This is the next book in my queue. Sometimes a book can shift the direction of your life. This was such a book for me. It’s been a long time since I have read it completely, and I’m looking forward to reading it again:
In a crucial time in my doctoral studies, one of my mentors, Elizabeth Wheeler (HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth (University of Michigan Press, 2019) offered the first graduate seminar on disability studies at the University of Oregon (it was one of the few such courses offered at the time). As the child of a profoundly disabled woman, every aspect of my childhood had been shaped by disability, but it never occurred to me that disability itself could be a legitimate object of study.
Disability was just what it was, and the challenges of my family were our own. I had never questioned what I would learn later had a name: the so-called ‘medical model’ of disability (this common sense way of viewing disability sees it as individual tragedy to be quantified and cured, if at all possible.) Imagining disability might be more than that, perhaps something that everyone in a culture participates in and bears some responsibility for, was a radically new idea to me.
The class, and particularly my exposure to Rosemarie Garland Thompson’s tidal wave of a book: Extraordinary Bodies, Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, (Columbia Press, 1997) changed how I saw my own life and disability forever. Coming at a pivotal time in my doctoral studies when I was ripe for a ‘string theory’ to bring together so many of my disparate interests, this revolutionary book made me think something that I still think is true today many years later: that disability studies, this newest discipline in the academy, is also its most exciting. Because of its broad applicability and the host of unquestioned assumptions so many of us hold around disability, it may be our most useful area of investigation.
Extraordinary Bodies provides an important introduction to the potentials of this discipline and its invitation to expand our thinking about disability. Due to the success of social movements associated with gender and race (among them #metoo and Black Lives Matter), many young people are at least aware of their investment in race and gender. Disability, on the other hand, until recently, has been something many just take for granted as a static truth of bodies, not something that may actually involve much more than individual bodies.
While feminism sought to politicize the materiality of bodies and rewrite the category of ‘woman’, basically to denaturalize what it meant to be a woman (or a man) and make us look at gender and sexuality in new ways, Extraordinary Bodies, and the discipline of disability studies more broadly, seeks to do the same thing with the disabled body. Rosemary Garland Thompson’s work is concerned with the same central question that organizes disability studies: what exactly does it mean to be disabled? Is disability a self evident truth of the body? Or is it a social construction, one that is historically and cultural, culturally fluid. And as such can be reimagined.
One of the main things that the discipline of disability studies is concerned with doing is interrogating the dominance of the medical model in literature and culture, dislodging how natural it looks and feels, making all of its usually unspoken assumptions explicit. All of this allows it to make explicit the distributions of power disability conceals. Disability studies is also concerned with visuality and identifies the extreme contradictions of the visibly disabled body: what Garland Thomson points out is a history of conspicuous display while being “politically and socially erased.” Extraordinary Bodies is concerned with both of these things as it gives a limited interrogation of select American literature and culture.
Among the visual culture the book considers is the contradictory past of the freak show, the popular late 19th, early 20th century form of entertainment, in which disabled and raced bodies were displayed for profit. Like much of her work she considers the contradictions present in this practice, both the exploitation of bodies not considered ‘normal’ as well as the potentials these bodies might have had to disrupt ‘normal’. She brings attention to ‘normal’ and illustrates how this idea is much more than just concerned with the body. She suggests that examining the normal body can help expose much of the invisible assumptions that help decide what bodies are marked and what bodies are not.
She suggests that turning the light on ‘normal’ can help reveal that disability is not so much a property of bodies, as it is a product of cultural rules, rules that say what a body should do, or be. And that thus idea of normal is crucial to this. Her work, like Disability Studies itself, turns the spotlight on normal (much as race studies made the invisible concept of whiteness visible). Thompson suggests that the concept of disability is the shadow body of normal and is essential to delineating its lines, and crucial in ways that we don’t don’t normally think about in defining what it means–among other things–to be American, that it is crucial to related concepts of self reliance and autonomy.
And most of this cultural work she suggests takes place in the visual, in how bodies look, and what they are seen to be doing. In literature, she suggests that disability usually appears to be at the margins, with disabled characters frequently marginalized characters. In addition to marginalizing characters, she also suggests that there is a huge gap between the real lives of those with disabilities and the imagined lives of those with disabilities in these representations.
She also highlights the fact that these characters with disabilities are often objectified, made to be the object of action, rather than capable of true action themselves. And because of all of this, it positions the reader not to identify with the character with disability. That instead the worlds of such stories creates a reader position that assumes a non-disabled identification.
At the same time, as she points this out, she also brings attention to contradictions taking place at the margins. In marginalizing disabled characters or in the creation of disability as spectacle in the historical freakshow, she suggests something else may also be occurring. She suggests that disability can become a marker of difference as eminence, that somehow it may become a celebration of what the normal would normally seek to conceal. As such, she highlights the potentially disruptive power of representations of disability, something rarely addressed in many interrogations of the medical model.