Extraordinary Bodies!Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture & Literature

Sharita Gilmore: Images of The

Grotesque

Who is Rosemarie Garland Thomson?

Rosemarie Garland Thomson is a Women’s Studies professor at Emory University. Her fields of study are feminist theory, American literature and disability studies.

Garland Thomson is an epitome of that which she studies. She is a disabled, American woman. She is a living representation of her research.

Extraordinary Bodies

• Garland Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies focuses on the disabled body. She specifically emphasizes the representation of the disabled in American culture and literature

• She utilizes literature & American culture to illuminate the power of representation and how it shapes and alters the discourse on disability

• Discusses the gap between the reality of disabled and the representation of the disabled in culture and literary works

• She interrogates the idea of the neutral norm-the normate in which she uses the construction of the normate as the mirror through which she gazes into the realm of the disabled

• Investigates how representation attaches meaning to bodies

• Attempts to expand understanding of how culture shapes the representation of bodies

A Brief Overview:

Theorizing Disability •Garland Thomson uses Extraordinary Bodies to theorize disability •Thomson claims that disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body similar to the fictions of race and gender •“My purpose here is to alter the terms and expand our understanding of the cultural construction of bodies and identity by reframing “disability” as another culture-bound , physically justified difference to consider along with race, gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality”

DISABILITY:CULTURAL DEVIANCE

•Thomson suggests that without cultured structures disability would not exist •Example: “deafness is not a disabling condition in a community that communicated by signing as well as speaking” [disability is culturally determined] •She claims that physical disability is the body’s rebellion of cultural rules about what the body should be or do

Theorizing Disability cont’d

Because I do not fit in the cultural norm

The Neutral ‘Norm’- The Normate

•“There is only complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height and a recent record in sports” –Erving Goffman

•The normate is the figure through which people can deem themselves definitive human beings.

Theorizing Disability cont’dRace. Gender. Sexuality. Disability. Same difference?

• The disabled body parallels with the identifiers of race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity because they each defy the cultural norm and the culturally structured ideals of what the body should look like and how it should function

Disability & Feminism• Thomson suggests that many

parallels exist between the social meaning attributed to female and disabled bodies

• Both are deemed deviant and inferior

• Both are excluded from full participation from public and economic life

• Both defy the idea of ‘the norm’• Aristotle claims that the female acts

as a deformed male [a mutilated male]

Femininity & Disability •Garland Thomson attempts to theorize disability similar to the ways that feminism has theorized gender •Thomson suggests that both femininity and disability are inextricably entangled in patriarchal culture •Claims that historically the practices of feminism have configured female bodies to disability [i.e. foot binding, corseting and the removal of the clitoris]

Theoretical References: The Extraordinary Body Erving Goffman’s Stigma Theory

•(1963) describes stigmatization as a social process that attempts to account for all forms of otherness•Stigmatization is a social process in which particular human traits are deemed deviant •“Stigma Theory reminds us that the problems we confront are not disability, sexuality, gender, race or class…they are instead the inequalities, negative attitudes, misrepresentations, and institutional practices that result from the process of stigmatization”

Mary Douglas’s Concept of Dirt

•speculates about how the relativity of dirt can be compared with the cultural meaning of disability [dirt is matter out of place like disability is the body out of place•Dirt, like the disabled body is an anomaly in the construction of cultured society • “Douglas’s interpretation of dirt as the extra-ordinary can be extended to the body we call disabled as well as to other forms of social marginalization

Textual Reference

• Nights at The Circus Fevvers not only has an extraordinary body [she has wings and is part woman part swan] but she defies the boundaries her society has constructed and therefore finds residency among the circus. As Garland Thomson suggests, her disability like race, gender and sexuality majorly affect her identity.

• The carnival/circus setting provides a located for the disabled and the dislocated. “The grotesque body [disabled body] as the carnivalesque disrupts the status-quo and inverts social hierarchies”

A Look @ The Disabled

Bibliography

• Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia University Press: New York, 1997.

• Images. Google Images. Google.com