by Bruce Bawer
I attend a session about “Marxist Cultural Studies” at which the lead speaker is Neil Larsen, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who tells us that in the 1970s literary theory became, quite simply, “Theory,” and Cultural Studies wasn’t even a part of the vocabulary. Back then, Larsen was opposed to Cultural Studies; but now he feels differently, because today’s Cultural Studies “is so capacious that it contains everything.” To be sure, he still questions its “underlying political . . . assumptions” (it’s apparently not Marxist enough for him); but at this point, he says, it’s pointless to tilt at that windmill. Larsen’s talk is about Raymond Williams, a British Marxist critic who is seen as one of the progenitors of Cultural Studies, and about another British Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton, who “popularized” Williams. Larsen slings a lot of jargon about “Hegelian language” and “the experienced power of capitalism” and “the embarrassment of old literary theory.” The “embarrassment” Larsen is referring to is apparently the fact that the entire corpus of literary criticism from Aristotle to T. S. Eliot is, in his eyes, pathetically inadequate because it isn’t postmodern. Larsen is plainly acquainted with that corpus, but he’s also plainly teaching his students to have contempt for a rich tradition with which they haven’t even taken the trouble to become acquainted.
One thing I’ve noticed at this conference is the odd, unacademic way in which many of the participants have cheered one another on, like contestants on American Idol. It’s striking, too, how fervently the speakers insist on the importance of “collective” thinking even as their own “work” reveals an inability to separate their “research” from their eagerness to talk about their own personal experiences, hobbies, enthusiasms, and grievances. Rampant individuality is okay, apparently, as long as it’s framed as somehow having to do with group justice, collective oppression, commodification, capitalism, and so on. The fact is that while Cultural Studies professes hostility to American individuality, it is in practice, more often than not, an exercise in self-absorption and self-indulgence that has less in common with traditional studies in the humanities than with today’s TV talk and reality shows and online social networks.
I hear a talk by Robert Irwin, a professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UC Davis, who notes that the “legitimacy” of Cultural Studies “is still seen as a question mark” in Latin America, where many academics regard it as a fashionable new “colonialist import from North America” and as a threat to “traditional disciplines.” In Irwin’s view, the reason why scholars in other disciplines fear Cultural Studies is that its practitioners are “more sophisticated thinkers” than are their colleagues in fields like literature, history, and sociology. Irwin points out that many Cultural Studies scholars identify as political activists or artists rather than academics, for the goal of Cultural Studies is not mainly to produce scholars but to “foster the development of intellectuals,” many of whom make “political incursions into the public sphere” instead of becoming conventional academics. Specialists in Cultural Studies, he says, “channel political desire into scholarly paradigms”; “we” begin not with “disciplinary tools” but with “questions.”
“Sophisticated thinkers”! “Intellectuals”! It’s Larsen all over, looking down with professed embarrassment at “old literary theory.” Should one laugh or cry? Most of the people presenting papers at this conference are junior professors or graduate students who, by all indications, have only the most rudimentary familiarity with history, literature, philosophy, or any other legitimate field of learning. They haven’t been educated in anything—they’ve only been trained to mimic their teachers’ jargon and given license to pronounce on things about which they know next to nothing. To call them intellectuals distorts the meaning of that word in the most grotesque manner imaginable. Indeed, the discipline’s jargon-ridden rhetoric is, in large part, a way to disguise one’s ignorance of pre-Theory thought, art, literature, and, not least, history. Most of these people’s knowledge of history would appear to consist of a few bullet points about Western imperialism and colonialism; routinely, they talk about slavery and the genocide of Indians as if these extremely well-known chapters of history are unknown to almost everyone except themselves. They never reveal the slightest familiarity with the ancient or medieval world, and know only one thing about the age of empire: whites bad, others victims. To examine objectively a complex topic like British rule in India (which brought pluses along with minuses) is beyond these people’s competence, outside their interest, and entirely off their ideological radar.
When Irwin turns over the lectern to Tamara Spira of the University of California, Santa Cruz, she begins by telling us that she started out as a history student, but switched to Cultural Studies because she found history too “objective.”
2. “Minorized Bodies”: Disability Studies
If there is anything that is a slap in the face to social constructionism, it is physical disability. It is real. It exists. To suggest otherwise—to look into the eyes of people who are constantly in pain, people who require the daily use of wheelchairs or respirators, and to tell them that their afflictions are social constructions—mere linguistic epiphenomena—rather than the very real consequences of accidents or biological processes, is not only palpably untrue but cruel.
How, then, to shape a postmodern identity studies discipline around the fact of disability? Very carefully. While Disability Studies acknowledges the objective reality of disability, it goes as far as it can to diminish the place of biology and medicine in the discourse about disability and to focus on those aspects of the lives of disabled people that don’t entirely resist social constructionist interpretations. The way in which practitioners in this field approach their subject is neatly summed up by the Society for Disability Studies.
