Deconstructing Normalcy and Resignifying the Marked Body
In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes, “The erasure of the body encourages us to think that we are listening to neutral, objective facts, facts that are not particular to who is sharing the information. We are invited to teach information as though it does not emerge from bodies.”1 hooks’s focus on embodiment and how it can “deconstruct the way power has been traditionally orchestrated”2 compels us to contemplate the ways in which paradigms of power and dominance are both maintained and challenged in society and more particularly in our classrooms. Important aspects of her liberatory and transformative pedagogy include the interrogation of identity categories, calling into question essentialist politics while considering the importance of “experience as a standpoint on which to base analysis or formulate theory.”3 As part of this project, hooks discusses the need for students and professors to regard each other as “whole” human beings, and though hooks never suggests that this offers a universal answer to the problems of sexism, racism, and classism, she does suggest that the classroom is a critical space for the deconstruction of hegemonic practices which reinforce and sustain practices of domination.
hooks argues persuasively that “Only when we confront the realities of sex, race, and class, the ways they divide us, make us different, stand us in opposition, and work to reconcile and resolve these issues will we be able to participate in the… transformation of the world.”4 She also acknowledges that such confrontations, while necessary, can be messy, uncomfortable, and even hostile. It is easy for white students and teachers to understand their whiteness as unmarked and neutral and, by extension, to take for granted the privileges conferred upon them by their whiteness in a racist society. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray note, historically (in literature and in western society generally) “whiteness [has served] as a sort of invisible norm, the unraced center of a racialized world. Whiteness is different from blackness… in that it has long held the privileged place of racial normativity.”5 One challenge, then, especially at predominantly white, homogenous colleges and universities, is to deconstruct the normative while considering the ways in which bodies are ideologically marked, the ways in which all bodies are cultural signifiers with deep historical, social, and political contexts.
Like many faculty across the country, we teach at a university whose population is overwhelmingly white, working class, and conservative. Many of our students have never interacted with a person of color or a person from another country until they arrive at our campus—and even then such interactions are often limited and grudging. In other words, many of our students bring with them to campus racist, sexist, and ableist perspectives. As race and postcolonial theorists like Anthony Appiah (in his article, “Race”), Frantz Fanon (in Wretched of the Earth), and Gayatri Spivak (most famously in her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) argue, those in positions of power rarely sacrifice that power willingly. One step toward an acknowledgment of that power is to recognize and articulate its sources. This means that conversations about embodiment, identity, and power compel many in our classrooms to first consider and then destabilize those very categories which seem “naturally” to situate those who are white so comfortably in positions of relative cultural authority.
In this chapter, we will cite personal examples from our teaching with the aim of illustrating the points that we are making. In order to do this, we will indicate which of us is writing at the beginning of the relevant paragraph. While we teach different subject matter (Cindy teaches in the English department and Sue teaches music therapy), there are many aspects of our teaching that have similarities.
As white women initiating conversations about embodiment, it is critical for us to consider as part of our praxis our own subject position in the classroom and in society. As hooks notes, “When we write about [or teach about] the experiences of a group to which we do not belong, we should think about the ethics of our actions, considering whether or not our work will be used to reinforce and perpetuate domination.”6 We believe that it is both important and useful to address frankly the ways in which our own identity categories (which of course are neither uniform nor stable) confer privilege and power upon us, especially in our role as white university professors and especially in the classroom. Taking such steps is useful for a variety of reasons: because hooks is right that concerns about appropriation and tokenism are valid and need to be addressed, but also because it can model for students a critique and a making visible of our own embodiment and the various cultural benefits (or costs) which might be affiliated with that embodiment.
In “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” hooks cites Pratibha Parma: “The appropriation and use of space are political acts.”7 We agree, and we think as teachers we need to recognize this in the classroom and to be honest about our own identity categories, about the standpoint(s) from which we participate in dialogues about embodiment. To that end, we need to name ourselves as white women (and to complicate that identity category, to negate the idea of its neutrality) and as teachers, because even in a student-centered, liberatory classroom, our role grants us at least a modicum of power which our students typically do not have.
