06 11: 41 am page 1 The Disability

bet	44/61
Sana	05.10.2017
Hajmi	5.02 Mb.
	#17160

1 ... 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 ... 61

Disability Studies Quarterly 24.4 (Fall 2004).

Available online at http://www.dsq-sds.org/_articles_html/2004/fall/dsq_fall04_listserv.asp (1–14). Cited within the

text as “Guidelines.”

Hahn, Harlan. “Advertising the Acceptably Employable Image: Disability and Capitalism.” In Th

e Disability Studies Reader,

edited by. Lennard J. Davis, 172–86. New York: Routledge, 1997. Cited within the text as “Advertising.”

Halley, Janet E. “‘Like Race’ Arguments.” In What’s Left of Th

eory?: New Work on the Politics of Literary Th

eory, edited by Judith

Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Th

omas, 40–74. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.

Harris, Angela P. “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Th

eory.” Stanford Law Review 42.3 (February, 1990): 581–616.

Hughes, Bill, and Kevin Paterson. “Th

e Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body: Towards a Sociology of Impair-

ment.” Disability & Society 12.3 (1997): 325–40.

Jackson, Grace E., M.D. “Th

e Right to Refuse Treatment.” Available online at http://psychrights.org/Articles/rightorefuse.

htm

Jakobsen, Janet R. “Queers Are like Jews, Aren’t Th

ey? Analogy and Alliance Politics.” In Queer Th

eory and the Jewish Question,

edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, 64–89. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Jamison, Kay Redfi eld. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. New York: Random House, 1995.

Jewson, N. D. “Th

e Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770-1870.” Sociology. 10.2 (May 1976):

225–244.

Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. Foreword Michael Bérubé. New York: New York University Press,

1998.

Marano, Hara Estroff . “Race and the Blues.” Psychology Today. Available online at http://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/

pto-20030930-000001.html

“Massie: exclusion ‘more profound’ for disabled people.” Ouch! BBC.co.uk. June 16, 2005. Available online at http://www.bbc.

co.uk/ouch/news/btn/massie_exclusion.shtml. Cited within the text as “Massie.”

McRuer, Robert and Abby Wilkerson, eds. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Desiring Disability: Queer Th

eory Meets

Disability Studies. 9.1–2 (2003).

“Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity Supplement.” U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, Offi

ce of the

Surgeon General. Available online at http://www.mentalhealth.org/cre/execsummary-2.asp (1–4). Cited within the text

as “Mental.”

Mitchell, Angela. What the Blues Is All About: Black Women Overcoming Stress and Depression. With Kennise Herring, Ph.D.

New York: Penguin, 1998.

Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder, Eds. Th

e Body and Physical Diff erence: Discourses of Disability. Foreword James I.

Porter. Ann Arbor: Th

e University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Mollow, Anna. “Disability Studies and Identity Politics: A Critique of Recent Th

eory.” Michigan Quarterly Review 43.2 (Spring

2004): 269–96.

“New Report on Women and Depression: Latest Research Findings and Recommendations.” Press Release. American Psy-

chological Association. March 15, 2002. Available online at http://www.apa.org/releases/depressionreport.html (1–5).

Cited within the text as “New.”

Oliver, Michael. Th

e Politics of Disablement. London: Macmillan, 1990. Cited within the text as PD.

———. “Th

e Social Model in Action: If I Had a Hammer.” Implementing the Social Model of Disability: Th

eory and Research. Ed

Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer. Leeds, UK: Th

e Disability Press, 2004. 18–31. Cited within the text as “Social.”

Pfeiff er, David. “Th

e ICIDH and the Need for Its Revision.” Disability & Society 13.4 (September 1998): 503–23.

Phillips, Jane. Th

e Magic Daughter: A Memoir of Living with Multiple Personality Disorder. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Porter, Roy. Th

e Greatest Benefi t to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Reiser, Stanley Joel. Medicine and the Reign of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Rouse, Deborah L. “Lives of Women of Color Create Risk for Depression.” Women’s ENews. http://www.womensenews.org/ar-

ticle.cfm/dyn/aid/666, October 1, 2001. 1-6 (web pagination).

Samuels, Ellen. “My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian

and Gay Studies 9.1–2 (2003): 233–55.

RT3340X_C023.indd 298

7/11/2006 10:09:04 AM

299

“When Black Women Start Going on Prozac . . .”

Silvers, Anita. “Formal Justice.” In Disability, Diff erence, and Discrimination: Perspectives on Justice in Bioethics and Public Policy,

edited by Anita Silvers, David Wasserman, and Mary B. Mahowald, 13–146. Maryland: Rowan & Littlefi eld, 1998.

Smith, Barbara. “Notes for Yet Another Paper on Black Feminism, or Will the Real Enemy Please Stand Up?” Conditions 5

(1979): 123–142.

Smith, Bonnie G., and Beth Hutchinson, Eds. Gendering Disability. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers Uni-

versity Press, 2004.

Solomon, Andrew. Th

e Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Spelman, Elizabeth V. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Th

ought. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.

Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. New York: Random House, 1990.

Tremain, Shelley. “On the Subject of Impairment.” Disability/Postmodernity. Ed. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare. London:

Continuum, 2002. 1–24. Cited within the text as SI.

———. “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critical Disability Th

eory: An Introduction.” In Foucault and the Government of Dis-

ability, edited by Shelley Tremain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Cited within the text as FG.

Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. Ed. Brian D. Smedley, Adrienne Y. Stith, and

Alan R. Nelson. Committee on Understanding and Ending Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. Board on the

Health Science Policy. Institute of Medicine of the National Academy. Washington, DC: Th

e National Academy Press,

2003. Cited within the text as UT.

UPIAS. Fundamental Principles of Disability. London: Union of Physically Impaired against Segregation, 1976. Available online

at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/UPIAS/fundamental%20principles.pdf

Wendell, Susan. “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities.” Hypatia 16.4 (2001) 17–33.

White, Evelyn C., ed. Th

e Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves, 226–34. Seattle, Washington: Seal Press, 1990.

Williams, Patricia J. Seeing a Color-Blind Future: Th

e Paradox of Race. Th

e 1997 BBC Reith Lectures. New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1997.

Wilson, Anne and Peter Beresford. “Madness, Distress and Postmodernity: Putting the Record Straight.” In Disability/Postmo-

dernity, edited by Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, 143–58. London: Continuum, 2002.

