When lesbian existence is imagined as a marginal alternative to the centrality of heterosexuality, it reinforces the notion that heterosexuality is naturally dominant. In this essay, Robert McRuer applies Adrienne Rich’s idea about lesbian identity to disability studies. If thinking about lesbian existence reveals “compulsory heterosexuality,” so too can we analyze “compulsory able-bodiedness” from the perspective of disability.
Queer and feminist theorists have long critiqued the definition of heterosexuality as “normal relations between sexes” and insisted that homosexuality is subordinated because of the standard of normalcy. Disability studies also draws on critiques of normalcy, as demonstrated by Lennard Davis, and McRuer suggests that able-bodiedness is seen as even more “natural” than heterosexuality. Because able-bodiedness is considered a “normal” requirement for life in the industrial capitalist system, having an “able body” becomes compulsory. Like heterosexuality, able-bodied identity is defined by its repeated performances, and McRuer points out that many cultural institutions are dedicated to showcasing these bodily performances.
There is a constant need to affirm able-bodied identity because able-bodied norms are in reality impossible to embody, and even the status of being able-bodied is only a temporary part of a human life. Since both queerness and disability have the potential to disrupt the performance of able-bodied heterosexuality, both must be contained and embodied by queer/disabled figures that “can be tolerated” in popular imagination. McRuer argues that like being “critically queer,” being “severely disabled” can foster a sharp critique of compulsory able-bodiedness. He suggests that the commonly marginalized bodies are the best positioned to refuse the “mere toleration” that keeps those bodies at the margins.
In her famous critique of compulsory heterosexuality Adrienne Rich opens with the suggestion that lesbian existence has often been “simply rendered invisible” (178), but the bulk of her analysis belies that rendering. In fact, throughout “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” one of Rich’s points seems to be that compulsory heterosexuality depends as much on the ways in which lesbian identities are made visible (or, we might say, comprehensible) as on the ways in which they are made invisible or incomprehensible. She writes:
Any theory of cultural/political creation that treats lesbian existence as a marginal or less “natural” phenomenon, as mere “sexual preference,” or as the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations is profoundly weakened thereby, whatever its other contributions. Feminist theory can no longer afford merely to voice a toleration of “lesbianism” as an “alternative life-style,” or make token allusion to lesbians. A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long overdue.
(178)
The critique that Rich calls for proceeds not through a simple recognition or even valuation of “lesbian existence” but rather through an interrogation of how the system of compulsory heterosexuality utilizes that existence. Indeed, I would extract from her suspicion of mere “toleration” confirmation for the idea that one of the ways in which heterosexuality is currently constituted or founded, established as the foundational sexual identity for women, is precisely through the deployment of lesbian existence as always and everywhere supplementary—the margin to heterosexuality’s center, the mere reflection of (straight and gay) patriarchal realities. Compulsory heterosexuality’s casting of some identities as alternatives ironically buttresses the ideological notion that dominant identities are not really alternatives but rather the natural order of things.1
More than 20 years after it was initially published, Rich’s critique of compulsory heterosexuality is indispensable, the criticisms of her ahistorical notion of a “lesbian continuum” notwithstanding.2 Despite its continued relevance, however, the realm of compulsory heterosexuality might seem to be an unlikely place to begin contextualizing disability.3 I want to challenge that by considering what might be gained by understanding “compulsory heterosexuality” as a key concept in disability studies. Through a reading of compulsory heterosexuality, I want to put forward a theory of what I call compulsory able-bodiedness. The Latin root for contextualize denotes the act of weaving together, interweaving, joining together, or composing. This chapter thus contextualizes disability in the root sense of the word, because I argue that the system of compulsory able-bodiedness that produces disability is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness, that—in fact—compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodiedness and vice versa. And, although I reiterate it in my conclusion, I want to make it clear at the outset that this particular contextualizing of disability is offered as part of a much larger and collective project of unraveling and decomposing both systems.4
The idea of imbricated systems is of course not new—Rich’s own analysis repeatedly stresses the imbrication of compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchy. I would argue, however, as others have, that feminist and queer theories (and cultural theories generally) are not yet accustomed to figuring ability/disability into the equation, and thus this theory of compulsory able-bodiedness is offered as a preliminary contribution to that much-needed conversation.5
In his introduction to Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams describes his project as
the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society. Every word which I have included has at some time, in the course of some argument, virtually forced itself on my attention because the problems of its meaning seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problems it was being used to discuss.