Cindy: One way that we analyze the intersections of power and space in our classroom (often on the first day of class) is to consider the physical setup of most classrooms (with the teacher at the front and students arranged in symmetrical rows) and the ways in which such a setup constructs power in particular ways. When I ask why none of the students sat at “my” desk on day one, they usually reply with slightly uncomfortable laughter. But the fact that no student ever has assumed that “position of power” is noteworthy. I often introduce Foucault’s ideas of the panopticon with a handout and a brief overview to complicate our analysis of power and space. We consider how the typical position of the teacher in the classroom also gives her the power of surveillance (a power which can “produce” docile bodies more easily) which is denied to our students, so jammed into their tight, uncomfortable desks that they are barely able to move, much less look around with any degree of ease or authority. Thus, from the start of the semester, we begin to consider how differences—in terms of space (where we sit or stand), in terms of age (I am usually older than my students), in terms of address (though I ask students to call me by my first name and explain that I do so in order to deconstruct the power hierarchy constituted via the discursive practice of using titles versus first names, many are deeply uncomfortable at first about doing so and thus I receive innumerable e-mails which address me simply with “Hello”)—all differences which are typically marked and visible and which contribute to hierarchies and to ideological understandings of one’s “place.”
Sue: When I first meet with a class I immediately ask them to move their seats into a circle. They then move their chairs into a slight curve (in order to keep the “teacher” space separate) until I insist that they close the circle. After they have done this I ask them to think about why it is that I have all of my classes sit in a circle and how this differs from the setup that they usually have in classrooms. Some students suggest that I do this because it simulates a therapy group and they are learning to be therapists. We spend time discussing the advantages of sitting in a circle—to have a seamless flow between all members of the classroom, to encourage greater interaction between all members, and to lessen the teacher–student hierarchy. I then introduce ideas from feminism and we talk about how each of us has a unique perspective and that each has something to teach the group and to learn from the group. I stress that it is by incorporating different perspectives that we will all gain greater insights into the subject matter we are studying. Interestingly, it takes several weeks of reinforcement before they will come in and arrange the chairs without prompting.
Though these are indeed mild strategies by which to introduce issues of difference, efforts to confront difference in the classroom in more critical ways often spark resistance or, conversely, force the one or two students of color in our classrooms to “assume the role of ‘native informant’”8 or the “expert” on the category of Otherness under discussion. The question of how to nurture an environment where “difference [can] be acknowledged”9 and respected in a classroom where there is often deep resistance to such difference poses a particular challenge.
Cindy: I have found that one way to “unpack” such differences in a nonthreatening way is to begin our interrogation by means of a Disability Studies perspective. In essence, I am arguing that once we have considered historical, economic, and cultural processes by which people with disabilities are stigmatized, it is less threatening to consider the ways in which race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, and religion might “mark” bodies in particular ways. As hooks puts it, “Once we start talking in the classroom about the body and how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically challenging the way power has orchestrated itself in that particular institutionalized space.”10 While this chapter is an important start, I believe that more work needs to be done exploring the importance of hooks’s theorizations concerning hegemonic epistemologies, ways of knowing, ways of seeing, and ways of being embodied vis-à-vis the praxis and theory oriented area of Disability Studies, particularly in terms of its importance in terms of generating critical knowledge production in both the classroom and within larger spaces of social transaction.
Sue: Given that I am working with students who are becoming therapists, it is very important to help students become aware that they may be adding to rather than diminishing the pathologization of “deviant” bodies. As Jennifer Adrienne states, “The construction of assessments, goals, objectives, evaluations, clinical notes and insurance diagnoses, are all how we socially create what is necessary in order to legitimate our profession and to legitimate the need for our job.”11 Therefore, it is very important for students to be aware of their tendency to construct people with disabilities as the negative other. One music therapy student coming to awareness about the perception of sick and healthy bodies wrote, “To what extent does the healthy person view the patient with cancer as being synonymous with their dying body? Do we put the entire person in the ‘sick category’ so as to avoid actual connection with this person who somehow ‘no longer exists’ because his/her body no longer exists in the form it once did? Are sick/dying people only bodies because we do not want to acknowledge our own vulnerability and the reality of our own mortality?” She then went on to relate this to her experiences with an eating disorder and her reduction by others. She wrote, “I was somehow no longer the same person as before. Instead, I was only a thin body.”
