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Re-engaging the Body:

Disability Studies and the
Resistance to Embodiment
Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell

D
D isabled Romantic poet Lord Byron’s last, unfinished play, The Deformed
Transformed (1822), tells the story of Arnold, who endures social derision
for his multiple disabilities.1 The social context of Arnold’s oppression is the pri-
mary subject matter of the drama. Arnold’s initial critiques of social intolerance
quickly give way to his own sense of his disabled body as grotesque. Byron’s hero
opts for suicide in order to escape his torment. Just as Arnold is about to impale
himself, a “dark” Stranger arrives with an offer: the exchange of his disabled
body for the apparently ideal — but actually flawed — body of the Greek war

We are particularly indebted to those artists, activists, and scholars who participated in the mak-
ing of our documentary video, Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back. We thank William Elison for his
invaluable copyediting and Carol A. Breckenridge for providing forums for scholarship on disability
studies. Finally, we thank the students in our graduate seminar on “Disability in the Movies” at the
University of Illinois at Chicago for the intellectual stimulus they provided during our composition of
this essay, and our friend Riva Lehrer for her devotion to disability art.
1. In most biographies, Byron is described as having a clubfoot, a rather amorphous nineteenth-
century medical classification. However, contemporary descriptions of the poet’s condition indicate
that it was a more serious disability than this archaic diagnosis might suggest. In Byron’s Memoirs,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge quotes Mary Shelley’s observations about his physical demeanor: “A mal-
formation of one of his feet, and other indications of a rickety constitution, served as a plea for suf-
fering him to range the hills and to wander about at his pleasure on the seashore, that his frame might
be invigorated by air and exercise” (Watkins 1822: 46). More recently, Phyllis Grosskurth, following
the work of Denis Browne, has laid the groundwork for a more specific diagnosis that is, we would
argue, similar to some forms of what is now labeled cerebral palsy. Byron walked with a “sliding gait,”
and his “congenital deformity” was confined to his right leg, which “curved inwards, and was so stiff
that it impeded the movement of the ankle” (Grosskurth 1997: 25).

Public Culture 13(3): 367–389

Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press
Film stills © Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell

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Public Culture hero, Achilles. Arnold jumps at the opportunity, even though he believes that he
must barter away his soul in exchange; he is, after all, like Byron, a student of
Goethe’s Faust.
After transforming the “deformed” Arnold’s body into the shape of Achilles,
the Stranger announces that he plans to accompany the protagonist while taking
the form of his rejected body. The “deformed” body thus shadows the “ideal”
body’s pursuit of an unrestricted physical life. In this way, The Deformed Trans-
formed illustrates the dependence of epistemological operations (and heroic tra-
ditions) on disabled bodies: the able body cannot solidify its own abilities in the
absence of its binary Other. In the end, Arnold’s acquisition of an “ideal” body
gains him little more than an insufferable ego and an obliviousness to the exis-
tence of diverse bodily forms across human populations.2
We begin with Byron’s The Deformed Transformed as an allegory for the
efforts of U.S. disability studies first to disengage from, and then to re-engage
with, disabled bodies. In the drama, rejection of the apparently visceral life of dis-
ability for the evidently social ideal of a “classical” and “able” body encapsulates
the double bind that confronts those who inhabit disabled bodies: one must either
endure the cultural slander heaped upon bodily difference or seek to evade the
object of derision. Such erasures of disabled people have historically been
achieved through such cultural “solutions” as institutionalization, isolation, geno-
cide, cure, concealment, segregation, exile, quarantine, and prosthetic masking,
among others. As a theatrical effort to destigmatize the disabled body, Byron’s
play—much like research in disability studies over the past twenty years—aims
to debunk the fictions of desirability that invest the “able” body. In critiquing the
presumed desirability invested in able bodies, disability studies has sought to
destigmatize disabled bodies only by default. In the mid-1990s, U.S. disability stud-
ies returned to encounter the sloughed-off disabled body after the “perfectible,”
able body had been rethought as a matter of epistemology, as opposed to biology.
We argue that disability studies has strategically neglected the question of the
experience of disabled embodiment in order to disassociate disability from its
mooring in medical cultures and institutions. Although recently disability criti-
cism has been calling for a return to a phenomenology of the disabled body,3 this

2. Byron’s play is analyzed at length in our essay “Unfixing Disability,” which will be published in
a forthcoming volume on disability and performance art in the Corporealities: Discourses of Disabil-
ity series by the University of Michigan Press.
3. As Kevin Paterson and Bill Hughes (1999: 598) argue, to surrender a discussion of impairment
is tantamount to relegating disability to the status of nothing more concrete than an ideological
remainder: “[While] disability studies had recognised the social nature of impairment. . . . it lacks the

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return has been slow in coming. Like feminized, raced, and queered bodies, the Re-engaging
disabled body became situated in definitive contrast to the articulation of what the Body
amounted to a hegemonic aesthetic premised on biology. Within this cultural
belief system, the “normal” body provided the baseline for determinations of
desirability and human value.
The section that follows, “Abstracting the Body,” begins with a discussion of
the advent of the normative body in medicine through an analysis of the theories
of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem and the documentary films of Fred-
erick Wiseman. Leading documentarians of institutions, these three have pro-
duced work critical of sterile ideals of the body based on statistical averages and
on an investment in the diagnosis of biological differences as deviance. Such cri-
tiques have provided the fundamental premise of disability studies: the able body
emerges as a narrow measure for the creation of discriminatory, human-made
environments that elide the existence of biological and cognitive variations. Next,
in “The Cultural Arena of Disability,” we examine the ways in which disability
studies has expanded the analysis of the pathologization of disabled bodies
beyond the walls of the medical institution and into an engagement with intrinsi-
cally social questions of human value and belonging. One result of this expansion
has been to direct scholarly attention to the use of disability as a metaphor for
social conflict in various artistic traditions. In the segment “Theaters of Repres-
sion,” we argue that as medical science strains to rein in the disabled body’s
deviance, movies unleash nightmarish images of disability as a threat to social
stability. In posing such an opposition, we analyze portrayals of disability in Tod
Browning’s 1932 horror classic, Freaks, and Werner Herzog’s misguided political
satire, Even Dwarfs Started Small (1971). Finally, in “Body Poetics,” we conclude
with a discussion of the re-engagement with disabled embodiment in the poetics
of disability performance artists.

