Sensing Disability

MAIRIAN CORKER

Disability theory privileges masculinist notions of presence, visibility, material real-ity, and identity as given. One effect of this has been the erasure of sensibility, which, it is argued, inscribes, materializes, and performs the critique of binary thought. Therefore, sensibility must be re-articulated in order to escape the neces-sary error of identity implicit in accounts of cultural diversity, and to dialogue across difference in ways that dislocate disability from its position of dis-value in feminist thought.

In times that are increasingly characterized by concerted attempts to global-ize knowledge, the issue of difference is highlighted. In trans-Atlantic com-merce, those of us who work in disability studiesor, indeed, in feminist philosophyare constantly reminded of the diffi culties of thinking globally. Not the least of these diffi culties is how we use and understand language without falling into the epistemic trap of universal truths. Language does not, as a rule, travel well, and meanings frequently get lost in errors of translation. Written primarily from a British perspective, this essay will explore some of the diffi culties of addressing ontological difference in the context of the dominant view in disability theory that bifurcates the given of biological anomaly or limitation (impairment) and the mutability of oppressive social conditions of or responses to normativism (disability).1 The bifurcation of impairment and disability is analogous to the traditional feminist bifurcation of sex and gender, which was conceived as a way of focusing attention on the social nature of womens oppression. Traces of such a bifurcation can often be found at the level of ontology, as can be observed in the tendency to view both impair-ment and disability in terms of simplistic, collective accounts of ontologically diverse experiences that assume such experiences to be incommensurable. Such accounts are frequently founded on dualisms between mind and body or deafness and blindness, for example.

Hypatia vol. 16, no. 4 (Fall 2001) by Mairian Corker

Mairian Corker 35

However, postessentialist feminists2 have criticized this bifurcation on the grounds that it retains the excesses of masculinist thought and thus contributes to womens oppression. The binary between the given of stable material facts and the mutability of interpretation is seen to reinforce masculinist dichotomies such as reason/emotion, nature/culture, presence/absence, and universalism/relativism. At the heart of these dichotomies is the assumption that the nature of knowledge is determined by theories, methodologies, and data that are legitimated by dominant, masculinist world-views. Thus, binary thought is seen to perpetuate gender stereotypes and symbolic constructs of the womans body that constrain how social differentiation is conceptualized, and which leave outdated masculinist notions of identity intact. These notions of identity inscribe narrow forms of social practice that reduce the productive infl uence of difference in ways that obscure or disregard important dimensions of womens experience.

Feminists, both disabled and non-disabled, have criticized the dominant views of disability theory and feminism for their failure to take account of disabled womens experiences, and for their failure to problematize impair-ment.3 But, with some exceptions that, interestingly, tend not to be located within mainstream disability studies literature,4 these critiques emphasize that disability studies should become a universalizing discourse of difference5 that inscribes and retains the categorical status of (a visible and present) disability. There has been a reluctance to fully address concerns that a universalized discourse of disability conceived in these terms operates in ways that limit how we think collectively from disabled peoples lives, and therefore places constraints on how we theorize the relationship between disability, impair-ment, and normativism.6 Indeed, it could be argued that existing critiques of normativism within disability studies are themselves based on disablist7 models of emancipation from normativism that presuppose and reinforce the domina-tion of particular disabled ontologies. This process initiates a descent into injustice, which should be of concern to feminists and disabled people alike. Hence, there remains a need to develop an ethical and philosophical framework in which the meaning of difference can be negotiated in ways that are not limited by a normative bias regarding what constitutes the disabled body, the proper function of disabled peoples mental ability, and communication. Since impairment, as it is defi ned in the dominant discourse, in feminism, and in disability theory, is not of disabled peoples lives but a series of labels and their signifi ers derived from scientifi c positivism,8 there is similarly a need to understand impaired ontologies. To achieve this understanding, disabled feminists must embrace both a critique of normative bias and a critique of onto-logical imperialism that understands and refl ects their mutual constitution.

Clearly there are many strands to such a critique, which is necessarily informed by feminist, postessentialist perspectives. In this essay, I will focus on the erasure of disabled peoples sensibility by the normative bias of ontologi-

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cal imperialism. Sensibility is taken primarily to be the set of individual and collective dispositions to emotions, attitudes, and feelings that are relevant to value theory, including ethics, aesthetics, and politics. But since I will be arguing that an important material aspect of sensibility is sensation, sensibility is also used as a metaphor for the embodiment of these dispositions, specifi cally in people who sense the world differently. Further, sensibility must, by its very nature, take biological difference and socio-cultural difference to be mutually constitutive, rather than to regard either or both as given, and this troubles the impairment/disability binary. When we understand that the contributions made by biological conditions such as deafness and blindness to our lived experience are constituted in and through social interaction, we can then turn to exploring these embodiments. In conclusion, it is suggested that such a methodological and theoretical turn enables the development of responsible and responsive ways, or sensed ways, of thinking collectively that can be used to balance the political project of emancipation from oppression with the struggle for inclusive societies.