Because white students and faculty so often do not understand their own whiteness as unmarked, we often underestimate (or deny outright) the stigmatization of bodies, especially marginalized bodies. It is imperative, then, to begin by contemplating the ways in which “The process of stigmatization thus legitimates the status quo, naturalizes attributes of inherent inferiority and superiority, and obscures the socially constructed quality of both categories,” as Rosemarie Garland Thomson notes.12 Disability Studies begins with the assumption that bodies always do important cultural work (see Simi Linton, Garland Thomson, Mitchell and Snyder, Robert McGruer, Michael Davidson, Tobin Siebers), and by integrating texts which address disability into our classrooms, we are often able to open up a dialogue in which students recognize that people with disabilities (PWDs) in fact have been and still are stigmatized in a variety of ways. For instance, reading Nancy Mairs’ “On Being a Cripple” invites conversation about how a disease like multiple sclerosis and its physical “markers” have cultural ramifications tied to American values of independence, a strong work ethic, mobility, and physical attractiveness. Many of our students who might have before insisted that markers of difference are no longer a “big deal” suddenly are writing about the prejudice faced by their father who has MS or about the blow to masculine self-esteem experienced when their grandfather lost an arm in an industrial accident and was subsequently unemployed and on welfare. And, reading Adrienne Asch’s “Critical Race Theory, Feminism, and Disability: Reflections on Social Justice and Personal Identity”13 leads students to begin to explore the many ways that environments privilege certain types of bodies over others and how these environments were shaped by those in power.
Cindy: One student wrote an essay in which she analyzed her childhood fears of a neighbor with a facial disfigurement, reading those fears dialogically with fairy tales and Disney movies which align physical “deviance” with moral deviance (think of characters as varied as Captain Hook, Richard III, the Phantom of the Opera, Captain Ahab, or the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”). She was amazed to discover that by the time she was six or seven, she had internalized an array of cultural biases which denigrate disability so fully that they had come to seem “natural.” Such epiphanies are often radically transformative. But because the roots of ableism (like the roots of racism) run so deep, it’s important to further complicate our analyses with readings and discussions of the historical roots of ableist attitudes.
Sue: I often share with students some of my own experiences and “mistakes” I have made. I explain to them that through my own enculturation process, I came to adopt oppressive social practices that were invisible to me. While I have several different types of examples of how this has manifested itself, one example involves the way that I see the physical layout of the world and my assumption that how I see it is how it actually is. I tell them that one day I was helping a friend rearrange her bedroom in order to maximize the small space she had. I found a perfect solution and began to assert my viewpoint. When she looked at me and asked me how she would get her clothes out or how she would get into her bed, I replied that it was easy and proceeded to show her. As she looked at me and shook her head in tolerant amusement, the ignorance of my suggestion became embarrassingly clear. I had not taken into consideration that her wheelchair would not fit into the tight space that my upright ambulatory body did!
By openly discussing examples of how I have overlooked ways in which my body is privileged over other bodies, I hope to foster an environment of safety in which my students, too, can explore ways in which their bodies have been privileged and oppressed due to their race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ablebodiedness, ethnicity, or religion.
In Ain’t I a Woman? hooks asks a critical question: “For how does one overthrow, change, or even challenge a system that you have been taught to admire, to love, to believe in?”14 In other words, how do we step outside our ideological framework enough to perceive the shape and substance of that framework, much less critique it? This is of course a question which has plagued cultural theorists, and especially Marxian and Althusserean theorists, for generations.
Cindy: I do not pretend to have the answer, but in my classes, we read from Michael Oliver’s The Politics of Disablement to understand how industrialization and an increased emphasis on time-keeping in the nineteenth century marginalized and continues to marginalize PWDs. In discussions about the debate behind FDR’s statue in Washington, DC (whether to portray him standing independently or in his chair), we contemplate the ways in which an American valuation of independence constructs the needs of many PWDs as “weakness.” We consider the ways in which disability, currently understood within a medical paradigm, reinforce our cultural privileging of science and support a eugenicist impulse in much of modern medicine. We discuss the ideological distinctions between physical and mental disabilities and the prevalent cultural attitude that mental health disorders are the consequence of character faults or a failure of will power. During such discussions, many of us in the classroom share “aha!” moments where we recognize in lived, immediate ways that “deviant” bodies are pathologized in troubling and deeply complicated ways in our society.