Winick, Bruce J. Th

e Right to Refuse Mental Health Treatment. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1997.

Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. Second edition. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.

RT3340X_C023.indd 299

7/11/2006 10:09:05 AM

RT3340X_C023.indd 300

7/11/2006 10:09:05 AM

301

Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and

Queer/Disabled Existence

Robert McRuer

Contextualizing Disability

In her famous critique of compulsory heterosexuality Adrienne Rich opens with the suggestion that

lesbian existence has oft en been “simply rendered invisible” (178), but the bulk of her analysis belies

that rendering. In fact, throughout “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” one of Rich’s

points seems to be that compulsory heterosexuality depends as much on the ways in which lesbian

identities are made visible (or, we might say, comprehensible) as on the ways in which they are made

invisible or incomprehensible. She writes:

Any theory of cultural/political creation that treats lesbian existence as a marginal or less “natural”

phenomenon, as mere “sexual preference,” or as the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homo-

sexual relations is profoundly weakened thereby, whatever its other contributions. Feminist theory

can no longer aff ord merely to voice a toleration of “lesbianism” as an “alternative life-style,” or make

token allusion to lesbians. A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is

long overdue. (178)

e critique that Rich calls for proceeds not through a simple recognition or even valuation of “lesbian

existence” but rather through an interrogation of how the system of compulsory heterosexuality utilizes

that existence. Indeed, I would extract from her suspicion of mere “toleration” confi rmation for the

idea that one of the ways in which heterosexuality is currently constituted or founded, established as

the foundational sexual identity for women, is precisely through the deployment of lesbian existence

as always and everywhere supplementary—the margin to heterosexuality’s center, the mere refl ection

of (straight and gay) patriarchal realities. Compulsory heterosexuality’s casting of some identities as

alternatives ironically buttresses the ideological notion that dominant identities are not really alterna-

tives but rather the natural order of things.

More than twenty years aft er it was initially published, Rich’s critique of compulsory heterosexuality

is indispensable, the criticisms of her ahistorical notion of a “lesbian continuum” notwithstanding.

Despite its continued relevance, however, the realm of compulsory heterosexuality might seem to be

an unlikely place to begin contextualizing disability.

I want to challenge that by considering what

might be gained by understanding “compulsory heterosexuality” as a key concept in disability studies.

rough a reading of compulsory heterosexuality, I want to put forward a theory of what I call compul-

sory able-bodiedness. Th

e Latin root for contextualize denotes the act of weaving together, interweaving,

joining together, or composing. Th

is chapter thus contextualizes disability in the root sense of the

word, because I argue that the system of compulsory able-bodiedness that produces dis ability is thor-

oughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness, that—in

RT3340X_C024.indd 301

7/11/2006 10:11:01 AM

Robert McRuer

302

fact—compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness and vice versa. And,

although I reiterate it in my conclusion, I want to make it clear at the outset that this particular con-

textualizing of disability is off ered as part of a much larger and collective project of unraveling and

decomposing both systems.

Th

e idea of imbricated systems is, of course, not new—Rich’s own analysis repeatedly stresses the

imbrication of compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchy. I would argue, however, as others have,

that feminist and queer theories (and cultural theories generally) are not yet accustomed to fi guring

ability/disability into the equation, and thus this theory of compulsory able-bodiedness is off ered as

a preliminary contribution to that much-needed conversation.

Able-Bodied Heterosexuality

In his introduction to Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams describes

his project as

the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general

discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society. Every

word which I have included has at some time, in the course of some argument, virtually forced itself

on my attention because the problems of its meaning seemed to me inextricably bound up with the

problems it was being used to discuss. (15)

Although Williams is not particularly concerned in Keywords with feminism or gay and lesbian lib-

eration, the processes he describes should be recognizable to feminists and queer theorists, as well

as to scholars and activists in other contemporary movements, such as African American studies or

critical race theory. As these movements have developed, increasing numbers of words have indeed

forced themselves on our attention, so that an inquiry into not just the marginalized identity but also

the dominant identity has become necessary. Th

e problem of the meaning of masculinity (or even

maleness), of whiteness, of heterosexuality has increasingly been understood as inextricably bound

up with the problems the term is being used to discuss.

One need go no further than the Oxford English Dictionary to locate problems with the meaning

of heterosexuality. In 1971 the OED Supplement defi ned heterosexual as “pertaining to or character-

ized by the normal relations of the sexes; opp. to homosexual.” At this point, of course, a few decades

of critical work by feminists and queer theorists have made it possible to acknowledge quite readily

that heterosexual and homosexual are in fact not equal and opposite identities. Rather, the ongoing

subordination of homosexuality (and bisexuality) to heterosexuality allows for heterosexuality to be

institutionalized as “the normal relations of the sexes,” while the institutionalization of heterosexuality

as the “normal relations of the sexes” allows for homosexuality (and bisexuality) to be subordinated.

And, as queer theory continues to demonstrate, it is precisely the introduction of normalcy into the

system that introduces compulsion: “Nearly everyone,” Michael Warner writes in Th

e Trouble with

Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, “wants to be normal. And who can blame them, if

the alternative is being abnormal, or deviant, or not being one of the rest of us? Put in those terms,

there doesn’t seem to be a choice at all. Especially in America where [being] normal probably outranks

all other social aspirations” (53). Compulsion is here produced and covered over, with the appearance

of choice (sexual preference) mystifying a system in which there actually is no choice.

A critique of normalcy has similarly been central to the disability rights movement and to disabil-

ity studies, with—for example—Lennard Davis’s overview and critique of the historical emergence

of normalcy or Rosemarie Garland-Th

omson’s introduction of the concept of the “normate” (Davis,

23–49; Th

omson, 8–9). Such scholarly and activist work positions us to locate the problems of able-

bodied identity, to see the problem of the meaning of able-bodiedness as bound up with the problems

it is being used to discuss. Arguably, able-bodied identity is at this juncture even more naturalized

RT3340X_C024.indd 302

7/11/2006 10:11:04 AM

303

Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence

than heterosexual identity. At the very least, many people not sympathetic to queer theory will

concede that ways of being heterosexual are culturally produced and culturally variable, even if and

even as they understood heterosexual identity itself to be entirely natural. Th

e same cannot be said,

on the whole, for able-bodied identity. An extreme example that nonetheless encapsulates currently

hegemonic thought on ability and disability is a notorious Salon article by Norah Vincent attacking

disability studies that appeared online in the summer of 1999. Vincent writes, “It’s hard to deny that

something called normalcy exists. Th

e human body is a machine, aft er all—one that has evolved

functional parts: lungs for breathing, legs for walking, eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, a tongue for

speaking and most crucially for all the academics concerned, a brain for thinking. Th

is is science, not

culture.”

