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Uncle Sam wants you -- in the dark
The Navy is trying to sink an exposé of the phony "gay" scandal behind the explosion on the USS Iowa.
By Jeff Stein
[08/18/99]

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Disco Bloodbath
Violent death doesn't get more FABULOUS than the murder of drug dealer Angel Melendez by party promoter Michael Alig.
By Peter Kurth
[08/18/99]

Crackpot authorities
From Wilhelm Reich to Julian Jaynes to H.W. Fowler, I sing of the brilliant, the ambitious and the just a bit mad.
By Mark Wallace
[08/17/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Secrets and lies
I have a past life that would raise the hair on your neck. Do I have to tell my boyfriend?
By Garrison Keillor
[08/17/99]

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"Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst"
A life of one of the great trash novelists argues that (clunky metaphors aside) it's time for a revival.
By Daniel Mangin
[08/17/99]

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Throughout history disabled people have been subjected to isolation, ridicule, torture and endless fantasies about their moral monstrousness. Thus, disabled peoples' fears about fascist societies and eager doctors of death are profoundly understandable. But disability studies has gone a step further and questioned the very notion that society might want to avoid producing disabled individuals. "Many eras have tried to figure out how to get rid of their disabled people," David Mitchell explains, "not only in terms of eugenics and genocide, although that certainly happened, but also cultures fantasize about literally eliminating disability. Think of the Easter Seals slogan, 'Prevent birth defects.' That kind of thing. As if somehow if we were more attentive, we could get rid of disability."

Can Mitchell really mean that the medicines and technologies that help prevent and predict deformities are part of some insidious plot to exterminate disabled people? Is a woman who chooses to take a folic acid supplement during her pregnancy -- a vitamin known to reduce the incidence of birth defects -- embracing a polite modern manifestation of eugenics?

While scholars of disabled studies are appropriating the disabled body as the consummate anti-fascist signifier, they also warn against the "ableist" trap of making disabled people into overloaded symbols. In his lecture on Charles Dickens' "Barnaby Rudge," Patrick McDonagh of Concordia University argued that the intellectually disabled Barnaby Rudge, who leads his fellow citizens to riot against the British government, is used both to symbolize "the mob's moral idiocy" and to reinforce the value of paternal authority. Among SDSers the unspoken rule seems to be that it's kosher to assign symbolic import to disabled folk so long as it's done in the service of Marxist ideology.

At the core of disability studies is a question that has of late occupied many an academic discipline. What is normal? Since Michel Foucault theorized that societies -- not natural laws -- invent the "normal," normalcy has been the focus of fierce debates in women's studies, queer theory and ethnic studies, as well as in more traditional fields like history, political science, literature, sociology and anthropology. Yet in an academic petri dish teeming with peculiar intellectual hybrids, disability studies must be one of the most bizarre creatures the ivory tower has ever spawned.

The ostensible goal of SDS has been to spread acceptance of the disabled into "ableist" culture. But like their queer studies/gay rights counterparts -- who shifted focus from acceptance of gay culture to a more chauvinistic gay pride -- disability mavens are advocating a surreal ideology one might call "disability pride." Not only do SDSers want to declare that disability is normal, they insist that disability should not be associated with disease, and therefore doesn't need curing.

Having taken disability pride to its logical extreme, many SDSers view Western medicine much the same way most homosexuals view reparative psychotherapy. Just as homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual, and is no longer widely accepted as a disorder, the hope seems to be that society will come to understand disability as a kind of alternative lifestyle, or body-style. SDSers refer disparagingly to such remedial approaches as the "medical model," in contrast to the "empowerment model," which locates disabled people on a "continuum of normalcy." In this vein, one conference attendee announced proudly that she had "given up on being fixed," adding with a smile, "It feels good."

But this is not group therapy. It's a budding intellectual movement -- struggling to redefine a portion of our society that has been grossly misrepresented and misunderstood. Does the empowerment model enlighten us about disability's real role in the lives of individuals and society? Or does it simply obfuscate an unpleasant truth with feel-good oxymorons?

In their interrogation of conventional sexual, racial and social categories, postmodern theories have successfully revealed the limitations of much conventional wisdom. Even so, it's hard to deny that something called normalcy exists. The human body is a machine, after all -- one that has evolved functional parts: lungs for breathing, legs for walking, eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, a tongue for speaking and most crucially for all the academics concerned, a brain for thinking. This is science, not culture. How then can we make the case that blind eyes, or deaf ears, or mute tongues are serving the purpose for which they evolved? They are, in purely ergonomic terms, broken, dysfunctional and -- contrary to what SDSers might maintain -- in need of repair, if repair is feasible. When one is dealing with severe physical disabilities, it's difficult to accept that anti-medical definitions of disabilities do anyone any good. As SDSers themselves admit, such disabilities quite often entail a great deal of discomfort and pain, not to mention infuriating inconvenience.

Next page | What is normal? Being disabled?