My friend Lennard Davis who is one of the leading scholars in the area of Disability Studies has observed that the diversity minded folks in higher education are often opposed to including disability as a form of human diversity in academic culture. Lenny explains this peculiar circumstance in his book Bending Over Backwards, a collection of essays about disability and culture. Here's a quote:
"Indeed, in multicultural curriculum discussions, disability is often struck off the list of required alterities because it is seen as degrading or watering down the integrity of identities. While most faculty would vote for a requirement that African American or Latino or Asian American novels should be read in the university, few would mandate the reading of novels about people with disabilities. A cursory glance at books on diversity and identity shows an almost total absence of disability issues. The extent to which people with disabilities are excluded from the progressive academic agenda is sobering, and the use of ableist language on the part of critics and scholars who routinely turn a "deaf ear" or find a point "lame" or a political act "crippling" is shocking to anyone who is even vaguely aware of the way language is implicated in discrimination and exclusion."
If the issue of exclusion was merely a matter of being left off the reading lists in higher education one might argue that the extraordinary number of first rate memoirs and novels with disability themes that have been published in recent years will take care of the matter in due course. Books like Nancy Mairs Waist High in the World or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are remarkable as much for their poetry as their embodied narratives and you can easily build your own lists of associated literary texts without too much difficulty.
The odd thing is how the diversity minded folks in higher education privilege essentialism and normalcy at the same time. By essentialism I mean the symbolic construction of ethnicity or sexual orientation as a de facto co-efficient of marginalization and exploitation. One is exploited and excluded because being black or Chinese-American or Latino or gay is to be trapped in a reductionist category of representational language that is subborned by the figuration of cultural privilege. "Talking back" to a hegemonic culture is to reframe the terms of the debate but not to alter the nature of identity. In social terms this process of debate strives for equal but seperate identification.
A different way to put this is to say: "I will be equal in my rhetorical place but insistent in my nurture of exclusion." I make no claim or argument for or against this position and merely aim to point out that this dualism of identity exists both inside and outside of higher education.
Disability troubles this dualism because people with disabilities want to claim rhetorical equality in much the same way that other historically marginalized groups have done while simultaneously rejecting the social construction of normalcy–that is they reject the static idea of the body as a marker of any kind of cultural identity. The scholar Rose Marie Garland-Thompson calls those who embrace the healthy body as their primary marker of identification "normates" –a term that carries something of the futility of their position for the human body remains "normal" for merely part of a life and even this is conditional as luck and circumstance will surely dictate.
But by rejecting the static symbolism of the body as having a significant cultural meaning people with disabilities scare the other alterities half to death. If disability is a social construction and nothing more then it follows that racial or gendered identities can also be collapsed. The utopian position that differences are devoid of meaning beyond their historical claims of oppression is a protean dialectic that bothers those who need a stable form of normalcy against which to position their claims for equality and their claims for exclusion.
The irony is that people with disabilities are more progressive than many in academia when it comes to deconstructing the relationship between the physical body and the cultural nausea of embodiment yet they are shut out of the diversity dialogue at their respective colleges and universities because the culture of embodied diversity is deeply troubled by their kind of difference.
Accordingly at all too many campuses disability is remanded like a habitual scofflaw to a purely reactive position–non-academic, rehabilitative, often poorly funded and directed, inchoate and driven by the threat of lawsuits rather than by any visionary ideas. IN turn "real" people with disabilities are not only shut out of the rich diversity cultures of their respective colleges but they are provided with grudging and ineffectual support services.
This isn't the case everywhere. Noted exceptions in the United States include Syracuse University, The Ohio State University, the University of California–most notably at Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
I have grown to believe that difference as weighed against normalcy, whether that's whiteness or physical prowess or heterosexuality (just to name a few of the usual suspects) is a quaintly 19th century position–a "hand me down" from the age of empire and industrial nation states. I am in no way unique for saying so but I point this out because I sense that the stability of normal bodies (whether literal or figurative) is rightly more a matter of celebration than distress. Unless you're a "normate". If that's the case then you have something that's poorly designed and which you will want to protect.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 