In a nutshell, you either have an able body, or you don’t.

Yet the desire for defi nitional clarity might unleash more problems than it contains; if it’s hard

to deny that something called normalcy exists, it’s even harder to pinpoint what that something is.

e OED defi nes able-bodied redundantly and negatively as “having an able body, i.e. one free from

physical disability, and capable of the physical exertions required of it; in bodily health; robust.”

Able-bodiedness, in turn, is defi ned vaguely as “soundness of health; ability to work; robustness.” Th

parallel structure of the defi nitions of ability and sexuality is quite striking: fi rst, to be able-bodied is

to be “free from physical disability,” just as to be heterosexual is to be “the opposite of homosexual.”

Second, even though the language of “the normal relations” expected of human beings is not present

in the defi nition of able-bodied, the sense of “normal relations” is, especially with the emphasis on

work: being able-bodied means being capable of the normal physical exertions required in a particular

system of labor. It is here, in fact, that both able-bodied identity and the Oxford English Dictionary

betray their origins in the nineteenth century and the rise of industrial capitalism. It is here as well

that we can begin to understand the compulsory nature of able-bodiedness: in the emergent industrial

capitalist system, free to sell one’s labor but not free to do anything else eff ectively meant free to have

an able body but not particularly free to have anything else.

Like compulsory heterosexuality, then, compulsory able-bodiedness functions by covering over,

with the appearance of choice, a system in which there actually is no choice. I would not locate this

compulsion, moreover, solely in the past, with the rise of industrial capitalism. Just as the origins of

heterosexual/homosexual identity are now obscured for most people so that compulsory hetero-

sexuality functions as a disciplinary formation seemingly emanating from everywhere and nowhere,

so too are the origins of able-bodied/disabled identity obscured, allowing what Susan Wendell calls

“the disciplines of normality” (87) to cohere in a system of compulsory able-bodiedness that similarly

emanates from everywhere and nowhere. Able-bodied dilutions and misunderstandings of the mi-

nority thesis put forward in the disability rights movement and disability studies have even, in some

ways, strengthened the system: the dutiful (or docile) able-bodied subject now recognizes that some

groups of people have chosen to adjust to or even take pride in their “condition,” but that recognition,

and the tolerance that undergirds it, covers over the compulsory nature of the able-bodied subject’s

own identity.

Michael Bérubé’s memoir about his son Jamie, who has Down syndrome, helps exemplify some of

the ideological demands currently sustaining compulsory able-bodiedness. Bérubé writes of how he

“sometimes feel[s] cornered by talking about Jamie’s intelligence, as if the burden of proof is on me,

offi

cial spokesman on his behalf.” Th

e subtext of these encounters always seems to be the same: “In

the end, aren’t you disappointed to have a retarded child? [ . . . ] Do we really have to give this person

our full attention?” (180). Bérubé’s excavation of this subtext pinpoints an important common ex-

perience that links all people with disabilities under a system of compulsory able-bodiedness—the

experience of the able-bodied need for an agreed-on common ground. I can imagine that answers

might be incredibly varied to similar questions—“In the end, wouldn’t you rather be hearing?” and

“In the end, wouldn’t you rather not be HIV positive?” would seem, aft er all, to be very diff erent

questions, the fi rst (with its thinly veiled desire for Deafness not to exist) more obviously genocidal

than the second. But they are not really diff erent questions, in that their constant repetition (or their

RT3340X_C024.indd 303

7/11/2006 10:11:04 AM

Robert McRuer

304

presence as ongoing subtexts) reveals more about the able-bodied culture doing the asking than about

the bodies being interrogated. Th

e culture asking such questions assumes in advance that we all agree:

able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aim-

ing for. A system of compulsory able-bodiedness repeatedly demands that people with disabilities

embody for others an affi

rmative answer to the unspoken question, Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you

rather be more like me?

It is with this repetition that we can begin to locate both the ways in which compulsory able-

bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality are interwoven and the ways in which they might be

contested. In queer theory, Judith Butler is most famous for identifying the repetitions required to

maintain heterosexual hegemony:

e “reality” of heterosexual identities is performatively constituted through an imitation that sets

itself up as the origin and the ground of all imitations. In other words, heterosexuality is always in

the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself—and failing.

Precisely because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of heterosexual identity

is propelled into an endless repetition of itself. (“Imitation,” 21)

If anything, the emphasis on identities that are constituted through repetitive performances is even

more central to compulsory able-bodiedness—think, aft er all, of how many institutions in our cul-

ture are showcases for able-bodied performance. Moreover, as with heterosexuality, this repetition is

bound to fail, as the ideal able-bodied identity can never, once and for all, be achieved. Able-bodied

identity and heterosexual identity are linked in their mutual impossibility and in their mutual in-

comprehensibility—they are incomprehensible in that each is an identity that is simultaneously the

ground on which all identities supposedly rest and an impressive achievement that is always deferred

and thus never really guaranteed. Hence Butler’s queer theories of gender performativity could be

easily extended to disability studies, as this slightly paraphrased excerpt from Gender Trouble might

suggest (I substitute, by bracketing, terms having to do literally with embodiment for Butler’s terms

of gender and sexuality):

[Able-bodiedness] off ers normative . . . positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the

persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals [able-bodied-

ness] itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would off er this insight

into [able-bodied identity] as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody

of itself, as an alternative [disabled] perspective. (122)

In short, Butler’s theory of gender trouble might be resignifi ed in the context of queer/disability studies

to highlight what we could call “ability trouble”—meaning not the so-called problem of disability but

the inevitable impossibility, even as it is made compulsory, of an able-bodied identity.