One pedagogical practice that I have used in College Writing courses which illuminates in profound (if disturbing) ways the deep cultural stigmas attached to (culturally perceived) disabilities is to place posters, which have different descriptors, on different sections of the wall on the day we are to discuss Mairs’s essay: multiple sclerosis, developmental disability, deafness, blindness, paralysis, and dead. Before we begin discussing the reading, I ask students to stand under the poster which designates their choice if they had to make one. Every fall, I am astonished by how many line up under “dead.” We then embark on a discussion (often personal, often passionate) about why students might have chosen the “disability” that they did—and also why some might prefer to be dead rather than, say, blind—and along the way, begin considering how deeply our ideas of “independence,” “mobility,” or “productivity” are culturally constructed. On many occasions, for example, students have chosen to have deafness or a developmental disability because they are not necessarily visible. We then discuss the implications of such a choice, and the specular nature of “disability” as it is defined in Western societies.
Although “difference” is not always visually marked, it usually is, which is why hooks’s reminder is so incredibly significant: you’ve got to “remember yourself—because to remember yourself is to see yourself always as a body in a system.”15
Sue: A student stated one day that her difference was not usually visually marked—she has a congenital bladder defect. However, what became infuriating to her was that the same symptoms experienced by someone without this disability are viewed very differently. That is, if one of her roommates drinks too much and accidentally wets her bed, everyone finds this hilarious, but if she accidentally wets her bed due to her bladder condition, this is something to be ashamed about.
While embodiment matters, it can also lead to absolutist or definitive renderings of identity categories (“He’s the crippled guy”; “That’s the black kid in the corner”; “Kim’s the dyke”). In much of her work, hooks examines the thorny problems of essentialism. She generally celebrates the ways in which “critiques of essentialism have usefully deconstructed the idea of a monolithic homogenous black identity and experience,”16 but she adds in “Culture to Culture: Ethnography and Cultural Studies as Critical Intervention” that “this critique should not become a means to dismiss differences or an excuse for ignoring the authority of experience.”17 Many students (actually, many of us generally) are uncomfortable with the idea that something as seemingly stable as our “identity” is in fact unstable, subject to re/vision. hooks’s clear connection of “the will to know with the will to become” suggests to us one way to consider how identity categories are (or can be) liminal, how no single identity category can “essentially” explain anyone in the classroom (or beyond).
Cindy: One way I do this in our discussions of embodiment via readings in Disability Studies is to talk about my own embodiment—not just as a white woman and a professor but as a person with Crohn’s disease and a demyelinating disorder. The liminality of those identity categories is sometimes illustrated in very real, lived ways, when I experience an exacerbation and become ill or have to use a cane. I might discuss the experience, for instance, of being considered “able-bodied” in a visual society where I “look” okay despite having lost ten pounds and having become anemic in two weeks due to a flare-up of my Crohn’s, while the use of a cane if my legs become weak during an exacerbation of my demyelinating disorder marks me as “being sick.” I also discuss the ways in which a Crohn’s flare-up can be more difficult and daunting than a neurological flare-up. Many of my students can relate to this in a variety of ways: some have broken legs and realized only then how unaccommodating most public places are to those with mobility challenges, while others have experienced gut-wrenching frustration when society has minimized or marginalized the invisible disabilities or diseases of friends or family members.
Many years ago, one student asked, “Why isn’t mean-spiritedness or racism considered a disability? What about hatred?” After years of reading deeply in both liberatory pedagogy and Disability Studies, I was abashed to realize that he had asked a question that I’d not considered before with such clarity. I have since incorporated it into class discussions, because it gets directly at issues of embodiment and the ways in which bodies are culturally marked, at the ways in which the exteriority of bodies often seems to matter more fully than character, aesthetics, generosity, or kindness, for instance.
