Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (review)

Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature is a fascinating, but frustratingly limited investigation into representations of the disabled in American history and writing. Her aim is to “reveal the physically disabled figure as a culturally and historically specific social construction” (p. 41) by using literary and visual depiction of that figure to interrogate (and destabilize) the idealized American body and the idealized American identity it is meant to reflect. Her reading on this count is compelling. She argues persuasively that in encoding certain bodies as “deviant” or “defective” a culture thereby reassures itself of its own corporeal normalcy and even superiority. The standards for such deviation, like those for beauty, vary from one culture or age to another, of course, thereby highlighting the social constructedness of their supposedly neutral, natural, and physiological basis. The strength of Thomson’s book lies in “denaturaliz[ing] the cultural encoding of these extraordinary bodies” on which her discussion focuses (p. 5), thereby exposing the fallacious and self-interested reasoning that seeks (implicitly or explicitly) to marginalize those whose bodies are regarded as deviating from the norm.

Thomson begins by, as she puts it, “theorizing disability” (p. 19). She offers a fusion of sociocultural analyses through which to expose the alienating actions that the normative group imposes upon the disabled. Her analysis brings together feminist commentary on identity politics and the critique of social relations based on bodily differences, Erving Goffman on stigmatizing as a socialized act of comparing and devaluing, Mary Douglas on “cultural intolerance of anomaly” (p. 33), and Michel Foucault on “the unmarked norm” (p. 40) as reference points for understanding the historicized body. From these sources Thomson develops an outlook that examines the various complex means by which the disabled body functions culturally by defining the subject position of, as she terms it, “the normate” (p.8).

To demonstrate that representations of the disabled figure serve to expose the boundaries of the otherwise all-but-invisible “normal” body, Thomson engages a tripartite approach in the second part of her monograph (“Constructing Disabled Figures: Cultural and Literary Sites”), in which she explores representations of “disability” in American freak shows, nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, and twentieth-century African American fiction. Here things become problematic.

Disability, as the term is generally used, refers to a physical or mental condition that, in the words of the Americans with Disabilities Act, “substantially limits one or more of life’s daily activities” (p.6). But, in Extraordinary Bodies, disability refers in these analyses to virtually any distinctive physical characteristic, not just one imposing a limitation. We believe Thomson unduly stretches terminology to fit her argumentative needs. Her analysis of the freak show, for instance, encompasses such so-called freaks as contortionists, hirsute individuals, tall people, and ersatz Fiji Islanders. One of her most astute readings discusses the case of Sartje Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus.” But Baartman’s body was not dis-abled by any conceivable use of the term, nor was she ever in America; Baartman was displayed exclusively in Europe, where she was regarded as remarkable on account of her large buttocks.

Thomson counterpoises the freak show to the American embrace of the work ethic, an ethic that entails “ability.” The “leveling of class distinctions,” she states, “set the stage for a new social hierarchy based on ability—expressed, for instance, in the Jeffersonian idea of natural leadership.” This then produced an “aristocracy of the body” (p. 64). Atop this new caste is

the acquisitive and capable American who claims the normate position of masculine, white, nondisabled, sexually unambiguous, and middle class....such an exclusive, idealized self develops within an expanding market economy as a self-controlled individual responsible for shaping his destiny and the social order by competently manipulating his acquiescent, standard body, along with personal skills and technological tools. Freak shows acted...