On (Dis)Ability

Of the readings we did for this week (cited below), the one I found most helpful was Jason Palmeri's article on technical communication pedagogy. In addition to offering a new perspective on disability studies, Palmeri provided constructive ways to help others learn about this field as well. After providing several examples and a discussion of how "cripples" are framed as "burdens on society" and thus marginalized, Palmeri moves to promoting the idea that technical communicators must see disability accessibility "as a source of transformative insight into design practice for all" (57). This sounds like a noble and achievable goal to me, but I have more trouble imaging how it can work practically when he moves in that direction. Palmeri suggests that "we must begin to trouble the binary between normal and assistive technologies" by viewing all technologies as assistive. This makes sense, but when he goes on to say that students should conduct research with a screen reader, I wonder 1) might this activity reinforce that binary? and 2) where the heck do I get a screen reader? Both ponderings, obviously, point to larger questions about understanding and access that I don't have answers to.

Questions of access were at the forefront of several of the materials we viewed this week. Sandhu, Saarnio, and Wiman discuss access at several points, although I was disappointed that they didn't problematize the idea that laws can provide access until later in the piece. As an undergraduate, I distinctly remember the news staff of the campus paper doing investigative piece after investigative piece in attempts to get the administration to see that the campus was in violation of several accessibility laws. In the end, some administrators agreed but said there simply weren't funds to right the issues we raised. Sandhu, Saarnio, and Wiman also raise interesting questions about the intersection of poverty and disability. The correlation between the two conditions makes the whole situation much more complicated.

These three authors also make a claim when positing that there is a horizontal divide and a vertical divide within the digital divide. They say that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are inaccessible to some because of issues we've discussed before (socioeconomic concerns), and this is a horizontal divide. The vertical divide is "the difference between people who are able to use the existing technologies and people with disabilities with little or only partial access to these resources' (8). I think what we're dealing with is actually more than a divide. In searching for a better metaphor, it's almost as though we're all navigating the surface of a pane of safety glass that has splintered. In terms of technology, there are chasms everywhere.

Pamela Walker explore one such fissure in her essay "Artists with Disabilities: A Cultural Explosion." She makes a good point early on in saying that society expected people who were differently abled to accept their circumstances and make do, and that people internalized that feeling. This struck a chord with me because, although I do not identify with any community of physical disablement, I have internalized the same worldview in terms of socioeconomic struggles. Perhaps this is also why I react negatively to the lyrics near the end of Walker's essay "We're not longer grateful for the handouts you have thrown us ... " While I like the metaphorical "moving out and moving up," the sense of ungratefulness rubs me the wrong way. I don't have a lot of things and I don't think the system we live in is fair, but I'm grateful for what I do have. For that reason or perhaps for a reason I still need to find and explore, these lyrics do not evoke empathy in me.

Walker's text was rich with other connections between disability studies and the scholarship I've known. Her note on censorship was, I thought, very important. Unfortunately, I fear censorship in some form is happening to disabled artists, because I didn't find much when I tried to search for the artists she mentions. And she's certainly right that this has been going on for centuries. Her mention of Hephaestus struck a note of familiarity with me as well. As an undergraduate, I wrote a paper arguing that Hephaestus was the most overlooked of the Greek gods, and he certainly is the most unusual in his complexity. I love the connection Walker makes that Hephaestus, the one god described as lame, is the most well known patron of the arts among the Greek gods.

This brings us to the idea of cyborgs. I found Cromby and Standen's discussion of the definition of cyborg highly informative (although I'm obviously prone to liking definitions). They suggest three interpretations: 1) a metaphor used for rhetorical leverage 2) use of media and 3) physical augmentation of the body. The latter two, the authors say, are useful to people with disabilities. They then discuss issues of cyborgism, including access, surveillance, control, and dependency. Their points about the problematic nature of using technology in this way are well taken. I was especially interested in their discussion of surveillance and the idea of a house that could monitor whether its occupants needed intervention. The authors conclude that such a situation could be helpful or invasive and may ultimately increase the chasms discussed above that allow only the wealthy to have truly palatable options. The Thoughtware.tv site contributed some valuable insights to this dicussion as well, and I especially liked Jeff's ideas on the rhetorical choice behind the word disability:

"Disability focuses on a loss. Cyborg focuses on adaptive technology. It focuses on what we can do, not what we can't do. And I think that's a fundamental paradigm shift that must
occur if the disabled population has any hope of transitioning out of the shadows,
out of the institutions, and living a life of mobilization as opposed to one of stagnation."

I do take issue with one point in Cromby and Standen's article: the notion that women are more shaped by standards of appearance in our society than men. I wold argue that this is dependent on individual people. Although there may be a general perception that women are more affected by this, that may only mean that men are in greater danger of acting upon it.

Although I mentioned earlier that I do not self-identify as a disabled individual, I have certainly made use of cyborg technologies--braces, dermatological interventions, laser eye surgery--and I have encountered a surprising amount of (not always unwelcome) surveillance in each case. This also makes me think of the video I just watched of "quadraphlegic gamer/artist Robert Florio playing" a video game using mouth controls (found on this site). Although this surveillance was apparently allowed by Florio, it still was a result of his disability. Access, surveillance, control, and dependency are categories that become exponentially more complicated in terms of theorizing (dis)ability.




Works Cited

Cromby, John and Penny Standen. "Cyborgs and Stigma: Technology, Disability, Subjectivity." Cyberpsychology. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.

