Feminism, Disability, and Embodiment

A recent exhibit on Feminism and Art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts included Barbara Bloom's 1995 work, Playboy in Braille. ¹ For reasons that remain unknown to me, the museum chose to exhibit Bloom's work closed, leaving visitors to wonder about the relationship between a copy of a braille Playboy magazine and an exhibit on Feminism and Art. After all, Barbara Bloom did not create the braille edition of the magazine, so why would it be exhibited in an enclosed glass case crediting Barbara Bloom? After further investigation, I learned that Bloom's artistic addition to the magazine was the centerfold, a copy of Eve Arnold's 1954 photograph of Marilyn Monroe, fully clothed and reading James Joyce's Ulysses ([1922] 1992). ² While perhaps not a conscious interrogation of the complex connections between feminism and disability studies, Barbara Bloom's Playboy in Braille nonetheless provides rich interpretive ground for considering how feminist disability studies draws upon and challenges analyses of bodily norms, identity, accommodation, representation, and oppression in both feminism and disability studies, themes addressed by the essays included in this volume.

Informed by Michel Foucault's concept of "disciplinary normalization" (1979), feminist disability studies interrogates the complex web of institutionalized techniques of normalization that sustain patriarchy, white supremacy, class power, "compulsory ablebodiedness," and compulsory heterosexuality (McRuer 2002). These myriad, mutually reinforcing techniques of normalization subject bodies that deviate from a white, male, class privileged, ablebodied, and heterosexual norm. Seemingly unrelated technologies such as orthopedic shoes, cosmetic surgery, hearing aids, diet and exercise regimes, prosthetic limbs, anti-depressants, Viagra, and genital surgeries designed to correct intersexed bodies all seek to transform deviant bodies, bodies that threaten to blur and, thus, undermine organizing binaries of social life (such as those defining dominant conceptions of gender and racial identity) into docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of gendered, raced, and classed bodily function and appearance. Exposing techniques of normalization that shape experiences of oppression provides a way of understanding the connection between all forms of oppression.

One norm of embodiment that is made explicit in Bloom's Playboy in Braille concerns the primacy of vision in dominant conceptions of communication and knowledge and in classic feminist critiques of the role of the male gaze in the production of femininity. Feminists such as Luce Irigaray have offered influential critiques of the privileged place of sight in the Western philosophical tradition (1993). However, many feminist accounts of the primacy of vision have tended to focus on how a visual economy of sameness and difference consolidates patriarchal power and privilege while leaving disability unaddressed.

In her book, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Rosemarie Garland Thomson ³ describes the conceptual and phenomenological link between the gaze and the stare in constituting the otherness of femaleness and disability, noting that "[i]f the male gaze makes the normative female a sexual spectacle, then the stare sculpts the disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle" (1997, 26). As Thomson makes clear, the framework of feminist disability studies offers a way of understanding the dynamics of the gaze and the stare that enhances both feminism and disability studies. Feminist disability studies provides a theoretical framework for expanding an understanding of historical and ideological connections between marginalized embodiments. In her contribution to this volume Garland-Thomson articulates how both femaleness and disability have been marked as deviations from "normal human" embodiment, deviations that must be contained or eliminated to maintain the perception of existing social hierarchies as natural and inevitable.

Similarly, Barbara Bloom's Playboy in Braille problematizes the gaze in ways that reveal connections between sighted female readers and male and female blind readers. Far from the Marilyn Monroe character who describes herself as "not very bright" in Some Like It Hot (Wilder 1959), Bloom's centerfold presents a Marilyn Monroe who defies the "dumb blonde" sexist stereotype by engaging in serious reading. Rather than inviting the gaze, Marilyn Monroe's eyes in this photograph are fixed on...