Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities

692 Pages·2002·1.662 MB·Modern Language Association

by  Sharon L. Snyder (editor)

Disability Studies:
Enabling the Humanities

Edited by
Sharon L. Snyder,
Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

The Modern Language Association of America New York

Copyright 2002 by The Modern Language Association of America

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America

For information about obtaining permission to reprint
material from MLA book publications, send your request by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Disability studies : enabling the humanities / edited by
Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie
Garland-Thomson.
p. ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87352-980-4 (cloth) -- ISBN 0-87352-981-2 (pbk.)
1. Disability studies. 2. Humanities. 3. People with
disabilities in literature. 4. Sociology of disability. I.
Snyder, Sharon L., 1963- II. Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, 1958-
III. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. [DNLM: 1. Disabled Persons-
-psychology. 2. Disabled Persons--rehabilitation. 3.
Medicine in Literature. 4. Psychoanalytic Theory. 5. Self
Concept. 6. Social Values. WB 320 D6117 2002] HV1568.2 .D594
2002 306.9'08--dc21 2002016698

Cover art by Anne Yanagi

Printed on recycled paper

Published by The Modern Language Association of America
26 Broadway, New York, New York 10004-1789
www.mla.org

To Phyllis Franklin, who helped guide us here, and the next generation of
disability studies students, who will take us all further

Contents

Acknowledgments, page xi
Introduction: Integrating Disability into Teaching and Scholarship, page 1

Enabling Theory

Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,
page 15
David T. Mitchell
The Visible Cripple (Scars and Other Disfiguring
Displays Included), page 31
Mark Jeffreys
Tender Organs, Narcissism, and Identity Politics, page 40
Tobin Siebers
The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability
in Popular Photography, page 56
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance,
page 76
Michael Davidson
Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence,
page 88
Robert McRuer

Bodies of Difference: Politics, Disability, and Representation,
page 100
Lennard J. Davis

Autobiographical Subjects

Signifying Bodies: Life Writing and Disability Studies, page
109
G. Thomas Couser
Oliver Sacks and the Medical Case Narrative, page 118
Leonard Cassuto
The Autobiography of the Aching Body
in Teresa de Cartagena's Arboleda de los enfermos, page 131
Encarnacion Juarez
Reconstructing the Posthuman Feminist Body
Twenty Years after Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals, page 144
Diane Price Herndl
Sex and Death and the Crippled Body: A Meditation, page 156
Nancy Mairs

Rehabilitating Representation

Infinities of Forms: Disability Figures
in Artistic Traditions, page 173
Sharon L. Snyder
Exemplary Aberration: Samuel Johnson
and the English Canon, page 197
Helen Deutsch
Bulwer's Speaking Hands: Deafness and Rhetoric, page 211
Jennifer L. Nelson
The Twin Structure: Disabled Women
in Victorian Courtship Plots, page 222
Martha Stoddard Holmes
Exploring the "Hearing Line": Deafness, Laughter,
and Mark Twain, page 234
Christopher Krentz

"How Dare a Sick Man or an Obedient Man Write Poems?"
Whitman and the Dis-ease of the Perfect Body, page 248
Robert j. Scholnick
"No Friend of the Third Reich": Disability as the Basis for
Antifascist Resistance in Arnold Zweig's Das Beil von
Wandsbek, page 260
Carol Poore
The Fat Detective: Obesity and Disability, page 271
Sander L. Gilman

Enabling Pedagogy

Disabilities, Bodies, Voices, page 283
Jim Swan
Constructing a Third Space: Disability Studies,
the Teaching of English, and Institutional Transformation,
page 296
James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson
Disabled Students Come Out: Questions without Answers, page 308
Georgina Kleege
An Enabling Pedagogy, page 317
Brenda Jo Brueggemann

Afterword: If I Should Live So Long, page 337
Michael Berube

Notes on Contributors, page 345
Works Cited, page 351
Index, page 373

Acknowledgments

This project has been substantially enabled by multiple
minds, spirits, and bodies--enablers all. We owe much to the
remarkable staff at MLA headquarters who first helped the
MLA's Committee on Disability Issues (CDI) become permanent
and who also, directly or indirectly, contributed to the
development of this volume, which was engendered from
preliminary and initial CDI committee meetings: the
inimitable Phyllis Franklin; the ever-encouraging, always
available Martha Evans; and a team of others who worked with
and for the CDI then as now--Karin Bagnall, Karen Susnitsky,
and Maribeth Kraus. Carol Zuses kindly suggested ways and
means for organizing sessions on disability issues at the
1995 MLA convention in San Diego and the 1996 MLA convention
in Chicago; many of this volume's contributors first met as
a result. In particular, we wish to acknowledge Terry Ford's
counsel on the ways and means to correct for the many
bibliographic erasures of disability studies scholarship
that have occurred under dated rubrics. Alongside this group
are the original CDI members, those fearless (and fun) souls
who helped shape the volume long before we had a single
submission and who probably, truly, gave us all our best
ideas at points and in ways we can hardly trace anymore:
Lennard Davis, Tammy Berberi, Georgina Kleege, Nancy Mairs,
David Mitchell, and Ellen Stekert. Tremendous thanks also to
those who continue to serve disabled academic populations on
the CDI: Mark Jeffreys, Michael Berube, and Michael
Davidson. We are grateful to Harilyn Rousso and Simi Linton,
who provided guidance and sage advice as consultants and as
members of the "dinner committee." Their expertise and grace
surely infuses these pages as well.