"Game Accessibility: Gaming with a Physical Disability." The Game Accessibility Project. http://www.accessibility.nl/games/index.php?pagefile=motoric

"On Disability, Adaptive Technology and Cyborg Societies." Thoughtware.tv. http://www.thoughtware.tv/videos/show/1121-On-Disability-Adaptive-Technology-And-Cyborg-Societies

Palmeri, Jason. "Disability Studies, Cultural analysis, and the Critical Practice of Technical Communication Pedagogy." Technical Communication Quarterly 15.1 (2006): 49-65. Print.

Sandhu, Jim S., Ilkka Saarnio, and Ronald Wiman. "Information and Communication Technologies and Disability in Developing Countries." October 2001. Print.

Walker, Pamela. "Artists with Disabilities: A Cultural Explosion." National Arts and Disability Center. University of California. 1998. Web.


Image from https://pstevensfhs.wikispaces.com/Hephaestus

On David Spurr's "The Rhetoric of Empire"

“The nomination of the visible is no idle metaphysic, no disinterested revealing of the world’s wonders. It is, on the contrary, a mode of thinking and writing wherein the world is radically transformed into an object of possession.” (Spurr 27)

Picking up where I left off in my last post, I think the working definition of race that I suggested is still making sense. (Race: a construction of particular rhetorics, used for a particular end in a particular social realm.) While I do think the idea of race was originally put forth with nefarious intentions, I don’t think the common usage of the term today necessarily indicates ill will. This may be a topic for more exploration later.

Having read portions of David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire before with a particular orientation in mind, I tried very hard to think of colonization and surveillance as applied to ethnicities, cultures, and/or “races.” My tendency, however, is still to think of colonization as applied to individual bodies, which is really a microcosm of those larger issues. I’ll try to address aspects of both in this post.

The first passage that caught my interest was Spurr’s reference to Derrida's anthropological war. The question of whether two cultures can communicate with each other without doing violence is a very subjective one. Spurr tells us that violence begins in the act of naming or of leaving unnamed. For example, we can examine the case of the Cherokee Indians, whose name for themselves was something closer to chilo-kee. (Obviously even my representation of their name for themselves is situated within a hegemonic culture, as I’m sure their represenation of themselves in writing did not look like those English letters above.) The white settlers heard “Cherokee,” and so that is how this particular tribe came to be known (Haas, lecture).

A big problem with theories of colonization, as shown above, is that a theoretical model for the colonial situation is necessary in order for us to examine it. However, this in itself is naming and does violence to the culture being studied. Is there a way to conduct an ethnography or to enter a communicative relationship without doing some measure of symbolic violence upon the culture studied? I don’t think there is. However, the amount of violence done may be smaller if two cultures desire to communicate peacefully as equals than if they lean toward any of the other (much more common) possible relationships. And when a relationship is inevitable, the choice of the least amount of violence is still commendable.

Having established, though, that symbolic violence is inevitable, I think I should point out that not all meetings of cultures need to end in colonization. For example, Spurr’s definition of colonization as “a form of self-inscription onto the lives of a people who are coneived of as an extension of the landscape” would not necessarily apply to all meetings of cultures (7). In the ideal such meeting, symbolic violence would still occur, but two cultures could look at (gaze upon) each other with mutual respect.

The framing of the colonized people as being natural is an interesting concept to me because it is not one I have focused on before, and yet it certainly is important and undeniable. Besides the many examples Spurr gives us, I couldn’t help reverting to thinking of my own academic explorations and the many ways in which women are colonized. Certainly, women have traditionally been thought of as the sex more in tune with nature, while men are thought of as more given to expertise in science, technology, etc. We are definitley subject to delusions about our own importance, including the idea that human history is distinct from natural history (159). Spurr demonstrates a “universal binarism that derives ethical value from an entire series of polarities: the Orient vs. the West, southern vs. northern Europe, primitive vs. modern, nature vs. civilization” (160). Thus, we can see how colonizers normalize an obligation to civilize, to “free” a (subservient) race from the grip of nature.

It is interesting, as well, that colonizing forces endow “the savage” with power that cannot be overcome by force alone; it must also be overcome by myth and symbol (and metaphor). This is the reasoning for all the visible representations of colonization, including Spurr’s noted depictions of crowds of aimless people, characterized as “children” juxtaposed with men in suits from the “First World.” As such, it is the writers/authors/scholars who possess the most powerful tools of colonization.

(This nature/human binary also fits with the problems Spurr emphasizes in the relations of a colonial situation, including the notion of technological and economic advancement as a status indicator in the dominant viewpoint that cultures exist in binary relationships (6). To address the economic advancement argument in terms of my earlier male/female example, one need only search the concept to discover that most studies show women making about 77 or 78 cents for the same work that men earn a dollar for.)

Spurr also cautions us, though, not to concieve of power as a monolithic structure. The “writer” of a colonial discourse can be any voice of institutional authority or cultural ideology (12). Very often, because of the Panopticon-like gaze that the colonized know may be resting upon them, these voices of authority come from the colonized peoples themselves in hopes of assimilating, gaining power, or being a “model minority.” Thus, everyone is always a subject of a colonizing gaze, regardless of who is aligning themselves with the dominant power structure in order to do the gazing. “For the observer, sight confers power; for the observed, visibility is a trap” (16).

We even have systems for placing inanimate landscapes under the power of the speaker because they can be gazed upon (18). The idea of a golf course as colonized wilderness makes me wonder what is safe if the earth itself is subject to this dominant discourse? Certainly people are not, as evidenced by Spurr’s telling of the colonization of the bodies of both the male and female pygmy. I think the answer is nonexistent; anything can be colonized. “The gaze is never innocent or pure, never free of mediation by motives which may be judged noble or otherwise” (27). There is always a purpose or motive to surveillance/the gaze.