Cultural Disability Studies in Education: Interdisciplinary Navigations of the Normative Divide [1 ed.] 113810325X, 9781138103252

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Cultural disability studies in education:
Fields, representations, and social aesthetics
Introduction: Social sciences, humanities, and education
The tripartite model of disability: A critical framework
Navigations of the normative divide: Social aesthetics and cultural representations
Conclusion: Cultural Disability Studies in Education
1. Visions from the yellow decade: Disability, aesthetics, and residual existence
Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and aesthetics
Divided and divided again: The imaginary of doom and gloom
Shambolic but symbolic: Revolutionary misrepresentation
Not so novel: The resonance of pre-surrealism and realism
Concluding discussion: Ocularnormative aesthetics
Indicative questions
2. From sideshow to cinema: Disability, film, and horrification
Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and film studies
Narrative with a vengeance: One of us
Nightmare scenario: From children to monsters
Behind the monster: Unexpected praise
Concluding discussion: Horrification and society
Indicative questions
3. Remembering the drowned and the saved: Disability, Holocaust, and the inadequacies of representation
Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and Holocaust studies
Realities of representation: Classic and critical approaches
Learning from Levi: Humanity, criticality, and dignity
Keeping the lessons alive: The necessity of multiplicity
Concluding discussion: Supplementing the moral imperative
Indicative questions
4. In the log house: Disability, gender, and resistance to social norms
Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and gender studies
Identity politics: Gender, disability, and juxtapositions
Unhappy accident: Left bereft
Man and boy: From trivialisation to infantilisation
Concluding discussion: Her and him
Indicative questions
5. Stuff happens: Disability, happiness, and the pursuit of cure
Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and happiness studies
The shock of happiness: Blindness is bliss
It might never happen: From contentment to uncertainty
As it happens: Life writing
Concluding discussion: Happiness-cure synonymy
Indicative questions
6. End of the rock star: Disability, music, and the passage of time
Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and popular music studies
Rock star persona: Now and then
Revolutionary representation: From normative to non-normative positivisms
Concluding discussion: The heroes and casualties of tragic representation
Indicative questions
7. One of the crowd: Disability, humour, and the contradictions of comedy
Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and humour studies
How everyone talks: Disabling language
Here today: Disabling narrative
Concluding discussion: Latent disability humour
Indicative questions
8. On the campaign trail: Disability, mass media, and levels of representation
Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and media studies
Real beauty and real blindness: Wonderful representation
The sighted face of blindness: Fearful and pitiful representation
Dramatics and problematics: Nothing more than need
Concluding discussion: The need for multifaceted representation
Indicative questions
Epilogue
Glossary of terms
Index

Citation preview

‘David Bolt is one of the foundational scholars working in critical disability studies, and the clear and concise outline of disability and education here showcases his extensive knowledge of the field. Well-written, accessible, and with a wide range of examples from across disciplines, this book is essential reading for everyone working in the subject areas on which it focuses.’ – Professor Stuart Murray, Director, Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities, University of Leeds, UK

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CULTURAL DISABILITY STUDIES IN EDUCATION

Over the last few decades disability studies has emerged not only as a discipline in itself but also as a catalyst for cultural disability studies and Disability Studies in Education. In this book the three areas become united in a new field that recognises education as a discourse between tutors and students who explore representations of disability on the levels of everything from academic disciplines and knowledge to language and theory; from received understandings and social attitudes to narrative and characterisation. Moving from late nineteenth- to early twenty-first-century representations, this book combines disability studies with aesthetics, film studies, Holocaust studies, gender studies, happiness studies, popular music studies, humour studies, and media studies. In so doing it encourages discussion around representations of disability in drama, novels, films, autobiography, short stories, music videos, sitcoms, and advertising campaigns. Discussions are underpinned by the tripartite model of disability and so disrupt one-dimensional representations. Cultural Disability Studies in Education encourages educators and students to engage with disability as an isolating, hurtful, and joyful experience that merits multiple levels of representation and offers true potential for a non-normative social aesthetic. It will be required reading for all scholars and students of disability studies, cultural disability studies, Disability Studies in Education, sociology, and cultural studies. David Bolt is Professor in the Department of Disability and Education at Liverpool Hope University, UK, where he is also Director of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies; a series editor of Literary Disability Studies; and a general editor of A Cultural History of Disability. Previous books include The Madwoman and the Blindman (2012); The Metanarrative of Blindness (2014); Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability (Routledge, 2014); and Disability, Avoidance, and the Academy (Routledge, 2016).

ROUTLEDGE ADVANCES IN DISABILITY STUDIES

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeAdvances-in-Disability-Studies/book-series/RADS Autism in a De-centered World Alice Wexler Disabled Childhoods Monitoring Differences and Emerging Identities Janice McLaughlin, Edmund Coleman-Fountain and Emma Clavering Intellectual Disability and Being Human A Care Ethics Model Chrissie Rogers The Changing Disability Policy System Active Citizenship and Disability in Europe Volume 1 Edited by Rune Halvorsen, Bjørn Hvinden, Jerome Bickenbach, Delia Ferri and Ana Marta Guillén Rodriguez Citizenship Inclusion and Intellectual Disability Biopolitics Post-Institutionalisation Niklas Altermark Intellectual Disability and the Right to a Sexual Life A Continuation of the Autonomy/Paternalism Debate Simon Foley The Changing Disability Policy System Active Citizenship and Disability in Europe Volume 2 Edited by Rune Halvorsen, Bjørn Hvinden, Jerome Bickenbach, Delia Ferri and Ana Marta Guillén Rodriguez Cultural Disability Studies in Education Interdisciplinary Navigations of the Normative Divide David Bolt

CULTURAL DISABILITY STUDIES IN EDUCATION Interdisciplinary Navigations of the Normative Divide

David Bolt

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 David Bolt The right of David Bolt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bolt, David, 1966- , author. Title: Cultural disability studies in education : interdisciplinary navigations of the normative divide / David Bolt. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge advances in disability studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018007374| ISBN 9781138103252 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138103276 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315102894 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Disability studies. Classification: LCC HV1568.2 .B65 2018 | DDC 305.9/08--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007374 ISBN: 978-1-138-10325-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-10327-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10289-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction: Cultural disability studies in education: Fields, representations, and social aesthetics Introduction: Social sciences, humanities, and education 1 The tripartite model of disability: A critical framework 3 Navigations of the normative divide: Social aesthetics and cultural representations 7 Conclusion: Cultural Disability Studies in Education 10 1 Visions from the yellow decade: Disability, aesthetics, and residual existence Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and aesthetics 15 Divided and divided again: The imaginary of doom and gloom 16 Shambolic but symbolic: Revolutionary misrepresentation 19 Not so novel: The resonance of pre-surrealism and realism 21 Concluding discussion: Ocularnormative aesthetics 23 Indicative questions 24 2 From sideshow to cinema: Disability, film, and horrification Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and film studies 26 Narrative with a vengeance: One of us 27 Nightmare scenario: From children to monsters 30 Behind the monster: Unexpected praise 32 Concluding discussion: Horrification and society 33 Indicative questions 34

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viii Contents

3 Remembering the drowned and the saved: Disability, Holocaust, and the inadequacies of representation Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and Holocaust studies 37 Realities of representation: Classic and critical approaches 38 Learning from Levi: Humanity, criticality, and dignity 40 Keeping the lessons alive: The necessity of multiplicity 43 Concluding discussion: Supplementing the moral imperative 45 Indicative questions 47 4 In the log house: Disability, gender, and resistance to social norms Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and gender studies 49 Identity politics: Gender, disability, and juxtapositions 50 Unhappy accident: Left bereft 52 Man and boy: From trivialisation to infantilisation 55 Concluding discussion: Her and him 57 Indicative questions 58 5 Stuff happens: Disability, happiness, and the pursuit of cure Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and happiness studies 61 The shock of happiness: Blindness is bliss 62 It might never happen: From contentment to uncertainty 65 As it happens: Life writing 67 Concluding discussion: Happiness-cure synonymy 68 Indicative questions 69 6 End of the rock star: Disability, music, and the passage of time Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and popular music studies 73 Rock star persona: Now and then 74 Revolutionary representation: From normative to non-normative positivisms 79 Concluding discussion: The heroes and casualties of tragic representation 80 Indicative questions 82 7 One of the crowd: Disability, humour, and the contradictions of comedy Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and humour studies 85 How everyone talks: Disabling language 86 Here today: Disabling narrative 89

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Contents ix

Concluding discussion: Latent disability humour 92 Indicative questions 93 8 On the campaign trail: Disability, mass media, and levels of representation Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and media studies 96 Real beauty and real blindness: Wonderful representation 97 The sighted face of blindness: Fearful and pitiful representation 100 Dramatics and problematics: Nothing more than need 103 Concluding discussion: The need for multifaceted representation 104 Indicative questions 105

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Epilogue

109

Glossary of terms

114

Index

116

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In working on this book I have been helped by numerous people on a number of levels, too many to acknowledge comprehensively or indeed sufficiently in these pages, but some of whom I can at least mention by name. On a general point, I remain relatively new to Liverpool so the warmth of its welcome is still much appreciated – I am happy to find myself surrounded by such great people and places. I came here nearly nine years ago to live and work at Liverpool Hope University and as such the institution must be thanked as a whole, although I am particularly mindful of supportive colleagues such as Philip Bamber, Richard Budd, Colin Cooper, Robert Cunningham, Maureen Brotheridge, Siobhan Garber, Rosie Germain, Cassia Gilford, Sheila Hayes, Suzanne Jamieson, Steve Jolley, Eileen Kavanagh, Glyn Kenyon, Theresa Lewin, Jacqueline Lloyd, David Lundie, Daniela Mangione, Ian Martin, Janet Martin, Rebecca McCoy, Kenneth Newport, Cathal O’Siochru, Christine Parry, Gerald Pillay, Philip Roberts, Joe Prendergast, Michelle Pryor, Roni Pugh, Namrata Rao, Frank Su, Janet Thomas, Philippa Williams, June Wilson, and Colin Wong. More obviously I must thank Claire Penketh, the Head of Disability and Education, and the rest of the core membership of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies (CCDS), including Owen Barden, Ana Bê, Marie Caslin, Ria Cheyne, David Feeney, Manel Herat, Alan Hodkinson, Ella Houston, Erin Pritchard, Irene Rose, and Laura Waite, as well as past and present early-career scholars who have joined us to work on their research projects – David Doat, Harriet Dunn, Nina Michelle Worthington, and Gesine Wegner – not to mention all our inspiring undergraduates and disability studies MA students. As Director of the CCDS I have met hundreds of influential scholars from around the world, all of whom I would like to thank, a few of the most significant being Julie Allan, Clare Barker, Len Barton, Peter Beresford, Stella Bolaki, Lucy

Acknowledgements xi

Burke, Fiona Kumari Campbell, Thomas Couser, Liz Crow, Michael Davidson, Lennard Davis, Ann Fox, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Dan Goodley, Alice Hall, Chloë Hughes, Georgina Kleege, Petra Kuppers, Rod Michalko, Robert McRuer, David Mitchell, Stuart Murray, Ryan Parrey, Margaret Price, Mike Rembis, Katherine Runswick-Cole, Sharon Snyder, and Tanya Titchkosky. Many of these colleagues have visited on multiple occasions and in so doing have helped to sustain the CCDS, alongside regulars like Emmeline Burdett, Lisa Davies, Pauline Eyre, Cath Nichols, and Sue Smith. Further afield I have been enthused by everyone involved with the Literary Disability Studies book series (Palgrave Macmillan/Springer), most obviously my fellow editors Elizabeth Donaldson and Julia Miele Rodas but also contributors such as Michael Bradshaw, Chris Foss, Patricia Friedrich, Jonathan Gray, Alex Tankard, Hannah Thompson, and Zach Whalen. The book series has grown from relationships forged via the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (Liverpool University Press/Project MUSE), whose editorship has also enabled me to work with respected scholars such as Rachel Adams, Susan Anderson, Tammy Berberi, James Berger, Michael Berube, Simone Chess, Johnson Cheu, Helen Deutsch, Jim Ferris, Anne Finger, Maria Frawley, Chris Gabbard, Martin Halliwell, Diane Price Herndl, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Joyce Huff, Jonathan Hsy, Merri Lisa Johnson, Alison Kafer, Deborah Kent, Christopher Krentz, Miriamne Ara Krummel, Stephen Kuusisto, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Rebecca Mallett, Felicity Nussbaum, Susannah Mintz, James Overboe, Catherine Prendergast, Ato Quayson, Carrie Sandahl, Ralph Savarese, Susan Schweik, David Serlin, Margrit Shildrick, and Hannah Tweed, as well as all the guest editors and authors from whom I have learned so much. More specifically, in working on this book I have been supported by Claire Jarvis and Georgia Priestley, among other folk at Routledge. In addition, I have developed some ideas based on aspects of research I have published in Disability and Society, Midwest Quarterly, and Mosaic. A few things have even been buzzing around my head since my time at the University of Staffordshire. I must therefore thank all the editors and tutors who have supported the project in its infancy. On a formal but no less personal level, thanks are due to the support workers on whom I have relied since coming to Liverpool, including Suzanne Angus, Tom Coogan, Heather Cunningham, Philippa Leddra, and Holly Lightburn. Thanks are also due to Turgut Olgun, Yunus Yilmaz, and everyone at Eton Place who continue to provide fantastic food and great coffee that sets me up in the mornings, revives me in the afternoons, and somehow prepares me for those lively evening MA sessions. Finally, I must say that my family and friends have always been supportive of my work. I spend far too little time with them all but am eternally grateful for their tolerance in this matter. I know how lucky I am to be able to chat and relax with my Mum and Dad, my brother Stephen and sister-in-law Gerry, and my daughter Nisha and her boyfriend Dan – precious moments measured out in crosswords, food, and yet more black coffee. Also, although grateful that a few of my

xii Acknowledgements

colleagues have become close, I am pleased that a few times a year I still get to enjoy a couple of pints with my oldest friends Peter Bagnall and David Cuddy – long may this tradition continue. Most of all I must thank my wonderful partner Heidi on whose love I have come to depend in everything I do. It is to her that I dedicate this book.

FIGURE 0.1

Sketch by Nicholas Roerich from the cover of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind (1906).

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INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL DISABILITY STUDIES IN EDUCATION: Fields, representations, and social aesthetics

Introduction: Social sciences, humanities, and education Disability studies is not necessarily the same thing as the study of disability. Disability studies emerged in the mid 1970s, at ‘approximately the same historical moment’ in the United Kingdom and the United States (Connor et al., 2008: 442). Yet disability as a topic of study has been of interest in psychiatry and psychology since the late nineteenth century, considered on sociology courses about social problems and deviance since the early part of the twentieth century, as well as on programmes in so-called Special Educational Needs, rehabilitation, and speech disorders that have proliferated since the middle of the twentieth century (Taylor, 2011). Indeed, before the first disability studies course started at the Open University in the mid 1970s, as the value of social model thinking became increasingly apparent in the United Kingdom, ‘academic interest in disability was confined almost exclusively to conventional, individualistic medical explanations’ (Barnes, Oliver, and Barton, 2002: 3). However, although driven by a relatively small number of disabled activists and social scientists, in the 1980s the discipline developed with the founding of the Society of Disability Studies, along with what we now know as the Disability Studies Quarterly and Disability and Society. This interest and engagement continued to grow in the 1990s and by the end of the century there were courses and journals in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Barnes, Oliver, and Barton, 2002). That is to say, the increasingly significant field that ‘spans the boundaries of academia, personal experience, political activism and public policy’ (Albrecht, 2002: 19) emerged in the last four decades and, although often inhibited by avoidance if not outright resistance (Bolt and Penketh, 2016), expanded in a number of directions along the way.

2 Introduction

One of the interdisciplinary directions in which disability studies expanded was cultural disability studies. By the end of the twentieth century this work in the humanities started to recognise disability as a focus that patently should have been found alongside race, class, and gender among critical approaches to cultural representations (Davis, 1995; Garland-Thomson, 1996; Couser, 1997; GarlandThomson, 1997; Mitchell and Snyder, 1997; Brueggemann, 1999; Kleege, 1999). Particularly significant in the 1990s was the launch of both Lennard Davis’s The Disability Studies Reader, an edited collection that has now celebrated five editions, and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Corporealities: Discourses of Disability, a book series that has published over twenty-five titles. More recently, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the need for a specialised periodical was addressed by the launch of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, which has now published upwards of thirty issues. These landmark publications are indicative of the international proliferation of work that increasingly takes disability studies beyond the social sciences to engage with the detail and relevance of the cultural imagination. Another of the interdisciplinary directions in which disability studies expanded was Disability Studies in Education. The formal inception of this field began in the United States at the end of the 1990s, the aim being to ‘deepen understandings of the daily experiences’ of disabled people in ‘schools and universities, throughout contemporary society, across diverse cultures, and within various historical contexts’, or more specifically to ‘create and sustain’ accessible and inclusive education (Connor et al., 2008: 441–42). Within a couple of years, at the start of the twentyfirst century, National-Louis University hosted Disability Studies in Education: Critical Reflections on the Themes of Policy, Practice, and Theory, an initially small conference that proved such a great success that it became an ‘annual event attracting ever-growing numbers of researchers, academics, teachers, and others actively seeking a more pluralistic approach toward theory and practice in educational and rehabilitation services’ (Baglieri et al., 2011: 270). The consequence is that now, nearly two decades on, universities in the United Kingdom and the United States offer progressive Disability Studies in Education courses that rethink so-called Special Educational Needs from a highly critical perspective.1 In the main these three fields – disability studies, cultural disability studies, and Disability Studies in Education – are located in the social sciences, the humanities, and education respectively, but each is interdisciplinary in its own right. Scholarship in disability studies and Disability Studies in Education represents ‘social constructionist or interpretivist, materialist, postmodernist, poststructuralist, legal, and even structural-functionalist perspectives and draws on disciplines as diverse as sociology, literature, critical theory, economics, law, history, art, philosophy, and others’ (Taylor, 2006: xiii), while the interdisciplinarity of cultural disability studies is explicit in its very name. The present book brings something of all three fields together under the rubric of Cultural Disability Studies in Education (CDSE). On a personal level this interdisciplinary venture reflects two decades of educational experience, which have taken me from doing a multidisciplinary access

Introduction 3

course to completing a literary disability studies doctorate; from sessional teaching in Peter Heaney’s English Department at the University of Staffordshire to a professorship in Claire Penketh’s Department of Disability and Education at Liverpool Hope University; and from publishing in education, the humanities, and the social sciences to editing works and organising events that break down many of the disciplinary boundaries. The pedagogic approach that has emerged from this experience is centred on what I call CDSE discourse, the premise of which follows the most famous educationalist in disability studies, Len Barton, whose philosophy stresses the importance of creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and learning: I am now absolutely clear, I became clear about this gradually, but I am clear about it now, with one perennial and profound understanding and that is they must never see themselves as anything but a learner and we’re all learners together. We are at different stages of the learning continuum, but there’s never a moment when I am not a learner. (Barton, 2005: 3)2 In the same spirit of mutuality, I endeavour to initiate or at least encourage embodied discourse in all the educational settings with which I am familiar, from my office to the lecture theatre; from research seminars to conferences. Although I bring in a focus on fields and disciplines, the definition of discourse I adopt and adapt is ‘communication or social interaction that produces and reproduces shared meanings and understandings’, a conversation, a dialogue, but also a ‘range of linguistic and non-linguistic forms of meaning making, such as text, pictures, images, non-verbal communication, music and so on’ (Sunderland, Catalano, and Kendall, 2009: 704). As my focus so oscillates between pedagogics and aesthetics, the interdisciplinary venture recognises CDSE discourse as part of cultural representation and vice versa – my classes often involve a culmination of contributions from students who have direct or indirect experience of disability, intermingled with critical engagements with attitudes, theories, and portrayals, as the educational encounter adds to and draws on the very matter under discussion.

The tripartite model of disability: A critical framework Underpinning this conception of CDSE is the tripartite model of disability. My reasons for introducing and developing this representational model over the past few years – and in the present book – are multiple but generally pertain to complexity. Again on a personal level I sometimes find myself reflecting on the ways in which my own embodiment both thrills and troubles me – I happen to have autoimmune and eye conditions (a combination of diseases that the medical profession renders comorbid), which means I have physical and visual impairments, as well as related things like chronic pain and rather tricky long-term medication requirements that mean living with a compromised immune system. One of the ways in which this embodiment thrills me is in the non-normative social aesthetic of my

4 Introduction

life and the intrinsically interrelated perspective I bring to my work as an academic – I am not caught up in many of the pursuits considered synonymous with happiness and am lucky enough to be employed in a field that recognises merit in the preoccupations on which I instead spend my time. It troubles me too, however, because as someone who does not perceive by visual means I use touch and voice a lot, which is complicated by the fact that my hands and jaw are among my main sources of pain. Moved by pride and sometimes shame (both of which I guess I am really meant to deny) I work with and through such things, against attitudinal and other social barriers, but with a growing awareness of disability as a complex form of consciousness (Titchkosky, 2011); as an experience ‘more dynamic than representation usually suggests’ (Garland-Thomson, 2009: 68); and as a stream of negotiations with society that can be recognised along epistemic lines (Siebers, 2015). In so doing I find it important to dispel simplistic representations of disability, an end to which I believe the tripartite model can contribute. The basis of the model is the representation of disability in the context of attitudinal and other social barriers that have been traced back to handicapism – a term coined to denote not only assumptions but also practices that promoted unequal treatment of people because of apparent or assumed physical, mental, and/or behavioural differences (Bogdan and Biklen, 2006; Ashby, 2010; Connor et al., 2008). My starting point is that there is no uniformly accepted term for discrimination against disabled people (Harpur, 2012), prejudice rendered a nameless apartheid (Goggin and Newell, 2003), although Anglophone terms have emerged in the form of ableism and disablism. The first of these terms is more widely used in the United States, for example, while the second finds favour in the United Kingdom (Ashby, 2010), which suggests they have emerged in accordance with the distinction between person-first and British social model language (Harpur, 2012). This being so, ableism designates the ideology against which a focus on personhood rather than disability is asserted, while disablism resonates with the contention that people with impairments become disabled by society – the one associated with the idea of ableness, the perfect or perfectible body and mind, the other with disablement in accordance with a social constructionist understanding (Campbell, 2008). Thus, although in practice the two terms might be interchangeable, it is worth exploring their respective merits (Campbell, 2008; Harpur, 2012; Goodley, 2014). The understanding I tend to share with colleagues and students is that ableism is the process by which nondisabled people are systematically rendered supreme and disablism is the array of related attitudes and actions against disabled people – much as patriarchy privileges men and misogyny victimises women. Led by what are elsewhere designated non-normative positivisms (Coole and Frost, 2011; Mitchell and Snyder, 2015), I propose that ableism and disablism be understood as normative positivisms and non-normative negativisms respectively, that these concepts be used to construct the tripartite model of disability. This being so, the model can assist in learning about and from the ups as well as the downs of disability:

Introduction 5

1. 2. 3.

normative positivisms – the ongoing affirmation of social norms without a second thought for disability; non-normative negativisms – difficult or disabling deviations from social norms; non-normative positivisms – affirmed deviations that depart from the social norms of ableism and disablism.

These three components must be considered here in more detail in order to ground and make sense of the representational model that serves as a critical framework and exposes problematic inequity throughout the book. The component of the model that pertains to representations of normative positivisms proves dominant; it is defined by ableism, the assumed normalcy that has been societally entrenched, profoundly and subliminally embedded in culture, rampant throughout history, and widely used by various social groups to justify their elevated rights and status in relation to other groups (Davis, 1995; Campbell, 2008; Wolbring, 2008). As tutors and students we probably recognise that, even in the twenty-first century, academia as a ‘social space can be read as an environment intended for non-disabled persons’ (Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson, 2002: 297). These normative positivisms are literally built into the landscape of inaccessible buildings and classrooms but also occupy the attitudinal landscape of departments, faculties, and institutions, ‘revealed in pragmatic arguments about cost as well as deeply embedded in traditional humanist concepts such as universality’ (Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson, 2002: 297). Indeed, if I reflect candidly on more than two decades in academia, I must admit to attitudes and actions that enforce some or many of the numerous forms of ableism:     

cognitive ableism, a bias in favour of the interests of people who actually or potentially have certain cognitive abilities (Carlson, 2001); lexism, an array of normative practices, assumptions, and attitudes about literacy (Collinson, 2014); sanism, the privileging of people who do not have so-called mental health issues (Prendergast, 2014); audism, the landscape in which everyone perceives by auditory means (Bauman and Murray, 2009); ocularcentrism, the dominance of visual perception (Jay, 1994).

If anything, alas, with due consideration this list is likely to lengthen, for when contemporary tutors and students occupy positions passed down to us we buy into a myriad of normative positivisms but often do so without intent. What is more, the intent might be to the contrary, as I know only too well, for an aspect of the CDSE discourse I employ takes place in tutorials, seminars, and even lectures, which means spontaneous engagement with highly important but likewise sensitive issues that might prove traumatic for some active or passive contributors (Kafer, 2016). Indeed, for some students my very encouragement is problematic – the

6 Introduction

more highly I value their input the more likely I am to increase anxiety. So pervasive are the normative positivisms in contemporary education that we find ourselves engaged in continual if not continuous exposure. Normative positivisms per se are not necessarily an issue but in their dominance they have detrimental consequences for tutors and students alike. On a curricular level, disability becomes marginalised if not medicalised (Penketh, 2011; Bolt, 2012; Mapley, 2015; Bolt and Penketh, 2016), a state of affairs indicative of the way in which many bodies and minds become represented and positioned as Other, meaning many people fall outside the norms of bodily appearance and/or performance and face social and material exclusion (Ashby, 2010; Hodge and Runswick-Cole, 2013). The assumed power of ableism relates to the cultural privileging of non-disabled people but, by extension, it oppresses those who experience so-called mental health issues, learning difficulties, physical impairments, sensory impairments, and so on (Rauscher and McClintock, 1997; Eisenhauer, 2007); it results indirectly in the exclusion, victimisation, and stigmatisation of disabled people (Wolbring, 2008; Hodge and Runswick-Cole, 2013). In the terms of the tripartite model, dominant normative positivisms can and often do lead to nonnormative negativisms. Prominent rather than dominant, the component of the model that pertains to representations of non-normative negativisms is defined by disablism. Disablism is more specifically about the oppressive and abusive behaviours that arise from the belief that people who have impairments are inferior to those who do not have impairments (Miller, Parker, and Gillinson, 2004), the ways in which so-called less able people are discriminated against and different abilities become defined as disabilities (Thomas, 2004; Wolbring, 2008). Nevertheless, because it involves not only the social imposition of restrictions but also the socially engendered undermining of psycho-emotional well being (Thomas, 2007), disablism is not necessarily explicit. Aversive disablism is subtle and often unintentional, meaning perpetrators may recognise the problem without recognising their own part in it (Deal, 2007). As a tutor, for instance, I have known people who are vocal about disablism to nonetheless deny my subjectivity in the work place: to address messages not only to me but also to one of my support workers, to explain rather bafflingly how I should manage the support I receive, to speak to colleagues instead of me, to sit or pass silently rather than addressing me in meetings, and so on. Along similar lines, to my shame, I can recall an initial conversation with a Deaf visitor during which I repeatedly turned away from him and towards his interpreter – because I do not perceive by visual means I found myself instinctively facing the direction from which the sound of the latter’s voice came. On another occasion I walked to a restaurant with a visitor who was using a wheelchair and realised that the route I tend to favour is relatively free from drop kerbs – a kerb is disabling for some people but for me it serves to demarcate where the road and its hazards begin. Given that we in contemporary education can probably come up with many more such examples (i.e. unintended varients of anomalous practice and

Introduction 7

thus, in my case, hypocrisy), I propose that ableism and disablism be conceptualised on a continuum that spans normative positivisms and non-normative negativisms. The third component of the tripartite model, which pertains to representations of non-normative positivisms, cuts across the continuum of the other two and is defined by growing appreciation of disability as part of the enrichment of cultural, social, and personal experience (Swain and French, 2000; Bauman and Murray, 2009; Kuppers, 2009; Garland-Thomson, 2013; Siebers, 2015). Disability is understood in terms of alternative lives and values that neither enforce nor reify normative standards, peripheral embodiments that hold potential far beyond the limitations of equality (Mitchell and Snyder, 2015). This being so, more than mere inclusion the aim for tutors and students engaged with CDSE becomes the ‘transformation of knowledges’ (Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson, 2002: 306). That is to say, epistemology is reconsidered, along the lines of cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer, 2014), in order that epistemic privilege is neither assumed by nor restricted to disabled people but that non-normative perspectives are encouraged, expected, and endorsed. The rhetoric of inclusive Higher Education (Bolt, 2004) can then be addressed by ‘enabling pedagogy, a theory and practice of teaching that posits disability as insight’ (Brueggemann, 2002: 321), meaning we all benefit from curricular cripistemologies, which ‘offer teachable moments organized around crip/ queer content that interrupt normative cultural practices’ (Mitchell, Snyder, and Ware, 2014: 296). Although neither dominant nor prominent, it is these nonnormative positivisms that provide the aspirational direction for the pedagogics encouraged in the present book.

Navigations of the normative divide: Social aesthetics and cultural representations Underpinned by the tripartite model of disability, CDSE discourse navigates the imaginary of the normative divide from both sides. To this end cultural representations are explored by tutors and students with reference to social aesthetics. It thereby becomes apparent that insofar as normative positivisms and non-normative negativisms can be disrupted by non-normative positivisms (epistemology by cripistemologies, rhetorical inclusion by enabling pedagogy, and so on), the formation of normative social aesthetics can be disrupted by recognition of non-normative alternatives. The definition of social aesthetics used here is: 1. 2. 3. 4.

an ‘examination of the manner in which humans present themselves in space in order to constitute effective and affective social behaviour’; a ‘descriptive process of examining the qualities exuded by the human environment and through human interaction with the environment’; the ‘study of aesthetics as embedded in relative social norms’; the ‘manner in which a society is visually represented’ (Coleman, Hartney, and Alderton, 2013: 10).

8 Introduction

In these terms the concept has great interdisciplinary potential, for it represents a ‘rediscovery of aesthetics in the everyday, and in this there is an immediate political dimension: social aesthetics can comment on the powerful, additional zones of communication that frame how societies work as both systems seeking stability and as structures of power and control’ (Coleman, Hartney, and Alderton, 2013: 10). The proposition of the book is that CDSE discourse can help us learn much about these things from aspects of cultural representation ranging from disciplines and curricular to actors and authors; from narrative and characters to media and campaigners. In the opening chapter’s discussion, tutors and students are encouraged to combine disability studies and aesthetics in order to explore ocularnormative qualities communicated in cultural representations of the 1890s. This interdisciplinary approach has curricular potential that becomes evident as consideration is given to dramatic and novelistic texts from the period – namely a Belgian play, Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind, and an English novel, Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed. Blindness is common to these pre-surrealist and realist representations that nonetheless posit vision as the normative means of perception in both the human environment and human interactions with the environment. This dominance is such that the characters effectively become occupied if not suffocated by social norms to which they have no access. The result is that they tolerate a residual existence whose only pleasure is in the past, usually prior to the onset of blindness. The representations are dominated by normative positivisms to the extent that disability is reduced to non-normative negativisms. The reduction of disability to non-normative negativisms is a concern in the second chapter’s discussion that focuses on what can be thought of as a by-product of the normative social aesthetic, for notions of freakery often derive from preoccupations with the manner in which society is visually represented. Interdisciplinary approaches that bring disability studies and film studies together explore how the beauty sought by the aesthetes of the 1890s is manifestly countered in filmic representations of the 1930s – specifically by the eponymous characters in a controversial film from the United States, Tod Browning’s Freaks. How humans present themselves in the name of affective and effective social behaviour is epitomised in the very concept of the freak show nonetheless praised in some informed responses. Notably, Browning’s community of disabled characters was played by people who actually had impairments, a state of affairs that alas even today cannot be taken for granted. However, as a representation of the human environment, the characterisation and overall narrative about horrific clashes between disabled people and non-disabled people obviously did little to dispel the Anglo-American eugenic imagination of the time. The nadir of eugenics was reached in 1930s and 1940s Germany, where the reduction of disability to non-normative negativisms was such that it became a method of protecting, endorsing, enforcing, and achieving the most rigid of normative social aesthetics. Applied in the first instance to disabled people, this terrible logic was strategically revised in accordance with Nazi ideology and thus resulted in

Introduction 9

the systematic mass murder of millions, including gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and most obviously Jews. This being so, the third chapter’s discussion builds on the premise that Holocaust studies is an essential aspect of contemporary education, but contends that tutors and students must draw on disability studies in order to engage more productively with representations such as Primo Levi’s Italian memoir The Drowned and the Saved. After all, the variety of voices and range of representations are our only means of grasping something of the social injustice so dire that, in many ways, it eludes the very act of representation on which we must depend. Social injustice is explored on a micro level in the fourth chapter’s combination of disability studies and gender studies, which opens discussions about the human environment via identity politics and the American dream. Because the implications and consequences of the dominant enforcement of normative positivisms were revealed in Nazi Germany, the decades that followed marked the rise of progressive civil rights movements, including among other great things the international growth of feminism and the introduction of the British social model of disability. These developments enable tutors and students to appreciate that, as a product of 1980s America, Bobbie Ann Mason’s short story ‘Shiloh’ provides an instructive but often unnoticed representation of disability as a social concern that impacts on the human environment of community, family, and identity. The educational task is to negotiate the juxtaposition of a feminist characterisation that sometimes clashes with the more subtle representation of issues around physical impairment; to think about how non-normative pursuits are systematically thwarted in favour of things that accord with social norms. The pursuit of happiness is reconsidered in the more recent representations that form the focus of the fifth chapter’s discussion – namely, George Sava’s English novel Happiness is Blind, Brian Friel’s Irish play Molly Sweeney, and Stephen Kuusisto’s American memoir Eavesdropping. Disability studies and happiness studies are brought together to critique the social norms of well-being, including the curative associations that disqualify people who have impairments. The representation of blindness is revisited but in this instance the normative positivisms that dominated the works considered in the opening chapter are largely chased away. Indeed, rather than being reduced to non-normative negativisms, disability is recalibrated and represented as a viable alternative to normative positivisms. The human environment is enhanced as the pursuit of happiness becomes reinvigorated with cripistemologies and non-normative positivisms. The pursuit of happiness is seemingly exemplified by some figures in popular culture, a state of affairs considered in the sixth chapter’s discussion with the benefit of disability studies and popular music studies. The proposition is that tutors and students analyse popular music videos for narrative, imagery, and lyrics that represent disability, the focus here being a couple of powerful examples from the United Kingdom and the United States – namely, Queen’s ‘These are the days of our lives’ and Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’. These representations correspond with each other because in both cases the audience is presented with a cultural

10 Introduction

icon whose apparently exemplary social aesthetic has been dismantled by chronic illness, a poignant moment of non-normative negativisms that serves to mark the end of a legendary life but, for some people, resonates with day-to-day experience. Detailed discussion reveals that what may seem like representations of residual existence in fact make key points about what is essential in the human environment. Some of the ways in which non-normative negativisms become subverted to upset the dominance of normative positivisms are explored in the seventh chapter’s combination of disability studies and humour studies. Be they explicit or implicit, social norms are the focus of many if not most comedic representations, as is certainly the case in Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain’s twenty-first-century British sitcom Peep Show. Figures with learning difficulties, mental health issues, physical impairments, sensory impairments, and chronic illnesses, among other things, become invited guests in a self-consciously futile endeavour to substantiate social norms to which the characters aspire. The norms of the human environment are thus subjected to rigorous ridicule by means of comedic contradiction. The final chapter’s discussion brings together the disciplines of disability studies and media studies in order to engage with a couple of twenty-first-century campaigns from the United Kingdom – specifically, Dove’s Real Beauty and the Royal National Institute of Blind People’s See the Need. The representation of blindness is again revisited but the findings are rather surprising insofar as the Real Beauty campaign contains some non-normative positivisms, whereas the See the Need campaign is a one-dimensional stream of non-normative negativisms, meaning that Dove sustains something of late twentieth-century progress but the RNIB returns to the normative social aesthetic and consequential residual existence of the late nineteenth century, as considered in the opening chapter and captured in Nicholas Roerich’s artwork on the cover of the present book. Indeed, it is fair to say that See the Need would have made a particularly fitting title for the disabling dramatics of Maeterlinck’s The Blind.

Conclusion: Cultural Disability Studies in Education Over the last four decades disability studies has emerged not only as a discipline in itself but also as a catalyst for the interdisciplinary fields of cultural disability studies and Disability Studies in Education. In the present book these three areas become united in a new field that recognises education as a discourse between tutors and students who explore representations of disability on the levels of everything from academic disciplines and curricular to language and theory; from received understandings and social attitudes to narrative and characterisation. In this context it is important to critique the ‘boundaries among academic disciplines, community, and discursive spaces’ as well as the ‘rhetorical constructions of difference and the dominant cultural narratives’ employed by tutors and students (Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson, 2002: 306). It is important, too, that we cease to approach disability from before the normative divide, whereby too little thought is given to

Introduction 11

issues such as the often uninspired curriculum and the persistent problematic assumptions about disability (Ware, 2001). What is more, to the extent that disability is a culturally defined experience, owing its very existence to the beliefs and practices built around the ways in which society responds to human difference (Gallagher, 2004), it is important to disrupt the dominance (and often visual premise) of normative social aesthetics. At this juncture I must recommend a number of other recent introductory works (Cameron, 2014; Hall, 2016; Davis, 2017; Shakespeare, 2017), my own contribution being to assert that disability studies is a great asset to many fields and disciplines; that acting on this fact can lead to curricular reform that displaces rhetorical notions of inclusion in favour of appreciation; and that the consequential understanding of disability representation helps to address the inequity of dominant normative positivisms, prominent non-normative negativisms, and unacknowledged or thwarted non-normative positivisms. Contemporary tutors and students are encouraged to engage with disability as an isolating, hurtful, and joyful experience that transforms aesthetics and pedagogics; merits multiple levels of representation; and offers true potential for community via navigations across the normative divide.