Queer/Disabled Existence

e cultural management of the endemic crises surrounding the performance of heterosexual and

able-bodied identity eff ects a panicked consolidation of hegemonic identities. Th

e most successful

heterosexual subject is the one whose sexuality is not compromised by disability (metaphorized as

queerness); the most successful able-bodied subject is the one whose ability is not compromised

by queerness (metaphorized as disability). Th

is consolidation occurs through complex processes

of confl ation and stereotype: people with disabilities are oft en understood as somehow queer (as

paradoxical stereotypes of the asexual or oversexual person with disabilities would suggest), while

queers are oft en understood as somehow disabled (as ongoing medicalization of identity, similar to

what people with disabilities more generally encounter, would suggest). Once these confl ations are

available in the popular imagination, queer/disabled fi gures can be tolerated and, in fact, utilized in

RT3340X_C024.indd 304

7/11/2006 10:11:05 AM

305

Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence

order to maintain the fi ction that able-bodied heterosexuality is not in crisis. As lesbian existence is

deployed, in Rich’s analysis, to refl ect back heterosexual and patriarchal “realities,” queer/disabled

existence can be deployed to buttress compulsory able-bodiedness. Since queerness and disability

both have the potential to disrupt the performance of able-bodied heterosexuality, both must be safely

contained—embodied—in such fi gures.

In the 1997 fi lm As Good As It Gets, for example, although Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), who

is diagnosed in the fi lm as obsessive-compulsive, is represented visually in many ways that initally

position him in what Martin F. Norden calls “the cinema of isolation” (i.e., Melvin is represented in

ways that link him to other representations of people with disabilities), the trajectory of the fi lm is

toward able-bodied heterosexuality. To eff ect the consolidation of heterosexual and able-bodied norms,

disability and queerness in the fi lm are visibly located elsewhere, in the gay character Simon Bishop

(Greg Kinnear). Over the course of the fi lm, Melvin progressively sheds his own sense of inhabiting

an anomalous body, and disability is fi rmly located in the non-heterosexual character, who is initially

represented as able-bodied, but who ends up, aft er he is attacked and beaten by a group of burglars,

using a wheelchair and cane for most of the fi lm. More important, the disabled/queer fi gure, as in

many other contemporary cultural representations, facilitates the heterosexual romance: Melvin fi rst

learns to accept the diff erences Simon comes to embody, and Simon then encourages Melvin to recon-

cile with his girlfriend, Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt). Having served their purpose, Simon, disability,

and queerness are all hustled off stage together. Th

e fi lm concludes with a fairly traditional romantic

reunion between the (able-bodied) male and female leads.

Critically Queer, Severely Disabled

e crisis surrounding heterosexual identity and able-bodied identity does not automatically lead

to their undoing. Indeed, as this brief consideration of As Good As It Gets should suggest, this crisis

and the anxieties that accompany it can be invoked in a wide range of cultural texts precisely to be

(temporarily) resolved or alleviated. Neither gender trouble nor ability trouble is suffi

cient in and of

itself to unravel compulsory heterosexuality or compulsory able-bodiedness. Butler acknowledges this

problem: “Th

is failure to approximate the norm [ . . . ] is not the same as the subversion of the norm.

ere is no promise that subversion will follow from the reiteration of constitutive norms; there is no

guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion” (“Critically

Queer,” 22; qtd. in Warner, “Normal and Normaller” 168–169, n. 87). For Warner, this acknowledg-

ment in Butler locates a potential gap in her theory, “let us say, between virtually queer and critically

queer” (Warner, “Normal and Normaller,” 168–169, n. 87). In contrast to a virtually queer identity,

which would be experienced by anyone who failed to perform heterosexuality without contradic-

tion and incoherence (i.e., everyone), a critically queer perspective could presumably mobilize the

inevitable failure to approximate the norm, collectively “working the weakness in the norm,” to use

Butler’s phrase (“Critically Queer,” 26).

A similar gap could be located if we appropriate Butler’s theories for disability studies. Everyone is

virtually disabled, both in the sense that able-bodied norms are “intrinsically impossible to embody”

fully, and in the sense that able-bodied status is always temporary, disability being the one identity

category that all people will embody if they live long enough. What we might call a critically disabled

position, however, would diff er from such a virtually disabled position; it would call attention to the

ways in which the disability rights movement and disability studies have resisted the demands of

compulsory able-bodiedness and have demanded access to a newly imagined and newly confi gured

public sphere where full participation is not contingent on an able body.

We might, in fact, extend the concept and see such a perspective not as critically disabled but rather

as severely disabled, with severe performing work similar to the critically queer work of fabulous.

Tony Kushner writes:

RT3340X_C024.indd 305

7/11/2006 10:11:05 AM

Robert McRuer

306

Fabulous became a popular word in the queer community—well, it was never unpopular, but for a

while it became a battle cry of a new queer politics, carnival and camp, aggressively fruity, celebratory

and tough like a streetwise drag queen: “FAAAAABULOUS!” [ . . . ] Fabulous is one of those words that

provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular, usually oppressed,

subculture’s most distinctive, invigorating features. (vii)

Severe, though less common than fabulous, has a similar queer history: a severe critique is a fi erce

critique, a defi ant critique, one that thoroughly and carefully reads a situation—and I mean reading

in the street sense of loudly calling out the inadequacies of a given situation, person, text, or ideology.

“Severely disabled,” according to such a queer conception, would reverse the able-bodied understanding

of severely disabled bodies as the most marginalized, the most excluded from a privileged and always

elusive normalcy, and would instead suggest that it is precisely those bodies that are best positioned

to refuse “mere toleration” and to call out the inadequacies of compulsory able- bodiedness. Whether

it is the “army of one-breasted women” Audre Lorde imagines descending on the Capitol; the Roll-

ing Quads, whose resistance sparked the independent living movement in Berkeley, California; Deaf

students shutting down Gallaudet University in the Deaf President Now action; or ACT UP storming

the National Institutes of Health or the Food and Drug Administration, severely disabled/critically

queer bodies have already generated ability trouble that remaps the public sphere and reimagines and

reshapes the limited forms of embodiment and desire proff ered by the systems that would contain

us all.

