theory

A Journey in Theory

DellFrog3 Comments

When I signed up for a class about “Disability Rhetoric” I was apprehensive. I was interested in learning more about disability, but I had never encountered rhetoric. I remember searching the definition of rhetoric every day for the first two weeks of class. Once I moved past my fear of rhetoric it was time to tackle the concept of disability. Our first assignment with “The Kids Are Alright” immediately challenged my perceptions of disability, forcing me to confront the overcoming and sympathy (read: pity) narratives that had been taught to me. One of the earliest quotes from my journal is in response to an article by Simi Linton. “But we have failed as a society by expecting abnormality and inability of people who are disabled.” While I still believe this is true in some respects, I don’t think I gave enough credit to the disability community. In today’s world, disability is far more visible than it was even as I was growing up, in large part due to the activism around making the world more accessible and sharing the narratives of people with disabilities. I think this also calls into question definitions of normal and ability, ones that I hadn’t considered at the time of writing that line.

Surrounding the conversation of Disability Visibility as a whole: “It is the way of understanding more about the world and how empathy is the answer when you have more knowledge about the vastness of diversity and the vastness of disability.” I had never encountered the narratives of people in Disability Visibility, and I had never encountered the drastic actions that we saw present in disability activism stories like in Crip Camp. The narratives we encountered were not all sunshine and roses. I don’t like reading sad stories, but there is a difference between a sad story and a provoking narrative that I encountered in this course. Stories like “Unspeakable Conversations” and The Kids Are Alright aren’t necessarily triumphant stories, but they aren’t sad stories either. They are stories that show multi-faceted people experiencing life. And it was refreshing to get a narrative that went beyond my expectations unapologetically. These authors weren’t writing to pander to the nondisabled community, they were writing for themselves.

I hadn’t really encountered a lot of theory outside of educational theory, and seeing disability theories and applying them to literature and media has helped me develop a greater sense of critical analysis. Being able to develop these skills and knowledge has been instrumental in shaping the path of my future. I have learned new perspectives from my peers and been revived in my hope for teaching. I think this quote from October summarizes my thoughts of the class pretty well. “It is where people begin to learn and break free of prior discourses and develop new concepts in conjunction with other like minded people.” I could not be more grateful for the knowledge, theory, and connections I have learned in this class. It also showed me that I can bust out writing much more confidently than I had expected. I am proud of where I have come and I look forward to how I can use this experience in my future.

“Normal” is Bull Shit

unsureunderwaterobot3 Comments

What is Disability Studies? And what questions do I have?  

Disability studies is broad, specific, academic, anecdotal, and intersectional; it transcends time. It aims to answer, what is it like to be disabled now? How it was being disabled in the past? How can we improve the world for disabled people moving forward? It is a study of people, places, things, and ideas. Disability studies does not exist in a vacuum; it cannot be seen through a narrow lens, but rather views the world holistically, centering disabled stories and lives. This field is far reaching. Disability studies is a study of race, sexuality, orientation, class, disability, privilege, rhetoric, design, language, limits and beyond. It offers a wider perspective of thinking and progressively looks to embrace and empower intersectional thinking.  

Disability theory is not an algorithmic equation. It cannot be memorized and regurgitated. It is a way of thinking and it’s for everyone. It is story-telling, listening, and amplifying. The way I have thought about it, it’s like putting glasses on your brain. Disability studies sees the world differently than churches, medical labs, and politics; and it acts accordingly.  

An interesting dilemma I am struck by is that I am learning about disability studies in a very ableist place. Higher education perpetrates all the “ism”s, both tangibly and intangibly.  

Disability studies seems to pose more questions than answers.

How, then, can we continue to open the floor for disabled voices in the classroom? How can teaching styles, floorplans, even temperatures be deconstructed to create a space suitable for the masses – including but not limited to disabled folks? How can we question our motives to ensure we aren’t studying out of pity or saviorism? How can we have open-ears but continue to be critical? How can we ensure our actions are not bandaid solutions? How can we actionably move toward a better world for disabled folks that gets at the core of mistreatment? How can we approach disability studies with a wide-reaching theory, while recognizing that disability is not a monolith? 

