Gendering Disability--"Integrating Disability"

Rosemarie Garland-Thomas in “Integrating Disability” from Gendering Disability examines the ways in which disability theory can borrow from feminist theory. She looks, specifically, at the domains that each share: representation, the body, identity, and activism.

Relevant for my research, Garland-Thomas notes that in regard to prenatal testing for disabilities as a means of modern eugenics [an issue in autism-circles--prenatal screening for autism]:

“[W]e cannot predict or, more precisely, control in advance such equivocal human states as happiness, suffering, or success. Neither is any amount of prenatal engineering going to produce the life that any of us desire and value. Indeed, both hubris and a lack of imagination characterize the prejudicial and reductive assumption that having a disability ruins lives. A vague notion of suffering and its potential deterrence drives much of the logic of elimination that rationalizes selective abortion (Kittay 2000). Life changes and quality are simply far too contingent to justify prenatal prediction.”

Also, relevant: "disability has four aspects: first, it is a system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations; second, it is a relationship between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self" (Garland-Thomson 77).

"The disability system excludes the kinds of bodily forms, functions, impairments, changes, or ambiguities that call into question our cultural fantasy of the body as a neutral, compliant instrument of some transcendent will" (Garland-Thomson 77). I wonder how much of our (collective) fixation with finding the "cause" of and "cure" for autism is related to our fear of our own diminished mental capacities? How much do we fear losing our consciousness? Our abilities to think and rationalize for ourselves? The Terri Schiavo case reflected just how much our society finds abhorrent the mentally disabled mind... And, besides that, if autism can happen to him/her, can it happen to me, too? Or, to a child of mine?


"Normal has inflected beautiful in modernity. What is imagined as excess body fat, the effects of aging, marks of ethnicity such as supposedly Jewish noses, bodily particularities thought of as blemishes or deformities, and marks of history such as scarring and impairments are now expected to be surgically erased to produce an unmarked body. This visually unobtrusive body may then pass unnoticed within the milieu of anonymity that is the hallmark of social relations beyond the personal in modernity. The purpose of aesthetic surgery, as well as the costuming of power, is not to appear unique--or to 'be yourself,' as the ads endlessly promise--but rather not to be conspicuous, not to look different. This flight from the nonconforming body translates into individual efforts to look normal, neutral, unmarked, to not look disabled, queer, ugly, fat, ethnic, or raced" (Garland-Thomson 83). While Garland-Thomson is discussing, it seems, the physically disabled body, I think her observations apply equally to the mentally disabled mind (that's redundant, I know). While seemingly praised for their individuality of mind, autistics are still seen as mentally "abnormal"--a mind needing to be "cured" or fixed. We praise the unique abilities and/or characteristics of some autistics but still seek to normalize their thinking and mental processes.

A quote for my ultrasound images paper (that I would like to submit for publication at some point after developing it more with a section on disability): "The beautiful woman of the twenty-first century is sculpted surgically from top to bottom, generically neutral, all irregularities regularized, all particularities expunged. She is thus nondisabled, deracialized, and de-enthinicized" (Garland-Thomas 83).