In addition to focusing on how our bodies are culturally marked, we also place great emphasis on how our bodies are marked by our gender. Like hooks, we are committed to feminist education in order to develop our students’ critical consciousness. Many of our students are very resistant to feminism and at first are not able to see how they have been oppressed by patriarchy. “Mostly they think feminism is a bunch of angry women who want to be like men.”18 If asked how many of them believe that all people should receive equal pay for the same work, all of them raise their hands. When asked how many of them believe that hurting someone you love doesn’t make sense, all of them raise their hands. However, when asked how many of them would define themselves as feminists, only a couple at most will raise their hands. This leads to discussions about the negative connotations attached to the word feminism and why that might be. Sometimes, simply starting by talking about the difference between the terms slut and stud in our perceptions of women and men, can be very effective. We point out that a woman doesn’t go up to another woman and say as a compliment, “You are such a slut!” While it is amusing and always gets a laugh, it opens up a much more serious space to consider the sexual double standards that are still so prevalent in our society and the ways in which this is represented in part in our interpretations of bodies in gendered ways. These double standards are also highlighted in discussions about the candidates in the 2008 democratic primaries. In fact, much of the commentary on Hillary Clinton has been coded in terms of her gendered body (e.g., her crying and its impact on female voters), as much of the commentary on Barack Obama has been coded in terms of his raced body (e.g., the depiction of him as articulate and bright and clean). While many of our class conversations begin on a light note, often students begin to feel vulnerable as their long held assumptions are shaken.
In writing about an increasing focus on cultural diversity at the university, hooks notes that such a focus has also meant that “The idea that the classroom should always be a ‘safe,’ harmonious place was challenged.”19 We agree with hooks that it is pedagogically imperative for us as teachers and learners in our classrooms to be vulnerable, to not just confront but incite discomfort, to critically examine intersections of power, embodiment, knowledge, and in doing so, to wed “the will to know with the will to become.”20 But we also believe that a pedagogy which risks discomfort, even anguish, can also benefit from strategies which defuse (but never diminish) those risks.
A Disability Studies approach to those aforementioned intersections can do this and can also create a space for classroom conversations not only about cultural stigmatizations of different kinds of embodiment but also, and more importantly, about why such stigmatizations matter. Another approach is to adopt a narrative perspective and to talk about ways in which we interpret experiences through narratives, stringing together meaningful events. Narratives about ourselves, others, or societies get influenced by the broader narratives from our cultural context. Some narratives can affirm our identities and others can denigrate them. A narrative understanding of the self presupposes that identities are not fixed and are shaped by historical and lived contexts.
Sue: It is fairly easy for music therapy students to come to see how a person with a disability is reduced to a thin description, a restrictive narrative that defines the person in terms of what they are not able to do. The next step is for them to see how people in other groups that have been oppressed historically are also reduced to thin descriptions, descriptions that are restrictive in terms of the ways we understand them. As such, as soon as we see another body we are interpreting them through dominant stories that we have learned from a very young age.
To acknowledge that bodies have a concrete, historical, and lived context which cannot be dismissed or denied is an important first step in a transformative pedagogy, and having taken it, we can then more easily deconstruct the ways in which embodiment contributes to paradigms of power which are the products of a host of ideological state apparatuses, in Althusserean terms. In The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, Susan Wendell discusses the “disciplines of normality” which combine to create simultaneously ideas of what constitutes “normativity” and what constitutes “deviance,” arguing that “In a society that idealizes the body, people who cannot come close enough to the ideals, and those whose bodies are out of control, become devalued people because of their devalued bodies.”21 In Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard Davis explores in great depth the historical development of a shared cultural concept of “normal.” From a structuralist perspective, we can consider how the concept of “able bodied” (or “white” or “man”) relies upon its binary opposite (“disabled, “black,” “woman”) to accrue meaning. But from a poststructuralist perspective, we can begin to call into question those seemingly stable binaries. When asked the question which matters most, her being black or her being a woman, hooks draws attention to the flawed disjunction vis-à-vis questions of identity. She notes, “All such questions are rooted in competitive either/or thinking, the belief that the self is formed in opposition to an other.… Most people are socialized to think in terms of opposition rather than compatibility.”22
Cindy: Like hooks, I adopt a poststructuralist approach to understanding embodiment and identity, because oppositional/structuralist thinking is too often ultimately essentialist.
