“As a Cripple I Swagger”: Disability Studies in Education and Embodied Difference

• In Event: Practicing Disability Studies in Education, Acting Toward Social Change

Abstract

Scholars in disability studies locate dis/abilities within structures of society, rather than within the biology or essence of individuals. Such critical understandings of dis/ability as a social and political construct implicitly build upon Simone de Beauvoir’s (1989,1952) oft-cited “woman is made not born” critique of biological determinism. The dis/abled body, thus, functions as a cultural text ‘made’ within binary social relations of power and inscribed with meaning. Despite the fact that Beauvoir did not explicitly or adequately address disability and her writing (at least in translation) is peppered with ableist metaphors, several of her ideas about the body are nonetheless relevant to disability studies in education (DSE).
In this paper, I focus on Mairs’ writing, making connections to Beauvoir’s concept of situated embodiment, to demonstrate how both authors conceive of the body as both situation and point of view. I show how viewing the body as situation, helps to lay bare the embedded socio-cultural-political practices that infuse the dis/abled, gendered, and raced body with meaning. Drawing primarily on Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Mairs’ (1996) Waist-high in the World: A Life Among the Non-Disabled, but also more recent scholarly writing on Mairs (Johnson & Mintz, 2011), I illustrate the implications of this work for DSE.
Privileging of knowledge generated from lived/embodied experience is but one example of the many points of connections between Mairs and Beauvoir that have relevancy to DSE. With concepts such as la situation (situation) and l’expérience vécue (lived experience) (1989, 34-37), Beauvoir refuses essentialism and biological determinism and privileges alternative knowledge claims grounded in particular lived realities—themes also addressed by Mairs. Thus, both writers view the body as simultaneously material reality and situation to be taken up and interpreted--an occasion for meaning, rather than as a static object or state of being.
Mairs and Beauvoir also expose the instabilities of categories, such as disabled and normative, a destabilization that is central to inclusive practice. Moreover, both writers expand the social model of dis/ability by refusing individual/social, mind/body, and theory/practice binaries. I show how Mairs articulates an ever more sophisticated theory of embodiment that stays intimately close to the particularities of her own body, illustrating a model of disability that is deeply personal, but also political and social. Because Mairs delves so completely into the relationship between embodiment and issues of subjectivity, language, and perception, her work is particularly fertile ground for DSE. This paper marks a beginning point for a much-needed rereading of both Beauvoir and Mairs within a larger discourse of DSE.

Author

• Beth A. Ferri, Syracuse University