Material Bodies, Bodies of Narrative

What value do we accord disabled lives? The question was forced, not for the first time, early on in the pandemic. As Lennard Davis put it, “A wartime gut reaction as well as a combination of health ethics templates and cost-benefit analyses assessing whose life is worth saving and whose is less so” created a “eugenics sinkhole” in which disabled people, in particular, were likely to get trapped, their lives defined as deficient, as less-than.1The field of disability studies suggests a different conception of disabled experience. Here the experience of disability is viewed as intrinsic to the human condition, no more a “deficit” than is mortality, even though disability is more unevenly distributed. Three recent essays, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “How We Got to CRISPR: The Dilemma of Being Human,” Emily Violet Maddox’s “Reading Walter Benjamin with a Disability Lens: The Storyteller and The Mummerelehn,” and Sari Altschuler’s “Touching The Scarlet Letter: What Disability History Can Teach Us about Literature,” highlight different ways in which this more subversive notion of disability can be explored from a humanist, humanities-inflected point of view. They encircle dilemmas of historical progress (Garland-Thomson and Maddox) and of hermeneutics (Maddox and Altschuler), showing that disability is often embedded in ostensibly familiar topics of inquiry, the “hidden history” suggested by the disability historian Paul Longmore.2Dealing with utilitarianism and its descendants head-on, Garland-Thomson takes the legacy of eugenics as her topic. She understands eugenics not as a historical relic but as a political-ideological project that survived its post-Nuremberg suppression to return in an ostensibly liberal, “free-market” guise.3 Proponents of eugenics, Garland-Thomson suggests, never shed their belief in the standardization of humanity, even as they learned to distance themselves from the abuse of state power by relying instead on the rhetoric of consumer choice.Disability is, of course, anathema to eugenics—the result of “bad genes” that must be replaced by “good genes” on either the population or the individual level. But disability is also a near synonym for variation—in human embodiment and human experience. Where we draw the line between normality and pathology is not simply a medical judgment but one that is historical, axiological, and political. Calling for “humane technologies” that accommodate and support human variation rather than eliminate it in the name of progress, Garland-Thomson proposes a nonteleological view of humanity that does not seek perfection by eliminating everything deemed abnormal or pathological but instead makes room for their flourishing.4In her essay Maddox similarly critiques historical determinism but evokes a different kind of disability gain. In positioning various marginal figures—mythical, allegorical—in Benjamin’s work as disabled, Maddox proposes to clarify and concentrate the challenge they pose to the normative conceptualizations of the human derived from Enlightenment thinking, but solidified and hardened through the mid-nineteenth-century birth of statistics and the standardizing regimes that attended both late nineteenth-century industrialization and World War I. The “formations of disability” in Benjamin are related to the ubiquity of disabled bodies following the carnage in Europe.5 “These non-normative figures who have been swept away in the grand narratives of progress” are, through their remembered existence, stubborn challenges to that grand narrative.6For her part, Altschuler delves further into the canon and beyond individual embodiment to demonstrate the uses of disability history for literary and cultural studies. Her reading of The Scarlet Letter is grounded in the particularities of nineteenth-century forms of tactile print, but also in the recent turn toward “cripistemologies,” an attempt to deploy insights from disability studies in a critical examination of how some forms of being-in-the-world are privileged over others.7 Altschuler’s reading focuses on the tactile and haptic aspects of the eponymous letter, proposing that these are more narratively significant than previously understood as well as suggestive of the novel-reading technologies of their time.Here, as elsewhere in disability studies, and for that matter in many critical branches of the humanities, the central move is to expose a dominant mode of understanding the world as simply one among many—and to do this by closely examining the relationship between embodiment, materiality, and the social world. Disability studies has long been painfully aware of the materiality of embodiment. As Tobin Siebers pointed out, disabled people—“we of the tender organs”—have historically been conceived as narcissists, incapable of looking beyond their individual embodiment.8 In fact, the reverse is true. Escaping into narcissism is an option that is simply not available to disabled people, who are consistently forced to confront the sociomaterial reality in which they are situated.In recent decades disability studies has come into its own as a global, interdisciplinary field. The humanities-based tradition that predominates in the United States is increasingly brought into dialogue with British and Scandinavian traditions that hew more closely to the social sciences, intermeshed with elements of Continental philosophy and increasing attention to the importance of the global South. The essays reviewed here, while clearly works of literary scholarship, show how disability is, by now almost inevitably, a concept that forces engagement with history, materiality, and epistemology. It is a way of recognizing the world, in its imperfection and its potential

Art · Astrobiology · Literature · Narrative · Physics · Disability Rights and Representation · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Foucault, Power, and Ethics

• Disability Theory

  Tobin Siebers•Disability theory•2008

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• Reading Walter Benjamin with a Disability Lens

  Emily Violet Maddox•Journal of Literary & Cultural…•2021

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• Uncovering the Hidden History of People with Disabilities

  Paul K Longmore, Hugh Gallagher et al.•Reviews in American History•1987

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• TouchingThe Scarlet Letter

  Sari Altschuler•American Literature•2020

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• In the Time of Pandemic, the Deep Structure of Biopower Is Laid Bare

  Lennard J Davis, Lennard Davis•Critical Inquiry•2021

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