THE "DISABILITY OF THINKING"
THE "DISABLED" BODY

by Lee Davis Creal

Course Paper for Ambiguous Bodies: Studies in Contemporary Sexuality
Masters Level English Course (6994.06)
Professor Julia Creet
York University, Toronto, Canada

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For many years it has become a mark of commonplace courtesy and intellectual rigor to note occasions when racism, sexism, or class bias creep into discourse....Yet there is a strange and really unaccountable silence when the issue of disability is raised: the silence is stranger, too, since so much of the left criticism has devoted itself to the issue of the body, of the social construction of sexuality and gender. Alternative bodies people this discourse: gay, lesbian, hermaphrodite, criminal, medical, and so on. But lurking behind these images of transgression and deviance is a much more transgressive and deviant figure: the disabled body. 

"What is the relationship between language and the self, or between one's life story and the subject of the story?...Self-narration is a matter of becoming conscious of the narratives that we already live with and in...we are collectively and individually, embedded in an ongoing history...Self-narration is an interpretive activity, not a simple mirroring of the past...the past is not something fixed and final but is something continually refigured and updated in the present. 
 While the above statements may seem unrelated, they do frame my exploration and discussion of critical theory and its application to the self-narrative of Norman Kunc's video "The Other Side of Therapy." My intention is to interrogate the "theoretical body" with the "concrete body" of Norman in the hope that they will be mutually informative.

Lennard Davis' statement is provocative and a direct challenge to theorists to include the "much more transgressive and deviant" disabled body in their discourse. Disability, he says, is part of a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking about the body under certain historical circumstances. At the same time, many academic disciplines are now recognizing the importance of narratives in the production of a more embodied understanding of ourselves and our world. Self-narration or life-writing is a cognitive site from which we can learn to take the texts of our own lives and world as seriously as we do "official narratives" about ourselves and our world.. Individually and collectively they can be read as resistance narratives that reveal discriminatory practices embedded in our culture. As Donna Haraway says, feminist scholars "need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability to translate knowledges among very different--and power-differentiated--communities. We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future." (Haraway, 1991: 187)

The "Concrete Body" 

I should begin by saying that Norman Kunc is my brother. His "disability" has been part of my life since his birth when lack of oxygen to the brain during a difficult birth caused his cerebral palsy. I was eleven years old when Norman was born, a big sister/little mother to my disabled and cherished younger brother. I have undergone a transition from that point forty-two years ago, a process of learning through or across Norman, gradually becoming increasingly aware of how differently abled we all are. To see ourselves as differently abled is a conceptual leap, one that I learned over time. It is a concept that levels the playing field and forces us to become more conscious and self-flexive when considering what the term "disabled" means, especially if one considers there are perhaps ten to twenty million mentally "normal" people in the world with serious physical, sensory or health related handicaps. "One of the tasks for developing consciousness of disability issues is the attempt to reverse the hegemony of the normal and to institute alternative ways of thinking about the abnormal body" (Davis: 49). Norman's video represents one way of attempting this task and he has given me his full consent to interrogate the experience of "his body" in relation to the "theoretical body" of texts. 

In his video, Norman Kunc, addressing a meeting of Canadian neurologists, describes the impact of physical therapy and rehabilitation on his "disabled" body. The notion of "story" is important to him, and he has reread his own many times. Norm was born in 1957 with cerebral palsy and throughout his childhood and early adolescence his rehabilitation consisted of physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy. The implicit message he received in rehabilitation was that he was deficient and abnormal and in order to become a "valued" person he would have to overcome his disability. He became increasingly determined to conquer his disability and this led to what Norm would describe as "declaring war on his own body." He attended a public school for crippled children but at age thirteen thought he could overcome his devalued status by moving to a regular school. He applied and was accepted, but he says the war didn't end with this transition, only the battleground changed. He tells stories of hiding in the washroom to eat twinkies which because of their softness and his spasticity were difficult to eat in the school cafeteria; of dates where he would keep score of moments where his disability became obvious and he would mark his "performance" in order to ascertain whether he would call the young woman again; of dances at the university he attended where he would fall and knock things over in the process. 