These questions are posed not to accuse, but to query. I think in the spirit of disability studies, I am called to push forward the spaces I take up. 

Critical thinking, based on our positionality is a huge part of disability studies. It challenges our learned understanding of “normal”. These learned understandings often come from a place of ableism, hierarchy, and individualism, and they must be broken down and unlearned. Because “normal” is bull shit. Disability studies supplies language, action, and conceptual reframing for learners to deconstruct ideas of “normal”. If there is no “normal,” which several authors have claimed thus far, how can we recognize difference? Eliminating “normal” can be misconstrued and create monoliths of understanding, which I am still grappling with. O’Toole, author of Celebrating Crip Bodyminds writes on the complexities normal and how we can balance deconstruction with recognition: 

“Acknowledging that there is no ‘normal’ doesn’t mean that everyone 
experiences disability as a political and social identity. Acknowledging that there is no 
‘normal’ creates a society where difference can be recognized without being diffused or ignored. It does not take away the culture of disability, only adds an opportunity and awareness for us to be more integrated into society as a whole” (O’Toole pg. 12) 

O’Toole mentions integration, which sparks yet another question. Integration can, in cases, lump folks in a way that does not appropriately observe difference. How, then can we acknowledge/recognize without diffuse/ignore?  

The questions keep on coming.

Sex, Beauty, and Disability  

Sex, attraction, and physical beauty are heavy concepts that carry personal and structural weight. Sex and beauty are vulnerable for nondisabled folks who don’t experience marginalization, so bringing in disability is a whole new can of worms. Sex and beauty are often tied closely with white supremacy, consumerism, and unrealistic standards. The rhetoric of the world tells us that disability equals abnormality and abnormality equals ugly. These structures are inherently false, but rampant. Margaret Shildrick wrote on sex and disability in Keywords of Disability Studies. They write about why disabled folks are sexually fetishized or erased, “… we might conclude that it is because sexuality is always a site of deep-seated anxieties about normative forms of embodied being” (Shildrick pg. 165). Shildrick emphasizes that the mistreatment of disabled people comes from projected insecurities. I would argue that those insecurities come from a greater structural standard. Woven throughout Disability Visibility are stories of beauty and sex within the disability community. Stories of lives shared between disabled lovers are portrayed in Sins Invalid as well, a documentary of a performance team in San Francisco. These two learning tools use creative story-telling to enlighten viewers of the multifaceted experiences of disabled people regarding beauty and sex.
 

Rhetoric of space and Crip Space   

As explained in Dolmage’s Disability Studies and Rhetoric, there are myths created about disability that stem from inaccurate rhetoric; rhetoric in the literary sense, rhetoric of space, rhetoric of politics, and rhetoric of economy and culture. The world has given us a language, a physical space, and a general understanding that is built on ableism.

The concept of “crip space” was introduced in Disability Visibility in the chapter The Beauty of Spaces Made for and by Disabled People. Crip spaces are environments that are constructed in a way that not only includes disabled bodyminds, but is centered around them. The concept of crip space is very rhetorical by nature. Spaces produce an ability or inability to exist for disabled people. If an office is on the top floor of a building that only has stair access, a wheelchair user cannot physically exist in that space. If a classroom is taught at the speed of a neurotypical person, that classroom has lost its value for someone who is mentally disabled. No one used their worlds to explicitly tell disabled folks they don’t belong in those spaces, but the spatial rhetoric produced a space in which disabled people cannot exist. s.e. smith argues, “this is precisely why they are needed: as long as claiming our own ground is treated as an act of hostility, we need our ground. We need the sense of community for disabled people created in crip space” (s.e. smith pg. 274).

