Feminism, Disability, and Embodiment

KIM Q. HALL A recent exhibit on Feminism and Art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts included Barbara Blooms 1995 work, Playboy in Braille.1 For reasons that remain unknown to me, the museum chose to exhibit Blooms work closed, leaving visitors to wonder about the relationship between a copy of a braille Playboy magazine and an exhibit on Feminism and Art. After all, Barbara Bloom did not create the braille edition of the magazine, so why would it be exhibited in an enclosed glass case crediting Barbara Bloom? After further investigation, I learned that Blooms artistic addition to the magazine was the centerfold, a copy of Eve Arnolds 1954 photograph of Marilyn Monroe, fully clothed and reading James Joyces Ulysses ([1922] 1992).2 While perhaps not a conscious interrogation of the complex connections between feminism and disability studies, Barbara Blooms Playboy in Braille nonetheless provides rich interpretive ground for considering how feminist disability studies draws upon and challenges analyses of bodily norms, identity, accommodation, representation, and oppression in both feminism and disability studies, themes addressed by the essays included in this volume. Informed by Michel Foucaults concept of disciplinary normalization (1979), feminist disability studies interrogates the complex web of institutionalized techniques of normalization that sustain patriarchy, white supremacy, class power, compulsory ablebodiedness, and compulsory heterosexuality (McRuer 2002). These myriad, mutually reinforcing techniques of normalization subject bodies that deviate from a white, male, class privileged, ablebodied, and heterosexual norm. Seemingly unrelated technologies such as orthopedic shoes, cosmetic surgery, hearing aids, diet and exercise regimes, prosthetic limbs, anti-depressants, Viagra, and genital surgeries designed to correct intersexed bodies all seek to transform deviant bodies, bodies that threaten to blur and, thus, undermine organizing binaries of social life (such as those dening dominant conceptions of gender and racial identity) into docile bodies that reinforce dominant cultural norms of gendered, raced, and classed bodily function and appearance. Exposing techniques of normalization that shape experiences of oppression provides a way of understanding the connection between all forms of oppression. One norm of embodiment that is made explicit in Blooms Playboy in Braille concerns the primacy of vision in dominant conceptions of communication and knowledge and in classic feminist critiques of the role of the male gaze in the production of femininity. Feminists such as Luce

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Irigaray have offered in uential critiques of the privileged place of sight in the Western philosophical tradition (1993). However, many feminist accounts of the primacy of vision have tended to focus on how a visual economy of sameness and difference consolidates patriarchal power and privilege while leaving disability unaddressed. In her book, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, Rosemarie Garland Thomson3 describes the conceptual and phenomenological link between the gaze and the stare in constituting the otherness of femaleness and disability, noting that [i]f the male gaze makes the normative female a sexual spectacle, then the stare sculpts the disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle (1997, 26). As Thomson makes clear, the framework of feminist disability studies offers a way of understanding the dynamics of the gaze and the stare that enhances both feminism and disability studies. Feminist disability studies provides a theoretical framework for expanding an understanding of historical and ideological connections between marginalized embodiments. In her contribution to this volume Garland-Thomson articulates how both femaleness and disability have been marked as deviations from normal human embodiment, deviations that must be contained or eliminated to maintain the perception of existing social hierarchies as natural and inevitable. Similarly, Barbara Blooms Playboy in Braille problematizes the gaze in ways that reveal connections between sighted female readers and male and female blind readers. Far from the Marilyn Monroe character who describes herself as not very bright in Some Like It Hot (Wilder 1959), Blooms centerfold presents a Marilyn Monroe who dees the dumb blonde sexist stereotype by engaging in serious reading. Rather than inviting the gaze, Marilyn Monroes eyes in this photograph are xed on Joyces Ulysses. Of course, one could argue that vision remains privileged in Blooms piece since reading with her eyes is the activity that presents Marilyn Monroe as an active subject of her own pursuits, rather than a passive object of the gaze. However, I would argue that it is precisely the fact that Marilyn Monroe is reading Ulysses that enables connections between sexism and ableism in Blooms piece. The fact that Marilyn Monroe is reading with her eyes highlights the fact that both blind readers of Playboy and female readers of literature are participating in activities that have historically been denied them; both challenge dominant assumptions of who readers of Playboy and Ulysses are or should be. In the absence of access to the centerfold, a visitor to the Feminism and Art exhibit might be inclined to interpret Blooms work as another feminist critique of pornography. However, this interpretation actually reinforces the norm of vision and the privilege of the sighted to the extent that it understands Blooms piece as nothing but a feminist mockery of

