Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies

Refiguring Rhetorica: Linking Feminist Rhetoric and Disability Studies

Refiguring Rhetorica Linking Feminist Rhetoric and Disability Studies Jay Dolmage and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson Feminism and disability studies ought to be powerful allies. Feminist rhetorical methods provided a foundation for the emerging field of disability studies in the humanities in the late 1980s. And in the 1990s, disability studies theories and methods developed synergistically with feminism and other theories in directions that challenge and transform methods and theories across fields. As feminists have argued, the received collection that we call rhetoric is made up of remnants of a classical past, layered over by accumulated practices from nearly three millennia in which the structures and values of patriarchy dominated, all wrapped up with over three centuries of Enlightenment logic. Within this messy collection of traditions , one constant was that female embodiment—because it deviated from male embodiment—was figured as dis-abled; to be a woman was to be disqualified from civic debate (see Crowley 1999; Grosz 1994, 1996; Lindgren 2004). By the time of the Enlightenment, as Evelyn Fox Keller’s work (1985) has shown, to be a woman was also to be an object of science, not a maker of it. In these ways, the category of woman has been closely aligned with the category of disability as a term that has marked deficiency and disqualification. In contrast, we recognize the positive signification of disability and believe that feminism’s engagement with disability can refigure the face, body, and voice of rhetoric(a). We reframe disability, not only by 23 24 Jay Dolmage and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson turning around this word’s usual function as the ultimate specter of derogation, but also by making use of its gathered meanings in order to shape and focus a new critical lens built on the generative potential of an alliance between disability studies and feminisms. A feminist, disability studies perspective impacts methods—not only in our scholarly projects, but also in teaching and service, which also are frequently areas where composition and rhetoric research is undertaken and applied. We believe that five key concepts from disability studies provide methods for the work of critique, recovery, and invention of new rhetorical futures. These concepts grow out of, and deepen, feminist critiques of the rhetorical tradition. Rolling through each of these concepts is a key rhetorical strategy in disability studies—the move to investigate the history of bodily norms in order to unmask the powers and processes of “norming” and the construction of “normality.” demystifying normal Normal always highlights particular power relations that affect everyone , but especially people with visible disabilities. “When we think of bodies, in a society where the concept of the norm is operative,” Lennard Davis writes, “then people with disabilities will be thought of as deviants” (1995, 29). As Davis and other disability studies scholars have pointed out, the categories of normal and abnormal, able and disabled are invented and enforced in service of particular ideologies, for instance a valorization of the bourgeois subject or of the middle class (1995, 26–29).1 These categories are useful fictions that mark unwanted elements while reinforcing the hegemony of the dominant group. The term normate has been developed in the field of disability studies to connote the ways normalcy is used to control bodies—normalcy, as a social construct, acts upon people with disabilities.2 Normate designates the unexamined and privileged subject position of the supposedly (or temporarily) able-bodied individual. As with the concepts of male privilege, of whiteness, or of heteronormativity, the individual assuming the normate position occupies a supposedly preordained, unproblematic , transparent, and unexamined centrality. A normate culture, then, continuously reinscribes the centrality, naturality, neutrality, and unquestionability of this normate position. Such cultures demand nor- Refiguring Rhetorica 25 malcy and enforce norms, both marking and marginalizing those bodies and minds that do not conform. Disability studies scholars critique normalcy by studying the history of norms, challenging their centering mechanisms and the politics that construct disability as deviance. The field of disability studies therefore also challenges those rhetorical moves that attribute deviance to a society ’s others—those discourses that suggest that inequities based on disability , race, class, gender, national, and other divisions are attributable to biology. Importantly, in challenging the idea that social imbalance can be explained by biology, disability studies challenges both the attribution and the construction of deviance—not just reversing attributions of deviancy, but also deconstructing the mechanisms by which an individual or group...