Notes 1 The field is set to be consolidated further by the new Journal of Disability Studies in Education. 2 This mutuality is demonstrable in publications aligned with the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies that combine the work of tutors and students (e.g. Barden and Bygroves, 2017; Hodkinson and Burch, 2017; Bolt and Mapley, 2018).

References Albrecht, G. L. (2002) American Pragmatism, Sociology and the Development of Disability Studies, in C. Barnes, M. Oliver, and L. Barton (eds) Disability Studies Today, Cambridge: Polity Press. Ashby, C. (2010) The Trouble with Normal: The Struggle for Meaningful Access for Middle School Students with Developmental Disability Labels, Disability and Society, 25, 3, 345–358. Baglieri, S., Valle, J. W., Connor, D. J., and Gallagher, D. J. (2011) Disability Studies in Education: The Need for a Plurality of Perspectives on Disability, Remedial and Special Education, 32, 4,267–278. Barden, O. and Bygroves, M. (2017) “I wouldn’t be able to graduate if it wasn’t for my mobile phone.” The Affordances of Mobile Devices in the Construction of Complex Academic Texts, Online. Innovations in Education and Teaching International. Available http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2017.1322996 (accessed 3 Jan 2018). Barnes, C., Oliver, M., and Barton, L. (2002) Disability Studies Today, Cambridge: Polity Press. Barton, L. (2005) Special Educational Needs: An Alternative Look. (A Response to Warnock M. 2005: Special |Educational Needs – A New Look), The Disability Archive UK, Online. Available http://pf7d7vi404s1dxh27mla5569.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/ library/Barton-Warnock.pdf (accessed 18 August, 2017).

12 Introduction

Bauman, H.-D. and Murray, J. M. (2009) Reframing: From Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain. Deaf Studies Digital Journal, 1, Fall, 1–10. Bogdan, R. and Biklen, S. K. (2006) Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theories and Methods, 5th Edition, Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Bolt, D. (2004) Disability and the Rhetoric of Inclusive Higher Education. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 28, 4, 353–358. Bolt, D. (2012) Social Encounters, Cultural Representation and Critical Avoidance, in N. Watson, A. Roulstone, and C. Thomas (eds) Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Bolt, D. and Mapley, H. (2018) A Dance of Difference: The Tripartite Model of Disability and the Cultural Heritage of Dance, in S. Whatley, C. Waelde, S. Harmon, A. Brown, and K. Wood (eds) Dance, Disability and Law: Invisible Difference, Bristol: Intellect. Bolt, D. and Penketh, C. (eds) (2016) Disability, Avoidance, and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge. Brueggemann, B. (1999) Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness, Washington: Gallaudet University. Brueggemann, B. J. (2002) An Enabling Pedagogy, in S. L. Snyder, B. J. Brueggemann, and R. Garland-Thomson (eds) Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, New York: Modern Language Association of America. Cameron, C. (ed.) (2014) Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide, London: Sage. Campbell, F. K. (2008) Exploring Internalized Ableism Using Critical Race Theory, Disability and Society, 23, 2, 151–162. Carlson, L. (2001) Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reflections on the History of Mental Retardation, Hypatia, 16, 4, 124–146. Coleman, E. B., Hartney, C. and Alderton, Z. (2013) Defining ‘Social Aesthetics’, Literature and Aesthetics, 23, 1, 1–11. Collinson, C. (2014) ‘Lexism’ and the Temporal Problem of Defining ‘Dyslexia’, in D. Bolt (ed.) Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Connor, D. J., Gabel, S. L., Gallagher, D. J. and Morton, M. (2008) Disability Studies and Inclusive Education –Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 12, 5–6, 441–457. Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds) (2011) The New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham: Duke University Press. Couser, G. T. (1997) Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Davis, L. J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body, London: Verso Books. Davis, L. J. (ed.) (2017) Beginning with Disability: A Primer, Abingdon: Routledge. Deal, M. (2007) Aversive Disablism: Subtle Prejudice Toward Disabled People, Disability and Society, 22, 1, 93–107. Eisenhauer, J. (2007) Just Looking and Staring Back: Challenging Ableism Through Disability Performance Art, Studies in Art Education A Journal of Issues and Research, 49, 1, 7–22. Gallagher, D. J. (2004) The Importance of Constructivism and Constructivist Pedagogy For Disability Studies in Education, Disability Studies Quarterly, 24, 2. Garland-Thomson, R. (ed.) (1996) Freakery: Cultural spectacles of the extraordinary body, London: New York University Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press.

Introduction 13

Garland-Thomson, R. (2009) Disability, Identity, and Representation: An Introduction, in T. Titchkosky and R. Michalko (eds) Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (2013) Disability Gain. Liverpool: Address to Avoidance in/and the Academy: The International Conference on Disability, Culture, and Education. Goggin, G. and Newell, C. (2003) Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Goodley, D. (2014) Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism, Abingdon: Routledge. Hall, A. (2016) Literature and Disability, Abingdon: Routledge. Harpur, P. (2012) From Disability to Ability: Changing the Phrasing of the Debate, Disability and Society, 27, 3, 325–337. Hodge, N. and Runswick-Cole, K. (2013) ‘They Never Pass Me the Ball’: Exposing Ableism Through the Leisure Experiences of Disabled Children, Young People and Their Families, Children’s Geographies, 11, 3, 311–325. Hodkinson, A. and Burch, L. (2017) The 2014 Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice: Old Ideology into New Policy Contexts? Journal of Education Policy, Available http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02680939.2017.1412501 (accessed 3 Jan 2018). Jay, M. (1994) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, London: University of California Press. Johnson, M. and McRuer, R. (2014) Cripistemologies: Introduction, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8, 2, 127–148. Kafer, A. (2016) Un/Safe Disclosures: Scenes of Disability and Trauma, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 10, 1, 1–20. Kleege, G. (1999) Sight Unseen, London: Yale University Press. Kuppers, P. (2009) Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 3, 3, 221–240. Mapley, H. (2015) In Search of Disability: A Critical Discourse Analysis of a Key Stage 1 Guided Reading Scheme, Disability and Society, 30, 6, 896–909. Miller, P., Parker, S. and Gillinson, S. (2004) Disablism: How to Tackle the Last Prejudice. London: Demos. Mitchell, D. T. and SnyderS. L. (eds) (1997) The Body and Physical Differences: Discourses of Disability, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, D. T. and Snyder, S. L. (2015) The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, D.T., Snyder, S.L. and Ware, L. (2014) “[Every] Child Left Behind” Curricular Cripistemologies and the Crip/Queer Art of Failure, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8, 3, 295–314. Penketh, C. (2011) A Clumsy Encounter: Dyspraxia and Drawing, Rotterdam: Sense. Prendergast, C. (2014) Mental Disability and Rhetoricity Retold: The Memoir on Drugs, in D. Bolt (ed.) Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Rauscher, L. and McClintock, M. (1997) Ableism Curriculum Design, in M. Adams, L. Bell, and P. Griffin (eds) Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook, New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, T. (2017) Disability: The Basics, Abingdon: Routledge. Siebers, T. (2015) Introduction: Disability and Visual Culture, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 9, 3, 239–246.

14 Introduction

Sunderland, N., Catalano, T. and Kendall, E. (2009) Missing Discourses: Concepts of Joy and Happiness in Disability, Disability and Society, 24, 6, 703–714. Swain, J. and French, S. (2000) Towards an Affirmation Model of Disability, Disability and Society, 15, 4, 569–582. Taylor, S. J. (2006). Before It Had a Name: Exploring the Historical Roots of Disability Studies in Education, in S. Danforth and S. L. Gabel (eds) Vital Questions Facing Disability Studies in Education, New York: Peter Lang. Taylor, S. J. (2011) Disability Studies in Higher Education, New Directions for Higher Education, 154, 93–98. Thomas, C. (2004) Developing the Social Relational in the Social Model of Disability: A Theoretical Agenda, in C. Barnes, and G. Mercer. (eds) Implementing the Social Model of Disability: Theory and Research, Leeds: The Disability Press. Thomas, C. (2007) Sociologies of Disability, ‘Impairment’, and Chronic Illness: Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology, London: Palgrave. Titchkosky, T. (2011) The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ware, L. (2001) Writing, Identity, and the Other Dare We Do Disability Studies? Journal of Teacher Education, 52, 2, 107–123. Wilson, J. C. and Lewiecki-Wilson, C. (2002) Constructing a Third Space: Disability Studies, the Teaching of English, and Institutional Transformation, in S. L. Snyder, B. J. Brueggemann, and R. Garland-Thomson (eds) Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Wolbring, G. (2008) The Politics of Ableism. Development, 51, 252–258.

1 VISIONS FROM THE YELLOW DECADE Disability, aesthetics, and residual existence

Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and aesthetics When engaging with CDSE one of the many fields and disciplines on which tutors and students can draw is aesthetics, roughly defined as the study of beauty and the sublime. Although arguably ‘indebted to rhetoric’, aesthetics has part of its history in rationalism, the dominant philosophy of the early 1700s, but was developed greatly in the late 1700s by German philosopher Immanuel Kant (Poulakos, 2007: 335). Imported to Bulgaria in the 1890s, the ideas of another German philosopher, Johannes Volkelt, reveal social considerations in the contention that ‘aesthetic qualities are not the physical properties of things’ but the ‘psychological products of our minds’, from which it follows that aesthetics is both relative and normative, for something or indeed someone must conform to a number of rules and conditions in order to qualify as beautiful (Spassova, 2001: 112). This being so, the philosophical form of aesthetics produces a social variant concerned with ‘an epistemology – an understanding of space or place and social structure – and communication’ no less involved with contemplations of emotion (Coleman, Hartney, and Alderton, 2013: 10). Social aesthetics can therefore benefit greatly from openness to the non-normative knowledge of cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer, 2014), which is why in recent years disability studies has helped to recognise beauty otherwise deemed broken; to prize physical and indeed mental differences as valuable in their own rights (Siebers, 2010). Be it normative or non-normative, aesthetics concerns the representation, assessment, and currency of beauty in many forms of human interaction. A significant aspect of social aesthetics is the visual representation of society (Coleman, Hartney, and Alderton, 2013), especially for Victorians with a fascination in the ‘act of seeing’ (Flint, 2000: 1), as in the ‘“Aesthetic movement” of England’s yellow 1890s’ (Gates, 1993: 233). In this ocularcentric cultural context,

16 Visions from the yellow decade

against convictions about the necessity of moral or political messages, came the contention that art could be gazed upon and celebrated for its own sake; the rise of the aesthete whose social interactions involved dandyism and other exaggerated preoccupations with appearance. Amid cries of hedonism and decadency, the figure of the aesthete was endorsed by a number of periodicals, notably The Yellow Book that marked out the 1890s as the ‘most colourful decade’ of the century (Claes and Demoor, 2010: 133). Different meanings of the adjective colourful became entwined as the philosophical, psychological, and visual aspects of aesthetics impacted variously on the social norms of the human environment and beyond. The present chapter identifies the yellow decade as a key cultural moment in which dominant normative positivisms expand into prominent non-normative negativisms that shape representations of blindness, the result being that blind characters are ascribed what I call a residual existence (given that value lies only in their sighted past). First published in 1891, New Grub Street chimes on many levels with The Yellow Book, to which the author George Gissing was a contributor, and tells the story of a literary community in Britain. The tragic sequence that exemplifies the meaning of residual existence is that Alfred Yule loses his sight, the ability to be productive as an editor, and then all social worth in that his life is ‘over’ and ‘wasted’ (Gissing, 1996: 335). This rendering of existence resonates in other works of the same year, including Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind and Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed. Both are considered here but the main focus is on Maeterlinck’s short play, which proves especially provocative if tutors and students can find time to read it together in class (perhaps with reference to the faceless and hopeless image of blindness appropriated on the cover of the present book).

Divided and divided again: The imaginary of doom and gloom CDSE discourse about residual existence must begin with the issue of division, whose significance is evident right from the start of The Blind. Set on an island, in the dark shadows of an ancient forest, the ‘gloomiest’ of plays (McCannon, 2004: 454) opens with the corpse of a sighted priest holding centre stage, on the right of whom there are six blind men seated on stones, tree-stumps, and dead leaves; on the left, separated from the men by an uprooted tree, there are six blind women, one of whom is said to be mad, and a sighted baby. The sex segregation of the scene, which remains constant and explicit throughout the play, reveals the extent of the community’s institutionalisation and as such resonates with the day-to-day experience of many contemporaneously disabled people (divided from broader society and then again from each other to further discourage non-normative reproduction). The normative divide is fundamental to the premise of Maeterlinck’s play, whose gripping quality, at least according to a late twentieth-century introduction, rests in its simplicity: ‘The blind depend on the priest to see them to safety; the audience can see the priest is dead, though the blind cannot; so the blind are

Visions from the yellow decade 17

without succour, although they do not know it’ (Slater, 1997: xv). There is little in the way of action but dramatic tension results as the implied sighted audience peaks across the normative divide and sees what the characters cannot see (a one-way dynamic indicative of the normative divide before which non-normative positivisms seldom reach). In the dramatic dynamic, while Maeterlinck’s implied sighted audience is furnished with nothing positive about experiences of visual impairment, ocularnormative values and aspirations readily circulate among the characters, as dominant normative positivisms bring about numerous non-normative negativisms: . They told me he’d be able to cure me. He says I’ll be able to see one day. Then I can leave the Island. FIRST MAN BORN BLIND: . We all want to leave the Island! SECOND MAN BORN BLIND: . We’ll all stay here for ever! THIRD MAN BORN BLIND: . He’s too old; he won’t have time to cure us! THE YOUNG BLIND GIRL: . My eyelids are closed, but I can feel my eyes are alive… FIRST MAN BORN BLIND: . Mine are open. SECOND MAN BORN BLIND: . I sleep with my eyes open. THIRD MAN BORN BLIND: . Let’s not keep talking about our eyes! SECOND MAN BORN BLIND: . You haven’t been here long, have you?(Maeterlinck, 1997: 23) THE YOUNG BLIND GIRL:

Although the island is rendered beyond the normative divide, the community of blind characters is convinced by the necessity of eyes and sight from which a longing for cure evidently follows. The counterintuitive implication, moreover, is that the longer someone remains part of this non-normative community the more they become so affected by dominant normative positivisms, the values and aspirations also shared by the implied audience. The dominant values and aspirations are constructed before rather than beyond the normative divide and have epistemic dimensions that run in complete opposition to cripistemologies – along what I therefore term anti-cripistemic lines. Accordingly, although problematised recurrently in disability studies (e.g. Rodas, 2009; Vidali, 2010), commonplace confusion between seeing and knowing means that The Blind can be easily comprehended as a ‘drama of human incomprehension’ (Taggart, 1994: 627), one of Maeterlinck’s ‘parables of ignorance’ (McCannon, 2004: 455), occupied by ‘feeble, puerile, unadventurous people, with an obvious handicap preventing them from seeing the realities of life’ (Slater, 1997: xvii). After all, the community in The Blind confuses seeing with knowing, and vice versa, on a number of levels, one of which pertains to the time of day. Although the first man born blind knows it is late when he grows hungry, the sixth blind man only deduces darkness from the absence of a blue line that, in the past, he has been able to see when in the sunshine and suggests the answer for all is to look up to the sky. Stranded in the forest and thus deprived of the institutional context, the community becomes ‘intolerably abstracted from the concept of time’ (Taggart, 1994:

18 Visions from the yellow decade

630). But notably it is not the sixth blind man alone who looks skyward for an answer; on the contrary it is only the three men born blind who ‘go on looking down at the ground’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 14). In other words, the normative positivisms are so dominant that nine of the twelve blind characters delve into their past resources and endeavour to see in order to work out the time of day. The anti-cripistemic dimensions of dominant normative positivisms endorse a related notion of social aesthetics. In their interactions with the environment, the characters are stifled by visual preoccupations exemplified in a number of references to the aesthetic quality of the sun. In a conversation about being rudely awakened by the priest, the third man born blind wonders whether the annoying alerts to sunrise were even true, recalls noticing nothing himself, and bemoans never having seen the sun. The oldest blind man and the oldest blind woman are both very quick to say that they could see the sun long ago, although the memories have now faded. But the issue for the third man born blind is that they should not be expected to get up and go out in the sun; that there is neither benefit nor reason; that it might just as well be midnight. Even when the sixth blind man argues that he would prefer to go out at midday, when it feels brighter, the real incentive is that his eyes just might open. The aesthetic of the yellow decade is betrayed as the conversation circles the exemplary beauty of the sun that the characters comprehend in largely if not purely visual terms. The implicit irrelevance of heat, sounds, smells, and emotions brought by sunrise has anti-cripistemic implications in this unhappy interaction with the environment because even knowing the difference between midday and midnight comes to require the sense of sight. The unhappy interaction with the environment is induced by normative positivisms so dominant as to render the community profoundly lost. The sixth blind man posits vision as a necessary condition for bringing meaning to location when he asks if anyone has memories of seeing the island in the past and, if so, ‘can they tell us where we are?’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 16). This compulsion to make a connection with the lost Self (Taggart, 1994) comments indirectly on the predicament in which the blind characters find themselves, oblivious to everything about their journey despite having it described to them by the priest. Their own sensory information is rendered irrelevant and the fact that it has not been supplemented by verbal information implies a lack of communication and learning that, again, contrasts with the sighted Self of days gone by. More than a big country far across the sea, the young blind girl cannot say from where she comes, believes she would need to make signs that cannot be seen. But she can remember seeing the faces of her parents and sisters; flowers and mountains; water and fire; the seaside and the sun. In brief, she can remember seeing many things mistakenly thought to be lost to her on the island. The implication of the lost community is that vision is a necessity when it comes to learning and communicating about location, the full profundity of which becomes apparent as place merges with time and results in an empty form of not only knowing but also existing. This is why a number of the unhappy characters

Visions from the yellow decade 19

‘embark on an attempted description of their other life, long gone, and themselves as they then were’ (Taggart, 1994: 632). Indeed, the ocularnormative rendering of place locates any sense of belonging firmly in the sighted past when the oldest blind man exclaims that they have not seen the house they call home: ‘it’s all very well to run our hands over the walls and the windows, we don’t know where we live’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 24). It is as if knowledge of home, that most profound exemplification of place, is somehow predicated on vision. The dominance of normative positivisms is at its strongest in relation to how the blind characters interact with each other. Illustrating why disability is sometimes known as the ‘master trope of human disqualification’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006: 125), the community is rendered unsocial and unhappy because (rather than conversation, shared experience, smell, sound, taste, touch, and so on) vision is the sole means by which people get to know and indeed love each other. When asked if she is beautiful, like someone from far away, the young blind girl says only that she has not seen herself, as though logically unable to answer the question. This implied logic is confirmed when the oldest blind man laments that they have not seen each other; that talk, touch, and togetherness are no comparison; that they might as well be alone; and that it is impossible to ‘love someone without seeing them’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 25). In these terms, vision is required to validate the very existence of Self and Other and thus fundamental to any connection between the two, a relational problem that impacts on compassion, for the blindness of Maeterlinck’s characters ‘strikes at the very heart of their being’; ‘prevents them not only from seeing each other, but also from feeling for each other, from understanding each other’ (Slater, 1997: xvi). When referring to the fact that prior to the priest’s death he had been crying for several days, the young blind girl says with some puzzlement that it made her cry too, even though she could not see him, empathy rendered mysterious by assumptions that only sighted people are able to identify with another’s feelings. The anti-cripistemic rationale is illustrated when the oldest blind man refers to the death of the priest and says they did not know anything because they have never seen him: ‘When have we ever known what’s in front of our poor dead eyes?’ (Maeterlinck, 1997: 40). In this dramatic account of residual existence the community becomes increasingly hopeless as the play draws to its shambolic end; dominated by normative positivisms the blind characters endeavour to benefit from the eyesight of a dog first and then the baby, ultimately unable to pull together and escape their pending doom.

Shambolic but symbolic: Revolutionary misrepresentation Despite what we learn from disability studies, tutors and students must acknowledge that problematic representations are sometimes defended in the name of aesthetics. Maeterlinck wrote in French and, in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Freedman, 1990: xx), is likened to Irish writer Oscar Wilde as an aesthete and precursor of the culture industry. The play, moreover, is said to have made a ‘revolutionary advance in the theatre: its emphasis on mood and ambiance over

20 Visions from the yellow decade

plot and character helped in part to give rise to the surrealist and the symbolist movements’ (Kornhaber, 2005). Hence, the ‘reality and the details of what blindness is really like are not a central point of interest’, according to an understatement in the introduction, for the ‘innovative’ Maeterlinck rejects realism in favour of ‘symbolic blindness’ (Slater, 1997: xx). That is to say, the pre-surrealist play heralds the surrealism of the early twentieth century and so moves, by definition, beyond the realms of realism. On considering symbolic blindness, tutors and students are likely to follow multiple lines of CDSE discourse. Mindful of the ancient story of Oedipus in which the mythical king unknowingly broke the incest taboo by having sexual intercourse with his mother and, on realising what he had done, gouged out his eyes, we might say that the blind characters are symbolically castrated; that the dead priest on whose knowledge they depend and the sun whose beauty they covet represent the father and mother respectively. Alternatively, given that the dramatis personae consists of a priest and twelve blind people, the same number as Christ and the disciples, we might argue that the community represents humanity, the priest symbolises religion (Slater, 1997), or that the play is about ‘spiritual blindness’ that must be overcome to ‘gain enlightenment’ (McCannon, 2004: 453). Then again, given the current divisive climate of Brexit, Donald Trump, and so on, contemporary tutors and students might well contend that the blindness is symbolic of another aspect of the ‘human condition: the bulk of us led astray, deceived, puzzled and abandoned by powerful political establishments’ (White, 2008). What is certain is that, in discussing the residual existence in the play, the inferences are plentiful, for the symbolism takes us in many directions, from which it might be gathered that the pre-surrealist drama of The Blind was without real implication for people who had visual impairments. But with the benefit of disability studies the aesthetic defence proves problematic in at least two ways, one of which pertains to embodiment. Embodiment can be defined as ‘all the many and various ways that we (self and other) accomplish relations to being in possession of the bodies that we are’ (Titchkosky, 2007: 13). These bodies differ from those of others and indeed from the bodies that we once were, meaning that they are not defined by dominant normative positivisms. However, the tenor of symbolic blindness relies on the stereotypical assumptions of its vehicle, which means that, far from being in possession of the bodies that we are, people who have visual impairments must be identified as lost and unhappy in order to represent the metaphysical bewilderment of humanity (Bolt, 2013). The pre-surrealist characters of The Blind may well be ‘portrayed as sightless in order to make a philosophical point’ but ‘what emerges on the stage is a ridiculous tableau of groping, groaning, and grasping at the air’ (Jernigan, 1974), which ‘reinforces every negative stereotype of blindness’: the community is ‘lost, fearful, querulous, indecisive, ill-informed’ (White, 2008). Rather than demonstrate how epistemic standards can become supplemented if not superseded by cripistemologies, the characters ‘grope haltingly in the darkness, and if they gain insight at all, it is simply to recognize that they are blind’ (McCannon, 2004: 455). This being so, the non-

Visions from the yellow decade 21

normative negativisms of the symbolic blindness are never without implication for social attitudes towards people who have visual impairments. Representational disregard for the lived experience of people who have impairments creates a form of what in disability studies is famously known as narrative prosthesis, whereby stories depend on uninformed notions of disability for inducements of emotion and impressions of insight (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000). Although in relation to non-literal representation there are many relatively positive approaches of which tutors and students should be aware (Vidali, 2010; Barker, 2011; Titchkosky, 2015), a frequent criticism is that ‘metaphoric treatments of impairment seldom confront the material conditions of actual disabled persons’ (Davidson, 2008: 1). The fiction is created in spite of the facts, meaning that for the symbolism of, say, the Oedipal interpretation to work, readers must think that visual perception is not only paramount when it comes to aesthetics but also a necessary condition of desire. Yet even scientific approaches to aesthetics problematise this position in claims that ‘seeing is ultimately derived from touching’, not to mention a zoological stance that flawless skin is the ‘most universally desired human feature’ and that ‘flowing, healthy hair runs close behind’ (Etcoff, 1999: 91), for the fact that these qualities can be perceived by haptic as well as visual means begins to reveal the lie of symbolic castration.

Not so novel: The resonance of pre-surrealism and realism Another way in which the aesthetic defence proves problematic pertains to resonance between Maeterlinck’s pre-surrealist play and contemporaneously published realist novels. Most obviously, Kipling’s The Light That Failed tells the story of Dick Heldar, a painter who loses his vision as a result of a head injury sustained during his time as a war correspondent in Sudan. Prior to the onset of his blindness (i.e. his shift across the normative divide) he just about manages to complete an oil painting called The Melancholia, which unbeknown to him is almost immediately defaced by its subject Bessie Broke. This being so, the subject takes control over the visual representation to which the blind artist thereby becomes oblivious. After all, Dick’s idea of what is on the canvas about which he shows so much pride is manifestly erroneous (Bolt, 2013). These dominant ocularnormative positivisms are disrupted from time to time, such as when Dick is presented with some modelling wax, but he ‘rejects the tacit suggestion that he might switch from painting to sculpture because he is certain that switching from vision to touch will take too long’ (Kleege, 2010: 4; Kleege, 2018). The novel contains some recognition that aesthetic qualities may be perceived by haptic means, then, but vision remains paramount overall. The haptic aspect of aesthetics is dismissed by the artistic protagonist whose life thereby becomes meaningless; as he crosses the normative divide, like Maeterlinck’s blind characters, Dick takes on a residual existence. In exploring the shift to residual existence, tutors and students engaged with CDSE might note that an Oedipal reading of The Light That Failed invokes further resonance with Maeterlinck’s The Blind and as such blurs the distinction between

22 Visions from the yellow decade

realism and symbolism. Rather than a priest, it is Dick’s friend Torpenhow who frequently fulfils the paternal and by extension dominant normative role. In one unfortunate episode Dick is even taken out by a nine-year-old boy called Alf, who forgets his adult charge and goes fishing instead. Torpenhow and everyone else who is alive and can see are cursed by Dick when he finally arrives home, for he infamously thinks of himself as ‘dead in the death of the blind, who, at the best, are only burdens upon their associates’ (Kipling, 1988: 142). From this profound jealousy rises desire when – corresponding with Maeterlinck’s nostalgic blind characters – Dick endeavours to peer back across the normative divide and thinks, ‘at length, with imagery and all manner of reminiscences’, of his would-be lover Maisie and ‘past success, reckless travels by land and sea, the glory of doing work and feeling that it was good’, and of ‘all that might have happened had the eyes only been faithful to their duty’ (Kipling, 1988: 167). Moreover, much as the preoccupation with vision becomes manifest in Maeterlinck’s references to the sun, the beauty of the moon symbolises desire in The Light That Failed. During a return journey to Sudan, Dick asks if there is a moon and, on being informed of its setting, wishes he could see. This hopeless longing resonates with the pitiful moment when Maisie deems him ‘down and done for – masterful no longer, but rather a little abject; neither an artist stronger than she, nor a man to be looked up to – only some blind one that sat in a chair and seemed on the point of crying’ (Kipling, 1988: 159). Indeed, ‘filled with pity most startlingly distinct from love’, Maisie becomes ‘more sorry’ for Dick than she has ‘ever been for anyone in her life’ (Kipling, 1988: 159). This discussion of an Oedipal reading reveals unhappy consequences of dominant normative positivisms in issues of jealousy, parasitic dependency, and sexual inadequacy that define the forbidden relationship.1 Although ultimately unhappy, the representation of blindness in The Light That Failed is not quite as dominated by normative positivisms as is Maeterlinck’s The Blind. Tutors and students engaged with CDSE must of course acknowledge that, like Maeterlinck’s blind characters, Dick Heldar comes to confuse day and night; to fall asleep ‘through sheer weariness’ at midday and rise ‘restless in the chill of the dawn’ (Kipling, 1988: 167). So confused about the time, however, he would ‘grope along the corridors of the chambers till he heard someone snore. Then he would know that the day had not yet come’ (Kipling, 1988: 167). In other words, Dick’s epistemic engagement with the world is sometimes productively informed by sound as well as vision, a multidimensional perspective that also has an aesthetic impact on his life. When longing for the sight of the moon, for example, he pauses to ‘hear the desert talk’ (Kipling, 1988: 206). The novel contains several such departures from dominant normative positivisms, although when informed by disability studies we cannot ignore the overall idea that the light fails, soon to be followed by love, respect, art, beauty, and life itself. These consequential non-normative negativisms are epitomised as the story ends with Dick returning to the battlefield and, as anticipated, getting killed. So although the representation of blindness is perhaps not as ocularnormative as in Maeterlinck’s The Blind, again unhappiness reigns as the potential for a non-normative social aesthetic is displaced in favour of residual existence.

Visions from the yellow decade 23

Concluding discussion: Ocularnormative aesthetics When bringing together disability studies and aesthetics the representation of blindness proves a fruitful topic for discussion. The present chapter explores a couple of representations from 1891 and shows that the normative positivisms of Maeterlinck’s The Blind are such that, although blindness is explicit in the title and the dramatis personae, vision is the play’s dominant theme. CDSE discourse might critique how the audience is ‘made to concentrate on one particular aspect of blindness – the helplessness that it induces in sufferers, and their resulting feelings of anxiety and distress’ (Slater, 1997: xix). After all, in their residual existence the ‘thinness and rigidity of their notions are amply borne out’, for the characters acquire knowledge neither by ‘gaining a conception of the mountains, valleys and caves around them’, nor a ‘feeling for natural rhythms and relationships’ (Taggart, 1994: 629). But interdisciplinary engagement means also recognising that the characters and the audience are recurrently referred to the supposed necessity of vision, relentless normative positivisms against which the community is bound to appear unaware, unproductive, unempathetic, and unhappy. Although these motifs might be read as symbolic in the play, there are recurrences in contemporaneous works of realism that cannot be so explained, from which it follows that the problem is with the ocularnormative and thus anti-cripistemic notions on which the representations of blindness are based. Born of the yellow decade the representations considered in the present chapter reveal much about aesthetics. Previous research has led to the critical concept of aesthetic blindness (Bolt, 2013), which encapsulates two erroneous yet commonplace preconceptions that bolster the normative divide: 1. 2.

normative positivisms – aesthetic qualities are predominantly perceived by visual means; non-normative negativisms – blindness becomes synonymous with ignorance.

The representational problem is that, like blindness and knowledge, blindness and aesthetics are often constructed so that the one is remote from the other, portrayed according to an ocularnormative aesthetic that disqualifies all but visual embodiments (Feeney, 2009; Bolt, 2013; Kleege, 2018). This being so, anyone who engages with CDSE cannot help but recognise that – more than being relative and normative as mentioned at the start of the chapter – aesthetics is very much a social matter. This conclusion accords with the concept of aesthetic nervousness (Quayson, 2007), the way some bodies make other bodies feel (Siebers, 2010), and the ‘extent to which the body becomes thinkable when its totality can no longer be taken for granted, when the social meanings attached to sensory and cognitive values cannot be assumed’ (Davidson, 2008: 4). The human disqualification of all but visual embodiments secures a normative social aesthetic based on how people perceive, how they are perceived, and how they are perceived to be perceived. In this unhappy representational mode, so necessary is sight that without

24 Visions from the yellow decade

it people can only long, dream, or nostalgically recall, which is why the nonnormative existence becomes residual and how the normative counterpart is deemed essential.

Indicative questions:     

Why are aesthetics and disability studies important to each other? Why was the representation of disability such an interest in the 1890s? What is a residual existence? How do symbolism and realism relate to each other? What is an ocularnormative social aesthetic?

Note 1 This interpretation illustrates the ‘primary scene of extreme anxiety’, also known as aesthetic nervousness (Quayson, 2007: 17), from which it becomes apparent that the ocularnormative aesthetic deters interpersonal relationships with the blind character.

Highly Recommended Reading (Disability Studies and Aesthetics): Siebers, T. (2010) Disability Aesthetics, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

References Barker, C. (2011) Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bolt, D. (2013) Aesthetic Blindness: Symbolism, Realism, and Reality, Mosaic, 46, 3, 93–108. Claes, K. and Demoor, M. (2010) The Little Magazine in the 1890s: Towards a ‘Total Work of Art’, English Studies, 91, 2, 133–149. Coleman, E. B., Hartney, C., and Alderton, Z. (2013). Defining ‘Social Aesthetics’, Literature and Aesthetics, 23, 1, 1–11. Davidson, M. (2008) Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Etcoff, N. (1999) Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, London: Brown. Feeney, D. (2009) Sighted Renderings of a Non-Visual Aesthetics: Exploring the Interface between Drama and Disability Theory, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 3, 1, 85–100. Flint, K. (2000) The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freedman, J. (1990) Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture, California: Stanford University Press. GatesJrH. L., (1993) The Black Man’s Burden, in M. Warner (ed.) Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gissing, G. (1996) New Grub Street, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. Jernigan, K. (1974) ‘Blindness: Is Literature Against Us?’ National Federation of the Blind. The Banquet of the Annual Convention, Chicago, Illinois.

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Johnson, M. and McRuer, R. (2014) Introduction: Cripistemologies, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8, 2, 127–148. Kipling, R. (1988) The Light That Failed, London: Penguin. Kleege, G. (2010) Dialogues with the Blind: Literary Depictions of Blindness and Visual Art, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 4, 1, 1–16. Kleege, G. (2018) More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, New York: Oxford University Press. Kornhaber, D. (2005) The Blind. Disability Studies Quarterly, 25, 3. Maeterlinck, M. (1997) Three Pre-Surrealist Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCannon, J. (2004) Passageways to Wisdom: Nicholas Roerich, the Dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck, and Symbols of Spiritual Enlightenment, The Russian Review, 63, 3, 449–478. Mitchell, D. T. and Snyder, S. L. (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Poulakos, J. (2007) From the Depths of Rhetoric: The Emergence of Aesthetics as a Discipline, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 40, 4, 335–352. Quayson, A. (2007) Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, New York: Columbia University Press. Rodas, J. M. (2009) On Blindness, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 3, 2, 115–130. Siebers, T. (2010) Disability Aesthetics, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Slater, M. (1997) Introduction, in M. Maeterlinck Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snyder, S. L. and Mitchell, D. T. (2006) Cultural Locations of Disability, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spassova, P. (2001) Aesthetics as a Philosophical Discipline in Bulgaria, Studies in East European Thought, 53, 1, 111–117. Taggart, A. (1994) Blind Process: Maeterlinck’s The Sightless, Modern Drama, 37, 4, 626–637. Titchkosky, T. (2007) Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Titchkosky, T. (2015) Life with Dead Metaphors: Impairment Rhetoric in Social Justice Praxis, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 9, 1, 1–18. Vidali, A. (2010) Seeing what we know: Disability and Theories of Metaphor, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 4, 1, 33–54. White, P. (2008) Lost in the woods, The Guardian. 5 Feb.

