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Uncle Sam wants you -- in the dark
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By Daniel Mangin
[08/17/99]

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In May the SDS held its 12th annual conference in Washington. The vast majority of the 250 members are themselves disabled. I attended, hoping to witness this new brand of literary theory at work. Partly due to the flurry of judicial and legislative activity pursuant to the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, disability studies, once an arcane field of literary theory, has begun to attract attention from both the media and the academy. Last year the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a congratulatory piece on the rise of the new field. Meanwhile, several well-respected university presses have begun cranking out the obligatory readers and monographs on the subject. Some schools have even launched DS graduate programs: Syracuse University offers a master's and the University of Illinois at Chicago has its own Ph.D. program.

Following the tradition of leftist identity politics, in which marginal or minority groups embody a surrogate proletariat and a potential instrument of cultural revolution, SDS envisions disabled people as an inherently subversive class. So, as Brown University professor of German Carol Poore asserted in her SDS conference lecture, "No Friend of the Third Reich," disability is actually preferable to ability in that able-bodiedness "is the precondition for being a tool of the ruling class." Disability is, therefore, seditious; and disabled bodies, as Poore put it, are "non-conforming bodies."

Poore drove her point home in her analysis of Arnold Zweig's novel "The Acts of Wandsbeck." In the book, Tom, a crippled man and a committed anti-fascist, helps to bring down a local shopkeeper who is determined to enforce Nazi race laws, which, as we know, subjected disabled people to the same brutal discrimination and genocide as Jews, homosexuals, communists and Gypsies. According to Poore, Tom's disability hard-wires him for political resistance, and thereby separates him organically from the run-of-the-mill German who is equally hard-wired to be fascistic, or to be what Daniel Goldhagen called one of "Hitler's willing executioners." So, like Goldhagen, Poore argued that "the defect is not Tom's, but the larger society's."

No one disputes that this was true in Nazi Germany, but Poore's conclusions didn't seem focused entirely on Germany circa 1945. In the context of a conference where many of the participants appeared to endorse the notion that we are living in what disability studies guru Lennard Davis calls "the United States of Ability," there also lurked the idea that Amerika is also filled with body-fascists, who, if given the chance, would happily exterminate their disabled population. Like the most radical race philosophies in America, according to which it is commonly understood that being white ipso facto makes you racist, the SDS philosophy seemed to endorse the idea that disabled people are martyred revolutionaries, and "normals" are really just Nazis in disguise.

Next page | Is assisted suicide genocide of the disabled?