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Why disability studies entails the study of everything else

Over the past few months I’ve been corresponding with a graduate student at another university who’s just getting into disability studies and beginning to offer disability studies courses.  At one point, she asked me if I’d attended the MLA session on “Citizenship and United States Writing”; I replied that my MLA was almost entirely given over to administrative matters, and that I’d only had time to attend two sessions.  She told me that no one on the panel had addressed citizenship in the context of disability, whereupon I said, “hey, that sounds a lot like the American Studies Association,” whereupon someone else said, “sounds pretty much like the American Historical Association, too” whereupon someone wondered whether the American Sociological Association had done anything on disability and citizenship, whereupon we all agreed that everyone who wants to talk about the history of U.S. citizenship, from here on in, should be required to read Douglas Baynton’s essay, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky.  Notice is hereby served.

Baynton writes, “Disability has functioned historically to justify inequality for disabled people themselves, but it has also done so for women and minority groups.  That is, not only has it been considered justifiable to treat disabled people unequally, but the concept of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them” (33).  Baynton explicitly aligns his essay with Joan Scott’s groundbreaking “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (American History Review 91 [1986]: 1053-75), and closes by arguing that disability is “more than an identity, [it] is a fundamental element in cultural signification and indispensable for any historian seeking to make sense of the past. . . .  It is time to bring disability from the margins to the center of historical inquiry” (52).

So for today, let’s take a look at what Baynton has to say about the intersection of disability and race in American history:

Disability arguments were prominent in justifications of slavery in the early to mid-nineteenth century and of other forms of unequal relations between white and black Americans after slavery’s demise.  The most common disability argument for slavery was simply that African Americans lacked sufficient intelligence to participate or compete on an equal basis in society with white Americans.  This alleged deficit was sometimes attributed to physical causes, as when an article on the “diseases and physical peculiarities of the negro race” in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal helpfully explained, “It is this defective hematosis, or atmospherization of the blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium, and an excess of nervous matter distributed to the organs of sensation and assimilation, that is the true cause of that debasement of mind, which has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves.” . . .

A second line of disability argument was that African Americans, because of their inherent physical and mental weakness, were prone to become disabled under conditions of freedom and equality. . . .  Dr. Samuel Cartwright, in 1851, for example, described two types of mental illness to which African Americans were especially subject.  The first, Drapetomania, a condition that caused slaves to run away—“as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation”—was common among slaves whose masters had “made themselves too familiar with them, treating them as equals.” The need to submit to a master was built into the very bodies of African Americans, in whom “we see ‘genu flexit written in the physical structure of his knees, being more flexed or bent, than any other kind of man.” The second mental disease peculiar to African Americans, Dysaesthesia Aethiopis—a unique ailment different “from every other species of mental disease, as it is accompanied with physical signs or lesions of the body”—resulted in a desire to avoid work and generally to cause mischief.  It was commonly known to overseers as “rascality.” Its cause, similar to that of Drapetomania, was a lack of firm governance, and it was therefore far more common among free blacks than among slaves—indeed, nearly universal among them—although it was a “common occurrence on badly-governed plantations” as well.  (37-38)

Things become more complicated, of course, when people who are stigmatized by association with disability seek to claim membership in a community of citizens by distinguishing themselves from people with disabilities, who are thereby treated as if their stigmatization is appropriate to their condition:

The attribution of disease or disability to racial minorities has a long history.  Yet, while many have pointed out the injustice and perniciousness of attributing these qualities to a racial or ethnic group, little has been written about why these attributions are such powerful weapons for inequality, why they were so furiously denied and condemned by their targets, and what htis tells us about our attitudes toward disability. (41).

Did we discuss Baynton’s essay in my disability studies seminar today?  You bet we did, along with three other essays.  Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment on disability and gender!

Posted by on 02/08 at 04:02 PM

  1. "As far as racism and racist opinion go, too effn bad; that is in the zone of expression and we hold that dearer than anything.”

    For some strange reason, I think Daniel’s hideous comment offers an interesting segueway into Professor Berube’s new title:

    “Why disability studies entails the study of everything else.”

    These recent riots about the racist cartoons (like the earlier riots in Paris where cars were set on fire night after night) suggest that the rioters are being characterized as “disabled” in some profound way.

    They’re depicted as unable to control their tempers, unable to use adult reasoning, to see that a cartoon is “just” a cartoon, that it’s supposed to be “funny,” ha ha.. like Teletubbie being gay, or like Spongebob holding hands with the Starfish.

    Muslims who say that Mohammed is NOT like Spongebob the Starfish or TinkyWinky (not fit to be the subject of a cartoon, in other words) are portrayed as “disabled” precisely *for* their inability to accept Daniel’s argument: that the zone of freedom of expression is of utmost importance and value to Americans. They value respect for their religion more than freedom of expression, and for that, they are viewed as disabled.

    Just a quick note Daniel: Too e’ffn bad that you claim to value the zone of ‘freedom of expression’ more than anything else when you don’t even have the ability to show up at an anti-RNC rally without the threat of being arrested.

