“Vulnerability and Power”: Disability, Pedagogy, Identity

Abstract

One of the major contributions of disability studies (DS) is the insight that our bodies change and have changed meaning over time—not just within lifetimes, but more structurally, over decades and centuries. Following the twin leads of Michel Foucault and the Disability Rights movement, schol­ ars in DS have traced the shifting definitions of seemingly self-evident terms like “able-bodied,” “independent,” and “productive,” at the same time reclaiming derogated terms such as “crip” and “mad.” It’s not surprising, then, how many of the founding figures in the humanities in contemporary DS have been historians and historicizers.1 Helen Deutsch’s groundbreaking work on early modern concepts of impairment and disability argues that in a culture in which bodies were vulnerable to infections, injury, malnutrition, and prenatal and birth com­ plications, the language for physical and cognitive anomaly was both more granular and more generalized: physically disabled, blind, intellectually dis­ abled, and injured people fell into the same amorphous category as sup­ posed “freaks of nature” (people of unusually large or small stature, con­ joined twins, people born without various limbs) and “monsters.” And the eighteenth century distinction between “defect” and “deformities” con­ stitutes a very different vocabulary of bodily difference from the one in place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the same time, impairments that would in more recent times be considered wholly disabling—for example, Samuel Johnson’s several disabil­ ities (poor vision, extensive scarring from scrofula, and a neurological con­ dition that resembled Tourette’s syndrome)— were seen as eccentricities or deformities, rather than identifiers of a particular kind of person. Disability scholars have chronicled this dynamic relationship between historical change and embodiment, not least the ways in which marginalized gender, race, and class identities could themselves be categorized as diseases or dis­ abilities. d s has shown the inextricability of US definitions of disability over time from the economics of plantation slavery, the characterization of bourgeois femininity as constitutively diseased, the pathologizing of a range of sexual desires and activities, as well as the historically constructed focus on independence as the measure of citizenship. That is to say, we cannot understand our past, or our present, without looking at how marginal and impaired bodies are imagined to fit into the body politic. Ellen Samuels is part of the second generation of disability studies aca­ demics, a generation that has inherited these insights and built upon them. Trained in the field by established scholars, Samuels claims an intersectional