He says there were two key moments in his life that helped him see his disability in a new way. The first was in his mid-teens when he chose not to have an operation for a neurological pacemaker to minimize his spasticity. The second was at university while in conversation with his professor and fellow students in a pub, his professor mimicked his voice. Norm was shocked and asked his professor why he would do such a thing. His professor replied "Because that's how you talk." Norm replied saying he thought he had an academy award performance going on and imitating his speech undermined his performance. His professor replied asking "Norm, why are you trying to be non-handicapped?" Norman had never been asked that question and he says it led to a categorical shift in his thinking. From that point on Norman began to see his cerebral palsy made him different, but not deficient. A process of liberation began where, for instance, when he fell on the dance floor, he saw it not as an interruption but as part of the dance. He began to see that his disability made him part of an identifiable group that was socially constructed and to see society's need for perfection and normalcy as social oppression. The war now was not with his cerebral palsy but a war against social oppression and prejudice. With this realization, Norm and his body shook hands and a truce was declared. A new dimension of social justice now became his focus.

With this new terrain came new questions that demanded a new response. If society devalued him because of his difference, attempts to become normal would perpetuate the discrimination and validate the prejudice. He saw rehabilitation inextricably linked with oppression and a direct result of our social and cultural commitment to "normalcy" as a kind of "perfection" where normal standards of ability, appearance, and behaviour are the criteria for what is allowable: if you don't measure up you are inferior. Further, Norm says, rehabilitation is defined and constructed by our culture and its motives are not altruistic but built on a culture (neurotically?) obsessed by a need to minimize disability. Rehabilitation professionals err in trying to improve "quality of life" by making a person "function" better. Norm argues that it is not functioning that improves the quality of one's life, but relationships, a sense of belonging, having fun, making a contribution, and to some degree, struggle itself. He describes how segregated physical activities led to an absence of friendships and their therapeutic focus overrode a sense of fun and play--swimming became aquatic therapy, play became recreational therapy, art became art therapy, having a pet became touch therapy, and music became play therapy. Every activity was seen as a way to make Norm "better" and supported the premise that he was not good enough, not adequate, not normal. Even sleep was no reprieve, because he had to sleep with an iron brace on his leg.

The "Theoretical Body"

The disabled body is a nightmare for the fashionable discourse of theory because that discourse has been limited by the very predilection of the dominant, ableist culture. The body is seen as a site of "jouissance" that defies reason, that takes dominant culture and its rigid, power-laden vision of the body to task...The nightmare of that [disabled] body is one that is deformed, maimed, mutilated, broken, diseased....Rather than face this ragged image, the critic turns to the fluids of sexuality, the gloss of lubrication, the glossary of the body as text, the heteroglossia of the intertext, the glossalia of the schizophrenic. But almost never to the body of the differently abled. 

The disabled body or differently-abled body has been largely absent from theoretical discourse on the body. Why? Is it because, as Leonard Davis implies above, it is not seen as chic, sexy or fashionable? Is the disabled body too transgressive and deviant? Does it overstep the boundaries of what is considered allowably transgressive or deviant? Are there theoretical limits? Does it produce in the viewer's gaze the fear of the uncanny, in the Freudian sense, with the attendant repulsion for the unfamiliar unheimlich or too different 'other? Does the disabled body not destabilize and disturb notions of the classical body and disrupt the idea of an organized body as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari? Is not the disabled body the most manipulated through the desire of the medical establishment to organize the body in a certain way? Is it not the most disciplined body in the context of Foucault's theory of discipline in which the body is turned into an aptitude or a capacity that must be increased through discipline? These are only some of the many issues that could be raised in theoretical discourse and I will not attempt to answer them all. They are "loaded," but intentionally so, to point out the relevance of the disabled body to theoretical discourse and the need for language to replace the silence on the disabled, the most marginalized of the marginalized. But first, I will turn to the body itself, and bodily ontology as discussed by Elizabeth Grosz, in order to begin with and in the body.

