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Challenging Subjects: Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer, Christopher Nolan, and Autobiography
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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On the back cover of Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer’s 1989 book I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes, there is an excerpt from a review in the Washington Post, which, presumably, is supposed to help sell the book. This short blurb speaks volumes when it states, “What Sienkiewicz-Mercer has made of her fate is nothing short of triumph,” succinctly summarizing much of what we feel is the problem with the public reception of autobiographies by people who have so-called “severe” disabilities. The implication in the reviewer’s choice of words is that Sienkiewicz-Mercer must “make” something of her fate, which means that she is a victim of circumstances; she must triumph over what must be a tragic fate, rather than a difficult situation . That is the only way in which she can have a voice in the tab (temporarily able-bodied) world. For this triumph and this only, she is to be revered and celebrated. This happens to Sienkiewicz-Mercer as it happens to other people with disabilities who, in the recent words of Thomas Couser, have been “hyperrepresented in mainstream culture; they have not been disregarded so much as they have been subjected to objectifying notice in the form of mediated staring” (2005, 603). In this paper, we will consider two autobiographical narratives, the one by Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer and Christopher Nolan’s Under the Eye of the Clock (1987), in order to identify the discursive barriers which work to construct an infantilized, disabled subject, a subject who is “challenged.” Both of these writers have been characterized in what we call the “tab celebratory process” as “special,” but also have been made somehow universal , in ways which disable their own narratives. We refer to the nondisabled readers and reviewers of Sienkiewicz-Mercer’s and Nolan’s 79 heidi janz and julie rak Challenging Subjects Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer, Christopher Nolan, and Autobiography autobiographies as tabs in order to draw attention to the fact that, in many interesting and important ways, the distinction between able-bodiedness and disability is a tenuous and contestable social construction. Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler observe that “no one is ever more than temporarily able-bodied. This fact frightens those of us who halfimagine ourselves as minds in a material context, who have learned to resent the publicness of race- or sex- or otherwise-marked bodies, and to think theories of embodiment as theories about the subjectivity of able-bodied comportment and practice under conditions of systematic injustice” (2001, 35). In opposition to tabs, we call Sienkiewicz-Mercer and Nolan “crips.” The term “crip” is a politicized reclaiming of the older term “cripple .” Crips, unlike cripples, resist the tendency, in medicine and culture, for tabs to disempower them as subjects. We wish, therefore, within the domain of what we call “crip theory,” and with the assistance of critical work on testimonials from autobiography studies, to “rehabilitate” these narratives ourselves so that we can expose the discourses of legitimacy that have been used against these autobiographies, both to celebrate them and to invalidate what these authors want to do, politically, with their stories . We want to shift the emphasis from subjects who are challenged, to subjects who challenge. Since the 1980s, critics of autobiography have looked for ways to describe autobiographical writing done by people who have written in the genre under what are termed “extraordinary constraints.” Autobiographical discourse, since the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions in the eighteenth century, has been understood to be a discourse of what Sidonie Smith (1993) has termed the universal male subject. This subject has been formed by a conglomeration of ideologies which includes enlightenment beliefs in liberalism, Darwin’s progressive view of history, and the consolidation of Protestant ideology under the term individualism. Added to this mix are Victorian beliefs about psychology and Freud’s ideas about the relationship of early experiences to the formation of the personality (Smith 1993, 5–10). Therefore, the person who is able to write autobiographically has to be able to conceive of themselves as someone who can be self-reflexive, or someone who has a self to “flex.” The writer must have leisure time in which to write, possess print literacy, have a sense that (mostly) he or (less often) she has a private “self” which can be narrated , and, perhaps, a public life to which readers can relate. As Smith has shown, this has meant that traditional autobiographical discourse is most often produced by white, middle...