Abstracting the Body

The authority the biological sciences have wielded over cultural constructions of
the body in the late-twentieth-century West—instantiated in the United States by
the hegemony of the medical-professional and rehabilitation-sciences establish-

conceptual tools to trace the patterns of embodiment as they are lived through the mutually incorpo-
rated experiences of impairment and disability.” In her book Claiming Disability, Simi Linton (1998)
makes a similar point, calling for a return to a phenomenology of disabled bodies that can more accu-
rately mine the experience of disability through meaningful, visceral language.

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Public Culture ments — has encountered challenges in recent decades from the academy in the
form of alternative methodologies that position bodies as interdependent social
entities. Theorists took issue with the established empiricist approaches to mate-
rial bodies, arguing that to treat the body as a discrete object that could be reha-
bilitated or “cured” by modern medicine was to decontextualize it from the lived
world. Such criticism gained urgency as bodies became increasingly subject to
evaluative, rather than strictly diagnostic, assessments by a medical establish-
ment flush with cultural capital. In question was not so much the meaning of
materiality itself as the observing professional gaze that classified and evaluated
bodies within hierarchies of deviance. In response to the rising prominence of
such medical disciplines as pathology and teratology in particular, theorists of the
body sought to effect a rescue of the stigmatized body from its relegation to the
status of a “defective” anatomy. As the preparatory work to disability studies,
body theory helped to re-present the aberrant body as a contested field of political
meanings, and deviance became defined as a subjective imposition upon neutral,
divergently functioning organisms.
In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of groundbreaking works sought to invert tra-
ditional medical and scientific approaches to identifying bodily pathologies. The
method of scrutinizing the body was identified as a prurient activity practiced
under the sanitized guise of empirical objectivity; institutions such as clinics, hos-
pitals, and medical schools were criticized for their complicity in the historical
sequestration of the disabled body. In other words, theorists of the body sought to
invert the traditional power dynamic of the medical gaze by situating the institu-
tion, in place of the body, as an object of scrutiny. In the new methodology’s tac-
tical inversion, the gazer became the gazed upon.
Among the most influential of these works was Michel Foucault’s study of the
rise of medical institutions, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical
Perception. Foucault argued that as the architecture of the medical establishment
took shape at tangible cultural locations — clinic and hospital, treatment room
and surgical suite, amphitheater and bedside—the object of its gaze (namely, dis-
crete human bodies) grew increasingly abstract. Specific symptoms became sub-
sumed within a general topography of diseases; bodies were partitioned among
an array of specialties and subspecialties; the individual experience of any patient
came to be regarded as extraneous to the purview of the physician as he (the
holder of the gaze was, by definition, male) made his diagnosis and thus rein-
scribed the knowledge-base of his profession. In sum, the idea of “the body” as
object gave way to that of “the patient,” which, in turn, gave way to a surveillance
of “the pure order of disease” (Foucault 1975: 14). Such an evolution (or devolu-

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tion) of the body within the field of medicine made it increasingly subject to rel- Re-engaging
egation to predetermined categories of deviance by physicians enabled to act as the Body
evaluators of difference — and thus as arbiters of pathology. The only thing dis-
ability signified was a failure on the part of organisms to realize their “full poten-
tial” as aesthetic and functional vessels.
Consequently, with the advent of modernity, the articulation of bodily differ-
ences shifted from entries in a catalog of biological diversity — a medieval
approach to the study of Nature 4 — to an objectifying taxonomy of deviance.
“The patient ha[d] to be enveloped in a collective, homogenous space” that
allowed mutable organisms to be fixed within categories deemed relevant to the
knowledge-base of medicine (Foucault 1975: 196). In the late sixteenth century,
Montaigne (1971: 539) referred to “cripples” as emblematic of creation’s “infinity
of forms,” which God, “in His wisdom,” supplies as evidence of his inexhaustible
bounty.5 In an effort that can be seen as parallel to Montaigne’s — if minus the
religiosity — Foucault effectively critiqued medicine for artificially constricting
the elasticity of organisms within its domain of expertise. The body became a
static fact before the trained eye of the physician who would extract its visual
data while refusing to acknowledge its activities within a wider social arena:
“[diagnosis] gave to the clinical field a new structure in which the individual in
question was not so much a sick person as the endlessly reproducible pathologi-
cal fact to be found in all patients suffering in a similar way” (Foucault 1975: 97).
In other words, discrete bodies, with their specific characteristics, became pro-
cessed within a medical catalog that re-presented those characteristics as typical
expressions, or symptoms, of diagnostic conditions. In an ironic turn, the Fou-
cauldian body found itself in the service of the medical catalog, rather than the
other way around.
In the United States, the influential scholarship of Foucault emerged contem-
poraneously with the criticisms of social management schemes that typified the
intellectual activism of the Vietnam generation. One example was the critique of
the medicalized body leveled in the work of U.S. New Documentary filmmaker
Frederick Wiseman. From his initial Titicut Follies (1967) to the remarkable Hos-

4. The cataloging of physical anomalies and their attendant mythical meanings occupied physi-
cians and philosophers during the Middle Ages. In his work On Monsters and Marvels, the pre-
Enlightenment French surgeon Ambroise Paré gathered examples of deviance in human and animal
physiques as evidence of biological diversity across species. See Paré 1982.
5. We discuss the importance of Montaigne’s influence on the popular understanding of disability
in a chapter in Mitchell and Snyder 2000, “Montaigne’s ‘Infinities of Forms’ and Nietzsche’s Higher
Men,” in which we compare polar approaches to the meaning of disabled bodies in philosophical nar-
ratives.

