Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge

Afterword(s)

302 Afterword(s) C y n t h i a L e w i e c k i - W i l s o n and J e n C e l l i o With a nod to Raymond Williams (1976), who collects and analyzes a vocabulary of culturally charged words, and Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth Lloyd (1992), who assemble keywords of evolutionary biology, we have chosen to conclude this volume with a compendium of key words. We have not compiled this list as a dictionary, index, or glossary in the traditional sense. Our goal is not to stabilize meanings, but instead to surface issues and tensions embedded in these terms and to unravel the perhaps too neat stitches between connections we have made so that other threads may become visible. For as we look back over the editing of this collection, we see a repetition of key concepts that could be arranged in a number of alternate ways or considered as complex subjects in themselves . We also recognize that by placing certain chapters together, and gathering these into thematic sections, we have privileged some ways of understanding the interplay of disability and mothering over other possibilities . In truth, the connections among these chapters and concepts are flexible, and they can be reassembled differently, creating new avenues for future inquiry. We hope this gathering of keywords may thus suggest to readers other ways of adapting concepts to their own disciplinary frameworks , other ways of understanding and using histories of past inquiry, and new areas for future investigation. While disability and feminist mothering is the topic of this book, and feminist and disability studies inform our approaches, we the editors are also situated in writing and rhetoric. This disciplinary framework for Afterword(s) • 303 interpreting and analyzing culture is grounded in language and tends to understand worlds first through words. Words have what Keller and Lloyd call traveling power (2); they can move beyond their situated moment and generalize worlds, and in this regard we wish to be careful. As we argued in the introduction, we do not want to forget embodied knowledge, situated experience, and complex histories and structures—that is, the complex contexts of words and concepts. On the one hand, then, the emphasis on the power of language to inform attitudes, to make meaning, to shape reality, to persuade, to move, and to inform has led us to compile key words as a way of reflecting on this volume. In doing so, we agree with Williams (1976, 15) that “certain uses” of language bind “together certain ways of seeing culture and society.” And when readers reassemble these words, concepts, and chapters in different ways, they are beginning the process of re-seeing culture. On the other hand, as Keller and Lloyd note in their introduction (6), keywords are also repositories of historical scientific constructs at a particular moment. They also embed disciplinary perspectives . And they can provide “a rough map” of “some of the territory of dispute and change” (6). Although they can be reassembled, history, time, disciplinarity, and even entrenched debates limit their pliability and reconstructive possibilities, too. With those cautions in mind, we present this set of keywords and concepts with the hope that readers may use these as starting points for discussion and further inquiry. Abelism: A term in disability studies somewhat parallel to racism, sexism, or homophobia, ableism expresses the preference for and social advantages of being nondisabled. Ableism is an ideology through which the nondisabled see themselves as able and normal and part of the mainstream , and thereby deserving of social arrangements that are organized to suit their needs. Ableism is also closely aligned with naturalist arguments that those who hold power do so because they have been endowed by nature with superior abilities. Writing of Cindy Sheehan’s antiwar rhetorical strategies, Abby Dubisar notes that Sheehan often risks reinforcing ableism when Sheehan points to maimed, disabled veterans produced by war as a terrible tragedy. This is a rhetorical move that reinforces the dominant view of disability as monstrous. Julie Minich notes 304 • Disability and Mothering that Cherrie Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints veers away from contesting ableism when Moraga seems to link body normativity with a reimagined Chicana nationalism. On the preference for fitness, see Jen Cellio’s “‘Healthy, Accomplished, and Attractive’: Representations of ‘Fitness’ in Egg Donors”; on the presumed advantage and greater rights of being nondisabled...