Producing Space, Producing Disability

In Paris, a group of blind people have opened a temporary restaurant, called Gout du Noir. In a darkened cellar, blind waiters serve sighted visitors food they cannot see. Here, it’s the sighted diners who are in the dark, unable to read the menu, fumbling for their food, losing their knives and forks, spilling their wine. And it’s the blind people who are confident and in control. It’s about time there were more images of people with disabilities directing and helping others, rather than always being the recipients of other people’s pity and aid.[1]

This story, featured in a British newspaper two years ago, is a nice illustration of what geographer Brendan Gleeson calls “marginalizing spatial discourse” in his new and important book Geographies of Disability. Space, he argues, is a social artifact that can be used to disable, rather than enable people with physical impairments. He points to a long history in Western capitalism solidifying the connections between disability and the production of space: “the historical production of space is a contested process where the exercise of power largely determines who benefits and who loses from the creation of new places and landscapes.” (2) In the example of the French restaurant, of course, it’s the nondisabled that are purposefully meant to feel the impact of a disabling space, but the mechanisms of disablement are the same.

Gleeson makes a comprehensive and timely contribution to the field of social geography and disability theory. This is only the second major study, after Imrie[2] to address the social space of disability and Gleeson makes a strong argument for the importance of this union. Geography, he argues, is a particular spatial discourse of power that has marginalized disabled people and, accordingly, geographers have a responsibility to develop research and theory that can contribute to the larger political struggles of disability movements. “I argue that new geographic work on disability needs to do more than simply describe the spatial patterns of disadvantage — it must contribute in a variety of ways to a broader political campaign that disabled people, and advocates, are waging in various struggles against the construction of oppressive environments.” (3)

Intended as such a contribution, Geographies of Disabilities is divided into three sections. The first is a theoretical excursion into the fields of historical materialism, geography, and disability theory. Gleeson skillfully weaves together concepts of the body, space, nature, and disability to develop his own contribution to theorizing disability — embodied materialism, a “historical-geographical account of embodiment.” (49) He purposefully draws on established theories of social production, specifically the materialist debates on the production of nature and the production of space rather than the more recent literature on the body, claiming that it overlooks disability in favor of other “somatic identities,” such as the sexed body. (34)

Gleeson’s framework will sound familiar to readers of disability theory. He draws on Marx’s idea of two natures and Lefebvre’s concept of social space to introduce the social model of disability, which contrasts the physical experience of impairment with the oppressive social experience of disability. The creative tension between impairment and disability has provided the foundation for rich theory building in the growing field of Disability Studies, while at the same time fueling the political movements challenging disability oppression. Likewise, Gleeson’s framework questions the naturalization of disability as an inevitable consequence of physiology: “for materialism, the course of social embodiment has not been naturally given, but rather the outcome of a dialectical historical relationship between the natural world and human society.” (44) His framework, then, does not offer a new view of disability as a social construct, but shifts the theoretical attention back to the materialist debates on nature and space. Gleeson’s account places embodiment at the heart of the material processes through which human beings transform received nature and thereby created unique social spaces. Thus, social embodiment is, like the material processes that reproduce it, sourced in specific historical-geographical contexts. Any materialist analysis of embodiment, then, must carefully specify both the social spaces and social...