standing, but the new approach establishes an
>interdisciplinary field on the model of women's, queer, and ethnic studies.
>Linton, author of the upcoming My Body Politic (Michigan), explains: "The
>curriculum had traditionally housed disability in a very sequestered
>area—how to fix people and take care of them. Disability studies is us
>looking out at the world and seeing how that looks to us." It also
>critiques "how disability is represented in all kinds of texts—in
>literature, film, the annals of history."
>
>The Society for Disability Studies (SDS) was founded in 1982, with an
>emphasis on social science. In the early 1990s, scholars working
>independently in the humanities began to discover each other's work at SDS
>conferences. Linton, whose legs were paralyzed in a car accident in 1971,
>describes these conferences as "quite chaotic. You've got 50 people who use
>wheelchairs, you've got blind people with dogs, you've got deaf people with
>interpreters. . . . And we all sort of move to accommodate each other. It's
>a powerful experience for outsiders coming in for the first time."
>
>Today, Syracuse, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Wisconsin, and others
>offer programs in the field. Locally, the CUNY Graduate Center launched a
>certificate program last fall, consisting of four courses on the cultural
>and political aspects of disability, which can lead to various degrees. For
>the past two years, Columbia has hosted a monthly seminar for area faculty
>and grad students. Organized by Linton and colleagues, its topics range
>from disability in late capitalism to the intersection of disability and
>queer studies. Just last May, the field was officially recognized as a
>division by the Modern Language Association (MLA).
>
>Disability scholars aim to revolutionize the way disability is imagined in
>our culture. Rather than pathologizing individuals, they ask how society
>accommodates different bodies (or doesn't). Disability, they point out,
>highlights the dynamic nature of identity itself: Entry into the disabled
>community could be a matter of an overlooked stop sign or the emergence of
>a lurking gene.
>
>Anyone who's taken a women's studies class or read Edward Said will be
>familiar with the terms of the field. The study of disability, like that of
>gender, race, and sexual orientation, is rooted in bodies perceived as
>"other." All of these disciplines use the language of critical
>theory—Foucault, with his interrogations of power, the body, and pathology,
>is big in disability studies. And these related fields can cross-pollinate.
>Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who teaches in the women's studies department at
>Emory University, promotes the integration of feminist and disability
>studies. Her scholarship reveals unsettling parallels: Women have often
>been conflated with the disabled, beginning with Aristotle's representation
>of women as mutilated men.
>
>Disability studies may sound esoteric, but it grapples with concerns any
>eighth-grader can relate to. The pressure to be normal is a major theme of
>the research. As Garland-Thomson has written, "[T]he cultural function of
>the disabled figure is to act as a synecdoche for all forms that culture
>deems non-normative." Disability discourse often touches on bodies that
>stray from the norm—"freaks," but also people considered fat, ugly, or
>funny looking.
>
>Although disability has fruitfully integrated with other identity studies,
>the field has not always received a warm welcome. Alison Kafer, who teaches
>feminist and disability studies at Southwestern University, attributes
>resistance in part to funding, but on a deeper level, she notes that "women
>and queers and people of color have often been cast as sick. That's how
>discrimination was justified." Now those minorities are saying, "You know
>what—we're not sick," and they shun association with people still seen as
>defective. The ambivalence is mutual; some disability scholars want to jump
>from what they see as the sinking ship of identity studies. As University
>of Illinois at Chicago's Lennard J. Davis pointed out in a 2004 conference
>paper, "We are in a twilight of the gods of identity politics, and there is
>no Richard Wagner to make that crepuscular moment seem nostalgic and
>tragic." So dis- ability studies has arrived, but is it too late?
>
>Despite the falling currency of identity studies, the field's institutional
>gains are clear, if modest. But institutionalization may not be the primary
>goal. As Garland-Thomson says, "We don't necessarily need people majoring
>or minoring in disability studies. We need to create a system in which
>educated people have it as a category of understanding." She observes that
>many canonical literary works have a neglected disability aspect: Ahab in
>Moby Dick is an amputee, Shakespeare's Richard III is a hunchback, and
>several of Toni Morrison's characters are disabled as well as black and
>female. "You wouldn't have to teach a class called 'Disability and
>Literature,' " she says. In studying literature—or any subject—disability
>is simply an additional lens at our disposal. In literature,
>Garland-Thomson has found, disability is typically reduced to a metaphor,
>shorthand for strangeness.
>
>Exciting scholarship is being generated. Last March's issue of the PMLA
>(the MLA's publication) featured papers from a recent MLA conference,
>including "Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women's Autobiography" and "Crip
>Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability
>Studies." One item on the field's agenda is to welcome cognitive
>disabilities into the fold. SDS continues to hold annual conferences as
>well. "I come back from SDS so excited," says Linton. "My colleagues are
>the smartest people I've met, ever."
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