Incorporating Disability Studies into American Studies

by Rosemarie Garland Thomson

The study of disability within an American Studies framework has been wide ranging and rich for sometime. This interest in disability as a field of inquiry is a response to several current trends in American Studies: first, our turn toward studying marginalized groups; second, our concern with the political content of scholarship and pedagogy; third, our critical emphasis on social constructionism; fourth, our lively interest in questions about the body's relation to subjectivity, agency, and identity; and fifth, our commitment to serving under- represented populations. Recognizing the complexities of such seemingly natural representational systems as race and gender has prompted us to investigate more critically the social construction of other bodily differences and material situations that inflect identity. Such inquiries have yielded the vibrant aggregate of critical analyses and pedagogical practices in American Studies that I am calling Disability Studies. The major emphasis of Disability Studies is to shift from a medical model to a minority model in studying disability. Some recent efforts that place disability in a cultural and political frame include studies on such topics as invalidism in women's writing; disability and the ideology of individualism; the traces of disability in autobiographical forms; a critique of telethons, legal theory and disability; feminist disability studies; the politics of appearance; the crippled figure in sentimentalism; politicized approaches to the grotesque, carnivalesque, and liminal; freak shows; and histories of deaf culture. Nevertheless, the coordinates of this dynamic body of scholarly work have been largely unrecognized, disconnected, and unarticulated. So although disability is the subject of wide scholarly interest in American Studies, the overarching disciplinary structures that would unite and support this work are only beginning to emerge. Here are some examples: revisions of the MLA Bibliography are underway that would allow publications about disability to be indexed more accurately; the University of Michigan Press has approved a new series on "Disability and Culture;" conference panels on disability are appearing with increasing frequency at ASA, MLA, and OAH; Routledge is publishing a Disability Studies Reader this year; conferences on the discourses of disability have been held at the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Michigan, and the University of Leeds; several new books, especially Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy and my own Extraordinary Bodies, explicitly theorize disability studies; special journal issues on disability studies are underway; NYU Press is including a book on disability studies in its "Cultural Fronts" series on issues in the profession; several committees within professional organizations now include representatives from disability studies; disability is beginning to be addressed in analyses of identity categories such as race and gender. Institutional apparatuses, structures, and practices such as these both register and foster the nascent field of Disability Studies as a part of cultural studies. The ASA is a leading force in recognizing as well as institutionalizing Disability Studies as a component of American Studies. For example, a series of panels and events focusing on disability is scheduled for Friday, October 31, at the 1997 Annual Meeting in Washington. They include a panel on "Disability and the Cultures of Women,"co-sponsored by the Women's Committee and the Minority Scholars Committee; the viewing and discussion of the international prize-winning documentary film, "Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back;" the first meeting of the Disability Studies and Issues Caucus; and a one-woman show entitled "The Reflections of a Black Deaf Woman," performed by Michelle Banks, founder of New York's Onyx Theater Company. In addition, the Crossroads Project will sponsor a Disability Studies Discussion List. American Quarterly has also recently published articles on disabled veterans in film and on the metaphorics of deafness. The ASA has thus been instrumental in claiming the study of disability as a cultural and political enterprise rather than the exclusive province of disciplines such as rehabilitation, medical pathology, and special education. Disability is not only the focus of current scholarly inquiry, it is a pedagogical issue as well. The topic of disability is emerging as one of our major national concerns on several fronts. Disabled people are

the largest minority group in the United States, and the demographic aging of America promises to increase their presence. Supported by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the landmark civil rights legislation guaranteeing equal access and rights to disabled people, activists and disabled citizens nationwide are insisting that their concerns and presence be recognized--as witnessed by our recently, if temporarily, disabled President Clinton pressing for the inclusion of a wheelchair in the new Franklin Roosevelt Memorial. Complex legal, social, and ethical questions concerning disability, such assisted suicide, abortion rights, and genetic engineering, press our national consciousness insistently. Furthermore, the issue of what constitutes the reasonable accommodation of disabled people that the Americans with Disabilities Act mandates and the challenge of how to fully include disabled people persist in our public and private conversations. In short, disabled people have become a visible and vocal constituency in America today. They are a clientele to be served by the academy, as well. Just as disability is moving from the margins to the center of the national conversation, so disability is being integrated into the American Studies curriculum. In less porous and innovative disciplines, disability is frequently subject to curricular segregation, still too often imagined as a subject only studied in specialized courses. American Studies courses, however, are precisely where such ghettoization can be undone. For example, in American Studies courses, disability can be included as a category of analysis that parallels and intersects gender, race, ethnicity and class. The history of the Disability Rights Movement and its legislative victories could be intertwined with the study of the larger Civil Rights Movement. Literary criticism can point to the roles of disabled figures in film, fiction, autobiography, and performance, as it has on women and people of color. The disabled figure is an ideological construct that both problematizes American individualism and informs our concept of the subject in a democratic order. Moreover, disability is seminal to subjects as varied as welfare, health care, architecture, abortion, urban geography, poverty, identity politics, consumer culture, work, technology, and industrialization. In short, disability is a concept and a community that is deeply imbricated in American Studies if we simply recognize it and include it in all our existing curricula. Not Included: For example, following earlier work such as David Hevey's The Creatures That Time Forgot (Routledge), Barbara Hillyer's Feminism and Disability (U of Oklahoma P), Martin Norden's The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (Rutgers UP), Mary Russo's The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (Routledge), Arthur W. Franks' The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago UP), David Wills' Prosthesis (Stanford UP) and Diane Price Herndl's Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840-1940 (U of North Carolina P) are more recent book- length studies such as Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (Verso) and The Disability Studies Reader (Routledge), Robert Garland's The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Greco-Roman World (Cornell UP), David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's Discourses of Disability: The Body and Physical Difference in the Humanities ( U of Michigan P) and the critical film Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back, Susan Wendell's Rejected Bodies (Routledge), as well as Rosemarie Garland Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (Columbia UP) and Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (NYUP). In addition, Disability Studies essays have appeared in such prestigious journals such as Feminist Studies, American Literature, American Quarterly, College English, and Michigan Quarterly Review, which will publish a special issue in Disability Studies. The University of Michigan Press has inaugurated a series on "Disability and Culture" that has several promising manuscripts under consideration. Moreover, several of these distinguished pieces of scholarship have been awarded prizes: Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy won the Gustavus Meyer Center's Award for Best Scholarship in North America on Human Rights; Mitchell and Snyder's Vital Signs won the Grand Prize for Best Film, 18th World Congress of Rehabilitation International: A Festival of Film; Rosemarie Thomson's essay on Toni Morrison won the Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship. This notable intensification of publishing on Disability Studies signals the arrival of a new area of critical production.