Crip Blessings: A Poem for a Race and Disability Seminar

A poem for my students
inspired by the Spring 2019 syllabus

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May you question what’s wrong with perfect 

But always try to do better.

May you change the world

But never so much that we lose the power to evolve and grow.

May you turn and face the strange

Even when that strangeness is your own future.

May you journey far into other world

And learn to see the other in the self.

May you stand up for the outcast

But beware of desire that turns into hellfire.

May you love your hands, your feet, your face

Enough to be able to face the past that lives with us.

May you be big enough to care for the small,

And small enough to see the magic in the world.

May you call out abuse and oppression

But always out of love that goes beyond yourself.

May you not be afraid of your own monstrosity

But never lose the ability to accept care when you need it.

May you find allies in the most unlikely of places

As we consider the past and dream of a better future together.

May we never forget the discarded parts of our lives and families,

Because they may ever come back hungry for better.

May we dream with our eyes wide open,

But never so much that we cannot perceive truth from lies.

May we find ways to survive even the worst of times,

And find support that will not take advantage of us in our moment of need.

May you follow and grow in your genius,

Without taking ourselves out of the contexts of our world.



May you reject moral apathy, intellectual laziness, and boredom,

As you focus on the elements of goodness, truth, and beauty around us.

May you walk away from this class learning something of how to learn

And keep it with you as you become more yourself in the years to come.

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Becoming Crip, Becoming-Hermaphrodite in Mandeville's Travels

"I wish to say no more about such marvels as are there, so other people might travel there and find new things to describe"

The Travels of John Mandeville

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The Normate World Falls Apart

Chapter thirteen ends with an admission that his quest to physically travel and represent all the diversity in the world is a failure. "Many other maner of peple beth theraboute, of wham hit were to moche to telle," (1896-1897). It is significant that this admission comes directly after his description of the hermaphrodites in lines 1892-1895. It is as though the hermaphrodites, while not being the last of the diverse people he describes, sit in the exact middle or cross beyond of the available tools of categorization (both meanings for the prefix "trans"). After the hermaphrodites, Mandeville has reached his breaking point and has to stop speaking. Mandeville's silence, the absenting of a voice that has dominated and structured the world through narrative, acknowledges the other peoples in the world and the other voices that may now be allowed to speak for themselves. In the Defective Middle English version, he admits his limitations for containing diversity by leaving room for other travelers and writers. "I wish to say no more about such marvels as are there, so other people might travel there and find new things to describe, things I haven’t mentioned or described, because many people very much like and desire to hear new things" (Anthony Bale 124). From the onset, Mandeville's second pilgrimage was motivated by the desire for diversity which he calls the desire "to hear new things." In one sense, Mandeville has accomplished this in the goal of his journey to the margins, he has described many things pushed away from the bodies and imagination of England. Yet in another sense, he can only accomplish this goal by stopping his narrative and allowing other voices to speak. For to hear new things means not only to hear about them, but to hear from them directly. Mandeville cannot and does not speak for the hermaphrodites.

Mandeville choses to end his narrative travels, yet the text goes further, suggesting that no man, even a powerful, ablebodied, cisgender Christian man, can physically embody the diversity of the whole world by speech or deed. At last, as though gasping for air, Mandeville concludes by admitting that his pilgrims narrative cannot possibly contain all the marvelous things in the world: "There are many countries and marvels I have not seen, therefore I can’t describe them correctly" (Bale 123-124). Despite giving the impression of semi-omnipresence and omniscience in his mapping of places and peoples, it is at the end of his journey that he finally confesses the limits of being a body moving through space. He is becoming conscious of the instruments and methodologies of his pilgrimage. Mandeville has limited vision, he can only see in his way and cannot see other things, in other ways. Furthermore, he is limited in his ability to speak. His words do not reveal all things as an object truth but are shaped by the limits of his capacity to know and communicate. More information would require the gaze and voices of other people. "Moreover," adds Mandeville, "in countries which I have visited there are marvels that I haven’t described, as it would take too long" (Bale 123-124). Mandeville's pilgrimage produces a kind of mappa mundi but one limited and distorted by the shape of his travels. Pilgrimage as more than static maps but rather  it is the embodied movement and limitations of movement through space that shapes places and peoples of the world. The mappa mundi and the pilgrim change from nouns with pre-determined forms, objects of transcendent truths, into the actions and productions of mapping, worlding, embodying, peopling, and pilgriming. 

