The Facilitated Communication Debates and Masculinity: Implications for Educators

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: Disabling Intersections of Gender, Sex Education, and Families

Abstract

The Facilitated Communication debates, extending from 1980 through the present, have mostly focused on authorship. This paper is a critical discourse analysis of newspaper articles, television programs, scholarly articles, and movies on FC concentrating on the watching of bodies in the Great Chain of Being (Foucault, 1977, 1980, Hall, 2001, Lesko, 2001). This watching of bodies and insistence on performance has permeated both sides of the Facilitated Communication debates. This paper examines how the debate ultimately insist on the Western masculine virtues of independence and self-reliance. Both sides of an argument market their cases to win people over, even when their basic framework may not differ as much as their ideology would suggest (Billiig, 1997).

Author

• Andrew Bennett, unaffiliated