Divisions among the "Disabled"; Footnote to Marta Russell

christian a. gregory driver at nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu
Thu Jun 18 16:49:58 PDT 1998



>Where's the problem with this? At worst, she might be wrong on the
>facts--though I have yet to see any convincing evidence of an organic
>basis for CFS. (I'd be happy to be educated on this.) But even if she's
>wrong, why does her position arouse such hostility? She constantly
>insists that she in no way wants to belittle CFS victims or their
>suffering. Her broader argument--that a disease can be real even if its
>origin is psychological--is one I would expect disability advocates to
>embrace. And isn't she right that feelings of "overwhelming shame, guilt
>or helplessness" can make people unwell as surely as any pathogen?
>Wouldn't a left position be to broaden our notions of health rather than
>to insist that suffering can't be taken seriously unless it has an
>organic basis, as those who insist CFS _must_ be organic implicitly do?

yeah, maybe, except that showalter's repetoire of causalities doesn't include the most obvious one for thinking about gulf war syndrome, for example--namely, us imperialism. the hyperanxious claims about that the gulf war would be "no vietnam" did not only refer to the unmourned legacy of extended deterrence. they also referred to national anxiety about america's place in a post-soviet global system. gws is a sign of global class struggle, if it's anything. to ascribe it to some new version of hysteria returns it to the mommy-daddy-me, even if showalter is smart enough to run this symptommatology through lacanian psychoanalysis. zzzzz.

but more than that, her naive belief that she could excise hysteria from its presumed therapeutic legacies is incredibly cynical--as if being wrong about "the facts" were somehow incidental when making broad diagnostic claims about huge swathes of people. sheesh. or, as if, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, someone who did cultural studies had to be reminded about the value laden character of diagnostic language.

put another way: the "organic" character of these diseases is beside the point--because they never have any meaning, organic or otherwise, in a vacuum. saying that purely psychological afflictions are also "real" and not "fantasmatic" is no big achievement, because access to drugs, therapy, treatment, counterdiagnoses, to say nothing of health care workers, mediates every "affliction," like every "cure."

and we academics wonder why we're loathed by folks.

christian



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