Disability Studies, Crip Theory, and Movement Between the Two

There were many typos in the original posting, because I was trying to write this rather complicated post using my iPad's touch keyboard.  Instead of simply correcting them, I'm going to highlight the corrections.  I'm going to assume the goodwill of the seminar in believing that these mistakes weren't sloppiness, but rather the artifacts of my having to engage with the blogging technology through a less perfect interface than the full keyboard and large screen of my laptop, and in this way they remind me of similar issues I have when sending email to my partner Larry.  Larry has to use Dragon, a text-to-speech software, to both write and to navigate his computer.  It takes him approximately four times as long to do a simple task, such as open or close a program, because this technology is a poor retrofit that "compensates for" his mobility impairment rather than a "universally designed" computer system which would anticipate his need to access the controls differently, and as such it presents a number of difficulties.  It strikes me that being aware of how working with a more cumbersome and less perfect tool to create texts impacts even a (relatively) expert producer of such texts might inform our understanding of similar artifacts in the work of our students, peers, and professors whose embodied experience complicates their use of technologies.  The edits will appear in red.

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I chose Robert McCruer's article because I think it serves to do two very important things: 1. establish the radical goals of Crip Theory as differentiated from the liberal democratic goals of Disability Studies and, 2. make obvious the central role that Queer and Feminist Theory play in the development of--and continued work in--Crip Theory.  (Jay Dolmage's Metis essay gives us even more insight into the linkage between Feminist and Crip theories, rhetorics, and positionalities.)  "Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies," is a move to establish Crip Theory as something to the side of--though not seperated or holding itself apart from--Disability Studies.   The best analogy, for which I have to thank Sherrie Gradin, is that Disability Studies is to Crip Theory as LGBTQ Studies is to Queer Theory; LGBTQ/Disability Studies attempts to describe and remediate (as in "rectify the inequalities" and not as in "to set straight") the positions of disabled and LGBTQ persons within the historical moment we find ourselves. Queer/Crip Theories use tensions created by these inequalities to critique that historical moment.  This is a key distinction to make if we are going to move beyond the idea of "accomodation" in rhetoric and in practice and toward an ethic of universal design and universal subjectivity.  Crip Theory does not wish to be "normalized;" in fact, it resists what Garland-Thomson calls realism's aim "to routinize disability, making it seem ordinary" (588). McRuer makes this distinction clear in the article:

There is one other argumentative strand that troubles me in "Seeing Disabled," this time because I am at least incined to be convinced by portions of it"  "Realism aims to routinize disability, making it seem ordinary. As such, it has the most political power in a democratic order, although one could argue that the transgressive most effecitly achieves social change in democracies" (363).  My first question about this seductive argument is: if one could argue that the transgressive most effectively achieves social change--and in a post-Stonewall, post-HEW takeover, post-ACT UP, post-ADAPT, post-Sex Panic! world, such an argument would have a lot going for it--then why not argue it? (589)

His concern is that, as difference is made normate, critique becomes less and less possible as more and more positionalities are "deployed in the service of normalizing dominant mythologies" (591).   

To understand this concern, it's important first to understand what he means by "normate," a construct first put forth by Garland-Thomson (who is amazing, and whose work is radical and brilliant, even if she is being heavily critiqued in what we've read this week, and you should read many, many things by her).  To quote Garland-Thomson as quoted by McRuer, "This neologism names the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate's boundaries.  The term normate usefully designated the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings" ((Extraordinary Bodies 8) "Crip Eye" 591).* 

McRuer inverts perhaps the most frequently uttered "truism" in Disability Studies--everyone will eventually be disabled--by asserting "the fact that, if we live long enough, all of us will become normate is arguably the dominant story of the gay movement at the turn of the century" (591). (Note that he specifically uses the word "gay" rather than the word "queer" here, another way that McRuer differentiates from the social liberal construction of sexual "preference" and the radical potentiality of queerness.) Normativity, then, is always and must always be seen against the backdrop of non-normative bodies; disabled bodies, women's bodies, bodies of color. 

For me, this article has always suggested a number of questions, some of which I'd like us to consider together in class:

1.  How can the radical agendas of Queer/Crip Theory and the neoliberal agendas of LGBTQ Studies and Disability Studies coexist in a generative relationship?  (It seems obvious that they must, or Crip Theory runs the risk of itself becoming a contributor to the material oppression of queer and disabled persons living in this particularly moment and time.)

2.  Normativity can only be recognized in outline against the deviant.  It strikes me that this must require making the deviant visible.  How can we, in our classrooms, use this visibility to complicate students' understanding of their own positionalit(ies)?

3.  Given the difficulty Johnson Cheu describes in "Becoming Visible, Lessons in Disability" in getting students to move beyond the  medicalized conversation on specific disabilities to the social construction of disablity, is it even possible to move students beyond identifying social constructions of disability and into using Crip Theory as a mode for critique?  How do we move beyond the "Study" and get to the "Theory" in undergraduate writing classes?  Or, perhaps, are there good reasons we shouldn't try?


Some Resources in Conversation with the McRuer:

A link to the (longer version) essay "Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Culture" by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: http://www.clc.wvu.edu/r/download/29474






Not the exact image of Assistant Secrtary Judith F. Huemann that Garland-Thomson uses (I couldn't find a copy of it), but one from the same photographer and the same era.  Add pearls and an american flag in the background, make the wheelchair a little more visible, and you'll get the picture.












The picture of Bob Flanagan Garland-Thomson used.  If you're REALLY adventures, a web search for images of Bob Flanagan will also turn up one from his performance--the one I imagine he'd want us to see--that's is significantly more difficult than the one Garland-Thomson used.  Or watch the movie.  It's not easy, but it is, in spite of all the difficult sexual material, an excellent exegesis on pain, sexuality, and the experience of being an exceptionally bodied person.  (But, okay, I have never been able to watch the whole thing, either.) Or perhaps just listen to him read his poem "Why" and think about what it says about embodiment.  Think about the cough.  (Look it up on YouTube, which has "disabled" embedding, probably because of copyright issues.  Make sure you watch the one with the little boy at the beginning, because it's actually read by Bob Flanagan--with no challenging sexual imagery, I promise--and some of the others are not.)


Also, consider watching this video by Rosemary Garland-Thomson.  I use it in my ENG 151(0, now) class to great effect at the beginning of the visual rhetoric assignment:

*How does one actually do this?  I tried looking it up in the OWL, and could find no definitive answer.

Thanks!

Sarah