It’s only fair
to say at the outset that I don’t know much about rhetoric. I do know a bit about disability though,
from both theoretical and experiential viewpoints, and I am professionally
interested in how people make moral sense of the experience of being (in) a
particular kind of body. So I was
interested to see what the authors collected in this volume thought that the
discourse technique we call rhetoric has to do with bodies, and especially
deviant bodies.

The book’s
three sections deal sequentially with identity, education, and the cultural and
spatial rhetorics of disability. In the
very first paragraph of their introductory chapter Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson
pose the question that the rest of the book will circle around: “[W]hen
Americans think, talk and write about disability, they usually consider it as a
tragedy, illness or defect than an individual body ‘has’ – that is, as personal
and accidental, before or without sociopolitical significance….Why is disability still strongly ‘imbued’
with a meaning that not only points to the personal but actually restricts
thinking about disability in any other way?” (my italics). They go on to
suggest that “this ‘natural’ view of disability is tied to the dominant views
of language and the body”. From this argue that the field of rhetoric can
therefore be an ally of disability studies as an analytic and emancipatory
movement.

As is usually
the case with collections like these, contributions range widely in topic,
style and (it has to be said) quality. Some are innovative, others less so.
Most chapters are accessible, although Nirmala Erevelles’ (“In search of the
disabled subject”) in particular requires a familiarity with the rhetorical
conventions of post-structuralism: it repays the effort, though, as she
provides a fascinating analysis of the limitations of poststructuralist feminist
theory to contribute to disability studies, comparing it with the approach of
historical materialism. Some pieces are more overtly political than others (for
example, Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky, “Putting disability in its place:
it’s not a joking matter”). Some readers will be more drawn to the chapters
that take a historical view (Martha Stoddard Holmes, on “Working (with) the
rhetoric of affliction: autobiographical narratives of Victorians with physical
disabilities”; Hannah Joyner, on “Signs of resistance: deaf perspectives on
linguistic conflict in a nineteenth century Southern family”), others to the
personal accounts that link experience with discursive concerns (Miriamne Ara
Krummel, “Am I MS?”; Deshae E Lott, “Going to class with (going to clash with?)
the disabled person: educators, students, and their spoken and unspoken
negotiations”) or that examine the genre of disability memoir (G Thomas Couser;
“Conflicting paradigms: the rhetorics of disability memoir”). I was most drawn to the unpacking of
rhetorical modes in particular contexts (Ellen L Barton, “Textual practices of
erasure: representations of disability and the founding of the United Way”;
Brenda Jo Brueggemann, “Deafness, literacy, rhetoric: legacies of language and
communication”).

While I would
argue that most disciplines would benefit from a greater understanding of
disability, there are two aspects of disability studies that are particularly
relevant to the psychologically inclined. 
One, of course, is the place of mental health in disability rhetoric.
Catherine Prendergast’s chapter “On the rhetorics of mental disability,”
touches on this. (The title
incidentally raises one of the issues that is not considered by the
predominantly American, predominantly geisteswissenschaftliche
authorship of this collection: that different countries, cultures and
readerships have different ‘rules’ about how to talk about disability. I flinched a bit at seeing schizophrenia
described as a mental disability rather than a mental illness here.) Although most of the chapter is about the
truth claims of people with schizophrenia, their families, and the adherents
and critics of DSM-IV, Prendergast also usefully indicates one of the current
tensions between the worlds of physical disability and mental health. She finds
herself in a quandary, she says, because “the literature on disability would
seem a natural place to turn to find [language with which to understand mental
illness], yet it seems that disability studies, with its emphasis on the body
and not the mind, creates fissures through which attention the mentally
disabled easily falls. One might ask if
there are any discourses in which people with severe mental illness might
comfortably reside.” (p. 46) I suspect that disability studies’ emphasis on the
body may not be the whole story: another reason might be the differential
attribution of responsibility and blame in physical and mental conditions, the
different moral worlds, if you like, that physical disability and mental
illness occupy. Many disabled people
have found a social constructionist model of ‘the disabling society’ more
helpful to understanding disability and guiding political agency, than the
medical model, which sees disability as straightforwardly a pathology located
in an unfortunate individual. If
nothing else, the social model shifts the stigma of disability away from the
individual and his or her deviance. But for those who have experienced
conditions like depression, schizophrenia, eating disorders and so on, the medical
model (and increasingly that is equivalent to the genetic model) has been a
liberation. Where mental illness once
carried the stigma of defective personality or moral calibre, responsibility
can now be dumped in the more neutral explanatory territory of disorderly
neurotransmitters or aberrant genes.