(15)
Although Williams is not particularly concerned in Keywords with feminism or gay and lesbian liberation, the processes he describes should be recognizable to feminists and queer theorists, as well as to scholars and activists in other contemporary movements, such as African American studies or critical race theory. As these movements have developed, increasing numbers of words have indeed forced themselves on our attention, so that an inquiry into not just the marginalized identity but also the dominant identity has become necessary. The problem of the meaning of masculinity (or even maleness), of whiteness, of heterosexuality has increasingly been understood as inextricably bound up with the problems the term is being used to discuss.
One need go no further than the Oxford English Dictionary to locate problems with the meaning of heterosexuality. In 1971 the OED Supplement defined heterosexual as “pertaining to or characterized by the normal relations of the sexes; opp. to homosexual.” At this point, of course, a few decades of critical work by feminists and queer theorists have made it possible to acknowledge quite readily that heterosexual and homosexual are in fact not equal and opposite identities. Rather, the ongoing subordination of homosexuality (and bisexuality) to heterosexuality allows for heterosexuality to be institutionalized as “the normal relations of the sexes,” while the institutionalization of heterosexuality as the “normal relations of the sexes” allows for homosexuality (and bisexuality) to be subordinated. And, as queer theory continues to demonstrate, it is precisely the introduction of normalcy into the system that introduces compulsion: “Nearly everyone,” Michael Warner writes in The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, “wants to be normal. And who can blame them, if the alternative is being abnormal, or deviant, or not being one of the rest of us? Put in those terms, there doesn’t seem to be a choice at all. Especially in America where [being] normal probably outranks all other social aspirations” (53). Compulsion is here produced and covered over, with the appearance of choice (sexual preference) mystifying a system in which there actually is no choice.
A critique of normalcy has similarly been central to the disability rights movement and to disability studies, with—for example—Lennard Davis’s overview and critique of the historical emergence of normalcy or Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s introduction of the concept of the “normate” (Davis 23–49; Garland-Thomson 8–9). Such scholarly and activist work positions us to locate the problems of able-bodied identity, to see the problem of the meaning of able-bodiedness as bound up with the problems it is being used to discuss. Arguably, able-bodied identity is at this juncture even more naturalized than heterosexual identity. At the very least, many people not sympathetic to queer theory will concede that ways of being heterosexual are culturally produced and culturally variable, even if and even as they understood heterosexual identity itself to be entirely natural. The same cannot be said, on the whole, for able-bodied identity. An extreme example that nonetheless encapsulates currently hegemonic thought on ability and disability is a notorious Salon article attacking disability studies that appeared online in the summer of 1999. Norah Vincent writes, “It’s hard to deny that something called normalcy exists. The human body is a machine, after all—one that has evolved functional parts: lungs for breathing, legs for walking, eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, a tongue for speaking and most crucially for all the academics concerned, a brain for thinking. This is science, not culture.”6 In a nutshell, you either have an able body, or you don’t.
Yet the desire for definitional clarity might unleash more problems than it contains; if it’s hard to deny that something called normalcy exists, it’s even harder to pinpoint what that something is. The OED defines able-bodied redundantly and negatively as “having an able body, i.e. one free from physical disability, and capable of the physical exertions required of it; in bodily health; robust.” Able-bodiedness, in turn, is defined vaguely as “soundness of health; ability to work; robustness.” The parallel structure of the definitions of ability and sexuality is quite striking: first, to be able-bodied is to be “free from physical disability,” just as to be heterosexual is to be “the opposite of homosexual.” Second, even though the language of “the normal relations” expected of human beings is not present in the definition of able-bodied, the sense of “normal relations” is, especially with the emphasis on work: being able-bodied means being capable of the normal physical exertions required in a particular system of labor. It is here, in fact, that both able-bodied identity and the Oxford English Dictionary betray their origins in the nineteenth century and the rise of industrial capitalism. It is here as well that we can begin to understand the compulsory nature of able-bodiedness: in the emergent industrial capitalist system, free to sell one’s labor but not free to do anything else effectively meant free to have an able body but not particularly free to have anything else.
