In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Disability Rhetoric by Jay Timothy Dolmage
  • R. Kyle Kellam
Disability Rhetoric. By Jay Timothy Dolmage. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014; pp. 304. $39.95 cloth.

Jay Timothy Dolmage’s book Disability Rhetoric seeks to relocate the body as the source and function of all rhetoric. In doing so, he argues, we might uncover lost histories and meanings of various lesser-known bodies—marginalized, disabled bodies—that can help us understand more fully our available means of persuasion. While the title of this book might suggest this work is solely for scholars in disability studies, a read of the text uncovers Dolmage’s attempt to help disability scholars see the ways that disability myths are always argued discursively and rhetoricians understand [End Page 766] that embodied difference points to rhetoric’s multiplicity. Dolmage employs mētis as the driving methodology for his work because it is a “cunning and adaptive intelligence” and “demands a view of the body and embodied thinking as being double and divergent” (5). Mētis is the means by which Dolmage skillfully maneuvers backward and forward through disability myths, deconstructing the way we centralize and memorialize the “normal” body through our classical rhetorical traditions.

In fact, chapter 1 claims our classical teachings demonstrate that normativity only persists rhetorically in myths where we embrace a common norm, mean, or ideal. From ancient stories like Demosthenes overcoming his feminine style to our modern medicalization of disability and difference, Dolmage argues that “rhetorical history—in this strange mixture of voices from antiquity and filters from our own time—does enforce bodily norms” (29). The chapter archives various disability myths from multiple cultures that shape our understanding of disability and the body at large. Dolmage clearly charts these tropes so we as readers can see that “the pause, reflection, and reconsideration we might engender will themselves be critical and creative opportunities” (33).

The second chapter then reframes the histories of disabled characters in ancient Greece, shifting them from narratives that centralize normativity into histories that show unique rhetorical embodiments. For example, readers will understand that Tiresias’s blindness and/or sex change—both a kind of bodily difference and disability—are the very things that allow him the elite power of ornithomancy in the myth. In seeing disability as more than “stigma and disqualification” (63), we might “understand more fully the ways that normativity constrains our available means of persuasion” (92). Dolmage makes clear that the power to transform these myths begins with recontextualizing their powerful origins.

Chapter 3 makes the important move to suggest that in reframing disability myths as testing our possibilities of communication, we can see that rhetoric itself is disabled. If disability stands in as an embodied model for responses to various non-normal situations, then rhetoric is the prosthesis that provides us with the imperfect means to respond. Rhetoric becomes the embodied extension of the self by which we navigate the imperfect process of meaning making. This move, readers will respect, “is an honest appraisal of the partiality and embodiment of communication” (124). The chapter then masterfully shifts the disability myths highlighted in chapter 1 into an [End Page 767] extensive, but not exhaustive, collection of disability rhetorics used to imagine new ways of communicating.

After constructing disability as a generative concept, chapter 4 returns to mētis, offered as the tool by which we practically employ these new disability rhetorics. Here we have Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire and metallurgy, whom we learn was actually celebrated for his disability because it granted him rare gifts of embodied intelligence. In some myths, his crooked feet allow for quicker lateral movement, and in other myths, his need for a wheelchair is the precise impetus for Hephaestus to develop such a skill for metallurgy. Layered and woven beautifully by Dolmage, Hephaestus’s various stories invite an interpretation where mētis is the rhetorical embodiment required for anyone to “adapt to and intervene in a world of change and chance” (150).

With mētis firmly at the forefront, chapter 5 explores two critical steps in Dolmage’s argument. First, it revisits the story of Metis, the Greek goddess who was eaten by Zeus for her...

pdf