Dis-Abling Sensibility

The diffi culties of communicating and theorizing across cultural, ontological, and epistemic difference within the disability collective are particularly marked. There are two main reasons for this that operate respectively at different levels of communication and understanding: what is immediately recognizable or visible, readily accessible, and easily understood, and what can be understood only by addressing the complex set of signifi ers that are concealed, often through normative practice.

The fi rst reason is that unifying disabled people is problematic because we are geographically dispersed and socially and culturally diverse, in addition to being one of the most powerless groups in society. As such, we are often relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of the oppressed in social systems built on structural inequality. Whereas feminists are increasingly recognizing the importance of social and cultural diversity among and within women, these particular conceptualizations of difference, and the way they are employed in theory and practice, erase the experience of disabled women, whose difference remains defi ned in terms of biological anomaly and limitation. In feminist texts, disability is commonly placed in the category of the undefi ned otherthe and so on . . . who, in this reading, has no cultural status.

From a disability studies perspective, this erasure locates feminism within an oppressive normative bias which must be resisted by disabled people. Thus, Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997, 22) and others argue for a universalized disability discourse that draws on feminisms challenge to the structural system of gender. She aims to develop a perspective on disability that advocates

Mairian Corker 37

political equity (1997, 23). But this perspective prompts questions about what, precisely, is meant by positive, given that positivity and negativity are socially constructed value judgements and their history tends to be authorized.

In common with what I see to be the prevalent fl eshy concerns of feminist philosophy and social theory, Thomsons standpoint politics foregrounds vis-ible disabilities9 (1997, 141 n. 12) and freakery. She seeks to imagine disabled bodies as extraordinary rather than as deviant and to shift the conception of disability from pathology to (positive) identity (1997, 137). But the way in which she attempts to do this leads me to the conclusion that she interprets identity largely in terms of recognition; or, to go back to my earlier distinc-tion, identity, when conceived in this way, is located at the surface level of communicating difference. However, I would question the assumption that the claiming and honoring of physical markers of exceptionality as identity is less troublesome, and less normativizing, than the notion of impairment as given in the context of binary thought founded on notions of presence/absence and mind/body.

It is commonly argued within both disability studies and feminism that identity is a necessary error10 that is needed to challenge the normative bias that produces stereotypical versions of disabled people and women. However, there is considerable evidence that identity, when it asserts itself in the name of cultural singularity and control over life and environment, can fragment collective expression. Moreover, when a system is designated as pluralist, the only identities that are likely to enter the plurality are those that are able to fi t within the overall rationality that approves and controls the consensus. Put another way, the regulative power of universalizing discourse constitutes minoritizing expressions of difference.

The privileging of the visible and the present in many ways refl ects the rational consensus of disability theory and politics,11 and, as Thomson (1997, 143 n. 6) notes, her position is similar to that taken by feminist texts in the postmodern, materialist tradition.12 But the embodiment of rational consensus in the material body demands a turn against the constitutive historicity of disability, and, as Judith Butler (1993) suggests, if it is accompanied by an erasure of performativity, such a move can be profoundly undemocratic, often exclusionary. It therefore risks disembodying collective thought in ways that problematize Thomsons claim that disability is defi ned not as a set of observ-able, predictable traitslike racialized or gendered featuresbut rather as any departure from an unstated physical and functional norm (1997, 24).

An example may help at this point. Deaf people who use sign languages represent a powerful embodiment of the rational consensus of visibility and presence, and so their entrance into the collective voice of disability politics is accommodated in spite of the Deaf 13 communitys emphasis on Deaf identity and the political goal of social coexistence. Historically, traces of normativism

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in this identity have produced a troubled relationship with the physical fact of deafness, or hearing impairment, and therefore with impairment in general (see Corker 1998; 2000). Additionally, the self-affi rming goals of minority language rights and social coexistence in some ways put Deaf identity at variance with disabled peoples universalizing expressions of difference, which have the political goal of social inclusion. A common way of justifying these goals is that because no two cultures or languages can be perfectly transparent to each other, there is always an excess of meaning that will not be reached in dialoguing across difference. But within the Deaf experience, this excess is taken as meaning that Deafness is incommensurable14 or untranslatable vis--vis disability: a binary is established between Deafness and disability that is reproduced in totalizing concepts of difference.