2 FROM SIDESHOW TO CINEMA Disability, film, and horrification

Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and film studies For half a century the field of film studies has contributed to explorations of how society is visually represented in culture. In the 1930s the Museum of Modern Art founded a film library for the ‘preservation, circulation, and appreciation of movies’, which made it possible for film studies to build a substantial place in the American academy by the early 1960s (Auerbach, 2006: 34). It is perhaps fair to say the British academy did not experience comparable impact until the 1970s but there was certainly some relevant progress in the late 1960s: first, the British Film Institute and London University started a course for teachers; and second, Screen Education Yearbook (a publication of the Society for Education in Film and Television) became the bimonthly journal Screen (Vitali, 2005). Thanks to these and many other international contributions the scope of film studies grew massively between the 1970s and the turn of the century. Rather than swerving the significance of the audience, the field followed ‘new methodological currents in history, literature, communication, and cultural studies’, and in so doing began to incorporate a ‘full range of approaches that analyzed the social and cultural contexts’ (Fuller-Seeley, 2001: 98). A new generation of film historians ‘drew from the emerging field of social history to bring issues of class, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, and culture into the study of the consumption as well as production of film’ (Fuller-Seeley, 2001: 98), and more recently (e.g. Adams, 2001; Smith, 2012; Cheu, 2013; Mogk, 2013; Chivers and Markotic´, 2015; Fraser, 2016; Markotic´, 2016; Antebi and Jörgensen, 2017) disability studies has been brought into the purview to gain a deeper understanding of how social norms and the human environment are represented. The filmic representation of disability considered in the present chapter is perhaps the most significant and controversial of them all. Based on Tod Robbins’s

From sideshow to cinema 27

‘Spurs’ (a short story published in 1923), the film Freaks was directed by Tod Browning, produced by Irving Thalberg, and first released by MGM in 1932. Although not at all well received originally, banished by MGM to the vaults for twenty years and banned for twice that time in the United Kingdom (Whittington-Walsh, 2002), it was reissued for the Cannes Film Festival in 1962 and went on to gain something of a cult status (Larsen and Haller, 2002; Church, 2011). Having been considered for decades in disability studies (e.g. Bogdan, 1988; Garland-Thomson, 1996; Garland-Thomson, 1997; Mitchell and Snyder, 2000; Adams, 2001; Davis, 2002), and interpreted from Bakhtinian, Freudian, and Lacanian perspectives (Whittington-Walsh, 2002; Herzogenrath, 2002), when rereleased on DVD in 2004 it was set more generally to ‘delight film fans, academicians, disability activists, and any combination thereof’ (Karamanos, 2005). Indeed, from its ‘conception as a horror movie exceeding all expectations, something more disturbing than everything seen so far (via Dwain Esper’s exploitation of it under dubious and misleading titles such as Forbidden Love, Monster Show, and Nature’s Mistakes), to its revival as an avant-garde film in the tradition of Buñuel and Robbe-Grillet, Freaks has covered the range of horror, art-house, and documentary’ (Herzogenrath, 2002). Thus, the film is relevant to the work of many tutors and students in contemporary academia. On combining disability studies and film studies we must take note of the representation of community that is not completely dominated by normative positivisms. Within earlier representations, groups of disabled characters tend to be rendered unhappy and rather hopeless – as in the residual existence of the community of blind characters considered in chapter 1 – but this certainly is not so in Freaks. When push comes to shove these disabled characters are defined by interdependency and as such are by no means strangers to hope; the community pulls together instantly and instinctively when one of its number is mistreated. In fact, in a departure from the original short story and his own previous representations of disability, Browning went to ‘extreme lengths to create a sense of community among them’, the result being an ‘entire colony of obsessive avengers, male and female, who act as one when outsiders violate their moral code’ (Norden and Cahill, 1998: 90). The conceptual issue on which the present chapter focuses is that the community of characters and the cast of actors are subject to a process of what I term horrification, whereby the potential for a non-normative social aesthetic is identified but represented in a way that induces fear; that serves to maintain the imaginary of essential existence before the normative divide.1

Narrative with a vengeance: One of us The combination of disability studies and film studies emphasises the importance of the social context of Browning’s Freaks. Although in the early twentieth century the ‘Protestant ethic combined with Victorian morality’ discouraged interest in so-called freak shows, the film industry soon ‘took over as chief exhibitors’, representing disabled characters as ‘either violent psychotic offenders or child like

28 From sideshow to cinema

savants’ (Whittington-Walsh, 2002: 695). Sideshows fell out of favour among metropolitans who regarded film a far more sophisticated form of entertainment (Larsen and Haller, 2002), which suggests one rationale for the attempted filmic resurrection in the 1930s when Browning employed a number of people with visible impairments to create what has since been deemed a ‘truly uncanny work of art’ (Herzogenrath, 2002: 15). However, this filmic variation on the freak-show theme was no better received than the real thing would have been at the time. No more ‘exotic celebrities’, freak-show performers were instead considered abnormal humans whose rightful place was within institutional walls, meaning the film became regarded not only as ‘filled with disgusting images’ but also as highly ‘exploitative’ (Larsen and Haller, 2002: 171). Indeed, this was the start of an era in which ‘seeing real people’ with impairments was unacceptable, an ‘affront to the “moral order of the body” and the curative power of science and medicine’ (Larsen and Haller, 2002: 171). For these and many other reasons – to which I return later in the chapter – the social context must be kept in mind as tutors and students give consideration to the film’s narrative. Framed in a barker’s spiel about a travelling show pitched somewhere in France, the film’s narrative follows a community of disabled people in its interactions with non-disabled people. Hans (played by Harry Earles) is engaged to Frieda (played by Daisy Earles), the basic complication being that he falls in love with Cleopatra (played by Olga Baclanova) who has an affair with Hercules (played by Henry Victor). Hans and Frieda are performers of short stature, Cleopatra is a statuesque trapeze artist, and Hercules a strongman, corporeal diversity that proves thematic in a film abundant with characters who have physical or at least visible impairments. The film’s forbidden relationship between a man of short stature and a typically beautiful non-disabled woman proves problematic in many ways (and on many levels) relevant to CDSE discourse.2 In an early scene Cleopatra notices Hans watching her and deliberately drops her cape in order to beckon his assistance. She turns away and smiles as he swiftly retrieves the cape and drapes it over her shoulders. He asks if she is teasing him but she insists not and thereby elicits his growing attentions: . Are you laughing at me? . Why no, monsieur. HANS: . Then I’m glad. CLEOPATRA: . Why should I laugh at you? HANS: . Most big people do. They don’t realize I’m a man, with the same feelings they have.(Freaks, 1932) HANS:

CLEOPATRA:

These desirous feelings are further stirred when Cleopatra grabs Hans and pulls him close to her, as though about to kiss him, but instead thanks him for his kind help. The scene begins to illustrate how the film exploited extraordinary bodies by ‘imagining them as sexual’ (Davidson, 2008: 77), a naive and yet condescending state of affairs worsened by the fact that the cultural imagination was unprepared

From sideshow to cinema 29

for the suggested relationship that induced discomfort rather than titillation: ‘Although producers of the time assumed sensual sequences would draw audiences, they failed to understand that audiences did not consider sideshow “freaks” fully human and were disturbed by what they may have seen as the “abnormality” of the romance’ (Larsen and Haller, 2002: 170). That is to say, within the film’s narrative Cleopatra fakes interest in Hans but the thing for contemporary tutors and students to note is that for the audience of the time this was beyond the pale, the very idea of the forbidden relationship was enough to cause great controversy. Although unbeknown to Hans, Cleopatra’s duplicity is apparent to the other characters – and, by extension, to the audience. Frances is a performer who has no arms and in conversation with Angelino, a performer who has dwarfism, alludes to the normative divide on which the central deceit is based, ‘Cleopatra ain’t one of us. Why, we’re just filthy things to her. She’d spit on Hans if he wasn’t giving her presents’ (Freaks, 1932). This suspected ascription of uncleanness is later confirmed and reveals that the underpinning divide is meant to ensure the purity and thus dominance of normative positivisms. Even Hans’s fiancée Frieda is well aware that Cleopatra’s interest in him is mocking rather than loving. She tries to explain this to Hans but his characterisation is dominated by normative positivisms to the extent that he rejects her in favour of the possibility of a romance that crosses the normative divide. The determined Frieda is forced to confront Cleopatra directly: ‘I know you just make fun. But Hans, he does not know this. If he finds out, never again will he be happy’ (Freaks, 1932). However, Frieda only makes things worse because she unwittingly reveals that Hans has inherited a fortune. With this wealth in mind, Cleopatra plots to marry and poison Hans, so that she and Hercules can reap the rewards. Hans finally becomes enlightened during the wedding feast when Cleopatra’s true feelings emerge in outrage at the idea of crossing the normative divide and joining the community of disabled people. This pivotal moment in the narrative begins when Cleopatra and Hercules assert their normative status and kiss passionately in front of Hans and the rest of the wedding party. Angelino endeavours to distract everyone from the awkwardness of the moment and proposes a toast: ‘Attention! Attention! We’ll make her one of us. A loving cup! A loving cup!’ (Freaks, 1932). As Angelino fills and shares the loving cup the disabled characters unite, bang on the table, and chant, ‘We accept her, one of us, gooble gobble’ (Freaks, 1932). But when it comes to Cleopatra’s turn to sip she is evidently filled with something more like hate, throws the loving cup back at the disabled guests, and silences them with yells of the eponymous insult: ‘You dirty, slimy freaks! Freaks! Freaks!’ (Freaks, 1932). She orders the guests to leave and asks the increasingly unhappy Hans if he is ‘a man or a baby’ before she continues in the work of his humiliation: . Ashamed! You! Holy Christmas! What must I do? Must I play games with you? Must Mamma take you horsey-back ride? HERCULES: . That’s it! Horsey-back ride! Come, come, my little fly speck. Momma is going to take you horsey-back ride.(Freaks, 1932) CLEOPATRA:

30 From sideshow to cinema

This scene has been described as the ‘narrative moment’ that ‘crystalizes’ Cleopatra’s ‘evil’, for although a ‘groom carrying the bride across the threshold on their wedding night might be regarded as the apogee of romance’, this reversal of the heterosexual tradition signals the nadir of the humiliation (Norden and Cahill, 1998: 93). Cleopatra ‘systematically infantilizes3 and emasculates’ Hans, ‘condescending to his advances, leading him on both sexually and emotionally’ (McRoy and Crucianelli, 2009: 259), and by the end of the wedding feast even he has to recognise the duplicity: the personification of pride comes to hide his face in shame. Cleopatra and Hercules nonetheless go ahead with their endeavour to poison Hans and this results in the revenge sequence by which the film is often defined. Many tutors and students engaged with CDSE are likely to agree with critics who condemn Freaks on the grounds that it ‘perpetuates the stereotypical image’ of disabled people as ‘psychotic killers seeking revenge for their disempowerment’ (Whittington-Walsh, 2002: 696). In these terms the scene ‘serves as a perfect example of the imagined bitterness and resentment’ projected onto disabled people by non-disabled people (Davis, 2002: 34). After all, the disabled characters ‘exact a cold-blooded revenge, in a nightmarish sequence replete with thunder and lightning’ (Norden and Cahill, 1998: 88); they turn into a ‘mob of murderers’ as they slide through the ‘mud and rain to enact vengeance on the nondisabled star’ (Larsen and Haller, 2002: 170). Cleopatra’s murderous plans are thereby thwarted, for she and Hercules become the victims of a counter plot that involves him being stabbed but culminates in her being turned into what the barker reveals is a kind of chimerical being, part woman, part chicken: ‘How she got that way will never be known. Some say a jealous lover. Others, that it was the code of the freaks. Others, the storm. Believe it or not, there she is’ (Freaks, 1932). This spiel takes the narrative back to the opening scene and in so doing reveals that the revenge involves Cleopatra becoming a sideshow attraction.

Nightmare scenario: From children to monsters An important point for CDSE discourse is that the revenge sequence illustrates how the community of disabled characters is rendered monstrous, which is a key aspect of their horrification. At the very outset the barker promises ‘living, breathing, monstrosities’; when relaxing in the countryside some of the disabled performers are referred to as ‘monsters’ (Freaks, 1932); and the MGM advertisements proclaimed that the film starred ‘strange and grotesque freaks and monstrosities’ (Norden and Cahill, 1998: 88–89). Indeed, MGM had commissioned scriptwriter Willis Goldbeck precisely to submit a story that could ‘out-horror’ Browning’s own Dracula (Herzogenrath, 2002: 9) but the studio executives misunderstood that ‘real physical difference’ would not merely enhance the genre; that the reality of the non-normative embodiment would ‘cause aesthetic anxiety among moviegoers’ (Larsen and Haller, 2002: 171), such as those who ran scared from the preview screenings (Herzogenrath, 2002). Tutors and students engaged

From sideshow to cinema 31

with CDSE must of course recognise that unusually it is ‘the ordinary, the apparently normal, the beautiful which horrify’; the ‘monstrous and distorted which compel our respect, our sympathy, ultimately our affection’ (Herzogenrath, 2002: 15); but it must not be ignored that the film also ‘dramatizes the freaks as “magic monsters,” capable of some strange supernatural, even surgical, mutilation’ (McRoy and Crucianelli, 2009: 264). By the turn of the century the circus had two very different lives, ‘one as a happy place for children’, the other ‘as a place of monstrosity’, and Freaks certainly was an example of the latter in its representation of ‘sideshow circus performers who turn violent’ (Parker, 2011: 558). After all, if the normative social aesthetic is disrupted during the wedding feast, as the typically beautiful characters behave malevolently, it becomes reinstated as a matter of course when the eponymous characters respond in kind. The grotesque embodiment with which the film climaxes has attracted much in the way of critical attention and so is likely to be of particular interest to tutors and students engaged with CDSE. Transformed from ‘beauty to freak’ (Davis, 2002: 33), Cleopatra is said to become a ‘legless, half-blind stump’ (Herzogenrath, 2002), ‘uttering nonverbal sounds in a fenced-off pen with side show gawkers looking down on her’, akin to a ‘prelingual child in a playpen watched by adults’ (Norden and Cahill, 1998: 93). Indeed, it has been argued that ‘what audiences and critics found truly horrifying and distressing is that Cleopatra, a beautiful though evil woman, received a punishment worse than death. She was disabled’ (WhittingtonWalsh, 2002: 703). Whatever the intent, though, an important point is that the powerful conclusion and interpretations must not obscure the fact that being part woman and part chicken is not the same as being conjoined twins, of short stature, or limbless; that it is quite distinct from having dwarfism, microcephaly, and so on. The film’s thematic implication that the disabled characters make Cleopatra one of them is highly problematic if due consideration is not given to the resulting animalisation.4 The bottom line is that the disabled characters make her one of them only insofar as she too becomes a sideshow spectacle. It is sometimes argued that in effect Browning drew the animalising and dehumanising problems of sideshows into the medium of film and in so doing worsened them considerably. In these terms he ‘presents the performers in much the same way as the sideshow culture, coding them as either comedic or horrifying’ (McRoy and Crucianelli, 2009: 262). The film is thereby ‘structured to reproduce, not counteract, the sideshow’s transformation of bodily difference into freakish spectacle’ (Adams, 2001: 66). Conversely, it also has been asserted that Freaks is ‘unique’ insofar as the disabled characters are only seen in their ‘actual social identity’, in their ‘day to day lives’; that they are never seen in a ‘mode of presentation used in Freak Shows and the other films’ (Whittington-Walsh, 2002: 698). However, in a scene described as ‘pure performance’ (McRoy and Crucianelli, 2009: 261), a character referred to as the living torso who has neither arms nor legs is shown lighting a cigarette with his lips and teeth (Freaks, 1932). Although he ‘ruptures conventional economies of spectatorship by looking directly at the camera in open acknowledgement of our presence’ (McRoy and Crucianelli, 2009: 261), one

32 From sideshow to cinema

issue is that this character also known as the ‘human worm’ only has one line in the film, when he shouts after Rollo the acrobat, ‘Anything I can do in the act, bro?’ (Freaks, 1932). Another issue is that the story essentially stops so as to focus the normative gaze on his non-normative embodiment: ‘Despite the film’s sympathies with its titular characters, Freaks’ stylistic emphasis on “abnormal” bodily spectacle over narrative more closely resembles the formal tenets of classical exploitation films than those of classical Hollywood cinema, arguably contributing to the hostile public and critical reception that marginalized it as a cinematic oddity’ (Church, 2011: 7). Although far more sophisticated than the sideshows, then, the film’s marked quality is nonetheless peculiarity, defined by non-normative embodiment rather than complex characterisation. Many of the disabled characters have minimal or no dialogue, as if the actors were not employed for their talents but exhibited for visual effect.

Behind the monster: Unexpected praise Notwithstanding the many problems raised about Browning’s Freaks, the representation can be productively reconsidered in CDSE discourse along the lines of non-normative positivisms. In psychoanalytic terms, rather than follow the freak shows and provide a ‘reassuring categorization of us and them’, the normal and the strange, the film reveals that very distinction ‘does not hold, since they are two sides of the same coin – the one being the repressed truth of the other’ (Herzogenrath, 2002). Even in disability studies the film has been said to offer one of far too few positive early representations (Adams, 2001). After all, based on the ‘institutional, xenophobic oppression experienced in the daily lives’ of disabled people, it did not blame impairment for disempowerment, did use actors with physical and mental impairments, did allow the characters with impairments emancipation, and as such can be ‘viewed from the frame of reference of revolution and social change’ (Whittington-Walsh, 2002: 706). The many problems with Browning’s Freaks – as I know from considering it with disability studies undergraduates and postgraduates – can dominate CDSE discourse but the film’s praise nonetheless warrants further attention. When navigating from beyond the imaginary of the normative divide, it is important for contemporary tutors and students to return to the social context of the film. Because there are so many reasons to rejoice the demise of freak shows it is perhaps too easy for us to forget the argument that it ‘isolated the performers (who were generally labelled with a physical or mental disability) from not only the rest of society but also from the economy’ (Whittington-Walsh, 2002: 695). For many disabled people who appeared in the freak shows the experience was not exploitative but rewarding financially and indeed socially (Bogdan, 1988), especially in the context of woefully limited opportunities for human interaction. Daisy and Violet Hilton (known for being conjoined twins), for example, feared the medical profession far more than they ever feared the freak show; they preferred their fame to the impatiently awaiting pathology (Bogdan, 1988; Darke, 1994). It is

From sideshow to cinema 33

therefore notable that many of the characters in Browning’s film were played by disabled people who had direct personal experience of performing in freak shows (Norden and Cahill, 1998; Mitchell and Snyder, 2000; Whittington-Walsh, 2002). In adopting this approach to casting, Browning is said to have taken a ‘major step beyond his horror film colleagues at other studios by assembling a group of developmentally and physically disabled side show performers from around the world to appear in his film as themselves’ (Norden and Cahill, 1998: 88), meaning that people such as the Hilton sisters, as well as Frances O’Connor and Minnie Woolsey (respectively known for being armless and prematurely aged) were once again employed in the entertainment industry they loved. Insofar as employment issues follow disabled people down the decades of modernity, it still remains praiseworthy today that in Freaks the disabled characters are played by disabled actors but this raises a point for CDSE discourse about representation. The documentary aspect of the film is of particular interest, for although one of the many problems with freak shows was the notion of captive creatures from myth being exhibited for the pleasure of normative audiences, the film’s footage actually serves to evidence the existence of certain disabled people. The trouble eased by this embodied representation is that, as a ‘result of separation surgeries and the pathologization of corporeal variety, conjoined twins like the Hilton sisters are, in fact, fading into the realm of myth’ (Hosey, 2009: 46). No matter how normative medical science might become, then, the employment of actual disabled people in Browning’s film contributes to the cultural memory of disabled lives that can all too easily fade. However, the documentary aspect of the film is also massively problematic because of the representational slippage around notions of freak show performers being played by themselves. A salient point for CDSE discourse is that, irrespective of their shared names, embodiments, and performances, the disabled actors in the film are obviously not playing themselves. After all, although played by brother and sister Harry and Daisy Earles the characters Hans and Frieda are engaged to be married at the start of the film and become romantically reunited in the brief conclusion. To get too caught up with reflectionist notions of documentary, then, would be to invoke incest. More broadly, the disabled characters form a non-normative community defined by loyalty but also by revenge, violence, and murder. They become monstrous in their human interaction and to so define the disabled actors would be to take the representational process of horrification to its terrible extreme.

Concluding discussion: Horrification and society Over more than eighty-five years Browning’s Freaks has elicited many diverse interpretations and responses in disability studies and film studies. For some it is an ‘insufficient representation of the freak’ (Feuer, 2007: 77); for others it ‘managed to display the “normalcy” of the characters, while attempting to project the real oppression they experienced – socially created attitudes and stigmas’ (WhittingtonWalsh, 2002: 696). From some perspectives, mainly ‘concerned with the power of

34 From sideshow to cinema

the visual image’ (McRoy and Crucianelli, 2009: 258), repulsion from the representation of physical difference was the overriding reaction that marked it as the most disturbing film of all time (Norden, 1994; Larsen and Haller, 2002); from other positions ‘what truly offends, shocks audiences and critics alike, and the reason for the film’s continued banishment is not only the visibility of the actors with disabilities, but also the fact that Browning and his actors found no shame in showcasing their diversity’ (Whittington-Walsh, 2002: 696). This range of contrasting readings is unsurprising because from the very epigraph, ‘which simultaneously argues that “the disabled” are the same as “us” (the normatively positioned viewer) while promising the ultimate eradication of disability by modern teratology, Freaks labors with contradictory impulses – both to normalize and exoticize its disabled acting ensemble’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2001: 380). That is to say, irrespective of social context the text itself elicits many diverse interpretations and responses. But to anyone engaged with the field of CDSE the film’s relationship with the social context is of particular importance. In the 1930s the cultural imagination was permeated by eugenic fears that beyond the normative divide people were necessarily degenerate: Freaks ‘heightened these cultural notions with its confirming narrative that people with “misshapen” bodies would turn violent, killing and maiming nondisabled people’ (Larsen and Haller, 2002: 170). In this mode of horrification the community of disabled characters represents a threat to all that is good about human interaction, the potential for a non-normative social aesthetic is rendered immoral. Indeed, although ‘ostensibly challenging it, Freaks reinforces the cultural link between evil and disability/ugliness; the cruel woman who early in the film is a beautiful spectacle is made hideous by the end, journeying from her role as ‘“peacock of the air” to that of a “chicken woman”’ (Norden and Cahill, 1998: 93). For all its complexities, then, the representation employs horrification to induce fear around romantic relationships that cross the normative divide and thereby resonates profoundly with the eugenics movement of the time.

Indicative questions:     

Why are film studies and disability studies important to each other? Why was the representation of disability so significant in the 1930s? How does film represent the normative divide? What is meant by horrification in this context? What have been posited as the pros and cons of freak shows and how do these things resonate today?

Notes 1 Although the process of horrification relates to horror, genre is not a focus here. Important work elsewhere considers representations of disability in genre fiction (Cheyne, 2012) and in horror films specifically (Smith, 2012). 2 Some representations of forbidden relationships that cross the normative divide are more complex and challenge negative stereotypes of disability (Cheyne, 2013).

From sideshow to cinema 35

3 Frequently found among representations of disability, infantilisation is pronounced in Freaks, for not only in the narrative but also in MGM’s publicity the disabled characters are rendered ‘strange children of the shadows’ (Norden and Cahill, 1998: 92). 4 On a related point it must not be forgotten that any representational effort to ‘humanize the freaks’ is misplaced insofar as ‘their inherent humanity is not for the filmmaker to bestow’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2001: 380).

Highly Recommended Reading (Disability Studies and Film Studies): Chivers, S. and Markotic´, N. (2015) The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

References Adams, R. (2001) Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Antebi, S. and Jörgensen, B. E. (2017) Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies, New York: State University of New York Press. Auerbach, J. (2006) American Studies and Film, Blindness and Insight, American Quarterly, 58, 1, 31–50. Bogdan, R. (1988) Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cheu, J. (2013) Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability, London: McFarland. Cheyne, R. (2012) Introduction: Popular Genres and Disability Representation, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 6, 2, 117–123. Cheyne, R. (2013) Disability Studies Reads the Romance, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 7, 1, 37–52. Chivers, S. and Markotic´, N. (2015) The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Church, D. (2011) Freakery, Cult Films, and the Problem of Ambivalence, Journal of Film and Video, 63, 1, 3–17. Darke, P. A. (1994) The Elephant Man (David Lynch, EMI Films, 1980): An Analysis from a Disabled Perspective, Disability and Society, 9, 3, 327–342. Davidson, M. (2008) Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Davis, L. J. (2002) Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions, London: New York University Press. Feuer, M. (2007) Everybody is a Star: The Affirmation of Freaks and Schlemiels through Caricature in the Comics of Drew and Josh Friedman, MELUS, 32, 3, 75–101. Fraser, B. (2016) Cultures of Representation: Disability in World Cinema Contexts, New York: Wallflower Press. Freaks (1932) Film. Directed by Todd Browning. MGM. Fuller-Seeley, K. (2001) Spectatorship in Popular Film and Television, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 29, 3, 98–99. Garland-Thomson, R. (1996) Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Herzogenrath, B. (2002) Join the United Mutations: Tod Browning’s Freaks, Post Script – Essays in Film and the Humanities, 21, 3, 8–19. Hosey, S. (2009) “One of Us”: Identity and Community in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 3, 1, 39–50. Karamanos, H. (2005) Review of Tod Browning’s FREAKS on DVD, Disability Studies Quarterly, 25, 3. Larsen, R. and Haller, B. A. (2002) Public Reception of Real Disability: The Case of Freaks, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 29, 4, 164–172. Markotic´, N. (2016) Disability in Film and Literature: A Critical Study, London: McFarland. McRoy, J. and Crucianelli, G. (2009) “I Panic the World”: Benevolent Exploitation in Tod Browning’s Freaks and Harmony Korine’s Gummo, Journal of Popular Culture, 42, 2, 257–272. Mitchell, D. T. and Snyder, S. L. (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mogk, M. E. (2013) Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television, London: McFarland. Norden, M. F. (1994) The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Norden, M. F. and Cahill, M. A. (1998) Violence, Women, and Disability in Tod Browning’s Freaks and The Devil Doll, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 26, 2, 86–94. Parker, M. (2011) Organising the Circus: The Engineering of Miracles, Organisation Studies, 32, 4, 555–569. Smith, A. (2012) Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press. Snyder, S. L. and Mitchell, D. T. (2001) Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment, Public Culture, 13, 3, 367–389. Vitali, V. (2005) Why Study Cinema? Serial Visions of the Culture Industry and the Future of Film Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6, 2, 282–288. Whittington-Walsh, F. (2002) From Freaks to Savants: Disability and Hegemony from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) to Sling Blade (1997), Disability and Society, 17, 6, 695–707.

3 REMEMBERING THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED Disability, Holocaust, and the inadequacies of representation

Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and Holocaust studies When engaging with CDSE it should be remembered that just four decades ago there were no dedicated courses in Holocaust studies. Rather, the subject tended to be reduced to a dismal, irregular, and incomprehensible footnote to World War II (Karn, 2012). Since then, however, there has been significant progress in the academy. In the liberal arts today, few academics question the importance of the Holocaust as a historical subject or doubt its contemporary relevance (Karn, 2012); most recognise that to ignore it would be ‘to distort history’ (Totten and Feinberg, 1995: 324); and some – among whom I certainly include myself – argue that there is a moral imperative to teach it in the contemporary classroom (Lindquist, 2011). In other words, from next to nothing in the mid 1970s, Holocaust studies has grown into a highly significant aspect of twenty-first-century education. More than emerging at a similar time to disability studies, Holocaust studies shares a number of qualities, for both disciplines are underpinned by embodied, experiential knowledge; both are universally relevant in their focus on human interaction; and both are particularly sensitive to social norms and related current issues around hate crime. Like disability studies, moreover, Holocaust studies explores questions about historical epistemology as well as contemporary challenges, the idea being that the past is taught in a way that critiques our present knowledge base and its ramifications (Karn, 2012). All of these things are pondered in the present chapter, as is the fact that disability studies and Holocaust studies both gain much from interdisciplinary engagement with each other. A disability studies course that does not refer to the Holocaust is patently deficient – hence, on the disability studies MA I lead we draw on Holocaust studies at the outset and recurrently throughout the course. Conversely, although not mentioned in a number of otherwise excellent twenty-first-century educational guides (e.g.

38 Remembering the drowned and the saved

Lindquist, 2008; Margaliot, 2010; Lindquist, 2011; Karn, 2012), disability studies ‘should play a critical role in any effort to comprehend the nature and mechanisms of the Nazi Holocaust’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006: 100). The premise of the present chapter, therefore, is that Holocaust studies is enriched significantly by disability studies and vice versa. In building on the interdisciplinary premise I refer to the fact that context and consequence are essential considerations in Holocaust studies. It has been stressed within the discipline, for example, that students must be led by educators to recognise a chain of events, decisions, and indecisions that link the Nuremberg Rally in 1934 to the Munich Conference in 1938 to the killing operations that began at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 (Karn, 2012). The hypothesis on which I expand is that this approach is supplemented by interdisciplinary engagement with disability studies, which adds that ‘what Hitler did in developing a hideous policy of eugenics was just to implement the theories of the British and American eugenicists’ (Davis, 1995: 38); and that, planned in the mid-1930s, the ‘euthanasia program’ was implemented in ‘1939, when wartime dislocation and secrecy made it relatively easy to institute such extreme measures’ (Hubbard, 2006: 113). In these interdisciplinary terms, which draw on both Holocaust studies and disability studies, it should indeed be asserted that the ‘anti-Semitic ideology, propagated by the Nazi Party from the early 1920s until Germany’s surrender in 1945, was based on pseudo-scientific fallacies’ (Margaliot, 2010: 58); but it is also necessary to teach about the part of dominant normative positivisms and prominent non-normative negativisms in the formation of those fallacies, navigations of the normative divide, and the endorsement if not enforcement of the normative social aesthetic.

Realities of representation: Classic and critical approaches Although in some senses only a fading echo of the related experience, the significance of representation cannot be overestimated by tutors and students interested in disability and the Holocaust. The ‘slaughter of disabled people under the Nazi regime’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006: 100) was linked representationally to the ‘subsequent genocide of Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals’, and other so-called undesirables (Hubbard, 2006: 114). Marked by non-normative negativisms, and thus envisaged beyond the normative divide, these targeted groups were represented as an infection, a disease, or a cancer in the normative body of the nation (Proctor, 1988; Hubbard, 2006). This metaphorical representation seemed fitting in the cultural imagination precisely because the systems for mass murder had been perfected on disabled people, an already medicalised community, and because that terrible perfecting was done in the name of medical science. Accordingly, the systematic extermination was represented by its Nazi perpetrators as a ‘gigantic program in sanitation and public health’ (Hubbard, 2006: 114). To some extent, therefore, the social norms were embedded in the aesthetics of the perversely medicalised representation. The importance and complexity of representation is a concern in both disability studies and Holocaust studies. Like disability, the Holocaust is a human story and so

Remembering the drowned and the saved 39

must be taught as such (Margaliot, 2010), meaning that a profound engagement with representation is invaluable and often essential. Why? What? How? Tutors and students tend to work through these questions, the key being that we understand the first question of why a discipline is important before turning to the second and third questions of content and methodology (Margaliot, 2010). In disability studies and Holocaust studies alike – as in the other fields and disciplines considered in the present book – representation is instrumental to the ways in which all three of these underpinning educational questions are addressed. For example, a number of approaches have been recommended to ensure the Holocaust is taught appropriately:     

recognising it as a central event in world history; examining it as a catalyst for fostering intellectual and personal growth in tutors and students; situating it as a primary focus of contemporary education; defining patterns of human behaviour; regarding its study as a force for social and educational progress (Lindquist, 2008).

Many if not all of these things also could be said of disability studies and in each case engagement with representation is critical. Representation may be understood in a number of ways, the most obvious being mimetic or reflective and generally referred to as reflectionism. Tutors and students who subscribe to this school of thought believe that language ‘functions like a mirror’ and reflects the ‘true meaning as it already exists in the world’ (Hall, 1997: 24). It might then be said that Jewish author and scientist Primo Levi, a famous Holocaust survivor, held a mirror alongside his experience; that he reflected the full horror in the work he first published soon after World War II in 1947. If This Is a Man certainly provides a powerful account of his time in Auschwitz and The Truce describes his flight from that most terrible of incarcerations (Levi, 1991). When this work is perceived as a reflection of the Auschwitz experience, readers may be said to work through the disturbing invocations and to arrive at the final page with a sense of catharsis. This state of affairs might seem fair enough on one level but the implications are highly problematic. Perhaps implicit in the assertion that, as witnesses, survivors are ‘both sought and shunned’, for the desire to hear their truth is countered by the need to ignore them (Des Pres, 1976: 41), the reflectionist trap I tend to invoke and explore is that tutors and students may come to regard Holocaust writing as a means of sampling the true horror, after which we can feel triumphantly knowledgeable and without a real need to learn more. Whether or not we feel receptive to this or other such critical introspection, it is useful to recognise problems with reflectionism inherent to the process of representation – as illustrated in chapter 2 with reference to documentary. For this reason the reflectionist notion of representation is challenged by classic Constructivist theory, which recognises that meaning is fixed in language by neither

40 Remembering the drowned and the saved

things in themselves nor the users of that language: ‘Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems – concepts and signs’ (Hall, 1997: 25). In bold terms, constructivists might assert that all composition is construction; that we ‘do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it’; that there is no mimesis, only poesis; and that there is no recording, only constructing (Scholes, 1975: 7). But that is not to say that constructivists deny the very existence of the material world. Rather, the point is that meaning is not conveyed by this material world but by the system we use to ‘represent our concepts’ (Hall, 1997: 25). In his endeavour to ‘provide explanations for anti-Semitism’, therefore, Levi ‘admits that none seems adequate to account for the magnitude and irrationality of the phenomenon in Nazi Germany’; that ‘maybe what happened cannot be comprehended, in fact must not be comprehended, because comprehending is almost justifying’ (Cicioni, 1995: 83). This contention illustrates constructivist theory insofar as the material world of the Holocaust is deemed beyond the reflective capacity of our language systems. The difficulty is that if, in avoiding the reflectionist trap, tutors and students subscribe to constructivist theory then we must acknowledge the problematics of the Holocaust representations on which we rely. If there can be no truly reflective representation of the most commonplace experience, we are unlikely to accept the notion of a Holocaust reflection – that is, a reflection of this ‘unprecedented event’ that has ‘fundamentally challenged the foundations upon which human civilisation rests’ (Margaliot, 2010: 58). This difficulty is worsened by the fact that the representational problem is not only the inability to reflect the Holocaust in human language, it is also the ‘human inability to remember such a “superhuman” experience’ (Sodi, 1990: 76). Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, which was first published in 1989, more than four decades after If This Is a Man and two years after his suicide. In this posthumous work Levi explores the memory of the offence, the grey zone, shame, communication, useless violence, the intellectual, and stereotypes. In so doing, he gives testimony to events while recognising the human inadequacies that plague this immense task: from the very outset he ‘problematises the limits of memory and of knowledge’ (Cicioni, 1995: 156). This critical understanding of epistemic limitations counter-intuitively enhances and emphasises the educational importance of representation.

Learning from Levi: Humanity, criticality, and dignity Perhaps the most obvious problem with a reflectionist approach to Holocaust representation is that the underpinning experience is so disturbing. That is to say, ‘all prisoners were at all times under extreme duress, and psychological and physical torment’ (Klein, 1990: 82), which may well have hindered their ability to perceive events objectively. Indeed, for the duration of any torture the effect is likely to be far more vivid than is the cause. In CDSE discourse we must remember, too, that in Auschwitz this extreme duress took on many different forms; that ‘each individual situation carried with it many unknown variables’; and that ‘no two prisoners

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had the same chances, the same options, the same pressure’ (Klein, 1990: 82). Accordingly, in The Drowned and the Saved Levi recognises that it is important to combine his own recollections with those of other survivors; that there is a need for a polyphonic approach; that while prisoners shared certain experiences, the absolute reality of each individual experience was subjective. His representation is ‘never dichotomous, oversimplified, or schematic’; he ‘believes that reality has the form of a prism, which breaks down beams of light into different colors, none of which can be said to mirror exactly the appearance of the original source of light’ (Klein, 1990: 84). One witness will necessarily experience and recollect horrific events differently from another, but Levi reminds us not to deem one right and the other wrong, for when juxtaposed the representations of both are invaluable. Towards an appreciation of complexity, this disruption of dichotomous representation is taken further in the argument that the world simply cannot be divided into white and black; that there are always numerous shades of grey; and that each of us is a grey zoner, in one way or another (Klein, 1990: 84). This being so, although part of Holocaust studies is pondering the ever-perplexing question of how unawareness could be claimed by people who lived near to concentration camps, tutors and students must endeavour to exercise critical thinking skills rather than to arrive at simplistic conclusions (Margaliot, 2010). Because the Holocaust exposed the human capacity for evil but simultaneously involved great courage and compassion, educational encounters with the subject require an examination of personal ethics and conduct (Margaliot, 2010). The grey zone acknowledges that every Nazi was not purely evil nor every Jewish person purely good. For this to be so the human element would have to be absent from the equation: Nazis would be demonised; Jewish people would be idolised; and Holocaust representation would be crassly fictionalised (an unrecognisably evil race attempts to exterminate a faultlessly good race but, at the eleventh hour, the latter is heroically rescued from the former). Rather, Holocaust studies encourages us to examine the continuum of individual behaviour, from evil to good, in order to consider what it means to be human and humane (Lindquist, 2011), meaning that tutors and students encounter a particularly if not uniquely challenging instance of ambiguity (Karn 2012). Not for a moment are we likely to forget that Nazism is inherently evil but it can be more difficult to remain mindful that perpetrators and victims are basically the same. Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved teaches us to dismiss the notion that there is something more horrific about one Jewish person’s mistreatment of another than there is about a Nazi’s mistreatment of someone who is Jewish, which reminds us that the fundamental horror of the Holocaust was precisely the fact that the Nazis systematically murdered millions of their own kind – that is, humankind. This terrible truth causes a slight but nonetheless uncomfortable diminishment in remoteness from the human guilt that surrounds the Holocaust phenomenon, for there surely can be no prospect of catharsis once we recognise ourselves in the grey zone. A more understandable reluctance to recognise the grey zone nonetheless raises another problem with the reflectionist approach to Holocaust representation. Levi

42 Remembering the drowned and the saved

admits that the memory of the offence can be ‘modified, suppressed by defence mechanisms or crystallised into stereotypes by victims and oppressors alike’ (Cicioni, 1995: 158). He recalls survivors who ‘subconsciously filter their memories, preferring to speak of the truces, of the moments of reprieve, of the bizarre and the offbeat rather than the moments of extreme pain’ (Sodi, 1990: 59). In addition to this defensive filtering, the memory of the offence can ‘even increase by incorporating extraneous features’ (Levi, 1989: 11). That is to say, the memory that grounds representation – and, by extension, education – is subject to both loss and change. But the worst problem with the notion of a Holocaust reflection is the fact that those prisoners who experienced the greatest loss are unable to offer embodied representation. Implicit in the book title The Drowned and The Saved, the ‘vast majority of Jews, those who have indeed shaped history, can no longer come to the surface of life to bear witness to what happened, either because they were killed in the crematoria, or annihilated spiritually’ (Klein, 1990: 85). As such this most important history has been written by people who did not fathom its full depths (Levi, 1989; Cicioni, 1995). In these terms, not even a survivor can know the full force of the Holocaust experience, a point that reveals the vast distance between representation and reality. We who ‘did not experience’ Auschwitz ‘can only imagine – from the comfort and warmth of our living-room armchairs – what it must have been like’ (Klein, 1990: 82). This bare fact betrays the educational relevance of the reflectionist trap, for if someone like Levi admits to not knowing the extent of the phenomenon, contemporary tutors and students are typically if not necessarily rendered naive. The representational and educational lack is worsened if and when Holocaust studies does not engage with disability studies and thus fails to recognise that thousands of disabled people were also rendered unable to offer testimony. After all, by 1941 over seventy thousand people had been killed in the psychiatric hospitals of Nazi Germany, which had been purposefully equipped with gas chambers and crematoria (Lifton, 1986; Proctor, 1988; Hubbard, 2006; Snyder and Mitchell, 2006; Burdett, 2014). Some physicians were reluctant to intervene as actively as others but nonetheless ‘let children die of slow starvation and the infectious diseases to which they became susceptible’, a death from so-called natural causes (Hubbard, 2006: 113–114). Most of these disabled people, however, were killed by ‘injection with legal drugs’ or in the purpose-built gas chambers (Hubbard, 2006: 113). What is more, although this systematic murder of disabled people may have diminished after the Church-led protests in 1941 (Hubbard, 2006), decentralised euthanasia continued until 1945 (Friedlander, 1995; Burdett, 2014), the end result being an estimated death count of a quarter of a million. The terrible truth is that even the hundreds of thousands of disabled people who did fathom the full depths of history may seem relatively few when juxtaposed with the multimillion death count of Jewish people, which is perhaps why disability studies has been and often still is deemed irrelevant to Holocaust studies. However, the fact is that even if the time limits of a course suggest a rationale that

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focuses on the most prominent aspects of this history, what is sometimes termed the Jewish Holocaust (Gruner, 2012; Oren and Shani, 2012; Spidal, 2011), disability studies remains relevant. Designed for killing disabled people, the very gas chambers in the psychiatric hospitals of Nazi Germany were subsequently dismantled and shipped east to be used against Jewish people, as well as Romany and gay people, in Auschwitz and other extermination camps (Garland-Thomson, 1997; Hubbard, 2006). In other words, the ‘feasibility of mass murder and the development of genocidal killing technologies’ in Nazi Germany were ‘first practiced and perfected upon the bodies of disabled people’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006: 32; Mitchell and Snyder, 2000: 9), meaning that those to whom the metaphor in Levi’s book title most obviously refers were not alone in being so deliberately and systematically drowned.

