Disability and the Body
Robert Murphy & Becoming Paralyzed
"The lessons learned from the experience of paralysis have profound meaning for our understanding of human culture and the place of the individual within it. The relationship between society and its symbolic standards for acting and evaluating on the one hand, and the strivings and interests of ordinary people on the other are not easily adjusted to each other or mutually supportive. Rather, the individual and culture are essentially in conflict, and history, instead of being the realization of human intentions and cultural values, is commonly a contradiction of both. The study of paralysis is a splendid arena for viewing this struggle of the individual against society, for the disabled are not a breed apart, but a metaphor for the human condition." (Murphy)
WHAT DOES MURPHY MEAN BY THESE STATEMENTS?
- The disabled represent humanity stripped down to its bare essentials (????)
- Illness and impairment are, are social and psychological conditions, as well as somatic problems (????)
- Anatomy may not be destiny, but it is indeed the unstated first assumption in all our enterprises (Simone de Beauvoir) (?????)
- Illness negates the "lack of awareness of the body"-the body can no longer be taken for granted
THE DAMAGED SELF
- What is the experience of being a paraplegic
- physical symptoms: disassociation from the body
- not knowing where your legs are
- bed sore/pain & discomfort
- DEPENDENCY (ramp, wife, children, colleagues,students, wheelchair)
- psychological symptoms
- isolation-being alone in a crowded room (isolation from those who are standing)
- loneliness
- patterns of avoidance by "normals"
- overload with emotion, exhaustion, fear-need a "break", but can not get one
- desire to withdraw from social interaction
- guilt and SHAME
- DEPENDENCY
- is this gendered?
- social symptoms
- infantalization
- Emasculation
- loss of sexuality (gendered???)
- impotence (male)
- female????
- asexual or overly sexed (halo)
- SUPER-GIMP: cover for this loss.
- weakening attributes of the body threaten social/cultural attribution of masculinity.(strength, activity, speed, virility,stamina, fortitude) paralytic tries to compensate for these deficiencies by overachieving in some gendered way
- female: super mom, beautiful appearance, advocate for others in the cause
- male: paralytic athlete, advancement in work, produce children
- Theory of Everything (film)-Stephen Hawings life-an illustration of this.
- loss of social interaction (in chair)
- "The amputee is missing more than a limb, he is missing one of his conceptual links to the world, an anchor of his very existence"
- SUMMARY:
- lowered self-esteem (dependency)
- Invasion and Occupation of thought by the physical deficit (no time for normalcy)
- Strong undercurrent of Anger:
- Acquisition of a new, totally undesirable identity (replace the biography you carefully worked through your whole life)
ATTITUDES TOWARD THE BODY IN AMERICAN CULTURE
- a good body requires exercise and diet that attains the appropriate shape and proportions. This is a reflection of your discipline and moral character
- moral quality supported by the notion of "self-improvement"
- the disabled "contravene" all the values of youth, virility, activity and physical beauty
- disabled present a fearsome possibility about the nature of imperfection in American culture & society
GOFFMAN: DEFERENCE & DEMEANOR
- "each party must comport him/herself as a person of worth and substance, and each must put social space and distance around the self. The other in turn, respects the demeanor by according deference. The extent of this mutual respect varies of course, with the situation and the people involved , and the way in which it is expressed is an artifact of culture. It occurs through the subconscious grammar of gesture and verbal nuance , a language so subtle that it escapes the awareness of both user and hearer, except when it is withheld-as it so often is for the physically impaired (119)"
- disabled are always met with partial withdrawal of deference
- disabled are sometimes seen as evil (pop culture) FACE
- SPREAD--when a physical deformity is generalized to one's character (Beatrice Wright)
- disability is at center stage , the parties involved in conversation must take pains to practice DEVIANCE DISAVOWAL (Fred Davis) where the participants try to conduct themselves as if nothing is amiss.
