Disability Studies Grows Up, And Apart

Davis Schneiderman Disability Studies Grows Up, And Apart (on Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism & Other Difficult Positions [New York: NYU Press, 2002]) Disability studies is a rising academic disdpline, whidi Stanley Fish perhaps a tad too flippantly calls "the newest theoretical kid on the block" (on the back cover blurb for Bending Over Backwards). It is slowly working its way onto college syllabi, just as disability advocates are fighting for access in the courts. It also stares back (to take the title of Kenny Fries's excellent 1997 collection), at the "ableist" society where such biases are accepted cultural constructions. Fries's wide-ranging anthology excerpts fromAdrienne Rich's "Contradictions: Tracking Poems" series, which culminates in lines bike: "The problem, unstated till now, is how/to live in a damaged body" (172). As with the recent trajectory of disability studies, Rich's concern is expansive; her world (of the body) is "misshapen so yet the best we have" [sic] (172). Although Lennard J. Davis's intelligent new book, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism & Other Difficult Positions, has affinity with Rich's version of universal fragmentation, Davis reminds his readers thatwhile some of the mostimportant issues in disability studies have been (until recently), unstated, disability studies must avoid the essentialist pitfalls that come with the cultural acknowledgement of an identity group. In his first book-length foray into disability studies, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995), Davis traces much of the current rendering of the disabled subject to the quantified "average" man developed by persons such as French statistidan Adolphe Quetelet. Quetelefs resulting abstract subject—an "average of all human subjects in a given country" (26)—became a standard of the "ideal" body exploited openly by the Nazis and various eugenicists, and underwritten implidtly by ableist oilture. Even with recourse to such foundational narratives of disability as an ableist construct—represented by the interplay between "ideal" and the "average" (with the bell curve's emphasis on the "median" [Enforcing 33]) and between "eugenics and statistics" [174nl6])—Davis's projed is more complicated than it at first appears. Rather than arguing for the ascendancy of his newest theoretical kid as merely the fourth member of the current race/dass/gender triumvirate, he maintains the instability of the category of "disability" itself. Davis asserts that disability is indeed an "identity," a category of Otherness constructed by an ableist "majority" (those persons who believe themselves to not possess a disability1), but he also holds that this "majority" draws on the illusion of an error-free body separating them from those persons with disabilities. The notion of the bodyfreefrom error becomes as specious a concept as those infamous interpretations of the bell curve, or the efficacy of the phrenologisfs nineteenth-century calipers. 318 the minnesota review The first two chapters of Enforcing Normalcy are reprinted in Davis's The Disability Studies Reader (1997), an important anthology that argues for just this sort of problematized counter-construction of disability studies as a paradigm. Davis notes the sublimation of disability studies to its more established siblings—race, dass, and gender (4). Yet the many collected works that deal with disability and its relation to gender, education, culture , stigma, politics, and history, serve together as a compendium of the way disability studies presents itself. In the Reader, the discipline becomes a multi-layered construction "in favor of advocacy, investigation, inquiry, archaeology, genealogy, dialectic, and deconstruction" (5). In many ways, The Disability Studies Reader is the disdpline's debutante ball, cementing the maturity of its first stage into a movement deemed worthy of academic anthologization. The second stage in the encampment of a theoretical movement is often an attack on the essentialism of the first. Disability studies, Davis notes, is certainly akin to other paradigms, particularly feminism/gender studies , in that its second wave may well enact a familiar family struggle, with practitioners, proponents, and pedagogues engaging in an Oedipal critique of the essentialist notions that may have initially brought the category into prominence. In Bending Over Backwards, Davis argues that the success in establishing disability as a "legitimatized" identity group now calls forth the necessity of performing a meta-critique of the entire process of...