Fluent Essays

Write a paragraph (200 words) with a brief summary of the key points, analysis, and arguments of the reading, and any insights you might want to share (response format). Make sure to integrate at least two authors in your response.Reading(s): will be attachedEasy vocabulary. No plagiarism (studypools standards are 15\% and below). hirschman_queerness.pdf bell__introducing_white_disability_studies.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview J Med Humanit (2013) 34:139–147 DOI 10.1007/s10912-013-9208-x Queer/Fear: Disability, Sexuality, and The Other Nancy J. Hirschmann Published online: 8 March 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract This paper examines the relationship between disability and “queerness.” I argue that the hostility frequently expressed against both disabled and queer individuals is a function of fear of the undecidability of the body. I draw on feminist, queer, and disability theory to help us understand this phenomenon and suggest that these different kinds of theories have a complementary relationship. That is, feminist and queer theory help us see how this fear works, disability theory helps us see why it exists. Keywords Disability . Queer theory . Feminist theory . Fear . Hostility In 2013, when states allow gays to marry or form domestic partnerships and adopt children; when many insurance policies cover transsexual operations; when increasing numbers of our students openly challenge gender lines in their dress, manners and behavior; when “don’t ask, don’t tell” has been consigned to the rubbish heap of bad ideas, and gays and lesbians can serve openly in the military: why is there still such hostility to “queers”? When Matthew Sheppard was beaten to death, strung up on a fence and left to die, the vast majority of Americans were horrified and saddened (Healy 2008); but isn’t that all behind us? Unfortunately no: gay kids are beaten up and persecuted every day, gays and lesbians are still discriminated against, and transgendered and transsexual individuals are still subject to ridicule, exclusion, hostility and outright violence. In this paper I draw on disability to help explain this problem, which I believe involves the way in which repugnance toward the other is a cover for fear of the self. I take a theoretical approach to understanding one particular dimension of the intersection of disability and LGBT or queer theory, namely the undecidability of the body and the ontological and epistemological uncertainty this produces for the human experience. There are many ways in which being “queer” and being “disabled” intersect, and the naming is, of course, only the first. As Butler describes it, “naming” is a process “by which one is, quite without choice, situated within discourse” (1993). Homosexuality was indeed considered a “disability” for many years (Rauch 2004), and despite its accepted place in ancient society, its naming called it into being as a deviant practice in the modern era, a process that Louis Althusser labeled “interpellation,” which is “an act of discourse with the power to create that to which it refers,” (Butler 1993,122, see Althusser 1971). In particular, N. J. Hirschmann (*) The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: njh@sas.upenn.edu 140 J Med Humanit (2013) 34:139–147 discourses of illness and “curing” took particular prominence at various points in history, most recently in the 1980s United States (McGruer 2002). What queer and disabled individuals are called, by themselves and by others, is itself a political, ontological, and epistemological issue. Gays, lesbians, transgender, transsexual and bisexual individuals have struggled for years over the naming of identity—not just the hostile epithets and derogatory terms used to describe and name them, but the battles within, as feminism and women’s studies gave way to lesbian studies, which gave over to gay studies, a term which may or may not include lesbians. Soon after, bisexual was added to the mix, at which point the academic field became known as LGB studies, followed by the further addition of transgender and transsexual issues—LGBT—and finally recapturing the derogatory term “queer” to encompass it all and more, but operating through a critical distance that acknowledged the constructed character of categories of sexuality—for indeed, the “Q” is used to stand in for “questioning” as often as “queer.” Intersex (also sometimes including “intersectional”) was later added, but questioning/queer was still the final and encompassing term: LGBTIQ (Aragon 2006). In this essay, I will adopt the term “queer” as a shorthand to include this variety of sexual identities that challenge and resist the heterosexual and heteronormative imperative though I will also make reference to specific sexual identities at various points. In similar, if not parallel, struggles, disabled individuals have worked through the terminologies of “crippled,” “handicapped,” and then “disabled,” which ushered in a