10

Compulsory heterosexuality is intertwined with compulsory able-bodiedness; both systems work

to (re)produce the able body and heterosexuality. But precisely because these systems depend on a

queer/disabled existence that can never quite be contained, able-bodied heterosexuality’s hegemony is

always in danger of being disrupted. I draw attention to critically queer, severely disabled possibilities

to further an incorporation of the two fi elds, queer theory and disability studies, in the hope that such a

collaboration (which in some cases is already occurring, even when it is not acknowledged or explicitly

named as such) will exacerbate, in more productive ways, the crisis of authority that currently besets

heterosexual/able-bodied norms. Instead of invoking the crisis in order to resolve it (as in a fi lm like

As Good As It Gets), I would argue that a queer/disability studies (in productive conversations with

disabled/queer movements outside the academy) can continuously invoke, in order to further the

crisis, the inadequate resolutions that compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness

off er us. And in contrast to an able-bodied culture that holds out the promise of a substantive (but

paradoxically always elusive) ideal, a queer/disabled perspective would resist delimiting the kinds

of bodies and abilities that are acceptable or that will bring about change. Ideally, a queer/disability

studies—like the term queer itself—might function “oppositionally and relationally but not necessarily

substantively, not as a positivity but as a positionality, not as a thing, but as a resistance to the norm”

(Halperin, 66). Of course, in calling for a queer/disability studies without a necessary substance, I hope

it is clear that I do not mean to deny the materiality of queer/disabled bodies, as it is precisely those

material bodies that have populated the movements and brought about the changes detailed above.

Rather, I mean to argue that critical queerness and severe disability are about collectively transforming

(in ways that cannot necessarily be predicted in advance) the substantive uses to which queer/disabled

existence has been put by a system of compulsory able-bodiedness, about insisting that such a system

is never as good as it gets, and about imagining bodies and desires otherwise.

Notes

1. In 1976, the Brussels Tribunal on Crimes against Women identifi ed “compulsory heterosexuality” as one such crime

(Katz, 26). A year earlier, in her important article “Th

e Traffi

c in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Gayle

Rubin examined the ways in which “obligatory heterosexuality” and “compulsory heterosexuality” function in what she

theorized as a larger sex/gender system (179, 198; cited in Katz, 132). Rich’s 1980 article, which has been widely cited

and reproduced since its initial publication, was one of the most extensive analyses of compulsory heterosexuality in

feminism. I agree with Jonathan Ned Katz’s insistence that the concept is redundant because “any society split between

RT3340X_C024.indd 306

7/11/2006 10:11:05 AM

307

Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence

heterosexual and homosexual is compulsory” (164), but I also acknowledge the historical and critical usefulness of the

phrase. It is easier to understand the ways in which a society split between heterosexual and homosexual is compulsory

precisely because of feminist deployments of the redundancy of compulsory heterosexuality. I would also suggest that

popular queer theorizing outside of the academy (from drag performances to activist street theater) has oft en employed

redundancy performatively to make a critical point.

2. In an eff ort to forge a political connection between all women, Rich uses the terms “lesbian” and “lesbian continuum”

to describe a vast array of sexual and aff ectional connections throughout history, many of which emerge from historical

and cultural conditions quite diff erent from those that have made possible the identity of lesbian (192–199). Moreover,

by using “lesbian continuum” to affi

rm the connection between lesbian and heterosexual women, Rich eff aces the cultural

and sexual specifi city of contemporary lesbian existence.

3. Th

e incorporation of queer theory and disability studies that I argue for here is still in its infancy. It is in cultural activ-

ism and cultural theory about AIDS (such as John Nguyet Erni’s Unstable Frontiers or Cindy Patton’s Fatal Advice) that

a collaboration between queer theory and disability studies is already proceeding and has been for some time, even

though it is not yet acknowledged or explicitly named as such. Michael Davidson’s “Strange Blood: Hemophobia and

the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation” is one of the fi nest analyses to date of the connections between disability

studies and queer theory.

4. Th

e collective projects that I refer to are, of course, the projects of gay liberation and queer studies in the academy and

the disability rights movement and disability studies in the academy. Th

is chapter is part of my own contribution to these

projects and is part of my longer work in progress, titled Crip Th

eory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability.

5. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder are in line with many scholars working in disability studies when they point out the

“ominous silence in the humanities” on the subject of disability (1). See, for other examples, Simi Linton’s discussion

of the “divided curriculum” (71–116), and assertions by Rosemarie Garland-Th

omson and by Lennard Davis about the

necessity of examining disability alongside other categories of diff erence such as race, class, gender, and sexuality (Gar-

land-Th

omson, 5; Davis, xi).

6. Disability studies is not the only fi eld Vincent has attacked in the mainstream media; see her article “Th

e Future of

Queer: Wedded to Orthodoxy,” which mocks academic queer theory. Neither being disabled nor being gay or lesbian

in and of itself guarantees the critical consciousness generated in the disability rights or queer movements, or in queer

theory or disability studies: Vincent herself is a lesbian journalist, but her writing clearly supports both able-bodied and

heterosexual norms. Instead of a stigmaphilic response to queer/disabled existence, fi nding “a commonality with those

who suff er from stigma, and in this alternative realm [learning] to value the very things the rest of the world despises”

(Warner, Trouble, 43), Vincent reproduces the dominant culture’s stigmaphobic response. See Warner’s discussion of

Erving Goff man’s concepts of stigmaphobe and stigmaphile (41–45).

7. Michel Foucault’s discussion of “docile bodies” and his theories of disciplinary practices are in the background of much

of my analysis here (135–169).

8. Th

e consolidation of able-bodied and heterosexuality identity is probably most common in mainstream fi lms and televi-

sion movies about AIDS, even—or perhaps especially—when those fi lms are marketed as new and daring.” Th

e 1997

Christopher Reeve-directed HBO fi lm In the Gloaming is an example. In the fi lm, the disabled/queer character (yet again,

in a tradition that reaches back to An Early Frost [1985]), is eliminated at the end but not before eff ecting a healing of the

heteronormative family. As Simon Watney writes about An Early Frost, “Th

e closing shot [ . . . ] shows a ‘family album’

picture. [ . . . ] A traumatic episode is over. Th

e family closes ranks, with the problem son conveniently dispatched, and life

getting back to normal” (114). I am focusing on a non-AIDS-related fi lm about disability and homosexuality, because I

think the processes I theorize here have a much wider currency and can be found in many cultural texts that attempt to

represent queerness or disability. Th

ere is not space here to analyze As Good As It Gets fully; for a more comprehensive

close reading of how heterosexual/able-bodied consolidation works in the fi lm and other cultural texts, see my article

“As Good As It Gets: Queer Th

eory and Critical Disability.” I do not, incidentally, think that these processes are unique to

fi ctional texts: the MLA’s annual Job Information List, for instance, provides evidence of other locations where heterosexual

and able-bodied norms support each other while ostensibly allowing for tolerance of queerness and disability. Th

e recent

high visibility of queer studies and disability studies on university press lists, conference proceedings, and even syllabi

has not necessarily translated into more jobs for disabled/queer scholars.

