Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance

Part I: Taxonomies: Disability & Deaf Performances in the Process of Self-Definition

PART I Taxonomies Disability & Deaf Performances in the Process of Self-De‹nition This ‹rst part provides a wide sampling of performance strategies that artists with disabilities have deployed to construct disability and Deaf cultures. Historian and activist Paul Longmore explains that the disability culture movements re›ect and feed the disability civil rights movement.1 Longmore argues that both movements have critiqued “hyperindividualistic ” American cultural values and coalesced around a set of alternative values derived from the experiences of disabled and Deaf people: “They declare that they prize not self-suf‹ciency but self-determination, not independence but interdependence, not functional separateness but personal connection, not physical autonomy but human community.”2 The contributors to this section demonstrate that disabled artists have been key to communicating this critique of hegemonic values and to embodying alternative values through performance. All of the artists under consideration in this part consciously attempt to articulate an alternative cultural identity for those on the inside of that experience as well as for those on the outside. In her essay “Delivering Disability, Willing Speech,” Brenda Jo Brueggemann argues that performers with disabilities primarily challenge notions of autonomy and what Longmore calls “functional separateness.” Brueggemann contends that these artists challenge the “rhetorical triangle,” which consists of three separate entities: the speaker, the audience, and the subject . The performers she considers—Neil Marcus, the Flying Words Project, and sign language interpreters—confuse the traditional rhetorical triangle by using cooperative communication tactics that muddle boundaries between individual performers and between actors and audience. Brueggemann ultimately argues that the ‹eld of rhetoric must adapt to take these alternative communication dynamics into account. Rosemarie Garland Thomson analyzes performances by three artists— Cheryl Marie Wade, Mary Duffy, and Carrie Sandahl—whose work simultaneously tackles feminist and disability issues. In “Dares to Stares: Disabled Women Performance Artists and the Dynamics of Staring,” Thomson argues that these artists must negotiate both the “male gaze” and what she calls “the stare” to claim a space for disabled feminine subjectivity. She explores how these artists confront the medicalization of both female and disabled bodies, take pride in their bodily difference, and turn “stigma management” into art. All three performances make apparent how identity is formulated through highly ritualized social exchanges. The way in which identity is formed in communities is taken up by Jessica Berson in “Performing Deaf Identity: Toward a Continuum of Deaf Performance .” Berson analyzes three performances: Shakespeare Theater’s King Lear, Bruce Hlibok and Norman Frisch’s signed performance art, and the Amaryllis Theater Company’s Twelfth Night. She examines the role that language plays in de‹ning Deaf cultural identity in practices ranging from “outside” performances, which explain Deaf culture to hearing audiences, to “inside” performances by and for the Deaf. Finally, Jim Ferris’s “Aesthetic Distance and the Fiction of Disability” describes how a group of college students at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale found community through the exploration of their disability experiences in a collaborative performance piece called Do You Sleep in That Thing? Ferris, who directed the project, describes how this group of performers experimented with calibrating various degrees of aesthetic distance to claim both af‹nity with, and difference from, their mainly nondisabled audience. Aesthetic distance also allowed the performers to explore disability as a “‹ction” whose meaning is context dependent, a move that allowed them to rewrite the meaning of disability for themselves. Declaring disability a “‹ction”—or a social construction—is a signi‹cant thread running through all four of these essays. This declaration, however, is not meant to minimize or deny the very real experiences of disability and impairment. Instead, it allows people with disabilities to intercede in the meaning-making process by writing (and performing) their own ‹ctions, ‹ctions they ‹nd more truthful. 14 Bodies in Commotion Notes 1. Paul Longmore, “The Second Phase: From Disability Rights to Disability Culture ,” in Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003). This essay was originally written in 1995 and is reprinted in this collection. 2. Ibid. Part I: Taxonomies 15 ...