recognition of the constructed character of linguistic and social evaluations of bodily difference. Whereas what became known as the “medical model” of disability viewed handicap-cum-disability as stemming from a defective body that either had to be cured or set aside, the “social model” of disability maintained that certain bodily features were favored and others disfavored by the built environment—such as stairs and narrow doorways that block wheelchairs—as well as social attitudes, such as the belief that a disabled worker will be less productive and capable than a nondisabled one. In other words, society made certain people disabled, not their bodies. Some feminists, like Iris Young (1980), latched onto this “social model” to argue that patriarchy “disabled” or “crippled” women by not teaching them how to use their bodies efficiently, or indeed teaching them to use their bodies in self-defeating ways–an argument that ironically contradicts disability perspectives by viewing disability in exclusively negative terms. Along the way, “impairment” gained a fairly secure foothold for describing the divergence of certain bodies from their “normal” functioning, and “disability” became exclusively a term to describe the social disadvantage to which a particular society puts a particular impairment. This closely mirrored the distinction feminists had developed between “gender” as a category of social roles and treatment that attached to certain bodies and “sex” as a category of the body that was free from social influence. But of course, as Judith Butler showed us, such a division creates as many problems as it addresses. Butler upended feminist theory when she challenged the accepted wisdom that “sex” constituted the biological reality of female bodies (such as reproductive organs), whereas “gender” constituted human-made social roles (for instance, women as mothers), arguing instead, following Foucault, that sex and the sexed body itself are socially constructed and constituted by language and discursive practices. Though many disability scholars continue to embrace enthusiastically this binary and demonize the medical model, others attuned to Butler’s criticism and indebted in many ways to the advances made by feminist theory more broadly speaking have increasingly become skeptical of bifurcating the social and medical models. Indeed, one could readily argue that the often-maligned “medical model” of disability emerged out of Enlightenment thinking about the power of human agency; rather than J Med Humanit (2013) 34:139–147 141 simply accept illness as “fate” or “God’s will,” science and medicine were seen as ways in which humans could construct and change illness by social intervention (Kudlick 2011). In other words, one might suggest, the medical model was “always already” social. More pedestrian similarities, parallels, and intersections between disability and queerness abound, of course, such as the feminization of disability such that a disabled man is perceived as weak and helpless, regardless of what any disabled man or woman (or nondisabled man or woman for that matter) could actually achieve; much as gay men are feminized and denigrated by being labeled women—a term that is supposedly neutral in everyday discourse but which becomes a mark of contempt when used to refer to men. Simultaneously, though disabled women could be seen as hyperfeminine because of their heightened physical vulnerability, they are much more often seen as unfeminine or of distorted, perverted femininity insofar as their impairments cause them to fail to meet standard ideals of feminine beauty, much like lesbians are often viewed as perversions of the feminine and hence in need of “a good fuck” to restore their essential femininity (read as “subordination”) (Samuels 2002, Thomson 2002). All of these similarities are important and the subject of appropriate exploration (see McGuer and Wilkerson 2003). But the commonality I focus on in this essay is the way in which both queer and disabled persons are feared by heterosexuals and able-bodied, respectively. In Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler states that “heterosexual performance is beset by any anxiety that it can never fully overcome, that its effort to become its own idealization can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is consistently haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself” (1993, 125). And of course stories of violence against gay and transgendered men in particular pervade the popular news; derogatory jokes about gays and lesbians permeate the mainstream media. Similarly, fear of the disabled is well documented in disability studies. Rosemarie Garland Thomson argues that the disabled are “the ultimate other” because the able bodied know that they could become disabled at any time, and they fear that possibility: “Cast as one of society’s ultimate ‘not me’ figures, the disabled other absorbs disavowed elements of this cultural self, becoming an icon of