Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge

17. Motherhood and Activism in the Dis/Enabling Context of War: The Case of Cindy Sheehan

222 17 Motherhood and Activism in the Dis/Enabling Context of War The Case of Cindy Sheehan A b b y M . D u b i s a r US peace activist and mother Cindy Sheehan built her authority as a peace activist by yoking her antiwar mission to her role as a mother of a dead soldier son. In a statement addressed to Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense during the war on Iraq, Sheehan (2005, 45) wrote: “I wish I could convey to you in person the pain and devastation your reckless policies have brought to my life. The grief is so profound and primal that it can’t be described by the written word. You can’t see my red, swollen eyes or my grief-etched face. Your policies have created a hole in my heart.” As an activist strategy that made her a household name and, as some would say, galvanized the United States peace movement of the early-twentyfirst century, Sheehan concretized her emotional pain as a physical disability and then used this metaphor of disability to speak out against the war. What are the benefits and costs of such a rhetorical strategy? This chapter1 takes as its starting point the belief that the experiences of disability, here applied to mothering and war, enable as well as constrain rhetorical strategies for US women’s peace activism. Disability studies 1. I would like to thank the editors for their insightful and compelling comments on this essay, as well as Rebecca Dingo, Denise Landrum, and Kate Ronald for offering perceptive and engaged readings of revisions of this piece. Motherhood and Activism • 223 scholars Jay Dolmage (2005), David T. Mitchell (2002), and Amy Vidali (2010) all analyze the implications of disability and metaphor, examining language that appropriates disabilities and the implications of disability metaphor. For example, writers who use disability metaphors in literary narratives, Mitchell argues, employ such language to provide a “shock feature of characterization” and use it as an “opportunistic metaphoric device” (2002, 15). Dolmage furthers this analysis of metaphors and invites his audience to understand that metaphors are “more than words” and powerfully form our social world. For example, “When bodily experience is written about, metaphors do the work: they explain how we understand and live in the world, and then, in a way, they dictate how we will experience it in the future” (2005, 111). Without metaphors, communicating about bodily experiences would be nearly impossible. Uncovering the entailments of metaphors and the effects of their deployment helps us understand not only the power of language, but also the long-lasting effects made possible by constructions of embodied experiences that rely on normative/nonnormative characterizations. Vidali (2010, 34) gives her audience a framework to apply when analyzing metaphors of disability, one that more fully engages their diversity. She encourages an approach that “refrains from policing metaphor; encourages transgression; . . . and invites creative and historic reinterpretations of metaphor.” Taking into account such approaches to better understanding metaphors of disability, this chapter works to understand the relationship between disability metaphors and antiwar activism, specifically in the context of Sheehan’s rhetorical choices. What are the consequences, for Sheehan, of using disability metaphors ? In what ways are such metaphors effective for some audiences but not others? This analysis of Sheehan’s rhetorical strategies considers possible critiques of her application of disability metaphors, while also engaging the benefits of her alignment with the disability community, connecting the embodied experience of mothering to the embodied and disabling experience of war. Sheehan’s stance as a mother (also fraught with metaphors) is both a plea for audiences to believe her and locate “truth” in her experience and a means to build ethos or credibility, to balance her personae both as an “average American mom” and as an expert on US foreign policy and militarism. 224 • Abby M. Dubisar Further, focusing on Sheehan in the larger context of an extended conversation on mothering and disability engages a contemporary understanding of the tradition of mothers’ peace activism and illuminates its relationship to the contemporary collective activism of veterans. Those interested in peace activism and disability may be familiar with the tradition of a disabled veteran using her or his position as a hero and sometimes displaying the disabled body to argue against war. In contrast, the tradition of mothers advocating for peace includes in its history women around the world speaking from their...