Healing 

After skimming through my journal, I am struck with the reoccurring topic of healing. This came up several times at the beginning of the quarter. Medical, charitable, social, and cultural scopes of disability have different ideas of what healing looks like. I think the idea of “healing” requires some sort of sickness (something that must be cured). In understanding disability studies, the sickness (what must be cured) is ableism. When You’re Waiting to be Healed is a story that portrays this concept well. It is about a girl growing up in a religious family with Nystagmus. Her family prayed for her eyes to be healed from the “cursed abnormality”. She writes, “I was praying a lot, asking God to heal me so that I could have some sort of normality” (Eric-Udorie pg. 55). She was desperate for her eyes to be healed because the world around her told her that she was the problem. I would argue that disability studies sees our hierarchal culture as the problem.  

Reflective Annotated Bibliography: “Reassigning Meaning”

CloverLeave a comment

Title and Author(s):

Simi Linton, “Reassigning Meaning”, second chapter of Claiming Disability.

Summary:

In this reading, Linton provides a theoretical framework that re-centers disability within the discussion on health and society, while considering other intersectional factors of race, gender, and sexual orientation as belonging on an axis with points of privilege. First, Linton introduces the audience to many of the terms typically used to discuss disability⁠—ableism, special, abnormality, overcome, person with disability⁠—going as far as to deconstruct that dis- into its “semantic consequences” (31) of diminutive separation. Through naming oppressive language (i.e. “dying of AIDS”), describing the conflict (the implication that those with AIDS are incapable of living active lives), and providing a helpful alternative (i.e. “living with AIDS”), Linton demystifies the myriad of options for describing disability, recommending the terms disabled and nondisabled among them (27). At the center of Linton’s framework is the idea that the nondisabled position is not the “universal, neutral position from which disabled people deviate” (32), but simply possible outcomes of human variation.

Quotations: 

“This new language conveys different meanings, and, significantly, the shifts serve as metacommunications about the social, political, intellectual, and ideological transformations that have taken place” (9).

“When disabled people are able to pass for nondisabled, and do, the emotional toll it takes is enormous” (20).

“Saying that someone is suffering from a condition implies that there is a perpetual state of suffering, uninterrupted by pleasurable moments or satisfactions. Afflicted carries similar presumptions” (26).

Reflections:

More than anything else from this text, I am grateful to have a layman’s-terms toolkit for discussing disability as the quarter draws on. There is so much power in language, and as Linton points out, language itself is a driver and a shaper of conversation. Knowing exactly why certain colloquial terms have been intentionally abandoned by disability advocates, and which alternatives are preferable, makes me more comfortable in charting the waters ahead.

However, I was pretty confused by some of the language in this reading, specifically about nondisabled perspectives. Linton wrote “The nondisabled stance, like the white stance, is veiled” on page fourteen. What exactly does this mean? That the “nondisabled stance” is an undertheorized stance? What is a “white stance”, anyhow? At first, some of Linton’s phrasing might seem inflammatory, but that in itself helped me to generate thought as I worked to dispute whatever I disagreed with at first. Another example: Linton described the nondisabled on page 32 as “a category of people whose power and cultural capital keep them at the center”. This ordering of words makes it seem as though the nondisabled could wield this “power” as a tool to force their way into higher positions in society. However, I believe what Linton means to say is that the absence of ableist oppression among the nondisabled—whether that may be incurred medical bills, workplace discrimination, an increased difficulty in accessing resources, or imposed stigma—allow the nondisabled to come to the “center” of the discussion on disability, through the osmotic pressures of privilege in society. 

It’s clear from this reading that Linton is as deeply critical of the linguistic structures enforcing ableism as our popular slang, which to me is refreshing, as it adds a layer of depth. Linton argues that only through the use of humanizing, accurate, and warranted language towards disability may academic discussions on ability and society be facilitated respectfully and appropriately. Personally, I couldn’t agree more.