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Part IV: Performing Disability in Daily Life
- University of Michigan Press
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PART IV Performing Disability in Daily Life Part of sociology’s legacy to performance studies is the idea that we do not just live our “real life” identities, we perform them. An early touchstone text that employs a theatrical metaphor to describe interactions among people is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self of Everyday Life (1959). Goffman, who takes a functionalist approach, argues that who we are socially is bound up with who we are perceived to be by those around us (our audience) and that we behave as actors in order to control the impressions we make on others. This understanding of everyday behavior emphasizes that identity does not simply reside in individuals but is the product of social interactions among individuals. This perspective is congruent with the view of disability as something that is not an intrinsic characteristic of certain bodies but a construct produced through the interaction of those bodies with socially based norms that frame the way those bodies are generally perceived. The essays in this part address the performance of disability in several contexts that lie outside of overtly aesthetic frames. It is noteworthy that two of the essays, Maureen Connolly and Tom Craig’s and Carrie Sandahl’s, discuss the ways in which educational institutions implicitly enforce corporeal norms: Craig and Connolly point out that notions of productivity underlie the regimentation and physical settings of schools, while Sandahl reveals that a related concept of the productive body underpins the acting pedagogy of theater programs in the United States. Schools not only implicitly instruct us in social norms—they also enforce those norms by demanding that students perform themselves and their physical relationships to their environment in particular ways. Two of the essays here describe performative experiments that served as heuristics for uncovering social and cultural assumptions about disability and how it is performed. In “Looking Blind: A Revelation of Culture’s Eye,” Tanya Titchkosky describes her provocative decision to masquerade as blind as a means of getting a better look at the assumptions to which sightless people are subjected. By showing that people who conform to the socially de‹ned image of blindness are considered to be blind and treated as if they were (even when they are known to be sighted), Titchkosky shows how this identity category is constructed through interaction. On the basis of her experience, Titchkosky develops a concept of disability as an “inbetween state” that both conforms to and troubles the sociological concepts of master status and liminality. In “Disrupting a Disembodied Status Quo: Invisible Theater as Subversive Pedagogy,” Maureen Connolly and Tom Craig describe an intervention similar to, but more formally structured than, Titchkosky’s, in which Craig’s performance of physical disability in front of a class, accompanied by staged reactions from some members, led to spontaneous responses. Whereas Titchkosky herself was the ultimate audience for her performance of blindness , Craig and Connolly sought to use the technique of “invisible theater” to foreground the presence of disabled people and the reactions they elicit as part of a pedagogical effort to get the class to think and talk about disability issues. In both cases, an invisible, ‹ctional performance revealed the social underpinnings of everyday performances. If Craig and Connolly underline the value of performative pedagogical techniques for making people more aware of the social roles they play with respect to disability, Carrie Sandahl points to ways that performance pedagogy can be oppressive to the disabled. In “The Tyranny of Neutral: Disability and Actor Training,” Sandahl shows that the approach to training young actors that is standard in the American academy today is based on a concept of the “neutral” body that derives from both modern European performance theory and concepts of industrial productivity, such as Taylorism . Sandahl demonstrates that young actors are told that their productivity as performers depends on their ability to achieve an affectless physical state from which to build characterizations and shows that this approach marginalizes and humiliates disabled actors whose bodies cannot conform to this standard. Although many of the essays in this collection stress the multiple counternormative ways in which disability can be performed, an important part of the sociologically informed discourse on everyday life performance stresses that most people perform their identities in ways that conform to social norms most of the time. This is the issue Lenore Manderson and Susan Peake examine in “Men in Motion: Disability and the Performance of 216 Bodies in Commotion Masculinity.” As Manderson and Peake demonstrate...