    Too e’ffn bad that when your child is murdered in Iraq due to Bush’s lies, you don’t even have the right to exercise your freedom of expression and demand answers.

    You just get thrown in jail with all the rest of the freedom of expression folks: the Critical Mass cyclists, the Code Pink ladies, and all those other “free” American beings whose Diebold votes really matter.

    Posted by  on  02/08  at  06:30 PM

  2. Way back in the day, I worked in a group home around the time that it was ruled that people with mental disabilities could vote in federal elections in Canada. We took the residents who understood the process to vote, and they handled themselves pretty well, especially since they had all been institutionalized at one point. But there were a lot of folks at the voting station who gave us plenty of nasty glares. There was an almost complete lack of understanding about rights of citizenship, which I found very depressing.

    And now, I’m sorry to say, I have no idea what the current state it. Haven’t thought about it in years. I think I’ll be looking into it this week or next, see if the status remains.

    D

    Posted by Derryl Murphy  on  02/08  at  06:40 PM

  3. I have to wait until tomorrow?? Okay, but i really was just beginning to see where this was heading: how Rosie the Riveter was recast as incapable of performing the physical work necessary in post-WW2 industrial US, necessitating Rosies’s of the nation to be relegated as barefoot, pregnant, stay-at-home little women in the late 40’s and early 50’s.

    Posted by  on  02/08  at  07:42 PM

  4. Hot diggetty! My husband’s a contributor to that volume—he’ll be tickled that you’re using it. It’s an excellent intro to the field. I am struck, generally speaking, how many disability historians work in the Progressive Era as opposed to other moments (like, say, the Early Republic) in which citizenship rights were much in flux. While Doug’s work is certainly invaluable to theorizing disability as a “must” category, it draws its most potent examples from the era of 1880-1920.  Out of curiousity, what do you use to present the colonial and early republic history of disabled America? Or does American “disability” begin as a epiphenomenon of the industrial capitalist state?

    Posted by  on  02/08  at  09:48 PM

  5. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment on disability and gender!

    boy, oh boy! I bet I know what you’re going to write!

    Posted by Roxanne  on  02/08  at  10:41 PM

  6. I’d imagine there’s a subset of this debate that focusses on the timing and reasons for the takeoff era for studying disability...just when does this designation “begin” in the New World, and what are the criteria for the dating and timing of that decision, in other words, what should the first bullet point on the syllabus for the course be…

    And evil looks for going to the *voting booth???!!!*

    The angles, places, times and reason that we get hit with bad attitude simply due to difference...boggles the mind.

    Posted by imfunnytoo  on  02/08  at  11:27 PM

  7. Actually, Rox, it’s more a question of what Doug Baynton will say, and even I don’t have a clue.  I can’t wait to find out!

    And Bridgett, the question of when “disability” begins in the US is a great one.  It doesn’t even begin with the rise of industrialism, because what you get then is a proliferation of diagnoses rather than a catchall “disability” category:  by 1900, the general rubrics of feeblemindedness, lunacy, pauperism, and physical incapacity get more and more finely reticulated, and the borders between disability and disease get very blurry indeed.  I’d say that “disability in general” begins to come in focus only very recently (postwar), even as we have generated innumerable societies and foundations devoted to individual “conditions” (from Down syndrome to autism to Alzheimer’s to cystic fibrosis to arthritis to cerebral palsy).  But I do have a straightforward answer to the pre-1880 question (and I agree that Doug’s analysis draws its most potent examples from the period 1880-1920):  Phil Ferguson, “The Legacy of the Almshouse,” reprinted in Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, ed. Steven Noll and James W. Trent, Jr. (New York U P, 2004):  40-64.

    Posted by Michael  on  02/08  at  11:35 PM

  8. OK, I think it’s fair to give myself a plug here for having got on to this ten years ago:
    http://home.vicnet.net.au/~borth/DOWN1.HTM

    “Abstract:
    There is a consistent difference of some 15 IQ points between the test means of American black and white citizens, and there has been a fierce debate as to whether this can be best accounted for by black intellectual inferiority or by such environmental factors as prejudice and discrimination. However, even supporters of the environmental hypothesis have neglected to apply it to the population - people with Down’s Syndrome - to which it is most clearly applicable, and this failure of imagination indicates the boundaries of discourse in the field of intellectual disability.”

    Posted by Chris B  on  02/08  at  11:36 PM

  9. Hey Chris!  Thanks for chiming in.  We’ll take that up during Eugenics Week, on the class of April 5.  And as you know, half of my Life As We Know It consists of a chatty gloss on the final sentence of your abstract.

    Captcha word:  persons.

    Posted by Michael  on  02/08  at  11:38 PM

  10. I work in the public school system, and minorities are still overidentified as having disabilities. I know that teachers and school psychologists have only the best of intentions for the kids—being identified as having a disability makes many resources available that wouldn’t be otherwise. Obviously the label brings all kinds of unintended consequences.