Like compulsory heterosexuality, then, compulsory able-bodiedness functions by covering over, with the appearance of choice, a system in which there actually is no choice. I would not locate this compulsion, moreover, solely in the past, with the rise of industrial capitalism. Just as the origins of heterosexual/homosexual identity are now obscured for most people so that compulsory heterosexuality functions as a disciplinary formation seemingly emanating from everywhere and nowhere, so too are the origins of able-bodied/disabled identity obscured, allowing what Susan Wendell calls “the disciplines of normality” (87) to cohere in a system of compulsory able-bodiedness that similarly emanates from everywhere and nowhere. Able-bodied dilutions and misunderstandings of the minority thesis put forward in the disability rights movement and disability studies have even, in some ways, strengthened the system: the dutiful (or docile) able-bodied subject now recognizes that some groups of people have chosen to adjust to or even take pride in their “condition,” but that recognition, and the tolerance that undergirds it, covers over the compulsory nature of the able-bodied subject’s own identity.7
Michael Bérubé’s memoir about his son Jamie, who has Down syndrome, helps exemplify some of the ideological demands currently sustaining compulsory able-bodiedness. Bérubé writes of how he “sometimes feel[s] cornered by talking about Jamie’s intelligence, as if the burden of proof is on me, official spokesman on his behalf.” The subtext of these encounters always seems to be the same: “In the end, aren’t you disappointed to have a retarded child? … Do we really have to give this person our full attention?” (180). Bérubé’s excavation of this subtext pinpoints an important common experience that links all people with disabilities under a system of compulsory able-bodiedness—the experience of the able-bodied need for an agreed-on common ground. I can imagine that answers might be incredibly varied to similar questions—“In the end, wouldn’t you rather be hearing?” and “In the end, wouldn’t you rather not be HIV positive?” would seem, after all, to be very different questions, the first (with its thinly veiled desire for Deafness not to exist) more obviously genocidal than the second. But they are not really different questions, in that their constant repetition (or their presence as ongoing subtexts) reveals more about the able-bodied culture doing the asking than about the bodies being interrogated. The culture asking such questions assumes in advance that we all agree: able-bodied identities, able-bodied perspectives are preferable and what we all, collectively, are aiming for. A system of compulsory able-bodiedness repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be more like me?
It is with this repetition that we can begin to locate both the ways in which compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality are interwoven and the ways in which they might be contested. In queer theory, Judith Butler is most famous for identifying the repetitions required to maintain heterosexual hegemony:
The “reality” of heterosexual identities is performatively constituted through an imitation that sets itself up as the origin and the ground of all imitations. In other words, heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself—and failing. Precisely because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself.
(“Imitation” 21)
If anything, the emphasis on identities that are constituted through repetitive performances is even more central to compulsory able-bodiedness—think, after all, of how many institutions in our culture are showcases for able-bodied performance. Moreover, as with heterosexuality, this repetition is bound to fail, as the ideal able-bodied identity can never, once and for all, be achieved. Able-bodied identity and heterosexual identity are linked in their mutual impossibility and in their mutual incomprehensibility—they are incomprehensible in that each is an identity that is simultaneously the ground on which all identities supposedly rest and an impressive achievement that is always deferred and thus never really guaranteed. Hence Butler’s queer theories of gender performativity could be easily extended to disability studies, as this slightly paraphrased excerpt from Gender Trouble might suggest (I substitute, by bracketing, terms having to do literally with embodiment for Butler’s terms of gender and sexuality):
[Able-bodiedness] offers normative…positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals [able-bodiedness] itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would offer this insight into [able-bodied identity] as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative [disabled] perspective.
(122)
In short, Butler’s theory of gender trouble might be resignified in the context of queer/disability studies to highlight what we could call “ability trouble”—meaning not the so-called problem of disability but the inevitable impossibility, even as it is made compulsory, of an able-bodied identity.
