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David Mitchell Invisible Bodies and the Corporeality of Difference (on Martin Norden, The Cinema ofIsolation: A History ofDisability in the Movies [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994]; Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body [New York: Verso, 1995]; Rosemarie Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature [New York: Columbia UP, 1997]) InJean-Luc Nancy's recent philosophical treatise on the body and Being, The Birth To Presence, he boldly asserts that "[t]here is no such thing as the body. There is no body" (207). Any purveyor of current theory will recognize the almost commonplace anti-essentialist credo of such a claim. Once narrated as a naturalized boundary and barrier of self, the current "body" is decidedly "textual," in that its once firm borders have been demonstrated to be illusory and produced by linguistic operations, aesthetic conventions, and modern institutions. Developing out of the intersection of theoretical discourses in the humanties such as feminism, cultural studies, postmodernism, and poststructural theory, the body has surfaced as a material without essence —an ideologically manipulated substance made real by cultural and institutional practices. Michel Foucault's formulation of the "docile body" whose movements have been dissected, compartmentahzed, and re-organized by institutional forces seeking to optimize its performance or punish its excesses have set in motion this new understanding of the body as a history of institutional definitions and effects . Critiques of a privileged "body" or bodily type by overdetermining the physical traits of marginal populations (such as skin color, reproductive sex, or replicative physical "features") expose how dominant definitions of normalcy and superiority hinge upon narratives of biological dUference. The body acts as a phantasmatic host of "natural" differences that stratify populations into human hierarchies of value. The developing field of disability studies enters into these philosophical discussions of the body by interrogating the ways in which physical differences play host to an assortment of cultural phantasms and mythologies. Taking medicalized discourses that objectify physical and cognitive differences as pathological specimens, disabiUty studies employs a constructionist minority model which emphasizes the ways in which seemingly marginal social groupings prove central to 200 the minnesota review the definitional well-being of dominant ideologies. With this critical model, disability studies critiques abüst desires to narrate the disabled body as corrupt, contagious, morally incapacitated, malignant, or beknightedly tragic. Rather than accepting disabilities as limiting biological phenomena, the challenge has been to establish, in Harlan Hahn's words, "that disability is in the environment, not in the person " (Vital Signs). This emphasis redirects our understanding of disability away from limited or abnormal individuals and toward the cultural desire to divide the world into functional and non-functional bodies. Disability studies forwards the category of disabihty as a political , rather than a medical, issue in order to define people with disabilities as a legislatively recognizable minority culture. Until the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, this legislative definition of disability as an identifiable minority group had been ignored despite the fact that 69.1 percent of disabled individuals in the United States live below the poverty line. Recent figures of the World Health Organization identify disabled people as comprising six or seven percent of any given population representing about 240 million people globally. Such figures define a population that represents one of the largest minority groups in any culture. Martin Norden's The Cinema ofIsolation, Lennard Davis' Enforcing Normalcy, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies, all apply various methodologies from this burgeoning field of inquiry in order to interrogate the reasons why disabled populations have remained exclusively entrenched in medical, scientific and rehabilitative discourses. Each work begins by identifying the discomforting and unfortunate ellision of disability from other politicized forms of identity politics, and then seeks to demonstrate how interpretive paradigms that privilege disability might significantly alter our critical discussions of art, history, marginality, subjectivity and the body. Each study also imports various influential theories from cultural studies, psychoanalysis and feminism in order to examine disability, while challenging some of the foundational assumptions of extant theory. The Cinema of Isolation looks at the portrayal of disability throughout the history of film, Enforcing Normalcy analyzes scientific and artistic...

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