In "Lived Bodies: Phenomenology and the Flesh," Elizabeth Grosz cites the work of Merleau-Ponty in her discussion of corporeal phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, she says, seeks to understand the relationship between consciousness and nature and between interiority and exteriority. He reorients the tradition of the question "how can there be a world for a subject?" by locating subjectivity not in mind or consciousness but in the body; he argues that the mind and body are not separate entities but interrelated and that the mind is based on corporeal and sensory relations. The body, according to Merleau-Ponty, is a phenomenon experienced by the one who lives in it and it (the body) is the location which places one in the world and makes possible relationships between oneself and other objects and subjects. We understand and know our body only by living in it. It is a subject and lived reality for oneself and an object for others but it is never simply object nor simply subject. Merleau-Ponty says the body is "sense-bestowing" and "form-giving," and is "my being-to-the-world and as such is the instrument by which all information and knowledge is received and meaning is generated" (Grosz: 87). This resonates with Lennard Davis who says the body is not only a physical object but is "a way of organizing through the realm of the senses the variations and modalities of physical existence as they are embodied into being through a larger social/political Matrix" (Davis: 14). 

Norman was born in a body that had a different or limited motor ability depending on the point of view. His identity was located in his body-as-he lived it. His subjective experience of his body changed in relationship to "able-bodied" others who saw his body as disabled or deficient in relationship to their more "abled" bodies. Henry Rubin says Sartre also puts an explicit emphasis on the body as our means of existence in the world and cites Sartre's three levels of bodily ontology: The first level is the body-for-itself, a point of view for the subject that lives it; the second level is the body-for-others, a body that is an object and instrument for others, a corporeal reality touched by others; the third level is the alienated body where one is coerced into taking the viewpoint of the other on one's own body so that one is "vividly and constantly conscious of his body not as it is for him but as it is for the Other." (cited by Rubin: 269) I suggest this third level is the one Norm operated on until his "categorical shift" in perception. In the video, Norm recalls a childhood physiotherapy "moment" in a room with "strange" equipment, mirrors and a staircase against a wall. When the therapist asked him to climb these stairs, he asked her "Why? The stairs don't go anywhere." She replied, "You want to walk better, don't you?" Norm said yes but he also said he learned at this moment that it was not a good thing to be disabled, that he must minimize his disability and "perform normal" to the best of his ability. He saw himself in the eyes of the other (his therapist) as deficient and abnormal; the message that permeated all of his therapy was that he had to overcome his disability in order to be a valued person. He took the "other" point of view of his own body. His shift in perception led to a combination of the first and second level of bodily understanding; he lived no longer a body for others but lived a body for it/himself and others. The alienation had created a war-within-himself until the perceptual shift led to an inner truce and a new way of being-in-his-body and being-in-the world. He suddenly saw his disability as a characteristic like height, or weight, or gender and felt part of the normal diversity within the human community.

Grosz cites what she considers to be three crucial insights of Merleau-Ponty which I would like to consider in relation to Norman's experience and narrative. First, Merleau-Ponty says that while experience can not be taken as an unproblematic source of truth, it is not outside of social, political, historical and cultural forces and has a role in both the inscription and subversion of sociopolitical values. He takes experience seriously and sees it as relevant to philosophy and the production of knowledge. Norman's narrative is, as are all narrations, an interpretative activity that refigure and appropriate the past in the present. Narratives of lived experience are always partial, locatable, critical knowledges, to use Donna Haraway's terms, but they are cognitive sites that help us to understand the complexities of the world and how we are constructed in it. The experience of the able-bodied was directly relevant to the philosophy and production of knowledge that informed social, political and cultural practices to fix or rehabilitate Norm and other "disabled" bodies. Norm internalized the projection of the other on his body and initially accepted the societal values to make his mobility more normal and his body/self more socially acceptable. However, in the course of his narrative, Norm tells of a categorical shift that occurred in his perception of himself which led to a new of way of seeing disability as a social construction. In a sociopolitical context, Norm's narration of his experience can be seen as a resistance narrative and a subversion of sociopolitical values. Merleau- Ponty locates experience mid-way between mind and body: "Experience can only be understood between mind and body--or across them-- in their lived conjunction" (cited by Grosz: 95). Norm creates new meaning from his experience that is grounded in the lived conjunction of his mind and body.

Narrative theorist Anthony Paul Kerby says there is "a link between self-understanding and narrative--that persons gain at least some of their meaning through the story of their past" (Kerby: 33). However, meaning is an interpretation, and like understanding is a continuous process. The continuity of our life stories form our identity, which is reformed or transformed as we integrate our ongoing experience. Norm's narrative or story is his becoming-in-the-world. He defines himself and his values and offers new possibilities for the refiguration of himself and his viewer. "Speech brings about that concordance between me and myself, and between myself and others" (Merleau-Ponty: 392).

