Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race

6. Proving Disability

part iii Fantasies of Measurement This page intentionally left blank 6 / Proving Disability The overmastering fantasy of modern disability identification is that disability is a knowable, obvious, and unchanging category. Such a fantasy permeates all levels of discourse regarding disabled bodies and minds, even as it is repeatedly and routinely disproved by the actual realities of those bodies’ and minds’ fluctuating abilities. As we will see, individuals whose lives are shaped by such disability identifications often experience a kind of bodily/textual dissonance, in which their experiences are displaced and superseded by a written authentication that palimpsestically overwrites their own bodily knowledge. Carrie Sandahl, a disability scholar and performer, challenged this dynamic in her art-life piece The Reciprocal Gaze, in which she “attempted to make clear the medical and social metaphors that had been inscribed on my body by directly acknowledging and confronting them” (26). I begin part III with Sandahl ’s piece to frame my discussion of the institutionalization of fantasies of identification as always already accompanied by acts of creative resistance and bodily reclaiming. For one day of working and teaching, Sandahl wore a white lab jacket and white pants on which she had written notes from her medical records and marked the locations of her scars and “abnormal” x-rays along with dates of surgeries, as well as quotes from feminist psychoanalytic performance theory and questions people have asked her about her body: “Is one leg shorter than the other?” “Will this surgery cure you?” “Were you born this way?” (26–27). Whenever she met the eyes of people looking at 122 / fantasies of measurement her, she offered them a handout chronicling her medical history. In The Reciprocal Gaze, Sandahl materialized the submerged process of medical identification that shapes the lives of many people with physical disabilities , while foregrounding the extent to which such identifications take place not only in the medical setting but in everyday social interactions . The white lab coat and pants became textual surfaces overlaying her body and functioned as a kind of “paper suit” encasing her actual experience of her body.1 Following Sandahl, I suggest that each modern subject is, in a sense, an individual wearing a “paper suit,” our bodies contained and constrained by medical and bureaucratic authority, and each of us may seek at times to tear open that suit while remaining aware of the material consequences of such a rupture. I call this process biocertification, a neologism that draws upon and expands Foucauldian notions of biopolitical citizenship. Biocertification describes the many forms of government documents that purport to authenticate a person’s social identity through biology, substituting written descriptions for other forms of bodily knowledge and authority. Biocertification materializes the modern belief that only science can reliably determine the truths of identity and generally claims to offer a simple, verifiable, and concrete solution to questions of identity. Yet in practice biocertification tends to produce not straightforward answers but documentary sprawl, increased uncertainty, and bureaucratic stagnation. Defining Disability in the Age of Biocertification The science of counting “cripples” throws into relief battles over the delineation of “disability” in an environment where people are turned first into objects and then into numbers. For administrative purposes, it is imperative that the (real) disabled person is made visible through the processes of calculation and therefore can be made governable. The obsession with “disability fraud” induces such questions as “who is the genuine disabled person and how many of them are there?” (Campbell 128) People with disabilities in the present-day United States and other industrialized countries must provide a nearly endless series of medical certifications in a number of settings, including (but not limited to) school, work, travel, insurance, court, taxes, and sports. In this process the form becomes “informational, reproductive of a social formation as it institutes and applies its assumptions. . . . The form furnishes proving disability / 123 uniformity—regularity, repeatability, reiterability, predictability—to identity, rendering it accordingly accessible to administration” (Goldberg 31). Even those with permanent and unchanging impairments, such as loss of a limb or irreversible paralysis, must often file form after form, year after year, to maintain their legal and economic status as disabled. The 1994 documentary film When Billy Broke His Head features “Kay,” a former concert pianist who has permanently lost her sight yet must repeatedly certify her impairment to keep receiving benefits: “I have to have an affidavit stating that yes, I am legally...