The Megarhetorics of Global Development

Chapter 9. Enfreakment; or, Aliens of Extraordinary Disability

233 In “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography,” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues for the importance of understanding the role images play in shaping what she terms “rhetorics” of disability. “Genres of disability photography across modernity,” she argues , “have arisen precisely because they are useful devices with which to manipulate the viewer for a variety of purposes, almost all of which are driven to a greater or lesser degree by the economic mandates of modern capitalism” (339). The economic mandates of modern capitalism have, as Garland-Thomson’s analysis makes clear, generally required disability rhetorics that diminish, contain, or distance disability. What she terms the “sentimental” rhetoric, for instance, develops “as part of the larger nineteenth -century bourgeois culture of fine feelings” and works to position and contain disabled people as childlike and deserving of pity (341). The “exotic” rhetoric, to name another example, “reproduces an ethnographic model of viewing characterized by curiosity or uninvolved objectification and informed by western imperialism” (343). Robert McRuer Enfreakment; or, Aliens of Extraordinary Disability 9 234  Robert McRuer Convivial Visual Rhetorics of Embodiment For a century and a half, the visual rhetorics Garland-Thomson delineates have generally (and efficiently) consolidated able-bodied subject positions characterized by mastery and knowingness, reason and propriety , capable of looking with detachment at bodies perceived as different, damaged, or unruly. The ease and efficiency with which difference, damage , and unruliness are apprehended around images of disability suggest that such images are working to sustain a visual megarhetoric of disability. The power relations that have secured this visual megarhetoric have been, across the period Garland-Thomson surveys, incredibly unequal and have had disastrous material effects on disabled people. This visual megarhetoric has arguably worked to naturalize links between disability and poverty or disability and vice, and has helped to justify institutionalization, incarceration , and elimination. Positioning visual images of disability as “rhetorics,” however, suggests that they are open to contestation and reinvention—and, indeed, GarlandThomson overviews even more thoroughly in her recent book Staring: How We Look the range of ways those she terms “starees” work on, with, through, and against the visual rhetorics available to them (7). Although this chapter focuses largely on moving images rather than on photography —particularly on a 1998 video “performance document” called The Chain South, filmed in California and Mexico by Nao Bustamante and Miguel Calderón—I find Garland-Thomson’s approach useful for introducing a twinned insight: (1) that modern capitalism utilizes a megarhetorical visual to vouchsafe particular compulsory forms of embodiment and comportment , and (2) that such visuals can be used otherwise, in life-affirming and convivial ways. As J. Blake Scott and Rebecca Dingo demonstrate in their introduction to this edited volume, megarhetorics can be unraveled in ways that allow us to examine their multiple, layered, and intertwining threads. I extend their critique to visual performances that employ takenfor -granted megarhetorical visions and examine how, in and through their very employment of those visions, forms and modes of resistance become available. Through my reading of The Chain South, I posit that modernity (and specifically neoliberalism) requires certain embodied forms of propriety and comportment. Through visual and other megarhetorics, those embodied forms have come to be associated with able-bodied subjects, or with subjects Dingo describes in another context as “fit” (104). Although such Enfreakment; or, Aliens of Extraordinary Disability  235 “fitness” can even accommodate certain emergent disabled subjectivities, neoliberal visual megarhetorics nonetheless continue to obscure or ghost other disabled subjectivities. Artists and activists such as Bustamante invite us to imagine those other subjectivities, as well as the new and convivial spaces that would be welcoming to them. To briefly consider one example before continuing my project in relation to embodiment and visual rhetorics in The Chain South, I turn to freelance photographer Suzanne Levine’s Volver a Viver/Return to Life, published in 1996. This beautiful collection of photographs and stories of disabled people was compiled during the time Levine spent in Ajoya, in the mountains of western Mexico, at a community-based rehabilitation center called Programa de Rehabilitación Organizado por Jóvenes Incapacitados de México Occidental (PROJIMO, the Rehabilitation Program Organized by Disabled Youth of Western México). Volver a Viver was conceived and executed by Levine in consultation with the subjects of the photographs in 1994, which rather poetically is the year of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the...