In "The Other Side of Therapy," Norman' narrative is visual as well as auditory. The "normal" people viewing Norman, Davis would argue, see him through two main modalities--function and appearance. The viewer sees Norman's limitations--his awkward gait, spastic movements, laboured speech. He even tells you he has to be careful not to drool. Norman appears in the viewer's field of vision as a disabled person. Davis says "[d]isability is a specular moment. The power of the gaze is to control, limit, and patrol how the person is brought to the fore. Accompanying the gaze are a welter of powerful emotional responses. These responses can include horror, fear, pity, compassion, and avoidance" (Davis: 12). Davis draws on Bakhtin's concept of the grotesque in the Middle Ages

which reveled in presenting the body in its nonidealized form. The grotesque, for Bakhtin, was associated with the common people, with a culture that periodically turned the established order upside down through the carnival and the carnivalesque. Gigantic features, scatological references, inverse political power were all hallmarks of the grotesque--an aesthetic that ultimately was displaced by humanistic notions of order, regularity, and of course power during the renaissance. (Davis: 150)

But Davis argues, the term has failed to free actual bodies from the idea of the grotesque and he says there is a thin line between the grotesque and the disabled. The viewer of Norm's film could see him as a disturbing image in his/her visual field and react with horror, pity or compassion. Or the viewer could see him as a differently abled and fully constituted subject challenging ableist cultural values. I would suggest that the viewer goes through a transition from the former to the latter in the course of hearing and viewing Norman's narrative, in part because it is a visual presentation. We come to know Norman and become familiar with him. The viewer empathizes to a greater or lesser degree and Norm moves from unheimlich to more heimlich, in the viewer's field of vision. The German term heimlich is an ambiguous term. It means something which is familiar and agreeable but also what is concealed and kept out of sight. Through linguistic usage it has come to mean homely, something which one is familiar and "at home" with. Unheimlich has come to mean the opposite and leads to the experience of Freud's notion of the uncanny. Freud says what is experienced as uncanny can be traced back to something familiar that has been repressed: "this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become, alienated from it only through the process of repression" (Freud: 240). Perhaps the disabled body evokes the a neurotic fear of our own distintegration through aging, accident or illness.

If the disabled are viewed as unheimlich, the other who is not familiar to our specular gaze and are therefore people we are not "at home" with, why is this so? Does our ablest culture construct the differently abled as disabled? Do we not all have different abilities and disabilities intellectually, emotionally, physically? I am rather inept at mathematics but am I labeled learning-impaired? I had a hysterectomy and am therefore missing a body part, so I am somewhat phyically-impaired. Yet others are deaf and blind and are labeled disabled. There seem to be standards for one's functioning ability or functional modality in which one can be impaired but not defined as disabled. Davis argues that there is a gap between being impaired and disabled, a quantification of the human body which sets standards of who and who not is disabled. In thinking of disability, he says we have to consider "the disability of thinking" (Davis: 15). 

Most constructions of disability assume that the person with disabilities is in some sense more damaged while the observer is undamaged. Furthermore, there is an assumption that society at large is intact, normal, setting a norm, undamaged. But the notion of an undamaged observer who is part of undamaged society needs to be questioned. (Davis: 14)

In an interview that appeared in the journal, Physical Disabilities, Norman reflects on unwarranted assumptions people have made about him because of his disability. In airports, he often finds people think he has a mental disability and so treat him like a child. He says people sometimes assume people with disabilities are asexual, must have unhappy and unfulfilled lives, be lonely or sad. He says the fact is that a very small part of his life gets blown up into a very big part so that too many people see him as nine-tenths disability and one-tenth person. In his video Norm gives an example of an encounter at an airport: 

All I need in an airport is two or three minutes ahead of boarding time to get on the plane, store my luggage, and get settled. That's all. For example, a couple of years ago an airline agent came up to me and said "Are you catching a plane?" And I said "This isn't the bus stop?" She said "Where are you going?" I said "Why do you want to know?" She said "Can I see your ticket?" I said, "Well, no." And she said "Where are you going?" And I said we've already been through this, and so it went on. Finally, I said, "O.K., if you must know, I'm a human rights lawyer. I'm going up to collaborate on a human rights case in Ottawa. As a matter of fact, what you are doing can be considered harassment. I'd like to suggest you leave me alone or I'll contact your personnel officer.