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Public Culture pital (1970) and, most recently, through the course of his “Handicapped Series”
— Deaf (1986), Blind (1986), Multi-handicapped (1986), and Adjustment and
Work (1986) — Wiseman’s films exposed the institutional apparatus that would
reduce aberrant bodies to mechanical and inhumanly narrow entities.
Of these films, Hospital comes closest to the formulations of body studies in
the way that it problematizes the putatively universal category of “patient.” As a
parade of ailing patients interacts with medical administrators and physicians, the
medical subjects persist in narrating their life stories despite the listening profes-
sionals’ requests for the strict, bodily facts of their ailments. One woman with
hearing aids recounts her experiences as a refugee during World War II in Ger-
many and relates them to her “American” ethos of trying to stay off welfare.
Another man speaks of his sense of impropriety at being asked to undress so that
a female physician can better assess his disease. A transgendered individual
discusses his/her level of comfort with an ambiguous sexuality perceived from
elsewhere as “freakish” and as an inability to “fit in.” A woman explains her rela-
tionship to a friend who has been rushed to the emergency room above the insis-
tent questions of a doctor who wants to know what kind of medication the patient
takes for high blood pressure.
Wiseman’s film displays the exasperation of health care professionals as they
seek to navigate their way through the ailing mass of humanity that arrives on the
hospital’s doorstep each day. Ultimately, however, the viewer’s appreciation of
professional frustration gives way to a recognition of the necessity of this “extra-
neous” information to those rendered anonymous within the medical domain. All
of these stories help to contextualize the experiences of bodies in the fluctuating
and difficult world beyond the medical institution. But the narrative accounts
proffered by those who enter the institution are discounted as superfluous to med-
ical analysis, whose purview must be limited to any symptom detectable within a
body before it.
By the conclusion of Hospital, the medical industry appears increasingly sin-
ister even as the film highlights its “helping” ethos. There is the apparatus of
the profession — machines, uniforms, hierarchies, paperwork, rules and regula-
tions — and there are the bodies that intersect with the apparatus.6 On the audio
track, Wiseman inserts a sound akin to a functioning respirator chugging away in
the midst of the myriad dissections of human pathos—as if there were a mechan-

6. Wiseman’s contemporary, Ken Kesey, also pursues a similar critique of institutions as tentacu-
lar organisms in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). Kesey’s formulation of a medical “com-
bine,” or processing plant, reiterates the 1960s depiction of institutions as mechanical beasts.

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ical heart desperately beating somewhere in the recesses. What a viewer of Hos- Re-engaging
pital comes to fear is this mechanistic approach to varied biologies — not the the Body
usual coldness of bureaucracies indifferent to individuals, but a discipline that
sustains rote processes at the expense of the dynamic humanity it treats. One
leaves the film with a sense that the patients’ chaotic personal life stories provide
the only relief from the monotony of the “cases” that they come to represent
within institutional parlance. Those subject to these institutional processes nar-
rate their lives as if to stave off their inevitable relegation to a pathological cata-
log. Operative here are not merely fears regarding diagnoses (although there’s
plenty of that), but also a terror of categorization within a definition that one is
powerless to combat—medical diagnosis threatens to usurp the body’s elasticity.
Foucault had pursued an archaeology of “perception” as the privileged register
of analysis within medicine in order to affirm what medical historian (and Fou-
cault’s dissertation adviser) Georges Canguilhem (1989: 239) depicted as the
relinquishment of objectivity in the field at the end of the nineteenth century:
A norm, or rule, is what can be used to right, to square, to straighten.
To set a norm (normer), to normalize, is to impose a requirement on an
existence, a given whose variety, disparity, with regard to the require-
ment, present themselves as a hostile, even more than an unknown
indeterminant.
Canguilhem’s emphasis on adaptation over deviation situated the body as a his-
torically contingent phenomenon. Bodies were not the product of averages, but
rather interdependent vessels that shaped and were shaped by their environments.
Within this formulation, the proper medical study of the body would be a concise
description of organismic adaptive strategies. The norm thus becomes little more
than a hostile imposition upon necessarily fluctuating organisms. Canguilhem
argued that anomaly offered medicine a more appropriate gauge than dysfunction
because it surrendered the violence of evaluation that infused any notion of
deviance. Rather than interpret bodily and cognitive differences in terms of their
degree of deviation from a standardized norm, anomaly recognized difference as
the neutral expression of a biologically diverse species adapting to the pressures
of environmental and internal forces.
By the late 1960s, a profound reorientation of conceptions of the body was
under way in the academy. The new field of body studies would critique the dis-
ciplinary penchant for evaluating deviance on a scale set by standards of civic
and economic functionality. The “able body” had become a quantifiable ideal that
provided for the subjection of all bodies to its fictional standards. Although the

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Public Culture able body served as the quantifiable medical measure of functionality, its flawed
mimesis of any specific, lived body unmoored its hold in corporeality. Conse-
quently, Foucault’s influence on body studies came about primarily through his
ability to provide a working methodology for historicizing the institutional pro-
duction of embodied subjectivities. Body theorists began to follow his lead in
inverting the traditional operations of medical empiricism by positioning the able
body as a phantom materiality. By identifying the medical gaze as an object of
study, Foucault’s formulations became the basis for deflecting empirical practices
back onto institutions and the professionals who staff them.

