What Happens If You Put American Disability Studies at the Center?

Writing Deafness, Crip Theory, and Cultural Locations of Disability, three recent publications in the area of disability studies, do a great deal to extend the already landmark work of Paul Longmore¹ and Douglas Baynton² in American disability history and Rosemarie Garland Thomson³ in feminism, disability, and American studies. These more recent writers situate documentary disability film, deaf writers in the nineteenth century, and queer and disability performance art in relation to significant conversations about disability history, emergent cultural forms, and resistant practices. Strikingly, they also reach beyond national borders and point toward important transnational dimensions of these conversations. For example, in Cultural Locations of Disability Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell link trans-Atlantic practices of eugenics; in Writing Deafness, Christopher Krentz develops parallels between emerging deaf and Africanist culture and politics in the nineteenth century; and in Crip Theory, Robert McRuer uses both disability and queer theory to critique heteronormativity in a growing global context. Their work makes it clear that there are still no easy ways to loosen the stranglehold of a social rhetoric that relies on controlling and containing difference. Nevertheless, all four authors make compelling arguments for continuing to rethink the place of deaf and disability studies in American studies, and, echoing McRuer, to move toward new vocabularies and a renewed sense of the future.

It is now a commonplace to indicate that American studies needs to expand beyond U.S. national borders and to embrace the transnational turn as a commitment to international collaboration, stronger comparative work, and greater efforts to generate inclusiveness, but it is less clear why disability analysis is still often missing from these conversations. Following Emory Eliot's 2006 address "Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational?"⁴—in which he draws on Mary Helen Washington's 1997 ASA address "Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?"—I offer a provocation, asking, "What happens if you put American disability studies at the center?"

Disability studies theorists (following Foucault, Butler et al.) argue that bodies make themselves through the everyday practices that mark our social, cultural, and political landscapes. We are bodies-in-making, and yet our bodies are always about to escape us. At any time, we can be reminded that we are all only "temporarily able-bodied." Because we will all at some point belong to it, disability is the largest and most commonly shared identity category. Yet the unease around the questions of human frailty and the unpredictability of the material body continue to vex us. How can we frame a critical taxonomy of bodily difference and its instantiation in the American studies landscape when disability is often, as Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell put it, "reified as the true site of insufficiency" (17)?

Disability accentuates the instability of the material body, which is always slipping away from us as it plays on what Judith Butler calls the "disruptive return of the excluded."⁵ The three books under review model ways to incorporate a disability perspective into the study of history and culture both inside and outside the United States, and they show how social and political practices related to place, as well as to sensory and sexual difference, hold together the all-too-familiar disability oppressions. My goals are to locate each writer within the local U.S. terrain and to clarify how some of their work contributes to conversations about the transnationalism of American studies.

In Cultural Locations of Disability, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell challenge the tendency to...