Brief Thoughts on the Body

Lorde gives voice to her "feelings and thoughts about the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, the function of cancer in a profit economy, confrontation with mortality, the strength of women loving, and the power and rewards of self-conscious living." Lorde powerfully weaves together the three literary forms, allowing her to leap from raw expressions of pain to her inimitably astute social observations.




Guess what I'm reading? Sure, I'm a little scarred, but like Lordes, and after attending some of lectures today for the graduate program I am beginning in Critical Disability Studies, I do believe that cancer is just as much an industry as autism (moreso, actually) and the way we conceptualize the body as "doing and being done to." I'm not saying that industries and economies are inherently bad, but we can't just move through this blindly without realizing what influences the way we think and feel and HOW it does that. In this sense, I refuse to be yet another "victim." You likely won't find me running for the cure, but instead, talking honestly about experience.

This is just a beginning. I am thinking about the body, the social body, the "transgressive" body and how we choose to encounter it and how disability exists as an interpretation between bodies.

As for me, I have been amputated once and will be amputated again soon. I will be either temporarily or permanently disabled in some way. So, I also struggle to view disability/ability in a "corporeal normalcy binary" (Eliza Chandler, "Transgressive and Transformative Bodies: A Proposal for Evoking New Imaginations of Disabled Bodies for Disabled Youths") because we are never constantly one or the other. We are all sometimes disabled, and sometimes abled.

It's time aggressively destabilize current notions of disability. Contrary to what Harold Doherty wrote about me in a recent post about Reverent Wright and his speech Difference is Not Deficiency, for which I mistakenly wrote "deviance," disability writer Tom Shakespeare notes that normalcy reinforces deviance, so I extend this to ideas of abnormality, illness (as autism is often described) and so forth.

Instead, there exists diverse embodiment in our world. We are always shifting, and never resting in the binary.

I can say so myself. I can say so for Adam.