The Cultural Arena of Disability

With the advent of studies that demystified institutional ways of seeing as histor-
ically contingent practices, disability activists found a means for moving the
political critiques of discrimination and architectural exclusion they had been
conducting for decades into a viable academic format.7 Building on the work of
Erving Goffman — who, in a move parallel to that of Foucault and Canguilhem,
turned a critical lens on asylums and on the labeling of disabled bodies as “spoiled
identities”—and following the lead of feminist, racial, and gay civil rights move-
ments, disability studies developed a social model founded on the idea that dis-
ability was not embedded in defective biologies, but rather in faulty social struc-
tures. Disability studies pushed for a recognition of the ways in which bodies had
been molded into formulaic vessels for stigmatizing public beliefs. Since disabled
bodies had endured such a history of debilitating classifications, disability stud-
ies purposely refrained from formulating the embodied experiences of disabled
people. This neglect was willful and strategic: it explicitly sought to leave an
overanalyzed entity mercifully alone. Instead, the critical gaze was turned on the
practitioners of physical, occupational, and psychological evaluations and on the
institutions that authorized their gaze.
Foucault’s analysis of the overdiagnosed body offered the first recognition that
the professional scrutiny of bodily differences threatens to overwhelm material
bodies through its microscopic breakdown and perpetual analysis. Citing Johann
Georg Zimmermann’s treatise of 1774, Traité de l’expérience en médicine, he
writes: “Medical perception must be structured to look through ‘a magnifying

7. In “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the
New Disability History,” Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger (2000) detail the growth of Amer-
ican disability activism during the first half of the twentieth century.

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glass, which, when applied to different parts of an object, makes one notice other Re-engaging
parts that one would not otherwise perceive,’ thus initiating the endless task of the Body
understanding the individual” (Foucault 1975: 15). People with disabilities rec-
ognized the violative nature of this tendency toward overevaluation most viscer-
ally. Not only had they endured hours of diagnostic scrutiny on medical examina-
tion tables (not to mention a representation in textbooks that replicated this
process), but they had also been subjected to a variety of exclusive measures that
marked the extent of their cultural participation: “ugly laws” barred their appear-
ance on the streets; intelligence testing banned them from public educational set-
tings; segregated education isolated them in institutions that denied them equal
access to the privileges of their able-bodied peers; discriminatory reproductive
expectations identified them as physical and cognitive forms to be eradicated
from the continuum of varied human biologies; inaccessible transportation left
them physically stranded in their homes. These discriminatory practices demon-
strated that disabled people’s exclusion was the result of inflexible policies that
rationalized cultural segregation.
Consequently, disability studies has formulated the problem of the medical-
ized body in a manner similar to that undertaken earlier in body studies, taking up
medical institutions (and the ancillary administering of diagnosis, sequestration,
and case study) as the primary locus of its critique. The pathologization of human
differences is theorized as an imposition on the body — a regulatory effort to
standardize inherent dynamism. But while body studies provided a foundation for
a more general model of critique around the categories of illness, health, pathol-
ogy, and even bioethics, disability studies moves beneath these terms to encounter
disability directly in the experiences of human populations which were merely
referenced euphemistically by those more general terms. Disability studies nar-
rows the focus of its investigation to the social implications for bodies deemed
excessively aberrant. In doing so, scholars have expanded the domain of cultural
understandings about disability beyond the walls of its scientific management.
For disability studies, the disabled body is neither a matter of individual mal-
function—as cast by medicine—nor an effect of the abstraction of the body within
the health professions. Instead, disability translates into a common denominator
of cultural fascination (if not downright obsession)—one that infiltrates thinking
across discursive registers as a shared reference point in deciding matters of
human value and communal belonging.
In this emergent field, the able body is no longer characterized as merely a
false quantitative ideal, as it had been in body studies, but rather as an aesthetic
product of cultural forces that oppress those categorized as disabled. This subtle

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Public Culture shift in emphasis allows humanities scholars in disability studies to extend the
discussion of bodily deviance from the context of rehabilitative institutions to
that of wider ranging cultural locations. For instance, Lennard J. Davis (1995)
analyzes the role of institutions for the Deaf in the historical development of dis-
ability activism and community in eighteenth-century Europe. Martin Pernick
(1996) analyzes the influential role of public health films in the promotion of
eugenics in Chicago prior to World War II. Through readings of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century U.S. literary texts and cultural spectacles such as the freak
show, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) argues that disabled people’s bodies
have been represented as unassimilable within a normalizing biological ideology
that marks the disabled body as the inferior contrast to an able-bodied, white,
masculine citizenry. Paul K. Longmore (1997) assesses television genres, such as
disease-of-the-week movies and telethons, to dissect mainstream representations
of disability as tragedies in need of eradication or overcoming. In our own Nar-
rative Prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2000), we theorize the pervasive utility of
disability to literature in Europe and the United States by discussing the long-
standing artistic recourse to disability as a staple feature of characterization. Dis-
ability studies scholars have also analyzed the opportunistic use of corporeal
metaphors to emblematize societal weaknesses in literary and philosophical figu-
rations of disability.
Ultimately, these analyses of the pervasive dependency upon textual and visual
representations of disability in various cultural media have forced a reformula-
tion of a theory of marginality itself within disability studies. This is one site at
which disability studies diverges from the approach established by other civil
rights–based programs. While many minority movements have argued that their
social devaluation occurs as a result of their marginal presence in representa-
tional media, disability studies has formulated an analysis of social depreciation
targeting the perpetual recourse to images of disability in narrative and visual
mediums. As a result, disability studies follows a figuration of marginality as the
expression of an “overheated symbolic organism” that conveys potent meanings
as a result of its palimpsest-like discursive history (cf. Stewart 1993).