    Baynton’s essay is food for thought. It probably should be required reading.

    Posted by  on  02/09  at  07:27 AM

  11. First off, I’m not sure that Keef is ‘dangerous’ enough these days. Agreeing to censorship of the word ‘cock’ is a bit wussy, I think. Perhaps the GG Allin of acedeme…

    Secondly, I can’t believe that this issue of disability has been missed (in the mainstream anyway) thus far. It seems that almost every time that anyone is protrayed as deficient, it is either explicitly or implicitly an accusation of disability - and therefore disability is pretty much always a pejoritive description. Nystnt above points out that a moral deficiency is portrayed almost exactly as if it was a disability. I have suffered the classic ‘does he take sugar?’ assumption that my relatively mild physical disability means that I am deficient in many other areas. Like the kindly friend literally following me around at a party the other week with a chair insisting I sit down, as if I didn’t know anything about my own walking problems and also lacked the ability to make a decision for myself. Or the job interviewer who, without asking me, assumed that I couldn’t climb some steps, changed the venue of the interview and then complained accusingly about not being allowed to do the interview in her office.

    Anyway, the whole thing is very interesting. How women aren’t physically capable of holding a rifle, how queers are all sexual deviants who can’t keep their hands off straight people, blacks are here to steal our women, acne sufferers eat too much chocolate. I think the implications for looking at history and culture from this stand-point are fascinating. Can’t wait to read more on it.

    By the way, I don’t know whether this is widely known and read, but The BBC Ouch magazine has some really interesting writing by disabled people
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/

    Posted by saltydog  on  02/09  at  11:40 AM

  12. I’ll check out the article that you suggest.  I have been drawing on both Ruth Herndon’s work (Unwelcome Americans) and Simon Newman’s recent book (Embodied History) to think about disability and citizenship issues in pre-industrial and proto-industrial America, but it still seems to me that the genesis of the disability studies movement (disability as a group political identity, with the “disabled” achieving group cohesion by its treatment at the hands of the state) has pushed scholarship into historicizing disability by retrieving the shifting definitions of disability by the state—through poor laws, almshouses, warning out, etc. I understand the public policy necessity of that strategy. However, that sits awkwardly with the aspects of citizenship and rights-claims that inhere to disability as one aspect of personal identity.  After all, there are other potent issues at play in making claims on the state that are not primarily about how the state deals with the “problem” of the aggregated physically or mentally different in their midst.  I will throw out the proposition that social dependency in a society that premises much of its civic credo on the myth of masculine personal indepedence (economic and political) inscribes disability with deeply gendered meanings. I wait with great interest to hear what you have to say about the gendered nature of disability and citizenship.

    Posted by  on  02/09  at  12:01 PM

  13. I will throw out the proposition that social dependency in a society that premises much of its civic credo on the myth of masculine personal indepedence (economic and political) inscribes disability with deeply gendered meanings.

    I’m with you on this, Bridgett—or, more precisely, Eva Feder Kittay is, in Love’s Labor:  Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency.  But my remarks in today’s post are confined to Doug Baynton’s essay. . . .

    Posted by  on  02/09  at  12:21 PM

  14. I worked for the Center for the Study of Citizenship at the Maxwell School. My mentor was Manfred Stanley. Given his close association with Bob Bogdan, I recall a few folks working on disability and citizenship—which was, in fact, why I started becoming interested in the issue. Interested in my dilletante way, at any rate.

    Someone pointed out that my post to Ampersand, at Alas, a blog on “Oppression: it’s aprocess, not a product” aligned quite nicely with this series you’re doing.

    And I think, as you may have figured out, most of my rants about the reaction of feminist/the wider culture to “slut feminism” are deeply tied to the kind of analytical and historical framework you’re advancing here.

    I try to explain that to the radical feminists. They just think I like boinking a lot. wink

    Posted by Bitch | Lab  on  02/09  at  12:50 PM

  15. Following Derryl Murphy’s post, Clara Claiborne Park in Exiting Nirvana writes about her 40something daughter Jessy Parks voting.

    In Autismland, there is a constant trend of parents with younger kids or kids who can be mainstreamed to want them to be “indistinguishable” and even cured and recovered. (The word “disability” does not seem to go down too well.) It ends up being those who have the most in common at odds with each other---as if my not-going-to-be-mainstreamed 8 1/2 year old is a member of a club no one wants to be in.

    Posted by Kristina Chew  on  02/09  at  10:44 PM

  16. As someone with Asperger’s I find this really intresting. On one hand it seems like disability studies could be really useful in preventing the “Genocide”, the attempt to exterminate Autism by genetic screening and a search for a cure, carried out with the naive, medically unjustifiable, belief that there is something “inside” Auties which can be rescued and the equally precinious belief that society would be better without Auties. On the other hand, I have something of a knee jerk reaction to identity politics, perhaps I should learn to restrain it.

    Posted by  on  02/10  at  04:51 AM

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