Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment

265 Pages·2007·13.492 MB·English

by  Tanya Titchkosky

READING AND WRITING DISABILITY DIFFERENTLY:
THE TEXTURED LIFE OF EMBODIMENT
What is the meaning of disability, and how are our conceptions of dis-
ability formed in contemporary society? In this book, Tanya Titchkosky
challenges us to read and write disability differently than we ordinarily
do in daily life. Through the examination of everyday texts about dis-
ability, this unique and detailed study explores how disability is put
into text, narrated, and made present in readers' lives. Using interpre-
tive social theory, Reading and Writing Disability Differently engages
news media and policy texts that depict disability as a clear-cut prob-
lem in need of clear-cut solutions. These texts become opportunities to
reveal dominant Western ways of constituting the meaning of people,
and the .meaning of problems, as they relate to contemporary under-
standings of our embodied selves.
Releasing disability's power as something more than a problem, and
other than positive or negative, this study demonstrates the imagina-
tive potential of regarding texts on disability as sites to examine neo-
liberal culture. Given that media and policy texts on disability are
informed by tacit cultural assumptions, these texts serve as a social
scene worthy of critical inquiry. We are shown how we can pursue a
self-reflexive analysis of ordinary ways or reading and writing as they
constitute embodiment as a problem, and how we might escape the
confines of a collective imagination dedicated only to solving troubles.
The rigorous mixing of social theory and concrete analysis allows for
the possibility of a radical new approach to disability. Titchkosky holds
that through an exploration of the potential that lies behind limited rep-
resentations of disability, we can relate to disability as a meaningful
form of resistance to the restricted normative order of contemporary
embodiment.
TANYA TITCHKOSKY is a disability studies professor in the Department
of Sociology and Equity Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, University of Toronto, and author of Disability, Self, and Soci-
ety (2003).
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TANYA TITCHKOSKY
Reading and Writing
Disability Differently
The Textured Life of Embodiment
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9236-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8020-9506-0 (paper)
©
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Titchkosky, Tanya, 1966-
Reading and writing disability differently : the textured life of
embodiment / Tanya Titchkosky.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9236-6 (bound)
ISBN 978-0-8020-9506-0 (pbk.)
1. People with disabilities in mass media. 2. Sociology of
disability. I. Title.
HV 1568.T583 2007 302.23'2087 C2006-906615-9
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences,
through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using
funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance
to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and
the Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support
for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through
the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
For Sydney
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In particular, because speech acts are bodily performed, the body is a
rhetorical instrument that contributes to the 'force' of those speech acts
... The question is: How might disabled individuals speak with our own
authority against this psychically internalized authorization only to cite
able-bodied norms?
- Susan Stocker, 'Problem of Embodiment and
Problematic Embodiment/ 35
... how to think, write, and read otherwise ...
- Elizabeth Grosz, 'Histories of the Present and Future/ 22
It is no easy matter to attend to qualities that are not given, but which
make the given possible, lace its emergence, hover at its boundaries.
- Judith Butler, 'Foreword' to The Erotic Bird,
by Maurice Natanson, xiii
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Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 3
1 Text and the Life of Disability 11
PART ONE: PROBLEMS
2 Totally a Problem: Government Survey Texts 45
3 Metamorphosis: Making Disability a Medical Matter 79
4 Reading and Recognition: Un-doing Disability's Deadly
Status 108
PART TWO: DIS-SOLUTIONS
5 Governing Embodiment: Technologies of Constituting
Citizens with Disabilities 145
6 Overcoming: Abled-Disabled and Other Acts of Normative
Violence 177
Afterword 209
Notes 13
References 219Refe
Index 237