The Big Names in Disability Studies
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Bringing Freakery Back!
Well, if you're going to talk disability studies, you can't go wrong by starting with its rock star, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson.
You see, good old RGT wrote two books in the 1990s that set the world of disability studies on fire. Perhaps the most important is Extraordinary Bodies, which was the first book to really look at disability as a cultural construct (an idea used in books, movies, the visual arts, etc.) and as a way to define how Western civilization sees itself. Oh, and, above all, how it draws the boundaries of community by drawing lines between "normal" and "abnormal" bodies.
RGT shows us in Extraordinary Bodies and Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body that the visual display of non-normative bodies has been an important tool in Western cultures, because it establishes communities by distinguishing those who belong from those who don't.
RGT sees this not only in the form of the cabinets of curiosities, but also in the freak shows that were so popular in Europe and the US from the 18th to the early-20th centuries.
Since the 1990s, RGT has focused a lot of her attention on the means through which disability operates as a visual construct, with the disabled person choosing or being required to submit him/herself to a sort of visible inspection.
For RGT, the spectacle of disability may be in the form of the average Joe seeing someone on the street who doesn't look or act "quite right" and trying to diagnose, or to figure out, what might be "wrong" with that person.
Or, it might occur in the more socially approved form of a doctor's office visit, where the patient submits him/herself to the visual inspection of the doctor. Indeed, RGT's 2009 book, Staring: How We Look, argues that this instinct to stare at bodies and to try to define them based on how they look is a natural human impulse that shapes the way we perceive, understand, and react toward disability.
Not only this, but RGT also links the examination of non-normative bodies in the doctor's office to the freak shows of 200 years ago, and even to the idea of the disabled body as a of sign and wonder in the Ancient world and the Middle Ages. For RGT it's all just about the human instinct to stare and then to define in a new form.
Michel Foucault
The Doctor Will See You Now
We can't think about the visibility of the non-normative body (especially when it comes to the doctor's office) without thinking about Michel Foucault, our not-so-cheery guide through our modern world and the way our world "constructs" our ideas about the human body.
The Birth of the Clinic is just one of a sea of books Foucault has given us to show how modern medicine shapes the way that we feel about—and react toward—our bodies. And these attitudes, he suggests, are primarily geared toward maintaining the status quo, toward ensuring that those who have power keep it… and that those who don't have power won't get any.
So, for Foucault, the medical examining room becomes one of the many places were bodies are "disciplined" and made "docile," because, through diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, doctors define how bodies should look and perform. And then, in Foucault's words, they "punish" those who fail to meet those standards by trying to rehabilitate them to come close to the idea of "normal."
All of this happens, Foucault tells us, so that our modern power/knowledge systems can ensure that modern bodies are pretty much all alike and one body can be exchanged for any other should the first become injured or sick or die.
After all, our modern systems need a supply of fresh, well-functioning, and interchangeable bodies to keep them going. We have to have militaries, governments, and workforces that constantly renew themselves, year after year, decade after decade, and century after century.
And we can only do that if our bodies are "docile" (read: quiet and boring), if they don't look or function any differently from the others. If they do what they're supposed to when they're supposed to do it. If they all fall in line.
Lennard Davis
Not Just Your Average Joe, er, Lennard
Lennard Davis is widely considered one of the founding fathers of disability studies. He's co-writer and editor of maybe the first and most important book in the field, The Disability Studies Reader (1997). According to Davis, our modern understanding of the body, and in particular of the disabled body, really began to take shape in the mid-19th century with the rise of statistics and of the idea of the "average man" or "l'homme moyen."
Davis notes that the concept of the "norm" didn't emerge until 1855, as modern statistics began to emerge alongside and as a component of industrialization. The means of statistically analyzing modern populations developed in an effort to identify the physical and moral qualities of the "average" middle-class worker.
Davis argues that these efforts can be traced most especially to the French statistician Adolphe Quetelet, whose study of the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of the working class gave us the idea of what the "normal" middle class worker should look and be like.
But, for Davis, Quetelet's concepts of the norm were not quite so innocent. It wasn't just that these numbers helped us to understand what the middle class was like in this era. Nope, these ideas were meant to show us what the middle class must be like. In other words, social statistics weren't used to describe—they were used to compel.
So, these statistics didn't just say that the middle-class body looks and acts like X, Y, and Z… they also said that any body that doesn't look and act like X, Y, and Z must be abnormal and in need of "fixing." This, for Davis, marks the beginning of our modern idea of disability, of who a "disabled person" really is.
Shelley Tremain
Making Foucault at Home in Disability Studies
Theorists like Shelley Tremain have found a strong parallel between disability studies' interest in the norm and the ideas of Foucault. This is especially true of Davis' focus on the role of modern social statistics because, as Tremain notes, Foucault also relied heavily on the role of "measurement" (including statistical measurement) in shaping how we think about bodies and the ways these bodies are supposed to look and function.
Tremain uses Foucault's concept of "biopower" to explain how ideas of disability are applied in the modern world. Basically, "biopower" just means that the ways we understand, use, and shape our bodies are a reflection of the power/knowledge structures at work in our culture. And not only do these things reflect these structures, dear Shmoopers, they also perpetuate them.
Say what? Come again?
Well, all this really means is that when we determine what "normal" bodies look like and do, we also determine what "normal" society is—and that means that we use our "normal" bodies to keep things rolling along as they are and as they supposedly (but not really) "always" have been.
So, our "normal" bodies ensure that our schools teach as they have for centuries—for example, by using written and oral language as the primary method for students to learn… even if students have visual or hearing impairments.
Likewise, our military continues to function as it always has: by using perfectly "normal," perfectly "average" bodies that are uniform (bah-dum-bum!), regular, and interchangeable.
And medical clinics all work on a diagnostic model that says that anything that deviates from the statistical average is "abnormal" and must be fixed or cured in some way.
The whole goal of these Foucauldian ideas of biopower, according to Tremain, is just to perpetuate our modern, Western, capitalist society, to use our ideas of and our expectations for our bodies to determine how we think, how we live, how we relate to one another, and even how we work.
All so that our modern Western culture, with its power/knowledge structures firmly in place, can keep on rollin' the way we roll, Joe.