- TOUCHING is a sign of changed deference
- common bond with others that are disenfranchised
- ease with the opposite sex-NOT A THREAT
SHIFTS IN THE SOCIAL ORDER-Meaning of TOUCH
- Not long after I took up life in a wheelchair, I began to notice other curious shifts and nuances in my social world. After a dentist patted me on the head in 1980, I never returned to his office. But undergraduate students often would touch my arm or shoulder lightly when taking leave of me, something they never did in my walking days, and I found this pleasant. Why? The dentist was putting me in my place and treating me as one wold a child, but the students were affirming a bond. They were reaching over a wall and asserting that they were on my side. I ws a middle-aged professor and just as great an exam threat to them as any other instructor, but my physical impairment brought them closer to me because I was less imposing to them socially (126-127)
TAKING DISABILITY OUT OF THE FRAMEWORK OF DEVIANCE-LIMINALITY
- WHY? --it confuses many issues
- Disability as LIMINALITY
- initiate, isolation, instruction of the initiate, reincorporation into society in a new status)
- rules surrounding the treatment and interaction are unclear
- they are in the transitional phase between isolation and emergence
- Reason that there is such aversion toward the disabled
INCREASING DEPENDENCY
- dependency versus independence
- autonomy versus contingency
- inability to stand anymore
- loss of speech
- loss of shoulders to move wheelchair
TREATED AS CHILDREN
- pat on the head by the dentist
- "lack of autonomy and unreciprocated dependence on others bring debasement of status in American culture---and in many other cultures. Most societies socialize children to share and reciprocate , and also to become autonomous to some degree. Over-dependency and non-reciprocity are considered childish traits, and adults who have them-even if it is not their fault-suffer a reduction in status (201)"
- ESCAPE FROM DEPENDENCY HAS BEEN A CENTRAL THEME IN THE DISABILITY MOVEMENT-independence
EFFECT ON THE FAMILY
- Do I detect a not of impatience? Is she annoyed? Is she overtired? Should I have asked her? Does that slight inflection say, "What in the hell does he want from me now?" This is not completely a concoction of my imagination, for we have been married so long we are thoroughly familiar with each other's rich sub verbal vocabulary of tone, accent, stress, gesture, and facial expression. After all, we had learned in the Amazon to communicate in part sentences, half-words, and grunts. In my disabled mindset however, I pick up the right cues but I alter and magnify them, interpreting a small note of fatigue as a major resentment and reading rejection into a fleeting expression of annoyance. The anticipation of such responses, in turn, affects the way I phrase requests...[T]here is a heightened self awareness and guardedness in our relations that wasn't there before, and that has reduced openness and spontaneity. Our very attempts to avoid conflict through increased tact and delicacy have become part of the problem, not its solution. (214)
- effects on family
- effects on relationships
JARRING BODIES: Dreger
- Does "ambiguous sexual anatomy constitute a "social emergency"?
- hermaphrodites as voicesless disembodied subjects in medical literature
- force the question of What and Who is "normal"
- Conjoined twins and sexual anatomy
- Medicine as a way to "exhibit" unusual anatomies
- separated medical display from pornography
- 19th century- made money/ now modern talk shows are seen as distasteful
- medical professionals believe that they have the RIGHT to seeing, using and owning unusual anatomies
- what is the impact of the call for or surgery for normalization, understanding that one's IDENTITY is grounded in the experience of one's anatomy=elimination of the self?
- unfortunate- in need of paternalistic care
VISUALIZING THE DISABLED BODY-Lennard Davis
- Venus de Milo versus a disabled woman
- symbol of western beauty versus disfigurement (repulsive)
- disability de-eroticizes
- we see good and bad bodies and good and bad body parts
- varying meaning with varying disabilitiremoval defeminizes because breasts symbolize femininity
- removal of foreskin does not diminish masculinity
- the disabled are devalued in all areas of culture and society
- myths: medusa versus venus
- nudity and art
- nude is a PRODUCT of art
- most nudes are female=ART
- female nudes as "masculine" views of the body?
- venus: limbs are brought back through the imagination to eroticize the nude statue
- nudes are absent of bodily processes (also not sexy)
- disabled artists reroute the Medusa "gaze"
- Film: vehicles for delivering images of the body in extreme circumstances
- sex
- dead bodies
- violence
- disability
- enforce the normal body+ display the tension between the normal EROTOCIZED body and the uncanny INCOMPLETE body of the disabled
- WATCH BOXING HELENA
- Helena is the image of de-sexualizing
- she is never shown naked after she is disabled
- her body is not represented as having biological functions
INTEGRATING DISABILITY INTO FEMINIST THEORY
- PURE BODY UNREDEEMED BY MIND AND SPIRIT-disability puts the nbody at the forefront
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