9. See my discussion of Butler, Gloria Anzaldua, and critical queerness in Th

e Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American

Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (149–153).

10. On the history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), see Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston’s AIDS Demo-

Graphics. Lorde recounts her experiences with breast cancer and imagines a movement of one-breasted women in Th

Cancer Journals. Joseph P. Shapiro recounts both the history of the Rolling Quads and the Independent Living Movement

and the Deaf President Now action in No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (41–58;

74–85). Deaf activists have insisted for some time that deafness should not be understood as a disability and that people

living with deafness, instead, should be seen as having a distinct language and culture. As the disability rights movement

has matured, however, some Deaf activists and scholars in Deaf studies have rethought this position and have claimed

disability (that is, disability revalued by a disability rights movement and disability studies) in an attempt to affi

rm a

coalition with other people with disabilities. It is precisely such a reclaiming of disability that I want to stress here with

my emphasis on severe disability.

RT3340X_C024.indd 307

7/11/2006 10:11:06 AM

Robert McRuer

308

Works Cited

As Good As It Gets. Dir. James L. Brooks. Perf. Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear. TriStar, 1997.

Berube, Michael. Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. New York: Vintage-Random House,

1996.

Butler, Judith. “Critically Queer.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1.1 (1993): 17–32

———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

———. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Th

eories, Gay Th

eories, edited by Diana Fuss, (13–31).

New York: Routledge, 1991.

Crimp, Douglas, and Adam Rolston. AIDS DemoGraphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.

Davidson, Michael. “Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation.” In Beyond the Binary:

Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, edited by Timothy Powell (39–60). New Brunswick: Rutgers

UP, 1999.

Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.

Erni, John Nguyet. Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of “Curing” AIDS. Minneapolis: U of Min-

nesota P, 1994.

In the Gloaming. Dir. Christopher Reeve. Perf. Glenn Close, Robert Sean Leonard, and David Strathairn. HBO, 1997.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: Th

e Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage-Random

House, 1977.

Garland-Th

omson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New

York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Th

e Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Dutton, 1995.

Kushner, Tony. “Foreword: Notes Toward a Th

eater of the Fabulous.” In Staging Lives: An Anthology of Contemporary Gay

eater, edited by John M. Clum, vii–ix. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996.

Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: NYU Press, 1998.

Lorde, Audre. Th

e Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980.

McRuer, Robert. “As Good As It Gets: Queer Th

eory and Critical Disability.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.1–2

(2003): 79–105.

———. Crip Th

eory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: NYU Press, 2006.

———. Th

e Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. New

York: NYU Press, 1997.

Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. “Introduction: Disability Studies and the Double Bind of Representation.” In Th

Body and Physical Diff erence: Discourses of Disability, edited by Mitchell and Snyder, 1–31. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan

P, 1997.

Norden, Martin F. Th

e Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.

Patton, Cindy. Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” In Powers of Desire: Th

e Politics of Sexuality, edited by

Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Th

ompson, 177–205. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983.

Rubin, Gayle. “Th

e Traffi

c in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited

by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. .

Shapiro, Joseph P. No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. New York: Times Books-Random

House, 1993.

Vincent, Norah. “Enabling Disabled Scholarship.” Salon. Aug. 18, 1999. Available at http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/08/18/

disability

———. “Th

e Future of Queer: Wedded to Orthodoxy.” Th

e Village Voice 22 Feb. 2000: 16.

Warner, Michael. “Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5.2 (1999):

119–171.

———. Th

e Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Th

e Free Press, 1999.

Watney, Simon. Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

Wendell, Susan. Th

e Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Refl ections on Disability. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.

RT3340X_C024.indd 308

7/11/2006 10:11:06 AM

309

The Vulnerable Articulate

James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney

Marquard Smith

Prosthetics, Aesthetics, Erotics

is chapter circles around a particular question: what kinds of erotic fantasies are being played out

across medical, commercial, and later avant-garde images of the body of the female amputee in our

Western visual culture? In attending to this question, my aim is to consider how and why these im-

ages articulate the subject of prosthesis in academic discourse with regards to what Vivian Sobchack

has called “a tropological currency for describing a vague and shift ing constellation of relationships

between bodies, technologies, and subjectivities.”

Although these images that point towards the con-

fl uence of prosthetics, aesthetics, and erotics are oft en problematic in the extreme, and the arguments

that fasten themselves to and emanate from them are similarly somewhat awkward, it is my hope that

asking this question will make certain previously unthinkable possibilities available.

Flirting with Techno-fetishism

I have of late been fl irting with techno-fetishism. By techno-fetishism I refer simply to that well-known

and wide spread series of cultural practices acted out by academics, writers, artists, and others who

fetishize technology in their writings and art-making both within the confi nes of their intellectual

communities and in everyday life. From the start, I’m happy to acknowledge that techno-fetishism is

a practice of a “perverse” kind.

Fetishes always are in the West, seeing as how, since at least the late

nineteenth-century’s epistemological explosion of perversions, the presence of fetishistic practices

and objects marks the distinction between the “normal” and the “abnormal,” the normative and the

pathological, the well hinged and the unhinged, the “straight” and the “perverse.” We will remember that

for Michel Foucault in volume 1 of Th

e History of Sexuality fetishism was the “master perversion.”

is chapter is well disposed toward perverse, fetishistic practices and objects in general. But it is

wary of the idea of techno-fetishism, a pernicious notion whose cause for concern is its dangerously

implicit metaphorical opportunism. Philosophers of technology are prone to take advantage of meta-

phorical opportunities that are made available by thinking and writing about technology, and about

the technologization of being. Th

ey tend to indulge in a metaphorical poetics of technologization at

the expense of the more mundane reality of material lives that are lived through technology and the

body as it is experienced through the technology that it must employ—to the extent, for instance, that

the fi gure of the disabled body has for them become a living, shining embodiment of post-human

existence in prosthetic times.

