Disability and Representation

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Intro

• “The way we imagine disability in America is changing” (522)
• Americans with Disabilities Act (1990)
• Mandates full integration and prohibits discrimination
• Largest minority in the US (about 20%)
• Gaining much more public attention
• Award-winning films, politicians, toys, Miss America, athletes, advertising, etc.
• “All this suggests that disability is becoming a diversity, inclusion, and civil rights issue rather than simply a medical problem, charity case, or personal misfortune” (522-523)

Representation

• Disability imagery is rich in literature, film, TV, etc.
• “To deal in images and narratives…is to focus on issues of representation” (523)
• Saturating of the material world with meaning
• Representation structures rather than reflects reality
• “The way we imagine disability through images and narratives determines the shape of the material world, the distribution of resources, our relationships with one another, and our sense of ourselves” (523)

“The aim of much disability studies is to reimagine disability, to reveal how the storied quality of disability invents and reinvents the world we share” (523)

“Disability studies challenges our collective representation of disability, exposing it as an exclusionary and oppressive system rather than the natural and appropriate order of things” (523)

Artists with Disabilities

• American composer Thomas Greene Wiggins
• Originally known as “Blind Tom”
• “This is exactly what disability studies does: it recognizes the contributions of a group of people who have historically been dismissed because of deeply rooted cultural bias - in Wiggins’s case, both as a black man and as a person with disabilities” (523)
• Monet and Close developed disabilities later in life. They did not “overcome” them. Their art changed as a result of them accommodating their disabilities into their artistic works
• “They were great artists not in spite of disability but because of disability. This is the story we need to understand” (524)

Reimagining Disability

• Reimagining disability in this way accomplishes important cultural work:
• Shows disability as significant human experiences that occurs in every society, every family, and most every life
• Helps us accept that fact
• Helps integrate disability into our knowledge of human experience and history
• Helps integrate disabled people into our culture
• “Disability Studies points out that ability and disability are not so much a matter of the capacities and limitations of bodies but more about what we expect from a body at a particular moment and place” (524)

“We are expected to look, act, and move in certain ways so we’ll fit into the built and attitudinal environment. If we don’t, we become disabled” (524)

We All Need Assistance to Live

• All bodies are shaped by their environments from the moment of conception
• We transform constantly in response to our surroundings and register history on our bodies
• “The changes that occur when body encounters world are what we call disability” (524)
• We all need assistance to live
• “Every life evolves into disability, making it perhaps the essential characteristic of being human” (524)
• This both compels and discomforts people…

Discriminatory Attitudes and Practices

• Discriminatory attitudes and practices still persist
• Our society denies vulnerability, contingency, and mortality
• Pressured toward standardized bodies
• Accomplishable through medical and technological interventions
• Under the banner of progress and improvement
• Banish disability from our lives
• “Strong disincentives such as social stigma and a sense of somehow having failed to ‘overcome’ or ‘beat’ life’s inevitable limitations pressure us not to identify ourselves as persons with disabilities” (524)

Body Uniformity/New Eugenics

• Body uniformity is the goal
• Genetic engineering, selective abortion, reproductive technology, so-called physician-assisted suicide, surgical normalization, aesthetic-standardization procedures, ideologies of heath and fitness, etc.
• New Eugenics…
• “Although we value biodiversity in our environment, we devalue physical and mental variety” (524)
• We expect medicine to wipe away all disability

“As a consequence, when disability enters our lives, often our only available responses are silence, denial, shame, or determined and desperate vows to ‘fight it’” (525)

“Seldom do we imagine disability as an aspect of all lives that our society, government, and community should accommodate and include” (525)

Questions

• How can representation affect social justice?
• What would happen if our society fully recognized and validated human variation?
• What if we cultivated rather than reduced this rich distinctiveness?
• How would the public landscape change if the widest possible diversity of human forms, functions, and behaviors were fully accommodated?
• How would such an understanding alter our collective sense of what is beautiful and proper?
• What would be the political significance of such inclusion?

Nancy Eiesland: “...in addition to legislative, economic, and social changes, achieving equality for people with disabilities depends on cultural ‘resymbolization’” (525)

Perception Shift

• The way we imagine disability and disabled people must shift for real social change to occur
• Medical photographs and charity campaigns were the only public images of people with disabilities until the civil rights opened up the doors to political action and consumer culture
• “The ideology of cure and the mandate for normalcy intertwine, crowding out any possible narrative of accommodating rather than eliminating disability” (525)

“Cripsploitation”

• “Such images of disabled people as consumer citizens do the cultural work of integrating a previously excluded group into the dominant order” (526)
• “Cripsploitation” may be inadvertently progressive
• Adonis in a wheelchair is better than the whimpering victim in the corner…
• Latter two shots “refuse the traditional visual rhetorics that present disability as sentimental, inspirational, curable, shameful, or disposable” (526)
• “Instead these photographs evoke the visual conventions of commercial fashion photography to endow their subjects with authority and grace and to represent disability as a tenable and valued way of being in the world” (526)