The cultural management of the endemic crises surrounding the performance of heterosexual and able-bodied identity effects a panicked consolidation of hegemonic identities. The most successful heterosexual subject is the one whose sexuality is not compromised by disability (metaphorized as queerness); the most successful able-bodied subject is the one whose ability is not compromised by queerness (metaphorized as disability). This consolidation occurs through complex processes of conflation and stereotype: people with disabilities are often understood as somehow queer (as paradoxical stereotypes of the asexual or oversexual person with disabilities would suggest), while queers are often understood as somehow disabled (as ongoing medicalization of identity, similar to what people with disabilities more generally encounter, would suggest). Once these conflations are available in the popular imagination, queer/disabled figures can be tolerated and, in fact, utilized in order to maintain the fiction that able-bodied heterosexuality is not in crisis. As lesbian existence is deployed, in Rich’s analysis, to reflect back heterosexual and patriarchal “realities,” queer/disabled existence can be deployed to buttress compulsory able-bodiedness. Since queerness and disability both have the potential to disrupt the performance of able-bodied heterosexuality, both must be safely contained—embodied—in such figures.
In the 1997 film As Good As It Gets, for example, although Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), who is diagnosed in the film as obsessive-compulsive, is represented visually in many ways that initially position him in what Martin F. Norden calls “the cinema of isolation” (i.e., Melvin is represented in ways that link him to other representations of people with disabilities), the trajectory of the film is toward able-bodied heterosexuality. To effect the consolidation of heterosexual and able-bodied norms, disability and queerness in the film are visibly located elsewhere, in the gay character Simon Bishop (Greg Kinnear). Over the course of the film, Melvin progressively sheds his own sense of inhabiting an anomalous body, and disability is firmly located in the non-heterosexual character, who is initially represented as able-bodied, but who ends up, after he is attacked and beaten by a group of burglars, using a wheelchair and cane for most of the film. More important, the disabled/queer figure, as in many other contemporary cultural representations, facilitates the heterosexual romance: Melvin first learns to accept the differences Simon comes to embody, and Simon then encourages Melvin to reconcile with his girlfriend, Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt). Having served their purpose, Simon, disability, and queerness are all hustled offstage together. The film concludes with a fairly traditional romantic reunion between the (able-bodied) male and female leads.8
The crisis surrounding heterosexual identity and able-bodied identity does not automatically lead to their undoing. Indeed, as this brief consideration of As Good As It Gets should suggest, this crisis and the anxieties that accompany it can be invoked in a wide range of cultural texts precisely to be (temporarily) resolved or alleviated. Neither gender trouble nor ability trouble is sufficient in and of itself to unravel compulsory heterosexuality or compulsory able-bodiedness. Butler acknowledges this problem: “This failure to approximate the norm…is not the same as the subversion of the norm. There is no promise that subversion will follow from the reiteration of constitutive norms; there is no guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion” (“Critically Queer” 22; quoted in Warner, “Normal and Normaller” 168–169, n. 87). For Warner, this acknowledgment in Butler locates a potential gap in her theory, “let us say, between virtually queer and critically queer” (Warner, “Normal and Normaller” 168–169, n. 87). In contrast to a virtually queer identity, which would be experienced by anyone who failed to perform heterosexuality without contradiction and incoherence (i.e., everyone), a critically queer perspective could presumably mobilize the inevitable failure to approximate the norm, collectively “working the weakness in the norm,” to use Butler’s phrase (“Critically Queer” 26).9
A similar gap could be located if we appropriate Butler’s theories for disability studies. Everyone is virtually disabled, both in the sense that able-bodied norms are “intrinsically impossible to embody” fully, and in the sense that able-bodied status is always temporary, disability being the one identity category that all people will embody if they live long enough. What we might call a critically disabled position, however, would differ from such a virtually disabled position; it would call attention to the ways in which the disability rights movement and disability studies have resisted the demands of compulsory able-bodiedness and have demanded access to a newly imagined and newly configured public sphere where full participation is not contingent on an able body.
We might, in fact, extend the concept and see such a perspective not as critically disabled but rather as severely disabled, with severe performing work similar to the critically queer work of fabulous. Tony Kushner writes:
Fabulous became a popular word in the queer community—well, it was never unpopular, but for a while it became a battle cry of a new queer politics, carnival and camp, aggressively fruity, celebratory and tough like a streetwise drag queen: “FAAAAABULOUS!”…Fabulous is one of those words that provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular, usually oppressed, subculture’s most distinctive, invigorating features.