Once we have agreed that bodies are culturally marked, we can turn to a broad array of texts—music lyrics, television shows, films, YouTube, Facebook, global wars, magazine articles, textbooks, the practice of surveillance to create “docile” bodies—which open doors for us to complicate our discussions of how domination and colonization of people who are disempowered occurs, to enrich our consideration of how power is maintained and reinforced—and also to contemplate how those structures and institutions might be challenged, re/visioned, or undermined. And this is truly exciting, because I agree with hooks that “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”23
One way in which the classroom has been a radical space of possibility for hooks, as we have stated above, has been in terms of explorations of whiteness. Class discussions have explored the ways in which “the absence of recognition [of whiteness] is a strategy that facilitates making a group the Other.”24 She has found that when black students talk about whiteness and “critically assess white people from a standpoint where ‘whiteness’ is the privileged signifier,” white students are amazed “that black people watch white people with a critical ‘ethnographic’ gaze.”25 She states that this naïve amazement is itself “an expression of racism.”26 hooks goes on to state that:
Socialized to believe the fantasy, that whiteness represents goodness and all that is benign and non-threatening, many white people assume this is the way black people conceptualize whiteness. They do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness.27
Whether one has white and black students in a classroom, a mixture of racial groups, or white students only, whiteness is something that must be explored for radical transformation to take place.
Sue: Whiteness is often invisible to my students who are predominantly white, yet other races are hypervisible. I feel that by critically examining whiteness, it makes issues related to multiculturalism less about “them.” It puts the onus more on the students to think about the ways in which their whiteness influences every aspect of their being.
After exploring many of these issues, one student wrote, “Although my awareness has been increased, I must say that I often still do not view myself as privileged. In the same way, I still do not view myself as racist although I am. I realize that as a white person I do not view myself as raced. I realize that I view myself as the norm and view others as outside the norm. It is difficult to admit that I am racist. It is difficult to accept that I have earned things in my life through no merit of my own. It is difficult to accept stories of oppression from other races because of the implications to myself. If their experience of racism on a daily basis is true, what does that say about me? What does it say of my character as a good, responsible, respectable and deserving white person? It destroys it. It is so much easier to deny its existence and sweep it under the carpet. It is the denial surrounding these issues that empowers them. I believe that as we recognize and give voice to that which is silent and face our fears, we can begin to move forward.”
In “Choosing the Margin,” hooks shares Homi Bhabha’s concept of unhomeliness when she writes:
… the very meaning of “home” changes with experience of decolonization, of radicalization. At times, home is nowhere. At times, one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no longer just one place. It is locations. Home is that place which enables and promotes varied and everchanging perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference. One confronts and accepts dispersal and fragmentation as part of the construction of a new world order that reveals more fully where we are, who we can become, an order that does not demand forgetting.28
If “home” is a place which is (or can be) uncertain, if “home” can represent the unknown, the alien, this can throw us into a kind of existential terror. But it can also invite us into a space wherein cultural concepts of “normalcy” have lost their mooring, where hierarchies based upon embodiment (race, disability, age, geography) are no longer writ in stone but are subject to challenge. Teasing apart (but never fully answering) the riddle of how to balance identity categories which help us understand and make meaning in the world with essentialist notions of selfh ood (or Otherhood) which can be damaging or demeaning—such projects can become shared explorations of borderlands which we cross, where we meet (and sometimes clash with) others.
Cindy: I often teach Gloria Anzaldua’s poem, “Borderlands” as a transition piece from Disability Studies to Race Studies in my classes. In the poem, Anzaldua explores the experience of living on numerous borders: gendered, racial, ethnic, linguistic. While recognizing the challenges of living in las fronteras, she also celebrates the potential for change which occurs in that space. And if, at the beginning of the term, white students might well have believed that they do not—cannot—inhabit borders (because they assume that they live at the center), they often find themselves realizing that in fact they do, that their own subject positions are not fixed, that their ideas of “normalcy” have undergone and are undergoing alteration. They may not inhabit the same borders as a Latina or a black woman (though sometimes they might), but they recognize that “difference” often coincides with the known, that the boundaries between “normal” and “deviant” can be paper-thin, subject to collapse.
hooks recognizes that “It is fashionable these days…to talk about ‘hybridity’ and ‘border crossing,’ but we often have no concrete examples of individuals who actually occupy different locations within structures, sharing ideas with one another, mapping out terrains of commonality, connection, and shared concern.”29 A Disability Studies perspective offers one very rich and provocative means by which to consider “concrete examples of individuals who actually occupy different locations within structures,” but another specific way that we sometimes get at this is via discussions about class, because so many of our students come from working-class backgrounds. As hooks notes, “Class antagonism can be constructively used, not made to reinforce the notion that students and professors from working-class backgrounds are ‘outsiders’ and ‘interlopers,’ but to subvert and challenge the existing structure.”30 Many of our students, despite their conservatism, grew up in homes where the support of unions is so central that it is taken for granted, where parents got “screwed” when they were laid off of jobs or lost pensions, and where they consequently understand in concrete ways that the myth that hard work always pays off is just that: a myth. Thus, considerations of class and of students’ lived experiences can provide another bridge to considerations of race and gender in our enquiry into embodiment, power, and privilege.
