Author: Ophelia Benson

Disability studies has hit town. Actually it did that a longish time ago – this reporter may be a little behind the times. I noticed a new ‘Disability studies’ section in the University bookstore several years ago, and there are jokes about the subject in the Dictionary, which we started writing three years ago.

Now disabled people have gotten into the business of problematizing: Disability studies has arrived in academia. Of course, the medical study of disability is long-standing, but the new approach establishes an interdisciplinary field on the model of women’s, queer, and ethnic studies…”Disability studies is us looking out at the world and seeing how that looks to us.” It also critiques “how disability is represented in all kinds of texts—in literature, film, the annals of history.”

Should I be polite and serious and respectful and say I think that sounds like a good idea? But I don’t. I think it’s boring and scab-picky and whiney and trendy and tiresome.

For the past two years, Columbia has hosted a monthly seminar for area faculty and grad students. Organized by Linton and colleagues, its topics range from disability in late capitalism to the intersection of disability and queer studies. Just last May, the field was officially recognized as a division by the Modern Language Association (MLA).

That’s quite a range! From disability in late capitalism to the intersection of disability and queer studies – it’s breathtaking in its scope. And the MLA has recognized it as a division – well no wonder I don’t feel polite and respectful. If it were sociology or history, I might be, but just yet another branch of literary Theory? Er – no thanks.

Disability scholars aim to revolutionize the way disability is imagined in our culture. Rather than pathologizing individuals, they ask how society accommodates different bodies (or doesn’t). Disability, they point out, highlights the dynamic nature of identity itself: Entry into the disabled community could be a matter of an overlooked stop sign or the emergence of a lurking gene.

Cackle! Yeah, I suppose it could. Kind of like an episode of the Twilight Zone – you overlook a stop sign and – run over three pedestrians, and the next thing you know, You Have Entered The Disabled Community.

The what? What community? Why is that a ‘community’? Well we know why – the MLA has just said – because there are studies programs, that’s why. If there are studies, there’s a community. Don’t fret that it seems kind of insulting and stupid and oversimplifying to assume that everyone who has some sort of ‘disability’ therefore belongs to a ‘community’ of people with some sort of disability – it may seem that way but really it’s a Liberation Movement. Or something.

Anyone who’s taken a women’s studies class or read Edward Said will be familiar with the terms of the field. The study of disability, like that of gender, race, and sexual orientation, is rooted in bodies perceived as “other.” All of these disciplines use the language of critical theory—Foucault, with his interrogations of power, the body, and pathology, is big in disability studies. And these related fields can cross-pollinate. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who teaches in the women’s studies department at Emory University, promotes the integration of feminist and disability studies.

Doesn’t that sound exciting! Doesn’t that just sound like a stimulating cross-pollinated field? I’m tempted to enroll at Emory right now, so that I can learn why feminists are disabled and disabled people are feminists and all of them will be saved by the language of critical theory.

Although disability has fruitfully integrated with other identity studies, the field has not always received a warm welcome. Alison Kafer, who teaches feminist and disability studies at Southwestern University, attributes resistance in part to funding, but on a deeper level, she notes that “women and queers and people of color have often been cast as sick. That’s how discrimination was justified.” Now those minorities are saying, “You know what—we’re not sick,” and they shun association with people still seen as defective. The ambivalence is mutual; some disability scholars want to jump from what they see as the sinking ship of identity studies. As University of Illinois at Chicago’s Lennard J. Davis pointed out in a 2004 conference paper, “We are in a twilight of the gods of identity politics, and there is no Richard Wagner to make that crepuscular moment seem nostalgic and tragic.” So disability studies has arrived, but is it too late?

Oh, I do so hope so. I do so hope identity politics and especially identity studies are on a sinking ship. I do so hope scab-picking will at last go out of fashion and people can go on to something better.

But institutionalization may not be the primary goal. As Garland-Thomson says, “We don’t necessarily need people majoring or minoring in disability studies. We need to create a system in which educated people have it as a category of understanding.” She observes that many canonical literary works have a neglected disability aspect: Ahab in Moby Dick is an amputee, Shakespeare’s Richard III is a hunchback…In studying literature—or any subject—disability is simply an additional lens at our disposal.

Yes but – so what? So the hell what? Many ‘canonical’ literary works have people with hair, too; many have people who walk around; many have food; many have travel; many have characters wearing clothes. So what? Does that mean there have to be hair and walking around and food and travel and clothes studies? What do people see through the ‘additional lens’ of disability? Especially, what do they see that requires a new division in the MLA, or section in the bookstore?

Exciting scholarship is being generated. Last March’s issue of the PMLA (the MLA’s publication) featured papers from a recent MLA conference, including “Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women’s Autobiography” and “Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies.”

Exciting? Exciting? Hoo-boy.Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow needs to get out more, or do I mean less.

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Education has an article about criticisms and criticisms of criticisms of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. It’s hard to tell without reading a great many academic blog posts (I read part of one and decided that was more than enough of that), but it all seems to have a whiff of self-righteous orthodoxy-sniffing about it. But since I haven’t actually read all those academic blog posts, I could be wrong about that. But in any case, Jaschik turned up one comment – by a commenter at Crooked Timber – that sounds like exactly the kind of thought that started B&W on its erratic but dogged course.

