Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge

Part Five: Multiple Identities, Overlapping Borders

P a r t F i v e Multiple Identities, Overlapping Borders The essays of part 5 highlight the problematic concept of identity . In both disability studies and feminist theory, identity is a contested concept. While a singular group identity can be claimed for political purposes—for example, under the banner of “women’s rights” or “disability rights”—a group named woman or the disabled is obviously heterogeneous, not unified. There can easily be many important differences among the members of such a group, and the familiar terms of “race,” “class,” “nation,” or “gender” are only starting points for naming some of these categories of difference. Current theories of identity formation, whether primarily sociocultural, phenomenological , or postmodern, recognize that identities are multiple , with both overlaps and gaps. The many identities that individuals claim or are named by thus produce contradictions and tensions. These chapters explore the problematics of identity always already present at the intersections of disability and mothering. By ending the book with this section, we hope to expand the many threads connecting mothering and disability and also remind readers of the dangers of considering only one relation among many. Julie Maybee’s “The Political Is Personal: Mothering at the Intersection of Acquired Disability, Gender, and Race,” begins this work of expansion. As a feminist, and a partner in an interracial marriage, Maybee recounts events in her life that made her aware of the sociocultural constructs of gender and race. When her daughter experiences a disability, Maybee is quickly 242 • Multiple Identities, Overlapping Borders able to see the social construction of disability as well. As a feminist intent on raising an independent-minded daughter, Maybee describes how she must negotiate these various cultural attitudes about disability, race, and gender, revealing the ways that social meanings in categories of identity affect the personal experiences of mothering a disabled child—that is, how the social and political become personal. In “‘You Gotta Make Aztlán Any Way You Can:’ Disability in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints,” Julie Minich rereads Moraga’s play through a disability studies lens. She argues that the play not only critiques heteronormativity, but also revisions nationalism through the disabled body. Moraga’s play shows how “a deep commitment to a revolutionary, queer Chicana/o cultural nationalism (a nationalism that Moraga later terms ‘queer Aztlán’) and a profound unease with the ideology of body normativity . . . haunts the concept of the nation.” Although the play does not fully “realize” a new basis for nationalism, Minich concludes, “the play’s ending elucidates both the ethical importance and the ethical problems of predicating nationalist claims on a disabled body politic.” In “Intersecting the Postcolonial Mother and Disability: A Narrative of an Antiguan Mother and Her Son,” Denise Cordella Hughes-Tafen examines the history of and attitudes toward disability on the Caribbean island of Antigua as she recounts the experiences of her own mother’s mothering of her autistic brother. Hughes-Tafen notes both how mothering a child with autism affects a woman’s position in this society, and how a woman’s position in turn impacts her mothering choices. Her mother comes to the United States to access education for her son, and Hughes-Tafen traces the difficulties of noncitizen residents in getting services. In her account, she emphasizes the intersections of race, gender, class, and nation as she describes her mother’s efforts to advocate for her son in both a developing country and in the United States. Shawn Cassiman’s chapter, “Mothering, Disability, and Poverty: Straddling Borders, Shifting Boundaries, and Everyday Resistance,” uses data from in-depth interviews with Multiple Identities, Overlapping Borders • 243 disabled single mothers living in poverty to reveal their resistance to dominant social constructions of themselves as “bad” mothers. Their everyday resistance stories emphasize the limited support for mothers in the United States following welfare reform, the impact and stigma associated with disability, and the selfless dedication demanded of all women who choose to mother in such an environment. ...