Susan Wendell (1996) suggests that particular theoretical focuses and stand-points both derive from and are limited by knowledge. In The Rejected Body, she writes, for example, of the necessity of recognizing that the claim to speak for oneself does not relieve one of responsibility not to overgeneralize on the basis of ones experience and not to construe issues narrowly in the interest of promoting ones own viewpoint. However, she also says that her focus on physi-cal disability arises because she knows much more about physical disabilities than . . . about mental disabilities, and because (she is) particularly interested in attitudes towards the body (1996, 5). As Ofelia Schutte (2000, 55) notes, what we hold to be the nature of knowledge is not culture-free but is deter-mined by methodologies and data legitimated, in this case, I would argue, by the rational consensusThomsons politics of visibility underpinned by the unstated norm of physicalism. Moreover, even if we were to disagree with the view that bodily concerns are privileged in the mind/body dualismas might some philosophers who concur with Marx that philosophy is concerned primar-ily with (mental) interpretations of the worldthe outcome, for sensibility, is the same under conditions of binary thought. However, Schutte further suggests that we might map the statements of the culturally different other according to three categoriesreadily understandable, diffi cult to understand, and truly incommensurable (2000, 56). In everyday language, what this means is that the naturalness of peoples differences are constituted in comments such as Yeah, that is different, which closes communication at the level of Schuttes fi rst category. Moreover, when the degree of diffi culty in understanding the position of the culturally different other is determined by the rational consensus, this also tends to close communication at the fi rst level.

For example, in my book Deaf and Disabled or Deafness Disabled? (1998), I wrote of my own experience of struggling to make meaning in the context of an embodied uncertainty, instability, and transience that is characteristic of deafness as communicative difference in a hearing-speaking world. I suggested that though I seemed to speak the same language as English-speaking hearing

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people on a surface level, communicating at this level brought a loss of self because at the deeper level of signifi cation my language was very different. As an example, I used the term discussion, which for me signifi es the social practice that is legitimated by the dominant hearing-speaking culture of the universities in which I work. The hearing-speaking way of discussing is a practice that I fi nd oppressive because to function, I am necessarily embodied in a third party who has the role of translating across cultures in both direc-tions, often failing to keep the infl uence of their own culture in check. In bell hookss terms, discussion in the hearing-speaking way represents an absence of choices (1984, 5). However, I did not on this occasion describe it in quite this way, with the result that much was left unsaid.

In a subsequent review of the book, Anita Silvers (1998, 32) commented: I am persuaded that Corker accurately portrays the differences in the experience of deaf and hearing people in situations that are dominated by speech. But this sort of difference does not imply that deaf and hearing people give different meanings to discussion, any more than Corker and I mean different things by downstairs, even though my experience of descending the stairs in my power wheelchair is sure to be very different from Corkers experience of a graceful and surefooted descent. In this commentary, Silvers was perhaps reminding me of Wendells concern about overgeneralizing. At the same time, in making this comment, Silvers appears to take referring to be the primary component of meaning: that is, discussion and downstairs are regarded as signs that appear to signify some commonality of meaning at the deeper level of signifi ca-tion.

In the physical material world, it may be that downstairs, and even discus-sion, can be used mainly as referents to describe real objects. However, I would argue, fi rst, that we cannot use the same frameworks for describing mean-ing in the social world, and second, that it is primarily the social world that marks sensory ontologies. The reason for this claim lies in Silverss later observation that the population of the class constructed of individuals substantially limited by physical or mental impairments shifts, because whether each individual is a member is a transient fact (2000, 126; emphasis added). It is nevertheless the case that a state of embodied transience is not ontologically secure, and it is in the interests of such security that steps are often taken to render transience more predictable and manageable. But whether and how such steps can be taken is not uniform.

In the social world there is a contingency to meaning at the level of signifi ca-tion that in many ways determines the degree of mutuality that can be reached in social interaction. This contingency is universalized in the fi xity of the mate-rial or the physical, because as I suggest in my book (1998, 8489), navigating the social world is an altogether different and more complex cognitive task than navigating ones way around the physical material world. It is possible to

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40 Hypatia

map the latter to assist ones navigation, and one can even use the maps of others with some reliability, but for the former there can be no translation manual (Malinowski 1965) in any sense of the word. Further, social meaning must be understood and described within contexts of cultural reality often radically different from our own. Social languages are not parcelled out in rationally consistent conceptual schemes: they overlap, interact, fuse, form, and are deformed. The social is transience. And, as Gloria Anzalda (1987) suggests in her study of borderlands, these relations refl ect shades of linguistic meaning rooted in historical confl ict and in oppressive social relations, communicated in accent, intonation, gesture, as well as in semantic content.

