Disability in Local and Global Worlds (review)

With the expansion of Disability Studies in the academy one begins to notice a certain balkanisation of terms, methods, and approaches across the disciplines. Issues of representation and identity that have travelled from post-structuralism, feminism, queer theory, and critical race theory to disability issues assume different names and properties when seen from the vantage point of the social sciences or medical anthropology. This divide is apparent in Ingstad and Whyte's Disability in Local and Global Worlds from which, like their 1995 collection Disability and Culture, many of the foundational scholars and concepts of humanities-based study are absent. Instead, the essays offer a wealth of information about ethnographic work being done on disability in a global context, particularly in developing countries. The book challenges many key assumptions about disability rights in the developed world by exploring ideas of liberal individualism and independent living in alternative state, communal and familial contexts. The book also offers an opportunity for literary scholars and cultural studies practitioners to rethink the biomedical definition of the "body" within the broader meaning of social relations and kinship. As J. Hanks says, in another context, the "disfiguring scar in Dallas becomes an honorific mark in Dahomey" (qtd in Barnes and Mercer 135).

The editors divide their eleven essays into two sections. The first, "Locating Embodied Identities," studies how certain kinds of bodies experience the world and themselves through social interactions. The focus here is largely on global movements of people (Somali women in London, athletes attending the Deaf Olympics in Rome) and how bodily norms in one place look differently in another. The second section, "Localizing Policy and Technology," stresses biopolitical developments (transplant medicine, mobility adaptation, genomics, statistics) that impact and construct bodies in specific sites: bodily normalcy in the People's Republic of China (PRC), learning disabilities in Botswana, old age in Japan, mobility in Uganda. The book's title, as the editors are keen to point out, is not so much a plea for cultural relativism, but a survey of the imbricated relationships between local contexts of disability and global systems.

The issue of movement between local and global worlds is central to Aud Talle's essay on female circumcision in Somalia and London. The essay describes what happens when Somali women who have undergone female circumcision (genital cutting) seek gynecological health care in London. What had been a "complete" or "closed" body in their native country suddenly becomes, for these immigrant women, an impairment under the gaze of western medicine and feminist rights discourse. Without endorsing the practice of infibulation, Talle focuses on the complexities of assigning universal values of female agency on women who have been displaced from their homelands while bearing the (literal) scars of cultural practices:

The inscription of a cultural sign, the sewn "virginity," has been embodied as pain and resistance. In London, Somali women have begun to personify the "gaze" of others on their own bodies, not by reproducing others' views and commentaries ... uncritically, but by transforming them into heightened reflections and enforced opinions.

(71)

In the same vein, Marcia Inhorn and Aditya Bharadwaj study infertility as a disability in pronatalist countries, such as Egypt and India, where not having a child is socially disabling and a woman's barrenness stigmatizes her as polluted, even dangerous. Because assisted reproductive technologies are only available to elite members of these societies, poor, infertile families must "'live' their reproductive impairment within the midst of society at large" (85). And where infertility may be regarded as an invisible impairment in western countries, in the poor families like the ones Inhorn and Bharadwaj study, infertility is highly visible in the ways that communities scrutinize and monitor women for signs of pregnancy from the time that a woman marries. Reproductive rights discourse imagines a body of autonomous individuals who are free to make choices and can "vocalize their resistance as political agents" (79). In developing countries...