The interdependency of relationships is a fact of life most
disabled people are quite familiar with; it certainly was a
fact with our editorial collaboration. Yet the politics of
name order in traditional publishing may work against
displaying a sense of interdependent and equal
collaboration--especially when three editors, and three
names, are involved. While it is not a perfect remedy, we
agreed to a game of chance as a means for arriving at name
order.

We each are blessed with colleagues and students at our own
universities whose presence resonates in our work at large
and sometimes sounds itself more precisely on these pages.
At the University of Illinois, Chicago, are Carol Gill, Toby
Tate, Teresa Garate-Serafini, Larry Voss, Tamar Heller,
Yanling "Milly" Li, Sharon Lamp, Teresa Pacione, Sarah
Triano, Rebecca Maskos, Carlos Drazen, Sara Vogt, and all
the students in the Disabled Students' Union as well as
those students from UIC disability studies courses:
Histories of the Body (English 590, fall 1998); A History of
Disability Representation (Department of Disability and
Human Development 570, winter 2000); Visualizing the Body:
Disability Film Studies (Department of Disability and Human
Development 594, fall 2000); and Interdisciplinary Seminar
in Disability Studies (Disability Studies 595, fall 2000).
Laura Burt and Theresa Elsey in Michigan provided helpful
work-study assistance on the volume. Michelle Jarman in
Chicago lent her writing talents not only to the formatting
of the volume but also to the devising of a beautifully
serviceable index. Anja Tervooren from the University of
Berlin provided wonderful feedback on early drafts of the
essays. David Mitchell provided editorial guidance,
formatting help, and valuable consultation at every step of
the way. At the Ohio State University are Andrea Lunsford,
Jacqueline Jones-Royster, Jim Phelan, Michal J. Hogan,
Johnson Cheu, Amy Shuman, and all the students in OSU
disability-centered courses: Representations of (Dis)Ability
in Literature and Film (English 575, winter 1995);
Disability in Language, Culture, and Literature (Comparative
Studies and English 792, spring 1996); Abilities in America
(English 110, spring 1998); and Disability Discourses
(English 883, winter 1999).

The circle of supportive colleagues ripples in a pool far
bigger than just our home institutions. These include many
we've worked with in our scholarly areas (disability studies,
rhetoric and composition, cultural studies, literature,
women's studies, creative writing, African American
studies, comparative literature); colleagues at the Society
for Disability Studies, which was founded in the mid-1980s
by a small, but committed, group of disability academics and
professionals; colleagues at conferences we attend where groups similar to the
MLA's CDI meet, such as the American
Studies Association Disability Studies Caucus, the Conference
on College Composition and Communication's Task Force on
Disability Issues, and the Teaching about/with Disabilities
SIG; and the participants in the NEH Summer 2000 Institute
on Disability Studies in the Humanities. Embedded in these
enabling locations are significant individuals who deserve
being singled out: Sander Gilman, Paul Longmore, Adrienne
Asch, Jane Detweiler, John V. VanCleve, Susan Burch, Cindy
LaCom, Carrie Sandhal, Jim Ferris. This volume has benefited
from the skillful editing of Michael Kandel at the MLA.
Finally, there is family--family that believed in us, that
believed in this book, and that gave us not just the nod but
also the physical space and time to do it in: Jim, Karl,
Esther, Bob, Rob, Lena, Cara, David, Cameron, and Emma.

Introduction: Integrating Disability into Teaching and
Scholarship

Disability as both image and concept pervades language and
literature. English abounds with disability metaphors: we have
lame ideas, blind justice, dumb luck, paralyzed wills, deaf
ears, crippling traffic, and idiotic relatives. Disabled
characters people our most canonical literature, from
Homer's Polyphemous, Sophocles's Oedipus, William
Shakespeare's Richard III, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Roger
Chillingworth, Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, Herman Melville's
Captain Ahab, Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Mason and
Rochester, William Faulkner's Benjy Compson, William Carlos
Williams's Elsie, to Toni Morrison's Eva Peace. Many of our
most studied authors had disabilities that influenced their
writing: Homer and Milton were blind, Byron was lame, Keats
was consumptive, Whitman was paralytic, Joan Didion has written
of her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. The centrality of
disability to human experience is recorded in our narrative and
linguistic records.

This claim to disability's centrality in our lives rests on
defining the term broadly, as it has been done in the
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, known as the ADA.
This landmark legislation mandating civil rights for people
with disabilities suggests that disability encompasses
physical, sensory, and mental impairments; illnesses;
congenital and acquired differences thought of as
disfigurements or deformities; psychological disabilities;
stamina limitations due to disease or its treatment;
developmental differences; and visible anomalies such as
birthmarks, scarring, and the marks of aging. In this sense,
then, disability names the naturally occurring or acquired
bodily variations that accrue as we move through history and
across cultures. Moreover, the ADA provides civil rights
protection for people who have such disabilities (or are
perceived as having them). Such an interpretation suggests
that being identified as disabled has negative consequences
in the social, political, and economic realms. Despite those
negative consequences, disability as both a bodily condition
and a social category either now or later will touch us all.
The fact that many of us will become disabled if we live
long enough is perhaps the fundamental aspect of human
embodiment.

Yet, in our present collective cultural consciousness, the
disabled body is imagined not as the universal consequence
of living an embodied life but rather as an alien condition.
Thus disability tends to be figured in cultural
representations as an absolute state of otherness that is
opposed to a standard, normative body, unmarked by either
individual form and function or by the particularities of
its history. In stigmatizing and distancing ourselves from