... Such a review demonstrates the cultural contingency with which certain bodily differences become disabilities. The author demonstrates a central paradox in contemporary culture. Impairment is a normal part of the human condition, yet is marginalised and invisible within mainstream culture. The impaired body represents the repressed underside of the category of the 'normal' body. Just a cursory look
The first two chapters offer a succinct, if somewhat well worn, review of the historical constitution of disability. The author identifies the social context in which impairments become disabling in Western society. He identifies regulatory practices associated with the factory system and eugenic policies, both of which required uniformly disciplined and statistically 'normal' (ideal) bodies. Such a review demonstrates the cultural contingency with which certain bodily differences become disabilities. The author demonstrates a central paradox in contemporary culture. Impairment is a normal part of the human condition, yet is marginalised and invisible within mainstream culture. The impaired body represents the repressed underside of the category of the 'normal' body. Just a cursory look at official statistics indicates there are about six million disabled people in the UK and forty million disabled people in the USA. Disability is not a side issue but rather a central and pervasive theme in Hollywood movies Disability is everywhere, but able bodied people cannot bear to think about disability, since it challenges their own fantasies of wholeness. Drawing upon Lacan, Davis suggests that disability represents the repressed Real. The imaginary work required to create a unified sense of wholeness is threatened when the 'able' person confronts the body which is symbolically constituted as fragmented, disordered and incomplete. This is why the disabled body creates a sense of the uncanny. It reminds us of an earlier, now repressed stage of early experience, prior to the establishment of a unitary sense of self Enforcing Normalcy becomes particularly interesting, in Chapter Three. Here, Davis documents the constitution of Deaf people within modern culture. (I am following the convention with Deaf studies to use a capitol D when referring to the cultural group of sign language users, and d when referring to people with impaired hearing.) Prior to the 1600's, deaf people existed primarily as isolated individuals with 'hearing impairments'. Davis identifies a marked rise in the centrality of the category of deafness, in the Enlightenment. From 1600 to 1800, alongside the development of print technologies, there was a marked growth in literacy. Reading required 'muteness and attention to non-verbal signs'. As such, reading makes the hearing person temporarily 'deaf'. Under such circumstances, 'the deaf person became the totemic representation of the new [temporarily deafened] reading public... The fascination with conversation in the eighteenth century can be seen as a kind of cultural nostalgia for a form that was in the process of becoming an anachronism...' In other words, deaf people came to represent a loss in the importance of oral communication. By representing such a loss, Davis suggests that 'as with any good totem, the deaf person was both universalised and marginalised' The suggestion implied (although not explicitly stated) seems to be that, in the era of literacy (and a highly visual culture), deaf people's historical 'moment' has arrived. A similar argument might be made for people who are paralysed, but are able to navigate their way around cyberspace with as much agility as the most 'normal' of able bodies. Davis goes on (in Chapter Five) to look at the specific psychological resonance's which silence has for hearing people in modern culture.
-
Subject terms:
-
self-concept, self-determination, social role valorisation, treatment, therapy and treatment, violence, disabilities, hearing impairment;
-
ISBN print:
-
9781859840078