The discipline, we are told, “should challenge the view of disability as an individual deficit or defect that can be remedied solely through medical intervention or rehabilitation by ‘experts’ and other service providers. Rather, a program in disability studies should explore models and theories that examine social, political, cultural, and economic factors that define disability and help determine personal and collective responses to difference.” Of course, few would suggest that disability can be remedied “solely” by doctors or therapists. To pretend otherwise is to set up a straw man, thereby making Disability Studies look as if it is saying something new when it is not really saying much of anything at all.
Disability Studies, we are further informed, “should work to de-stigmatize disease, illness, and impairment, including those that cannot be measured or explained by biological science.” This last flourish is typical, implying that, at least in certain cases, Disability Studies is able to go places that biology cannot, provide insights that it cannot, and supply some undefined, beneficial something-or-other that is beyond the purview of medical science.
Also, “while acknowledging that medical research and intervention can be useful, Disability Studies should interrogate the connections between medical practice and stigmatizing disability.” Note the audaciously grudging nature of this “acknowledgment”: can be useful. And note how this “acknowledgment” is immediately undercut by a vague slur against medicine—an implication that stigmatization of disability is intrinsic to the practice of medicine. Disability Studies is not interested in doctors who cure disabilities, or who spend their lives trying to; its focus is rather on describing the actions of doctors in such a way as to minimize the good they do and to maximize the bad, and thereby magnify the role of the Disability Studies scholar.
The Disabled World website admits that there are those in the field who distinguish “physical impairment from social disability,” an approach that “in its most rigid form does not accept that impairment can cause disability at all.” Yet “[s]cholars are increasingly recognizing that the effects of impairment form a central part of many disabled people’s experience, and that these
effects must be included for the social model to still be a valid reflection of that experience.” In other words, some Disability Studies practitioners, in keeping with postmodern orthodoxy, have rejected the idea that physical disability is indeed, by its very nature, disabling, but have been compelled by a reality too overwhelming for even them to deny that certain handicaps can’t be theorized away. Not surprisingly, as Disabled World acknowledges, “[t]he feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ has been particularly influential” in the development of the basic premises of Disability Studies.
There are Ph.D. programs in Disability Studies, the first of which in the United States was founded at the University of Chicago in 1998. The Society for Disability Studies, founded in 1982 as the Section for the Study of Chronic Illness, Impairment, and Disability (SSCIID) and renamed in 1986, holds an annual conference and publishes a journal, Disability Studies Quarterly. Presentations in Disability Studies, moreover, are increasingly common at a range of identity studies gatherings.
At the Queer Studies conference in Berlin, for example, I attend a panel on “Queer Body Politics” at which a young Austrian woman, Heike Raab, discusses the similarities and differences between Queer Studies and Disability (or, as we saw earlier, Crip—short for “cripple”) Studies. Both disciplines, she says, share a focus on “minorized [sic] bodies” (in both, she elaborates, “the body is entwined with cultural systems of knowledge”); but while gays have traditionally been closeted, disabled people used to be publicly displayed at freak shows. Raab speaks of “queering crip and cripping queer” and asks, “Are crip bodies queer bodies, and can we say that queer bodies are crip bodies?”
What’s most striking about Raab’s paper (portions of which she displays in PowerPoint) is that she knows her Queer Studies jargon cold but keeps making simple mistakes in English (such as pronouncing realm “reelm”)—the result being that her paper is even harder to follow than the typical Queer Studies text:
Gender Performance, in the sense of Disability Studies, should aim a strategic confiscation from Gender rather than a deconstruction of Gender.
In the contrary, as Sedgwick’s dictum from The Epistemology of the Closet suggests, queer bodily practices and queer culture are for the most time in history marked from being in the closet.
Queers on Wheels [an organization for gays in wheelchairs] tries an intervention in the hegemonic way of seeing from bodily difference.
Needless to say, the most sacrosanct issue of all in Women’s Studies is abortion rights. In today’s academy, the only remotely acceptable way to criticize a woman’s unlimited right to terminate a pregnancy is to employ intersectionality—to trump the oppression of women, that is, with some other oppression. At the “Our Bodies, Our Shelves” session at the Cultural Studies conference in Berkeley, Daniel Caeton of the University of California, Davis, gives a presentation on “somanormativity,” meaning bodily normality. Caeton, who describes himself as disabled (though the nature of his disability is not visible), fears that amniocentesis and other tests used to detect embryonic or fetal disorders will also be used to “identify and expunge deviants,” and that as a result all potential disabled people will end up “in the medical waste incinerators.” He describes this as “genocide.” Yet how to prevent it? The only way, he tells a large and palpably uneasy audience, is to forbid mothers to abort children simply because they’re disabled. In this regard, he says, “the reproductive rights movement”—indeed, feminism itself—“is at odds with the disability rights movement.” Recalling that early-twentieth-century eugenics prescribed forced sterilization of the “feebleminded,” he notes that “the rhetoric of eugenics has come together with the rhetoric of reproductive rights” to create a nightmare for the disabled.
