Disability As a Material Confined to Particular Bodies

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy! Friedrich Ni­et­zsche

Soci­eties, com­mu­ni­ties, and groups are usu­ally based on the prin­ci­ples of obe­di­ence, re­spect, honor, and tol­er­ance; how­ever, in­stead of be­ing ap­plied to every in­di­vid­ual in a re­spec­tive en­vi­ron­ment, these prin­ci­ples be­came sub­verted into state en­forced norms, laws, and rules, which os­tra­cize any­one not con­form­ing to “nor­ma­tive” or “proper” so­cial, phys­i­cal, cog­ni­tive, or eco­nomic abil­i­ties. As a re­sult, we have reached the point where peo­ple fol­low that which does not nec­es­sar­ily bring good to the ma­jor­ity or cre­ate the func­tion­ing sys­tem, but that which ben­e­fits only those who de­vise the rules. For the great part of our lives, we carry the de­sire for be­long­ing—be­long­ing to a fam­ily, group, com­mu­nity, work en­vi­ron­ment, or so­ci­ety at large—which man­i­fests it­self in the de­sire to be ac­cepted and ma­te­ri­al­ized. This de­sire would never be so starkly pre­sent if it was not for the strat­i­fi­ca­tions so­ci­eties cre­ate. Not only do so­ci­eties strat­ify its mem­bers based on their eco­nomic and/​or so­cial ac­com­plish­ments, but also based on the phys­i­cal con­struct(s) of one’s body and the abil­i­ties that body can per­form. Just be­cause the ma­jor­ity of the state’s pop­u­la­tion can per­form cer­tain ac­tiv­i­ties with their bod­ies, any in­di­vid­ual un­able to per­form such ac­tiv­i­ties in the same or sim­i­lar way is im­me­di­ately viewed as dis­abled.

Why is dis­abil­ity as­signed to particular bod­ies? In so­ci­eties with thou­sands or mil­lions of peo­ple, the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of bod­ies seem un­not­i­ca­ble and ir­rel­e­vant, but when placed in a smaller com­mu­nity or group, the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of bod­ies be­come starkly vis­i­ble and sur­pris­ingly of great rel­e­vance. Aren’t all bod­ies par­tic­u­lar and unique in their own way? The same bod­ily parts dif­fer in dif­fer­ent peo­ple, for ex­am­ple my toes may be big­ger than my friends’, or my friends may have big­ger hands than me. To­day, more than ever, we use our bod­ies to shape our iden­ti­ties, our sense of be­long­ing, our fears, de­sires, and frus­tra­tions, but most im­por­tantly, we use our bod­ies to voice that which we can­not/​are not per­mit­ted to voice through lan­guage. Whether we are able-bod­ied or dis­abled, we use our bod­ies as a ma­te­r­ial or plat­form for the por­trayal of sym­bols. We all par­take in this por­trayal, ei­ther through what we wear or eat and drink, or through our bod­ily ac­tions, and some of us do it in more phys­i­cally ex­pres­sive ways, such as body pierc­ing or body art. In light of this, I would not nec­es­sar­ily say that dis­abil­ity is a ma­te­r­ial lo­cated in par­tic­u­lar bod­ies, but that we all in­habit bod­ies that may po­ten­tially be­come ex­cluded by a group as a whole or the group mem­bers. Dis­abil­ity and dis­abled bod­ies can work as a highly con­struc­tive and ed­u­ca­tional so­cial force, which makes us per­ceive bod­ies from a new persepec­tive, shat­ters bod­ily norms, and makes us face and ques­tion that which we think of as un­com­fort­able, un­de­sir­able, un­in­tel­li­gi­ble.

Ever since Pro­fes­sor Dol­mage posed a ques­tion about the type of lex­i­con that shapes rhetorics, bod­ily rhetorics in par­tic­u­lar, I have been think­ing about whether sign lan­guage could shape and de­fine rhetorics. How does sign lan­guage de­fine a lex­i­con of the stan­dard use of lan­guage? A great ma­jor­ity of hu­mans think in terms of sym­bols and im­ages, which are then ex­pressed through lan­guage. The lan­guges we speak and write have be­come ex­ten­sively mod­i­fied in the course of cen­turies, and most of them have lost the sym­bolic rep­re­se­n­a­tion of let­ters that they once used to pos­sess. This hap­pened even to the cur­rent lingua franca, the mod­ern Eng­lish lan­guage, which was cre­ated through an adop­tion of words from var­i­ous Indo-Eu­ro­pean lan­guages (pri­mar­ily Latin), and through the ex­clu­sion of a great part of the Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish lex­i­con where let­ters, apart from rep­re­sent­ing a par­tic­u­lar phoneme, were writ­ten as spe­cific sym­bols. How have we come to re­place sym­bols with words, ei­ther spo­ken or writ­ten? Sign lan­guage is the lan­guage of sym­bols, with its own gram­mar, syn­tax, mor­phol­ogy, and vo­cab­u­lary. It is prob­a­bly the most sym­bolic lan­guage that has sur­vived—even Chi­nese lan­guage is start­ing to lose its sym­bolic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of al­pha­bet. Is­n’t sign lan­guage the ar­che­typal use of lan­guage, and why can’t sign lan­guage be a pri­mal de­f­i­n­i­tion of rhetorics? The first hu­man com­mu­ni­ties and so­ci­eties were com­mu­ni­cat­ing mainly through the use of sym­bols, with each com­mu­nity de­vel­op­ing its own sym­bol­ism. De­spite the fact that the ma­jor­ity of world’s pop­u­la­tion com­mu­ni­cates through spo­ken medi­ums, we still in­ter­pret and an­a­lyze dreams or ex­pe­ri­ences through dif­fer­ent sym­bols.