Norman says the rehabilitation field is to people with disabilities what the diet industry is to women: "We live in a society that idolizes a full and completely artificial conception of bodily perfection. This view of the normal body tyrannizes most, if not all women in our culture, so that far too many women in our culture grow up believing that their bodies are inadequate in some way. The issue here is that I want professionals to think about the whole parallel between dieting and rehabilitation" (Giangreco: 4). 

In a culture where the normal body is given an ideal form, all members of the population will be below the ideal to a greater or lesser extent. Davis says the concept of the norm entered European languages over the period 1840 -1860. It was preceded by the word 'ideal' and the ideal body was the divine body of gods, which was unattainable by humans. The grotesque, he says, was inversely related to the concept of the ideal and is a signifier of the common people: "the grotesque permeated culture and signified the norm, whereas the disabled body, a later concept, was formulated as by definition excluded from culture, society, the norm" (Davis: 25). The norm is the average and as such it has to be differentiated from the ideal. The idea of progress holds within it the idea of perfecting the human body so that a new kind of ideal is constantly being created that is perceived as humanly attainable. 

In contrast to this idea of the normal body as ideal body is Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque that undermines political and social hierarchies through celebrating the life-affirming qualities of the transgressive folk: "grotesque images preserve their peculiar nature, entirely different from ready-made, completed being....They are contrary to the classic images of the finished completed man, cleansed, as it were, of all the scoriae of birth and development" (Bakhtin: 25). Bakhtin's grotesque body is a positive site of fertility, growth and abundance It is popular, utopian and festive and undermines or degrades what is considered ideal, spiritual and abstract. Laughter was intrinsic to medieval carnival because it undermined fear: "festive folk laughter presents an element of victory over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts" (Bakhtin: 92). 

In the context of Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, I would argue Norman celebrates the life-affirming qualities of his "awkward, spastic, drooling" self and by doing so is a site of resistance to the completed, cleansed, normal ableist and the attendant socio/political hierarchy. The humour throughout his narrative disrupts, challenges and undermines socio/political and cultural beliefs and practices embedded in our culture that oppress and restrict "disabled" persons. His use of humour is also a "release" for the audience, perhaps even a cathartic boundary breaker. One example is when Norm describes a car accident where he gets out of his car and staggering towards the person who has just crashed into him says "Now look what you've done. You've made me a cripple for life." Another example is when he describes going out on a date to an upscale restaurant. He is served peas and he describes how difficult they are to eat and his dilemma ;

"If I try to pick them up with a fork, they roll off. Pick them up with a spoon and you look like a dweeb. If I squash them, she'll think, ahhh gross. So I get the peas halfway to my mouth and I jerk, sending peas all over the table, and the tables beside us. Norm says he hears one of the business men at the table behind him saying "Dave, where did all these peas come from?" 

The audience dissolves into laughter. Even the peas are uncontrollable and disorderly, exceeding the boundaries of his plate and his table as they fly everywhere. This could be read as a site of carnivalesque folk humour in the Bakhtinian sense.

If disability is part of a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking about the body under certain historical circumstances, I think it is important to look back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the rise of capitalism. Under capitalism, disability became a pathology because disabled people could not meet the demands of individual wage labour. It brought new problems for social order and social control and required new ways of seeing these problems. 

Within this set of problems, the 'body' --the body of individuals and the body of populations--appear as the bearer of new variables, not merely between the scarce and the numerous, the submissive and the restive, the rich and the poor, healthy and sick, strong and weak, but also between the more or less utilizable, more less amenable to profitable investment, those with greater or lesser prospects for survival , death and illness, and with more or less capacity for being usefully trained. 

Able-bodied and able-minded individuals were thus constructed and worked within the new disciplines that factory work imposed. The antithesis, too, was constructed--the disabled--who were excluded. "This process of exclusion was facilitated by focusing on the body, of individuals and populations, and with the rise of capitalism, the main group who came to focus their gaze on the body, was the medical profession" (Oliver: 47). The economic and social factors can be seen as part of a project to control and regulate the body. For Foucault, the organized professional activity of psychiatry is only made possible when madness has been turned into a uniform pathology and those fitting the category are excluded. I would like to explore this in relation to disability, along with Foucault's theory of "discipline'' where the body is "manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful, increases its forces" (Foucault: 136) to the concrete body of Norman's experience. 