Both Savage Minds pieces seem to exhibit one of the worst tics of the academic left — a tendency to evaluate arguments exclusively with reference to whether or not they might, in some distorted form, serve the rhetorical purposes of one’s political opponents. It’s exactly the same approach to debate you find coming from the most thuggish members of the war party – whole lines of argument (e.g., Do our actions lead to more terrorism?) are ruled out from the start on the grounds that they stray too close to the other side’s manner of thinking. What is so depressing about this approach isn’t just that it’s bad scholarship. It’s that it rests on a complete misunderstanding of the point of scholarship, or at least a refusal to see arguments as anything rhetorical strategies.

So I felt like preserving that comment.

As Hamlet said, words, words words. They can be so tricky. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident – and it can be very difficult to tell which is going on. Consider this rumination by Hanif Kureishi.

I believed that questions of race, identity and culture were the major issues post-colonial Europe had to face, and that inter-generational conflict was where these conflicts were being played out. The British-born children of immigrants were not only more religious and politically radical than their parents – whose priority had been to establish themselves in the new country – but they despised their parents’ moderation and desire to “compromise” with Britain. To them this seemed weak.

What does he mean by ‘politically radical’ in that paragraph? More religious and politically radical – so by radical he means right-wing radical. But it’s not entirely clear if he knows that’s what he means. I think that’s a confusion a lot of people have – they conflate anger (and, yes, ‘grievance’) and sulkiness and intransigeance and violence with radicalism, meaning (vaguely, sort of) lefty or at least revolutionary radicalism. (‘Revolutionary’ of course is just as tricky, and in the same way. Hitler was a revolutionary. One can have a revolution that’s not an egalitarian or progressive one – to put it mildly.) Maybe that’s one reason there is this weird current of almost-sympathy for Islamist terrorists that is entirely absent in the case of the BNP; maybe that’s one reason the SWP is hooked up with Respect.

But maybe he doesn’t mean radical that way. Anyway he makes some good points later.

These men believed they had access to the Truth, as stated in the Qur’an. There could be no doubt – or even much dispute about moral, social and political problems – because God had the answers. Therefore, for them, to argue with the Truth was like trying to disagree with the facts of geometry. For them the source of all virtue and vice was the pleasure and displeasure of Allah. To be a responsible human being was to submit to this…It is not only in the mosques but also in so-called “faith” schools that such ideas are propagated. The Blair government, while attempting to rid us of radical clerics, has pledged to set up more of these schools, as though a “moderate” closed system is completely different to an “extreme” one.

Exactly.

You can’t ask people to give up their religion; that would be absurd. Religions may be illusions, but these are important and profound illusions. And they will modify as they come into contact with other ideas. This is what an effective multiculturalism is: not a superficial exchange of festivals and food, but a robust and committed exchange of ideas – a conflict that is worth enduring, rather than a war. When it comes to teaching the young, we have the human duty to inform them that there is more than one book in the world, and more than one voice, and that if they wish to have their voices heard by others, everyone else is entitled to the same thing. These children deserve better than an education that comes from liberal guilt.

But that thing about modifying as they come into contact with other ideas – that is asking people to give up their religion – and a good thing too. At the very least it’s asking them to give up their religion in the form of something insulated and protected from other ideas and from disagreement – which, surely, comes to the same thing. Yes, you can ‘ask people’ (it’s part of education) to give up their insistence on literalist irrational anti-rational belief systems that cannot be questioned or criticised – sure you can. Not by force, not by scolding them; but as part of ordinary human interchange, as part of life in the big world, where there are other ideas and other evidence? Of course you can.

This is so horrible! The situation it reports on – and the fact that the guy who wrote it was murdered yesterday.

As has been widely reported of late, Basran politics (and everyday life) is increasingly coming under the control of Shiite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr…And unfortunately, the British seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it…Fearing to appear like colonial occupiers, they avoid any hint of ideological indoctrination: in my time with them, not once did I see an instructor explain such basics of democracy as the politically neutral role of the police in a civil society.

So – guess what.

At the city’s university, for example, self-appointed monitors patrol the campuses, ensuring that women’s attire and makeup are properly Islamic. “I’d like to throw them off the grounds, but who will do it?” a university administrator asked me. “Most of our police belong to the same religious parties as the monitors.”

Nightmare. Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare.

An Iraqi police lieutenant, who for obvious reasons asked to remain anonymous, confirmed to me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations – mostly of former Baath Party members – that take place in Basra each month. He told me that there is even a sort of “death car”: a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.

And now the guy who wrote those words – who did not remain anonymous – has himself been assassinated.

Mr. Vincent and Ms. Tuaiz were kidnapped around 7 p.m. Tuesday, as they left a moneychanger’s shop in downtown Basra, by at least two men dressed in police uniforms and driving a police sedan, said a witness who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution…An officer in the Basra police department said Mr. Vincent had been working on a story about the role of police officers in the recent assassinations of former Baath Party officials…A recent comment on his blog showed that he was aware of the dangers of writing too openly about the Shiite parties of Basra, and that he had tried to be discreet in a recent story published in The Christian Science Monitor: “When you read this, keep in mind that for various reasons – not the least of which were safety concerns – the piece only scratches the surface of what is happening here.”

Hell. It’s just bottomlessly depressing.

Mr. Vincent said in conversations that he was particularly incensed about the sharp divide between men and women in the Islamic world. He said he had fully supported the American-led invasion of Iraq because he believed it was part of a much larger campaign being waged by the United States against what he called “Islamo-fascism.” But Mr. Vincent also said it was the duty of journalists to expose the pitfalls of the rising tide of Shiite Islam in Iraq to awaken the Bush administration to the kind of nation the White House was helping to create.

No doubt the rising tide of Shiite Islam didn’t want him doing that. Well, now he won’t be anymore.

Vincent’s blog is here. Worth reading, if the top post is anything to go on.