In such circumstances, I would suggest that the juxtaposition of physical or mental impairmenta dualism that is also employed by Wendell and, indeed, one that is prevalent in institutional discourseand the notion of transience seems untenable. The conjunction or references an incommensurable relation-ship that, in this case, elides sensation. Since sensation lies at the interface of mind, body, and world, and is therefore a critical part of ontology, its elision disembodies disability theory. Simply adding the term sensory to this phrase does not change its underlying pattern of signifi cations. This is perhaps an important reason why, in terms of accommodative outcomes, building ramps for those who use wheelchairs is not the same as providing bilingual education and sign language interpretation for those who are deaf. In an accessible physical environment, physical disability can disappear. But the social environment can never be rendered immutable in a way that accomplishes the disappearance of sensory disability, and this, I would argue, is complicated by the alternative ways of understanding the basic elements of reality necessarily employed by people with sensory impairments. The sensorially impaired body is always in a state of dys-appearance because the normal/disabled binary remains intact.15

Thus, Silverss error in equating physical and social offers additional evidence about the important contribution that can be made by attending to sensibility. However, it also highlights Anzaldas (1987) view that if language ratifi es and expresses social hierarchies, it must also provide a medium for liberation as new meanings are created at points of language confl ict. For example, people who are deaf are frequently assumed to live their lives between Deaf and hearing worlds, occupying marginal positions to both. This is sometimes a direct consequence of the rigidity of minoritizing identity politics that produces spaces of in-betweenness, populated by ontologies that are similar to the non-dualistic mestiza consciousness described in Third World feminist writing (Anzalda 1987; Mohanty 1991). What I was emphasizing, therefore, was Schuttes point about levels of understanding, and the limits that focusing understanding on what is immediately recognizable and readily accessible places on articulating difference and on understanding oppression. Put another way, I wonder where the comparison of downstairs with discussion is located

Mairian Corker 41

in relation to the rational consensus of physicalism (or mentalism), and what the outcome would be if this comparison were taken to a deeper level of understanding outside of the constraints of dualistic thought.

Attempting to answer this question seems to lead directly into the second diffi culty in communicating and theorizing across difference: that the politi-cal class of disabled people, and the owners of the rational consensus, may themselves have negative attitudes about impairment, and limited knowledge in respect of people with impairments dissimilar to their own (French 1993). On the surface, this seems to be especially signifi cant for a collective politics that must, if it is to avoid being exclusionary, deal with the transience of disability and with the disabled subject whose difference is invisible. But if, as Liz Stanley argues, the act of knowing must be examined as the crucial determiner of what is known (1990, 12), how then, given everything that has been said so far, are we to gain this knowledge if we operate within paradigms of (assumed) incommensurability? Is it possible that incommensurability can become the occasion for creativity and protest as new hybrid concepts emerge from clashes between dissonant and incommensurable ontologies in such a way that impairment itself is destabilized?

To explore this possibility further, I want to turn to the cluster of concepts that are at the heart of what I will call sensibility. By sensibility, I do not mean how we perceive the world around us, but the set of individual or collective dispositions to emotions, attitudes, and feelings that are relevant to value theory, including ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Sensibility, however, undoubtedly incorporates the subjective aspect of perception that philosophers call sensation, and thus, I would argue, it troubles particular understandings of our access to a fi xed mental or physical reality. Sensibility engenders ways of being in and knowing our world that are materialized in contradictory bodies in process, and performed in shifting aesthetic, ethical, and political values. In short, sensibility is the rubric of and so on described by Price and Shil-drick (1998), that constantly inscribes the excessive domain of what Butler (1993) calls unintelligibility, and that depends on the joining of reality and imagination.

Sensationseeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tastingis formed of a union of the senses to the point where they often seem indistinguishable (Classen 1993): we can do something only as we are able to make sense of it (Spivak 1992, 158). Sensation and sensibility are therefore not situated at the surface level of reception and interpretation of reality, but active processes that are the product of social and historical forces (Haraway 1988). A view of identity that privileges the present and the visible, as in Thomsons work, risks disembodying sensibility if it assumes that sensation is a direct line to reality and truth. More importantly, as implied in the critique of Silverss and Wendells use of the mind/body binary, a disability theory that bifurcates

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the given of biological anomaly or limitation (impaired sensation) from the mutability of oppressive social conditions of or responses to normativism (sensibility), to the point where it constructs them as incommensurable, dis-ables sensibility. This is especially so given that sensation, as the example of deaf people shows, is already compressed within the binary opposition of physical or mental impairment. Nevertheless, the dis-abling of sensibility effects a closure on valuable, insightful, and imaginative ways, sensed ways of being and knowing that can make collective expressions of disability more responsive and responsible.

Sensing Disability

Though rational discourse is limited by incommensurable differences, ratio-nality is traditionally a normative, masculinist concept that, in a disabled feminist reading, only has salience in universalized expressions of difference if it acknowledges its relation to the disabled, feminist imaginary who stretch[es] the limits of imagination(s) towards responsive and responsible local sensitivity both close and far from home (Code 2000, 68). Schutte suggests that a more useful way of thinking about incommensurability is to look at nodes in a linguistic interchange or a conversation in which the others speech, or some aspect of it, resonates as a kind of strangeness or displacement of the usual expectation (2000).16 Returning to my discussion with Silvers and Wendell, I interpret this to mean that a sensed disability thinks and acts out of its transience. That is to say, because transience operates at a more complex and under-theorized level of thought that has potentially deeper impact on our understanding of difference, dialogues across difference must take place from positions of absence or limitation, as well as from positions of assumed and present incommensurability.

To illustrate this point, and to bring a concrete focus to this analysis, I want to look at some embodied examples of interaction involving sensory ontologies that are marked as different from the norm. In the context of feminist preoc-cupations with vigilance against epistemic imperialism that reach beyond the concerns of the white, middle-class, female subject, the choice of examples that draw on the voices of disabled children is no accident. Childhood philosophers, like disabled philosophers, rarely fi gure within the traditional canon of philo-sophical writing, and both are marginalized by perceptions that label them as immature and irrational. Nevertheless, as Andrea Nye (2000, 102) sug-gests, often self-questioning and redefi nition [of philosophy] have come from outside what is considered philosophy proper. Moreover, she continues that the urgethe motiveto philosophize comes from awe, awe at the mystery and complexity of human existence (2000, 108). Awe goes hand in hand with sensibility, and I would suggest that, if anything, awe is the (potential)

Mairian Corker 43

condition of childhood. But childrens sense of awe tends to be forced into ready-made boxes by the interpretive limits of adult imaginationswhat I described above as disabled sensibility. In this context, and returning to Schuttes point above about linguistic interchange, it is particularly important to record encounters between identities that, though seemingly commensu-rable on the surface, weave together and syncretize different standpoints and sensibilities, as the following examples show.17

Translation of video-taped interview with Linda, aged 15 years, conducted in sign language:77. Mairian: So what do you think about disabled people?78. Linda: About disabled people . . . I like them. It must be hor-rible to be disabled but there is nothing wrong in it. I certainly wouldnt think or say what Glenn Hoddle18 said. I wouldnt do that. Its horrible, and the teasing, its not nice.79. Mairian: Do you think youre disabled?80. Linda: No!81. Mairian: No?82. Linda: Someone did say to me that deaf is disabled, is that true or not?83. Mairian: Im asking you . . . what do you think?84. Linda: No.85. Mairian: You dont think so?86. Linda: No . . . what about you?87. Mairian: . . . Um . . . disabled . . . has many meanings and maybe when I use the word disabled, I mean something different from you. But . . . I would say yes, I think I am disabled.88. Linda: (laughs) Why, you dont look disabled. You can walk naturally. Disabled people have funny walks, you knowlike Kevin. They have a funny walk and they are disabled and you are deaf and are not disabled. Other people have said that you are deaf so that means that you are disabled but I think I am deaf but Im not disabled. If you have a funny walk then you are and I am not. If I was disabled that would really upset me I think I would always wish that I could walk properly. So not being able to walk or see is disabilitynot me.