In his video Norman not only describes a physiotherapy exercise but has a volunteer reenact it with him. Norm takes the role of physiotherapist and has the volunteer kneel on the floor in front of him with his back to him. Norm says he was a young child, naked except for his underwear when he had this kind of therapy. Norm was to try and stay kneeling while the physiotherapist knocked him this way and that way from behind. The brutality of this therapy, the need to discipline his body, train it to "perform normal" becomes obvious in this visual reenactment. This "moment" can be read in many ways. It can be read through Foucault's theory as generally described above: Norm is in exclusion, separated from abled children in a segregated public school for handicapped children and he has a pathology, a physical disability that needs to be rehabilitated, trained and disciplined to increase his body's aptitude or capacity so he can function better and become a more valued member of society. Norm reads this moment as a form of abuse and says:

If you think about it, from the age of three until the age of twelve, three times a week, women who were older than I was, who were more powerful than I was, who had more authority than I had, brought me into their room, their space, their turf. They took off some of my clothes. They invaded my personal space. They gripped me and touched me. manipulating my body in ways that were painful--it hurt. Some of the exercises in physical therapy were very painful, others were threatening. For example, there was one where you are kneeling on the floor and the therapist kneels behind you and pushes you in different directions forward and sideways. The stated purpose of that activity is to improve reactive balance responses, but when I do this with nondisabled people as a training activity they find it enormously threatening when a person behind them is shoving them, especially when they never know what direction they were going to get pushed. When I was in school, I didn't know I had any other choice than to go along with it. To me it's a form of sexual assault even though it was completely asexual. It's the power and domination that is part of the abuse. It's important for professionals to understand and acknowledge the power differential that exists between themselves and the children with disabilities they are supposed to be serving. (Giangreco: 6)

Norm goes on to say that obviously the therapist does not have the same intent as a rapist, but says there can still be a similarity of action and a similarity of consequence. He talks about another moment in his video when he was working towards his Master's Degree in family therapy. In a section on sex therapy, he had to do exercises involving touch and discovered he hated being touched. Later in the course while studying the effects of post traumatic stress disorder, he reviewed his symptoms with his professor--resistant to touch, lack of trust, etc--and wondered why he fitted all these categories. That's when he first made the association between sexual assault and physiotherapy: His body carried the memory and the exercises triggered it.

To return to Foucault, and read Norm's physiotherapy experience as a discipline to make this body function better, I'd like to illustrate the limits of the therapeutic approach. A good example of this is Norman describing how he learned to walk. He says he spent years in therapy learning to walk by holding on to a bar on the wall. When not in therapy, he walked with his hand against a wall. One day when he was nine years old and sitting on his bike (with training wheels for balance) in his backyard, he saw a man flying a kite in the school yard behind his house. The man asked him if he wanted to fly the kite. Norm biked over to the school yard and in the course of flying the kite, found himself walking. 

But to return to the question: If disability is part of a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking about the body under certain historical circumstances, then how can it be deconstructed? Lennard Davis says in recent years many texts in a variety of discourses have been rethinking the body--the female, black,.queer body. The disabled body has only begun to be rethought. In cultural studies the transgressive bodies are romanticized, but the disabled body is not allowed to participate in "the erotics of power, in the power of the erotic, in economies of transgression." There has been no rhetoric he says tied to "prostheses, wheelchairs, colostomy bags, cane or leg braces" (Davis: 158).

This leads to the question of how the disabled, the most marginalized of the marginalized, can join the discourse and what can be done to accomplish this. Davis says many measures can be taken, including those familiar to other groups:

...highlighting narratives, lyrics, and representations of disability in literature courses, teaching the politics of disability in courses that deal with social and political issues, making conscious efforts to include people with disabilities in the media, and so on. Important as well would be the attempt to teach disability across the curriculum so that this subject does not remain ghettoized in special courses. This aspect of inclusion involves a reshaping of symbolic cultural productions and ideology. 