Keeping the lessons alive: The necessity of multiplicity With Constructivist theory in mind, the aim of tutors and students must be to engage as closely and widely as possible with representation without forgetting the unbridgeable distance central to the criticality of the whole educational encounter. It is surely true that teaching the Holocaust as though it were disconnected from contemporary politics and ideology is irresponsible if not dangerous (Karn, 2012), but so too is it the case that we ‘must beware of the error that consists in judging distant epochs and places with the yardstick that prevails in the here and now’ (Klein, 1990: 84). After all, the suffering experienced by the vast majority of tutors and students is minimal in relation to that of Holocaust victims. In my own teaching my students and I may recognise a distant link between hunger and starvation but nonetheless remind ourselves that the two are not synonymous, and that in any case starvation was but one element of a prisoner’s suffering. A vivid example of the armchair remoteness thereby avoided is provided in Levi’s discussion of stereotypes, which recalls the naivety if not arrogance of a schoolboy’s advice on how prisoners could have escaped from Auschwitz. This documented incident exemplifies the growing gap between experience and representation, where the latter is increasingly less informed by the former (Levi, 1989; Klein, 1990) and every link in the representational chain increases the possibility and indeed probability of misrepresentation. Concern about this experiential-representational gap emphasises that although, as Levi himself suggests in The Drowned and the Saved, If This Is a Man is in some ways inadequate, it is implicitly more valid than anything that is based on secondary sources, which is not to say that there is no educational value attached to, say, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List – a filmic representation of the way in which war profiteer Oskar Schindler realised the evil of Nazism and saved more than a thousand Jewish people in the service of his munitions factory in Czechoslovakia. Indeed, the inevitable demise of survivors means that twenty-first-century educators must adopt new ways of relating this most important history to generations who will not come into contact with anyone who has experienced the Holocaust

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(Margaliot, 2010). In three rather humbling encounters that have certainly supplemented my own learning, for example, I have met survivors Leon Greenman, Kitty Hart-Moxon, and Paul Oppenheimer, whereas it is now seldom the case that my postgraduates let alone undergraduates have been lucky enough to have had similar experiences. It is therefore increasingly important that Holocaust studies extends beyond such meetings and the intellectual examination of historical documents to the disciplines of art, literature, philosophy, and so on, the knowledge that contributes to understandings of human beings and the human spirit (Margaliot, 2010). Encounters with survivors are important but now, in an albeit impossible endeavour to compensate, it is increasingly necessary for tutors and students to explore a multiplicity of Holocaust representations. Alongside Levi’s memoirs and, among many other things, Spielberg’s massively popular film, Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1975) contributes to the multiplicity of representations with which tutors and students can productively engage. This lengthy documentary drama represents events at the trial in Frankfurt of some eighteen former Auschwitz functionaries (Carmichael, 1966), which was held by the German government in 1963–65 – nearly two decades after the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II. Having been at the trial, Weiss described his play as a ‘reflection of a segment of that actuality, torn out of its living context’ (Young, 1988: 70). In constructivist terms, however, as a representation of the trial The Investigation ‘necessarily remakes it’, reconstructs it as ‘any representation will, even the reporters’ own’ (Young, 1988: 72). Demonstrating the imaginative perspective that the playwright is said to hold over the historian, the ‘more resolutely Weiss ties up and packages the material, the more he interprets and adds’ (Ellis, 1987: 53). What is more, much as Schindler’s List was filmed in black and white so as to link it with and give the effect of ‘authentic monochromatic documentation’ (Cheyette, 1997: 229), Weiss gave approval to the idea of ‘hanging photographs of the actual defendants over the players’ heads as further “documentary” link between his dramatic reconstructions and the events themselves’ (Young, 1988: 72). This being so, CDSE discourse can benefit from an invocation of the concept of artifactuality, whereby the ‘actuality effect’ is monopolised and the artifactual power to ‘create events’ is centralised (Derrida, 1994: 29). The suggestion is that, reinforcing the ‘sense of whatever link it has to a past reality and then using the “authority” of this link to repress evidence of its own construction’, The Investigation ‘invokes itself as evidence’ not only of the realities to which its parts refer but also of the specific and apparently natural shape it ‘now lends these realities’ (Young, 1988: 71). As a representation of another representation, then, the documentary play adds much to the multiplicity of representations but nonetheless might be said to set the reflectionist trap of which tutors and students must beware. In order to minimise the likelihood of getting caught in the trap, the multiplicity of representations used in education should comprise not only different media and genres but also different voices and groups. After all, by exclusively focusing on the church-led protests that supposedly brought the Nazi euthanasia programme to an end, many historians have casually dismissed the hundreds of thousands of murders

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(Burdett, 2014). In the face of this dismissal – and providing tutors and students with a powerful introduction to related work on disability and the Holocaust (e.g. Friedlander, 1995; Snyder and Mitchell, 2006; Evans, 2007; Poore, 2007; Burdett, 2014) – the documentary film A World Without Bodies (2002) follows a group of disabled people who visit the Bernberg Psychiatric Facility and maximum security prison. In the gas chamber and crematoria ovens, as well as rooms for disrobing, autopsy, and body stacking, the site evidences the systematic nature of the murders therein committed. The film critiques and disrupts ‘racial and disability doctrines premised on a uniquely modern utopian fantasy of a future world uncontaminated by defective bodies’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006: 129). One of the broader points is that ‘if the Nazis had not moved from the persecution of biological and cognitive “deviants” to the extermination of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, the imaginary line between “medical intervention” and murder would not have been crossed’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006: 103). Although voiced from within disability studies, this contention is patently pertinent if not absolutely fundamental to Holocaust studies. As part of the multiplicity of representations used in education, academic work is complimented by artistic-activist counterparts. Resistance (2008), for example, is Liz Crow’s multimedia project, central to which is a short film that provides a powerful resource for tutors and students engaged with CDSE. Set in 1939, the film tells the story of Elise, a patient who sweeps the floors of a German institution for disabled people. Because she does not talk, Elise is wrongly assumed to be oblivious to the buses that leave full of patients but return empty. In the most poignant moment of the film the Nazis hold a champagne celebration for the successful despatch of the one thousandth so-called useless eater (Bush, 2010). Such remembrance of the ‘mass-slaughter’ of disabled people is crucial to an understanding not only of the ‘attitudes and moral failures that allowed the Holocaust to happen’ but also of how and why disabled people ‘continue to be marginalized in contemporary society’ (Evans, 2007: 20). CDSE discourse about these manifestly interdisciplinary concerns can be further stimulated by Crow’s contribution to Anthony Gormley’s living monument on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, where she sat in her wheelchair dressed in a Nazi uniform, an embodiment of contradiction that disrupted the normative social aesthetic and raised non-normative positivisms in a rarely represented point about Aktion-T4: that disabled people’s ‘resistance was pivotal in bringing the episode to a close’ (Crow, 2011: 114). With its focus on a generally marginalised voice, the multimedia form of this artisticactivist work significantly enriches the multiplicity of representations on which educational progress depends.

Concluding discussion: Supplementing the moral imperative The present chapter sustains the argument that there is a moral imperative for contemporary education to include Holocaust studies. So immense is the subject, however, that we who engage with CDSE must acknowledge the limitations of

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the knowledge we share, not to mention the inadequacy of the representations on which that knowledge is predicated. The constructivist concern is about confusing the ‘material world, where things and people exist’, with the ‘symbolic practices and processes through which representation, meaning and language operate’ (Hall, 1997: 25). In this vein, Holocaust studies recognises an underpinning dichotomy: that once the ‘archives of the German Lager had been razed, and historical documents lost forever’, only the word could ‘pledge itself as, and answer for, history and truth’ (Klein, 1990: 83); yet words are of little use when describing the experience of Holocaust survivors (Cheyette, 1997: 227). This dichotomy explicates the nature of what I mean by a reflectionist trap, for the very means of representation and indeed education are shown to be problematic. We can and should become more educated by reading representations of the Holocaust but must nonetheless recognise that the experience necessarily remains beyond our comprehension. Although bound to proceed with criticality, contemporary tutors and students who endeavour to negotiate this dichotomy must nonetheless beware of another trap, that the deconstruction of, say, artifactuality does not ‘turn into an alibi or an excuse’; that it does not ‘create an inflation of the image’, or else ‘neutralise every danger by means of what might be called the trap of the trap, the delusion of delusion’ (Derrida, 1994: 29). After all, irrespective of intent, to become too critical of reflectionist notions of representation is to deny events, meaning that ‘everything – even violence and suffering, war and death – is said to be constructed and fictive, and constituted by and for the media, so that nothing really ever happens, only images, simulacra, and delusions’ (Derrida, 1994: 29). Perversely, although trying to find a deeper understanding of social norms and human interaction, we could find ourselves horribly misunderstood, somehow thought to sympathise with neo-Nazi revisionist views – that is, an ‘outright denial that the extermination of the Jews and other groups had ever been planned, or had been more limited than the official figures suggest’ (Cicioni, 1995: 154). It is therefore important that contemporary tutors and students proceed not only with criticality but also with caution. The moral imperative for education to include Holocaust studies is served by this critical and cautious engagement with a multiplicity of representations. As the nadir of modernity, the Holocaust is unique yet its origins and ramifications indicate contemporary as well as historical relevance for tutors and students. These origins and ramifications are widely accepted as an important aspect of Holocaust studies but, in the most disturbing illustration of critical avoidance, those that relate to disability often go unmentioned. This normative state of affairs is particularly problematic because, as the present chapter shows, disability is integral to Holocaust education. In arguing that Holocaust education is supplemented by interdisciplinary engagement with disability studies, therefore, I also expose, in a Derridean sense, an absence that requires supplementing. That is to say, there is indeed a moral imperative for contemporary education to include Holocaust studies but this discipline is necessarily bereft when it does not engage with disability studies.

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Indicative questions:     

Why are Holocaust studies and disability studies important to each other? How did normative positivisms and non-normative negativisms figure in the formation of the pseudo-science on which the Holocaust was predicated? What is the reflectionist trap? Why is a multiplicity of representations so important in Holocaust education? How does activism enhance academic engagements with the Holocaust?

Highly Recommended Reading (Disability Studies and Holocaust Studies): Poore, C. (2007) Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

References A World Without Bodies. (2002) Film. Directed by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell. Brace Yourselves Productions. Burdett, E. (2014) ‘Beings in another galaxy’: Historians, the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Programme, and the Question of opposition, in D. Bolt (ed.) Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural and Educational Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Bush, S. (2010) “If No-One Speaks Out, Then Nothing Changes”: A Personal Response to Liz Crow’s Resistance, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 4, 2, 205–208. Carmichael, J. (1966) German Reactions to a New Play about Auschwitz, American-German Review, 32, 3. Cheyette, B. (1997) The Uncertain Certainty of Schindler’s List, in Y. Loschitzky (ed.) Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Cicioni, M. (1995) Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge, Oxford: Berg. Crow, L. (2011) Resistance on the Plinth: The Why of It, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 5, 1, 113–120. Davis, L. J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, London: Verso. Derrida, J. (1994) The Deconstruction of Actuality: An Interview with Jacques Derrida, Radical Philosophy, 68 (Autumn). Des Pres, T. (1976) The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, R. (1987) Peter Weiss in Exile: A Critical Study of His Works, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Evans, S. E. (2007) Hitler’s Forgotten Victims: The Holocaust and the Disabled, Stroud: Tempus. Friedlander, H. (1995) The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Gruner, W. (2012) “Peregrinations into the Void?” German Jews and their Knowledge about the Armenian Genocide during the Third Reich, Central European History, 45, 1, 1–26. Hall, S. (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: Sage. Hubbard, R. (2006) Abortion and Disability: Who Should and Who Should Not Inhabit the World? in L. J. Davis (ed.) The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd Edition, Abingdon: Routledge.

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Karn, A. (2012) Toward a Philosophy of Holocaust Education: Teaching Values without Imposing Agendas, History Teacher, 45, 2, 221–240. Klein, I. (1990) Primo Levi: The Drowned, the Saved, and the ‘Grey Zone’, Wiesenthal Center Annual, 7, 77–89. Levi, P. (1989) The Drowned and the Saved, London: Abacus. Levi, P. (1991) If This Is a Man / The Truce, London: Abacus. Lifton, R. J. (1986) The Nazi Doctors, New York: Basic Books. Lindquist, D. H. (2008) Five Perspectives for Teaching the Holocaust, American Secondary Education, 36, 3, 4–14. Lindquist, D. H. (2011) Meeting a Moral Imperative: A Rationale for Teaching the Holocaust, The Clearing House, 84, 26–30. Margaliot, O. (2010) Teaching the Holocaust: Remembrance Here and Now, Agora, 45, 1, 58–63. Mitchell, D. T. and Snyder, S. L. (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Oren, G. and Shani, A. (2012) The Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum: Educational Dark Tourism in a Futuristic Form, Journal of Heritage Tourism, 7, 3, 255–270. Poore, C. (2007) Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Proctor, R. N. (1988) Racial Hygiene: Medicine and the Nazis, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Resistance. (2008) Short film. Directed by Liz Crow. Roaring Girl Productions. Scholes, R. (1975) Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future, London: University of Notre Dame Press. Snyder, S. L. and Mitchell, D. T. (2006) Cultural Locations of Disability, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sodi, R. B. (1990) A Dante Of Our Time, New York: Peter Lang. Spidal, D. F. (2011) Treatment of Holocaust Denial Literature in Association of Research Libraries, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 38, 1, 26–32. Totten, S. and Feinberg, S. (1995) Teaching about the Holocaust: Issues of Rationale, Content, Methodology, and Resources, Social Education, 59, 6, 323–333. Weiss, P. (1975) The Investigation, New York: Atheneum. Young, J. E. (1988) Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the consequences of Interpretation, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

4 IN THE LOG HOUSE Disability, gender, and resistance to social norms

Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and gender studies In the past four decades, while resisting the notion of disciplinarity and advocating multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity, gender studies – sometimes designated feminist studies, women’s studies, or studies in gender and sexuality – has grown into an internationally recognised academic discipline (Pulkkinen, 2015). Inspired by the much-quoted 1940s assertion that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (de Beauvoir, 1974: 301), the conceptual distinction between sex and gender was posited in the 1970s by second wave feminists – including Ann Oakley, Sheila Rowbotham, and Sue Sharpe. Their contention was that although sex is a biological matter, gender can be better understood in social, psychological, and cultural terms. Women’s studies courses were cordially introduced to redress the lack of research about women in existing disciplines and to investigate social problems that affected women’s lives, a focus that grew to include gender and sexuality (Wood, 2012). The significance of this work was such that gender studies continued its advance into the present century (Brown, 2011) and contemporary tutors and students are now bound to be familiar with dedicated courses as well as with the widespread impact on other fields and disciplines. Gender studies, in its many incarnations, has informed and influenced disability studies from the start. For example, instrumental in the late-twentieth-century British disability movement, the social model was developed by activists and academics – including the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, Paul Hunt, Vic Finkelstein, Mike Oliver, and Colin Barnes – who drew a line between impairment and disability that paralleled the feminist distinction between sex and gender. It is similar because it regards disability as ‘socially created, or constructed on top of impairment, and places the explanation of its changing character in the

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social and economic structure and culture of the society in which it is found’ (Corker and Shakespeare, 2002: 3). In these terms one is not born, but rather becomes, ‘a freak’ (Mitchell, 1999: ix), for many things may cause impairment but only society causes disablement. A basic illustration that tends to work well in introductory classes is one in which the inability to walk is described as an impairment, while the inability to enter a room because the entrance is at the top of a flight of steps is disablement. The social model, therefore, challenges the idea that disablement is an ‘inescapable biological destiny’ (Barnes and Mercer, 2003: 12) and in so doing has become pivotal in and beyond British disability studies. In the present chapter disability studies and gender studies are combined with reference to a short story that – judging by my research and experience of teaching it to first-year English undergraduates – elicits much in the way of CDSE discourse about social norms, be they feminine, masculine, or disabling. Bobbie Ann Mason’s first book Shiloh and Other Stories was the winner of the Hemingway Foundation/ PEN Award in 1983 and the title work was selected for Best American Short Stories of 1981.1 It portrays a white working-class couple called the Moffitts who, disillusioned in their pursuit of happiness as defined by the American dream, find themselves preoccupied with random details of their everyday life (Henning, 1989). This unhappy existence emerges from what has been called a radical change in the relationship that acts as a catalyst for the breakup with which the story ends (Wilhelm, 1987), for truck driver Leroy has an accident that leaves him unemployed, at home much of the time, and thus increasingly caught in wife Norma Jean’s rebellion against ‘typically feminine roles’ (Bucher, 1991). This being so, the present chapter explores what tutors and students engaged with CDSE are likely to discuss about how representations of disability and gender work with and against each other.

Identity politics: Gender, disability, and juxtapositions Identity politics is something on which new students are surprisingly taciturn, many if not most being rather reluctant to refer to themselves as feminists until weeks or even months into a course. In breaking this ice, ‘Shiloh’ is very effective but must be discussed with due consideration to the social norms of nigh on four decades ago, when women’s liberation was trivialised as a battle of the sexes or else misrepresented as gender grandstanding (Bradley, 2007). Against this oppressive backdrop, it is quite striking that Norma Jean fulfils a masculine social norm and goes out to work; that she leaves Leroy with domestic duties typically deemed feminine.2 When they travel to Shiloh, moreover, it is she who drives, a detail noteworthy in the social context because anyone who had ‘driven down the road passing carfuls of couples, with the men in the front and women in the back’, knew it was ‘still considered appropriate for the man to drive’; to ‘assume the position of control’ (Bucher, 1991). In the South of the late 1970s and early 1980s there was an explicitly feminist aspect of numerous such interpersonal interactions, many of which are likely to be of interest to contemporary tutors and students engaged with CDSE.

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When considering the political aspect of personal interaction even the designation of characters is significant in terms of performativity. Classic feminist work on this matter is grounded in Speech Act theory and argues that gender cannot exist before or beyond the discourse by which it is named; that it is ascribed as the result of a process that begins when a baby is first referred to as a boy or a girl (Butler, 1980). A good point for CDSE discourse is that because Marilyn Monroe’s real name was Norma Jean Baker, she is invoked in the story that nonetheless employs typically masculine characteristics that disrupt further evocations of the feminine icon (Bolt, 2010). The fact that Leroy’s name means the king in French is also relevant in this respect because, as suggested when he opens a ‘king-sized bottle of beer’ but divides it carefully and hands a glass to Norma Jean (Mason, 1995: 362), his kingship becomes significantly diminished. Attached to the names of the two central characters, therefore, are connotations of feminine and masculine social norms that the characterisations recurrently resist. ‘Shiloh’ is sometimes interpreted as a tale of role reversal, rather than resistance, but it might be worth tutors and students stressing the detail that Norma Jean does not trade with Leroy completely (Bolt, 2010). If he can be said to take on a typically feminine role, she does not simply take on a typically masculine role, for among other things she does the bulk of domestic tasks like cleaning, going to the shops, and putting away groceries, not to mention cooking everything from casserole and fried chicken to chocolate pie. This versatility across gender lines anticipates new feminism, the assertion of women as powerful agents of change, with numerous resources at their disposal (Wolf, 1994). Indeed, it might be said that Norma Jean is an agent for change in a story of which the very focus is change: ‘The image is remote from traditional notions of the southern wife or lady, and the new image is one feminists are likely to applaud’ (Flora, 1999: 1020). She blurs the distinction between typically feminine and typically masculine social roles by excelling in them both. In crossing and combining typically feminine and typically masculine social roles, Norma Jean’s characterisation proves complex, as flagged up in the contrast of confidence and coyness that so easily initiates discourse among tutors and students. There is a stark difference between the boldness of the opening image in which she stands with her legs apart, lifting weights to build her pectorals, and the embodiment of weakness who subsequently sits on a kitchen chair ‘with her feet up and her arms wrapped around her knees’ (Mason, 1995: 362).3 This complexity is further suggested by the way in which she initially reminds Leroy of Wonder Woman but later looks ‘small and helpless’ (Mason, 1995: 362), a combination of strength and weakness confirmed when she tells him to feel one of her arms and adds that it is not as hard as the other. Corporeally she is half hard and half soft, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, stood with her legs wide open and then sat with them tightly closed, and as such can be said to evoke a complex mixture of defiance and vulnerability. The theme of corporeality becomes all the more significant when discursive engagement is expanded in order to benefit from disability studies, whereby

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Norma Jean and Leroy come to represent two sides of the normative divide. In these interdisciplinary terms a point of interest must be the way in which one depends on the other, how Norma Jean’s complex characterisation relates to Leroy’s impairment. She builds her body with equipment acquired for his rehabilitation, an exercise in self-improvement that prompts her enrolment on bodybuilding, cookery, and composition courses. Yet, far from acknowledging associative non-normative positivisms, her attitude towards impairment is dismissive. Insensitivity is implicit in her ostentatious bodybuilding regime, an aspect of the story’s building motif that at the very least reveals something of a preoccupation with normative corporeality – in accordance with the fact that her name contains the word norm. This interdisciplinary interpretation renders Norma Jean’s dismissal of impairment problematic insofar as she downplays her consequential gains, and thus keeps the normative positivisms distinct and dominant. CDSE discourse is invited by how the character-defining introduction of Leroy juxtaposes with that of Norma Jean. Distinct from the enhanced corporeality of his weightlifting wife, Leroy is introduced as a truck driver who has injured one of his legs in a highway accident and has a steel pin in his hip. It is suggested that he will not return to his work because even if therapy prepares him physically the accident has left him afraid to drive long distances. Readers are also informed that Leroy has been collecting ‘temporary disability’ (Mason, 1995: 355), which formalises his injury as an impairment, his income as unearned, and emphasises the distinction between past and present. It has been elsewhere argued that ‘Shiloh’ is a ‘negative example of how the present must pay attention to the past in order to find meaning’ (Gillespie, 2006: 104) and that the characters are ‘much more concerned with the present than the past’, it being ‘their own history that they must confront’ (Flora, 1999: 1020). But the issue on which disability studies helps us to focus is how Leroy’s normative past is displaced by a non-normative present marked by residual existence, a predicament very different from the far more hopeful characterisation of Norma Jean.

Unhappy accident: Left bereft When preoccupied with the future the pursuit of happiness necessarily renders the present unhappy, for the very search displaces the actual discovery, which is to say that the normative longing obscures non-normative appreciation. After all, the pursuit ‘operates as a futurity, as something that is hoped for, creating a political and personal horizon that gives us an image of the good life’ (Ahmed, 2007: 12). Accordingly, Norma Jean is not happy throughout the story but by the end has potential so to be. In the case of Leroy, however, both the future implied by the ending and his day-to-day existence are illustrative of unhappiness, which can be understood as something we try to avoid that takes the social meaning and order from being human (Ahmed, 2007). But given that this is a received and thus normative understanding it is worth engaging more closely with the representation and indeed concept of unhappiness.

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Because one significant source of social meaning and order is employment, CDSE discourse about unhappiness in ‘Shiloh’ might begin with the disabling social norm that impairment results in unemployment. On a contextual point tutors and students must acknowledge that at the time of Mason’s publication disabled people were underrepresented in the workplace – a state of affairs considered in chapter 1 and chapter 2 that remains massively problematic today. These unemployment rates vary with time and place but have been found generally higher than average (e.g. Davis, 2002; Barnes and Mercer, 2003; Hultin, Lindholm, and Moller, 2012; Sciulli, de Menezes, and Vieira, 2012). However, according to ‘insights’ triggered by the British social model of disability (Finkelstein, 2001: 2), the thing to stress is that the solution to this problem resides in society, that unemployment in people with impairments was, and still is, often the result of socially disabling attitudes and assumptions about access to premises, equipment, information, and so on. In other words, a disabled person is indeed more likely to be unemployed but this is often because employment opportunities are too frequently conceived in line with normative positivisms: to be envisaged beyond the normative divide is to be assumed unemployed if not unemployable. The dominant normative positivisms of employment are compounded by a number of prominent non-normative negativisms, such as a notion with which contemporary tutors and students bombarded with headlines about shirkers and scroungers are bound to be familiar: that disabled people are workshy. Implicit in ‘Shiloh’, this gross misrepresentation is rehearsed by Norma Jean, subtly resisted by Leroy, and thus navigated from either side of the normative divide. The lack of social meaning and order is illustrated at the start of the story when Leroy has been at home for a few months, for although his injured leg is feeling much better he knows he will not be able to return to his job and as such finds himself at a loss about what the future might hold. To keep from falling idle he occupies himself with various art and craft kits, most significantly a lamp in the shape of a truck that commemorates his yesterday and a log house built from lollipop sticks that imagines his tomorrow. These things are initially ‘diversions, something to kill time’ (Mason, 1995: 355), but he soon starts to think about the possibility of building a full-size log house. Far from appreciative of the preoccupations, Norma Jean proposes that, instead, Leroy might get work driving calves to the abattoir, on the understanding that more accessible vehicles are used, but he seems unconvinced by this suggestion. In keeping with the nature of normative positivisms, she emphasises that he will have to find employment and makes a list of possibilities pertinent to the normative social aesthetic: ‘You could get a job as a guard at Union Carbide, where they’d let you set on a stool. You could get on at the lumberyard. You could do a little carpenter work, if you want to build so bad’ (Mason, 1995: 359). Leroy rejects these persistent suggestions on the grounds that he is unable to stand for long periods of time, which Norma Jean dismisses as an excuse and points out that her own work involves standing all day behind a shop counter. Her argument puts them both on a similar footing, implies that his legs are no weaker than hers, the contradiction of which is betrayed when she raises her

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knees one at a time and then goose-steps around the kitchen, a display of strength bolstered by the fact that she is wearing weights on her ankles. This dominance of normative positivisms is indicative of how non-normative negativisms become prominent; how certain strengths mark out and stress certain weaknesses and as such set the received boundaries of social meaning and order. Insofar as impairment leads to unemployment (and all the associated devaluations), the disabling social norm is that relationship problems follow and the unhappiness snowballs. Most obviously, discussion about this matter can be stimulated by the psychoanalytic conception of castration, whereby demoralisation in respect of the so-called masculine role is considered alongside a loss of the capacity for erotic pleasure (Rycroft, 1985). In these terms – as explored in relation to blindness in chapter 1 – Leroy’s emasculation is expressed figuratively when his phallic rig is likened to a ‘huge piece of furniture gathering dust in the backyard’ and will soon be an ‘antique’ (Mason, 1995: 362), for there are asexual connotations attached to the implied social uselessness (Bolt, 2010).4 The unhappiness gathers momentum when Leroy broaches the topic of relationships with Norma Jean, who says nothing but on her organ ‘begins playing “Who’ll Be the Next in Line?”’ (Mason, 1995: 361). The ‘choice of songs functions as a speech act that completes her emasculation’ of Leroy, because she is ‘already subconsciously searching for his replacement’ (Bentley, 2004: 154). Norma Jean overtly ignores but covertly insults him, a complex form of the discursive castration to which he becomes accustomed, as illustrated when she rejects the very idea that they might have a romantic relationship and refers to the pending Shiloh trip accordingly: ‘Who’s going on a honeymoon, for Christ’s sake?’ (Mason, 1995: 364). More significantly, she cannot bear to look when in bed with him, insists on the lights being switched off, and shuts her eyes, which is notable in psychoanalytic terms because it resonates with the myth favoured by Freud – namely, the ancient story of Oedipus considered in chapter 1. That is to say, based on the familiar idea that not seeing is synonymous with not knowing, Norma Jean closes her eyes to Leroy and confirms the normative divide that renders the relationship forbidden. The erosion of desire can be explained in many ways, one of which pertains to the devastating loss of baby Randy, which has been read as the origin of Leroy’s symbolic castration (Bentley, 2004), but with the benefit of disability studies we cannot ignore the significance of Leroy’s leg injury. Its bearing on his symbolic castration is implied when Norma Jean proclaims, ‘In some ways, a woman prefers a man who wanders’ (Mason, 1995: 366). The normative positivisms are explicit but the assertion also contains implicit non-normative negativisms. Because the verb wander can denote walking and philandering alike, the implication is that for her Leroy is devalued in both respects (Bolt, 2010). But whatever the reason, her attitude certainly changes: 

Normative – before the accident she stays in bed with him, where they watch television and play cards;

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Non-normative – after the accident she leaves him ‘home alone much of the time’ with a ‘cooling place in the bed’ (Mason, 1995: 360).

That is to say, once he moves beyond the normative divide the warmth and intimacy of his essential existence are displaced by frigidity, emptiness, and what therefore become taunting memories.

Man and boy: From trivialisation to infantilisation The residual existence has an anti-cripistemic aspect, whereby knowledge based on disability is discarded, as beyond the normative divide Leroy’s emasculation worsens and is worsened by the reduced value of aspirations invested in the idea of building a log house. CDSE discourse on this point can be deepened by contemporaneously published work of feminist disability studies that notes how disabled people’s knowledge tends to be deemed ‘trivial, complaining, mundane’ (Wendell, 1989: 104). This phase of discussion might well circle around the episode with Stevie Hamilton, a teenager who sells marijuana and whose father is a doctor with whom Leroy went to high school. Although there is some attempt to assert chronological superiority in Leroy’s suggestion that Stevie gets the drugs from his ‘pappy’ (Mason, 1995: 357), the gentle gibe is effortlessly brushed aside in juvenile clichés (the identity of the supplier is for the teenager to know and the man to find out) and interest in buying something a little different is met with the same flippancy. The infantile term pappy is indicative of the way in which Leroy ‘tries discursively to emphasize their age difference but Stevie soon ‘establishes his power and authority’, keeping ‘Leroy ignorant, a form of intellectual castration’ (Bentley, 2004: 149–50).5 The epistemic aspect of this trivialisation becomes apparent when Leroy leans back against his car and boasts about the plan to build a log house, as soon as he gets enough spare time, and adds that his wife is not at all keen on the idea. Tutors and students who draw on gender studies to discuss the episode must note the problematic patriarchal expectation of empathy here but disability studies enables us to notice also that Stevie makes no effort to hide apathy when he interrupts Leroy by saying, ‘Well, let me know when you want me again’ (Mason, 1995: 357). Stevie thereby places himself before the normative divide and recognises value in neither Leroy’s discourse nor its epistemic basis. More than being deepened, CDSE discourse on ‘Shiloh’ is complicated by the classic work of feminist disability studies, for Leroy’s knowledge and related aspirations are also trivialised by Norma Jean. Tutors and students are bound to pick up on her consistently negative responses to the thematic idea, for she makes it clear that the authorities will not allow him to build in the new subdivisions; that she will stop him; that she does not want to live in a log house; that he should stop going on about it; and even that the whole thing is beneath contempt. The epistemic angle of the division becomes marked when Norma Jean sits at the table ‘writing’ and ‘concentrating’ on her outlines, while Leroy merely ‘plays’ with his log house plans (Mason, 1995: 363). She furthers her education with a course in

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composition, the very sound of which is intimidating for him, someone who has always had trouble with the subject of English. The CDSE discourse is complicated because in this instance the feminist approach seems more pertinent to the male character. Insofar as classic feminist disability studies draws attention to epistemic trivialisation, supposed carping, and renderings of the mundane, it raises the matter of infantilisation – considered in relation to representations of short stature in chapter 2. There is something of this issue when Norma Jean drives them both to Shiloh and Leroy’s status is reduced to that of a boring hitchhiker. He attempts to make conversation but is answered in monosyllables that leave him feeling awkward, ‘like a boy on a date with an older girl’ (Mason, 1995: 365), the implication being that subsequent to his injury Leroy is in danger of regarding his own thoughts as juvenile if not infantile. More explicitly, when in conversation with his mother-in-law Mabel Beasley, Leroy finds himself having to justify spending his time on the embroidery of a Star Trek pillowcase. She raises her voice, points a disparaging finger, and reveals her own political slant in mockery about his engagement in such mundane and indeed feminine activity. His initial defence is only that ‘big football players on TV do it’ (Mason, 1995: 358), the infantile register of which he realises and thus endeavours to change in favour of his idea of building a log house, but Mabel is neither impressed nor interested. If anything his epistemic trivialisation is epitomised when he looks at the plans for his log house at the kitchen table because she recognises no value in the preoccupation and puts her coffee cup on a blueprint. Accordingly, she has been elsewhere described as the ‘most emasculating figure in Leroy’s life’, this episode as her ‘most serious annihilation’ of his ‘sense of self and manhood’ (Bentley, 2004: 150–51). What interdisciplinary engagement with disability studies and gender studies adds is that her dominance is marked by the ableism and indeed patriarchy of normative positivisms that render him infantile. Expressed in terms of dimensional contrast, whereby corporeal diminishment equates with devalued social meaning and order, the normative divide and Leroy’s resultant infantilisation become manifest in the skills of building and driving alike. He is saddened by the way in which the new houses all look ‘grand and complicated’ in relation to the log house he wants to build for Norma Jean (Mason, 1995: 360), and while happy practicing with a set of Lincoln Logs, under what has been called ‘the illusion that stacking miniature logs from a model “kit” will prepare him for building an actual house’ that requires knowledge of carpentry, plumbing, electricity, and so on (Bentley, 2004: 156), Leroy is scared by the ‘thought of getting a truckload of notched, numbered logs’ (Mason, 1995: 363). This anxiety resonates with his fear of driving long hauls, the relationship between a log house and the model with the relationship between the rig and the car he drives after his accident. Although accessible in that he can sit in it comfortably, the car has power steering and an automatic shift that induce feelings of insignificance, as if he is barely doing the driving. Such is this issue that he drives without due care, nearly hits something from time to time, for the ‘prospect of an accident seems minor in a

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car’ (Mason, 1995: 360). The rig becomes emblematic of his normative status in the past, the car and building kits of his non-normative status in the present, and the dimensional contrast between the two conditions connotes the sense of trivialised social meaning and order. The trivialisations multiply as the story draws to its conclusion. When Leroy’s truck is displaced in favour of a car there is a reduction in terms of not only size but also pace, reference to which is made when the narrator says that in the past Leroy ‘used to take speed on the road’ but in the present he ‘has to go slowly’ (Mason, 1995: 357). More than emphasising a distinction between the man Leroy was before his accident and the one he becomes, the reference to pace foreshadows the drama of the closing scene. After the picnic in Shiloh is brought to an end by Norma Jean’s announcement that she is leaving him, finishing the unhappy if not forbidden relationship, he finally gives up on the idea of building a log house, screws up the plans, and throws them into the lake. He submits to the dominance of the normative positivisms; closes his eyes and concludes that the plan was indeed trivial, the ‘dumbest idea he could have had’ (Mason, 1995: 366). When he opens his eyes Norma Jean is walking through the cemetery, so he stumbles to his feet but his injured leg is painful and the other one is stiff with pins and needles. This difficulty is accentuated by the fact that Norma Jean is in the distance, running towards the river, as well as by a group of screaming children who rush and push right past him, a closing juxtaposition that connects his impairment with rejection, infantilisation, and trivialisation.