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the frequently encountered claim that those who subscribe to Playboy are interested in only the articles. In such accounts the disabled body is constituted as a spectacle deployed in ways that reinforce the privileged status of the enabled body. 4 The connections Bloom establishes between gender and disability can be further understood when one remembers that Ulysses and the braille Playboy magazine share a history of censorship in the United States. Published in 1922 by Shakespeare and Company in Paris, Joyces Ulysses was banned in England, Ireland, and the United States on the grounds of obscenity. And in 1985 the United States Congress decided to remove funding that enabled the Library of Congress to provide Playboy magazine in Braille, arguing that taxpayers money should not be used to support obscene materials. The ban on the funding of Playboy was later removed. Blooms centerfold evokes this shared history of censorship and critiques both sexism and ableism. Many of the essays in this volume challenge norms of bodily appearance and function that have informed feminist analyses of patriarchal oppression, feminine embodiment, and feminist resistance. In her contribution to this volume, Susannah Mintz, like Bloom, explores the centrality of vision in gendered identity and embodiment. Mintz provides a reading of Georgina Kleeges Sight Unseen that focuses on how the text problematizes vision rather than the disabled female body. Mintz suggests that Kleeges text offers a way to question the role of vision in shaping cultural norms of femininity and a new perspective on the feminist signicance of womens life writing. Rosemarie Garland-Thomsons essay demonstrates how feminist disability theory critiques, builds upon, and transforms both feminist and disability studies and identies four domains of feminist theory that are enhanced when disability is integrated into feminist analysis. The four domains she considers are identity, the body, representation, and activism. Garland-Thomson shows how disability, like gender and race, is a category of analysis and a system of representation that transforms feminist theory. Abby Wilkerson integrates queer theory, feminism, and disability studies in her analysis of the many ways disabled people have been denied sexual agency and, thus, political power. Because sexual agency is central to political agency, the denial of sexual agency to a group is a central feature of the oppression of that group. Like Wilkerson, Ellen Samuels addresses connections between understandings of the body in queer and disability studies. In particular, Samuels critiques the ways in which the work of Judith Butler has tended to be either ignored or appropriated by disability studies scholars. While stressing that Butlers insights regarding the constructed nature of the body are important for disability studies, and that the insights of disability studies are important

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for Butlers and other feminists theories of the body, Samuels cautions against appropriating feminist and queer theories of the body that ignore disabled experience. The essays by Ann Fox and Joan Lipkin and Cindy LaCom discuss respectively how integrating disability transforms feminist theater and postcolonial theory. The joint essay by Fox and Lipkin includes scripts from Lipkins DisAbility Project, a grassroots theater group in St. Louis, and considers the meaning and effects of a disability aesthetic. This essay seeks to explain how feminist disability theater contributes to social change. Cindy LaCom explores connections between postcolonial and disability studies. In particular, LaCom is interested in the previously unacknowledged role of disability in postcolonial deconstructions and reconstructions of gender and nation. LaCom notes that while postcolonial scholars have been cognizant of the afliation between their attempts to understand the Othering of colonial bodies and other struggles for liberation such as antiracism and feminism, they have ignored what disability could add to their analyses of the colonizer/colonized divide. LaComs essay identies the complex cultural work performed by disabled colonized bodies in gender identication and nation-building during postcolonial moments. In her reading of Clear Light of Day and You Have Come Back, LaCom argues that, within postcolonial texts, disabled colonized bodies are both repositories for anxiety surrounding emergent anti-colonial national identity and the monsters against which previously-colonized ablebodied subjects dene themselves as free. Another signicant contribution of feminist disability studies is the framework it provides for critiquing strategies of liberation that work to ultimately eliminate one form of oppression while perpetuating another. In particular, feminist disability studies critiques how disability has often been used in feminist theory as a metaphor for womens oppression in ways that further marginalize and stigmatize disabled women. The conception that women are disabled by patriarchal oppression actually works against feminist efforts to resist and end patriarchal oppression because it is shaped by norms of embodiment that have been used to justify the oppression of those marked as different. Indeed, as some feminist disability scholars have demonstrated, feminist conceptions of patriarchy as disabling have at various moments actively contributed to efforts to institutionalize disabled women.5 Feminist attempts to measure the harms of sexism by the extent to which it disables women furthers an ableist perception of disability as a despised condition that should be prevented or eliminated, a perception that continues to have harmful consequences in the lives of disabled people. Similarly, by claiming that white women should receive the vote in order to exert a more favorable moral inuence on politics and increase the number of voters who would vote in the interests of white supremacy, some white suffrag-

