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Chapter 3 Fitness
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67 3 n n n n n Fitness In this chapter, I trace the rhetorics of Wtness between three texts, a World Bank promotional and informational pamphlet and the disability and development Wlms From Exclusion to Inclusion and A World Enabled, which I encountered at a single occasion (a two-day World Bank conference on disability in 2004). By performing a transnational feminist rhetorical analysis of these texts that networks ideologies across time, the past is made visible by unpacking the palimpsest discursive layers that support rhetorical terms and arguments. As presented in chapter 2, the Beijing Platform networked gender mainstreaming arguments to a variety of contexts, noting that women’s well-being could not simply be measured by economics. Post Beijing, however, policy makers transcoded gender mainstreaming rhetorics to carry neoliberal connotations; as a result, gender mainstreaming came to mean “Wtting” women into a global capitalist economy by changing their behaviors. Wolfensohn’s speech in 1997, “The Challenge of Inclusion,” then evokes this very notion of Wtness or “Wtting in”; and, as this chapter will further demonstrate through an analysis of documents coming out of a World Bank conference, it also brings to mind some of the political and social ideologies of the early twentieth century in the United States. During this time policy makers and social activists, seeking to solidify U.S. national identity, wanted to create the industrialized normal citizenworker . Not only were these workers, through invariable physical Wtness and productivity, supposed to maintain their nation’s Wtness, their “Wt” and standardized bodies would preserve their country’s economic “Wtness.”The Wt body would be able to perform the tasks necessary for factory work and goods production—the necessities for building a strong national economy. The “unWt abnormal body,” however, during industrialization, was relegated to the welfare system because it could not literally work (Davis 40). To some extent then, the words unfit and fit evoke the discourse of normal citizenship and even eugenics (and Darwin’s theory of the survival of the Wttest), reminding North American audiences of height and weight 68 Fitness charts, psychological testing, the classiWcation of ability, and the building of a national citizenry and economy. In the context of globalization and transnational capital, making the unWt Wt then means not only making the citizen body Wt for work but also making the nation Wt into a global economy. Wolfensohn’s rhetoric of Wtness (as well as many post-Beijing gender mainstreaming documents) implies an erasure of diVerence as it discounts non-Western or other forms of (informal) economic viability and other forms of bodily viability. Thus, the rhetorical appeal of Wtness rests upon the audience’s desire to comprehend or make “normal” a country’s economic , social, and governmental practices—another form of global governmentality where bodies and economies are uniformly managed. In this formula, “all working bodies are equal to all other working bodies because they are interchangeable . . . all citizens must have standard bodies to be able to Wt into the industrial-political notion of democracy, equality, and normality” (Davis, Bending 111). In Wolfensohn’s speech, by making “developing ” nations Wt into what he describes as the “mainstream,” countries are given the task of maintaining the “normative” function of the global economy and ultimately of stratifying nations that are Wt and unWt. Likewise, individual citizens of these developing nations must support their nation’s globalized economy by entering into the capitalist market and producing commodities that will demarcate their acquiescence of “normal” economic activity. This sort of discourse of normalcy is reiWed when the state—or another governing body such as a supranational organization— attempts to make “normal” those who are deemed as unWt, nonstandard, or incomprehensible (Davis, Enforcing Normalcy 30). As a result, Wolfensohn’s rhetoric of Wtness resonates with modern conceptualizations of “normality,” whereby individuals practice moderation , discretion, diligence, and moral self-improvement (Terry 11), and neoliberal renditions, whereby people are responsible for their own economic behaviors. Without such self-regulation, the “abnormal” or nonmainstream is a threat to the security of those who appear to have embraced normality, whether through personal practices and behaviors or through nation-state development processes and governing. Crucially, however, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson points out, “the disabled body exposes the illusion of autonomy, self-government, and self-determination that un- [3.140.185.170] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 03:13 GMT) 69 Fitness derpins the fantasy of absolute able-bodiedness” and, as I show in this chapter, neoliberal ideologies (Extraordinary Bodies 46...