Manifesto of the Disabled Text

[This is an article Joyelle and I co-wrote for New Ohio Review, while it was still
under Catherine Taylor's excellent editorship.]
Manifesto of the Disabled Text
by Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Gransson, Action Books
1. Discomfort with a translated text is discomfort with a disabled text. (But the text
cant stand on its own! But something is lost, ruined, missing!, etc.)
2. As do disabled bodies, disabled texts create a nervousness with reference to able,
or enabled, texts and bodies. They give the lie to the supposed centeredness,
completeness, originariness of able, enabled, or original bodies and texts. Such
nervousness is already an admission that all is not as stablewith our bodies,
selves, and texts-- as we are led to believe we should believe.
3. Disabled texts need no longer comply with compulsory ablebodiedness.
4. This manifesto is a call for readers, teachers, publishers, editors, and translators
to examine and overcome their discomfort with disabled texts and to resist
compulsory ablebodiedness in their translation, publishing, teaching and reading
practices.
5. But what is compulsory ablebodiedness? The phrase comes from disabilities
studies, and was adapted by the theorist Robert McRuer from Adrienne Richs
paradigm of compulsory heterosexuality. Compulsory ablebodiedness refers to
the destructive, normalizing requirement placed on disabled bodies by society. In
Kim Q. Halls, figuration, below, compulsory ablebodiedness is contiguous with
other destructive and difference-erasing paradigms:
Informed by Michel Foucault's concept of "disciplinary normalization" (1979),
feminist disability studies interrogates the complex web of institutionalized
techniques of normalization that sustain patriarchy, white supremacy, class power,

"compulsory ablebodiedness," and compulsory heterosexuality (McRuer 2002).

These myriad, mutually reinforcing techniques of normalization subject bodies that
deviate from a white, male, class privileged, ablebodied, and heterosexual norm.
Seemingly unrelated technologies such as orthopedic shoes, cosmetic surgery,
hearing aids, diet and exercise regimes, prosthetic limbs, anti-depressants, Viagra,
and genital surgeries designed to correct intersexed bodies all seek to transform
deviant bodies, bodies that threaten to blur and, thus, undermine organizing
binaries of social life (such as those defining dominant conceptions of gender and
racial identity) into docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of
gendered, raced, and classed bodily function and appearance.
6. Translations, as disabled texts, pose the same challenges to the conventional
norm as disabled bodies do. They deviate from monolingual textual expectations,
and are thus deviant. They threaten to blur, and thus undermine, organizing
binaries of social/textual/literary life (such as those defining dominant conceptions
of gender/genre and racial/national/linguistic identity). Compulsory
ablebodiedness requires that translated texts function as docile bodies that
reinforce dominant cultural norms of genred, raced, and classed bodily/textual
function and appearance.
7. When publishers, teachers, readers, or translators themselves require the
translated text read as if it were written in English, as an elegant, fluent good
poem in English, they collude with and enforce such compulsory ablebodiedness.
And this is a best-case scenario, for too often publishers, teachers, and readers
anxiety over translation as an incomplete, diminished, impaired version of an
original results in translation not being published, taught, or read at all.
8. The effects of compulsory ablebodiedness on translation are intense and
repressive. Translations are excluded from most publications, from most prizes,
from most workshops, from most English literature classrooms, and from most
performances.
9. But while affirming McRuers diagnosis of compulsory ablebodiedness and