Even so, or perhaps because of this, this chapter must become intimate

with techno-fetishism to gauge its impact on the constellation of bodies, technologies, and subjectivi-

ties—without ever losing sight of its potential dangers or my complicity with it.

RT3340X_C025.indd 309

7/11/2006 10:13:37 AM

Marquard Smith

310

Maintaining this fraught dialectic between material and the metaphorical, the literal and the fi g-

ural, fl esh and poetics, is the most productive way of engaging with the central concerns of this essay,

the “constellation . . . of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities” in all of their real and phantasmatic,

grounded and ungrounded possibilities. Maintaining this dialectic becomes so pressing because it

is only in attending to both the literal, material, and fl eshy nature of things and fl irting with techno-

fetishism as a practice that involves an aestheticization, a poeticization, and a metaphorization of “the

prosthetic”—as what Sobchack calls an “unfl eshed” out catchword—that one can make use of such

possibilities without becoming unduly sympathetic towards the very things one admonishes.

To this end, the following speculations are staged in two parts. Part 1 considers the role that “passing”

plays in the discourse of prosthesis, and how the challenge that the amputee faces in trying to “pass” for

something that they are not turns on questions of visibility and invisibility. To demonstrate this I draw

on photographs from the early twentieth century that both follow a precedent set in medical imagery in

the nineteenth century and pursue commercial ends that they off er us ways to take in the intermittent

oscillation between the visible and the invisible that engenders a fetishistic eroticization of the female

amputees represented in the images. Part 2 focuses on the American double amputee paralympian

athlete Aimee Mullins. Mullins appeared provocatively in a Nick Knight photo shoot for an issue of

the fashion magazine Dazed and Confuse, guest edited by fashion designer Alexander McQueen in

1998; adorned the catwalk, Barbie doll-like on a revolving pedestal in McQueen’s 1999 Spring-Summer

Collection in London; and sprinted through the desert landscape of a television advertisement for the

British Internet service provider Freeserve in 2000 on her carbon-graphite “cheetah” legs designed

by Van Phillips. Here I shall be concentrating on Mullins in a more recent fi ne art context—the latest

episode of American artist and fi lmmaker Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle released in 2002—in

order to consider how she is drawn on here to both re-affi

rm the mechanisms and the fantasies of

techno-fetishism and at the same time off er some other nicely surprising possibilities.

Overall, then, I look to account for how these two historically distinct yet conceptually linked visual

renderings of the confl uences of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities as they are spun through the

prism of prosthetics, aesthetics, and erotics makes it possible for us to begin to articulate something

neglected and thus worthy of note in the etymology of perversion. Th

is is to say that an etymology of

perversion makes it possible to acknowledge, open up, and seek to separate the more obvious perverse

practices of techno-fetishism as practices of an erotic kind from a far more fascinating thread of the

genealogy of perversion—that is already apparent in Haverlock Ellis’s sexology, Max Nordau’s studies

in degeneration, and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis—in which the matter of sexuality is but one

part of perversion’s desire to, in fact, mimic a “turning away” from such sexuality.

e reason to insist upon the prospect of this separation—between the feat of perverting itself and

perversions of a sexual kind—is founded on the need to preserve the promise of the former and to

be wary of the sleight of hand of the latter. Th

at is, to be wary of perversion’s fetishizing in general, its

fetishizing of technology in particular, its techno-fetishism, its ability to make things disappear, its

imperative to loss. To put it another way, my endeavor here is to trace and rub up against the points of

articulation between fetishistic practices, fetishistic objects, and perversion itself. To do so is to ques-

tion some of the ways that—following the three primary models of fetishism; the anthropological, the

Marxian, and the Freudian—the matter of fetishism and its supplementary nature turns on or hints

at a disavowal, a displacement, a replacement of or a compensation for something else, a substitute

or surrogate for other things, now lost, that are magical, mysterious, horrifi c. Although I am deeply

suspicious of fetishism’s role in the patterning of human sexuality and subjectivity, what interests me

is the prospect of the perverting (but nonsexualizing) thread of the etymology of this genealogy of

perversion in which it becomes possible to begin to understand the implications of how, as Emily

Apter has put it so succinctly, fetishism necessitates “inanimate or non-human objects, [and] living

part[s] of the body [that are] treated as dead or partial objects substituted for the whole” and how these

inanimate, non-human, or partial objects are surinvested [or overvalued] to the exclusion of all other

targets of desire” [emphasis mine].

To put it more simply, what fascinates me is a decision to “turn

RT3340X_C025.indd 310

7/11/2006 10:13:42 AM

311

The Vulnerable Articulate

away” from perverse and fetishistic practices as being exclusively sexual and to turn toward the way

in which fetishistic objects, including the possibility of animated and animating objects as replacing

our phantasmatic desire for the human body as a totalized union and instead lead us into a malignant,

which is to say enduring investment in things that are not wholly human. For Apter, following Jacques

Lacan, a body is thus “composed of prosthetic parts . . . rather than [being] at risk of . . . loss.”

I believe, then, that certain discourses on prosthesis have something provocative to tell us about

the nature of fetishistic practices and fetishistic objects—especially given the supplementary nature

of these fetishistic objects, that, for Freud at any rate, are only ever body parts or inanimate objects

substituted inappropriately for the sexual object proper, ultimately taking its place and thereby encour-

aging us further to abandon this so called “proper” sexual aim. Since this is in essence the defi nition

of perversion, so by extension the discourse on prosthesis also has the chance to tell us something

unexpected about perversion—the very pathology spawning fetishistic practices. For me, something in

the material and metaphorical articulations of the body and its prosthetic technologies is mirrored in

the historical, theoretical, and morphological structure that we see unfolding in questions of fetishism

and perversion, and as a consequence questions of the emergence of sexuality and eroticism.

Part 1

Passing: Commercial Photography And “Evidence of a New Invisibility”

I really cannot tell you what my friends thought of your work, I believe there was only one word and

that was “marvellous,” and when I had the leg on and began to walk about, I don’t think they fully

realised it was me, aft er walking with a crutch all these years.

