Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism \u0026 Other Difficult Positions by Lennard J. Davis

Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism \u0026 Other Difficult Positions Reviews

• 
  amber

  I was thrilled when I got the book. This marks the beginning of my studies—in terms of formal reading and research—on disability. Incredible that it took me until I was nearly 30 to start this, though of course there are myriad reasons why I steered clear or shied away from it for so long, many of those reasons being the very subject of study now. (More on all that in other posts.)
  
  At first, I was annoyed with Davis. I found his account of growing up with deaf parents to be smarmy, to sound cold and like a token gesture or his ticket in to being able to write himself off a s an academic who can say something about disability I found him stuffy—he loves 19th century literature—and I suspected that his making a case for disability studies had more to do with his insecurities about class ( he grew up working class in the Bronx), except he was too chicken to write toward his own issues. His writing seemed so abstract, or perhaps overly technical and I found the technical categories he set up to be offensive, even though they seemed to be in the name of exploding a notion of disability.
  
  He holds that there is, on the one hand, impairment i.e. missing an arm, being blind, being in a wheelchair and then there is disability—that is, the person who is impaired becomes disabled when they encounter social barriers i.e. lack or ramps, gaps in MUNI trains (see article below about MUNI killing blind people again) lack of automatic door openers in public places. So, Davis says, disability is a social construct. Fine, I wholeheartedly agree. But, WHAT REALITY DOES DAVIS LIVE IN? I mean, when is an impairment not automatically rendered a disability? In a place where everyone lives in heated pools and hovercrafts and where the citizens can get an RRS feed for local transit GPS right into their heads? And even if there were no socially constructed barriers converting one’s impairment into a disability, those who are impaired still, oftentimes, suffer a great deal of pain or dis-ease that cannot be theorized away by potential social ideals.
  
  I do over-react. I see that Davis is more about the broad reach, about calling for a discourse instead of making very definite assertions within that discourse.
  
  Bending Over Backwards reexamines issues concerning the relationship between disability and normality in the light of postmodern theory and political activism. Davis takes up homosexuality, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the legal system, the history of science and medicine, eugenics, and genetics.
  
  He touches on a number of broad issues while repeating his pivotal concepts like that of the impairment/disability divide. His writing is a bit circular and his conclusions glossed over because he is trying to create a platform in the most general sense, he is mainly arguing not for the specifics of disability, but that it gets studied at all. I appreciate that, though I think the groundwork he is trying to lay doesn’t always make for the most stable footing.
  
  For instance, I am fascinated when he writes about disability as being that uber non-category which has the ability to out other all the uber Othering po-mo-ers are always coming to a crossroads about and thus solve many po-mo paradoxes about essentialism, constructivism, etc.
  Throughout, he maintains that disability is the prime category of postmodernity because it redefines the body in relation to concepts of normalcy, which underlie the very foundations of democracy and humanistic ideas about the body.
  
  Bending Over Backwards argues that disability can become the new prism through which postmodernity examines and defines itself, supplanting the categories of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
  
  I know that he is absolutely right on this point and that this is the biggest point of them all, but I fear that his championing of the disability prism could actually undermine disability studies. So much needs to be talked about, looked at, admitted too, discovered in real life instances of disability as it affects individuals and societies, that I fear this high-minded notion of using disability studies as a sup planter of categories is just another way of cancelling out the dialogue before it starts, making the dialoged, and thus the real life disabled person by extension, a foil to more abstracted figures of otherness in academia. Or worse, it may be another way of extending the trope of the disabled hero by making disability studies that hero trope which is the revelator of all tropes and this, while it sounds grandiose and prophetic, still takes away attention, makes less of, veils one from the difficult minutiae of the subject at hand, disability.
  
  Davis says that one of the major reasons why disability can diffuse issues in all other identify categories is because it is an inherently unstable category. That is, you will not wake up black tomorrow, but you may step off a curb tomorrow and become disabled and in fact, you are always already disabled it is just that you have not aged sufficiently to fully actualize as a disabled person. Well now, that is a doozie right there that deserves many a post and it is TRUE, BUT it is somewhat offensive in the way it is geared toward the currently able-bodied. It is fine and somewhat big-sounding in a Zen, ephemeral (You never know what you’re gonna get, thanks Forest kind of way but what about the people who are disabled and will never become undisabled? How does it sit with them to assign their category a kind of trickster changeability that imbues it with power while meanwhile the able-bodied still sit on the safe side of the ability trajectory where it is far easier to be empowered?
  
  [omission]
  
  Anyway, one concept that Davis does use and comes across VERY concretely is that of ableism. He basically uses the word the way one would use the word ‘racism”, but it shakes down in very different ways. That is, he claims that “the paternalistic public” wrongly assumes that disabled people are generally met with kindness and that hatred toward disabled people is almost a psychology impossibility. That not only should one not feel hatred toward the disabled, but that it simply isn’t done. This too-easy assurance of goodwill toward the disabled is really unconscious feigned ignorance about real aversion, bitterness and impatience one feels toward the disabled. And it is through this kind of denial, this ableism that large public entries like schools and malls and churches can attribute lack of accommodations and hazardous obstacles as “accidental”. Ableism is a kind of willful obliviousness.
  
  That’s a pretty extreme assertion. But basically–my adrenaline soared when I understood what Davis was doing and implying in coining this word, ableism. My feeling was well, I didn’t want to say it—but I am sure glad he did. So, while I think some of Davis’ major groundwork is shaky, I am glad to have read him and excited to seek out incisive work by other thinkers.
  
  
  
  RE: The MUNI issue I mentioned above.
  
  Muni underground train stations lack guardrails for blind. (Note: This headline should read—MUNI allows blind people to go plummeting to their deaths. (Leah, if you are reading, I assume Sicily has your back on this and it won’t so much be an issue for you. P.S> Leah, where are you?—at The Lighthouse? I have been thinking of you.)
  http://www.examiner.com/a-1269116~Mun...
  
  More at
  www.pietraluz.livejournal.com
  
• 
  Lynne

  Really interesting perspective on the history of normality, past legal states of affairs and perceptions of disability, and more. The essays get a little repetitive at times so I found myself skimming in places.