Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic by Emily Russell (review)
- Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic by Emily Russell
In Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic, Emily Russell, professor of American literature at Rollins College, interrogates issues of body rhetoric in terms of disability and citizenship and argues for a reconsideration of the complex nature of the relationship between anomalous bodies and the state. She analyzes narratives of disability in historical and contemporary American literature and calls for scholars to reconsider the body in terms of the physical, the textual, and the political. Russell's reconceptualization of disability offers rhetorical scholars a theoretical understanding and a methodological tool for analyzing discourse about the body. Given her case studies, Russell diverges from previous models of disability characterized by "inclusion" and "fixing" and proposes disability as a conceptual model that, she argues, is capable of reconfiguring notions of American citizenship. If the "national imagination is much more comfortable exploiting disability as a symbol than it is accustomed to considering the disciplinary effect of cultural norms upon disabled individuals" (9), then Russell's analysis of narratives that confront ideologies undergirding bodies marked by difference is not only timely, but also necessary.
Russell identifies inherent flaws in historical and contemporary approaches to disability where the "anomalous body is viewed either as without interior life and therefore entirely reducible to its form, or as purely [End Page 610] symbolic, a stand-in for 'larger concerns'" (14). To fill in the gaps of traditional approaches to anomalous figures, Russell argues for a distinction between physical, textual, and political bodies. Her purpose is not to "redraw the line between the metaphoric and the material," but rather to examine "the mutually constitutive relationship between the physical, political, and textual body to reveal the imaginative constructions that emerge through the productive tension among these terms" (14).
Russell interweaves academic and political perspectives as she attempts to locate "anomalous bodies in the comforting terrain of familiar stories" (203). Russell's choice of texts spans a vast historical timeline, but is justified as she points to the enduring and problematic relationship between the state and bodies of difference. In each chapter, Russell analyzes a literary work "that both reflect[s] and enact[s] crisis moments in the enduring connection between physical, textual, and national bodies" (18). Russell promises to connect the disability narratives to notions of citizenship when arguing that "all acts of U.S. citizenship presume bodily ownership" (15). The result is a thoughtful reading of historical and contemporary narratives that reveals the rhetorical construction of body able-ness.
Chapter 1, "Domesticating the Exceptional: Those Extraordinary Twins and the Limits of American Individualism," explores the 1894 Mark Twain story Those Extraordinary Twins, a narrative that details the experiences of conjoined twins in a small Missouri town. Russell argues that Twain uses freak show literary conventions in his depiction of the twins that informs a body politic domesticating physical difference as a spectacle. Russell notes that these literary conventions draw attention to "the imaginative pushing and pulling that identity formation entails" (54). In chapter 2, "'Marvelous and Very Real': The Grotesque in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Wise Blood," Russell moves to the intersection of body politics and American citizenship, specifically looking at the negotiation between the individual and the flourishing urban population. For Russell, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Wise Blood are representative literary works of authors fascinated by the depiction of grotesque bodies. In this chapter, Russell draws the reader's attention to material and physical distinctions of the body.
Chapter 3, "The Uniform Body: Spectacles of Disability and the Vietnam War," focuses on two narratives, Born on the Fourth of July (1976) and Paco's Story (1979) to illustrate the embodiment of disability in Vietnam Veterans attempting to stabilize a "meaningful body" (19) in the wake of [End Page 611] national disapproval. Russell interprets these texts as examples of disabled bodies becoming "politically eloquent" (98). Chapter 4, "Conceiving the Freakish Body: Reimagining Reproduction in Geek...