I must tell you I had a good deal of practice while at home, I had a mile walk two days aft er I left you

and I did not feel any inconvenience aft er and on Sunday I had the leg on nearly all day, and I only had

the backache’ a little. [emphasis mine]

is letter dated July 19, 1907 is one of a number of such patient testimonies that can be found in the

Osteogenesis Collection at the Science Museum, London. It is attached to an archive of photographs

of products manufactured by James Gillingham of Chard, a maker of artifi cial limbs since around

1866. Th

ese testimonies and images draw attention to the fact that at the heart of the modern dis-

course of prosthesis is the realization that the joining together of bodies and machines is not just a

manufacturing process, or even just an art and a craft . An ethic is in play here that seeks to answer a

challenge of presentation and utility: how an item of prosthetic technology is fashioned industrially,

and also how this piece of machinery is experienced. At stake, then, is how a particular prosthesis is

sculpted and utilized, how it looks and how it works, and how its aesthetic success and its practical

success aff ect the ontology of its wearer, the body’s experience of itself. Th

ese are matters of aesthetics,

ergonomics, and sentience.

Most interesting for my purposes is the quality of invisibility that circles around the presence of

the prosthesis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: as the patient says, when they put

on their leg and began to walk about, they didn’t think their friends fully realised who they were. Like an

uncanny inversion of the phenomenon of the spectral phantom limb which is experienced by many

amputees, here the identity of the patient has been disguised by the prosthetic device, and at the

same time has transformed the patient into someone else by its material existence. Th

is is a perfect

instance of the history of the development of prosthetic technology as it stands, and falls, on its ability

to play hide-and-seek with the truth. Th

is is simultaneously a humanitarian success story and a story

of inevitable failure. One story is about curative therapeutics, a pragmatic episteme of how medicine

and technology come together with a shared compassion for the integrity of the human being to be-

gin a process of reparation, to turn the disabled into the able-bodied. Another story is about an ever

RT3340X_C025.indd 311

7/11/2006 10:13:42 AM

Marquard Smith

312

more frantic eff ort to seek to conceal missing body parts, loss itself, by replacing them with artifi cial

substitutes or surrogates, to replicate or imitate that lost object, an irreconcilable quest, to make the

human body whole again, a will to verisimilitude that, in the end, simply draws attention to its own

inability to approximate the real.

In this patient testimony, then, success and failure turn on the edge between invisibility and vis-

ibility. Success is gauged in terms of invisibility, in terms of not being able to see the prosthetic device

or its consequences. Given this, it is ironic that the success story of prosthesis is legitimated by its

adherence to the truth of reparation when it is in fact determined by hiding the truth, making invisible

the body’s “disability” and the very thing that makes it “able-bodied” again. Th

is sleight of hand allows

the prosthetic wearer to carry out a so-called normal life safe in the knowledge that the rest of the

world is unaware of their disability. But of course, the point is that as eff ective as evidence of this new

invisibility might be in principle and from a distance, much like aesthetic surgery, so it is for prosthetic

technology. In practice, our eyes can be deceiving. Once you get closer, intimate, there is always a

small scar tucked away behind the ear or under the breast, or, in the case of prosthetic technology,

a slightly irregular gait, or, as the letter indicates, a little bit of backache suff ered by the patient, that

evokes a memory, sometimes visible sometimes invisible, that is both a reminder of success and an

admission of the failure to hide this truth.

is discourse of prosthesis as one of invisibility and visibility, success and failure, reparation and

imitation, deceit and display, can be located in debates around aesthetic and cosmetic surgery espe-

cially towards the end of the nineteenth century, although its genealogy goes back much further than

this, and in particular within the deeply ideological subject of “passing.” While “passing” has been

discussed recently by Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam in relation to questions of gender identity,

performativity, and queer sexual practices, it is a topic that has also been revitalized by Sander L. Gil-

man in his cultural history of aesthetic surgery.

In Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of

Aesthetic Surgery, Gilman explores “passing,” an aesthetic and, as I have already suggested, ideological

undertaking, emerging directly out of the racialization of nineteenth-century culture, as a challenge

by which an individual seeks to “pass” for something that they are not. Th

is “passing” has historically

assumed a variety of forms as an individual employs all kinds of aesthetic and medical deceits to be-

come something other than what we are. Th

is is not just a question of masquerading, then, but rather

of actually becoming something other than what we are, looking to pass as, or pass from, say, being

a man to being a woman, or vice versa, from being straight to being gay, or vice versa, from being

black to being white, or vice versa, and so on. (One can see why theorists of gender subversion such

as Butler and Halberstam would fi nd this trope so productive.) Th

rough this operation of passing,

the individual passes from one category to another, for the most part moving in a not unexpected

direction: from a category of exclusion to a community of inclusion, from being an abject pariah

to an object of desire, from being anomalous to being something else more enviable.

And while it

must be kept in mind that “passing” is inherently conservative because, as Gilman reminds us, unlike

reconstructive surgery it is premised on a purely physical metamorphosis in which signs of physical

diff erence, so called pathological signs, are camoufl aged through modifi cation, the consequences are

none the less very real.

As Gilman makes clear, such acts of “passing” do have a profound eff ect on

the correlation between an individual’s desire to overcome their physical stigmatization and their

psychological unhappiness, or, to put it diff erently, the visible eff orts at redesign will have a direct

impact on an individual’s invisible interior emotional architecture.

Much like Gilman’s account of aesthetic surgery in which “techniques must constantly evolve

so as to perfect the illusion that the boundary between the patient and the group [that they wish to

join] never existed,”

developments in prosthetic technology, as I have already indicated, are in prin-

ciple committed to the same evolutionary imperative: working seamlessly in such a way as to make

themselves invisible. Similar to the narrative that takes place in the discourse of aesthetic surgery,

an account of the development of prosthetic technology is caught up in ideological concerns that are

RT3340X_C025.indd 312

7/11/2006 10:13:42 AM

313

The Vulnerable Articulate

similar to those embedded in “passing” and thus might be characterized, as does Gilman for aesthetic

surgery, as “evidence of a new invisibility.”

Given the importance of this evidence of the new invisibility, that the truth and success of the

discourse of prosthesis are premised on hiding the presence of the amputee’s disability, their physical

otherness, and that visibility makes failure all too evident, it is ironic that the photographs of female

amputees produced by James Gillingham do the exact opposite

Download 5.02 Mb.

Do'stlaringiz bilan baham:

1 ... 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 ... 61