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Performing Disability, Problematizing Cure
- University of Michigan Press
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Performing Disability, Problematizing Cure johnson cheu In her one-woman show The Woman with Juice, Cheryl Marie Wade sets forth a new political agenda for people with disabilities. She writes, “No longer the polite tin-cuppers, waiting for your generous inclusion, we are more and more, proud freedom ‹ghters, taking to the stages, raising our speech-impaired voices in celebration of who we are.” Disability activists, artists, and performers are throwing off age-old stereotypes of the pitiable freak, the charitable, helpless cripple, and the inspirational poster child in favor of a new understanding of the meaning of our disabilities. More people with disabilities are coming to an understanding of something called “disability culture” and adopting a new understanding of our bodies and lives Recent scholarship in disability studies has both re›ected and helped spur on this “new” understanding of the disabled body and disability experience , as something more than just a “defective” body. While disability is a term largely imbued with medicalized notions of an impaired body, scholars such as Mairian Corker, Carol Thomas, and Jenny Morris have articulated a distinction between the terms impairment and disability. In this new con‹guration, impairment generally refers to the physical and psychological medical conditions of the body, while disability encompasses a larger cultural understanding of disability experience—teasing, stigma, the history of institutionalization, literary and media representations of disability, and so forth.1 In this way, the con‹guration of impairment refers to the body as a 135 corporeal entity, while disability refers to a societal and cultural phenomenon , an identity. While the work of the artists I examine—Neil Marcus’s Storm Reading and Jaehn Clare’s Belle’s on Wheels—addresses many stereotypes about disability, I focus my analysis on the challenges these artists make to the need for medical cure. These artists see beyond bodily impairment (as something that can, or needs, to be cured), to disability as culture, as identity. This shift is a marked difference from, for example, portrayals in mainstream Hollywood cinema, such as blind Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman lamenting his impairment. “I’m in the dark here! I have no life!” he wails. In Rain Man, though his brother Charlie accepts Raymond’s autism, Raymond is unable to integrate successfully into mainstream society and boards the bus alone. He ful‹lls what Martin Norden has termed “the cinema of isolation.” It is precisely Raymond’s inability to be “cured” that leaves him no alternative but to be reinstitutionalized. Not all Hollywood representations of disability imply, as these do, that medical cure is desirable ; however, medical cure of impairment is indeed not only scienti‹c, but also cultural. As such, it is a cultural idea that many disability activists and artists actively resist. How others represent us, how others who are able-bodied write about and perform our disability experiences, is not always how we write about, de‹ne, and see ourselves. Of black female spectatorship in cinema , bell hooks writes, “Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking” (210). Like the black women to which hooks refers, in producing their own bodily performances, these disabled performance artists resist cure as a way of complicating bodily impairment and disability experience. Just as the critical black female spectator must resist dominant ways of knowing and seeing, so too must disabled people. These disabled performance artists are questioning the idea of the body as spectacle, beyond the corporeal, impaired body in need of cure on stage. In doing so, the audience is asked to understand the disabled body as a performative entity within a larger social and cultural context. This shift, however, requires a change in spectatorial understanding on the part of most viewers who must renegotiate a perspective on disability as simply bodily impairment. In this essay, I extend performance theorists Herbert Blau’s and Peggy Phelan’s notions of the “vanishing point” in performance to disability and to the concept of medical cure of an impaired body. I then describe a technique artists use to challenge medicalized notions of disability by creating a three-dimensional illusion, which mirrors the implicit meaning of Phelan’s theory—that the vanishing point is both illusionary theatricality and a questioning of that illusion. I begin with the complexities of viewing the disabled body in performance. 136 Bodies in Commotion Disabled Bodies at the Vanishing Point A point...