Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance

Delivering Disability, Willing Speech

Delivering Disability, Willing Speech brenda jo brueggemann We might start with Demosthenes, who, despite a stutter and “short breath,” was the most celebrated of the ancient Greek orators. He was said to have worked to overcome his speech idiosyncrasies (they would now almost certainly be called “speech defects”) and to have practiced, pebblemouthed , projecting his voice over the roaring ocean. From Demosthenes, we can fast-forward two and a half millennia to Christopher Reeve’s ‹rst major oration as a disabled citizen, stopping the track at his speech before the 1996 Democratic National Convention—delivered between the pulses of his respirator-regulated breaths (roaring, perhaps oceanically, in his own ears) and powerfully performed, yet gestureless and expressionless as it was, from his quadriplegic body. We can pause again at Reeve’s speech delivered before thirty-eight thousand faculty, administrators, and graduating students with their family and friends at Ohio State University in 2003. From the center of the football ‹eld within the modern coliseum of one of America’s largest stadiums, Reeve spoke in his characteristic measured tones and breaths on the subject of “integrity,” while his newly shaved head reminded some of us of Patrick Stewart’s portrayal as the mutants’ center of integrity and master mind-melder, Professor X, in the X-Men ‹lms.1 In these instances and in‹nitely more, disability delivers rhetoric.2 I will be concerned in this essay with how a disabled body, often existing and performing outside the typically narrowly prescribed boundaries of rhetorical “standards,” performs successful political and persuasive discourse . I intend to expose the ancient rhetorical canon of delivery (vari17 ously known as pronunciatio and actio) as it has historically both prescribed and described “normalcy,” delivering the norms of a rhetorical body—and therein, too, delivering the “norms of a rhetorical culture” (Farrell 1993). While I might locate my argument alongside Lennard Davis’s own critique of “normalcy,” both constructed and enforced (Enforcing Normalcy; “Constructing Normalcy”), I also want to push back disability’s rhetorical “coming of age”—beyond his originary point of “the bell curve, the novel, and the invention of the disabled body in the 19th century”—to the development of the art of rhetoric from the ancient Greeks, and the historical march of rhetoric’s descriptions and prescriptions for the canon of delivery , the performance of a speaker, and the normalization of speaker’s bodies . In pushing backward, I come to rhetoric as a practice, if not also a theory , of habilitation and rehabilitation. Through its more than twenty-‹vehundred -year history, rhetoric has never been particularly friendly to “disabled ,” “deformed,” “deaf,” or “mute” people, the “less than perfect” in voice, expression, or stance. As Davis Houck and Amos Kiewe note in their introduction to FDR’s Body Politics, “the relationship between rhetoric and disability, of course, did not begin with Franklin Roosevelt” (4). They cite, as an example, the way that Homer “effectively disabled Thersites and his speech of dissent” against Agamemnon and the siege at Troy.3 In fact, without much injustice, one could de‹ne rhetoric as the cultivation and perfection of performative, expressive control over oneself and others. Though rhetorical theory has always devoted much, perhaps most, of its attention to the purely conceptual activities of inventing and arranging the “available means of persuasion” (Aristotle), it can never lose sight of the oral, performative communication of these means. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, for example, begin their second edition of The Rhetorical Tradition (2001) with a bow to the complex and “overlapping meanings” of rhetoric, including, among its performative aspects, the practice of oratory; the study of the strategies of effective oratory; the use of language, written or spoken, to inform or persuade; the study of the persuasive effects of language; the study of the relation between language and knowledge; the classi‹cation and use of tropes and ‹gures; and, of course, the use of empty promises and half-truths as a form of propaganda. (1) I will work from essentially all of these de‹nitions in this essay. For braiding together theory, practice, and analysis—as these de‹nitions all do—is the pair of (rhetorical) hands that, on the one hand, require the cultivation and perfection of one’s own performative, expressive self even as, on the 18 Bodies in Commotion other hand, they entail the similar cultivation and perfection of one’s real, imagined, and potential audience. Yet rhetoric has always been heavy-handed toward one of these two “hands...