Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge

3. Stalking Grendel’s Mother: Biomedicine and the Disciplining of the Deviant Body

49 3 Stalking Grendel’s Mother Biomedicine and the Disciplining of the Deviant Body T e r r i B e t h M i l l e r In the ancient tale Beowulf, it is the monster’s mother, rather than the monster itself, that is the hero’s true nemesis. If Beowulf figures as the harbinger of a stable new sociality, the retreat from the nomadic tribalism of old, then Grendel’s mother may be seen as his antithesis, the antisocial , antifoundational disruptor of communities. Grendel’s mother is the source of heterodoxy, of aberrance and chaos. Her body breeds violation; it mocks pretensions to predictability and control. From it issue beings that explode the foundations of the society into which they come. Her greatest threat, however, is simply her fecundity, her capacity to produce endless variation, her flagrant rejection of the norm. Grendel’s mother is profoundly difficult to kill, and Beowulf himself, that legendary warriorking , nearly dies in the attempt to do so. Today, scientific metanarratives, predicated upon reason and technological progress, have usurped the socializing function of ancient myth and legend. But the fear of Grendel’s mother haunts us still. In a July 22, 1991, broadcast on Los Angeles’s KFI Radio, talk show host Jane North ignited a controversy that would ultimately result in FCC charges of false reporting. The broadcast, according to the complaint, perpetuated numerous erroneous stereotypes as scientific fact. The topic under discussion on that July evening was whether Bree Walker, a respected local television anchor, had the right to carry her advanced pregnancy to term, despite having ectrodactyly, a congenital deformity of the hands and feet. The FCC would ultimately dismiss the case, and Walker, despite being 50 • Terri Beth Miller compelled to resign her anchor position on the grounds that she had been rendered “too political” by these events, would go on to give birth to an ectrodactylic but healthy son. The debate elicited by the broadcast, however , brought to the fore long occluded issues concerning the reproductive rights of disabled women, the valuing and devaluing of so-called deviant bodies, and the social construction of parameters of the normal. Above all, the Walker/North controversy presaged a dilemma that has gained prominence in this age of seemingly requisite prenatal screening and ubiquitous selective abortion over, as Ruth Hubbard (2006, 93) so poignantly phrases it, “who should and who should not inhabit the world.” In this chapter I will examine practices of prenatal screening and diagnosis, reading these interventions as bound in a complex network of biomedical discourse and clinical intercessory praxis, in which contemporary modes of reproduction are increasingly imbricated in an aggressive effort at communal self-definition through a parsing of the boundaries of the “human.” Within such a context, I argue, the ascendance of prenatal examination and intervention may well be understood as the coopting of the bodies of the pregnant woman and her fetus into a system of clinical discursive practices authorized solely for the regulation of bodies. Although naturalized and neutralized through the discourses of rationality and beneficence, such a system obscures what in reality is, as Foucault would have it, the subjugation of individuals through disciplinary processes. The intercessory practices of biomedicine render potentially deviant bodies docile through remediation or extermination, reifying an image of “normal” society by virtue of that which it disavows. The regulatory norms, which undergird prenatal screening methods , are highlighted most poignantly when the body of the pregnant woman is itself “deviant.” The outcry elicited by the specter of Walker’s pregnancy offers an unusually pointed glimpse into often subterranean attitudes toward disabled sexuality and reproduction. These attitudes typically remain underground because the disabled are infrequently seen in the public eye and, when they do appear, it is rarely within the context of reproduction. As Abby Wilkerson notes in her essay, “Disability , Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency” (2002), issues of sexuality and reproduction typically are assumed irrelevant for the disabled individual, Stalking Grendel’s Mother • 51 medical practitioners naturalizing this construct through such means as the failure to discuss birth control methods and disabled sexual function with their patients (34). Far more often than not, the discovery of parental genetic anomaly or fetal defect occurs within the walls of the examining room; because the bodies of many pregnant women give no outward sign of potential fetal anomaly, it is the pathologized discourse of the clinic that...