In this interaction, I see Linda as acting out of spontaneous consciousnessor what Harding (1991, 295) describes as the awareness she has of her individual experience before any substantial self-refl ection on that experience or any consideration of the social construction of her identity. This consciousness is nevertheless mediated by the dominant cultural texts that surround her. I feel she looks to me as the sympathetic outsider who comes with a set of

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critical, comparative questions that can develop her sensibility. I see myself as someone who has the prerogative of critical self-refl ection that allows me to choose between different senses, and who wishes to expand that prerogative to include Linda. Though both of us are deaf, and both of us use the same approach to communication in informal settings, Linda is growing up in the closed environment of a special school for Deaf children whereas my life has been spent in the tension-ridden spaces between Deaf and hearing worlds. Linda recognizes and demonstrates an aversion to disabling practice in relation to other disabled people, coupled with a rejection of the label disabled when applied to herself, to Deaf people as a group, and to me as a deaf person. Thus the distinction between Deaf and deaf becomes blurred in the process of social interaction. But, in the last example, it is interesting that disability is associated with how I look, with different kinds of visual performance, and with tragedy, and, in Lindas view, I dont fi t any of these perceptions. When I suggest that I am disabled, these same presentist assumptions are used to contest my self-perception.

A sensitivity to the diverse ontologies and experiences of deafness leads me to interpret our interaction in a number of ways. But which interpretation prevails depends on which part of the interaction we, separately and together, can make sense of, and whether all senses are equally accessible to both of us. If we process the part that says Deaf people are not disabled, as an adult who is academically trained, I could argue that this fi ts both with the traditional Deaf Studies view of Deaf identity as given, and with the social model perspective that bifurcates impairment and disability. But because Linda is acting out of spontaneous consciousness this would have little meaning for her. It would close down dialogue in exactly the same way as the researcher who, in response to Lindas insistence that Deafness is not disability, says Yeah, that is different. In this case, as Harding (1991) suggests, experience lies, but whose experience lies? However, if we consider how Linda contests my disabled sensibility with reference to her own way of making sense, an alternative interpretation is suggested. Certainly, Linda displaces impairment from Deaf experience. But how and why she does this is not as simple as Deaf identity would have us believe, when we remember that Lindas experience is both centered on sensual histories and geographies of vision and space, and marginalized on the basis of these same things within normative discourse. Linda remembers that some unidentifi ed person had suggested that deaf is disabledand, again, it is not clear which meaning of D/deaf is being employed herebut she still wants clarifi cation from me. In her world, disability is not named, though disabling practice is referred to. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Linda emphasizes that my visual appearance is at odds with her individual sensed experience of disability. In her world, she cannot exercise the prerogative to step outside of a visual experience that says a picture is a factthe fact being that because

Mairian Corker 45

disabled people look like freaks, I cannot therefore be disabled because I dont look like a freakunless she thinks from absence. For this to happen, absence must be fi lled from the knowledge of Others. What is important here is that Lindas interpretation of disability shows the limitations of Thomsons arguments. This example also indicates that the depth that critique gives to understanding is elided when we focus on the surface level of interpretation. Further, it is not diffi cult to see how this interpretation, deprived of sensibility, can fail to problematize the naturalized, taken for granted status of the category Deaf. In the absence of strategic interventions of the kind I sought to effect, dis-abled sensibility, if ritualised, materializes an exclusionary visual-visceral politics of looking like what you are (Walker 1993).

These limitations are further exposed when, in attempting to think collec-tively, we place deafness in conversation with blindnesssensibilities that are constructed as incommensurable in binary thought. There are many examples of insightful and imaginative thinking that takes place from diverse ontologies of blindness in both the disability studies literature and the philosophy literature.19 I will focus on one from Rod Michalkos book The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness, because it involves an interaction that has similar parameters to my interaction with Linda. That is, it is an interaction between an adult who has lived with both sightedness and blindness and a child who cannot know sightedness directly.

I spent some time speaking with a three year old blind boy, Mark, at his home. We sat on the fl oor, legs spread in front of us, rolling a ball back and forth. At one point, the ball hit Marks foot and bounced away from us. Mark immediately began trying to locate the ball. He began looking for the ball by stretching his arms out very quickly in as many directions as he could. After a short time, Mark stopped looking and said, My mommy could fi nd the ball. Really? I replied. Yeah, Mark said, cause she can see. I asked, How do you know that? Without any hesitation, Mark answered, Cause shes got really, really, really long arms! (Michalko 1998a, 79)

Rod, himself a legally blind person, suggests that Marks fi nal remark evokes a mixture of cuteness and pathos. Whereas the cuteness may mature into an adult experience that enhances blind sensibility, normative discourse hears only the pathosthe privatizing nature of blindness created by an exclusion from the world known through sight (1998a, 80). Normative, rational discourse insists that blind children must have the opportunity to understand their privatizing experience as illusion (1998a, 8081). Thus, pathos traps disabled sensibility in an association with the world of the private discrete individual. However, in his responsive reading of Marks sensibility, Rod offers a way in

46 Hypatia

which blind sensibility can sense a community consciousness that displaces the opposition between public and private life. From a position that says you look like what you arewhich, in a visio-spatial world, bears traces of the Cartesian proof of self-identity, I think therefore I amLinda would contest Marks observation that his mother has really, really, really long arms. Thus she reinforces the rational consensus that dis-ables blind sensibility. However, if Linda were to read Marks observation from a position of absence, she would see how it makes sense, how it imagines a world in which sight doesnt fi gure in the traditional sense. But for this imaginary to enter the plurality, Linda, as a stakeholder in the rational consensus that privileges the present and the visible, must value absence by re-constructing the unity of sensory embodiments.