Cindy: When hooks writes, “Though opposed to any essentialist practice that constructs identity in a monolithic, exclusionary way, I do not want to relinquish the power of experience as a standpoint on which to base analysis or formulate theory,”31 I find myself replying almost out loud, “Yes!” I agree with her that what we teach is usually less important than how we teach—that “a simple practice like including personal experience may be more constructively challenging than simply changing the curriculum.”32 I also believe that this is not an easy line to draw. I remember in one graduate course years ago that I taught called Discourses of Disability, one of my students exclaimed after reading a selection from Erving Goffman’s Stigma, “You know, really, we ALL have disabilities when you think about it.” That’s a bit like saying that we’re all a little bit black (or queer, or colonized, or subaltern, or female), and such a claim illustrates what happens when an identity category becomes so broad, so porous that it becomes meaningless. It is also an example of what happens when people in positions of potential power co-opt the lived experiences of marginalized groups to recolonize them subjectively. Though initially taken aback by this student’s comment, it ultimately became another way to ground theory in practice and to consider what we risk when we diminish difference in our shared project of resignifying embodiment.
Like hooks, we believe that theory is—has to be—a social practice, and that the goal of becoming “critical thinkers”33 has to remain one of our most central aims as teachers, students, scholars, and especially as we strive to become whole human beings. We also agree with hooks that “There is not much passionate teaching or learning taking place in higher education today.”343 However, conversations about teaching are imperative in fostering and reigniting a passion for learning, teaching, and the transformation of our worlds. We recognize and accept that there is “no speaking about power in a way that remains critically anterior to it,”35 but we agree with hooks that we must struggle to articulate the positions from which we speak, to value and integrate our lived experiences in conceptions of “knowledge,” and to transgress and resignify the ways in which we understand normalcy. She writes, “Acknowledging that we are bodies in the classroom has been important to me, especially in my efforts to disrupt the notion of professor as omnipotent, all-knowing mind.”36 Consciousness of our own embodiment has been and remains important to us as well, not only because it disrupts traditional concepts of power within the classroom, but also because of its potential to disrupt concepts of power beyond the classroom. And that can truly be transformative.
1. hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York; London: Routledge, 1994), 139.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 90.
4. hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, MA: South End Press), 1989, 25.
5. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, Introduction, in White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Matt Wray and Annallee Newitz (New York; London: Routledge, 1997), 3.
6. hooks, Talking Back, 43.
7. hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 152.
8. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 43.
9. Ibid., 30.
10. Ibid., 136–37.
11. Jennifer Adrienne, “A Feminist Sociology of Professional Issues in Music Therapy,” in Feminist Perspectives in Music Therapy, ed. Susan Hadley (Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers, 2006), 47.
12. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 31.
13. Adrienne Asch, “Critical Race Theory, Feminism, and Disability: Reflections on Social Justice and Personal Identity,” in Gendering Disability, ed. Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press), 2004.
14. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1981), 121.
15. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 135.
16. Ibid., 78.
17. hooks, Yearning, 130.
18. hooks, Feminism is for Everybody (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), vii–viii.
19. Hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 30.
20. Ibid., 19.
21. Susan Wendell. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York; London: Routledge, 1996), 89, 91.
22. hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984), 29.
23. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 12.
24. hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 167.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 169.
28. hooks, Yearning, 148.
29. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 129–30.
30. Ibid., 183.
31. Ibid., 90.
32. Ibid., 148.
33. Ibid., 5.
34. Ibid., 199.
35. Mike Hill, “Can Whiteness Speak? Institutional Anomalies, Ontological Disasters, and Three Hollywood Films,” in White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York; London: Routledge, 1997), 158.
36. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 138.