Since Caeton doesn’t want to be tagged as a right-winger for criticizing unfettered abortion rights, he strives to ground his position in left-wing principles. “In the leftist view,” he says, “it is the mind that has rights, not the body.” Also, while abortion rights are individual rights, disability rights are group rights—and every good leftist knows that the group’s rights trump the individual’s. Yet it’s impossible for Caeton to avoid looking at the individual: he points out that “from the point of view of feminism, a fetus is a clump of cells in a woman’s body,” but “when we recognize the disabled fetus, we do recognize its separate identity. . . . We personify the fetus,” he emphasizes, acknowledging that this divides him from the pro-choice movement, which accords fetuses “no independent human status.” His challenge is clear: “Are adults who require machines to survive also to be considered expendable?” he asks, condemning “technology used to eliminate another person before that person can be recognized to be human.” In conclusion, he insists on the need to “rethink” the relationship between feminism and disability rights. What he doesn’t admit is that there’s no way to “rethink” this matter in a way that will satisfy everyone—either women will continue to enjoy full abortion rights or they won’t.
When it’s time for Q&A, a woman in the almost entirely female audience notes that pro-choice activists and activists for the disabled are “allies” but laments that, indeed, “perhaps there is no solution” to the impasse Caeton has outlined. She questions whether it’s legitimate for Caeton, a man, to address these matters at all; as for the fetus’s rights, she suggests that “rights” is “an old concept” and that it is more au courant to think in terms of “reproductive justice.” Caeton’s reply: “I appreciate your historicizing that accurately.” Someone ventures: “Is this a problem with the verbiage?” Caeton, underscoring that his intention was to “open dialogue” and “stage an intervention,” insists that this isn’t “just an issue of verbiage.” Another audience member adds: “If we use the word anthropomorphize, don’t we run the risk of aiding our enemies in the pro-life movement with their ‘fetal personhood’?” Caeton replies that for him, as a disabled person, this is a life-and-death issue, and “the political expediency of avoiding the tactics of the enemy isn’t worth it for me.” His fellow panelist Lori Greenstone, mentioning that she has a disabled child, dares to ask: “Is there a place for a conversation in the middle—that is, it’s not just pro-life and pro-choice?” Amy Barber (author of that paper on the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) notes that while there are always disabled women at that event, she’s never heard any mention of this conflict—on the contrary, she has friends who are at once feminist activists and activists for the disabled.
A woman in the audience brings in the difference between second- and third-wave feminism, though she underscores that she is not trying “to incarnate that binary.” Another panelist recalls what she describes as “the arc of discourse around the cochlear implant,” reminding everyone that a couple of decades ago there was a debate within the “deaf community” about the use of such implants, which some activists decried because “hearing parents” were “eradicating deaf children” and thereby committing a “genocide of deafness”; today, however, the issue isn’t so politically charged. (She also refers, absurdly, to “deaf individuals’ aptitude to not hear.”) Caeton, though acknowledging the danger of “the right co-opting this” issue, emphasizes that it’s also dangerous “not to recognize the friction” between the pro-choice and disabled rights causes. Indeed, I can’t help concluding that despite Caeton’s strenuous effort to frame his argument from a left-wing, group justice perspective, what he’s presented is, at bottom, a straightforward pro-life argument: the fetus is a human being; abortion is murder. But how mightily he has struggled to distance himself from that cogent formulation! Instead of just speaking the plain truth as he sees it, he has felt obliged, in this feminist setting, to serve up a boatload of double-talk under the guise of nuance and “problematizing.”
Unsurprisingly, given the eagerness of professors and students of identity studies to claim as many labels for themselves as possible, some individuals have sought to expand the definition of disabilit
y to include . . . well, themselves. At the “Wrong/ed Bodies” session at the Cultural Studies conference, Angela Lea Nemecek complained that when she breastfed in her office at the University of Virginia, she was made to feel as if she had a disability. In short, her breastfeeding was “constructed in the workplace” as a disability. Therefore, she reasoned, breastfeeding is a disability and should be protected under the Americans with Disability Act. In addition to offering an example of social constructionist thinking in action, Nemecek embodies an academic phenomenon that might be called Disability Envy—the desire to have something about oneself recognized as a disability, thus increasing by one the number of victim groups one belongs to.
Meanwhile Emily Laurel Smith illustrated just how hostile Disability Studies can be toward medicine, therapy, and medical technology. Smith, a student of American Studies, Disability Studies, and Science/Technology Studies at the University of Minnesota, came to the Cultural Studies conference to talk about the forcing of technology—and thus of “cyborg” status, as she called it—upon disabled people. Smith explained that her mother has multiple sclerosis but refuses to use technology meant to make her life easier—an act that Smith celebrates as “resistance in the face of hegemony, as many of the vendors [of the technology] are able-bodied white men.” Smith described those who invent new technology to aid disabled people as uncaring capitalists, and further asserted that “disabled-rights activists expose normalcy as a construction”—showing that there are, indeed, practitioners of Disability Studies who choose to reject reality and pretend that what disables disabled people isn’t their disabilities but white men, capitalism, and all the other usual suspects.