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Book Review
Disability/postmodernity: embodying disability theory
Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (eds)
2002 249 pp pages London: Continuum
Cassandra Loeser
Research Centre for Gender Studies, University of South Australia, Magill SA
The editors of this collection set themselves and their colleagues the long overdue and explicitly focused task of 'exploring what post-modernist and post-structuralist scholarship can contribute to our understandings of disability and the diverse experience of disabled people' (p.1). In this modern era, the medical model has proclaimed disability as a resultant of 'abnormal' functioning of the body of an individual. The medical model is challenged by the social model that attempts to decentre the biological body as constitutive of 'disability' by arguing disability is a social construction. Despite the significant challenge posed by the social model to medical frameworks of understanding disability, the contributors argue that the social model remains problematic. This is because of its preoccupation with dichotomies: nature/culture and impairment/disability. Undermining dualities and collapsing hierarchical authorities is a main aim of the book.
The contributors argue that a post modernist intervention into studies of disability is required. With focus on the cultural construction of embodied experience, a postmodernist intervention theoretically opens reflection into the discursive constitution of the subject of disability through specific socio-political arrangements. It also contributes to an understanding of the practical dimensions of the subject of disability by exposing facets of life experience not traditionally 'involved in proposing and implementing institutional policies' (p. xiv). The editors assert the goal of the text is not to displace the social model of disability, but rather to demonstrate how 'Analyses of the subjectivity of those positioned by social structures and practices as having disabilities' (p. xiv) are 'an important complement to and deepening of these political [social model] arguments' (p. xiv). This is, they argue, what a postmodernist contribution to disability studies offers.
The volume opens by setting out some of the key theoretical and conceptual principles that map the postmodern terrain and it various contributions to analyses of disability. Co-authored by Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, chapter one clarifies the theoretical and conceptual approaches adopted in each of sixteen chapters that follow. The diverse contributions to the collection are divided in chapter one by way of their correspondence to and utilization of specific theoretical insights within the postmodern landscape. The post-structuralist contentions of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, the psychoanalytic interventions of Fredric Jameson and the contributions from feminism, queer studies and critical 'race' studies each serve as broad theoretical categories. It is clear, however, that these categories are far from definitive. Some of the subsequent chapters themselves draw upon a multiplicity of theoretical and conceptual frameworks within the postmodern terrain.
The co-authored chapter by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick and the chapter by Jackie Leach Scully engage with facets of Jacques Derrida's conception of difference. They illustrate how we may more successfully address the problematics of sustaining a 'normal/impaired' binary split in the medical/caring encounter involving disabled persons. Luce Irigaray's focus on though and interconnecting bodies is also a significant theme in Price and Shildrick's chapter. This is for disrupting perspectives that maintain the 'touch of the doctor ... represents the exercise of ... power' (p. 70) over disabled bodies. Precisely because 'every subject who can touch and see can be touched and seen by others' (p. 70), Price and Shildrick assert that the body of the assistant or doctor is 'not closed, self-contained, independent of the process of examination or of assisting' (p. 70) but is open to the world of the other. Price and Shildrick's analysis promotes the argument that through touch and the interconnection of bodies in contiguous 'care' situations 'the distinctions between self and other are never firm or final' (p. 73).
Rod Michalko's chapter and John Davis's and Nick Watson's analysis challenge the way disabled childhoods are represented in scholarly and popular literatures as 'tragic' and as being a 'financial burden on society'. These chapters I would claim are some the strongest within the book. They show how a postmodern approach can not only disrupt singular unified identities but also repudiate the supposed reality of universalist knowledges of disability and disabled bodies. This is because they draw on Donna Haraway's commitment to 'situated knowledges' and 'partial truths' to illustrate how science has projected a reality about disabled children's lives to the exclusion of the children's stories themselves. The chapters undertaken by Dan Goodley and Mark Rapley, Anne Wilson and Peter Beresford, Shelly Tremain, Russell Shuttleworth, and James Valentine are also worthy of mention here. They show how the crucial sense of difference necessary to constituting any subject as 'disabled' insistently disorganizes the logics of 'coherence', 'naturalism' and 'unity' that a universalist medical ethics seeks to convey. Each author deals with the concept of discourse - one of the significant legacies of Michel Foucault's work - to produce varying problematisations of contemporary knowledges surrounding impairment and disability.
The chapters provided by Tanya Titchokosky and Johnson Cheu use cognitive mapping to explore spatial and social orientations to disability. These authors see disability as a societal and intersubjective construction and argue for the reconceptualisation of disability in scholarly research not in terms of pathology and continuity of a fixed identity but as tied to temporality, spatiality, movement and ambiguity.
Anita Ghai's chapter uses Gayatri Spival's work on post-colonialism to understand disability in the Indian situation. Ghai argues that 'What is needed in India is an abandonment of the assumptions of essentialism' (p. 95) that construe 'an image of the disabled person ... as an incomplete entity' (p.94). In bringing a 'commitment to take responsibility for modifications that result from the situatedness of knowledge' (p. 96), Ghai recommends that a post-colonial and postmodern approach to understanding different gendered, 'raced' and ethnic disabled identity positionings are of significance in disrupting unified understandings of the subject of disability. 'Post-colonialism can destabilize the totalizing tendencies of imported Western discourse' (p. 96) and in so doing, forward the social models' concern with the project of emancipation for all disabled persons. Ghai's chapter has correlations with Miho Iwakuma's chapter on the significant contributions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to understanding disability. Iwakuma provides a phenomenological account of the intersubjective process of 'becoming' a person with a disability through embodied encounters in the lived everyday. Iwakuma does so to demonstrate how embodied experiential acquaintance is a fundamental criterion for testing the validity of theoretical postulates surrounding disability and disabled bodies. That the lived body is open to different possibilities in the same situation suggests the relation between 'disability', self, body and world is ambiguous.
Disability/postmodernity provides a synthesis and critique of
the modern/postmodern constituting and contesting of 'disability'
'impairment' and 'identity'. Considering there are 17 chapters in the
collection, it is a well-structured resource book that will be
attractive to both educators and students in health and disability
research. The broad spectrum it covers means it will be extremely
helpful for students in sociology and cultural studies. One suggestion
however is that the theoretical brevity of the book may make it
difficult reading for first year undergraduate students despite the
editors' protestations. Yet this minor criticism of the book as a
textbook should not dissuade the reader of student wanting to
understand conceptualisations of disability in the context of post
modern theorisation and debate. The politics of the body is the fulcrum
around which the book balances on one hand a discussion of the social
model and on the other hand a promotion of a postmodern ethics of
disability. The text effectively exposes a shift in thinking about
disability and identity. Disability/postmodernity does well to
signal the emergence of a new postmodernist sensibility that has
largely failed to emerge from the 'social model' approach to disability
research. I found the book both engaging and enjoyable and thoroughly
recommend it.
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