Does anyone still read this stuff?
Disability Studies and Literary Studies
A Marriage of More than Convenience
Fortunately, disability studies is alive and well, not only in the academy (i.e., among fancypants theorists and scholars and teachers), but also in our schools, communities, and workplaces.
Disability studies are becoming sort of the Avengers of the academic world, trying to figure out how the theoretical work being done in the field might translate into political action and into tangible improvements in the lives of the disabled.
Above all, disability studies tries to restore the voices of those with physical, psychological, and development disabilities to the conversation—not just recognizing the voices that were once silenced by the cure/cover/kill model, but ensuring that those voices are heard as the loudest and the most important in the movement.
One of the most powerful tools at work in disability studies is literary theory itself. Disability studies scholars are drawing on the insights not only of feminist and postcolonial theories, but also of reader-response criticism, trauma writing, and life-writing in general to explore the ways that we narrate the body and its experiences—and how that shapes the way that we value, treat, and use these bodies.
Likewise, literary scholars are deploying insights from disability studies to understand how our literature is driven by conscious and subconscious beliefs about how our bodies should look, function, and be.
In other words, literary studies and disability studies increasingly recognize that the stories we tell about our bodies are the stories we tell about ourselves. So to understand disability, we must draw on the tools of literary theory to help us understand disability's many narratives. To understand narrative, we must draw on disability studies to understand how our expectations of what it means to be a person determine the way we think—and therefore talk/write—about people.
Long story short: words are thoughts and thoughts become actions.
The Postmodern Disabled Body
Flesh and Word and a Whole Lotta Swag
In addition to the political aspects of today's disability studies comes a pretty redonkulous artistic component that, in many ways, reflects Simi Linton's concept of the embracing of disabled identity.
Here is where that wild and freaky and wonderful area of postmodernism really starts to crank things up. Disability studies and disability advocates are beginning to use postmodern ideas to shape their own sense of identity, to challenge how their bodies are perceived, and to ensure that they—not doctors, lawyers, legislators, politicians, or educators—determine what their own bodies mean and how they are to be understood.
Essentially, when postmodernism and disability studies come together (as they are now, woo!) what we get is Miami Ink on steroids because postmodern disability advocates do not just accept the "abnormality" of their bodies—they celebrate it. And many magnify it.
Just like getting tatted up with body sleeves to mark your individuality, postmodern disability folks will bling out their prostheses. They'll ornament their scars with some slammin' ink. They'll decorate their deformities with all kinds of swag. An example is Alex Minsky, a former Marine who lost a leg in Afghanistan and has now transitioned into a modeling career.
Minsky's photographs often feature, rather than hide, his prosthesis, using it strategically to represent an image of masculine strength that seems to actually be more than human, extra-ordinary, rather than "abnormal."
The Postmodern Self
Slip-Slidin' Away
This is how postmodernism is shaping disability studies. Because, in postmodernism, there's the idea that who we are is never stable. It's never fixed… as opposed to the Enlightenment ideal of the autonomous self, which never changes (and to most people is pretty darn boring).
Instead, postmodern ideas of the self tell us that we're always changing, that who were are from one moment to the next depends upon a whole host of factors, both internal and external.
Eh, what?
Well, the postmodern self is one in which the inside and the outside of a person are always meeting, negotiating, adapting, and changing. The inner thoughts, feelings, desires, and fears of a person meet with the outer environments, situations, and people one is surrounded by. So the person shifts and changes from one instant to the next, depending on that person's needs and desires at that precise moment.
Think of it this way: we speak, dress, and act differently at a job interview than we do at the club or hanging at home with friends. But how we dress, speak, act, etc., are all a matter of choice, of deciding "who" we want to "be" at any given moment.
Postmodern-inspired disability advocates argue that how we define, respond to, and represent our "impairments" is also a matter of choice. It's all about what kind of clothes, metaphorically speaking, we decide to wear on any given day.
So decorating a prosthesis, tattooing a scar, and featuring a deformity prominently in a photograph are all an aspect of taking control of one's disabled identity and how one's bodily impairment is perceived. The self, then, becomes a work of art, something that you create for yourself by consciously deciding how you will present yourself to the world.
"Disability" Identity
Flowin' Like Water
Another lesson that postmodernism teaches us is that our sense of self is always fluid, shifting and sliding from one moment to the next as our inner and outer worlds meet. This is an idea that disability studies folks can really get on board with because disability, as we've seen, is all about the idea of change.
The most fundamental principle of disability studies is the idea of the vulnerable and changeable body, the fact that if we just live long enough, we will all experience sickness, injury, and aging, which is the reason that many disability advocates use the term TAB (Temporarily Able-Bodied) for people without impairments.
This term just reiterates the fact that our bodies are fluid, that they are always changing, and that perfect health and functioning are only temporary. At some point, everyone will become disabled to some degree or another.
So, in light of this idea of the instability and unpredictability of the body, disability studies takes postmodernism's concepts of the fluid identity, of the sense of self that is shaped by whatever circumstances (both inner and outer) one is encountering at the moment, to show that the "disabled identity" is never stable.
It varies depending upon the environment you are in, the way you are feeling, and what you are doing from one moment to the next. So while a person with an impairment may not feel disabled in the comfort of her own home and among friends and family, when she ventures to a job interview and cannot reach the employer's office because of the stairs, the sense of being disabled will become incredibly acute.
Likewise, a person who has enjoyed perfect health and functioning all his life may feel far removed from a "disabled identity" until the instant that, like Christopher Reeve, an injury leaves him permanently paralyzed.
Today's disability studies, inspired by postmodernism, show us that, like all identities, "the disabled identity" is never fixed, it is never stable. In fact, the (singular) disabled identity doesn't exist. It is as varied as all the people who have, had, or will have an impaired body (in other words, there are as many "disabled identities" as there are people on the planet!).
And, to make it even more complex, the disabled identity created by each individual person is, in fact, multiple identities that shift from moment to moment, situation to situation.
So, a single, one-size-fits-all approach to disability, current theory shows us, is just plain wrong.
Complicated, much?