The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Disability's Criticism

No one is ever more than temporarily able-bodied. This fact frightens those of us who half-imagine 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. From this perspective, disability studies may be twice marginalized--first, by able-bodied anxiety; second, by a tendency to treat disability as just another hindrance to social mobility, perhaps one best left to medical discourse or descriptive sociology.

New work in disability studies, however, challenges established habits of thought about "having" a body. Disability studies dissolves deeply entrenched mind-and-body distinctions and further destabilizes the concept of the normal, whose charted internal ambiguities have themselves become too familiar. An ethics and a politics of disability are crucial to the work of the university--pedagogically, theoretically, and institutionally. But reconfiguring knowledge in light of disability criticism is a project that is likely to take longer than making public space accessible.

Disability studies teaches that an assumed able body is crucial to the smooth operation of traditional theories of democracy, citizenship, subjectivity, beauty, and capital. By assuming that the normative human is an able-bodied adult, for example, liberal theory can conflate political or economic interests with desires, political representation with having a voice in policy-making, social organization with voluntary association, and so on. Liberal theory naturalizes the political by making it personal. And the "person" at the center of the traditional liberal theory is not simply an individual locus of subjectivity (however psychologically fragmented, incoherent, or troubled). He is an able-bodied locus of subjectivity, one whose unskilled labor may be substituted freely for the labor of other such individuals, one who can imagine himself largely self-sufficient because almost everything conspires to help him take his enabling body for granted (even when he is scrambling for the means of subsistence). However, the mere possibility of a severely cognitively disabled adult citizen disrupts the liberal equations of representation and voice, desire and interest. Advocacy for the severely cognitively disabled is not a matter of voicing their demands. More generally, the intricate practical dialectics of dependence and independence in the lives of many disabled people unsettle ideals of social organization as freely chosen expressions of mutual desire.

Innovative intellectual formations in the academy--including feminist, postcolonial, sexuality, gender, queer, and critical race studies--have brought energy to work on the body. They have taught us to think the body as a site of excess and surplus, to theorize the extreme body, the mutilated body, the body in pleasure and pain (as James Porter and others have pointed out). ¹ They counter the medical focus on alterity as a matter of having too little or too much of a body. Different kinds of inter- and cross-disciplinary work on the marked body, moreover, have contributed significantly to each other. Critical race theorists, for example, have pointed to the whiteness of feminism. The ensuing debates have led to work that seeks to demonstrate the constitutive relation between race and gender. These two realms--once considered separate--now refract and image each other. But disability studies reminds us that feminism, sexuality and gender studies, and critical race theory meet at a point of incomprehension when faced with the corporeality of the disabled body.

There are also signs that the time has come to examine the relation between disability studies and queer theory. ² Both seek to elucidate the trouble with the ideal of the normal. Both work to disrupt the picture of the heteronormative family as the fundamental building block of a stable liberal polity, the site of care and nurture for the young, and the sole appropriate object of adult intimate aspiration. In general, however, the one does not read...