(vii)
Severe, though less common than fabulous, has a similar queer history: a severe critique is a fierce critique, a defiant critique, one that thoroughly and carefully reads a situation—and I mean reading in the street sense of loudly calling out the inadequacies of a given situation, person, text, or ideology. “Severely disabled,” according to such a queer conception, would reverse the able-bodied understanding of severely disabled bodies as the most marginalized, the most excluded from a privileged and always elusive normalcy, and would instead suggest that it is precisely those bodies that are best positioned to refuse “mere toleration” and to call out the inadequacies of compulsory able-bodiedness. Whether it is the “army of one-breasted women” Audre Lorde imagines descending on the Capitol; the Rolling Quads, whose resistance sparked the independent living movement in Berkeley, California; Deaf students shutting down Gallaudet University in the Deaf President Now action; or ACT UP storming the National Institutes of Health or the Food and Drug Administration, severely disabled/critically queer bodies have already generated ability trouble that remaps the public sphere and reimagines and reshapes the limited forms of embodiment and desire proffered by the systems that would contain us all.10
Compulsory heterosexuality is intertwined with compulsory able-bodiedness; both systems work to (re)produce the able body and heterosexuality. But precisely because these systems depend on a queer/disabled existence that can never quite be contained, able-bodied heterosexuality’s hegemony is always in danger of being disrupted. I draw attention to critically queer, severely disabled possibilities to further an incorporation of the two fields, queer theory and disability studies, in the hope that such a collaboration (which in some cases is already occurring, even when it is not acknowledged or explicitly named as such) will exacerbate, in more productive ways, the crisis of authority that currently besets heterosexual/able-bodied norms. Instead of invoking the crisis in order to resolve it (as in a film like As Good As It Gets), I would argue that a queer/disability studies (in productive conversations with disabled/queer movements outside the academy) can continuously invoke, in order to further the crisis, the inadequate resolutions that compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness offer us. And in contrast to an able-bodied culture that holds out the promise of a substantive (but paradoxically always elusive) ideal, a queer/disabled perspective would resist delimiting the kinds of bodies and abilities that are acceptable or that will bring about change. Ideally, a queer/disability studies—like the term queer itself—might function “oppositionally and relationally but not necessarily substantively, not as a positivity but as a positionality, not as a thing, but as a resistance to the norm” (Halperin 66). Of course, in calling for a queer/disability studies without a necessary substance, I hope it is clear that I do not mean to deny the materiality of queer/disabled bodies, as it is precisely those material bodies that have populated the movements and brought about the changes detailed above. Rather, I mean to argue that critical queerness and severe disability are about collectively transforming (in ways that cannot necessarily be predicted in advance) the substantive uses to which queer/disabled existence has been put by a system of compulsory able-bodiedness, about insisting that such a system is never as good as it gets, and about imagining bodies and desires otherwise.
1. In 1976, the Brussels Tribunal on Crimes against Women identified “compulsory heterosexuality” as one such crime (Katz 26). A year earlier, in her important article “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Gayle Rubin examined the ways in which “obligatory heterosexuality” and “compulsory heterosexuality” function in what she theorized as a larger sex/gender system (179, 198; cited in Katz 132). Rich’s 1980 article, which has been widely cited and reproduced since its initial publication, was one of the most extensive analyses of compulsory heterosexuality in feminism. I agree with Jonathan Ned Katz’s insistence that the concept is redundant because “any society split between heterosexual and homosexual is compulsory” (164), but I also acknowledge the historical and critical usefulness of the phrase. It is easier to understand the ways in which a society split between heterosexual and homosexual is compulsory precisely because of feminist deployments of the redundancy of compulsory heterosexuality. I would also suggest that popular queer theorizing outside of the academy (from drag performances to activist street theater) has often employed redundancy performatively to make a critical point.
2. In an effort to forge a political connection between all women, Rich uses the terms “lesbian” and “lesbian continuum” to describe a vast array of sexual and affectional connections throughout history, many of which emerge from historical and cultural conditions quite different from those that have made possible the identity of lesbian (192–199). Moreover, by using “lesbian continuum” to affirm the connection between lesbian and heterosexual women, Rich effaces the cultural and sexual specificity of contemporary lesbian existence.
