Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. The importance of this historical moment, however, should not obscure the decades of disability rights activism leading up to its passage, nor the similarly tireless work in the decades since to protect this promise of civil liberties from incursion by courts and lawmakers. For a history of this struggle, see Shapiro and Switzer. 2. In his essay “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” Douglas Baynton demonstrates the centrality of rhetorics and categorizations of disability to three major citizenship debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries— women’s suffrage, African American freedom, and immigration. Baynton argues that repressive notions of race, gender, and ethnicity were often couched in terms of disability , as in medical narratives of blacks’ biological inferiority or women’s inherent frailty. Baynton goes on to demonstrate the complexity of disability in struggles for civil rights by cataloging the ways in which groups made arguments against their own inequality by seeking to distance themselves from the label “disabled.” Such distancing carries with it the notion that disability itself is a legitimate category for exclusion and repression. Baynton’s essay offers a dual reminder of the often-overlooked centrality of disability in debates over citizenship as well as highlighting the complexity of simply adding disability to a list of multicultural historical and cultural categories. His brief history underscores the competing agendas and statements of bias among targeted groups. 3. Both quotes from Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 41–42. 4. To similar ends, Emily Martin’s “Body Narratives, Body Boundaries” and Barbara Duden’s Woman beneath the Skin both work from medical texts to argue that narratives of the body which masquerade as “biological fact” are historically contingent and socially constructed. 5. This is the language of the 1976 statement from the British Union of the Physically Impaired against Segregation (UPIAS), quoted in Shelley Tremain’s “On the 208 / notes to pages 11–15 Subject of Impairment.” Tremain draws from Michel Foucault to outline the complicity of the social model in the disciplinary constructs that present impairment as a “real,” biological condition. I am interested in a similar troubling of splits that assume a pre-social body, but I also want to focus on the ideological effects of the continued persistence of the social model within disability studies. 6. Grosz uses the phrase “embodied subjectivity” to hold together the mutually constitutive forces of body and subject. While my own understanding of how bodies and subjects are constructed is heavily influenced by Grosz’s usage, its proximity to “embodied citizenship” might evoke confusion. Volatile Bodies stages itself as an intervention into philosophical traditions that have failed to account for the primacy of the body in the development of the self. The reassertion of the body into these conversations is a positive move. My own argument about embodied citizenship suggests that while broader recognition of the role that bodies play in constructing all acts of citizenship is important, embodiment acts also as an unevenly distributed ideological burden. “Embodied citizenship” evokes a reminder that bodily difference acts as the compromising and conditioning force of national participation for people with anomalous bodies. 7. Mitchell and Snyder stake their claim for disability’s “unique” position on the compelling observation that liberatory work within race, gender, and sexuality is often undertaken with the desire to escape association with physical and cognitive limitations (2–3). These challenges to biological justifications for racial or gendered inferiority or the assignment of homosexuality to the status of mental illness result in what Mitchell and Snyder call the “dual negation” of disability, in which physical deviance serves as the “master trope of human disqualification” (3). While Mitchell and Snyder offer an important reminder of the violence and repression that takes place within and between disempowered groups, their desire for disability’s “difference” risks reinscribing physicality as a static property of identity formation. 8. In his chapter from Crip Theory, “Composing Queerness and Disability: The Corporate University and Alternative Corporealities,” Robert McRuer challenges the institutionalized compulsion for orderly, disembodied final products in the college composition classroom. McRuer advocates a model of “de-composition” that reflects the “difficult, messy, disorienting” (146) process of writing in contrast to the “corporate model of efficiency” (148). 9. For more on the effects of these traditions on literature of the mid-twentieth century and a discussion of the ways in which their assumptions mingle to produce the prevailing approach to disability, see chapter 2. 10. For a more extended critique of Butler...