Theaters of Repression

The work of disability studies scholars consolidated the argument that bodily and
cognitive differences were integral to various registers of meaning-making
within culture. While the earliest research in the field kept returning to a denun-
ciation of three prominent literary figures—Shakespeare’s Richard III, Melville’s

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Captain Ahab, and Dickens’s Tiny Tim—the growing body of historical research Re-engaging
called for wider ranging methodologies. As with later developments in race and the Body
gender studies, disability studies outgrew its denunciations of stereotypes;
instead, theorists began to argue that disability represented a deep-seated, yet
uninterrogated, cultural conflict. If the able body proved a utopian fiction of
abstract bodily norms, disabled bodies occupied the phantasmic recesses of the
cultural imaginary. The different body was more than a site for public scapegoat-
ing — cognitive and physical aberrancies acted as reminders of Others in our
midst who challenged beliefs in a homogeneous bodily order.
Out of these efforts to elucidate the constructed nature of disabled bodies in
history, disability studies set out to diagnose the investments of an ableist society
in disability’s various incarnations. Cultural efforts to medicalize or domesticate
disability effectively repressed the power of aberrancy to unmoor notions of the
body as a matter of norms, averages, and deviations. Locating disabled bodies as
rare examples of extraordinary deviance essentially cordoned off disability from
the differences that characterize typical biological diversity. For disability studies,
the impersonal was the political. Such a sequestration evidenced the mainstream
desire to reduce the different body’s (or mind’s) ability to destabilize normative
models of health.
In fact, disability studies scholars largely refused to define those bodies or
conditions that were disabling, opting in favor of an understanding of disability
as: That in the body which exceeds deterministic efforts to predict a life trajectory.
Following the work of Julia Epstein, we point out in the introduction to The Body
and Physical Difference that the ill body and the disabled body are culturally dis-
tinct entities because “diseases ‘follow a course’ and therefore prove familiar and
domesticated by virtue of a belief in their determinate status (i.e., the ability to
confidently narrate their future). Disability might be characterized as that which
exceeds a culture’s predictive capabilities and effective interventions” (Mitchell
and Snyder 1997: 3). The goal was to disrupt the seemingly objective knowledge
of aberrant bodies, not through alternative readings of their material meanings—
that would merely replace one interpretive system with another — but by rein-
voking disability’s resistant qualities. This disruption came by way of unearthing
disability’s long-standing historical associations with the grotesque or supernat-
ural as a form of theoretical resistance.
In The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell describes medicine’s resistance to an
acknowledgment of disability’s discordant power as a “theater of [scientific]
repression” (1989: 367). While medicine and the rehabilitation sciences situate
disabled people within a “neutral” zone of dispassionate inquiry in which empiri-

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Public Culture cism disarms the body of its volatile potency (i.e., the sexual and political impli-
cations of voyeurism and the intimacy of evaluation), disability studies causes the
flip side of aberrancy’s cultural meaning to resurface:
It will be my contention that the scientific imperative, the demand in the
nineteenth century for an epistemologically reliable inquiry into the
nature of things, derives part of its strength from the powerful competi-
tion represented by fascination for the freak and the occult. . . . Science
acquired its staying power from a sustained struggle to keep down the
demons of the supernatural, with whose visions, however, it competes.
The repression of this terror produces the counterfeit tranquility of sound
scientific procedure. Science is always an operation on horror, opening the
theater of its repression. (Ronell 1989: 366–67)
Ronell’s argument hinges on a recognition of empiricism’s historical achievement
in diminishing the power of disability’s association with the occult in the social
imaginary. Whereas the nineteenth-century freak show served to turn the prurient
popular interest in things supernatural into a salable commodity, medicine’s
ascent to power was partially tied to its ability to abate such efforts. Scientists pit-
ted themselves against supernatural beliefs by seeking to demystify disability and
other phenomena and, in turn, place the inexplicable within their control — the
control of man-made systems of knowledge. Yet, despite this project of contain-
ment, Ronell points out, “horror” would inevitably resurface — in the popular-
culture guise of film monsters, for example — to challenge all efforts at keeping
the demons at bay. Thus, science’s attempt to domesticate disability fails, in an
absolute sense, because disability’s historical alignment with the grotesque (that
is, the belief in the mysterious power of an “unassimilable” difference) continues
to reverberate into modernity.
Ronell’s McLuhanesque thesis presents innovations in communications tech-
nology (see, for example, her analysis of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of
the telephone as a means of making contact with his hearing-impaired mother
and wife, Eliza and Mabel) as having been animated by the desire to extend the
limited capacities of the body beyond its preprostheticized condition. This effort
to compensate for the human body’s inadequacies placed disability squarely at
the seat of cultural innovation. Compensation for differences quickly metamor-
phosed into technology that extended and verified the insufficiency of all bodies.
Thus telephones, invented to enhance voice transmission, extending the conver-
sant’s ability to contact a Deaf Other, became universally adopted by middle-class
U.S. households. The irony of the telephone (as of many other prosthetic inven-