all human vulnerability and enabling the ‘American Ideal’ to appear as master of both destiny and self” (1997, 41). Or as Tobin Seibers puts it, “Disability is the other other that helps make otherness imaginable” (2008, 48). Indeed, Siebers claims “In no other sphere of existence [other than disability]…do people risk waking up one morning having become the persons whom they hated the day before” (26). But the examples he draws on—“the white racist suddenly transformed into a black man…,the misogynist into a woman”—are self-referential, focusing on people who already hate a particular other: not all whites, just racist ones; not all men, just misogynist ones. The analogy is thus faulty. For he goes on to posit that all able-bodied people fear and hate all disabled individuals, a claim that ignores or outright denies the large numbers of nondisabled people who love and care for individuals in their families or among their friends who have disabilities. He also fails to include gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals among the “hated” groups. Yet I maintain that LGBTIQ individuals are the most similar to the disabled in this way, in that both embody the universal fear that the body is not given, determined, and determinate. Sexuality, like ability, can shift, alter, and change more readily than race or ethnicity, or even, taking into consideration current surgical developments, sexual phenotype. Moreover, as I have just implied, hatred is the wrong word; or more specifically, I maintain that such hostility and antagonism is generally a cover for fear. The nature of this fear is two-fold. The first is the immediate fear of becoming sick or disabled oneself, which leads to a psychic and social investment in the denial of the 142 J Med Humanit (2013) 34:139–147 humanity of disabled people: if their humanity is recognized, then the recognition of the possibility of becoming disabled oneself becomes more immediate, more real. The visibly disabled are often looked at with repulsion, emblemizing “the rejected body” in Susan Wendell’s phrase; the disabled body serves as a material reminder of human weakness, of the inevitability of the decay of the flesh (Wendell 1996; Hockenberry 2004, Shakespeare et al. 1997). As Martha Nussbaum notes, “Normals know that their bodies are frail and vulnerable, but when they can stigmatize the physically disabled, they feel a lot better about their own human weakness” (2004, 219). Accordingly, Nicholas Watson notes that “disabled people face a daily barrage of images of themselves as other, as unworthy, as something to be feared” (1998, 161). The fear of disability is pervasive and perhaps transhistorical, ranging from disabled infants being abandoned to die in ancient Greece and Rome up through the modern era’s “ugly laws” which barred disabled individuals from appearing on the streets and other public spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to nightmarish institutions like Willowbrook in our own time (Schweik 2009, Tyor and Bell 1984; but see Rose 2003). But as opposed to racism and sexism, which is fear of the not-self, of the different-fromself, fear of the disabled is fear of oneself, a fear of what might happen to one’s own body. I realize this statement can be misconstrued; I fully recognize that “difference” is a construction regardless of the content and that categories of “race” and “gender” are produced as social meanings that are attached to particular bodily configurations such as skin color and genitalia. In this, race and gender are quite similar to disability. But in terms of race and gender, those bodily configurations, though subject to interpretation, meaning, language and discourse, are nevertheless “there.” To make my point clear, if graphic: regardless of what feelings a person called a “woman” who has a vagina has about her sexual identity, she will not wake up tomorrow with a penis between her legs, any more than the white racist will wake up tomorrow with black skin. A sexist man may have his penis suddenly cut off, but he will not get a vagina in the process; he will not become a woman (assuming he lives). Indeed, the lengths to which the “man” must go to have a vagina surgically constructed and to make a change from male to female—or for a “woman” to go from female to male—are great, and take a considerable amount of time, not to mention that a great deal of emotional and psychic energy is required leading up to the physical change. By contrast, disability can and often does happen suddenly, and it happens every day to many people: any given “healthy” individual could pick up an autoimmune virus at any moment. Genetic predispositions to certain conditions could be suddenly triggered by the pollutants in the air accumulating in our bodies over a lifetime or the stressors of one’s job. Some of these changes could build up gradually, but they nevertheless reveal themselves suddenly, once a tipping point is reached. And of course, accidents such as automobile