Interpretive Methods in Disability Studies: Dyslexia Inflected Inquiry

Abstract

This article explores how disability studies can take shape as an interpretive method and how disability-perception can influence this. My exploration is organized in relation to the following question: In what ways might attention to dyslexia as an interpretive act inflect social inquiry? I treat interpretive methods as a form of inquiry that attends to the social activity of interpretation itself and I regard dyslexia as part of such activity. A key issue for such inquiry is how to methodically engage appearances as an interpretive encounter: That is, how can we make the taken-for-granted activity of perception as interpretation available for reflection and keep the subject ∞ object chiasma* relation a primary focus? Disability studies is a starting point for such inquiry in at least two ways: (a) it brings to attention the ways in which people interpret disability and (b) it considers how impairment experience itself is an interpretive modality that can momentarily disrupt the normative flow of common-sense, revealing aspects of the act of interpretation, and making it available for reflection. This article will show how the perception of disability as well as disability-perception can be regarded as enacting a “pause” in the everyday flow of common-sense and, thereby, encounter interpretive acts as an occasion for further inquiry. I turn to descriptions of perceptions and experiences of dyslexia as interpretive scenes where the normative order of ordinary interpretation can be revealed. I address various ways that dyslexia is described as a disruption to the normative order of language, especially the written word, print-language, even as the term dyslexia is used as a sense-making-device to reassert the primacy of normative expectations and values in literate-culture. As a sense-making-device imposed from without or as experience that seems to come from within, or as both, the appearance of “dyslexia” serves as a primal scene for uncovering the ways in which the social order of interpretation works. *Chiasma is not a dyslexic rendering of “chasm.” Instead, chiasma refers to the crosswise relation between concepts and structures that rely on each other for their meaning, for example, reading and readers; subject and object.