Disability Memoirs in the Academic World: Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint and Simi Linton’s My Body Politic

This article aims to examine how academic memoirs by disabled women exert a specific cultural mediation in contemporary society’s perception of disability. Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint (2007) and Simi Linton’s My Body Politic (2006) are two examples of what G. Thomas Couser has called the “new disability memoir,” as they are so highly self-aware about the issues involved in representation and disability (2009, 164). Moreover, inasmuch these texts focus to a significant degree on the narrator’s professional life, I would like to analyze them also as academic memoirs; in both, we invariably find the academic background as the platform from which they are able to build up a renewed identity. As their academic careers unfold (Linton’s in psychology and Felstiner’s in history), these women try to understand the deep changes their lives and bodies undergo with a severe impairment. In this context, I will look at the identity strategies these authors consciously use in order to become affirmative models of disability, showing the “damaging effects not of disease or impairment but, rather, of the cultural mythologies that interpret those conditions in reductive or disparaging ways” (Mintz 2005, 1).

Mary Felstiner and Simi Linton live quite parallel lives. Both have Jewish family backgrounds, both are happily married, both are feminists, and both will eventually become university professors. Before all that, they also share a generational time frame. They were born in the 1940s, and it is around 1970 (Felstiner in 1969 and Linton in 1971) when, still in their twenties, they meet disability most unexpectedly. This is the turning point at which both choose to begin their memoirs. Felstiner recounts how, shortly after the birth of her first child, she awoke at night with a severe pain: “I was still young, [when my joints] suddenly turned old. Then from one day to the next my life got thrown out of joint. An ailment called rheumatoid arthritis took hold of me, along with two million other people, mostly women” (2007, xi). In her book, Felstiner offers a multilayered investigation of the personal, political, and cultural aspects of coping with a debilitating illness while juggling the responsibilities of a university professor, wife, and mother (Margolis 2006, 250).

Simi Linton, on her part, suffers a car accident while hitchhiking from Boston to Washington, D.C., in 1971 to protest the war in Vietnam. In a shocking beginning, we read how they never got to Washington: “By the end of the day, my friend Carol was dead and my husband John, the ferociously smart man I’d married much too young, was in a coma he would never wake up from,” while Linton was “tethered to tubes and machines, breathing hard to keep myself alive” (Linton 2006, 2). She is left with a severe spinal cord injury which will immobilize her legs forever. And she adds, “The meaning this new body would have for me took years to know” (3). These years are recounted in her memoir; eventually she “gained the vantage point of the atypical, the out-of-step, the underfooted” (3), as she puts it. It takes her some time at Berkeley, a degree in psychology from Columbia University, and graduate work at New York University, to finally find her way into disability studies and thus be able to feel comfortable with her new perspective on the world.

Thirty years later, in the 2000s, both women publish powerfully moving and carefully written memoirs that recount the process that took them from tragedy and catastrophe to a positive identity as disabled women. As reflected in the book titles, both texts move constantly between two different levels of living disability, as a political and as private experience: My Body Politic involves the parallel stories of Linton’s own disability and the disability rights movement, while Felstiner’s subtitle is also rather explicit as she recounts her “public and private story of arthritis.” Both manage to identify the social and cultural barriers faced by disabled people, thus aiming to make a change...