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tions) was that the Deaf populations for whom the device was ostensibly invented Re-engaging
would find it one of the least accessible mediums of communication in a hearing the Body
world. Into the present, ironies of access continue to abound, such as the auto-
matic use of curb cuts by walkies and the rush into elevators of able-bodied peo-
ple who want to avoid the physical effort of climbing stairs.
But the disabled body does not serve only as the faulty body that prompts com-
pensatory invention schemes. Disability also promises a longed-for access to the
otherworldly, because bodily aberrancy has been historically interpreted as the
material signature of a divine order. Throughout European history, the extreme
physical marking inscribed by bodily excess or lack seemed to demand an expla-
nation for its “unnatural” origins. Monsters and madness threatened the mainte-
nance of an earthly order, but also bespoke a fraternization with the otherworldly;
religion’s “cures” of “demoniacs” and “cripples” reaffirmed the Church’s contact
with the Divine.
Disability studies scholars have used the historical linkage of disability with the
supernatural to expose further the coordinates of ideologies of the body. In ancient
Greece, as Henri-Jacques Stiker (1999: 44) argues, people with disabilities were
exiled because anomaly was interpreted as a sign of the gods’ dismay with the
larger community; in Norse mythology, according to Lois Bragg (1997), certain
divine figures were depicted as disabled as evidence of their sacrifice to the greater
good of the worshipers; in medieval Europe, disabled people were held to share an
intimacy with God that more mainstream society had surrendered (Stiker 1999:
82); in the Renaissance, disability was thought of as punishment for wrongs com-
mitted by the afflicted one’s parents (Huet 1998: 21); in modernity, disabling traits
were interpreted on an individual level as signs of personal malevolence and crim-
inality (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 15); and so forth. A characteristic mixture of
awe and terror can be identified as having informed the reactions of ableist social
orders toward their disabled populations. Disability was placed in the role of medi-
ator not only between material and linguistic orders, but also between earthly exis-
tence and inscrutable otherworldly happenings.
The use of disability as a figuration that harnesses the power of the uncanny is
apparent, for example, in both mainstream and avant-garde filmmaking. In such
works as Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs
Started Small (1971), the “miniaturized” world presented by the cast of short-
statured actors serves as a reflexive lens on the behaviors of normative adult
worlds. In Browning’s film, the story of Hans, who courts a “big woman” trapeze
artist named Cleopatra, equates the emotional life of circus freaks with that of
their normate fellow performers. As the object of Hans’s affections, Cleopatra

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Public Culture pretends to return his desire while plotting with her lover, the strongman Her-
cules, to kill him and steal his fortune. In identifying with the duped Hans, the
audience assumes a position of critique with regard to the duplicity and violence
associated by the film with social norms of courtship.
Yet in its misplaced efforts to humanize the freaks—“misplaced” in the sense
that their inherent humanity is not for the filmmaker to bestow — Browning’s
story also suggests that the chasm that divides freak from normate cannot be
crossed. The viewer is left to contemplate the ways in which freak culture mim-
ics normative behaviors and exposes their violence. However, because the freaks’
culture proves merely replicative of the world occupied by their fellow perform-
ers, it comes off as being mechanistic and unoriginal. While Browning believed
himself to be offering a rarely seen glimpse into the lives of disabled people, he
left his cast of “human monsters” emplotted within the narrative trope of revenge.
Thus, while Freaks depicts the social rejection of people with disabilities as inhu-
mane, it leaves more established myths—such as the oversexed nature of dwarfs
and the desire of disabled people for revenge against the able-bodied — unchal-
lenged. Beginning with the film’s opening epigraph, which simultaneously argues
that “the disabled” are the same as “us” (the normatively positioned viewer)
while promising the ultimate eradication of disability by modern teratology,
Freaks labors with contradictory impulses — both to normalize and exoticize its
disabled acting ensemble.
Werner Herzog took this contradiction a step further in enlisting short-statured
people in the enactment of a microcosmic farce. Even Dwarfs Started Small
depicts a political uprising of the infantilized short-statured and other disabled
inmates of an asylum near Mexico City. As the administration of the asylum is
taken over by its former prisoners, Herzog sets into motion a full-blown over-
throw of the oppressor’s institution. However, the film carries this narrative into
a broad satire of 1960s-style revolution, proposing that those who are oppressed
readily adopt the oppressor’s violent mechanisms of control. The anarchic dwarfs
set fire to plants, hang monkeys, and send a gas-powered vehicle running in cir-
cles as a means for Herzog to comment on the ultimate futility of resistance to
despotic regimes. Ironically, according to Herzog’s black comedy — which was
billed by promoters as a “land of reversed proportions”— dwarfs can become
tyrants every bit as overbearing as those of the normate world they seek to over-
throw.
Disability studies diagnoses the social condition of disabled people as situ-
ated between these two cultural extremes — medical specimen and supernatural
vision. There is no reference to physical or cognitive difference without a con-

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scious or unconscious materialization of its historical meanings. Thus, like all Re-engaging
material objects, disability comes to be constructed in a cathedral-like manner, in the Body
which competing cultural aesthetics leave their impression upon its surface. The
project of re-engaging the body requires efforts to resignify a multitude of stig-
matizing meanings assigned to disability throughout history.

Body Poetics

By moving disabled bodies into a social and political context and away from their
historical mooring as medical and supernatural oddities, disability studies trans-
formed the understanding of physical and cognitive difference from that of mal-
function within particular bodies to the scenario of a cultural production, writ
large. Historical representations do not disappear with the passing of an era or
cultural formation; they continue to manifest traces in our own, contemporary
moment. But exposing the able body as the progeny of a quantitative ideal and
debunking the historical attribution to disabled people of supernatural qualities
were both projects that maintained disability studies in its preoccupation with the
critique of immaterial bodies. Addressing the ideological phantasms dissemi-
nated by the nondisabled about disability created a vacuum with respect to our
contemporary understanding of the difference that physical and cognitive varia-
tion actually makes.
Even with scholarly efforts delimiting the ideological and constructed terrain
of disability to build on before venturing into a more visceral discussion of “real
limits” or “impairment,” the analysis of disabled bodies presents difficulties:
1. How does disability studies narrate the disabled body without replicat-
ing the static model of a diversity of biologies encompassed within
disability communities?
2. Can the effort to theorize the difference that disability makes avoid
recasting disabled experience as another landscape of voyeurism,
equivalent to earlier freak show spectacles or objectifying photographs
in medical textbooks?
3. Can the effort to humanize disability unconditionally be realized with-
out adopting the leveling gestures of humanism?
4. Finally, can stories of disability be analyzed without recourse to the
pathologizing discourse of interventionist medicine, on the one hand,
or to the grotesque, on the other?
In part, disability studies had devoted attention to the meaning of disability as
the product of epistemologies of able-bodiedness in order to avoid replacing one