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ists used a rhetorical strategy that relied upon rather than undermined white supremacy and patriarchy. By contrast, feminist disability studies strives to show how liberation requires transforming society to include diverse embodiments. In their essays, Elizabeth Donaldson and April Herndon raise questions about what counts as a disability and explore how some feminist appropriations of disability reinforce disabled womens oppression. Donaldson critiques feminist appropriations of the madwoman as a symbol of feminist rebellion and argues that the madness as rebellion narrative in feminism romanticizes madness in ways that have potentially harmful consequences for women who are mentally ill. Donaldsons essay questions the view that mental illness is a myth. April Herndon argues for a conception of Fat as a political identity that emerges from an awareness of how fat people are disabled in a society that values thinness and pathologizes fatness. Herndon explains how bodily norms and medical models have shaped the experiences of both fat and disabled people. Herndon also criticizes feminist theorists who, in their refusal to understand Fat as a political identity, have perpetuated the view that being fat is a consequence of individual pathology. Furthering an understanding of how even well-intentioned efforts to improve the lives of oppressed people can actually reinforce their oppression, Karen Jung discusses the effects of institutional accommodation policies on chronically ill women. Because chronic illness is an invisible disability, chronically ill women cannot begin the process of requesting accommodation without rst outing themselves as disabled. However, once the chronically ill women in Jungs study identied themselves as disabled, they were subjected to institutional normalizing efforts that had negative effects on their careers. Jungs essay offers an important perspective on the effects of university disability policies on chronically ill women and shows how identifying (or being perceived) as disabled can make one a target for ableist practices that disability policies are supposed to minimize or prevent. The idea for this NWSA Journal special issue on feminist disability studies resulted from my participation in the Summer 2000 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Disability Studies in San Francisco, California. I am indebted to all the participants and presenters at that Institute without whom this project would not have been possible. Our conversations about the intersections of disability, race, gender, class, and sexuality have transformed my thinking about the body, identity, and oppression. I am grateful to each of them for their brilliance. I am also grateful to Maggie McFadden, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Amy Hudnall, Amy Ruth, Kate Caras, Pat Beaver, Marilyn Smith, and the Editorial Board of the NWSA Journal for their belief in the importance of a special issue on feminist disability studies. It is my hope that the essays in this

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volume will provide an opportunity for readers to further consider how feminist disability studies can expand feminist analyses and shape a more inclusive future for Womens Studies. Kim Q. Hall is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Womens Studies Program at Appalachian State University. She is also co-editor (with Chris Cuomo) of Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reections (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld, 1999).

Notes
1. I would like to thank Rebecca Brown at the National Museum of Women in the Arts Library for providing access to the librarys resources on feminist body art. 2. Thanks to Steven Scott at the Steven Scott Gallery in Baltimore and Susan Inglett at the Inglett Gallery in New York for providing further information on Barbara Blooms Playboy in Braille. 3. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is also cited in this introduction and other articles in this issue as Rosemarie Garland Thomson. 4. I use enabled rather than ablebodied here because this term emphasizes the sense in which being ablebodied is made possible by the material, historical, social, and economic environment. Thus, those whose bodily appearance and function approximate norms of embodiment are enabled, and those who deviate most from those norms are disabled. 5. In her essay, Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reections on the History of Mental Retardation Licia Carlson discusses how Margaret Sanger mobilized eugenics rhetoric in an effort to obtain support for birth control (2001). Sanger argued that freeing motherhood would be socially benecial because it could be used to prevent feebleminded women from reproducing.

References
Carlson, Licia. 2001. Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reections on the History of Mental Retardation. In Special Issue on Feminism and Disability, Part I, eds. Eva Kittay, Alexa Schriempf, Anita Silvers, and Susan Wendell, special issue of Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 16(4):124 46. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.

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Irigaray, Luce. 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans.C. Burke and C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Joyce, James. (1922) 1992. Ulysses. New York: Modern Library. McRuer, Robert. Forthcoming. Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Experience. In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, eds. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Brenda Breuggeman, and Sharon Snyder. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilder, Billy. 1959. Some Like It Hot. Hollywood, CA: MGM/UA Studies. Motion Picture.