alec ramsdell wrote:
Marta,
> I haven't seen the last issue, but this doesn't sound surprising. It's
> much in keeping with Louis' characterization of the slant towards banal
> psychologing in the fiction. What was the "political" slant of the
> article (or as much as you read)?
Hi Alec,
The writer featured in the Nation, Leonard Kriegal, says that "to some extent, living with a permanent disability is a political act, since among the ways a society should be measured is how it tries to right the balance with illness and accident. To speak of being crippled in political terms is as valid as to speak of incest or child abuse or pornography in political terms. How one endures disability may be - and I say this reluctantly - a truer measure of what conservatives call "character" than of those of us on the left care to admit."
But the totality of the article is about how disablement results in an obsession with the body. Kriegal uses words like "affliction," "the broken body," - ouch - that the disability rights movement(DRM) has been trying to move beyond for 20 years. He denounces sentimentality but focuses centrally on loss of body. Well there is loss associated with disability, but this always becomes the dominant society's way of viewing disability and it plays on nondisabled people's fears about becoming disabled. It quickly moves nondisabled people to view disability a matter of personal loss -it garners their pity- rather than forcing nondisabled people to look at the macroeconomics of disablement.
Kreigal's words center disablement in a medical model, the "afflicted" individual is the issue, rather than the social construction of disablement, our exclusion, the barriers, being at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, our marginalization in a capitalist economy, the de-valutation of bodies perceived to be of no use to production, i.e., market-based social Darwinism.
When the individual psychological aspect is so elevated, social injustice gets put on the back seat which re disability has been so for decades and continues to be so. Disablement becomes an attitude not a social condition to be met withpolitical action rather than psychology or moralism.
The rest of the article is about writers who focus on their personal bodily affliction, the "besieged body." Kriegal writes, "I have no choice but to measure what I am against what I might have been if my virus had not taken me down."
The DRM says OK we know about that, it does become more difficult, but get over it. That is what disability pride is about. We know its a pain in the ass but what about doing something for your brothers and sisters who are experiencing oppression because of disablement. There are plenty of opportunities.
But then, to be fair there is a difference in my approach which is to analyze disablement in a socio/political vein from someone like Kriegel who is into the more popular literary emoting. I just don't think literary emoting should be the primary focus of the Nation.
One of the problems with the Nation is that is has not had much of an interest in our movement. As a consequence, it is way behind in its attempt to deal with our issues. Writers with disabilities have been having our discourse in disability pubs like The Ragged Edge and Mouth, the voice of disability rights for years. That has been readily accessible to anyone who had the interest to delve into it.
I've always had a curiosity as to why the Nation has ignored us. First I though it was because they had not been presented with the "correct" analysis, but after reading this piece I know it is largely that they are stuck in traditional psycholog-ism. Eeek, I've committed blasphemy.
Marta Russell
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