Deconstructing Value

To draw the various threads of this argument together, I want to return to the defi nition of sensibility as the set of individual and collective dispositions to emotions, attitudes, and feelings that are relevant to value theory, including ethics, aesthetics, and politics. In binary thought, the reasons for choosing one account or the other function as values that can be differently applied, individually and collectively, by those who make the choices (Kuhn 1996). Philosophical concern with value and dis-value has traditionally focused on three connected issues. First, on what sort of property or characteristic of something its having value or being of value is. Second, on whether having value is an objective or subjective matterwhether value is intrinsic to the object or is a matter of how we feel towards it. And third, on trying to say what things have value and are valuable. The idea that disability can be valuable is commonly greeted with a philosophical cynicism that argues that those who self-attribute value know the price of everything and the value of nothing, to quote Oscar Wilde.20

However, my reading of feminist accounts that attempt to transform pathol-ogy into identity, and that do so within a theoretical framework of binary thought, is that they continue to regard impairment as inherently dis-valuable. Reading the monstrous body as a cultural text avoids consideration of whether it has or can have intrinsic value, because, in this account, value is always socially constructed and, I would argue, easily (though not necessarily simply) read. In attempting to state the norm of monstrosity, which I think is what is meant when these accounts refer to claiming disabilitybut without making it valuableincommensurability and normativism are re-produced, which cre-ates other absences and other injustices. This is constituted in and through the kind of convolutedand disablistthought that asserts, on the one hand, that having an accredited impairment is not a necessary prerequisite for doing

Mairian Corker 47

disability research, but, on the other, argues that it is important to give disabled researchers a chance (Oliver and Barnes 1997, 812; emphasis added).

If disability is indeed any departure from an unstated physical and functional norm, binary thought leads us to the conclusion that disability is the transient yet ever-present embodiment of dis-valuea category of other designated as a dumping ground for anything that cannot be valued. If, as Price and Shildrick suggest, [a]ll those things which must be excluded from the normative binary of self and other, which must be silenced and forgotten, may acquire in their dislocation an accumulative force that returns to inhabit the moments of fracture (1998, 201), we need to imagine ontological states of absence where this very dislocation is materialized as present. In other words, how do D/deaf people make sense of an auditory world if it is not through the accumulative force of vision? How can blind people make sense of a visual world if it is not through the accumulative force of audition? How can we examine the mutual constitution of deafness and blindness without imposing normative binaries of presence/absence or value/dis-value that cancel out and render unintelligible the accumulative force of sensibility? And how can we resolve issues arising from the constitutive force of discussion and downstairs within differing ontological frameworks? These are questions about the relationship between local and global, individual and collective, and rights and responsibility.

Responsible collective thought and local action must strike at the very heart of a value theory that disables, and this can only be achieved by sensing dis-ability. In seeking to articulate sensibility, I have aimed to re-situate narratives of disability within their mutually constitutive reality. When we begin to think in this way, we open up the fi eld of possibility to dialogue across difference at the deep level of signifi cation, which is what I mean by sensing, without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized (Butler 1999, viii). To sense disability is to transcend identity politics in the search for inclusive societies, but it is also to challenge those who claim to have the authority in the philosophical interpretation of disability.

Notes

1. The bifurcation between impairment and disability is characteristic of emergent disability theory in the U.K., and is the basis for what is known as the social model of disability. It identifi es society as creating the problem of disability, and looks to fundamental social and political changes to provide the solutions. See Oliver (1996) and Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare (1999) for historical accounts of its conception. See also Thomas (1999) for a feminist interpretation of disability that leaves the bifurcation intact.

48 Hypatia

2. Postessentialist is used here to refer to feminisms of the poststructural and postcolonial traditions.

3. See Jenny Morris (1996), Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997), Simi Linton (1998), and Carol Thomas (1999) for examples of feminist accounts of disability in North America and the U.K.