Concluding discussion: Her and him Tutors and students engaged with CDSE are likely to find ‘Shiloh’ highly stimulating, especially when responses involve the close reading invited by the brevity of the story that is ‘lean and spare but eventually leads to a complex of meanings’ (Flora, 1999: 1020). Research in American history surely enhances the discourse (Brinkmeyer, 1987; Gillespie, 2006) but the obvious field with which to engage is gender studies. An important contention is that on reading ‘Shiloh’ many students voice dismay about what they interpret as Norma Jean’s refusal to compromise, as though it is she who spoils any chance of a happy ending with Leroy: ‘Why can’t she be happy serving merely as adjunct to his discovery of self, identity, and life’s purpose?’ (Bradley, 2007: 144). For these students, resistance to feminine social norms is irrelevant and the ending depicts Norma Jean gesturing to Leroy as she falls into the river or perhaps commits suicide, inferences that establish her as something of a scapegoat (Bradley, 2007). This approach resonates with the reluctance mentioned at the start of the present chapter that some new students have about admitting (let alone asserting) feminism, the ‘deep-seated gender expectations’ (Bradley, 2007: 139), but it also accords with appreciation of feminist disability studies and as such renders the story’s meanings all the more complex and difficult to negotiate.

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When tutors and students bring gender studies and disability studies together in this way the normative divide as well as feminine and masculine social norms must be considered. The story might be said to contain non-normative positivisms, at least if Leroy’s accident ‘turns out to be a fortunate one in that it causes him to notice much about his home and his community that he had not noticed before’ (Flora, 1999: 1020). This being so, his consequential idea of building a log house constitutes resistance to residual existence and thus represents a rare prospect of happiness derived from beyond the normative divide (not to mention hints towards cripistemologies). But given that Leroy takes his pursuit no further than the planning stage, ultimately defeated by the trivialising attitudes of his family and community more broadly, by the end the story reverberates with non-normative negativisms. Does Norma Jean flee because of Leroy’s impairment? Does she use his impairment against him by running away? Does he fail to persuade or perhaps even save her because of his impairment? These are some of the many questions raised by the unhappy ending nonetheless said to leave the two characters understanding each other more than ever, whereby the ‘possibility for further growth, apart or together, is present’ (Flora, 1999: 1021). This ambiguity only adds to the complex of meanings and thus to CDSE discourse about resistance to disabling as well as feminine and masculine social norms. Any conclusion that Norma Jean spoils the chance of a happy ending should therefore acknowledge that she does so not in the name of feminism but as an agent of the normative social aesthetic – that the latter rather than the former causes the problems represented.

Indicative questions:     

Why are gender studies and disability studies important to each other? How does the social model of disability inform approaches to representation? What happens when gender typicality is critiqued alongside assumptions about disability? What are associative non-normative positivisms? What are the non-normative negativisms/positivisms of physical impairment in the contemporary cultural imagination?

Notes 1 The book was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. 2 It is likewise notable that Norma Jean, in a typically paternal fashion, insists on imparting the ‘amazing amount of information’ that she has acquired at work; ‘every tune’ in the sixties songbook; her knowledge of composition; the correct pronunciation of dachshund; and numerous facts – Leroy’s name means ‘the king’, Norma Jean was Marilyn Monroe’s real name, ‘Norma comes from the Normans, the Normans were invaders, and so on (Mason, 1995: 356–364). 3 Discussion about this contrast can be stimulated by classic 1920s work in literary studies, which asserts that a flat character, in its purest form, is based on a single idea or quality,

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the increased number of which introduces a curve towards round characterisation (Forster, 1955: 135). 4 These implications are far from unusual: since classical times limping heroes in Western literature have been symbolic of infertility (Hays, 1971). 5 The term pappy may also be interpreted as an early sign of Leroy’s fading resistance to the infantilising discourse by which he is repeatedly defined.

Highly Recommended Reading (Disability Studies and Gender Studies): Hall, K. Q. (2011) Feminist Disability Studies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

References Ahmed, S. (2007) The Happiness Turn, New Formations, 63, 7–14. Barnes, C. and Mercer, G. (2003) Disability, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bentley, G. W. (2004) The Wounded King: Bobbie Ann Mason’s ‘Shiloh’ and Marginalized Male Subjectivity, Southern Literary Journal, 37, 1, 144–161. Bolt, D. (2010) The Starfish Paradigm: Impairment, Disability, and Characterization in Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh”, The Midwest Quarterly, 52, 1, 11–30. Bradley, P. L. (2007) “Rip Van Winkle” and “Shiloh”: Why Resisting Readers Still Resist, Critique, 48, 2, 137–148. Brinkmeyer, R. H. (1987) Finding One’s History: Bobbie Ann Mason and Contemporary Southern Literature, Southern Literary Journal, 19, 2, 20–33. Brown, J. T. (2011) A Required Course in Gender Studies, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 35, 1, 162–164. Bucher, T. (1991) Changing Roles and Finding Stability: Women in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories, Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association, 8. Online. Available spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/border/bs8/ bucher.htm (accessed January 4 2017). Butler, J. P. (1980) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Abingdon: Routledge. Corker, M. and Shakespeare, T. (2002) Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, New York: Continuum. Davis, L. J. (2002) Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions, New York: New York University Press. de Beauvoir, S. (1974) The Second Sex, 1949, Translated by H. M. Parshley, New York: Vintage. Finkelstein, V. (2001) The Social Model of Disability Repossessed. Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, 1 December. Flora, J. M. (1999) Shiloh by Bobbie Ann Mason, 1982, in T. Riggs (ed.) Reference Guide to Short Fiction, 2nd edition, Detroit: St James Press. Forster, E. M. (1955) Aspects of the Novel, New York: Harcourt Brace. Gillespie, L. G. J. (2006) The Grave Side of Bobbie Ann Mason, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 39, 1. Hays, P. L. (1971) The Limping Hero: Grotesques in Literature, New York: New York University Press. Henning, B. (1989) Minimalism and the American Dream: “Shiloh” by Bobby Ann Mason and “Preservation” by Raymond Carver, Modern Fiction Studies, 35, 4, 689–698.

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Hultin, H., Lindholm, C. and Moller, J. (2012) Is There an Association between LongTerm Sick Leave and Disability Pension and Unemployment beyond the Effect of Health Status? – A Cohort Study, PLoS ONE, 7, 4. Mason, B. A. (1995) Shiloh, in H. Lee (ed.) The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women, London: Phoenix. Mitchell, D. T. (1999) Foreword, in H.-J. Stiker, A History of Disability, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pulkkinen, T. (2015) Identity and Intervention: Disciplinarity as Transdisciplinarity in Gender Studies, Theory, Culture and Society, 32, 5–6, 183–205. Rycroft, C. (1985) A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin. Sciulli, D., de Menezes, A.G. and Vieira, J. C. (2012) Unemployment Duration and Disability: Evidence from Portugal, Journal of Labor Research, 33, 1, 21–48. Wendell, S. (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability, Hypatia, 4, 2, 104–124. Wilhelm, A. E. (1987) Private Rituals: Coping with Change in the Fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason, The Midwest Quarterly, 28, 271–282. Wolf, N. (1994) Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How it Will Change the Twenty-First Century, London: Chatto and Windus. Wood, C. V. (2012) Knowledge Practices, Institutional Strategies, and External Influences in the Making of an Interdisciplinary Field, The American Behavioral Scientist, 56, 10, 1301– 1325.

5 STUFF HAPPENS Disability, happiness, and the pursuit of cure

Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and happiness studies Happiness and happiness studies may seem like the most innocent of subjects to explore but neither is straightforward. The English term happy derives from the noun hap, meaning ‘what just happens’, chance, good or bad luck, and came to mean ‘having good hap’ (Griffin, 2007: 139). Consequently, in present use the adjective happy pertains to both situation and state of mind, to fortune and cheer (Griffin, 2007); and the noun happiness can be understood as an arena in which meaning is made (Titchkosky, 2013). Given these definitions alone, because situation impacts on mind and vice versa, there is a blurring of the edges between the private and the public, the personal and the political, famously enshrined in the 1776 American Declaration of Independence as the constitutional right to pursue happiness. This being so, although it can be traced back to Bhutan if not ancient Greece (Wright, 2013), happiness studies has been defined as a product of British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham’s development of utilitarianism, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which ‘elaborated a biopolitical conception of happiness, one that has now become universalized with neoliberal globalization’ (Wright, 2014: 794). Indeed, with reference to gender, race, and sexuality, it has been argued that happiness is used in the justification of social oppression to which resistance defines and causes unhappiness (Ahmed, 2010). Far from straightforward, the concept of happiness demands the rigorous critique formalised since the start of the century in the Journal of Happiness Studies, a scientific periodical that focuses on subjective wellbeing with reference to philosophy, health related quality-of-life research, psychology, sociology, and economy. Expansion of the interdisciplinarity in the direction of disability studies is rare (Verstraete and Söderfeldt, 2014; Iyengar, 2015) but especially important due to a received incompatibility of happiness and disability. Bentham’s utilitarianism was

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formulated in the ‘furnace of European industrialization and urbanization’, in ‘partial dialogue with the new political discourse of the “right to happiness” associated with the American and French revolutions’ (Wright, 2013: 21). But any suggestion that an index of social justice can or should be ‘the distribution of happiness’ (Vehmas and Watson, 2014: 643) is problematic if people seeking to access the so-called full benefits of citizenship must have minimum levels of corporeal, intellectual, and sensory capacity, as well as accordance with various subjective and cultural aesthetic conditions (Snyder and Mitchell, 2010; Mitchell and Snyder, 2015). Happiness has now become the entitlement, ideal, and promise in aspects of psychology, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, self-help books, spirituality, corporate motivational discourse, and so on, in a ‘pervasive atmosphere’ of positivity that is nonetheless toxic ‘to the extent that it is brutally normative’ (Wright, 2014: 795). In the apparently vital pursuit, impairment becomes a great impediment for first and third parties alike (Allison, 2009), while unimpairment masquerades as a basic requirement (Jordan, 2013). In the realms of received wisdom, happiness can be neither forged nor found beyond the normative divide. The received incompatibility can be explored in many ways, for the absence of discourses about happiness and disability is entrenched culturally as well as historically (Sunderland, Catalano, and Kendall, 2009). The cultural representations to which I refer in the present chapter are George Sava’s 1987 novel Happiness is Blind and Brian Friel’s 1994 play Molly Sweeney, as well as Stephen Kuusisto’s 2006 memoir Eavesdropping. In their publication the three texts are contemporaneous with the proliferation of work on the social model of disability – as considered in the introduction and chapter 4 – and accordingly engage with medicalisation in several ways. These concerns of disability studies resonate in happiness studies, where the problematics of happiness-cure synonymy have been traced back to, for instance, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis (Wright, 2014). This being so, the present chapter shows that interdisciplinary engagement with non-normative cultural representation enables not only challenges to the received incompatibility between happiness and disability but also departures from the subjective wellbeing defined by normative positivisms.

The shock of happiness: Blindness is bliss Published in 1987, Happiness is Blind draws on medical insights gained from author George Sava’s career as a surgeon. Protagonist Anthony Street is a test pilot who sustains a facial injury that according to the novel’s synopsis leaves him ‘hideously disfigured’ (Sava, 1987: cover). Unable to find employment and shunned by his friends, largely on account of the normative social aesthetic manifest in attitudes towards his visual appearance, he turns to a life of crime. He breaks into a flat but is interrupted by the owner, Helen Bourne, who ‘lives alone despite the fact that she has been blind since birth’ (Sava, 1987: cover). This seemingly unfortunate meeting marks the beginning of an unforbidden relationship that culminates in what multiple works in happiness studies have recognised as the main happiness indicator

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(Coombs, 1991; Kim and McKenry, 2002; Ahmed, 2007). That is to say, the two disabled characters end up getting married. Distinct in the cultural imagination from the forbidden relationship – considered in chapter 1, chapter 2, and chapter 4 – the unforbidden relationship does not straddle the normative divide but nonetheless shocks as it counters the received incompatibility of happiness and disability (and thus disrupts the dominance of normative positivisms). A point from happiness studies for tutors and students to ponder is that the ‘shock reveals the expectation of where happiness should be found’ (Ahmed, 2007: 8). By far the most obvious shock in Happiness is Blind is that Helen is unique because rather than in spite of her blindness; that she finds the ‘secret of turning disability into a source of strength’ (Sava, 1987: 163). There is a consequential shock too insofar as Helen persuades Tony to discuss and recognise virtues in his so-called ugliness. She explains that conversations with him are easier than they are with ‘most people’ (Sava, 1987: 156); that he puts everything into his voice and so departs from a general tendency to rely on supplementary facial expressions. Because of the nature of his injury, Tony’s mode of communication becomes focused on the verbal, an audible form that is particularly pertinent to Helen, given that she does not perceive the visual cues of body language, and this connection leads to a further consequential shock: their very relationship. After all, such a relationship might be unforbidden but the terrible logic is that, although the imagined purity of normative minds and bodies goes unthreatened, impure counterparts begin to thrive – a state of affairs that echoes the difference between the positive and negative variants of eugenics considered in chapter 2 and chapter 3. Thus, the expectation countered in the novel’s interrelated shocks is clearly that happiness should be found among sighted and by extension non-disabled people. The shock of happiness in representations of disability is sometimes accompanied by explanatory notions of compensatory powers, something problematised in disability studies before and since the publication of Sava’s novel (Monbeck, 1973; Kirtley, 1975; Kleege, 1999; Bolt, 2014), but a close reading reveals a number of details worth emphasising. For instance, music and poetry are said to bring Helen beauty, as does the touch of silk, fur, and so on. She goes on to explain that ‘normal people’ know little of such beauty but it is present for those who wish to appreciate it and that they might well ‘feel it obscurely’ (Sava, 1987: 157). This illustration of cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer, 2014), whereby the ‘resources of life are infinite to those who know how to draw on them’ (Sava, 1987: 157), departs from problematic notions of automatic compensatory powers. The resources to which Helen refers must be engaged with actively, meaning that impairment is neither necessary nor sufficient as a condition of ability. One of the things to raise in CDSE discourse is that non-normative positivisms value the senses in and on their own terms (Bolt, 2015), whereas compensatory powers tend to involve, say, being able to see with one’s hands or ears. This being so, perhaps the time has come for disabled people to reclaim the concept of compensatory powers that, when freed from the dominance of normative positivisms, might provide an index of cripistemologies and other non-normative qualities.

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As by-products of dominant normative positivisms, the shock of happiness in disability and the received negative correlation between the two conditions are widespread. Not only in disability studies but also in cultural studies and social studies of medicine there is work that critiques how disability, ill health, impairment, and sickness have been ‘represented in negative and deficit terms over time’ (Sunderland, Catalano, and Kendall, 2009: 703). From a perspective defined by the medical model, ‘unhappiness based on physical shortcomings is readily accepted as “true” – even as a just reason to want to end one’s life – while other complaints outside the realm of disability are believed to be rectifiable’ (Verstraete and Söderfeldt, 2014: 480). The trouble is that like demons these negative notions lurk in the cultural and indeed personal imagination, as represented when Helen becomes a mother and wants to see (in a general sense, in relation to the sun, and in a specific sense, with reference to her new child). After years of cripistemic awareness she says, ‘I’ve been happy and content in my darkness and now, when I’ve got something to be really happy about, I feel miserable for the first time’ (Sava, 1987: 176). Dominant normative positivisms thereby induce non-normative negativisms, along with passing thoughts of residual existence, for the rendering of motherhood as a fundamentally visual experience premises the conclusion that vision is an essential condition of related happiness. The shock of happiness in this representation of blindness is suspended insofar as cure is not pursued by Helen from the outset but becomes so when she has a child. As a rule happiness and health are associated with each other to the extent that illness displaces all other complaints, as though healthy people have many wishes but their sick counterparts have only one (Verstraete and Söderfeldt, 2014). A common inference is that people who have impairments long only to be unimpaired, disabled people to be non-disabled, and so on. Such is this rule that Helen undergoes a curative operation to restore happiness along with her eyesight. However, the surgery is rendered unsuccessful when, overeager to see her child in the sunlight, she removes her bandages prematurely. The darkness that ensues is painful and awful, hot and black, so much so that she nearly drops Victor Anthony and readers are told that – resonant with the residual existence considered in chapter 1 – the ‘sunshine was gone’ (Sava, 1987: 189). In this moment the normative positivisms dominate Helen briefly, the irony being that the received necessity of visual perception drives and indeed causes her to obliterate that very possibility. Blindness is thereby defined by haplessness rather than happiness. But the shock is reinstated by the end of the novel, meaning the received incompatibility of happiness and disability becomes once again countered. This assertion of happiness derives from a relatively early point in the disability movement, which is notable because, ‘although they disagree on the causes, both the social model and the medical model make suffering a central feature of the disabled experience’ (Verstraete and Söderfeldt, 2014: 481). In this social context of difficulties needing to be acknowledged, it is all the more shocking that Helen brings the novel to its conclusion by critiquing the sighted majority for looking on blindness as an affliction: ‘You do not know what it is to be blind, and you

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naturally think that without eyes our lives must be incomplete and denied most of the things you cherish. It is not true’ (Sava, 1987: 192). Because the ocularnormative pursuit peaks, Helen comes to appreciate perception in non-visual ways that depart from medical preoccupations with cure. She goes through the phase of longing to see but the eponymous state of happiness is ultimately found in blindness.

It might never happen: From contentment to uncertainty Published just a few years after Happiness is Blind, in 1994, Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney explores the same shock in a different way and as such enriches discursive, interdisciplinary engagement. Molly has been classed as blind for forty years, since being a baby, but her character is defined by several happiness indicators. Far from allowing herself to engage in self pity she demonstrates confidence; is employed as a massage therapist; and, perhaps most importantly, has been married to husband Frank for a couple of years. She has a full life and does not feel in any way deprived. Although not as explicit as in Sava’s novel, this is the shock of happiness around which the three interrelated monologues of the play circle. Given that the expectation countered in the play’s shock is that happiness should only be found among sighted people, the longing for cure becomes conspicuous in its absence. In general, happiness is ‘consistently described as the object of human desire, as being what we aim for, as what gives meaning and order to human life’ (Ahmed, 2007: 7), the normative basis of which sets up the expectation that for people who have impairments this pursuit must involve a longing for unimpairment. But instead of this longing, Friel’s play represents happiness that derives from employment, radio, walking, music, cycling, and so on. In swimming, for example, Molly is sure she finds far more joy than do any of her sighted counterparts. She eagerly opens her every pore to the haptic liberation; to the purest of sensations; to the unsurpassable rhythms; to the sheer pleasure of the experience. She is convinced that sight cannot improve on and might well detract from the delight; that sighted swimmers are therefore likely to become envious of the unqualified but nonetheless total pleasure. In her reflections haptic perception becomes supreme rather than supplementary. More than a ‘viable possibility for a new way of seeing’ (Upton, 1997: 348), Friel offers an ‘imaginative rendering of a marginalized aesthetic’ (Feeney, 2009: 92). The supremacy of visual perception is challenged recurrently as the audience is furnished with Molly’s version of events that, at least in the first instance, is free of the longing for cure. But although not initially dominated by normative positivisms, Molly becomes so by proxy. The play contains various attempts to ‘orientate’ her in a ‘sighted world’, for her father ‘teaches her about the colours of the flowers in her garden, while the other characters go to great lengths either to cure her, or to mask the most telling features of her blindness’ (Feeney, 2009: 90). The patriarchal alliance of husband and ophthalmologist, for example, creates the primary medium through which the normative notions pass. Mr Rice is cynical when Frank presents him

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with a portfolio that comprises photographs of Molly riding a bicycle and of them on their honeymoon; test results and letters from specialists; swimming diplomas and a physiotherapy commendation; and a magazine article and some ‘extracts from essays by various philosophers on the relationship between vision and knowledge, between seeing and understanding’ (Friel, 1994: 7). Indeed, something to note in CDSE discourse is that it is not Molly’s name that takes pride of place on the work; that the folder’s cover reads only ‘Researched and Compiled by Frank C. Sweeney’ (Friel, 1994: 6). However, a similarly self-serving approach is taken by the ophthalmologist himself, who endeavours to cure Molly in order to rescue his medical career. This is something about which he fantasises before he has even examined her, driven by a sense of competition and Frank’s persistence rather than anything to do with a prospective patient’s needs or unhappiness. The dominant normative positivisms therefore can be tracked as they travel from the two sighted characters to the one blind character. What Frank and Mr Rice want for Molly is assumed to be right and proper because of its normative value. Insofar as happiness can be thought of as a promise made to people willing to live appropriately, it encourages some life choices and discourages others (Ahmed, 2010), meaning Molly is obliged to follow the ways of the sighted majority if at all possible. To do otherwise would be to miss the opportunity of emerging from beyond the normative divide into a state of happiness that does not shock. The collective pressure is such that the non-normative happiness becomes displaced in favour of the promised transformation that turns out to be anything but straightforward. Once introduced, the subject of cure follows a trajectory that meanders to Molly’s ‘downfall, as it is her desire to please the others that makes her agree to the operation, despite her own misgivings about losing her unique sightless world’ (DeVinney, 1999: 113). On the night before the obligatory operation, for example, there is an impromptu party for Molly but, far from being excited at the prospect of visual restoration, she nurses major epistemic concerns (Bolt, 2014). Why should she have to learn a new way of knowing? Will she ever again experience community in a profound way? CDSE discourse about these questions must give due consideration to non-normative knowledge as captured in the concept of cripistemologies, as well as how happiness ‘can be an object of knowledge, and implicated in how we approach our objects of knowledge’ (Ahmed, 2007). Molly knows happiness initially and this very act of knowing is part of the shock insofar as it does not give ‘credence in its ultimate discourse to casual assimilations between seeing and understanding’, for an ‘unsentimental refutation of long-established metaphors of light and darkness, ignorance and knowledge’, lies at the heart of the play (Upton, 1997, 347). This being so, the operation that restores sight brings about an epistemic shift to uncertainty rather than certainty: . I think I see nothing at all now. But I’m not absolutely sure of that. Anyhow my borderline country is where I live now. I’m at home there. Well… at ease there. It certainly doesn’t worry me anymore that what I think

MOLLY:

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I see may be fantasy or indeed what I take to be imagined may very well be real – what’s Frank’s term? – external reality.(Friel, 1994: 69–70) In this closing monologue, ‘hospitalized for madness’ (Moloney, 2000: 286), Molly ‘comes to be at ease, if not at home, in the vigorous imaginative world of the mind’ (Russell, 2013: 209). This means that, as in Sava’s novel, the shock of happiness is suspended in the sense that cure is not sought from the outset but becomes so as a result of dominant normative positivisms, the difference here being that there is no real resolution. Given that work in happiness studies speculates that an ‘alternative history of happiness might be one that is open to the ‘“perhaps” of what happens, which follows the less well-trodden paths on its grounds’ (Ahmed, 2007: 13), it is notable that the play’s ending is complex in the epistemic fluidity that blurs the boundaries between blindness and sight, fantasy and reality, the knowledge of happiness and the bliss of ignorance.

As it happens: Life writing The received incompatibility of happiness and disability is recurrently alluded to in twenty-first-century disability studies without resorting to the pursuit of cure. Because the ‘disability movement’ is ‘based on a positive sense of a group difference’ (Vehmas and Watson, 2014: 648), many approaches encompass individual, collective, and cultural non-normative positivisms, whereby disabled people can lead full, satisfying, and even exemplary lives (Bauman and Murray, 2009; GarlandThomson, 2013; Mitchell and Snyder, 2015). In accordance with the affirmative model, for example, positivity about both impairment and disability may be asserted. To affirm a positive identity around impairment is to repudiate the dominant value of normality, meaning the model offers more than a transformation of consciousness about disability, it facilitates an assertion of the value and validity of the lives of people who have impairments (Swain and French, 2000). Indeed, if a rhizomatic model is invoked, far from being regarded as an impediment to happiness for disabled people and nondisabled friends, family, colleagues, and so on, disability becomes a site of mutually beneficial interconnections, richness, and artful living (Kuppers, 2009). These and other such approaches recognise that many disabled people pursue happiness without pursuing cure. The shock of the pursuit that defies the received incompatibility of happiness and disability is represented nowhere more than in disability memoir. The full importance of this work can be illustrated in CDSE discourse with reference to the concept of autistic presence, which resists the discursive simplification of autism (Murray, 2008). The material nature of this presence, the ‘excess it creates when confronted with any idea of what “normal” human activity or behaviour might be, stubbornly refuses to be reduced to any narrative – medical, social or cultural – that might seek to contain it without reference to its own terms’ (Murray, 2008: xviii). The presence – that I tend to illustrate in class with the exemplary work of Amanda Baggs – contains its own logic and methods, which must be understood,

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where possible from within, if a full idea of autism’s place in the world is to be gained (Murray, 2008). These ‘expressions can be found across a range of cultural productions’ (Murray, 2008: 6), one of which is the disability memoir engaged with so productively in disability studies (e.g. Coogan, 2007; Rose, 2008; Mintz, 2011; Torrell, 2011). The new memoirs are defined by an awareness of disability as a culmination of social, cultural, legal, and architectural obstacles, but usually involve the formation of a disabled identity (Couser, 2011). Indeed, encouraged by the Disabled People’s Movement (including the Disability Arts Movement), the writings of many who have impairments demonstrate a perspective on life that is both interesting and affirmative, one that can be used positively (Swain and French, 2000). That is to say, disability memoir can provide ethical and profoundly informed accounts of happiness from beyond the normative divide. Published in 2006, just shy of two decades on from Happiness is Blind, Eavesdropping is a prime example of disability memoir, wherein Stephen Kuusisto tells of his personal development from being an isolated child to becoming a successful adult who champions cripistemologies and the idea of a non-normative social aesthetic on many levels.1 Right from the introduction he asserts that he no longer craves ‘recognition as a sighted person’ (Kuusisto, 2006: vii) and in so doing begins to demonstrate the ‘variation in sensory perception’ that can ‘imbue a poet’s sensibilities with a more intense awareness of the body and provide insight into the interaction between body, text, and environment’ (Melancon, 2009: 184). In this vein, and with an explicit focus on the human interaction of creative listening captured in the form of audio postcards, Kuusisto represents an experience of visual impairment that frequently manages to elude dominant normative positivisms.2 He remembers being ‘flat out happy’ in conversations about the ‘wilderness of noises and the hours in a day’ (Kuusisto, 2006: 49). He recalls the happiness of listening to two students from New York University talking about jazz: ‘They had gone to the Blue Note to hear Oscar Peterson. They had grown up on Madonna but now they were grooving in New York and I was happy to be hearing about it’ (Kuusisto, 2006: 80). He raises the ante around the art of perceiving by other than visual means; makes an overt link between being ‘a listener’ and ‘a happy man’ (Kuusisto, 2006: 122); and in the process illustrates a non-normative pursuit that erodes the very shock of happiness that in fact attracts some readers to disability memoir.

Concluding discussion: Happiness-cure synonymy Demonstrated here in a cultural mode, tutors and students can gain much understanding from the bringing together of disability studies and happiness studies. The non-normative cultural representations shock as they recurrently counter the received incompatibility of happiness and disability. For example, explicitly in Happiness is Blind and Molly Sweeney, implicitly in biographical facts about Sava’s career as a surgeon and Kuusisto’s faculty appointment in a college of medicine, the medical profession is represented on multiple levels but preoccupations with cure as

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the basis of happiness are problematised if not avoided. Instead we are presented with critical representations that trouble what Kuusisto calls the idea that disabled people ‘are merely patients waiting in line for their proper cure’, for ‘no one needs to be cured to achieve a life of dignity and purpose’ (Savarese, 2009: 199). Indeed, in Eavesdropping he laments being offered casual cures by a number of strangers, including a ‘Catholic Woman of the Year’ in a hotel lobby, another woman in a diner, a man who assists people who have impairments around an airport, and another man who is a systems analyst for the airline (Kuusisto, 2006: 83–93). In so departing from happiness-cure synonymy the non-normative representations problematise the idea that happiness and disability fall either side of the normative divide to which happiness studies and disability studies often allude. Insofar as happiness studies reveals this normative nature and disability studies explores the resulting or else underpinning non-normative notions, happiness certainly emerges as neither innocent nor straightforward. Claims of happiness value particular forms of personhood and contribute to the setting of social norms (Ahmed, 2007), which is notable because the ‘production and reproduction of negative and deficit discourses’ about disability constitute a ‘collaborative effort’ sustained on individual, institutional, cultural, and societal levels (Sunderland, Catalano, and Kendall, 2009: 704). In this climate of prominent non-normative negativisms it is perhaps unsurprising if non-disabled people mispredict the emotional impact of disability and disabled people misreport levels of happiness (Ubel et al., 2005) but the shock remains that, although some people report a variety of depressive symptoms following the onset of impairment, others report favourable levels of happiness (Dunn, Uswatte, and Elliott, 2009; Oswald and Powdthavee, 2008). This shock reveals the expectation that happiness should be found among non-disabled people but it also raises the point that, when disabled counterparts are ‘as happy or happier’, institutions and society should not ignore the material conditions that turn impairment into disablement, nor should there be an expectation that persons with non-normative bodies and minds ‘exhibit “happiness” if disabling material conditions are removed’ (Iyengar, 2015: 6). We might even need to suspend belief that happiness is what everyone or anyone wants, and in so doing ‘consider not only what makes happiness good, but also how happiness participates in making things good’ (Ahmed, 2007: 7). After all, although it is important for tutors and students engaged with CDSE to critique the received incompatibility of disability and happiness we must also disrupt the implicit hierarchy of emotions by acknowledging the value of loss in its own right (Mapley, 2017). The received wisdom that must be challenged is that certain emotions belong either side of the normative divide, across which in reality they all cut.

Indicative questions:   

Why are happiness studies and disability studies important to each other? How is happiness a normative construct? What is non-normative happiness?

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What is an unforbidden relationship? How does happiness relate to cripistemologies? What is happiness-cure synonymy?

Notes 1 His first memoir about visual impairment is the prize-winning Planet of the Blind (Kuusisto, 1998) and he has more recently published Have Dog, Will Travel (Kuusisto, 2018). 2 The normative positivisms nonetheless reach one of the reviews on the book’s back cover, which claims that Eavesdropping is ‘about vision, ways of seeing with other senses, principally hearing’ (Merwin qtd in Kuusisto, 2006). This comment is at odds with the memoir that states, ‘I cannot see the world by ear, I can only reinvent it for my own purposes. But admitting this may make me lucky’ (Kuusisto, 2006: viii).

Highly recommended Reading (Disability Studies and Happiness Studies): Iyengar, S. (2015) Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body, Abingdon: Routledge.

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Friel, B. (1994) Molly Sweeney, New York: Plume. Garland-Thomson, R. (2013) Disability Gain. Avoidance in/and the Academy: The International Conference on Disability, Culture, and Education, Liverpool Hope University. Griffin, J. (2007) What do Happiness Studies Study? Journal of Happiness Studies, 8, 1, 139–148. Johnson, M. and McRuer, R. (2014) Cripistemologies: Introduction, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8, 2, 127–148. Jordan, T. (2013) Disability, Able-Bodiedness, and the Biopolitical Imagination, Review of Disability Studies, 9, 1, 26–38. Kim, H. K. and McKenry, P. C. (2002) The Relationship between Marriage and Psychological Well-Being, Journal of Family Issues, 23, 8, 885–991. Kirtley, D. D. (1975) The Psychology of Blindness, Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Kleege, G. (1999) Sight Unseen, London: Yale University Press. Kuppers, P. (2009) Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 3, 3, 221–240. Kuusisto, S. (1998) Planet of the Blind, New York: Dial Press. Kuusisto, S. (2006) Eavesdropping: A Life by Ear, New York: W.W. Norton. Kuusisto, S. (2018) Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey, New York: Simon and Schuster. Mapley, H. (2017) A Considered Apologia for Loss: How Blindness Memoir Destabilises the Hierarchy of Emotions, MA Dissertation, Liverpool Hope University. Melancon, M. L. (2009) ‘A River that No One Can See’: Body, Text, and Environment in the Poetry of Stephen Kuusisto, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 3, 2, 183–194. Mintz, S. (2011) On a Scale from 1 to 10: Life Writing and Lyrical Pain, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 5, 3, 243–259. Mitchell, D. T. and Snyder, S. L. (2015) The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Moloney, K. M. (2000) Molly Astray: Revisioning Ireland in Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney, Twentieth Century Literature, 46, 3, 285–310. Monbeck, M. E. (1973) The Meaning of Blindness: Attitudes Toward Blindness and Blind People, London: Indiana University Press. Murray, S. (2008) Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Oswald, A. J. and Powdthavee, N. (2008) Does Happiness Adapt? A Longitudinal Study of Disability with Implications for Economists and Judges, Journal of Public Economics, 92, 5–6, 1061–1077. Rose, I. (2008) Autistic Biography or Autistic Life Narrative? Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 2, 1, 44–54. Russell, R. R. (2013) Home, Exile, and Unease in Brian Friel’s Globalized Drama since 1990: Molly Sweeney, The Home Place, and Hedda Gabler (after Ibsen), Modern Drama, 56, 2, 206–231. Sava, G. (1987) Happiness is Blind, London: Robert Hale. Savarese, R. J. (2009) Lyric Anger and the Victrola in the Attic: An Interview with Stephen Kuusisto, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 3, 2, 195–207. Snyder, S. L. and Mitchell, D. T. (2010) Introduction: Ablenationalism and the Geo-Politics of Disability, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 4, 2, 113–126. Sunderland, N., Catalano, T. and Kendall, E. (2009) Missing Discourses: Concepts of Joy and Happiness in Disability, Disability and Society, 24, 6, 703–714. Swain, J. and French, S. (2000) Towards an Affirmation Model of Disability, Disability and Society, 15, 4, 569–582.

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Titchkosky, T. (2013) Encounters with Translations of Happiness, Health, Culture and Society, 5, 1, xiv–xvii. Torrell, M. R. (2011) Plural Singularities: The Disability Community in Life-Writing Texts, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 5, 3, 321–337. Ubel, P. A., Loewenstein, G., Schwarz, N., and Smith, D. (2005) Misimagining the Unimaginable: The Disability Paradox and Health Care Decision Making, Health Psychology, 24, 4S, S57–S62. Upton, C.-A. (1997) Visions of the Sightless in Friel’s Molly Sweeney and Synge’s The Well of the Saints, Modern Drama, 40, 3, 347–358. Vehmas, S. and Watson, N. (2014) Moral Wrongs, Disadvantages, and Disability: A Critique of Critical Disability Studies, Disability and Society, 29, 4, 638–650. Verstraete, P. and Söderfeldt, Y. (2014) Happiness Disabled: Sensory Disabilities, Happiness and the Rise of Educational Expertise in the Nineteenth Century, Paedagogica Historica, 50, 4, 479–493. Wright, C. (2013) Against Flourishing: Wellbeing as Biopolitics, and the Psychoanalytic Alternative, Health, Culture and Society, 5, 1, 20–35. Wright, C. (2014) Happiness Studies and Wellbeing: A Lacanian Critique of Contemporary Conceptualisations of the Cure, Culture Unbound, 6, 4, 791–813.

6 END OF THE ROCK STAR Disability, music, and the passage of time

Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and popular music studies Popular music is by definition well liked by a wide range of people and this admiration invariably extends to and indeed from the musicians who deliver the material, especially those prominent in live performances and music videos. This being so, not only musical ability but also public persona becomes part of the star quality to which musicians must aspire.1 The trouble is that the propagated image might be rebellious, raunchy, and many other things too, but is nonetheless normative insofar as it tends to swerve impairment and disability. Dominant normative positivisms and prominent non-normative negativisms can therefore discourage the potential of disabled people who depart from the normative social aesthetic but do not want to be keyed to the metanarrative of disability in which performance relates to the freak shows of the past – as considered in chapter 2. As a result many ‘non-visibly disabled musicians hide their impairments from fellow musicians, seeing it as a professional necessity to pass as healthy and pain-free’, which does not ‘increase understanding of disabled musicians and the music they perform’ (Cain, 2010: 748) but does begin to illustrate that, whatever might be implied by the public persona, disability remains highly relevant. Be that as it may, popular music studies has a longer history than some fields considered in the present book and yet has not been combined with disability studies until quite recently. The history of popular music studies can be traced back to the ‘Frankfurtian Marxist analyses of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the 1930s’ (Barden, 2015: 113); to the ‘United States and the arrival of rock and roll into the national consciousness in the mid-1950s’ (Cloonan, 2005: 78); to the journalists whose critical discourse primed the field (Waksman, 2010); to academic advances made in the United Kingdom, initially about the work of The Beatles (Cloonan, 2005); to the exciting developments that have taken place in non-Anglophone parts of the world (Cloonan, 2005); and so on. Although

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unappreciated in some academic circles, the field came to flourish in the interdisciplinary borders of ‘ethnic studies and (ethno) musicology, American Studies and performance studies, anthropology and sociology, women’s studies, history, literature, and journalism’, as it considered and reconsidered ‘questions of national and individual identity formations’ (Brooks, 2010: 99). It was not until the twenty-first century that the journal Popular Music formalised a relationship with disability studies via a special issue that recognised that the ‘uncontrollability of the pop body has been a persistent feature since its early days’; that there are ‘identifiable and powerful links between popular music and the damaged, imperfect, deviant, extraordinary body or voice, which can be, and surprisingly often is, a disabled body or voice’ (McKay, 2009: 293). Indeed, when popular music studies and disability studies are so combined the normative divide becomes apparent and thus problematised on many levels. In order to demonstrate this interdisciplinarity the present chapter focuses on a couple of music videos separated in their release by twelve years. First, sung by Freddie Mercury and released in 1991, Queen’s chart-topping song ‘These are the days of our lives’ was written by Roger Taylor, produced by David Richards, and won a Brit Award for best single in 1992. From the band that arguably invented the very art form in the 1970s, the accompanying music video was filmed in black and white and edited by the Torpedo Twins. Second, written by Trent Reznor and produced by Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash’s version of the Nine Inch Nails song ‘Hurt’ was released in 2003. The video, directed by Mark Romanek and named the greatest music video of all time by New Musical Express, was said to blend popular music and ‘real life in a towering film achievement’ set to ‘help restore art and creativity’ to a medium that had been ‘wallowing in shallow commercialism and conformity’ (Violanti, 2003). Poignantly, notwithstanding the fact that Mercury was forty-five years old and Cash was seventy-one, the videos both imparted final farewells to millions of fans around the world. But the key comparison for the purpose of this chapter is the fact that the singers both had chronic illness. Mercury had HIV/AIDS, which (given the lack of treatment at the time) ultimately rendered him unable to fight infections. Although his ‘prolonged illness was not public knowledge’ (Howarth, 2000: 134),2 when recording ‘These are the days of our lives’ and making the video he was said to be emaciated, in tragic pain, and unable to stand or walk without great difficulty (Gilmore and Greene, 2014; Queen: The Best Years of our Lives, 2015). Along similar lines, the time Cash spent working on ‘Hurt’ was marked by declining health. Manifest in shaky hands and a facial twitch,3 he had autonomic neuropathy, a disease of the nervous system that rendered him prone to lung disorders (Violanti, 2003). Given that the two rock stars4 are known for their image as well as their songs, the music videos and related discourse provide multifaceted representations of chronic illness with which tutors and students can productively engage.