The second
psychological interest is in understanding the mental mechanisms brought into
play, at individual and collective levels, to deal with human
vulnerability. Disability is generally
counted as one of the many nasty ways the body has of letting us down, and most
of the time we’d really rather not think about it. We so much don’t want
to think about it, at least in terms of its possible relevance to our own
lives, that ironically we spend an inordinate amount of effort constructing
ways of keeping the whole idea manageable. Two examples given in this
collection are the role of disabled people in fairy tales (Beth Franks,
“Gutting the golden goose: disability in Grimms’ fairy tales”, in which she found
that disability was present as a theme in an extraordinarily high proportion –
nearly half – of the 85 tales she examined), or by generating rhetorical
strategies that make sure AIDS is something those other people get (Emily F Nye, “The rhetoric of AIDS: a new
taxonomy”). One of Franks’ most striking points is that, after having given a
presentation to her students in which she emphasised that disability in fairy
tales “was primarily a feature of characters who played positive roles and that
it was used as a punishment in only one tale”, what three quarters of them
actually remembered was that
disability was a marker for negative characters. In other words, “we remember messages that conform to our
expectations and dismiss evidence to the contrary” – but this still leaves
unanswered the question of why the expectation that it’s the bad guys who are
disabled, should be so strong. 
Something else is going on here in the relationship between normal and
abnormal that reaches beyond embarrassment, unfamiliarity or resentment at
paying taxes to support disabled people, and my feeling is it would repay
deeper investigation.

An underlying
(unanswered, and possibly unanswerable) question running through this book is,
where do we draw the line between disability and something else? As Nye says in
her chapter, “Perhaps it is a stretch to compare AIDS with a more
‘conventional’ disability, but I argue that people with AIDS undergo a similar
perception of being disabled – they live with a physical and emotional stigma
because of their ‘impairment.” (p.229) The same query can be raised about
mental illness, or indeed about deafness, bearing in mind that some members of
the Deaf community would be adamant that hearing impairment is not a
disability. I found it revealing that deafness is disproportionately
represented in this collection. It is
an obvious disability to turn to in the context of rhetoric, because of the
convoluted connections between deafness and language, and the historical
struggle between signers and oralists. But although the significance of
communication styles to D/deaf identities is clear, I wonder whether the very
fact that speech and language are the key issues in deafness, makes it much too
comfortable an example to pick.

And I think
this reveals the reason why, in the end, I found the book less interesting than
I’d hoped. Although its title is
“Embodied rhetorics”, most of the authors are actually concerned with rhetoric
about (variant) embodiment. They look
at the nondisabled majority representing disability to themselves, from the
outside, and find it inadequate. As Ellen L Barton notes in her chapter on
changing advertising images of disability, even today’s apparently less
patronising ‘supercrip’ representations of disabled individuals “ultimately
erase the complex experience of living with a disability in American [or any
other] society.” But although interesting it is not exactly a new area. (Indeed
many of the chapters could have been in any book on disability that was
critical of the hardline medical model, and in one or two cases the references
to rhetoric looked suspiciously as if they had been put there to suit the
title.) What would have been more innovative – but much harder to do – is to
consider how disability affects rhetoric from the inside: how disabled people
think, talk and write about it, and whether variant embodiment produces a
distinctively different rhetoric.

But I realise
I’m in danger of committing the cardinal sin of book reviewers, and criticising
it for not being the book I want it to be, rather than whether or not it
achieved its stated aim. The editors
write that “Transforming disability will require transforming economic, social,
ethical, and educational practices, reimagining social spaces, and rethinking
ordinary habits…Our own experience has taught us that difference can produce
delight and curiosity, as well as fear and isolation. Difference teaches us to grow, to become other than ourselves, to
push beyond old identities and ways of thinking.” (p.18) Supplemented by other, standard works on the
social model of disability – especially from the British school of disability
studies, which tends to emphasise historical materialism over discourse — this
book will be of use to anyone interested in how we use language both to
construct and to reflect our realities, and who realises that moving forward
into new ways of thinking requires a clear understanding of where we are going
wrong with the old.

© 2003 Jackie Scully

Jackie Scully
lives and teaches in Switzerland. She
is author of Quaker Approaches to Moral Issues in Genetics (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).

Categories: Ethics, Philosophical