collisions happen daily and often produce a sudden, rapid, and dramatic change in people’s bodily configuration and ability. The rapidity and suddenness of such bodily changes remind us that our bodies are not essentially given to us but rather are in states of flux and uncertainty. This is frightening to most people. Accordingly, as Thomson maintains, “Disability’s indisputably random and unpredictable character translates as appalling disorder and persistent menace…. the self gone out of control…At once familiarly human but definitively other, the disabled figure in cultural discourse assures the rest of the citizenry of who they are not while arousing their suspicions about who they could become” (1997, 43, 41). This understanding of the fear of disability makes the comparison between disability and sexuality pertinent if we understand “the body” to include not just the corporeal body but also the way in which we perceive, understand, and experience our own bodies. For that, after all, is the foundation of the fear J Med Humanit (2013) 34:139–147 143 of the corporeal changes that the body may undergo in disability. Even if a sexist man will not wake up tomorrow with a vagina, he nevertheless suddenly may start to realize that he is “really” a woman “trapped” in a man’s body, or even simply that he has sexual desires for other men. The white racist is not likely to start wondering if he is “really” black; his fear is a fear of difference and of threat of the loss of white privilege, or perhaps even a fear that blacks may not “really” be so different from himself, thereby undercutting his justification for privilege. By contrast, the fear of the gay or lesbian or transsexual is a fear of what one already may be. The process of physical transformation from male to female and vice versa is lengthy, protracted, and difficult; by definition it requires intentionality, decision, and choice. But shifts in gender and sexual identity, in how we see and think of ourselves, our desires, and our identification framework can happen much more quickly, subtly, and can even “creep up” on us or be suppressed until we are suddenly forced to notice. Queer theory has shown us that sexuality is a highly variable feature of being and the body. Butler’s challenge to the sex/gender binary cast many feminist, queer, and other kinds of critical theorists’ understanding of the body into a state of flux and uncertainty: what Derrida (1992) called undecidability. This undecideability of the body means that sexuality is not something set firmly with rigid boundaries: those boundaries may be established by cultural practices as a way to protect social hierarchies as well as to solidify identity and remove the question of sexuality from the realm of uncertainty to make it more solid than it is as a way to combat anxiety. But the process of internalizing them into our psyches is never complete; uncertainty remains. Such uncertainty similarly characterizes health and ability; indeed, disability brings this uncertainty and flux into view in a particularly sharp manner for the reasons I just articulated: the body can change radically and dramatically in an instant. And of course, if one is supremely lucky, one may live into old age, which will bring more gradual impairments such as loss of mobility, hearing impairment, cognitive difficulties, and a range of other problems; as Lennard Davis notes, people over 65 make up one-third of people with disabilities (1995, 8). This is something we cannot avoid knowing; we all know old people, and even if we feel contempt or disgust for them (as, for instance, teenagers and young adults often do), such feelings are in part generated by the knowledge that that is what we could become. But whether disability happens suddenly or relatively gradually, the change in the body is decidedly material; it affects one’s physical encounters with the world regardless of people’s attitudes, in contrast to say, skin color, which impacts one’s interactions with the world predominantly as a result of prejudicial treatment. Even in the most supportive environment, using a wheelchair produces a different orientation to the physical world than does walking; in some contexts, the wheelchair may be a disadvantage, in others neutral, in still others an advantage, but it is always different. And it always signals the ways in which one’s own body is subject to change beyond one’s control. Because disability is a visible reminder of what one fears about the self, hostility toward the disabled, like hostility and aggression toward gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals, keeps such fear at bay by exaggerating the difference and distance between self and other, turning such others into a categorical “Other,” an alien being that the self could, presumably, never become. One of the effects is to force such otherness into hiding, thereby removing the signs of uncertainty from view. Just as such hostility ... Purchase answer to see full attachment