Rock star persona: Now and then A starting point for CDSE discourse is that although the prolific rendering of disability as infection and disease must be challenged for its erroneous generalisation

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and its distraction from social barriers – as illustrated in relation to malevolent medicalisation in chapter 3 and chapter 5 – it would be a grave mistake to dismiss the significance of chronic illness to disability studies. The non-normative negativisms are prominent insofar as the ‘onset of such conditions carries a particular threat of “biographical disruption” in a society that values an active, independent life-style’ and the ‘celebration of difference’ is problematic for many people whose ‘impairments are debilitating, painful or perhaps associated with premature death’ (Barnes and Mercer, 2003: 74, 77). This being so, it is ‘important to understand how people who live with illnesses or conditions that are not immediately cured, and are either chronic or recurrent’, are also ‘affected by structural, cultural and external circumstances’; that disability studies must not ‘shun illness altogether and leave it in the realm of the medical model and medical institutions’ (Bê, 2016: 466). That is to say, the reductive if not erroneous rendering of disability as infection and disease is indeed problematic in its history and continuing presence but the representation of people who have chronic illness is as pertinent as any other to disability studies.5 Insofar as one of the works on which the present chapter focuses is Queen’s music video of 1991, a particularly pertinent example of chronic illness is HIV/ AIDS. This condition offers tutors and students a significant ‘opportunity to engage the field of disability studies through chronic illness, stigma, and pain, all of which extend the image of disabled people while reinforcing foundational concepts’ (Day, 2017: 83–84). One such foundational concept is stigma (Goffman, 1963; Hunt, 1966; Garland-Thomson, 1997; Quayson, 2007), which certainly has had a massive impact on the lives of many people with HIV/AIDS (Sontag, 1991; Colker, 2005; McRuer, 2006; Day, 2017). It is not difficult therefore to reason why Mercury chose to keep the fact that he had the condition from the general public until just before he died. After all, while things today remain far from perfect, contemporary tutors and students must remember that people who had HIV/AIDS in the 1980s were ‘regularly marked as absolutely different, or seen as marked by absolute difference, and were excluded from schools, religious institutions, hospitals, public transportation, the “general population,” and even – almost – from the Americans with Disabilities Act’ (McRuer, 2006: 116). Nevertheless, Mercury’s chronic illness was implicit in some of his final works, such as the music video ‘These are the days of our lives’, which can therefore contribute to CDSE discourse that combines disability studies and popular music studies. It is fair to say that with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Queen had ‘anticipated the most vital marketing tool of the 1980s, the pop video’ (Queen: The Best Years of our Lives, 2015), and – as anyone who has been involved in the music business can testify – it is impressive that the same lineup featured in the band’s last such representation before Mercury’s death. Invoking the song before the singer, the ‘These are the days of our lives’ video opens with shots of songwriter and drummer Roger Taylor and then moves the focus to Mercury. Many tutors and students are likely to notice that, in contrast with previous representations, he is indeed pale and slim but from the outset looks boldly into the camera as he sings about feelings that take him right back to his

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youth if not childhood. These far-off, better days are defined in the lyrics by perfection, in the sense of never-ending fun and glorious sunshine. Such happiness – as considered in chapter 5 – has ‘long been at the centre of philosophy, posed as the moral question of what counts as the good life’ (Ahmed, 2007: 7), and its pursuit is embedded in the rock star persona whose bearers have hedonistic obligations thrust upon them. What Mercury sings testifies that those obligations have been met as the audience is introduced to the remaining two members of the quartet – namely, bassist John Deacon and guitarist Brian May. The scene is relatively sparse, an implicit theme being community as signified by the lyrical use of the pronoun we, the musical instruments, and the style of clothes worn by the group – including Mercury’s ‘custom-made vest’ that depicts ‘each of his beloved cats’ (Runtaugh, 2016). This exposition indicates that the memories to be shared are both fond and collective, details that feed into the work’s overarching theme: the passage of time. The multimodal representation provided by the music video enables an array of explorations of the thematic passage of time, and as such lends itself well to discursive interdisciplinary engagement. Somehow all the more apparent against the video’s sparse and monochrome aesthetic, the group’s performance is expressive throughout. In particular, although fairly static, Mercury maximises on facial expression and dramatic gestures as he sings metaphorical lines about not being able to turn back time, lament deepened by daydreams of a magical fairground ride on which he could return to the fun and games of the past. This bittersweet truth about retrospection is visually represented by Mercury in a number of ways. In reaching for the past he raises and lowers his arms as he points, puts up his thumbs, clenches his fists, opens, closes, and circles his hands. But he also puts his head down, throws it back, holds his gaze, and shuts his eyes to signify remembrance if not regret. Nevertheless, as the representation advances there is growing acceptance that the days gone by have flown as time so often does, as well as contemplation that culminates in the hopeful recognition of a constant state: Those days are all gone now but one thing’s still true, When I look and I find, I still love you. (Queen, 1991) Notably, mourning for the loss of the past becomes halted here by an appreciation of the present. Mercury’s dramatic performance changes into one of affirmation and acknowledgment as he takes a bow, nods into the camera, whispers the final words, and gives a broad smile echoed by May before the video fades to black. The passage of time is rendered dichotomous insofar as the boundless fun and games of the perfect past contrast with what seems like a residual existence, but the concluding point that these lines emphasise is that something essential remains in the present state. When tutors and students consider ‘These are the days of our lives’ alongside Cash’s ‘Hurt’, the dichotomous framing of the passage of time provides a useful starting point for discussion. In the ‘Hurt’ video Cash does what audiences might have expected of Queen in ‘These are the days of our lives’. After all, resonant

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with how the lyrics that Mercury sings juxtapose the past and present explicitly as they switch from when ‘we were young’ to ‘lately’, from ‘those were’ to ‘these are the days’ (Queen, 1991), Cash frames the song ‘Hurt’ in intense retrospection and introspection (Tatusko, 2005). But whereas Queen’s video is free of flashbacks to the good life throughout, the ‘Hurt’ video goes so far as to play the ‘frail and weary’ Cash against the ‘young, strong rebel of long ago’ (Violanti, 2003). Indeed, many scenes were filmed at the House of Cash, a Nashville museum whose flood damage provides an ‘eerie and dusty atmosphere to the emotional crevices’ of the singer’s past and present (Violanti, 2003), meaning that – as in Mercury’s reference to travelling back on a magical fairground ride – the largely dichotomous framing of the passage of time becomes a rather brutal aspect of the representation. Set squarely in the present the exposition of the ‘Hurt’ video shows Cash seated alone in a museum room. He is wearing his trademark black and singing but his hair is grey and the inanimateness of his facial expression almost equates him with the numerous artifacts by which he is surrounded. He sings of hurting himself just to check he still has feelings; of causing himself pain in order to confirm a connection with reality. As the lyrics so focus on pain the American flag is shown waving behind a sign that reads ‘House of Cash Museum. Closed to Public’ (Cash, 2003). The emblem of past celebration is thus negated by the declaration of the derelict state. Indeed, this ‘American music pioneer’ and ‘member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’ had a career that dated back to the early days of Elvis Presley, with an influence that had been felt by ‘everyone from Bob Dylan to Wyclef Jean to Kid Rock’, and yet in his final years was discarded by the ‘Nashville record industry power structure’ (Violanti, 2003). It is quite significant, then, that as the music video returns to the present state Cash sings and plays guitar but also shakes and hangs his head in an expression of regretful dissatisfaction. CDSE discourse can be stimulated by how the good life of the past is juxtaposed with the present boldly and on many levels, the most obvious being that of performance. The multifaceted representation combines something of Cash’s musical and acting talents that colleagues in popular music studies might well encourage us to explore. From his musical past there are bright lights, crowds of people, and a striking figure singing and playing the guitar on stage, while his musical present is defined by shots of still hands on a piano lid, a single finger hitting a piano key, and the recurrent question about what he has become. A similar dichotomy is represented in relation to acting. Black and white footage shows a young man in a steam train, smiling with his arm resting on the open window and his dark hair blowing in the wind; ‘You stay the hell away from me, you hear?’ he yells in another of the music video’s many retrospective clips; whereas the older man sits on his ornate carved seat, alone at what the multiple crucifixion references suggest is his own last supper. He sings of his crown of thorns, the burdensome comforts of dishonesty, and his irreparably broken mind. Decades-old footage thereby illustrates fame in performances and film roles that contrast sharply with the solitary figure in the throes of intense introspection. The implication is that the good life has been displaced by its antithesis – namely, a bad life – and it is the embodiment of this state that proves most memorable in the representation.

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But the good–bad juxtaposition of the past and present is broken down somewhat in the representation of family. This aspect of human interaction is indeed represented dichotomously when Cash sings at the piano and closes his eyes in remembrance as the video cuts to a framed photograph of his late mother. The existential question about what he has become is directed to his ‘sweetest friend’ and compounded with lyrics about losing everybody ‘in the end’ (Cash, 2003). However, when he repeats the same mournful lines later in the song the focus moves to his wife June Carter Cash, a prophetical shift insofar as she too died before him, just a few months after filming. The detail for tutors and students to note is that as Cash sings for the second time of losing the sweetest of friends, his wife is shown standing beneath his mother’s photograph, watching over him and holding back tears, loving concern distinct from but nonetheless linked to the joyful memories captured in the various visual representations of their marriage. When the residual aspect of existence is identified as something essential (e.g. love in the images of Cash and the words Mercury sings) dichotomous representation begins to deconstruct. The pertinence to disability studies becomes clear when we draw on popular music studies to find performance and family are entangled in the representation that does not disguise how the rock star persona is eroded by nonnormative embodiment. Indeed, this embodiment was behind director Romanek’s very decision to focus on the House of Cash museum: ‘It had been closed for a long time; the place was in such a state of dereliction. That’s when I got the idea that maybe we could be extremely candid about the state of Johnny’s health, as candid as Johnny has always been in his songs’ (Hooton, 2015). It is certainly fair to say the song ‘Hurt’ is candid in its representation of mental illness in general and addiction in particular. The references to the familiar pain of a needle tearing through flesh, as well as to remembering vividly what he is trying to forget, reveal the most complicated of comforts. Cash called ‘Hurt’ the ‘best anti-drug song’ he had ever heard; all about ‘a man’s pain and what we’re capable of doing to ourselves and the possibility that we don’t have to do that anymore’; something to which he could relate right from the start (Violanti, 2003). After all, he had long since experienced mental health issues in the form of addiction, being a drug user if not abuser throughout his life (Johnson, 2003; Tunnell and Hamm, 2009); although he went on to recover largely, as far back as the 1960s his health was in decline from years of amphetamine abuse (Tunnell and Hamm, 2009). This embodiment is expressed in the music video’s feast sequence when he shakily raises a crystal glass of wine only to empty it onto the table in front of him. He declares that he would give it all away, his ‘empire of dirt’; that from this place of pain he is bound to let people down and cause the eponymous ‘hurt’ (Cash, 2003). Judging by the abundance of gold records, awards, statuettes, photographs, and footage emblematic of this empire, the bittersweet toast is in mock honour of the rock star persona and to what it amounts in Cash’s present context of failing health. As in the Queen work the passage of time is largely rendered dichotomous as the riches and vitality of the past contrast with the residual reality of the present state. But again a key detail to note in CDSE discourse is that something essential remains, although in the lyrics Cash sings this is pain rather than love.

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Revolutionary representation: From normative to non-normative positivisms When an illness is critical as well as chronic the non-normative positivisms of its representation in popular music might be unexpected but still provide much from which tutors and students engaged with CDSE can learn about human interaction and the sometimes obscured essence of existence. Innuendo, the Queen album that features ‘These are the days of our lives’, ‘addresses impending death as memorably and gracefully as any work could hope to, and does so without a moment of selfpity’ (Gilmore and Greene, 2014). In part the very power of the musical composition grew from the group’s increased sense of community as Mercury’s advancing illness produced what Taylor called a ‘coming-together’, a ‘closing of the ranks’ (Gilmore and Greene, 2014). Indeed, although manifestly more introspective, a comparably non-normative source of power can be found on American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around, the album that features ‘Hurt’, given that Cash represents his illness as a catalyst for completion if not creation. He refuses to submit to the disease, vows to spite it, and in so doing finds strength in his weakness: ‘I came to the studio sometimes with no voice, when I could have stayed at home and pouted, but I couldn’t let that happen. I came in and opened up my mouth and tried to let something come out. I recorded when that was the last thing in the world I thought I could do’ (Violanti, 2003). In related discourse it has been asserted that the song ‘Hurt’ fitted Cash ‘perfectly in terms of his failing health’, for his voice was ‘shaky, yet effective for that very reason’ (Johnson, 2003). More broadly, but perhaps less convincingly, Cash’s prolificacy was sometimes deemed an effect of the same hyperactivity that ‘dragged him through thousands of pills’ (Johnson, 2003). It is, however, surely fair to assert that, in the case of the musical compositions to which Mercury and Cash were central, from difficult personal moments came some of the profoundest representations of the most morbid and unavoidable human interaction. The manner in which the human interaction with impending death is visually represented can be explored productively in CDSE discourse about the two music videos – as I have found with disability studies MA students. The video for ‘These are the days of our lives’ contains Mercury’s ‘final moments in front of a camera’ – he is ‘unmistakably a man almost dead’ and ‘those present at the filming said that even the touch of his clothes on his skin caused him agony’ – but the point to note is that he is ‘fully present’, ‘even luminous’ (Gilmore and Greene, 2014). This being so, it has been said that ‘thinking ahead’ (Queen: The Best Years of our Lives, 2015) he ‘used the media to record a message to be broadcast in a future without him’, to leave his voice, face, and body, and that through ‘these animated images he continues to communicate with us’ (Howarth, 2000: 134). Along similar lines, ‘Hurt’ has been referred to as Cash’s ‘video obituary’, a ‘gut-wrenching’ representation of aging, loss, and mortality that ‘pushes music video boundaries into real adult life’ (Violanti, 2003), and in so doing captures the essence of what it feels like to be ‘old, frail, and depressed’ (Johnson, 2003). In these reflectionist terms the

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music video can be even thought of as a mechanism that ‘encourages the ongoing communion between the living and the dead, presenting as it does the voice and a visual representation of the animated body of the deceased addressing us from “the life beyond”’ (Howarth, 2000: 134). The two music videos deal with pending death in a mature way that can contribute to CDSE discourse significantly. Insofar as the music videos represent chronic and indeed critical illness – something quite distinct from what director Mark Romanek calls ‘eye candy’, ‘hip and cool and all about youth and energy’ (Violanti, 2003) – they are similarly revolutionary but it must be said that the dominance of normative positivisms is felt in both. When Mercury was making the video for ‘These are the days of our lives’, at least according to related discourse, he used thick make-up to hide the markings on his face (Hutton, 1994) and it was filmed in black and white to ‘disguise the extent to which AIDS had ravaged’ his body (Runtaugh, 2016). These and other such strategies may well have served Mercury in swerving the stigma around HIV/AIDS but also comforted the audience by not disrupting the normative social aesthetic more than absolutely necessary. In contrast, the ‘Hurt’ music video makes the distinction between past and present quite explicit and confronts Cash’s ‘physical despair with a visual honesty’ that only enhances the ‘poignancy’ (Violanti, 2003). It is, as Romanek told MTV, about a powerful, legendary figure moving towards the twilight of his career and thus dealing with issues and emotions we are not used to encountering in videos (Violanti, 2003). But the use of retrospective footage nonetheless represents a point of reference defined by dominant normative positivisms, for it is the rock star persona of the past that creates fear of the embodied present.

Concluding discussion: The heroes and casualties of tragic representation In popular music studies Mercury and Cash emerge as exemplary figures. More than having a technically outstanding voice (Herbst et al., 2017), Mercury was said to have an ‘ability to project himself and the band’s music and image to the four corners of 70,000 seater venues’ (Queen, 2017). The energetic, charismatic, and flamboyant frontman had a ‘larger than life personality’, demonstrable at the most famous charity concert of them all, Live Aid 1985, when Queen and in particular Mercury ‘stole the show’ (Queen: The Best Years of our Lives, 2015). In 1992 a star-studded tribute concert at Wembley Stadium marked his death but also ‘gave birth to the Mercury Phoenix Trust’, an AIDS charity set up in his memory, and in 2010 a poll ‘saw him named the Greatest Rock Legend Of All Time, beating Elvis Presley to claim the title’ (Queen, 2017). Along comparable lines, in a life ‘often characterized as bigger than life’ (Tunnell and Hamm, 2009: 270), Cash had ‘one of the most remarkable careers in American popular music’, whereby he embraced both song and video in a way that made him a survivor in an industry that ‘burned out and buried’ his contemporaries Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, and so on (Johnson, 2003). He combined music and politics productively insofar as a concert he recorded at Folsom Prison

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turned out to be not only his most famous moment in music but also a pivotal event in American penology (Tunnell and Hamm, 2009). It was even said that he symbolised a greatly needed ‘faith in human betterment’ (Tunnell and Hamm, 2009: 283), idolatry rendered sardonically in his revision of the ‘Hurt’ lyrics that turned ‘something corporeal to something somewhat sacred’ – the ‘crown of shit’ becomes a ‘crown of thorns’ as the music video echoes his past career and ‘weaves in scenes of the crucifixion of Jesus’ (Tatusko, 2005). By all accounts it is not going too far to assert that more than being rock stars Mercury and Cash were legendary figures of the late twentieth century – their places in the cultural memory are secured. All this being so, CDSE discourse must recognise that the ways in which the two music videos work are contextual as well as textual. The works in themselves provide multimodal representations that also refer to popular culture, culture more broadly, and social attitudes, meaning they impart ideas but are premised on the rock star persona that Mercury and Cash exemplified. It is a long way down for anyone so elevated to fall and as such a potential tragedy begins. Part of the representational power of the two music videos is derived from the implicit and sometimes explicit struggle of the eminent central figures. Most obviously, the physical appearance of the singers differs from what their audiences have come to expect, although this difference is somewhat disguised in ‘These are the days of our lives’ and openly acknowledged in ‘Hurt’, for Mercury invokes a dichotomy that renders his present state distinct from the joyful past about which he reminisces but Cash provides documentary evidence of the proposed contrast. These and other textual elements of the representations are bolstered by contexts in which Mercury and Cash died soon after making their respective music videos. The autobiographical works thereby became indicative of broader biographies that were themselves rendered tragic. It is important that tutors and students bring disability studies to popular music studies and explore the implications of this tragic mode of representation for people who have chronic illnesses. In both music videos the very aesthetic is instrumental in defining this mode, for although not as demonstrable as ‘Hurt’, ‘These are the days of our lives’ adopts the monochromic approach historically used to represent impairment as tragic (Hevey, 1992; Barnes and Mercer, 2003). It must be said too that the tragic representation includes dichotomous renderings of the passage of time that accord with the normative divide:  

Normative – the good life, the pursuit of happiness, activity, vitality, youth, health, unimpairment, and non-disability; Non-normative – a bad life, lament, reflection, remembrance, maturity, sickness, impairment, and disability.

These polarities are far from definitive but in themselves reveal inconsistencies with chronic illness that after all tends to be both gradual and variable. In their past exemplification of the rock star persona, Mercury and Cash may be said to have taken the pursuit of happiness to the point of hedonism but in their represented

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present things are very different. The image that the rock stars once epitomised is dismantled in the sense that a key normative element seems to be removed – or rather displaced in favour of chronic illness, impairment, disability – and the result is a non-normative existence. When the passage of time is represented as dichotomous rather than continuous it is not recognised for what it gives as well as for what it takes away – as though memories of the past are the best prospect for the present of people who have chronic illnesses. The key point to remember, however, is that ‘These are the days of our lives’ and ‘Hurt’ ultimately posit love and indeed pain to represent existence that is not residual but essential.

Indicative questions:     

Why are popular music studies and disability studies important to each other? How do normative positivisms impact on the representation and human interaction of disabled musicians? When considering chronic illness what are the problems with representing the passage of time as past and present rather than as a continuum? Why is it important to uncover representations of essential as well as residual existence? How is disability represented in popular music?

Notes 1 The very shock of some television singing competitions is that they focus on voice alone, a thematic premise nonetheless set aside after the initial auditions. 2 Mercury died from HIV complications ‘just over 24 hours after he had publicly announced he had the disease’ (Queen, 2017). 3 This apparent departure from the normative social aesthetic is itself notable when consideration is given to works such as ‘All Shook Up’ and ‘Shaking All Over’, popular songs about ‘uncontrollable neurological tremors, as physical symptoms conflating the ecstasy of sexual attraction and of dance’ (McKay, 2009: 293). 4 More obviously pertinent to Mercury this term also applies to Cash in the present book. Although described in some quarters as a country singer if not a ‘country legend’ (Violanti, 2003), this was not so according to Cash, his biographers, nor many music critics (Tunnell and Hamm, 2009), which is why the term rock star is used here. 5 The field of feminist disability studies has made many significant contributions here, drawing from work on embodiment, challenging ‘traditional sociological literature’, and understanding chronic illness as an impairment in the ‘larger context of disability rights and the disabled people’s movement’ (Bê, 2016: 466).

Highly Recommended Reading (Disability Studies and Popular Music Studies): McKay, G. (2013) Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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References Ahmed, S. (2007) The Happiness Turn, New Formations, 63, 7–14. Barden, O. (2015) Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability by George McKay (review), Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 9, 1, 113–116. Barnes, C. and Mercer, G. (2003) Disability, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bê, A. (2016) Disablism in the Lives of People Living with a Chronic Illness in England and Portugal, Disability and Society, 31, 4, 465–480. Brooks, D. A. (2010) “Once More with Feeling”: Popular Music Studies in the New Millennium, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 22, 1, 98–106. Cain, C. M. (2010) Of Pain, Passing and Longing for Music, Disability and Society, 25, 6, 747–751. Cash, J. (2003) Hurt. [Single] American Recordings. Cloonan, M. (2005) What is Popular Music Studies? Some Observations, British Journal of Music Education, 22, 1, 77–93. Colker, R. (2005) The Disability Pendulum: The First Decade of the Americans with Disability Act, New York: New York University Press. Day, A. (2017) Chronic Poetics, Chronic Illness: Reading Tory Dent’s HIV Poetry Through Disability Poetics and Feminist Bioethics, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 11, 1, 83–98. Garland-Thomson, R. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Gilmore, M. and Greene, A. (2014) Queen’s Tragic Rhapsody, Rolling Stone, 3 July–14 July. Online. Available http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.hope.ac.uk/docview/1552550139? OpenUrlRefId=info:xri/sid:primo&accountid=12115 (accessed 14 April 2017). Goffman, E. (1963) Stigma: Notes on a Spoiled Identity, New York: Simon and Schuster. Herbst, C. T., Hertegard, S., Zangger-Borch, D., and Lindestad, P. (2017) Freddie Mercury – Acoustic Analysis of Speaking Fundamental Frequency, Vibrato, and Subharmonics, Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology, 42, 1, 29–38. Hevey, D. (1992) The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery, London: Routledge. Hooton, C. (2015) The Story behind Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’, Still the Saddest Music Video of all Time, Independent, 6 Oct. Online. Available http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en tertainment/music/features/the-story-behind-johnny-cash-s-hurt-still-the-saddest-musicvideo-of-all-time-a6683371.html (accessed 2 Jan 2018). Howarth, G. (2000) Dismantling the Boundaries between Life and Death, Mortality, 5, 2, 127–138. Hunt, P. (1966) Stigma: The Experience of Disability, London: Geoffrey Chapman. Hutton, J. (1994) Cover story: Mercury and Me, The Guardian, 22 Oct. Online. Available http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.hope.ac.uk/docview/293569490?OpenUrlRefId= info:xri/sid:primo&accountid=12115 (accessed 14 Apr 2017). Johnson, D. W. (2003) Johnny Cash’s Final Performance Transcended His Final Album, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, 15 Sept. Online. Available http://search.proquest.com/doc view/457178103/D10CFB80138B4BC2PQ/22?accountid=12115 (accessed 11 Mar 2017). McKay, G. (2009) Introduction: Special Issue on Popular Music and Disability, Popular Music, 28, 3, 293–295. McRuer, R. (2006) Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York Press. Quayson, A. (2007) Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Queen (1991) These are the days of our lives. [Single] EMI, Parlophone. Queen (2017) Band Members/Freddie Mercury, Queen. Online. Available http://www. queenonline.com/en/the-band/members/freddie-mercury/ (accessed 9 Apr 2017). Queen: The Best Years of our Lives. (2015) Documentary. Produced by Paul Nash. [Video] A Treble Clef Production. Runtaugh, J. (2016) Freddie Mercury: 10 Things You Didn’t Know Queen Singer Did, Rolling Stone, 23 Nov. Online. Available https://search.proquest.com/docview/ 1842845204/D2FDBCDC17846A3PQ/50?accountid=12115(accessed 14 Apr 2017). Sontag, S. (1991) Illness as Metaphor: Aids and its Metaphors, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tatusko, A. (2005) Transgressing Boundaries in the Nine Inch Nails: The Grotesque as a Means to the Sacred, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 11. Tunnell, D. K. and Hamm, M. S. (2009) Singing Across the Scars of Wrong: Johnny Cash and His Struggle for Social Justice, Crime, Media, Culture, 5, 3, 268–284. Violanti, A. (2003) Painful Reality Palpable in Cash Video, Buffalo News, 16 Mar. Online. Available https://search.proquest.com/docview/381582094/54E09C88A5D24A47PQ/5? accountid=12115 (accessed 11 Mar 2017). Waksman, S. (2010) Imagining an Interdisciplinary Canon, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 22, 1, 68–73.

7 ONE OF THE CROWD Disability, humour, and the contradictions of comedy

Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and humour studies Humour can be thought of as a taste of happiness and as such is far more complex than it seems. It can be used to ‘encourage, even force, others to view an aspect of the human experience from a perspective with which they may not be personally familiar or to consider sides of an issue to which they usually stand in opposition’ (Bingham and Green, 2016: 2). Indeed, although for some people the field of humour studies invokes both the silly and the serious and in so doing constitutes a contradiction in terms (Zemke, 1991), it played a formative role in American studies and during the 1970s became formalised in its own right by the American Humor Studies Association and the journal Studies in American Humor (Epp, 2010). In the 1980s and 1990s it further expanded thanks to the International Society for Humor Studies and the journal Humor (Zemke, 1991; Davis, 1995), as well as a number of publications in the field that brought together interdisciplinary research, summarised accomplishments, and proposed various new perspectives (Chfopicki, 1996). But seldom was it the case that these developments reached the dynamic and complex relationship between disability and humour (Reid, Hammond Stoughton, and Smith, 2006; Bingham and Green, 2016), a common belief being that the words disability and humour did not rightfully belong in the same sentence (Haller, 2003), as though the very idea of disability humour also would amount to a contradiction in terms – although this time the supposed juxtaposition is between sadness and silliness. The received contradictions of disability humour are addressed increasingly in contemporary representations, meaning academia is now more likely to recognise that disability studies can bring much to theories of humour and vice versa (Coogan, 2013). It is appreciated, in some circles at least, that critical engagement with humour holds great ‘potential to explore alternative perspectives on topics at

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the heart of Disability Studies’ (Mallett, 2010: 12), a general example being that humour ‘can bring us together and ease tension but, just as quickly, it can highlight difference and reinforce hierarchy’ (Bingham and Green, 2016: 3). Demonstrable in the conceptual distinction drawn between disability humour that centralises and disabling humour that denigrates (Reid, Hammond Stoughton, and Smith, 2006), this contradiction can be explored most productively in CDSE discourse when humour studies and disability studies are combined. Insofar as disabling humour tends to be normative and disability humour is more likely to be non-normative in its derivation, the two categories fall either side of the normative divide and as such raise many points for tutors and students engaged with CDSE to consider. For instance, we might wonder if only disabled people can laugh at disability humour and if so is it acceptable for people with one impairment to make jokes about those with another (Bingham and Green, 2016). Related questions are considered in the present chapter with reference to Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain’s Peep Show, a twenty-first-century sitcom set in London.1 The very genre reveals much about human interaction but Peep Show in particular provides us with an ‘examination of the ways in which “normal” people live their lives’ (Mills, 2008: 56). This normative focus may seem to define Peep Show as a disabling form of humour but owing to its contradictory mode of representation the manifest content is in effect subverted. It is my contention that from such contradictions of comedy we can learn much about the contradictions of society.

How everyone talks: Disabling language When tutors and students engage with the contradictions of Peep Show we should begin with its mode of representation, especially as we are likely to focus on certain episodes, extracts, or characters. I tend to concentrate on Mark Corrigan (played by David Mitchell), who is employed, self-conscious, and has an interest in history, as well as his friend and lodger Jeremy Usbourne (played by Robert Webb), whose aspirations in popular music render him confident but generally unemployed. Unlike the other characters these two manifestly problematic protagonists are represented in such a way that not only their spoken words but also their private thoughts are shared, which highlights many contradictions between internal identity and its linguistic enactment (McCarthy, 2014). This being so, their representational mode resonates with the titular reference to historical peepshows viewed from individual booths, based – like the dramatic scenario considered in chapter 1 – ‘on the pleasure for the audience of eavesdropping on resolutely private thoughts’ (Mills, 2008: 52). Afforded this quasi intimate perspective on contradictions between private thoughts and spoken words, tutors and students engaged with CDSE can gather much about social norms of human interaction thereby represented. One social norm of human interaction is the colloquial application of disabling language. When exploring this provocative point with my own students

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I sometimes mention the casual invocation of people who have spastic cerebral palsy. I do so because I can recall that variants of the medical term were used offensively during my own school years in the 1970s and 1980s but judging by more recent shared experiences these things have not improved as much as I would have imagined. The terms had (and still have) offensive currency among non-disabled people making fun of other non-disabled people, as represented when Mark uses the disablist word ‘spaz’ (Peep Show, 2003: 1), as well as among non-disabled people bullying disabled counterparts. What this means for those who actually have the condition is the ‘dual indignity’ of ‘being the direct target of demeaning jokes’ and having an aspect of their embodiment ‘used as a generalized derogatory term’ (Bingham and Green, 2016: 4). Yet the casual use of this or other such disabling language remains familiar and echoes down the decades of history. CDSE discourse about the disabling language of Peep Show is bound to move in the direction of learning difficulties, with which Mark sometimes seems somewhat preoccupied. The aspect of disability history thereby brought to the fore is the socalled retardation scale that remained in use until the 1970s, whereby an IQ score below 70 led to the descending classification of morons, imbeciles, and idiots (Gold, 2011). Mark likens Jeremy to ‘an idiot savant, but not so stupid’ (Peep Show, 2003: 3), an assessment echoed in references to an ‘idiot’ and a ‘moron’ (Peep Show, 2010: 5), a ‘gullible idiot’ (Peep Show, 2015: 1), and so on. These and other such insults illustrate the casual use of the retardation scale found problematic in disability studies (Halliwell, 2004; Savarese, 2007; Gabbard, 2008; Murray, 2008), the worst applications being when – as considered in chapter 3 – it served eugenics to mark out the so-called bad stock of humanity (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006). These historical applications resonate when Mark ponders his relationship with Sophie Chapman (played by Olivia Colman). When pretending to take drugs in a nightclub, for instance, he is hugged by one of her friends and thinks, ‘Oh God the sweaty grip of a moron’ (Peep Show, 2005: 5). Moreover, when Sophie and Mark are having a baby and she informs him that she would like to access private healthcare, he thinks, ‘I hope he’s clever. I will definitely resent paying three grand for an idiot’ (Peep Show, 2009: 3). We thereby witness how Mark’s assessment of Sophie’s milieu informs his private thoughts if not his spoken words about the kind of child she might bear and, by extension, that his preoccupation with learning difficulties serves the normative positioning of his own intellect. What Mark’s normative positioning illustrates is that as a social norm of human interaction the application of disabling words is strategic, as is also the case with the disabling application of non-disabling words, the most recurrent illustration in Peep Show being the adjective mental. Mark describes a cartoon he has drawn for Sophie as ‘bloody mental’ (Peep Show, 2003: 2); warns himself against going ‘totally mental’ when shopping for shoes (Peep Show, 2004: 4); and thinks of their decision to move in together as ‘definitely mental’ (Peep Show, 2015: 5). Jeremy proposes that maybe he can ‘get into Peter Gabriel and go mental’ (Peep Show, 2003: 3); warns a burglar that he and Mark ‘will go mental’ (Peep Show, 2008: 1); blames Mark for trashing a camper van, saying ‘he went mental’ (Peep Show, 2008: 5); and when moving in

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with Super Hans (played by Matt King) asserts, ‘We’re going to have a mental blast’ (Peep Show, 2010: 6). In these and other examples the protagonists use the word mental to signify that on occasion they might choose to lose control but should not be confused with those who have little or no choice in the matter.2 Be it via disabling words or disabling applications of non-disabling words, the language of Peep Show momentarily invokes disability in numerous places. Something tutors and students can take from humour studies on this point is how the social strategy serves the sitcom genre because, according to incongruity theory, humour results from situations in which something or someone is ‘odd’, ‘abnormal’, or ‘out of place’ (Morreall, 2009: 65–68), the ‘bringing together of two things that are commonly kept separate’, ‘behaviour that is unexpected’, or a ‘use of language that surprises’ (Mills, 2013: 324). The use of disabling words is surprising because in most examples it is indirect and as such momentarily invokes a disabled figure that is indeed out of place, the incongruity being that non-normative negativisms thereby enter an arena primed for normative positivisms. Insofar as disabling words momentarily invoke a disabled figure, for the purpose of CDSE discourse they can be placed under the rubric of flash representation (Bolt, 2016). These representations of disability continue along contradictory lines in serving a normative strategy, which tutors and students can explore with reference to Mark’s continual search for socioeconomic betterment. When reflecting on his performance in an important interview, not to mention the charitableness of his own nature, Mark thinks that perhaps he should have ‘mentioned the blind kids, although would’ve sounded as though I just did it for my CV. I definitely did not do that just for my CV’ (Peep Show, 2003: 5). This pointed protest indicates that he has indeed worked with the children in order to bolster his CV, which is why, on learning the job application is unsuccessful, he realises he should have ‘milked those blindies dry’ (Peep Show, 2003: 5). When subsequently pleading for the job he says, ‘but I’ve worked with blind kids’ (Peep Show, 2003: 5). The audience is thereby made aware of strategic flash representations that help to construct the normative divide before which, in his pursuit of personal advancement, Mark endeavours to situate himself. But in the normative endeavour the social strategy for advancement becomes still more complex. Happiness is pursued by Mark in ways that explicitly illustrate the proposition that it is ‘expected to reside in certain places, those that approximate the taken-for-granted features of normality’ (Ahmed, 2007: 9). This objective is explicit in an observation made by Dobby (played by Isy Suttie), that Mark tries to ‘get away with pretending’ he is a ‘normal human being’ (Peep Show, 2008: 2), as well as in his wish to eat chocolate from his pillow ‘like a normal human being’ (Peep Show, 2015: 2), for in these aspirations he does not consider himself before the normative divide. This being so, his strategy is to present himself as a disabled person from time to time, a masquerade that can be said to provide an ‘alternative method of managing social stigma through disguise, one relying not on the imitation of a dominant social role but on the assumption of an identity marked as stigmatized, marginal, or inferior’ (Siebers, 2004: 5). The masquerade ‘claims disability as a way to manage the stigma of social difference’ (Siebers, 2004: 8).