4. Here, I refer particularly to the work of Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price, who write both separately and together (Shildrick 1997; Price and Shildrick 1998; 1999), Ruth Butler and Hester Parr (1999), and to my own work that draws from queer theory/feminism (see Corker 1999a; 1999b; 1999c).

5. For example, Thomson (1997, 22) employs Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks (1990, 1) understanding of the universalizing view of difference that sees issues surrounding a particular difference as having continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of [identities]. Sedgwick contrasts this to a minoritizing view of difference that imagines its signifi cance and concerns as limited to a narrow, specifi c, relatively fi xed population or area of enquiry.

6. The term normalcy is used by Lennard Davis (1995) in his book Enforcing Normalcy to signify that which is not disabled. However, I tend to prefer the term normativism, which bears traces of Rosemarie Garland Thomsons (1997) term nor-mate, which, as Simi Linton (1998, 2425) emphasizes, by meeting normal on some of its own terms . . . infl ects its root, and challenges the validity, indeed the possibility, of normal.

7. I use the terms disablism and disablist to refer to prejudicial social practice that occurs among and within disabled people, which should, in my view, be linguisti-cally distinguished on the basis of signifi ers from normativism and normative.

8. That is to say, the signs deaf, blind, paraplegic, hearing impaired, visu-ally impaired, and mobility impaired are the result of the empirical procedures of scientifi c positivism. These procedures ritualize particular signifi ers, associated with disease, pathology and deviance, within dominant discourse.

9. The expression visible disabilities illustrates one of the diffi culties of using terminology across national boundaries, a perspective which is also relevant to the ensuing discussion. U.K. disability theory, for example, would take a Foucauldian perspective on disability as a form of disciplinary power, which operates in hidden ways, and does not always have visible, material effects. In this sense, for a person to announce a hidden disability in order simply to render a single encounter more predictable, does not necessarily imply that subsequent encounters will be similarly rendered nor does it change the ritualized nature of disability. To describe disability as visible not only creates an oxymoron, but is also exclusionary. However, Thomsons use of the plural term disabilities, together with her emphasis on extraordinary bodies, suggests that she may be referring to what U.K. theorists would call impairment.

10. See Judith Butler (1993).11. Other examples of the writing of disabled feminists include Susan Wendell

(1996), Simi Linton (1998), and Carol Thomas (1999).12. For example, Susan Bordo (1993), Rosemary Hennessy (1993), and Linda Nich-

olson (1995).13. When Deaf is capitalized in this way it tends to mark the identity of a linguistic

minority whose lives are centered on visio-spatial experience of the world and who

Mairian Corker 49

express themselves through the medium of sign language. However, it is not always easy to tell which meaning is being employed in spoken interaction, and the distinct signs /DEAF/ and /deaf/ are not always clearly articulated, especially among those for whom sign language is not a native language.

14. Incommensurable is used in the Kuhnian sense to mean the practices of dif-ferent language communities in relation to the same phenomena (Kuhn 1996, 175).

15. Williams (1998, 61), drawing upon Leders (1990) phenomenological analysis of the Absent Body, notes that the body . . . seizes our attention most strongly at times of dysfunction. . . . it dys-appearsthat is, it appears in a dysfunctional state, and this contests the normal bodily state of dis-appearance. The normal/disabled binary rests on some concept of impairment (dysfunction).

16. Schutte employs Emmanuel Levinass (1979) ethics of alterity, as informed by Luce Irigarays (1993) feminist ethics of sexual difference and Julia Kristevas (1981) psychoanalytic-semiotic studies. I tend to be more drawn towards Derridean (1976; 1978) notions of diffrance, however.

17. I have used these particular examples on a number of other occasions (see, for example, Corker 2000a; 2001) to illustrate different points. I fi nd that the practice of returning to and sometimes re-interpreting data over time, and in the light of new knowledge and experience, helps to challenge the idea of data as fi xed.

18. Glenn Hoddle was the manager of the England football team. He was sacked from his position after making comments about disabled people that apparently sug-gested that disability was a way of paying for past sins. Working with a group of youth for whom sport was a major means of communication and identity, and who were shut off from alternative knowledge by their placement in a residential school, it was important for me to see if this uncontested fact placed limits on the way in which they sensed disability.

19. See, for example, Brian Magee and Martin Milligan (1995), Jos Saramango (1997), Rod Michalko (1998b; 2001), and Georgina Kleege (1999).

20. This is Lord Darlingtons response to Cecil Grahams question, What is a cynic? in Wildes play Lady Windermeres Fan (1908), Act 3.

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