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Public Culture fiction of the body with another. But such a focus also conceded a historical lack:
that of a sensual and sensory language to theorize the body itself. The theoretical
diagnosis had been limited to an archaeology of institutional power that sought
artificially to stabilize meanings of the body. To narrate a phenomenology of the
body requires an approach that can capture its defining elasticity — not as an
established fact, but rather as a mutable, temporal, “first-person” organism. Such
is the domain of literature and art.
It is in the performances and writings of disabled artists that disability studies
has been able to return to a phenomenology of the body — not in the theoretical
formulations of disability studies proper. Such a radical body of work has emerged
in spite of the fact that even artistic practices have been reconstrued as “therapy”
and “rehab” for the variety of humans deemed “special.” After all, rehabilitative
dance, painting, and sports — with their interventionist (even clinical) rules of
engagement — are implicated in a thirty-year history of redirecting the trans-
gressive commentary of disabled peoples into “safer” forms of self-expression.
Expressive art — as opposed to art therapy — came into existence only when an
audience made up of members of the disability community could be projected
into the future. Such a cross-disability audience had been traditionally courted by
advertisements for such consumer goods as wheelchairs and hearing aids, lobbied
by legal ads, and reassured by religions. But once the means of artistic production
were seized by disabled artists to explain the cultural predicament of disability,
the deviant body could be radically transformed into a vehicle for redressing its
normative cultural assignment as a “dustbin for disavowal” (Shakespeare 1994:
298).
In the United States, disabled viewers of television had been exhorted to pro-
tect their rights by political action groups such as ADAPT (Americans with Dis-
abilities for Assistance Programs Today), Jerry’s Orphans, and Not Dead Yet, but
rarely had disability-identified viewers been invoked as the ideal witnesses, or
accomplices, in the staging of artistic commentary. As with the artwork of other
minority groups and cultures, that of disability culture emerged from a brew of
conflict and dissent (and issued from an effort to throw off the hospital bed blan-
kets and confront spectators with the reality of bodily difference).8 In the wake of
disability studies’ tarnishing of the able body as a false idol, the disabled body

8. In his first film, The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950), Marlon Brando casts off the blankets that
conceal his paralyzed legs as his horrified girlfriend looks on. The gesture, as replayed in the literature
and performances of disabled artists, is aimed at mobilizing the shock value not only of the different
body, but also of the viewer’s guilt over his or her feelings of revulsion.

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that had been historically banished from public viewing (not to Re-engaging
mention public discourse) could now be reprogrammed. the Body
As the armless performance artist Mary Duffy (1997) com-
ments about the perceived “threat” her body presents to nondis-
abled onlookers, “Nobody ever gets the joke. But I like it. It’s
my defense in a hostile world, you know?” The “defense” to
which she refers is a card that she “pedals out” to those who
would make a marvel of her ability to write with her feet:
This card has been coated with a noxious substance.
In twenty-four hours both of your arms will fall off.
(Duffy 1997)
Duffy’s inversion of the female disabled body’s meaning to her
own benefit turns upon the artist’s ability to resist her position-
ing as a “marvel” of cultural training or rehabilitative rescue.
In her performance art, she identifies the rampant medicaliza-
tion within contemporary U.S. culture that would position her
body as a “case history”:
The words you use to describe me are “congenital mal-
formation.” Those big words those doctors used—they
didn’t have any that fitted me properly. I felt, even in the
face of such opposition, that my body was the way it
was supposed to be. It was right for me, as well as being
whole, complete, and functional. (Duffy 1997)
Such an open rejection of patronizing efforts to see her body
as incomplete challenges cultural beliefs that the disabled
body must be augmented or aesthetically restored to a closer
approximation of normative biology. The language intended to
make her body less visible in its difference is revealed as a
prosthetic “skin” no less encumbering than prosthetic arms —
their purpose more aesthetic than functional. In her live per-
formance, Duffy’s body references classical forms such as the

From top: Mary Duffy reclaims her body as “whole, complete, and functional”
in her performance art; Cheryl Marie Wade tells of her experience as a live
specimen in a medical teaching hospital; Wade performs her poem “Hands”;
Carrie Sandahl dons a medical lab jacket to recount her body’s encounters
with medicine and social stigma. All stills from Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks
Back (1997), directed by Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell.