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Hence, when negotiating his feelings about Sophie, Mark is discovered deliberately cutting himself and says that self-harm ‘might be very appealing’, that she will want to look after him (Peep Show, 2004: 5), a masquerade of mental health issues that resonates when he hides from their wedding guests and considers telling them he is looking for God in order to appear ‘a tiny bit mad’ (Peep Show, 2007: 6). That is to say, Mark exploits prominent non-normative negativisms as he dons a mask of disability to face the dominant normative positivisms. Because Mark does not identify and is not labelled as disabled it is perhaps worth tutors and students considering how his social strategy illustrates disability drag, a ‘variety of the masquerade’ that provides an ‘exaggerated exhibition’ of disabled people but questions ‘both the existence and permanence of disability’; that ‘acts as a lure for the fantasies and fears’ of non-disabled people and ‘reassures them that the threat of disability is not real, that everything was only pretend’ (Siebers, 2004: 18). The most dramatic example is provided when Mark fails his assignment to lead a team of JLB Credit colleagues on Project Zeus. On realising the inadequacy of his presentation he tries to salvage something by invoking and indeed faking cancer. In response to the murmurs of disapproval he tells everyone he has a ‘brain tumour the size of a pineapple’ (Peep Show, 2007: 3); that he has done well for someone who is dying and only has a month to live. His thinking is evidently that the invocation and exploitation of prominent non-normative negativisms might be enough to distract from his own inadequacy. With reference to what he calls his ‘poor diseased brain’ (Peep Show, 2007: 3), he decides to fake terminal illness in a vain hope that he might save his presentation. His pretence is almost immediately apparent, so he fails in his endeavour to borrow a ready-made disability identity to explain why he does not make his way before the normative divide.

Here today: Disabling narrative The contradictory point about narrative that tutors and students engaged with CDSE can explore with reference to Peep Show is that the prominent but insubstantial non-normative negativisms often serve an important representational purpose. Known in disability studies as narrative prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000) – as considered in chapter 1 – this discursive dependence often involves disability being stripped of meaning and employed in the mechanics of narrative. Disability pervades both as a ‘stock feature’ of characterisation and as an ‘opportunistic metaphoric device’ (Mitchell, 2002: 15). As such, narrative prosthesis resonates with the framing of unusualness recognised by the incongruity theory of comedy (Coogan and Mallett, 2013). In schematic terms, which can be very useful in class activities, the concept of narrative prosthesis recognises that curiosity is tweaked by stories that promise a peep at the unusual: 1. 2.

A ‘deviance or marked difference is exposed to a reader’; a ‘narrative consolidates the need for its own existence by calling for an explanation of the deviation’s origins and formative consequences’;

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3. 4.

the ‘deviance is brought from the periphery of concerns to the center stage of the story to come’; the ‘remainder of the story seeks to rehabilitate or fix the deviance in some manner, shape, or form’ (Mitchell, 2002: 20–23).

This schematic can be illustrated and explored with reference to an episode devoted to the fleeting character Merry (played by Meredith MacNeill), a Canadian friend of Mark and Jeremy whom they have known since their university days: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Merry’s deviance from dominant normative positivisms is exposed when she gives her pub to Jeremy and Super Hans, as well as when she makes unexpected and uncharacteristic sexual advances towards Mark. An explanation of the deviation’s origins and consequences is sought when Mark queries the behaviour with Jeremy and says ‘something is wrong’ with Merry, she is ‘not right in the head’, she ‘has gone a bit funny’ (Peep Show, 2005: 2). Jeremy is convinced by Mark’s concerns and the deviance becomes central to the episode after all entitled ‘Sectioning’ as the helpline NHS Direct is called: ‘How easy would that be to do, a sectioning? I mean would I have to be involved at all? Or could I just give you the house number and assure you that she is completely mental?’ (Peep Show, 2005: 2). The remainder of the episode seeks to rehabilitate or fix the deviance insofar as Merry is diagnosed as being in an ‘acute stage of a manic depression’ and is subjected to the eponymous sectioning (Peep Show, 2005: 2).

This and other applications of the fourfold schematic can help tutors and students to explore the dispensable nature of many disability representations. Merry enters and exits in the same episode; she does not appear again throughout the narrative; her non-normative character is sketched for the sake of disability dramatics and quickly erased. In effect Mark and Jeremy dispense with their friend much as representations tend to dispense with disabled characters. With transitory characterisation in mind, when giving a lecture on Peep Show I tend to begin by focusing on Mark’s interactions with a more substantial disability presence. In an initial meeting, when Gerard (played by Jim Howick) talks about the tube that monitors his stomach levels, Mark instantly assumes he knows best and thinks, ‘That’s not business like, it’s not even a proper disability’ (Peep Show, 2007: 2). Mark’s characterisation thereby serves to demonstrate the ‘constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them’ (Garland-Thomson, 1997: 8). Identification and manipulation of non-normative negativisms are part of his social strategy. On realising the rest of his colleagues no longer want to work on Project Zeus, he supposes he can always roll out Gerard for the sympathy vote: ‘He’s my dark secret, my elephant man’ (Peep Show, 2007: 2).

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In itself an illustration of prominent non-normative negativisms, this allusion to the famous nineteenth-century disabled man Joseph Merrick is notable because, on account of the normative social aesthetic that clashed with his tumorous appearance, he found himself in a so-called freak show, an aspect of disability history that finds recurrent representation in Peep Show (Bolt, 2016).3 The contingency plan is scuppered, for example, when Gerard leaves the team and Mark laments the loss of his ‘beautiful elephant man’ (Peep Show, 2007: 2). It is this withdrawal from Project Zeus that results in Mark’s invocation of cancer in the presentation, a substitution that makes manifest the importance of non-normative embodiment to the normative assumption of authority. Mark’s private thoughts and spoken words provide us with a clear demonstration of a classic point about human interaction between disabled people and non-disabled people, the normate reduction of a ‘complex person to a single attribute’ (GarlandThomson, 1997: 12). Although Mark denies even noticing when asked about the tube (Peep Show, 2009: 5), this stance is contradicted in private thoughts that reveal more than a little preoccupation (Bolt, 2016). In an early encounter, far from listening to what Gerard has to say, Mark thinks, ‘Tube up his nose, tube up his nose, he’s a man with a tube up his nose’ (Peep Show, 2007: 2). In a subsequent meeting, moreover, Mark says Gerard’s name on answering his door but thinks, ‘Tube up his nose. The tube is back up his nose’ (Peep Show, 2009: 5). The disabling refrain finally escapes the realm of private thoughts when Mark speaks at Gerard’s funeral, reminds everyone of the ‘tube up the nose’ (Peep Show, 2012: 1), and in so doing shows how even in death the complex content of someone’s character can be displaced by a single attribute. CDSE discourse about the recurrent and reductive references to the tube that monitors Gerard’s stomach levels can be enhanced by the contention that they also key his character to the metanarrative of disability – meaning they trigger in Mark a vast array of received notions about disability (Bolt, 2012). Most significantly, the references point to the pseudo science of eugenics – as considered in chapter 3 – that historically rendered disabled people a threat to the normative positivisms of humanity and as such forbade certain relationships. This threat is implicit when a teambuilding initiative finds a group of JLB Credit colleagues socialising in a club, for a lapdancer approaches Gerard and Mark thinks, ‘Oh my God, this is horrible. Aargh, she is touching the tube, that can’t be hygenic’ (Peep Show, 2007: 2). This anxiety about sexual contact across the normative divide increases when Mark and Gerard form the Dobby Club and thus become direct rivals. Mark imagines himself before the divide in a ‘love contest with someone who’s one blocked sinus from intensive care’ and endeavours to find comfort in the non-normative negativisms of the assumption that Dobby will not desire a ‘kiss around the mucus duct. Nice’ (Peep Show, 2009: 5). But the anxiety continues when Mark names Gerard the ‘sickly prince’ (Peep Show, 2010: 6), the ‘sickly Casanova’ (Peep Show, 2012: 1) who at the start of the party must get ‘incredibly fucked – booze, drugs, whatever – before Dobby arrives’ (Peep Show, 2009: 5). Mark adds that this is just to be ‘on the safe side’ and Jeremy replies, ‘Chemical castration, classic’ (Peep Show, 2009: 5).

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That is to say, resonant with numerous other references to disability history, Mark’s implicit invocations of negative eugenics are flagged up by Jeremy’s throw away comment. Even a casual reference to eugenics warrants attention from tutors and students interested in attitudes towards disability. Mark’s interests in history and World War II furnish him with the fact that in Nazi Germany disabled people were ‘evaluated for extermination’ in accordance with ‘Eugenic Atlantic thinking’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006: 122), as illustrated when an unnamed character annoys him by taking the lift to ascend a single storey. On noticing that this man walks with a limp, Mark thinks, ‘People like him should wear stickers. They’ve got them for their cars. Oh yeah, great idea, Adolf’ (Peep Show, 2003: 2). Yet this awareness is continually contradicted, for in an early meeting, when accused of purposefully stepping on Gerard’s foot, Mark’s only defence is that he was careful to make it look like an accident (Peep Show, 2007: 4). Mark goes on to forbid Gerard openly from having a relationship with Dobby and says, ‘It’s no dice for you and your sickly ways’ (Peep Show, 2012: 1). Dobby is then deterred by Mark from responding to Gerard’s telephone calls, the cries for help that prove critical when his compromised immune system is beaten by influenza. Mark quells any consequential feelings of guilt by contributing to the cost of the funeral at which Alan Johnson (played by Paterson Joseph) celebrates the normative divide and proclaims that the ‘weak must make way for the strong, evolution marches on’ (Peep Show, 2012: 1). Thus, although relatively substantial, even Gerard’s characterisation spans fewer than half of the episodes and as such demonstrates the dispensable nature of disability representations that echoes (and thus encourages engagement with) the nadir of disability history and indeed modernity.

Concluding discussion: Latent disability humour Ranging from a private thought or spoken word to flash and fleeting representations, as well as the more substantial characterisation that appears in a number of episodes, disability is certainly recurrent in Peep Show (Bolt, 2016); but whether or not the sitcom can be thought of as disabling or disability humour can often remain rather a moot point in CDSE discourse. On the face of it, as the present chapter illustrates, the representation disseminates stereotypes and as such is manifestly problematic in relation to disability. However, the thing about Peep Show is that it contradicts its own manifest content, and in so doing depicts ‘noticeably artificial codes whose meaning and power are merely a consequence of their recirculation within society’ (Mills, 2008: 63). This means that, through the quasi intimate foregrounding of ways in which disability is casually discussed, Peep Show ‘manages to depict social convention as itself laughable, and forces the audience out of a “privileged”, unquestioning and unified position of superiority’ that is traditionally offered by sitcom (Mills, 2008: 63). The trouble is that such satire can prove problematic in its application of prejudicial discourse,4 meaning even though it problematises the normative divide and in so doing meets many of the criteria for disability humour, Peep Show is likely to propagate disablement in some circles.

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When tutors and students engaged with CDSE bring disability studies and humour studies together it might well be argued that mainstream comedy is the ‘product, the symptom and the cause of negative and discriminatory attitudes, with only certain sorts of comedic utterances from certain sorts of comedic authors being deemed acceptable’, from which we come to gather just ‘what can and cannot be said about the comedic representation of disability’ (Mallett, 2010: 7). This contention seems quite fair in that, to be so designated, disability humour must ‘challenge negative assumptions, reverse stereotypical and hierarchical relations, serve as a means of catharsis and coping for disabled people, or promote social change’ distinct from the disabling humour that continues to disseminate stereotypes and perpetuate isolation (Reid, Hammond Stoughton, and Smith, 2006: 633, 640). These conditions must be considered and encouraged in CDSE discourse but the thing to avoid is a mode of criticism that affords little or no space for ‘other readings, other meanings, other contexts’, and ‘provides a criticism which has very little to offer beyond chastisements and does not offer much to support a sustained theoretical engagement’ (Mallett, 2010: 7). It is, after all, from this level of engagement with the contradictions that tutors and students can learn most about humour’s role in disablement and indeed the role of disablement in humour.

Indicative questions:      

Why are humour studies and disability studies important to each other? How do prominent non-normative negativisms create humour? How do non-normative negativisms function in narrative? What are flash and fleeting representations of disability? Why does contemporary sitcom employ disablist language? How can the contradictions of comedy teach us about the contradictions of society?

Notes 1 First aired on Channel 4 in 2003 and running for 54 episodes, the final series was broadcast in 2015. Described as ‘the richest, most human, enduring, and hilariously quotable sitcom of the decade’ (Pollock, 2007), it won several prizes (including BAFTAs and British Comedy awards), and achieved ‘cult success’ (Anthony, 2015). 2 This positioning of the normative divide becomes explicit when Mark asserts that he is not a ‘mentaloid’ (Peep Show, 2007: 4) and when he suspects that a nearby couple may have ‘mental health issues’ and decides he must get Sophie ‘away from these freaks’ (Peep Show, 2009: 3). 3 Jeremy asserts, for example, that horse racing is a disgusting freak show, whereby ‘loads of tiny 7 stone men’ are put on horseback and made to race each other (Peep Show, 2009: 3). When Mark tries to explain this is not the case Jeremy retorts, ‘Oh right, they enjoy it do they, the tiny men?’ (Peep Show, 2009: 3). The experience of people who had dwarfism in the freak shows of the past – not to mention the complex legacy that remains today (Pritchard, 2017) – is confused with that of jockeys in the sport of horse riding, the comedic result being that Jeremy’s attempt at disability awareness fails miserably.

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4 An obvious example is the satirical wit of Johnny Speight, writer of the classic sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, that was lost on members of the audience who unexpectedly agreed with protagonist Alf Garnett’s intentionally racist and sexist rejection of liberalism (Bebber, 2014), as echoed in attitudes towards the character of Archie Bunker in the American version, All in the Family (Birthisel and Martin, 2013).

Highly Recommended Reading (Disability Studies and Humour Studies): Bingham, S. C. and Green, S. E. (2016) Seriously Funny: Disability and the Paradoxical Power of Humor, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner.

References Ahmed, S. (2007) The Happiness Turn, New Formations, 63, 7–14. Anthony, A. (2015) Mitchell and Webb on Peep Show: ‘We just wanted to milk it’, The Guardian, 1 November. Online. Available https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/ 2015/nov/01/david-mitchell-robert-webb-on-peep-show-we-just-wanted-to-milkit-interview (accessed 6 January 2017). Bebber, B. (2014) Till Death Us Do Part: Political Satire and Social Realism in the 1960s and 1970s, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 34, 2, 253–274. Bingham, S. C. and Green, S. E. (2016) Seriously Funny: Disability and the Paradoxical Power of Humor, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner. Birthisel, J. and Martin, J. A. (2013) “That’s What She Said”: Gender, Satire, and the American Workplace on the Sitcom The Office, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 37, 1, 64–80. Bolt, D. (2012) Social Encounters, Cultural Representation and Critical Avoidance, in N. Watson, A. Roulstone, and C. Thomas (eds) Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Bolt, D. (2016) Pretending to be a Normal Human Being: Peep Show, Sitcom, and the Momentary Invocation of Disability, Disability and Society, 31, 6, 745–757. Chfopicki, W. (1996) Book Review of Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk, Journal of Pragmatics, 25, 593–610. Coogan, T. and Mallett, R. (2013) Introduction: Disability, Humour, and Comedy, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 7, 3, 247–253. Coogan, T. (2013) “Usually I Love The Onion, But This Time You’ve Gone Too Far”, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 7, 1, 1–17. Davis, S. M. (1995) The Sociology of Humor: A Stillborn Field? Sociological Forum, 10, 2, 327–339 Epp, M. (2010) The Imprint of Affect: Humor, Character and National Identity in American Studies, Journal of American Studies, 44, 1, 47–65. Gabbard, C. D. (2008) ‘What He Found Not Monsters, He Made So’: The I-word and The Bathos of Exclusion, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 2, 1, 11–21. Garland-Thomson, R. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Gold, C. M. (2011) Morons, Imbeciles, and Idiots [online]. Available http://www.campbellm gold.com/archive_esoteric/morons_imbeciles_idiots.pdf. (Accessed 30 October 2017). Haller, B. (2003) DSQ Symposium, Disability and Humor, Disability Studies Quarterly, 23, 3/4. Halliwell, M. (2004) Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film, Burlington VT: Ashgate.

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Mallett, R. (2010) Claiming Comedic Immunity: Or, What Do You Get When You Cross Contemporary British Comedy with Disability, Review of Disability Studies, 6, 3, 5–14. McCarthy, M. M. (2014) Identity Crises in Peep Show, Academia.edu. Online. Available https:// ucc-ie.academia.edu/TinaMC/Papers (accessed 6 January 2017). Mills, B. (2008) ‘Paranoia, Paranoia, Everybody’s Coming to Get Me’: Peep Show, Sitcom, and the Surveillance Society, Screen: The Journal of the Society for Education in Film and Television, 49, 1, 51–64. Mills, B. (2013) Invalid Animals: Finding the Non-Human Funny in Special Needs Pets, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 7, 3, 321–335. Mitchell, D. T. (2002) Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor, in S. L. Snyder, B. J. Brueggemann, and R. Garland-Thomson (eds) Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, New York: Modern Language Association of America. Mitchell, D. T. and Snyder, S. L. (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Morreall, J. (2009) Humour and the Conduct of Politics, in S. Lockyer and M. Pickering (eds) Beyond A Joke: The Limits of Humour, New York: Palgrave. Murray, S. (2008) Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Peep Show. (2003) Series 1. Dir. Jeremy Wooding. [Television] Objective Productions. Channel 4. Peep Show. (2004) Series 2. Dir. Tristram Shapeero. [Television] Objective Productions. Channel 4. Peep Show. (2005) Series 3. Dir. Tristram Shapeero. [Television] Objective Productions. Channel 4. Peep Show. (2007) Series 4. Dir. Becky Martin. [Television] Objective Productions. Channel 4. Peep Show. (2008) Series 5. Dir. Becky Martin. [Television] Objective Productions. Channel 4. Peep Show. (2009) Series 6. Dir. Becky Martin. [Television] Objective Productions. Channel 4. Peep Show. (2010) Series 7. Dir. Becky Martin. [Television] Objective Productions. Channel 4. Peep Show. (2012) Series 8. Dir. Becky Martin. [Television] Objective Productions. Channel 4. Peep Show. (2015) Series 9. Dir. Becky Martin. [Television] Objective Productions. Channel 4. Pollock, D. (2007) Peep Show is the best comedy of the decade, The Guardian, 16 April. Online. Available http://www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2007/apr/16/p eepshowisthebestcomedyo (accessed 6 January 2017). Pritchard, E. (2017) Cultural Representations of Dwarfs and their Disabling Affects on Dwarfs in Society, Considering Disability Journal [online], Available https://cdjournal.schola sticahq.com/article/1985-cultural-representations-of-dwarfs-and-their-disabling-affect s-on-dwarfs-in-society [accessed 29 October 2017]. Reid, D. K., Hammond Stoughton, E. and Smith, R. M. (2006) The Humorous Construction of Disability: ‘Stand‐Up’ Comedians in the United States, Disability and Society, 21, 6, 629–643. Savarese, R. (2007) Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, New York: Other Press. Siebers, T. (2004) Disability as Masquerade, Literature and Medicine, 23, 1, 1–22. Snyder, S. L. and Mitchell, D. T. (2006) Cultural Locations of Disability, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zemke, R. (1991) Humor in Training: Laugh and the World Laughs with You – Maybe, Training, 28, 8, 26.

8 ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL Disability, mass media, and levels of representation

Preliminary discussion: Disability studies and media studies Now popular both as an area of interest and as a target for criticisms of contemporary academia, media studies can be easily traced back to the early 1960s. Given that the term media was seldom used and the author Marshall McLuhan was unknown, it was ‘hugely significant’ that in 1964 the book Understanding Media sold out in Toronto within two days of publication, for the work was on the cusp of a wave that inaugurated a ‘new field of study’ (Marchessault, 2014: 82). The consequence was a rise of media studies departments in many universities around the world; the establishment of peer-reviewed international scholarly associations, conferences, and journals; and the launch of ‘numerous undergraduate degree programs’ (Iqani and Feigenbaum, 2015: 301). The field set out, rather controversially, to ‘challenge the strictures and specialisms of the University’, which ‘needed to adapt to and understand the new world created by media’ or else become irrelevant (Marchessault, 2014: 84). Indeed, part of the project was, and still is, to ‘bring into academic study cultural activity and media production which is otherwise taken for granted or despised’ (Geraghty, 2002: 26). This being so, media studies is often slated within and beyond academia but nonetheless holds great value for contemporary tutors and students engaged with CDSE and thus interested in social aesthetics. CDSE benefits from engagement with media studies because, sometimes referred to as mass communication, the areas of interest can include journalism, broadcasting, web design, and advertising, all of which contribute to the normative divide before which the implied audience is meant and encouraged to reside. Advertising is singled out in the present chapter because it ‘equates the pursuit of material gain with human happiness’ (Cohan, 2001: 323), a deception that accords with the normative social aesthetic whose maintenance involves a divisive trinity of emotions:

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Normative population – wonder, fear, and pity; Non-normative population – patronised, feared, and pitied.

This issue was documented more than half a century ago in a prototypical work of disability studies, which asserted that disabled people were tired of being represented as pitiable objects whose purpose was to elicit funding; that the stereotyped portrayals of popular culture were massively problematic; and that being courageous examples to the world was a chore (Hunt, 1966). These issues reverberated down the decades in distorted representations of disability used by charity advertising to raise money (Barnes, 1991; Hevey, 1992; Barnes and Mercer, 2003) and, although recurrently recognised as problematic (e.g. Naemiratch and Manderson, 2009; Sklar, 2011; Burdett, 2016), the combination of disability studies and media studies reveals that the inducement of wonder, fear, and pity still remains in circulation today. The trinity of emotions can be productively explored by tutors and students who combine disability studies and media studies with reference to a couple of twenty-first-century advertising campaigns that feature visual impairment. First, the Real Beauty campaign was launched by Dove amid concerns that representations of women and girls in popular culture perpetuated an idea of beauty that was neither authentic nor attainable (Etcoff et al., 2004). Second, the See the Need campaign was launched by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (a.k.a. RNIB), who wanted eye departments in the United Kingdom to gain access to a ‘specially trained member of staff’ to ‘provide practical and emotional support to patients who have just found out they’re losing their sight’ (RNIB, 2015b). The two media campaigns are similar insofar as they both have laudable aims and feature disability but, as the present chapter shows, they differ in their levels of representation and the emotions they induce.

Real beauty and real blindness: Wonderful representation CDSE discourse that combines disability studies and media studies should acknowledge from the outset that Dove’s Real Beauty campaign does contain nonnormative positivisms. In order to explore this aspect of the representations, due consideration should be given to three advertisements in the campaign that prominently represent women who have visual impairments: the first is for deodorant, the second for the movement for self-esteem, and the third for hair colour radiance shampoo/conditioner. Aired between 2007 and 2012, all three trouble the normative divide insofar as they represent contentment if not happiness, are used in a mainstream campaign, and yet employ women who are disabled. The deodorant advertisement, for example, shows a woman who is alone but getting ready to go out with her friends. She tells the audience that she loves this chance to relax and pamper herself, that she finds the whole experience therapeutic. However, she explains, her deodorant and hair spray must be kept apart to avoid confusion between the two, thereby suggesting that for her the purely visible labels are not

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accessible. The non-normative nature of the representation emerges when the audience is told that the woman chooses her clothes by how they feel; that she has to be especially careful about using deodorant that leaves marks; and that she puts sellotape on the end of her eyeliner so as not to confuse it with lip liner. Her impairment becomes explicit in the assertion that she does most things by touch since losing her sight, which one of the team that developed the campaign has referred to as a ‘blind girl’ telling the manifest truth: ‘we could have got her a script and encouraged her to script it, but she is who she is and she talks authentically’ (Fielding et al., 2008). Importantly, experiential knowledge of impairment and disability is both represented and appreciated. But tutors and students engaged with CDSE must nonetheless note that the deodorant advertisement’s initial concealment protects the normative divide and induces wonder in the revelation that the woman so preoccupied by looks does not perceive by visual means. The underpinning shock is captured in the critical term aesthetic blindness, which denotes the epistemic myth of blindness to aesthetic qualities, whereby – as explored in chapter 1 and chapter 5 – visual impairment becomes synonymous with ignorance, and aesthetic qualities are observed by vision alone. An ocularnormative consequence of this myth is that when these qualities are perceived by other means they must find expression if not legitimation via visual terms. For example, the woman does not know why she uses a mirror, as she cannot see herself, perplexity that illustrates an anti-cripistemic stance and demonstrates dominant normative positivisms as the visual domain impacts on the thinking of someone who does not perceive by visual means. It is as though beauty must be assessed before and not beyond the normative divide, a suggestion confirmed when she finally turns to the camera and asks, ‘Do I look fit?’ (Dove, 2007). The importance of the visual assessment of her beauty thereby becomes explicit and keeps the normative status of the implied audience dominant. The movement for self-esteem advertisement is similar insofar as it too begins with a woman on her own but, unlike the woman in the deodorant advertisement, she is not preoccupied with how she looks and happiness is sought by somewhat different means. Rather than getting ready for a night out, she is preparing for a game of cricket. The advertisement is also different because the inducement of wonder pertains to the very fact that she engages in such a sporting pursuit, so instead of concealing her visual impairment in order to reveal it as the narrative unfolds, she opens with an explicit reference to when she began to lose her sight.1 Where the two parts of the campaign certainly do correspond is in the dominance of normative positivisms, for although the woman in the movement for self-esteem advertisement reassures the audience that she has found her passion in the sport she plays twice a week, the majority of her direct speech refers or alludes to vision as she employs what is well known in disability studies as an overcoming narrative (Mitchell and Snyder, 2000; Snyder and Mitchell, 2006). She describes losing her sight as a kind of darkness from which she is delivered by the light of her passion. The audience is then shown a sunlit scene of human interaction that reveals this passion to be cricket and the visual references continue as she says, ‘I started to see

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things clearly’ and ‘I don’t let my sight get in the way’ (Dove, 2011). These dominant normative positivisms illustrate the point that ‘if the actions of disabled individuals are cited as the source of overcoming, then it is only to the extent that they successfully distance themselves from the stigma of their own biologies’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006: 208). The assertion of happiness comes from beyond the normative divide before which the woman nonetheless seems obliged to insinuate herself. Of the three advertisements the best-known and easiest to find in order to screen in class is the one for hair colour radiance shampoo/conditioner that focuses on a solitary woman, like the other two, but includes multiple happy day-to-day representations: Kate Crofts is shown sitting on a sofa, in the shower, on the beach, in a car, in a boat, in a field, and so on. She wears a variety of bright colours in these pertinently colourful scenes; explains that when her hair has been coloured it is glossy, shiny, rich, and energised; and proposes the consequence that ‘even normal things become more vivid’, like the sun on her skin and the wind in her hair, that she feels beautiful and happy, like dancing and laughing (Dove UK, 2012). Again the normative divide is not disrupted initially, for this multifaceted representation of happiness contains no signifiers of visual impairment until Crofts finally says that being blind she cannot physically see the colour of her hair. She thereby induces wonder in relation to happiness and beauty, as well as to the colour by which these two things are supposedly elicited. The wonder of the hair colour radiance shampoo/conditioner advertisement becomes filtered through the concept of synaesthesia that proves highly stimulating in CDSE discourse. Particularly useful in this respect is a YouTube clip of the radio programme in which creative director Sarah Bamford explains that the idea came from a briefing with Dove and a colour psychologist about a test on someone who was blindfolded and yet could feel if colours were cool or warm (In Touch, 2012). In my own contribution to the programme I voice scepticism but Crofts argues that she is ‘acutely aware of the synaesthesia phenomenon of enjoying and experiencing one sense through another’ (In Touch, 2012). In so doing she reminds us of her assertion in the advertisement that colour is sounds, smells, and textures: yellow is sunshine on her face, lemon in her drink; blue is cool water, air, and sky (Dove UK, 2012). She also refers to the pertinence of different colours to different moods, which tutors and students informed by media studies are likely to find problematic in the stereotypical examples, whereby blondes are ‘bubbly and fun and girly’ and red hair reveals passion (Dove UK, 2012). Critical engagement informed by disability studies adds that in this representation of someone who does not perceive by visual means the focus on colour is indicative of how expressions of emotion can be dominated by normative positivisms. The dominance of normative positivisms increases when the normative divide slams down behind the target audience. The Dove campaign is inaccessible insofar as there are no audible indications of the products being advertised: in the first advertisement the product becomes apparent in the form of an image of Dove Invisible, a deodorant that, according to the writing on the screen, keeps the user’s

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‘black dress black’; in the second the text reads, ‘Dove movement for self-esteem’ and ‘How do you see the world?’; and in the third the text reads ‘Keep the feeling of freshly coloured hair’ and ‘Dove Colour Radiance’ (Dove, 2007; Dove, 2011; Dove UK, 2012). In the absence of an audible representation of these product names and slogans the advertisements are essentially inaccessible for people who do not perceive by visual means, a scenario that contradicts Dove’s employment of people who have visual impairments and its use of visual impairment as a theme. The campaign is voiced from but not to people beyond the normative divide.

The sighted face of blindness: Fearful and pitiful representation Tutors and students who compare and contrast the Real Beauty and See the Need campaigns should keep in mind the salient point that the RNIB has involved people who have visual impairments from the start, meaning we can expect the normative divide to be dismantled, or at least approached from beyond, and thus underpinned by cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer, 2014). Founded in the 1860s, the organisation began as the British and Foreign Blind Association for Improving the Embossed Literature of the Blind, a focus that grew to include matters of employment (RNIB, 2015a). The name was changed to the National Institute for the Blind and then to the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the twentieth century as the focus widened to encompass audio books, leisure, technology, accommodation, and so on. In the twenty-first century, moreover, the Royal National Institute for the Blind became the Royal National Institute of Blind People. These nominal developments over nearly a century and a half are indicative of the fact that the RNIB is now not only a charity but also a membership body, representation that should range from epistemic to campaign levels. But when tutors and students engaged with CDSE screen the RNIB’s See the Need campaign we are faced with dramatics rather than embodied representation, for the inducement of fear and pity is demonstrable from the outset. The first advertisement begins with a head and shoulders shot of an unnamed woman and a voiceover that addresses the audience directly (i.e. via the second-person pronoun you). The fearful moment about which the audience is so warned involves a doctor announcing the onset of blindness, compounded with anxieties regarding employment, home, and life itself. On this basis the point is made in no uncertain terms: ‘You’ll be angry that there’s nobody at the hospital who can help you face the future. That’s when you’ll see why everyone losing their sight needs the right support’ (RNIB, 2015b). To ensure the inducement of pity as well as fear, the camera moves closer to the actor’s face and shows that her eyes are tearful. Her face, in the words of an RNIB representative, ‘visibly crumbles as she is told she is going blind’ (Dickinson, 2015) and her eyes close to signify loss of sight, sadness, or perhaps a combination of both. On the plus side, when the voiceover continues with the campaign’s slogan, ‘Now that you see the need, demand support’ (RNIB, 2015b), people who have visual impairments are granted access in a way that was not so with the Dove predecessor.2

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Although comparably accessible, the second advertisement is still more dramatic in its use of distorted representation. In contrast with the unknown woman in the first example and those considered in the Real Beauty campaign, this part of the See the Need campaign features an internationally recognised popular music star. The opening scene is a rich rural setting over which the distinctive voice of Shirley Bassey proclaims that as a singer she needs her sight; that without it she would miss much about the world, including ‘colours, paintings, trees, wonderful buildings, castles’ (RNIB, 2015b). The scene changes to reflect these needs and the singer of popular music classics like ‘Diamonds are Forever’ and ‘Gold Finger’ is shown wearing dark glasses, walking arm-in-arm with photographer Alistair Morrison, as she continues: ‘I need to see faces. I need to see reaction of people’ (RNIB, 2015b). Having made these ocularnormative assertions, she is shown in happy dayto-day scenes, laughing, stirring a drink, having her hair styled for a photoshoot, and so on, before invoking a residual existence and proclaiming, ‘If I couldn’t see the people I could not imagine myself singing’ (RNIB, 2015b). The inducement of fear and pity is strongest when she is asked if she can imagine what it would be like to be told she was losing her sight and closes her eyes to answer: ‘No, I can’t imagine. It would just be devastating. It would be like telling me I’m going to die’ (RNIB, 2015b). The camera lingers and again Bassey closes her eyes to dramatise the point. The screen darkens apart from the words that are also spoken: ‘can you see how scary it would be to go blind without any support?’ (RNIB, 2015b). The purpose of the advertisement is revealed as the audience is informed that in the United Kingdom only one in three hospitals has a sight loss adviser and, as in the first part, the closing screen is the campaign slogan. From the first two examples alone it is evident that the See the Need campaign differs from its Real Beauty predecessor in terms of embodied representation. Whereas Dove employs people who have visual impairments, the RNIB turns to an unnamed woman who is not ascribed such experience in any of the literature and a singer who certainly is not known for having a visual impairment. This being so, the irony is that the RNIB’s campaign becomes dominated by normative positivisms and prominent rather than profound understandings of visual impairment. After all, it is on the basis of the normative positivisms of their own happy existence that the unnamed woman and the famous singer envisage unhappiness. Boldly situated before the normative divide, they raise non-normative negativisms in their representations of non-visual human interaction, a state of affairs duplicated in subsequent advertisements that employ well-known actors who do not have visual impairments. The representation is perhaps more about the inducement of pity than fear, and the opening scene urban rather than rural, but the third part of the RNIB’s campaign follows the second in relation to celebrity. The audience is shown a head and shoulder shot of Carry On star Barbara Windsor before the focus shifts to a happy slice-of-life scene in which she is sat in an armchair having a drink. She opens her eyes, introduces herself, and asserts that she is supporting the RNIB’s campaign. The setting changes from an intimate photoshoot to a busy

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urban scene as she speculates about needs and sight loss. She reflects that sight is important to her because she needs to learn her lines; to see the look on people’s faces; to see what is going on; and to know what is happening around her. Amid this familiar confusion between seeing and knowing, which clashes with cripistemologies, the focus returns to a head and shoulder shot to maximise on the thematic closing of eyes. ‘I’d hate not to see’, emphasises Windsor, ‘I couldn’t bear that’ (RNIB, 2015b). Ripples of water, a close up of flowers, and more urban images are shown as she continues in the same vein and, with a flash representation of disability, mentions that she has had her cataracts done. She closes her eyes once again and the advertisement ends in much the same way as the others. Although remembered internationally for her parts in the Carry On films of the past, Windsor has become known nationally in more recent years for her rendition of Eastenders matriarch Peggy Mitchell, mother of Grant Mitchell who is played by another actor featured in the RNIB’s campaign. This part of the campaign begins with Ross Kemp looking through a window. He states his support from the outset. He is shown sitting in a dark room as with another flash representation of disability he informs the audience that he is ‘partially deaf’ (RNIB, 2015b). He talks about his time reporting in Afghanistan as the photography theme is continued in images of a photoshoot that focuses on the camera and so on. He refers to the ways in which explosions can cause literal and figurative sight loss; points to his eyes in a dramatic gesture of non-normative negativisms; and asserts the importance of the gift of sight (RNIB, 2015b). Many of the same elements as in the other advertisements are present, including the inducement of fear, the emphasis on need and loss, and the recurrent closing of eyes. The final part of the RNIB’s campaign yet again features someone who does not have a visual impairment. Men Behaving Badly sitcom actor Neil Morrissey is shown at various stages of a photoshoot in order to emphasise normative positivisms. This emphasis is bolstered when he imparts wisdom about matters that range from acting to the essence of existing. Based on three decades of experience, he asserts that his profession is half sound and half vision, ‘that’s what makes a film, that’s what makes a TV programme, that’s what makes a life’ (RNIB, 2015b). He continues along these lines as the scene changes from a happy slice of life to a factory skyline to yet more photography. Like his counterparts in the other advertisements, he speculates that he would not have been able to succeed in his profession without visual perception. He ponders how people take sight for granted, the amount of information he takes in with his eyes, and the number of decisions he makes as a result of what he can see. On the basis of this ocularnormativism he then provides his most fearful and pitiful speculations about the unhappiness of people who do not perceive by visual means: ‘I can’t imagine how I’d make decisions. How I’d get through life. It’s unimaginable’ (RNIB, 2015b). To bolster this invocation of residual existence he shares some statistics about the lack of support in hospitals and, in keeping with the other four advertisements, closes his eyes once more to raise the non-normative negativisms.

