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But some SDSers maintain that, even if they were presented with a cure for their disabilities, they wouldn't take it. Such rejections of medical and therapeutic interventions are most well known in the deaf community -- a group that has created a rich culture based on sign language. But while sign language can work as a viable substitute for spoken language, it's more difficult to understand how quadriplegic culture might evolve a movement form that would render the ability to walk truly undesirable. This is perhaps the biggest self-delusion at the heart of SDS -- one that you can't entirely begrudge disabled people from indulging. We all lie to ourselves about unpleasant realities, if only just to get through the day.

When asked about this casting-off of cures, Phyllis Rubenfeld said: "You don't really think they believe that, do you? They think it's cool to say that. To some degree you do have to come to terms with your disability, because if you didn't you'd be on so many antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs that it wouldn't be funny. We all engage in denial."

Much like its cousins -- queer studies, women's studies and African-American studies -- disability studies already has a rigid methodology in place, from which few if any of its practitioners stray. In an essay in the Disability Studies Quarterly, Lennard Davis outlined this methodology of "emerging disciplines" into three basic tasks. The first is to expose negative stereotypes of disabled people throughout history and culture. McDonagh is a typical practitioner of this method. Oft-repeated examples of such negative stereotypes include Shakespeare's Richard III and Melville's Captain Ahab.

The second task in SDS is to unearth more positive examples of the disabled. This aims to show us that Western culture is, in fact, chock-full of disabled geniuses. Alexander Pope is one canonical literato that SDSers are fond of calling their own. As David Mitchell says:

Pope was a hunchback with severe scoliosis. Yet, he's famous for creating this perfectly symmetrical poetic style. His poems, for instance, use poetic couplets. It's interesting to see how Pope's experience of his own body influenced his belief in this kind of poetry that was a counterbalance to his own physical life. Pope has had many biographers, including Maynard Mack, who have completely discounted the role of his disability in his work.

Regurgitating a bit of dubious scholarship, Mitchell has also managed to add the Bard himself to the list of luminaries. "New research on the Earl of Oxford, who was actually Shakespeare," says Mitchell, "shows that he had a severe disability. He walked with a cane." (This, incidentally, undermines the idea that Shakespeare's Richard III was the brainchild of an evil normal).

The third and final task in SDS is to create a theory or philosophy of disability that will entirely recast the way our culture has conceptualized disability. This encompasses the so-called "empowerment model" and the drive toward "reforming normalcy."

But, as Phyllis Rubenfeld pointed out, all of this SDS theory isn't really helping anyone except the academic careerists who espouse it: "What bothers me about the theoretical stuff is that that's just being a snob. People would rather teach than work and get their hands dirty in the ditches."

The ditches, of course, are the depressing economic realities that many disabled people face -- most of which disability studies scholars largely ignore. According to Rubenfeld, a distressing number of relatively able-bodied disabled people have been collecting Social Security Disability Insurance since they were 18. Many of them live in government-subsidized (Section 8) housing. Though for the severely disabled who can't work, this kind of government aid is a life-saver, it often condemns them to lifelong poverty and desuetude. For those who could work but don't, SSDI, like welfare, can act as a disincentive to getting a job and finding a place in the real world.

But, aside from being useless to disabled people, SDS theory is also self-contradictory. Take steps one and two above: How can we say that Western culture has demonized, oppressed or ignored the disabled, and then turn around and claim that many of the great works of Western culture were created by illustrious disabled people whose disabilities deeply influenced their work? In this scenario, your Dead White Male hegemony turns out to be Dead, White, Male and Disabled. Now who's oppressing whom?

In his lecture on "Disability Studies in Theory," University of Michigan professor of English Tobin Siebers fell into this trap. After quoting Foucault and postmodern gender theoretician Judith Butler to bolster his assertion that all bodies are socially constructed, he made one exception: "Disabled bodies are a speck of reality beyond the constructed world, the badly turned ankle under society's skirts." He then argued that disability, not ability, might be a better measurement for what is normal since everyone is, at one time or another, disabled. In the womb, he claimed, we are disabled, as we are in the increasing decrepitude of old age. Life, Siebers maintained, is really just a brief window of ability between the natural states of disability. Thus, he concluded, "the able body [not the disabled body] is the true image of the other." The redefinition is complete: disability is normal, and ability is abnormal.

Today, such inversions are typical in scholarly circles. Disability studies is just another example of what has gone so disastrously wrong with leftist identity politics in the academy and with its overarching schema, postmodern theory. Its adherents see all available evidence through the warped lens of their foregone conclusions, rather than deriving those conclusions from an unbiased examination of the evidence. This is scholarship in reverse, and it is profoundly anti-intellectual. Because if you know the answer you're looking for in advance, and if there are no accepted facts in your discipline by which to measure truth and falsehood, then you'll always be able to massage the available evidence to support your conclusions.

Having fallen prey to the same fatuous thinking that once made scholars of racist, sexist and homophobic philosophies academically acceptable, these contemporary scholars glorify those without power instead of those with it. Nietzsche once called this the tyranny of the weak. Scholars are being trained to see hegemony under every bed and so, of course, they do. But in trying to construct a more humane intellectual legacy, they sometimes do damage to the very people they are professing to protect. Ensconced in their increasingly specialized worlds, such scholars have raised theoretical political empowerment over both real political empowerment and the pursuit of truth.

The scholarly world has become a theory factory where Ph.D.s are not considered professionals, much less intellectuals, until 1) they embark on their research with unerring faith in a rote yet radical theoretical paradigm; 2) they apply that paradigm blindly and methodically to every possible victimized subset of humanity; and 3) they neatly invert received bourgeois prejudices on each of those subsets.

So what is to be done? Perhaps the best that real scholars can do is expose the failings of this academic methodology to the students under its influence -- students whose chance at a real education in literature, culture and history is so imperiled.

The only hope may be to realize that trendy secondary sources are vastly overrated, and to return to primary sources, facts and the works of art themselves, not some pre-programmed ideologue's jerry-built interpretation of them. One of the biggest obstacles facing the disabled is that they can't get jobs because, as spokespeople like Phyllis Rubenfeld pointed out, they lack basic math and reading skills. Perhaps the money that's going into disability studies departments should really be going into job training programs. Unfortunately, disability studies graduates won't have much firsthand experience with the ABCs of their chosen disciplines -- they'll be convinced that the Earl of Oxford "was actually" Shakespeare, and they won't have learned how to think for themselves. But at least they'll avoid insidious doctors who wish to treat them, they'll understand their innate role as revolutionaries and, by God, they'll know they're normal.
salon.com | August 18, 1999

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