"In the end, it is treachery, rather than disability, that Richard’s “deformed” body ultimately signifies..."

Trajectories in Literary Disability Studies: An Overview

[Excerpted from Specialist Books on the Subject]

Introduction

In our present collective cultural consciousness, the disabled body is imagined as an alien condition. Thus disability tends to be figured in cultural representations as an absolute state of otherness that is opposed to a standard, normative body, unmarked by either individual form and function or by the particularities of its history. Disability Studies does not regard disability as a problem but as a location or position for gaining valid knowledge and understanding.

‘Stereotyped Representations’ of Disability in Literature

In in his opening soliloquy, Richard – in William Shakespeare’s Richard III (1592) – tells us that he is “not shaped for sportive tricks,” but rather is “rudely stamped” and “deformed, unfinished, sent before my time,” he does so to explain why he is, as a consequence, “determined to prove a villain. Richard’s villainy and hatred are, in his own words, directly connected to his physical disabilities. In the end, it is treachery, rather than disability, that Richard’s “deformed” body ultimately signifies.

There are numerous other examples from the literary canon that follow a similar logic: in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Ahab’s missing leg clearly signals ideas of his obsession and maniacal behavior; Rochester’s blindness, in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), allows that novel to explore questions of romance and care. In these and many other examples, disability is made to work primarily as a metaphor, a textual device that, precisely because of the ways in which it reconfigures what disability means, ultimately has little to say about the actual lives experienced by those with disabilities.

In part, it was the need to unpack the complexities of these metaphors, and the prejudices of the representations that often accompanied them, that led to the rise of literary disability studies as a critical discipline in the 1990s.

‘Normate’ & ‘Normalcy’ in Disability Studies

In the mid-1990s, Lennard J. Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy (1995) and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies (1997) were both foundational texts in the development of the new subject area. Each brought analytical tools from literary studies and critical and cultural theory to bear on disability representation, and each established core critical terms that helped shape the development of the discipline. 

Both Davis and Garland-Thomson focused on the power of the idea of the normal – “normalcy” in Davis, “the normate” in Garland-Thomson – in definitions of disability. The term ‘normate’ describes what is considered to be a normal human being in a particular society. For example, in a contemporary Euro-American context, these characteristics might relate to heterosexuality, whiteness, non-disabled status, and a certain height and weight.

Ableist Assumptions on ‘Normal’

Many of the metaphors that accompanied literary representations of characters with disabilities were, this new scholarship made clear, invested in these ideas of rules or of a deviation from the norm. 

Every character in popular fiction who was understood to be criminal because of, say, a facial disfigurement, or heroic because they challenged the perceived limitations that come with living “confined to” a wheelchair, could now be seen to be the products of ableist cultural assumptions about what kind of body or mind was normal and what were seen to be the terms of any difference from such norms.

Narrative Prosthesis

In 2000, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s book Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse unpacked how such ableist assumptions operated in the specific arena of narrative. Their key term “narrative prosthesis” highlighted how texts use and rely on disability to make narrative work. 

A “prosthetic” use of disability in narrative is one that employs representations of disability as a short-hand or stand-in to signify stereotypical notions of pity and moral or social disorder. Mitchell and Snyder argue that literary narratives and films often depend on disability as a device of characterisation or a “crutch” to lean on for its disruptive power and analytic insight. In this sense, disability is not represented for its own sake but, instead, it is used to shore up and stabilise ideas of the normal, telling readers something about the plot or deepening understandings of central, non-disabled characters.

The Defining Characteristics of Disability Studies

In terms of disciplinary location, Disability Studies is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary domain spanning the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. The overarching theoretical insights in the discipline are provided by the materialist/Marxist and postmodernist/-structuralist perspectives. 

Coming to more specific concerns, disability studies examines reality from the standpoint of disability, i.e., from the perspectives of persons with disabilities in society. Since disability has hitherto almost exclusively been conceptualised and studied by non-disabled persons, one of the goals of the discipline is to provide centre- stage to the voices of disabled persons, namely, their thoughts, feelings and experiences as members of an oppressed minority group and an oppressive culture.

Disability Not as a Problem but as a ‘Location’ for Gaining Valid Knowledge

Disability studies does not regard disability as a problem but as a location or position for gaining valid knowledge and understanding. In this connection, it is very critical of the expertise or ‘professional disability knowledge’ generated by the helping professions and mainstream sociology, psychology, education, etc., which construct disability as a problem in need of management, if not resolution. 

Disability studies eschews the application of such terms as deviance, overcoming, coping and cure, adjustment and acceptance, which reduce persons with disabilities to bearers of signs and symptoms of pathology.

Disability Studies in India

India probably has the largest number of persons with disabilities in the world after China. According to conservative estimates derived from the Census of India 2001, 1.8 to 2.1 per cent of the population suffers from some form of disability, which in absolute numbers comes to approximately 18.49 to 21.92 million persons. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 6–10 per cent of the population suffers from identifable physical or mental disability. That comes to over 90 million persons in India. 