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Dramatics and problematics: Nothing more than need When disability studies and media studies are brought to the See the Need campaign, it becomes evident that the role of drama is both significant and problematic. Although the RNIB can boast an organisational level of representation in terms of membership and so on, these five advertisements only feature people who are acting out or imagining an aspect of the lived experience of visual impairment. Hence, in harsh contrast with Dove’s approach, the RNIB’s Fazilet Hadi argues against the recurrent challenge to the campaign’s extreme negativity by saying it is ‘trying to dramatise people who are sighted losing their sight, and to dramatise that feeling of fear and anxiety they have because they’ve never lived with blindness’ (In Touch, 2015). This example of disabling dramatics worsens the inducement of fear and pity. Under the RNIB banner the thematic closing of eyes is no doubt interpreted by some viewers as an allusion to community but in the absence of people who actually have visual impairments it is divisive and distancing. Indeed, according to the RNIB, ‘Shirley Bassey and Barbara Windsor just gave comments off the cuff, we didn’t script them. Because they are sighted they express their fears and if you like they were looking at it from the sighted population’s point of view’ (In Touch, 2015). This claim is notable precisely because the advertisements feature actors – apart from Bassey who is nevertheless one of popular music’s most dramatic vocalists. As such, the campaign’s framework of visual preoccupations, the thematic closing of sighted eyes, and the premise of need are likely to result in the non-normative negativisms, irrespective of whether or not the individual advertisements are scripted. After all, actors more than anyone would find it easy to embrace the non-normative negativisms of the campaign and deliver something pertinent. Perhaps most concerning and as such stimulating in relation to CDSE discourse is the fact that the RNIB has shown little or no remorse for the non-normative negativisms of the campaign. After an initial ban, on failing to reach a resolution about the negative content with Facebook, the RNIB gave the story to The Guardian and within hours it was ‘shared thousands of times and attracted dozens of comments’ (Dickinson, 2015). This and the related coverage boosted the campaign and Facebook soon conceded. Rather worryingly, the feedback to the negative campaign was, according to the RNIB’s Group Head of Marketing and Communications, ‘overwhelmingly positive’ and the critics were in the minority (Dickinson, 2015). The stance was that just a small number of online comments were negative; that a dozen or so complaints were unhappily received from people registered as blind or partially sighted; and that nobody ‘wants to hear that the campaign your whole team has put their blood, sweat and tears into is “bland,” “boring” and a “PR failure” which made one viewer feel “nauseous, uncomfortable and miserable” – not exactly the response we were going for’ (Dickinson, 2015). The point for tutors and students engaged with CDSE to note is that the main concern seems to be the team, as when the response continues with the assertion that in the case of ‘every bold and powerful marketing and communications campaign’ there are bound to be people who think the RNIB has ‘done a

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bad job’, irrespective of how much time and effort goes into the research (Dickinson, 2015). The thing is that the representation of people who perceive by other than visual means should be central to anything and everything done in the name of the RNIB, so that small number of critical responses informed by experience must take priority over a large number of well-meant but uninformed or indeed misinformed supporters. Critical responses informed by experience are obviously of value to tutors and students keen to learn from and about media campaigns. The point I never fail to stress is that the experience of becoming visually impaired can and sometimes does have a negative impact (Green, Siddall, and Murdoch, 2002; Nyman, 2010; Thurston, 2010; Pybis et al., 2016), the problem being the one-dimensional nature of the campaign, as raised in the critical discourse to which I have contributed, including a number of articles (Bolt, 2015a; Taylor, 2015; Anon, 2015; Bolt, 2016); interviews on local, national, and international radio programmes (World at One, 2015; The Roger Phillips Show, 2015); and the More than Needs petition endorsed by a number of students and colleagues (Bolt, 2015b).3 For example, Jim Moran agreed with criticisms about negativity and added that the whole campaign was designed by advertising people; that the RNIB did not consult enough blind people; that neither as service user nor former Chief Executive of Bradbury Fields was he contacted (The Roger Phillips Show, 2015).4 Judging by this and many other critical responses informed by experience, the See the Need campaign is regressive and far from representative.

Concluding discussion: The need for multifaceted representation It might be said that the normative divide has been implicit in media campaigns since their very conception. The present chapter demonstrates how even recent advertisements are infused with a normative social aesthetic that involves wonder, fear, and/or pity about people imagined, rendered, deemed, and in some ways placed beyond the normative divide. The divisive trinity of emotions therefore proves useful when tutors and students combine disability studies and media studies to explore representation. The Real Beauty campaign is found to contain several inducements of wonder that are meant to represent but in fact distance the experience of people who have visual impairments, contradiction that echoes findings in media studies (Dye, 2009; Froehlich, 2009; Johnston and Taylor, 2008; Scott and Cloud, 2008), the charge being that Dove markets itself as an esteem-building brand based on enhancing women’s natural beauty and yet sells beauty products, that it contributes to the things it seeks to transform (Dye, 2009). In the See the Need campaign the ‘word fear is used explicitly, as are angry and scary, while pity is evoked by the recurrent closing of eyes and references to need, not to mention words like losing and devastating’ (Bolt, 2016: 1171), emotions bolstered by similarity repeatedly drawn between loss of sight and loss of life. In the case of these two twenty-first-century media campaigns, then, Dove induces wonder but the RNIB induces both fear and pity. CDSE discourse stimulated by the divisive trinity of emotions raises important issues about levels of representation. The basic point is that, in order to progress from

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the dominance of normative positivisms and prominence of non-normative negativisms, disabled people must be represented in media campaigns. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is the rule of thumb with which tutors and students in disability studies are now familiar (Charlton, 1998; Crowther, 2007), for most of the leading figures have direct or indirect personal experience of disability, meaning that activism and memoir are explored alongside research, theory, and representation. In these terms it must be commended that disabled people are represented prominently in Dove’s Real Beauty campaign but on closer consideration we find that the campaign is underpinned by normative positivisms. The employment of women who have visual impairments is progressive but their ocularnormative expressions suggest a need for epistemic representation, as does the apparent lack of consideration given to access – the result being a sense of tokenism (Houston, 2017). To further complicate things, people who have visual impairments are represented on an organisational level by the RNIB and yet the See the Need campaign is dominated by non-normative negativisms. People who perceive by other than visual means are unlikely to have trouble accessing the campaign but its representations are neither embodied nor informed – the faceless blind depicted on the cover of the present book are invoked at every turn. Indeed, despite the RNIB’s long-term involvement of people who have visual impairments, in relation to disability the See the Need campaign is far more oppressive than Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. The conclusion is that disabled people must be represented on all levels, epistemic, organisational, and prominent, for media campaigns soon permeate the cultural imagination and as such require complex engagement if the normative positivisms and non-normative negativisms are ever to be balanced with non-normative positivisms.

Indicative questions:     

Why are media studies and disability studies important to each other? What is divisive about the trinity of emotions often employed in advertising? How are media campaigns that feature disability dominated by normative positivisms? How are non-normative negativisms prominent in media campaigns for disability charities? Why is embodiment on multiple levels of representation so important in recognising non-normative positivisms?

Notes 1 Where concealment is employed creatively in the other Dove advertisements, if anything in this case there may be a charge of reductionism in the emphasis on visual impairment, a danger – as considered in chapter 7 – of ‘reducing the complex person to a single attribute’ (Garland-Thomson, 1997: 12). 2 It is worth noting that, despite the consideration of access, the theme of closing eyes is played down by the RNIB: it can be seen at least thirteen times in the advertisements but is only mentioned five times in the related transcripts.

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3 Eliciting (in the first three days) a hundred signatures from Belgium, Canada, India, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland, the More than Needs petition for change was a response to the one-dimensional stance adopted by disability charities such as the RNIB. The contention was that support must be sought but not at the expense of appreciation. The signatories thereby called for complexity in the representation of disability. 4 Along similar lines, Ian Macrae, Editor of Disability Now, asserted, ‘I am completely fed up of RNIB thinking it has the right to present me as an object of pity and present my impairment as a thing of terror’ and Peter White, the BBC’s Disability Affairs Correspondent, suggested that the campaign may be in conflict with the organisation’s ‘primary role, which is to tell people that there is life after blindness’ (In Touch, 2015).

Highly Recommended Reading (Disability Studies and Media Studies): Ellis, K. and Goggin, G. (2015) Disability and the Media, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

References Anon. (2015) Dame Shirley’s Blind Advertising Campaign Slammed by Uni Prof, All Together Now, 13 October. Online. Available http://www.alltogethernow.org.uk/barbara -windsor-and-dame-shirleys-blind-advertising-campaign-slammed-by-uni-prof/ (accessed 28 December 2015). Barnes, C. (1991) Discrimination: Disabled People and the Media, Contact, 70, Winter, 45–48. Barnes, C., and Mercer, G. (2003) Disability, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bolt, D. (2015a) Shame on you RNIB, You See the Need of Blind People but Omit our Achievements, The Conversation, October 8. Online. Available http://theconversation. com/shame-on-you-rnib-you-see-the-need-of-blind-people-but-omit-our-achievem ents-48688 (accessed 28 December 2015). Bolt, D. (2015b) More than Needs: Demand appreciation as well as support, Petition, Change.Org. Online. Available https://www.change.org/p/rnib-ceo-lesley-anne-alexander-the-abandonm ent-or-appreciative-improvement-of-the-rnib-s-see-the-need-campaign?recruiter=67430913 &utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=autopublish&utm_ term=mob-xs-share_petition-no_msg&fb_ref=Default (accessed 6 January 2016). Bolt, D. (2016) Negative to the Extreme: The Problematics of the RNIBs See The Need Campaign, Disability and Society, 31, 9, 1161–1174. Burdett, E. (2016) Disability Studies and Modern Responses to Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity: Critics’ Avoidance, in D. Bolt and C. Penketh (eds) Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge. Charlton, J. (1998) Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohan, J. (2001) Towards a New Paradigm in the Ethics of Women’s Advertising, Journal of Business Ethics, 33, 4, 323–337. Crowther, N. (2007) Nothing Without Us or Nothing About Us? Disability and Society, 22, 7, 791–794. Dickinson, N. (2015) What Happened When We Took on Facebook (and Won), CharityComms, December 4. Online. Available http://www.charitycomms.org.uk/articles/wha t-happened-when-we-took-on-facebook-and-won (accessed 13 December 2015). Dove (2007) Dove Blind Girl. YouTube. Online. Available https://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=mWoTdT7K__k (accessed 13 April 2017).

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Dove (2011) Welcome to the Dove Self-Esteem Project. Online. Available https://www.dove. com/uk/dove-self-esteem-project.html# (accessed 2 Jan 2018). Dove UK (2012) Meet Kate: here’s how Dove Colour Radiance makes her feel. YouTube. Online. Available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7aQdIh0K0o (accessed 17 March 2017). Dye, L. (2009) A Critique of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. Canadian Journal of Media Studies, 5, 1, 114–128. Etcoff, N., Orbach, S., Scott, J., and D’Agostino, H. (2004) The Real Truth about Beauty: A Global Report. Findings of the Global Study on Women, Beauty and Well-being. Online. Available http://www.clubofamsterdam.com/contentarticles/52%20Beauty/dove_white_ paper_final.pdf (accessed 6 April 2017). Fielding, D., Lewis, D., White, M., Manfredi, A., and Scott, L. (2008) Dove Campaign Roundtable, Advertising and Society Review, 9, 4. Froehlich, K. (2009) Dove: Changing the Face of Beauty? Fresh Ink: Essays from Boston College’s First-Year Writing Seminar, 12, 2. Garland-Thomson, R. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Geraghty, C. (2002) ‘Doing Media Studies’: Reflections on an Unruly Discipline, Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education, 1, 1, 25–36. Green, J., Siddall, H. and Murdoch, I. (2002) Learning to Live with Glaucoma: A Qualitative Study of Diagnosis and the Impact of Sight Loss, Social Science and Medicine, 55, 2, 257–267. Hevey, D. (1992) The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery, London: Routledge. Houston, E. (2017) The Representation of Disabled Women in Anglo-American Advertising: Examining how Cultural Disability Tropes Impact on the Subjective Wellbeing of Disabled Women, PhD Thesis, Lancaster University. Hunt, P. (1966) Stigma: The Experience of Disability, London: Geoffrey Chapman. In Touch. (2012) BBC Radio 4. 24 July 2012. In Touch. (2015) BBC Radio 4. 20 October 2015. Iqani, M. and Feigenbaum, A. (2015) The (Inter)Disciplinarity of Media Studies: Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities from the Perspective of Teaching Staff, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, 70, 3, 286–306. Johnson, M. and McRuer, R. (2014) Cripistemologies: Introduction, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8, 2, 127–148. JohnstonJ., and Taylor, J. (2008) Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 33, 941–966. Marchessault, J. (2014) Media Studies as Interdisciplinary Exploration, Journal of Visual Culture, 13, 1, 82–84. Mitchell, D. T. and Snyder, S. L. (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Naemiratch, B. and Manderson, L. (2009) Pity and Pragmatism: Understandings of Disability in Northeast Thailand, Disability and Society, 24, 4, 475–488. Nyman, S. R. (2010) Emotional Well-Being in People with Sight Loss: Lessons from the Grey Literature, British Journal of Visual Impairment, 28, 3, 175–203. Pybis, J., Thurston, M., Dennison, C. M., Broom, M. and Miller, A. (2016) The Nature of Emotional Support and Counselling Provision for People with Sight Loss in the United Kingdom, British Journal of Visual Impairment, 34, 2, 167–176. RNIB. (2015a) History of RNIB, RNIB. Online. Available https://rnib.org.uk/about-r nib-who-we-are/history-rnib (accessed 6 January 2015).

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RNIB. (2015b) #seetheneed, RNIB. Online. Available http://www.rnib.org.uk/see (accessed 28 December 2015). ScottJ. and Cloud, N. (2008) Reaffirming the Ideal: A Focus Group Analysis of the Campaign for Real Beauty, Advertising and Society Review, 9, 4. Sklar, H. (2011) ‘What the Hell Happened to Maggie?’ Stereotype, Sympathy, and Disability in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 5, 2, 137–154. Snyder, S. L., and Mitchell, D. T. (2006) Cultural Locations of Disability, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, J. (2015) Blind Liverpool Academic Slams RNIB’s “Simplistic and Damaging” New Campaign Videos, The Liverpool Echo, 12 Oct. Online. Available http://www.liverpoole cho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/blind-liverpool-academic-slams-rnibs-10229588 (accessed 28 December 2015). The Roger Phillips Show. (2015) BBC Radio Merseyside. 12 October 2015. Thurston, M. (2010) An Inquiry into the Emotional Impact of Sight Loss and the Counselling Experiences and Needs of Blind and Partially Sighted People, Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 10, 1, 3–12. World at One. (2015) BBC Radio 4. 9 October 2015.

EPILOGUE

When disability is mentioned in the context of education it is still generally associated with the field of Special Educational Needs (SEN), a powerful if contentious category that too often serves a dual purpose in ascribing special educational skills to tutors and reducing students to needs. This kind of thinking is openly countered by the field of CDSE that displaces reductive negativity in favour of complexity, the charge being that one-dimensional understandings of disability result in onedimensional approaches to learning and teaching. Needs are certainly part of the picture, but so too are community, relationships, happiness, culture, knowledge, and so on, as are their perception and indeed the picture itself in the blend of social aesthetics and pedagogics proposed. In challenging one-dimensional understandings and approaches, some contemporary educators and students might find it useful to employ the tripartite model of disability. To this end my introduction asserts that the first component of the model pertains to the ongoing affirmation of socially accepted standards (i.e. normative positivisms); that the second component pertains to problematised if not problematic deviations from those standards (i.e. non-normative negativisms); and that the third component represents affirmed deviations that depart from ableism and disablism (i.e. non-normative positivisms). This representational model provides a critical framework that encourages us to navigate the normative divide so troublesome in both its dichotomous construction and its asymmetric function. Normative positivisms can be thought of as dominant when they reach beyond the normative divide as rules and conditions, for the social aesthetic and resultant happiness of non-disabled people thereby problematise the lives of disabled people often deemed residual (as though the very essence of a person is lost once the divide is crossed). In this oppressive climate there is little scope for non-normative positivisms to flourish and respond in kind. To identify and critique, then, is to start to navigate this normative divide by which society is split asunder, the point

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being that openness to what derives from beyond the division soon renders onedimensional understandings simplistic if not ridiculous. Key to the proposed field of CDSE that opposes one-dimensional representations is the combination of disability studies and other disciplines. In the spirit of curricular cripistemologies (Mitchell, Snyder, and Ware, 2014) the present book explicitly combines disability studies with aesthetics, film studies, Holocaust studies, gender studies, happiness studies, popular music studies, humour studies, and media studies. Of course I am well aware that this sample barely scratches the surface of possibilities. Even without leaving the realms of my own institution I can invoke other work aligned with the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies that includes a module on the disability studies MA programme called Disability and Disciplines, which involves students working on interdisciplinarity inspired by some of the research that underpins the present book’s eight chapters, alongside guest sessions given by my dear colleagues Claire Penketh, Ella Houston, Owen Barden, and David Feeney on art, advertising, new literacy studies, and museum studies respectively. Also, led by eminent keynote speakers such as Julie Allan, Len Barton, Peter Beresford, Fiona Kumari Campbell, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Dan Goodley, Robert McRuer, David Mitchell, Stuart Murray, Katherine RunswickCole, and Sharon Snyder, the Biennial CCDS conference now known as Disability and Disciplines has explored numerous examples, a published selection of which includes SEN (Penketh and Waite, 2016), education studies (Hoffmann and Flamich, 2016), social work studies (Boxall and Beresford, 2016), marketing studies (Coogan and Cluley, 2016), creative writing (Nichols, 2016), theatre studies (Fox, 2016), and Gandhi studies (Karah, 2016). Postcolonial studies (Barker and Murray, 2010), genre studies (Cheyne, 2012), and of course literary studies (Bolt, Rodas, and Donaldson, 2012; Friedrich, 2015; Foss, Gray, and Whalen, 2016; Bradshaw, 2016; Thompson, 2017; Tankard, 2018) are just a few more examples with which I am particularly familiar. The combination of disability studies with these and many other fields and disciplines is fundamental to the advancement of CDSE discourse. In combining disability studies and other disciplines I refer to various forms of cultural representation. Because contemporary tutors and students must often familiarise ourselves with such representations, as well as critical and theoretical works, it is recognised that practicalities might well sway us in the direction of brevity. That is not to say we can, should, or do avoid expansive representations such as novels, plays, or films, some of which are after all considered in chapter 1 and chapter 5, and of course it is essential that we spend time on embodied autobiographical writing like Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved and Stephen Kuusisto’s Eavesdropping. But it is nonetheless appreciated as a bonus in chapter 1 and chapter 2 that representational brevity makes it possible for tutors and students to read Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Blind and to screen Tod Browning’s Freaks within a couple of sessions and still leave enough time to discuss, say, constructs of non-normative community. Popular music videos and media campaigns provide similarly convenient illustrative texts, as do sitcoms and other television series

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insofar as a single episode or extract can be screened, which is why these forms of representation are used in chapter 6, chapter 7, and chapter 8. Moving from late nineteenth- to early twenty-first-century contexts I explore these various representations for their normative positivisms, non-normative negativisms, and non-normative positivisms, respectively relating to epistemology, anticripistemic repercussions, and cripistemologies. Owing to the visual significance of the normative social aesthetic (i.e. how important it is to see and be seen in a certain way), chapter 1, chapter 5, and chapter 8 focus on visual impairment and in so doing demonstrate a shift from one-dimensional bleak representations of residual existence (as captured more than a century ago in the disabling dramatics of the artwork used on the cover of the present book) to complex alternatives and alas back again. That is to say, the sense of progression is surprisingly and yet comprehensively undermined by the RNIB, whose media campaign provides the most recent and yet most reductive of the representations I consider. Indeed, the See the Need campaign adopts a normative advertising aesthetic from decades ago, the contradictory implication being that a set notion of happiness could be pursued by the many but only found by the fortunate few. Because this advertising dynamic involved viewers imagining the normative divide before which they were encouraged to place themselves, the human interaction in any happy day-to-day representations was exclusively linked to non-disabled people. This endorsement of the normative social aesthetic is epitomised in the RNIB’s avoidance of people with visual impairments in favour of non-disabled celebrities. But in closing I am very happy to add that, perhaps in response to the critical reception to the See the Need campaign, the RNIB has since launched something much better in terms of complexity. The How I See campaign again focuses explicitly on sight but this time the approach is set by people who have visual impairments and are keen to disrupt dichotomous representation. The premise is that the vast majority of people who have visual impairments nonetheless have some vision: that we have to educate the sighted community about that 93 per cent. If the spectrum of VI was less of a mystery, we could get on and live our lives without having to endlessly manage other people’s expectations. (RNIB, 2016) This campaign displaces the non-normative negativisms of See the Need in favour of an approach that prominently represents people who have visual impairments, including challenges to received notions of employability and happiness, as one contributor named Phil refers to his ‘senior position’ and another named Nicki explains that there is ‘nothing wrong’ with her laughter (RNIB, 2016), meaning non-normative positivisms are included alongside non-normative negativisms and normative positivisms. As such, this departure from one-dimensional representations aligns the campaign more appropriately with its contemporary context. In comparing and contrasting the See the Need and How I See campaigns we can find something of a parallel with the fields of SEN and CDSE. The focus on sight

112 Epilogue

in both RNIB campaigns is indicative of profound normative dominance that reflects the majority position but the newer campaign is certainly more complex and far less divisive. The normative divide still stands but it is less firm and does not split people so strictly into the sighted and the blind, the successful and the unsuccessful, the happy and the unhappy, the essential and the residual, and so on. In the present book, along similar lines, instead of reducing people who have impairments to needs addressed by special educators, a multifaceted, polyphonic, and discursive alternative is proposed. But more than problematising the normative divide I also contend that while in existence it should be navigated from beyond; that contemporary tutors and students must not reduce learning to received ideas of knowledge, community, culture, beauty, happiness, and so on; that we must be also open to cripistemologies (Johnson and McRuer, 2014) and thus to what is hereby rendered a non-normative combination of aesthetics and pedagogics.

References Barker, C. and Murray, S. (2010) Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 4, 3, 219–236. Bolt, D., Rodas, J. M. and Donaldson, E. J. (eds) (2012) The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Boxall, K. and Beresford, P. (2016) Validating Critical Avoidance: Professional social work, mental health service users/survivors, and the academy, in D. Bolt and C. Penketh (eds) Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge. Bradshaw, M. (ed.) (2016) Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind, and Text, London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer. Cheyne, R. (2012) Introduction: Popular Genres and Disability Representation, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 6, 2, 117–123. Coogan, T. and Cluley, R. (2016) Servicescapes, People, Brands, and Marketing Management: Looking to the Future of Consumer Disability Research Through Disability Studies, in D. Bolt and C. Penketh (eds) Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge. Foss, C., Gray, J. W., and Whalen, Z. (eds) (2016) Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer. Fox, A. M. (2016) Fabulous Invalids Together: Why Disability in Mainstream Theater Matters, in D. Bolt and C. Penketh (eds.) Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge. Friedrich, P. (2015) The Literary and Linguistic Construction of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer. Hoffmann, R. and Flamich, M. (2016) Words for Dignity: From Budapest to Berkeley and Back, in D. Bolt and C. Penketh (eds) Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge. Johnson, M. and McRuer, R. (2014) Cripistemologies: Introduction, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8, 2, 127–148. Karah, H. (2016) Ahimsa and the Ethics of Caring: Gandhi’s Spiritual Experiments with Truth Via an Idea of a Vulnerable Human Body, in D. Bolt and C. Penketh (eds) Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge.

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Mitchell, D. T., Snyder, S. L. and Ware, L. (2014) “[Every] Child Left Behind” Curricular Cripistemologies and the Crip/Queer Art of Failure, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8, 3, 295–314. Nichols, C. (2016) Literary Disability Studies in Creative Writing: A Practical Approach to Theory, in D. Bolt and C. Penketh (eds) Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge. Penketh, C. and Waite, L. (2016) Lessons in Critical Avoidance: Disability Studies and ‘Special Educational Needs’, in D. Bolt and C. Penketh (eds) Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, Abingdon: Routledge. RNIB. (2016) #HowISee, RNIB. Online. Available http://www.rnib.org.uk/how-i-see (accessed 14 September 2017). Tankard, A. (2018) Invalid Lives, London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer. Thompson, H. (2017) Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction, 1789–2013, London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Aesthetic blindness the epistemic myth that renders blindness synonymous with ignorance, from which it sometimes wrongly follows that aesthetic qualities are perceived by exclusively visual means. Anomalous practice when policy and legislation do not result in actual change because disabling social attitudes are so profound. Anti-cripistemic in opposition to disability-informed understandings of knowledge. Critical avoidance the conspicuous lack of academic engagement with disability studies despite the abundance of representations of disabled people in course reading, case studies, films, and so on. CDSE discourse the mutually educational conversation between tutors and students engaged with Cultural Disability Studies in Education, which extends from tutorials, seminars, and lectures to interdisciplinarity, curriculum, and other modes of representation. Disabling dramatics exaggerated behaviour or representations that obscure the real issues, complexities, subtleties, and joys of disability. Flash representation an extremely brief and insubstantial invocation of disability, usually as part of an insult. Horrification the representation of disability and non-normative potential that serves to induce fear. Metanarrative of disability the grand story in relation to which people who have impairments often find themselves defined – irrespective if not in spite of actual interactions, sexuality, happiness, aesthetics, knowledge, and so on. Non-normative Negativisms problematic or problematised deviations from socially accepted standards of mind, body, and behaviour. Normative divide a conceptual distinction between normative and non-normative experience, existence, embodiment, and so on.

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Normative positivisms the dominant and often unnoticed affirmation of socially accepted standards of mind, body, and behaviour. Ocularnormativism the mass or institutionalised endorsement of visual necessity, whereby other means of perception are rendered wanting. Reflectionist trap the problem of tutors and students imagining that by reading, thinking, and learning about a subject they are gaining knowledge equal to experience. Residual existence the notion that when someone becomes disabled her, his, or their life is but a faded echo of the essential past. Tripartite model of disability a critical framework used to avoid one-dimensional representations by considering the experience of disability as a combination of indifference, difficulties, and qualities. Unforbidden relationship intimacy between disabled people that, unlike forbidden relationships, does not cross the normative divide but nonetheless shocks as it counters notions of asexuality (not to mention the received incompatibility of happiness and disability).

INDEX

ableism 4, 5, 6, 7, 109; see also audism; cognitive ableism; lexism; ocularcentrism; sanism academia: and normative positivisms 5; see also Higher Education ‘actuality effect’ 44 Adorno, Theodore 19, 73 advertising see media studies aesthetic blindness 23, 98, 114 “Aesthetic movement” 15–16; see also yellow decade aesthetic nervousness 23, 24n1 aesthetics 15; haptic dimension of 21; and the yellow decade 17–24; see also social aesthetics affirmative model 67 Allan, Julie 110 American Declaration of Independence 1776 61 American Humor Studies Association 85 American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around (Cash) 79 Americans with Disabilities Act 75 anomalous practice 6, 114 anti-cripistemologies 17, 18, 19, 111, 114; see also cripistemologies anti-Semitism 38, 40; see also Holocaust studies Armstrong, Jesse 10, 86–92 artifactuality 44 audism 5; see also ableism autistic presence 67–68

autonomic neuropathy 74 aversive disablism 6–7; see also disablism Baggs, Amanda 67 Bain, Sam 10, 86–92 Bamford, Sarah 99 Barden, Owen 110 Barnes, Colin 49 Barton, Len 3, 110 Bassey, Shirley 101, 103 beauty: disability studies’ perspective on 15; see also aesthetics; Dove Real Beauty campaign; social aesthetics Bentham, Jeremy 61–62 Beresford, Peter 110 Blind, The (Maeterlinck) 8, 10, 16–21, 22, 23, 110, xi blindness: and compensatory powers 63; normative positivisms 9; and residual existence 16, 21–22, 23; symbolic 20–21; yellow decade cultural representations 8, 16–24; see also Dove Real Beauty campaign; Kipling, Rudyard; Maeterlinck, Maurice; Sava, George ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (Queen) 75 Browning, Tod 8, 26–34, 110 Cash, Johnny 9–10, 74, 76–78, 79–82 Cash, June Carter 78 castration 54, 55 CDSE (Cultural Disability Studies in Education) 2, 7, 10–11, 111–112; CDSE discourse 3, 7, 8, 114

Index 117

Centre for Culture and Disability Studies 110 charity advertising 97; see also RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) chronic illness 74–75, 79–80, 81, 82, 82n5 civil rights movements 9 cognitive ableism 5; see also ableism Colman, Olivia 87 colour perception 99 compensatory powers 63 conjoined twins 32, 33 constructivism 43, 46; and language 39–40 Corporealities: Discourses of Disability (Mitchell and Snyder) 2 creative writing studies 110 cripistemologies 7, 9, 63, 66, 68, 100, 102, 110, 111; see also anti-cripestemologies critical avoidance 46, 114 critical illness 79–80 Crow, Liz 45 cultural disability studies 2, 10 cultural representation 8–10 cure: pursuit of 65–67; synonymy with happiness 68–69 Davis, Lennard 2 Deacon, John 76; see also Queen deafness see audism disability: and impairment 49–50 Disability and Disciplines conference 110 Disability and Society 1 disability drag 89 disability humour 85–86, 92, 93; see also humour studies disability memoirs 67–68 disability movement 67 disability studies 10; development of 1; and film studies 8, 26–35; and gender studies 9, 49–58; and happiness studies 9, 61–70; and Holocaust studies 8–9, 37–47; and humour studies 10, 85–93; and media studies 10, 96–106; and popular music studies 9–10, 73–82; and social aesthetics 8–9, 15–24 Disability Studies in Education 2 Disability Studies Quarterly 1 Disability Studies Reader (Davis) 2 Disabled Arts Movement 68 disabled identity 67, 68 Disabled People’s Movement 68 disabling dramatics 10, 103, 111, 114 disabling humour 86, 92, 93; see also humour studies disabling language 86–89

disabling narrative 89–92 disablism 4, 5, 6–7, 109; see also aversive disablism discourse, definition of 3 Dove Real Beauty campaign 10, 97–100, 104, 105 Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi) 9, 40–44, 110 drug use 78 Eavesdropping (Kuusisto) 9, 68–69, 110 education studies 2, 110 embodiment 20 emotions, trinity of 96–97, 104–105 employment of disabled people 33, 53–54 eugenics 8–9, 34, 38, 63, 87, 91–92 fear, in cultural representations of blindness 100–102, 103, 104 Feeney, David 110 feminism 9; feminist disability studies 82n5; second wave 49; see also gender studies, film studies, and disability studies 8, 26–35 Finkelstein, Vic 49 flash representation 88, 92, 102, 114 Folsom Prison concert (Cash) 80–81 Freaks (Browning) 8, 26–34, 110 Friel, Brian 9, 65–67, 68–69 Gandhi studies 110 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 110 gender studies: and disability studies 9, 49–58; and sex 49; see also feminism genre studies 110 Gissing, George 16 Goldbeck, Willis 30 Goodley, Dan 110 Gormley, Anthony 45 Greenman, Leon 44 Hadi, Fazilet 103 handicapism 4 Happiness is Blind (Sava) 9, 62–65, 68–69 happiness studies, and disability studies 9, 61–70 Hart-Moxon, Kitty 44 hate crime 37 Have Dog, Will Travel (Kuusisto) 70n1 Higher Education: inclusive 7; see also academia Hilton, Daisy and Violet 32, 33 HIV/AIDS 74, 75, 80 Holocaust studies, and disability studies 8–9, 37–47 Horkheimer, Max 73

118 Index

horrification 27, 30, 33–34, 114; see also Freaks (Browning) horror movies see Freaks (Browning) Houston, Ella 110 How I See campaign, RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) 111–112 Howick, Jim 90 humanities 2 Humor 85 humour studies, and disability studies 10, 85–93 Hunt, Paul 49 ‘Hurt’ (Cash) 9–10, 74, 76–78, 79–82 identity politics 50–52 idiots (retardation scale classification) 87 If This Is a Man (Levi) 39, 40, 43 imbeciles (retardation scale classification) 87 impairment: and disability 49–50; and positive identity 67 incongruity theory 88, 89 infantilisation 35n3, 56, 57 Innuendo (Queen) 79 International Society for Humor Studies 85 Investigation, The (Weiss) 44 IQ scores 87 Joseph, Paterson 92 Journal of Happiness Studies 61 Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 2 Kant, Immanuel 15 Kemp, Ross 102 Kipling, Rudyard 8, 21–22 Kumari Campbell, Fiona 110 Kuusisto, Stephen 9, 68–69, 110 language: and constructivism 39–40; disabling 86–89; and reflectionism 39 learning difficulties, cultural representations of 87 Levi, Primo 9, 39, 40–43, 44, 110 lexism 5; see also ableism; literacy Light That Failed, The (Kipling) 8, 21–22 literacy 5; see also lexism literary studies 110 Live Aid 1985 80 MacNeill, Meredith 90 Macrae, Ian 106n4 Maeterlinck, Maurice 8, 10, 16–21, 22, 23, 110, xi marketing studies 110

Mason, Bobbie Ann 9, 50–58 mass communication 96; see also media studies May, Brian 76; see also Queen McLuhan, Marshall 96 McRuer, Robert 110 media studies, and disability studies 10, 96–106 medical model of disability 64 medicalisation of disability 6 mental, as an adjective 87–88 mental health issues 5, 89; see also sanism Mercury, Freddie 9–10, 74, 75–77, 79, 80, 81–82 Mercury Phoenix trust 80 Merrick, Joseph 91 metanarrative of disability 73, 91, 114 Mitchell, David 2, 86, 110 Molly Sweeney (Friel) 9, 65–67, 68–69 Moran, Jim 104 More than Needs petition 106n3 morons (retardation scale classification) 87 Morrissey, Neil 102 Murray, Stuart 110 music videos see Cash, Johnny; Queen narrative prosthesis 21, 89–90 Nazism 8–9, 92; see also Holocaust studies neo-Nazism 46 New Grub Street (Gissing) 16 non-normative negativisms 4, 5, 6–7, 9, 11, 81, 109, 111, 114; and aesthetic blindness 23; and chronic illness 75, 82; and employment of disabled people 53, 54–55; and happiness studies 63, 64, 69; and Holocaust studies 38; and humour studies 10, 89, 90–91; and media studies 10, 102, 103, 105; and popular music studies 73; and yellow decade cultural representations of blindness 8, 16, 17, 22 non-normative positivisms 5, 7, 11, 109, 111; and blindness 9; and chronic illness 79; and film studies 32; and gender studies 58; and happiness studies 66, 67; and media studies 10, 97 normative divide 7–11, 109–110, 114; and film studies 29, 32, 34, 38; and gender studies 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58; and happiness studies 62, 63, 66, 68, 69; and humour studies 86, 88–89, 91, 92; and media studies 96, 97, 98, 99–100, 101, 104; and popular music studies 74, 81; and social aesthetics 16–17, 21, 22, 23 normative positivisms 4, 5–6, 7, 11, 81, 109, 111, 115; and aesthetic blindness 23; and

Index 119

employment of disabled people 53, 54; and film studies 27; and happiness studies 63, 64, 65–66, 67, 68; and Holocaust studies 38; and humour studies 10; and media studies 99, 101, 105; and popular music studies 73; and yellow decade cultural representations of blindness 8, 9, 16, 17, 18, 22 ‘Nothing about us without us’ 105 Oakley, Ann 49 O’Connor, Frances 33 ocularcentrism 5; see also ableism; visual perception ocularnormativism 8, 65, 98, 105, 115; and yellow decade cultural representations of blindness 17, 19, 21, 22, 23–24 Oedipus story 20, 21–22, 54 Oliver, Mike 49 Openheimer, Paul 44 overcoming narratives 98–99 Peep Show (Armstrong and Bains) 10, 86–92 Penketh, Claire 110 pity, in cultural representations of blindness 100–102, 103 Planet of the Blind (Kuusisto) 70n1 Popular Music 74 popular music studies, and disability studies 9–10, 73–82 postcolonial studies 110 Queen 9–10, 74, 75–77, 79, 80, 81–82 Real Beauty campaign, Dove 10, 97–100, 104, 105 realism 22 reflectionist trap 39–40, 41–42, 44, 46, 115 representation: and Holocaust studies 38–40, 41–44; multifaceted 104–105 residual existence 16, 21–22, 23, 55, 64, 109, 115 Resistance (Crow) 45 retardation scale 87 Reznor, Trent 74 Richards, David 74 RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People): development of 100; How I See campaign 111–112; See the Need campaign 10, 97, 100–104, 105, 111–112 Robbins, Tod 26–27 rock stars see popular music studies Roerich, Nicholas 10, xi Romanek, Mark 74, 78, 80

Rowbotham, Sheila 49 Rubin, Rick 74 Runswick-Cole, Katherine 110 sanism 5; see also ableism; mental health issues Sava, George 9, 62–65, 68–69 Schindler’s List (Spielberg) 43, 44 See the Need campaign, RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) 10, 97, 100–104, 105, 111–112 self-harm 89 SEN (Special Educational Needs) 1, 2, 109, 110, 111–112 sex, and gender 49 Sharpe, Sue 49 ‘Shiloh’ (Mason) 9, 50–58 sitcoms see humour studies; Peep Show (Armstrong and Bains) Snyder, Sharon 2, 110 social aesthetics 7–8; and disability studies 8–9; normative 58; and the yellow decade 15–24; see also aesthetics social model of disability 1, 9, 49–50, 54, 64 social norms, and gender studies 50, 51, 58 social sciences 2 social work studies 110 Society of Disability Studies 1 spastic cerebral palsy 87 ‘spaz’ 87 Speech Act theory 51 Speight, Johnny 94n4 Spielberg, Steven 43, 44 ‘Spurs’ (Robbins) 26–27 stereotypes 43, 97 stigma, and HIV/AIDS 75, 80 Studies in American Humor 85 Suttie, Isy 88 symbolic blindness 20–21 symbolism 22 synaesthesia 99 Taylor, Roger 74, 75, 79; see also Queen Thalberg, Irving 27 theatre studies 110 ‘These are the days of our lives’ (Queen) 9–10, 74, 75–77, 79, 80, 81–82 Till Death Us Do Part 94n4 trinity of emotions 96–97, 104–105 tripartite model of disability 3–7, 109–110, 115 trivialisation 55–56, 57, 58 Truce, The (Levi) 39 Understanding Media 96 unforbidden relationships 62–63, 115

120 Index

visual perception; see also ocularcentrism Volkelt, Johannes 15

Wilde, Oscar 19 Windsor, Barbara 101–102, 103 women’s studies 49; see also gender studies Woolsey, Minnie 33 World Without Bodies, A 45

Webb, Robert 86 Weiss, Peter 44 White, Peter 106n4

Yellow Book, The 16 yellow decade cultural representations of blindness 8, 10, 16–24, xi

Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation 49 utilitarianism 61–62