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Public Culture Venus de Milo as her poetry recounts a personal history of social and medical
encounters, in the process resignifying her body as “whole, complete, and func-
tional.” To insist that the disabled body forgo prosthetic concealment unashamedly
relocates disabled bodies within a continuum of biological variation.
The poetry and performances of Cheryl Marie Wade invoke both the medical-
ized objectification of disabled bodies and their historical association with the
grotesque. “Sassy Girl: Portrait of a Poster Child Gone Awry” includes mono-
logues that describe medical symposia where, as a young disabled teenager, she
served as a medical exhibit while her body was showcased as a biological mon-
strosity:
I’m fourteen. Doing time in this teaching hospital when the head honcho
of surgery, Zeus, I believe he was called, decides to do a little show-and-
tell. . . . (Wade 1997)
For Wade, the medical theater of case studies becomes a repository of her own
horrific memories until she overcomes the urge to cry in the face of this objectifi-
cation and begins to parody the medical practitioner’s litany of pathologizing
descriptions. By refusing a passive compliance with the dehumanizing vocab-
ulary of medicine, the disabled body steals the medical stage and rejects the terms
of its professional reception. This mimicry of patronizing professional language
proffers an entrance into an otherwise closed system of representation that would
silence the disabled body. Such a strategy turns a silencing imperative into a pro-
ductive commentary on the disabled body’s presumed passivity and obedience to
authoritative taxonomies.
As a further redress to the historical affiliation of disability with monstrosity,
Wade’s poem, “Mine Are the Hands of Your Bad Dreams,” draws from mytho-
logical figurations of the body in order to identify a third space from within which
to embrace bodies that would otherwise exist only in relation to their alliance
with the disadvantaged.
Mine are the hands of your bad dreams—ooga, booga—
From behind the black curtain.
Claw hands, the Ivory girl’s hands after a decade of
roughing it
Crinkled, puckered, sweaty, scarred
A young woman’s dwarf, knobby hands
That ache for moonlight.
That tremble. . . . That struggle. . . .
Hands that make your eyes tear.

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My hands, my hands— Re-engaging

Hands that could grace your brow, your thighs. . . . the Body
My hands, my hands. . . . Yeah! (Wade 1997)
The conscious “outing” of disabilities in art runs counter to the social expectation
that divergent physicalities should be concealed from view. Wade resignifies an
implied nondisabled viewer’s horror—hands of your bad dreams—and casts her
poetic net wide to draw in a multitude of associations that clear the way for the
many powers—experience, metaphor, service, touch, emotion—that compel her
personal reclamation of “MY HANDS” by the conclusion of the poem. The con-
densed movement, from horror to isolated longing to the final seductive embrace
of her own desirability, powerfully replays a disabled woman’s rewriting of a
social script that would leave no space for affirming identity. Wade’s personal
reclamation pioneers an alternative embrace of the disabled body as sexual and
self-assured (even knowingly menacing) that evidences a fully cognizant subject
in charge of the historical and contemporary terms of her own representation.
In each of the art and performance pieces mentioned above, the speaking sub-
ject must come to terms with a monster of cultural making—what Duffy refers to
as her “own inner critic.” The formulation of a disabled subjectivity arrives posi-
tioned between discourses of the monstrous and the medical. Yet, as Carrie San-
dahl points out in the documentary Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (Sharon
L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, 1997), “being forbidden [whether by polite soci-
ety or disability studies] from talking about our medical conditions is also a way
of oppressing us.” The disabled body cannot simply be fashioned anew out of
whole cloth because its cultural situation finds it embedded within objectifying
and objectionable languages of the body. Donning a white medical suit that cites
the history of medical interventions upon her body, Sandahl recuperates her dis-
abled body by refusing to participate in the cultural demand to conceal natural
and constructed differences:
This piece acknowledges the way that I feel that people with disabilities
are always situated within a medical discourse. That’s why I got the lab
jacket and why it’s written in red to signify blood. And the fascination that
people seem to have with a medical discourse of your body—as if it’s
always written on your body whether you’re wearing it or not. (Sandahl
1997)
By demarcating the topography of her body and assigning each of its identifying
features to a corresponding medical practitioner or intervention, Sandahl’s body
becomes more than the sum of its parts — disability is reformulated as the prod-

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Public Culture uct of organic and cultural adaptive strategies that allow the body to endure with-
out acceding to the “predictions” that accompany interventions.
Such a process of reclaiming the medically (and socially) authorized narrative
of one’s body becomes the basis for disability art’s resignification of the disabled
body: not an erasure of the discursive terms that define one as Other, but rather an
effort to invert the power of even denigrating terminology into a redress of social
ideologies of difference. In Sandahl’s performance art, her medical suit pointedly
captures questions of incomprehension —“I bet the Easter Seals can do some-
thing for you.” “Do you ever dream that you’re normal?”—in order to deflect the
aggression behind such queries back at the public which formulated them.
A parallel example is documented in the poetry of Eli Clare. Her memory of
rehab training and speech therapy as a child with cerebral palsy recalls the repet-
itive practices that were supposed to lead her back to normative communication
patterns. The narrator of the poem “Learning to Speak” tells us: “I practiced the
sounds th, sh, sl / for years, a pianist playing endless / hours of scales” (Clare
1997). Yet, rather than merely memorialize the rote practices of rehabilitation,
the poem turns on the revelation that the acquisition of language would prove to
be a tool, not of a normalizing social order but of her own entrance into political
action: “I had to learn / the muscle of my tongue.”
Eli Clare’s poetry, like that of other disabled artists, reckons with the body as
an instrument that must be trained to articulate the experience of disability anew.
Although the language of deficits, limitations, and pathologies saturates the social
vocabulary that brings disability into being, an ableist culture’s discourse must be
mastered while, simultaneously, a radical transformation of the relationship
between materiality and meaning is engaged. The redeployment of disabled bod-
ies serves as more than a tool of integration; it becomes a tool of art itself by
reclaiming that which has been historically viewed as dysfunctional.
Thus, disability studies and art have come full circle to reinvest the disabled
body with a phenomenology predicated upon more than the rejection of stigma-
tizing assumptions. Like Byron’s play, disability studies first divests able-bodied-
ness of its mythical aura of perfectibility and then reclaims the sloughed-off
disabled exterior as a mantle of future possibility. Reclaiming disability, to alter
Simi Linton’s phrase slightly, occurs at the historical intersection of the nondis-
abled body’s demystification and the disabled body’s reintroduction as the more
appropriate paradigm for a mutable humanity.

Sharon L. Snyder is an assistant professor in the Department of Disability and

Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. David T. Mitchell is

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an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Ph.D. in Disability Re-engaging
Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They are the authors of the Body
Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000).

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