Phenomena such as war, ethnic confict, HIV/AIDS, natural disasters, industrial injuries and road accidents are increasing the number of persons with disabilities. Ironically, enhanced life expectancy has also increased manifold the incidence of old age-related, chronic disease-induced disabilities worldwide.

The academy can make a contribution to institutionalising it, but there are as yet hardly any programmes or courses on disability studies (as distinct from studies on disability in the paramedical, social work, clinical and legal felds) in Indian universities. 

As an academic specialisation, disability studies would incorporate the rich insights of already institutionalised interdisciplinary fields such as women’s studies, and dalit and tribal studies, sharing common experiences of social exclusion and mobilisation.

Historicising Disability and Disability Studies

Shilpaa Anand points out that, being a field of inquiry that has originated in the West, Disability Studies tacitly draws on historical material that is peculiar to the West’s experiences of the world. 

Consequently, historicising disablement in non-Western cultural contexts using the Western paradigm for mapping out African, South Asian, Japanese and Middle Eastern histories of disability is problematic. Such a perspective, for example, excludes historical experiences, such as colonialism, that the West’s collective experience cannot conceptualise. Anand proposes a solution through a re-evaluation of the historical method(s) adopted.

Destigmatisation, Recognition and Empowerment

Concrete proposals are needed to ameliorate the life conditions of persons with disabilities through micro- and macro-level approaches. Suggestions are made to replicate strategies of the women’s movement for empowerment in the disability sector. Phenomenological exploration of the lived reality of exclusion, gender budgeting and engendering legal instruments and policy documents are put forward as concrete possibilities to this end.

People-first Language

As language is a key tool of oppression, naming is critical when a socially disadvantaged section of the population seeks recognition and rights. Analysis of key linguistic terms and the replacement of pejorative with more value-neutral and positive terms are essential preliminary steps in any movement towards collective self-affrmation and empowerment. 

The disability rights movement has promoted a move away from a language of handicap towards a more empowering language that emphasises self-determination and personhood. In the American context, this people-first language approach has given rise to the use of the term ‘person with disabilities’.

The term, ‘People-first language’ is about the correct terminology and language to describe different types of disability. Proponents of people-first language use the term “people with disabilities” rather than “disabled people”. 

This people-first idiom, often used by disability studies scholars in the United States, seeks to emphasise the individual rather than their disability. By contrast, the term “disabled people”, which is often favoured in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and in languages other than English, emphasises an affirmative sense of group identity and minority status. 

In the Indian context, where political correctness is a prickly issue, the tendency is to use a mix of terms like ‘differently-abled’, ‘challenged’, ‘person with a disability’ and ‘child with special needs’ in policy documents, media reports and even by disability activists.

‘Temporarily Able-Bodied’

TAB is an acronym for “temporarily able-bodied”. Disability scholars and rights activist use this term to highlight the flexibility of disability as a category which, unlike gender or race, any human being can join at any stage in their lives. 

It emphasises the fact that able-bodied status is temporary and, if we live long enough, most of us will become disabled in some way. Disabilities can be invisible and short-lived; most disabilities are acquired over the course of a lifetime rather than from birth. The term “not yet disabled” is used to similar effect.

‘Crip Reading’ from a Literary Context

“To crip” is to question and to subvert dominant cultural expectations about disability and able-bodiedness in fresh new ways. In a literary context, a “crip” reading suggests a subversive reading of text that emphasises the presence of disability, the potential for interpretations and representations that deviate from a rigid norm. 

By re-appropriating a term that traditionally has derogatory associations, “crip theory” draws attention to the significance of linguistic choices and turns traditional meanings inside out to make “crip” a term with a positive value. In this sense, “crip” or “to crip” is comparable to the use of “queer” or the verb “to queer” in queer and gender theory.

Conclusion

Disability Studies Scholars argue for disability as an important and potentially transformative category and root for voices that speak with, rather than for, disabled communities and help to reconfigure understandings of literary history and shift modes of reading in the present. In this regard, Disability Studies is founded on a commitment to challenging the social marginalisation of people with disabilities.

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Select Bibliography

Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. The Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2002.

Disability Studies in India: Global Discourses, Local Realities. Ed. Renu Addlakha. Routledge, New Delhi, 2013.

Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. Dan Goodley. SAGE Publications Ltd. London. 2011.

Disability Studies in India Retrospects and Prospects. G.N. Karna. Gyan Publishing House New Delhi. 2001.

Disability Studies Today. Ed. Colin Barnes, Mike Oliver and Len Barton. Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. London. 2002.

DIS/ABILITY STUDIES: Theorising Disablism and Ableism. Dan Goodley. Routledge, New York. 2014.

Literature and Disability. Alice Hall. Routledge. New York. 2016.

The Disability Studies Reader. Fourth Edition. Lennard J. Davis. Routledge, New York, 2013.

Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies. Second edition. Ed. Nick Watson and Simo Vehmas. Second edition. Routledge. New York, 2020.

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