Exciting New Scholarship
Disability studies has hit town. Actually it did that a longish time ago – this reporter may be a little behind the times. I noticed a new ‘Disability studies’ section in the University bookstore several years ago, and there are jokes about the subject in the Dictionary, which we started writing three years ago.
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…”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.”
Should I be polite and serious and respectful and say I think that sounds like a good idea? But I don’t. I think it’s boring and scab-picky and whiney and trendy and tiresome.
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).
That’s quite a range! From disability in late capitalism to the intersection of disability and queer studies – it’s breathtaking in its scope. And the MLA has recognized it as a division – well no wonder I don’t feel polite and respectful. If it were sociology or history, I might be, but just yet another branch of literary Theory? Er – no thanks.
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.
Cackle! Yeah, I suppose it could. Kind of like an episode of the Twilight Zone – you overlook a stop sign and – run over three pedestrians, and the next thing you know, You Have Entered The Disabled Community.
The what? What community? Why is that a ‘community’? Well we know why – the MLA has just said – because there are studies programs, that’s why. If there are studies, there’s a community. Don’t fret that it seems kind of insulting and stupid and oversimplifying to assume that everyone who has some sort of ‘disability’ therefore belongs to a ‘community’ of people with some sort of disability – it may seem that way but really it’s a Liberation Movement. Or something.
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.
Doesn’t that sound exciting! Doesn’t that just sound like a stimulating cross-pollinated field? I’m tempted to enroll at Emory right now, so that I can learn why feminists are disabled and disabled people are feminists and all of them will be saved by the language of critical theory.
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 disability studies has arrived, but is it too late?
Oh, I do so hope so. I do so hope identity politics and especially identity studies are on a sinking ship. I do so hope scab-picking will at last go out of fashion and people can go on to something better.
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…In studying literature—or any subject—disability is simply an additional lens at our disposal.
Yes but – so what? So the hell what? Many ‘canonical’ literary works have people with hair, too; many have people who walk around; many have food; many have travel; many have characters wearing clothes. So what? Does that mean there have to be hair and walking around and food and travel and clothes studies? What do people see through the ‘additional lens’ of disability? Especially, what do they see that requires a new division in the MLA, or section in the bookstore?
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.”
Exciting? Exciting? Hoo-boy.Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow needs to get out more, or do I mean less.
“Does that mean there have to be hair and walking around and food and travel and clothes studies?”
I’d be willing to bet a fair few PhD theses have been written on those topics. As an aquaintance remarked to me, you can’t get funding for just studying Ulysses, you have to come up with some novel way of looking at it, and since most of the sensible novel things have already been done, its going to have to be a really stupid perspective, its the game you have to play.
“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).”
‘Imagined’, does that just mean ‘thought of’? I love the objection to ‘pathologizing’ individuals, down that road zero progress in medical treatment lies – of course disabled people have a pathology, that’s why they’re disabled, maybe we should stop pathologizing sick people too, wouldn’t that be liberating for them?
You’re in Seattle too, right? We sure have our share of cellphone-chattering nitwit drivers. Good for you for phoning that guy’s employer.
My favorite spot for watching drivers be oblivious — I’m wildly off topic now, I know — is near the U Village at the corner of 25th and Blakeley, where I’ve seen drivers turning right onto 25th into crowds of bicyclists and pedestrians. I can understand not seeing one pedestrian, but eight?
And while I’m maundering on, let me clarify — some of our activists say reasonable things in plain language. And some of our activists say stupid things in inflammatory or obscure language.
Ah, you’re in Seattle – yes, I am too. Boy do we have our share. Yeah, phoning the employer was pretty satisfying. The woman who answered gasped when I told her what he’d said – then asked for a description, and after a few words said in a grim tone that she knew who it was. She didn’t sound as if she thought it was okie doke. ‘Oh, one of our guys nearly ran over someone and then swore at her? Cool!’
Yes, I know that spot – crosses the Burke-Gilman. Yup, people just barrel through. It’s The Majesty of the Car, you see – the sacred car must never be made to stop for the mere human. The bigger the car is, the truer that is – more big, more majestic, is why.
“Disability scholars aim to revolutionize the way disability is imagined in our culture”.
I am interested in the revolutionising bit, being done by “scholars”. This is a big clue that such “studies” are illegitimate because fraudulent because lacking open-mindedness while hiding under the cloak of academic impartiality. They already have their conclusion – that social attitudes towards the disabled are wrong and must be changed – so what is there left to study?
A memory brought a happy smile to my face: the book “BAD: or The Dumbing of America” by Paul Fussell (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671792288/qid=1123401274/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_8_2/202-9839958-0667853).
Fussell distinguishes between “bad” in the normal sense and “BAD”, which is when something is bad but praised as being good for the very reasons that make it bad. Thereby combining pretentiousness with ineptitude. The book is hilarious and a must-read for anyone tryign to make sense of our western world.
Anyway, disability studies are BAD.
Anyway
Sorry. Lost control of that sentence. But you get the point.
BAD – yes – terrific book.
In fact – Paul, why not write it up for ‘In the Library’?
Don, yup, point gotten.
Although – to be fair – as I said, I think it’s a perfectly sensible subject for various empirical fields – and for that matter for philosophy. It’s just this identity stuff, this studies stuff, and above all this MLA stuff, that seems so…surplus to requirements.
“Pathologizing” in this case may refer to many people’s irritating habit of viewing disabled people at all times as only a specimen of our disability, not as actual human beings capable of various interests and abilities. This plays out in many ways, each more annoying than the last. It may also be a reference to the “social model” of disability — that disabled people’s trouble comes less from our actual medical impairments than from the stupidity and ignorance around us. It may sound radical, but do not underestimate the human capacity for stupidity and ignorance.”
True. But this is the pernicious nature of such fields. There are perfectly valid and indeed worthwhile points to be made about the way disability is stigmatised and whatnot. But as soon as a field like this is set up there will be a race to be radical. If some of disabled people’s problems are caused in a large part not by the disability itself but by others attitudes to them then maybe all their problems are. Hey, maybe there isn’t actually anything wrong with disabled people at all, isn’t the ‘biomedical’ model just creating the stigma. Hey, without the doctors labelling them disabled people wouldn’t have any problems at all!
This slide is easy, inevitable, and sad, because it devalues the mainstream, somewhat plodding and unexciting work done that actually helps people and would be widely if grudgingly accepted.
The same problems afflicted womens’ studies and various ethnic studies, it is just a pity to see that studies of disabilities will follow the same path to pseudo-radicalism and posturing impotence.
Recognised by the MLA and already papers with ‘jokey’ titles to show the writer’s street cred.
We needn’t worry, folks – the whole project is doomed before it starts.
Handedness Studies. A sinister prospect?
Part of the Left Behind series, perhaps?
(Whoops, there goes my coffee.)
At least Handedness Studies could give biochemists an opportunity to recapitulate the Sokal Hoax.
Hmm…I wonder if one could do a combination Sokal Hoax-Rapture parody-evangelical fiction tease-Disabiity studs takeoff. A bricolage, a pastiche, a paradigm of hybridity, a mixed salad. Then try to get it published in the Omaha Review of Books.