Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge

12. Vulnerable Subjects: Motherhood and Disability in Nancy Mairs and Cherríe Moraga

164 12 Vulnerable Subjects Motherhood and Disability in Nancy Mairs and Cherríe Moraga S u z a n n e B o s t Motherhood is idealized in modern American culture (as in most cultures ), but being a mother deviates from the ideal modern American subject . Motherhood is not conducive to individual integrity, self-reliance, or reason. Pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding are boundary violations that emphasize our permeability as bodies and as subjects. Parenting involves connection and emotion more than rational objectivity (as when my spine tingles every time my baby cries). In short, motherhood revolves around qualities that have been demonized since the Enlightenment. As what are mothers celebrated, then? As pitiful dependent creatures? As ex-centric and mystical beings? As heroes battling challenges to their integrity? As the presence of reserved “stork parking” in major shopping malls attests, mothers are given accommodations alongside people with disabilities . Pulling up next to a “disabled parking” slot to take advantage of the much-needed extra space—or, alternately, refusing the stork parking because I want to defy the assumption that I’m incapable of pushing my baby across a snowy parking lot—I am engaging in questions about selfreliance relevant to both mothers and people with disabilities. How does modern American subjectivity incorporate people who need “special” assistance? Must equality revolve around individual independence? I am interested in the alternatives to self-reliance posed by both motherhood and disability as well as the pressures these identities put upon American Vulnerable Subjects • 165 cultural ideals. Measuring Nancy Mairs’s autobiographical narrative on living with multiple sclerosis, Waist-High in the World: A Life among the NonDisabled (1996), against Cherríe Moraga’s autobiographical narrative about motherhood and illness, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (1997), reveals the cultural contingencies of our corporeal ideals and enables us to imagine “other” viable ways of being. The material and social structures in which we live often assume English speakers with heterosexual families who are able to open doors, climb stairs, and read signs. They also assume independence, vigor, and health as shared ideals. These cultural biases are masked by the pretense that medicine, law, and the built environment are culturally neutral and objective—a pretense that marks all difference as “deviance” rather than “different but equal.” Yet viewing the world from a wheelchair, as Mairs does, or identifying with a culture whose values differ radically from the dominant one, as Moraga does, makes visible the narrow limits of any ideal. Mairs’s experience of mothering, as a white heterosexual woman with a visible disability, certainly differs from Moraga’s, a Chicana lesbian who is not herself disabled. Yet both narratives represent motherhood as an exercise in vulnerability, and both writers seemingly abandon self-reliance to embrace the interdependence that their personal experience mandated. Mairs turns to Catholicism, and Moraga to Mesoamerican cultures, as they search for worldviews within which they can experience vulnerability as a positive attribute. “The mark of self-reliance, for me,” Mairs writes, “is not whether or not I open a door for myself but whether I accept the burden of my limitations ” (1996, 105). Cultural expectations create “burdens” that are as real as the limits of one’s body. In the “fitness”-obsessed contemporary United States, Mairs’s use of a wheelchair is considered pathetic, “depressing,” “shameful and at least a little suspect” (100, 206).1 Although “health,” itself, 1. I put terms like “fitness” and “health” in quotation marks because they are cultural constructs with prejudicial regulatory functions. “Fitness,” as a metaphor, highlights this fact since it implies that bodies must be made to “fit” a certain size or shape dictated by religion, fashion, political exigency, cultural taboos, etc. 166 • Suzanne Bost is a temporary condition that involves an unnerving degree of corporeal fluctuation (from our regular digestive processes to aging) and permeability (from our porous skin to our dependence upon pills or lotions), American popular culture defies this vulnerability by celebrating athletes and exercise, assuming anesthesia as the proper response to pain, and marketing products that promise to seal off our bodies from germs (like the foreign policies that promise to protect our nation from alien intrusions ). In this context, disability presents an unwanted reminder of the vulnerability of the human condition. From her wheelchair, Mairs will never embody the ideal celebrated in popular culture (“a lithe erect form in motion”), and her...