3. The incorporation of queer theory and disability studies that I argue for here is still in its infancy. It is in cultural activism and cultural theory about AIDS (such as John Nguyet Erni’s Unstable Frontiers or Cindy Patton’s Fatal Advice) that a collaboration between queer theory and disability studies is already proceeding and has been for some time, even though it is not yet acknowledged or explicitly named as such. Michael Davidson’s “Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation” is one of the finest analyses to date of the connections between disability studies and queer theory.
4. The collective projects that I refer to are, of course, the projects of gay liberation and queer studies in the academy and the disability rights movement and disability studies in the academy. This chapter is part of my own contribution to these projects and is part of my longer work in progress, titled De-Composing Bodies: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability.
5. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder are in line with many scholars working in disability studies when they point out the “ominous silence in the humanities” on the subject of disability (1). See, for other examples, Simi Linton’s discussion of the “divided curriculum” (71–116), and assertions by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and by Lennard Davis about the necessity of examining disability alongside other categories of difference such as race, class, gender, and sexuality (Garland-Thomson 5; Davis xi).
6. Disability studies is not the only field Vincent has attacked in the mainstream media; see her article “The Future of Queer: Wedded to Orthodoxy,” which mocks academic queer theory. Neither being disabled nor being gay or lesbian in and of itself guarantees the critical consciousness generated in the disability rights or queer movements, or in queer theory or disability studies: Vincent herself is a lesbian journalist, but her writing clearly supports both able-bodied and heterosexual norms. Instead of a stigmaphilic response to queer/disabled existence, finding “a commonality with those who suffer from stigma, and in this alternative realm [learning] to value the very things the rest of the world despises” (Warner, Trouble 43), Vincent reproduces the dominant culture’s stigmaphobic response. See Warner’s discussion of Erving Goffman’s concepts of stigmaphobe and stigmaphile (41–45).
7. Michel Foucault’s discussion of “docile bodies” and his theories of disciplinary practices are in the background of much of my analysis here (135–169).
8. The consolidation of able-bodied and heterosexuality identity is probably most common in mainstream films and television movies about AIDS, even—or perhaps especially—when those films are marketed as “new and daring.” The 1997 Christopher Reeve-directed HBO film In the Gloaming is an example. In the film, the disabled/queer character (yet again, in a tradition that reaches back to An Early Frost [1985]), is eliminated at the end but not before effecting a healing of the heteronormative family. As Simon Watney writes about An Early Frost, “The closing shot…shows a ‘family album’ picture. … A traumatic episode is over. The family closes ranks, with the problem son conveniently dispatched, and life getting back to normal” (114). I am focusing on a non-AIDS-related film about disability and homosexuality, because I think the processes I theorize here have a much wider currency and can be found in many cultural texts that attempt to represent queerness or disability. There is not space here to analyze As Good As It Gets fully; for a more comprehensive close reading of how heterosexual/able-bodied consolidation works in the film and other cultural texts, see my article “As Good As It Gets: Queer Theory and Critical Disability.” I do not, incidentally, think that these processes are unique to fictional texts: the MLA’s annual Job Information List, for instance, provides evidence of other locations where heterosexual and able-bodied norms support each other while ostensibly allowing for tolerance of queerness and disability. The recent high visibility of queer studies and disability studies on university press lists, conference proceedings, and even syllabi has not necessarily translated into more jobs for disabled/queer scholars.
9. See my discussion of Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, and critical queerness in The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (149–153).
10. On the history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), see Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston’s AIDS DemoGraphics. Lorde recounts her experiences with breast cancer and imagines a movement of one-breasted women in The Cancer Journals. Joseph P. Shapiro recounts both the history of the Rolling Quads and the Independent Living Movement and the Deaf President Now action in No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (41–58, 74–85). Deaf activists have insisted for some time that deafness should not be understood as a disability and that people living with deafness, instead, should be seen as having a distinct language and culture. As the disability rights movement has matured, however, some Deaf activists and scholars in Deaf studies have rethought this position and have claimed disability (that is, disability revalued by a disability rights movement and disability studies) in an attempt to affirm a coalition with other people with disabilities. It is precisely such a reclaiming of disability that I want to stress here with my emphasis on severe disability.
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