applying the phrase to the status of translation viz. text culture, we depart from
Halls formulation, quoted above, in that we do not see the prosthesis as symptom
of compulsory ablebodiedness, that is, as a function of the requirement that
disabled bodies or texts pass as original, intact or able.
10. Instead, translation is the prosthetic that calls attention to its own unnaturalness; it is the peg-leg that deterritorializes the body. Then again, it is the
peg-legged lady who refuses to wall-flower, who takes the stage, who is tantamount
to the barn, who invites us to a barn-dance within her own leg wherein we wave our
termitic jaws.
11.Translation is not only the text rendered into a new language; it is the entire
operation. We dont speak of the original and the translation, that is, the original
and the plagiarized copy. When we say translation we mean the entire on-going
process. And this process in all its ongoingness is the prosthetic.
12. We find synchronicity between our model of the prosthetic and that developed
by David Wills in his work of criticism, Prosthesis. Among many wonderful new
paradigms and disruptive subparadigms worked into this prose, Wills suggests
Prosthesis occurs on the border between the living and the lifeless. It represents
the monstrosity of interfering with the integrity of the human body, the act of
unveiling the unnatural within the natural. Translation provides Wills with an
instance of prosthesis which soon swells to include all acts of writing and reading:
Prosthesis treats of whatever arises out of that relation, and of the relation itself,
of the sense and functioning of articulations between matters of two putatively
distinct orders: father/son, flesh/steel, theory/fiction, translation/quotation,
literal/figurative, familiar/academic[] French/English, nature/artifice []
13. Like Wills, we wear prosthetic goggles, theyre the same as our eyes, we see the
translation prosthetics in every text. In Aase Bergs 2001 book Forsla fett (Transfer
Fat), pregnancy that capacious metaphor for the natural, and for the natural,
spontaneous act of poetry writing becomes all prosthesis. Translation (English
tracts of string theory, zombie flicks and D-list movies, science fiction novels) is the

constitutive action of the book. This un-natural prosthetic, this peg-legged text
induces the reader to break down the Swedish language, to see its compounds as
un-natural. In Bergs monstrous figuration, the scientific becomes corporeal and
the corporeal becomes scientific. Spackhuggaren (killer whale) becomes a spack
huggare (blubber biter). The strings of science become umbilical strings. Text and
body become a transfer of monstrous fat.
14. In his 1963 sound experiment Birds of Sweden, concretist poet and artist
yvind Fahlstrm translates Edgar Allen Poes The Raven into whammo a
language based on exclamations from comic books, permutating the poem into an
sonic assemblage of shouts and moans. The prosthetics of the tape-player, of the
translation. At the same time Fahlstrm creates games, in which the human body
enters a room of moveable imagery; he also dreams of a mass-produced, massdistributed project, a game called Babies for Burroughs. It took a strange
marriage with the corporate body of General Electric to birth Fahlstrms
omnivorously omnimedia Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, with a montaged cast of
cyborgs, geniuses and ecstaticians.
15. Berg and Fahlstrom provide pragmatic models for how publishers and
translators can channel their discomfort with the disabled text of translation into
pieces that are multiple and already their own variantsvisible, dynamic,
threatening, prosthetic texts. This may be done by acknowledging and undermining
compulsory ablebodiedness, by dropping the requirement that texts be capable of
standing alone as good or fluent poems, by instead inviting translation-theprocess into and onto page/stage of the publication, revealing itself to be
prosthetic, a mass of umbilical understrings. Practically speaking, this may involve
visual appendages such as notes and hypertext, sonic prosthetics like recordings
and phonetics, and especially the use of hybrid, invented, proximate, one-off pidgin
languages, even the dreaded and verboten translatese. With electronic and web
media, the possiblities can only metastasize.
16. We want to insist: All these suggestions are designed to admit the prosthetic
status of the text. The text is always already prosthetic. In the case of translation

and related practices, prosthetics does not mean to cover up the disabledness of the
text, nor to compensate for it; instead it makes the disabledness visible and takes it
as a catalyst for irrepressible transformations. Translators and publishers will have
to collaborate to bring off this rejection of compulsory publishing conventions.
17. Meanwhile, English and writing teachers must get translation into the
classroom by any means necessary. This may be threatening because it may mean
presenting works over which the teacher herself does not have mastery. Thus the
practical magic by which mastery over the text means mastery over the students
will breakdown. Students and teachers will just have to invent an adventurous
classroom ethos from there.
18. This is our deal now.

Footnotes:
See McRuer, Robert. Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer-Disabled
Existence. In Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Bruggeman and Rosmarie GarlandThomson, eds., Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York; Modern
Language Association of America, 2002.
Hall, Kim Q. Feminism, Disability, and Embodiment. NWSA Journal, Volume 15,
Number 1, Spring 2003. p. 132. Accessed on Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu.libproxy.nd.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v015/15.1hall.pdf, 12/07/2007.
Wills, David. Prosthesis. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics Series. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1995.
Wills, 247
Wills, 10
http://www.ubu.com/sound/fahlstrom.html.