Davis mentions highlighting narratives, which is exactly what I have attempted to do in this application of critical theory to Norman's narrative. The nexus of knowledge and power that created the "disabled" as "other" is challenged in personal narratives. Narratives are multiple and complex and reveal the different identity traditions within the "disabled" community. Personal biography is one level where people experience and resist oppression. I suggest their very concreteness, their lived experience, moves the reader to consider the very specific situation of the "disabled" writer in a more empathetic manner and understand more "thickly" what it means to be the "disabled other." While one has to be aware of the ambiguity inherent in "really" knowing how another feels, empathy is a mutual, reciprocal process that is both interpretative and intersubjective. Lorraine Code quotes Simone de Beauvoir "It is only as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the other is revealed as an other. And to love him genuinely is 

to love him in his otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes." Code says "Empathy at its best preserves yet seeks to know the 'strangeness,' respects the boundaries between self and other that the 'forbiddeness' affirms, does not seek to assimilate or obliterate the 'freedom.' Its ambiguity is manifested in coming to terms simultaneously with the other's likeness to oneself, and her/his irreducible strangeness, otherness" (Code: 141). 

I'd like to return to the beginning of my paper and reiterate the following and hope that these statements have become more transparent through my exploration of the "theoretical body" in relation to the "concrete body" of Norman. Many academic disciplines are now recognizing the importance of narratives in the production of a more embodied understanding of ourselves and our world. Self-narration is a cognitive site from where we can learn to take the texts of our own lives as seriously as we do "official" narratives about ourselves and our world. Norm's narrative provides one embodied site that is knowledge-producing for himself and the viewer. It is a resistance narrative that reveals the hidden political and social injuries he has experienced behind the mask of benevolence. Because it is a visual and auditory narrative, the viewer comes face to face with Norm which I suggest produces a more empathetic understanding not available through analysis alone. Lennard Davis says

Only when the veil is torn from the bland face of the average, only when the hidden political and social injuries are revealed behind the mask of benevolence, only when the hazardous environment designed to be the comfort zone of the normal is shown with all its pitfalls and traps that create disability--only then will we begin to face and feel each other in all that rich variety and difference of our bodies, our minds, and our outlooks (Davis: 170). 

Davis' comments on empathy can be related to what Donna Haraway says about feminist scholars: "we need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability to translate knowledges among very different--and power-differentiated--communities. We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future.

Throughout history, 
people with physical and mental disabilities 
have been abandoned at birth, 
banished from society,
used as court jesters, 
drowned and burned during the Inquisition, 
tortured in the name of behaviour management, 
abused, raped, euthanized, and murdered. 

Now, for the first time, people with disabilities are taking their rightful place as fully contributing citizens. 

The danger is that we will respond with remediation and benevolence rather than equity and respect. 

And so, we offer you

A CREDO FOR SUPPORT

Do Not see my disability as the problem. Recognize that my disability is an attribute. 

Do Not see my disability as a deficit. It is you who see me as deviant and helpless. 

Do Not try to fix me because I am not broken. Support me. 

I can make my contribution to the community in my way. 

Do Not see me as your client. I am you fellow citizen. See me as your neighbour. 

Remember, none of us can be self-sufficient. 

Do Not try to modify my behaviour. Be still and listen. What you define as inappropriate 

may be my attempt to communicate with you in the only way I can. 

Do Not try to change me, you have no right. Help me learn what I want to know. 

Do Not hide your uncertainty behind "professional" distance.

Be a person who listens, and does not take my struggle away from me by trying to make it all better. 

Do Not use theories and strategies on me. Be with me. 

And when we struggle with each other, let that give rise to self-reflection.

Do Not try to control me. I have a right to my power as a person. 

What you call non-compliance or manipulation may actually be 

the only way I can exert some control over my life. 

Do Not teach me to be obedient, submissive and polite. 

I need to feel entitled to say No if I am to protect myself. 

Do Not be charitable towards me. The last thing the world needs is another Jerry Lewis. 

Be my ally against those who exploit me for their own gratification.

Do Not try to be my friend. I deserve more than that. Get to know me. We may become friends. 

Do Not help me, even if it does make you feel good. Ask me if I need your help. 

Let me show you how you can best assist me. 

Do Not admire me. A desire to live a full life does not warrant adoration.

Respect me, for respect presumes equity. 

Do Not tell, correct, and lead. Listen, Support, and Follow. 

Do Not work on me. Work with me. 

Dedicated to the memory of Tracy Latimer 1995 Norman Kunc and Emma Van der Klift

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