Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (review)

The week I read Lennard Davis's Bending Over Backwards, the New Yorker published Gahan Wilson's cartoon, "Gifts for the Cloned Baby." ¹ Prompted by the Raëlians's claim, in December 2002, to have cloned a child, the cartoon pictures a plush sheep "Dolly doll," a copy of the beloved children's book Goodnight Moon, a disposable diaper with "double-helix twist ties," and a "crib mobile playing Rick James's 'Superfreak.'" Because I had Davis's book on my mind, the cartoon spoke to me about more than the controversy over reproductive cloning. Morphing the icons of normal babyhood—dolls and stuffed animals, children's books, diapers, and mobiles—into a nursery for the alien baby, it illustrated why Lennard Davis's Bending Over Backwards: Essays on Disability and the Body is crucial, if at times uncomfortable, reading for medical professionals and scholars in the medical humanities alike.

Why should a cartoon in response to a controversy about cloning persuade me of the importance of a study of the cultural significance of disability? Lest this seem a wild claim, let me elaborate. Responding to the Raëlian cloning story, journalists distinguished between so-called therapeutic cloning, with its medically significant potential to induce stem cells that have the potential to differentiate into a variety of cell types, and reproductive cloning, with its troubling potential to produce children with genetic abnormalities. Dr. Stephen L. Teitelbaum, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, warned that reproductive cloning is irresponsible, because children born as a result of the technique may be at great risk for genetic problems, and expressed "the concern that . . . because of the moral and ethical implications, the emotion will spill over into areas [such as therapeutic cloning] which have great potential to help patients with diseases like Parkinson's, diabetes and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis." ² And Dr. Robert Lanza, medical director of Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Massachusetts, lamented that the cloning story could make therapeutic cloning impossible: "What a sad day for science. . . . The backlash could cripple an area of medical research that could cure millions of people, and it would be tragic if this announcement results in a ban on all forms of cloning." ² The desire of Lanza and Teitelbaum to help people suffering from genetically linked illnesses is of course commendable. But the wording both of Lanza's worry and Wilson's cartoon hints at a troubling subtext to the cloning story, what we might call an ableist bias. ³ If a cloned child, with its high risk of genetic problems, would be a superfreak, is the child who will inherit genetically based Parkinson's disease or diabetes, as the result of "old-fashioned" heterosexual reproduction, merely a garden-variety freak? Wilson's cartoon, like the force of Lanza's lament, relies on our assumption that medically normal infancy has its inherently undesirable opposite: the state of injury of being crippled, freakish, disabled (p. 19).

Davis challenges this us-them logic that opposes the normal and the disabled, beginning with an introduction titled, "People with Disability: They are You." Pointing out that "today's baby boomer generation is fast heading toward disability," he harnesses its protest politics to introduce the notion that disability itself should be "a civil right for all—the right to be ill, to be infirm, to be impaired without suffering discrimination or oppression" (pp. 4, 1). The chapters that follow provide a potent challenge to "the politics of disavowal," demonstrated, as Michael Bérubé has pointed out, by those who put psychological distance between themselves and people with a disability (p. 35).

As psychoanalysts know, the assault on disavowal often requires indirection, and this is a remarkably indirect book. Indeed, it seems to contort itself, to lean backwards, beginning with its most ardently argued and challenging chapter, which...