Disability Studies

by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Brenda Brueggemann
(reprinted with permission)

The study of disability in both literary criticism and the humanities in general is a grass-roots scholarly movement that has emerged from the academic turn toward identity studies, an awareness of the need for diversity in scholarly topics, and the recognition that disability is a political rights and integration issue. Disability studies in the humanities seeks to overturn the medicalized understanding of disability and to replace it with a social model of disability. This view defines "disability," not as a physical defect inherent in bodies (just as gender is not simply a matter of genitals, nor race a matter of skin pigmentation), but rather as a way of interpreting human differences. In other words, this critical perspective considers "disability" as a way of thinking about bodies rather than as something that is wrong with bodies. Within such a critical frame, disability becomes a representational system more than a medical problem, a social construction rather than a personal misfortune or a bodily flaw, and a subject appropriate for wide-ranging intellectual inquiry instead of a specialized field within medicine, rehabilitation, or social work. Such a critical perspective extends the constructivist analysis that informs gender and race studies. This approach to disability looks at such issues as changes in the way disability is interpreted over time and within varying cultural contexts; the development of the disabled as a community and a social identity; the political and material circumstances resulting from this system of assigning value to bodies; the history of how disability influences and is influenced by the distribution of resources, power, and status; and how disability affects artistic production. It also insists on the materiality of the body–its embeddedness in the world–by focusing on issues such as equal access for all, integration of institutions, and the historical exclusion of people with disabilities from the public sphere.

Disability studies probes the historical formation of the social identity "disabled," presenting it as a way of organizing physical, mental, and emotional variations into a large and diverse group of people who may have no more in common than the stigmatized designation of abnormality. In other words, we study the historical and cultural consequences of how this interpretive system creates what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community" of “the disabled,” a social group that all people will join if they live long enough.

Disability Studies focuses its analytical lens on the myriad sites where culture elaborates disability. It ranges across such discourses as history, art, literature, religion, philosophy, and rhetoric, engaging the critical conversations of aesthetics, epistemology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, feminism, the history of the body, and issues of identity. Disability is everywhere in culture–from Oedipus to the Human Genome Project—once critics know how to look for it. It is a narrative about human differences we can chart over time, an interpretation of physiological and mental traits we can query, an exclusionary discourse we can excavate, and a fiction about bodily variation we can reveal. Most important, these narratives shape the material world, inform human relations, and mold our sense of who we are. In short, then, disability studies interrogates disability; it challenges our collective stories about disability, redefining it as an integral part of all human experience and history.

Perhaps because representation is one of the central concerns of literary criticism, disability studies has burgeoned in literary studies, reflecting major paradigm shifts in recent critical thought and practice. Here are some examples: First, recovering the history of disabled people is part of the shift in the practice of social history from studying the powerful and the elite to focusing on the perspectives and contributions of the previously marginalized. Second, theorizing disability as an identity category responds to critical theory’s inquiry into the body's relation to subjectivity, agency, and identity. Third, framing disability in political terms reflects the post-civil rights impulse toward positive identity politics. Fourth, insisting on the integration of disability into the curriculum and disabled people into the classroom corresponds to the recent humanistic commitment to serving under-represented populations. Fifth, examining disability arises logically from literary theory’s emphasis on discourse analysis, social constructivism, and the politics of representation.

Literary studies of disability are generally of two types: either analyses of how disability operates in literary texts or how the experience of disability influences an author’s work. For instance, disability autobiography and memoir is a capacious and burgeoning genre of life writing. Critical analyses of disability flourish in literary criticism: for example, studies on the disabled figures in Victorian novels by Dickens and Wilkie Collins and on the convergence of racial and disability identity in Toni Morrison’s characters. Disabled characters in Gustave Flaubert, Herman Melville, and Shakespeare—to name only a few–prompt analyses. Disability also influenced the literary production of countless writers, many of whom we don’t identify as disabled—for example, Alexander Pope, Audre Lorde, Samuel Johnson, and William Styron.Critics have shown that the signature use of the grotesque in Southern and Modernist writing is often figured as disability (e.g., Faulkner, O’Connor, West, Petry, and McCullers). Moreover, the concept of disability and disabled figures are central to sentimental literature, abolitionist discourse, religious devotional literature, and benevolence. Disability pervades classic American literature: Ann Bradstreet imagines her book of poetry as a deformed child; Hawthorne often expresses his concern with marked bodies as disability (e.g., “The Birthmark” and Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter); Emerson elaborates the ideal of the American individual in opposition to the figure of the “invalid;”  Melville’s excess (e.g., Ahab) is often figured as disability; Thoreau’s consumption shaped his libertarian philosophy; Twain uses deafness as humor; the category of illness is fundamental to Whitman’s poetic project; Poe embodies the gothic (e.g., “Hop-Frog”) as disability. Indeed, once one begins to notice disabled characters and the concept of disability as part of a larger discourse of difference, they appear somewhere in almost every literary text.

A number of germinal critical texts and collections of essays that theorize disability in culture and literary representation have emerged in the 1990s. In 2002, the MLA published a collection of literary critical essays entitled  Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon Snyder, Brenda Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. Other significant monographs have defined the field, contexts, and terms of disability studies, such as Brenda Jo Brueggemann’s  Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness (Gallaudet, 1999), G. Thomas Couser’s Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing (Wisconsin 1997), Lennard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. (Verso,1995), Rosemarie Garland-Thomson ‘s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (Columbia UP, 1997), and David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s  Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse Michigan,2000). In addition, disability studies are proliferating in the form of special issues of journals such as Hypatia, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and The National Women’s Studies Association Journal.

The aim of disability studies is to integrate the concept of disability as a category of analysis into all aspects of study, both in literary criticism and in the humanities in general. Just as scholars and teachers have learned that gender, race, sexuality, and class analyses deepen our understanding of cultural texts, so they now recognize that considering disability expands and complicates the ways we see the world. The integration of disability, as a concept and as a constituency, can transform the university—just as did the critique of gender and the presence of women. Moreover, such critical intellectual work facilitates a fuller integration of the sociopolitical world—for the benefit of everyone. As with gender, race, sexuality, and class: the constituency for disability studies is everyone. To understand how disability operates is to understand what it is to be fully human.

*Bedford Glossary Entry