In fact, reversing the traditional promise of the first pilgrimage to the center of the Christian world to make a person healed and whole, the conclusion of the second pilgrimage to the islands of the anti-loca sancta is to make Mandeville into a broken and diverse embodiment of the margins. By the end of the second pilgrimage, he has not only stopped speaking, he has effectively lost the ability to speak. This occurs, in part, because he has lost the ability to walk. In the Cotton version of the text, he writes that he has lost the ability to walk because of an "arthritic gout" (185). Losing the ability to move as he had in his pilgrimage takes away Mandeville's power to structure space by moving through it. Instead, he becomes more like the place-locked peoples he describes, like the hermaphrodites and Amazons. In any case, his desire to contain difference at once fringing on neurotic and his ableist attempt to be everywhere and all things is proven impossible, wearing down his body. Thus, not only does Mandeville become spatially locked like those on the margins but his body becomes crip, loses its status as ablebodied that he had when he was living in the center of the Christian world. Mandeville leaves Jerusalem like one of the people of power and returns to it as one of the freaks from the margins. Indeed, it is Mandeville's choice to offer his body to Rome as embodied cultural authority that transform pilgrimage from a process of healing into a process of marginalizing, cripping, freakening. The last work of his pilgrimage is to make Mandeville into a monster, a body that shows the diversity of the world and the diversifying effect pilgrimage has on space and the body. Rather than merely look and recording the difference of the Hermphrodites, Mandeville becomes crip and becomes hermaphroditic.

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Back to the Center

While the end of the traditional pilgrimage is to return from the center to the margins, the cycle of the second pilgrimage is to come back from the margins to the center of Christianity, "tornyng homwarde to Rome" (2840). While supposedly from England, Mandeville calls Rome home. The margins may give rise to the diversity of crip, trans, and intersex bodies of pilgrims yet while most pilgrimages involve a return to these places of origin, Rome or Jerusalem continue to signify "home" for many Christians. These Loca Sancta are the physical embodiment of the City of God on Earth. Indeed, the allegory of the pilgrims journey is the leaving behind of the earthly point of origin to end at last in Heaven, used in varying levels of transparency but perhaps most famously portrayed in the 17th century Pilgrims Progress. However Mandeville challenges the norms of the pilgrim's journey by traveling from the center of the Christian world to the margins, he nonetheless ends his travels and his narrative back in Rome. This return marks the limits as well as the strategy of Mandeville. He can challenge but not totally resist the power Rome has to orient space and bodies toward it. Yet throughout his narrative, Mandeville demonstrates the ability to turn expectations towards his alternative agenda. Although Mandeville returns to Rome, he is not the same man. Mandeville has become different, become crip, become hermaphroditic, transgressing boundaries of place and embodiment. In returning to Rome, Mandeville presents himself central authorities in order to evidence that his loop is more like a spiral, containing more every time is leaves and never totally resolving back into itself.

The purpose of the trip back to the centers of Christianity is for Mandeville to present himself and his book as proof of the diversity of the world, "to showe my book to the holy fader, the pope, / and telle to hym mervayles whoch Y hadde y-seye in diverse contrees"  (2840-3). Mandeville and his book have effectively become "monsters" working to show the center the truth of the diversity that exists on the margins. In turn, Mandeville hopes that the central authorities of the Christian world would verify his account of diversity, "so that he, / with his wise / consayl wolde examine hit with diverse peple that beth in Rome" explains Mandeville. "For / ther beth in Rome evermore men dwellynge of diverse nacions of the worlde." Unexpectedly, Mandeville trust in Rome to verify his embodiment of diversity is based not on the innate centrality and wholeness of the people there but because the center itself has become a collection of diverse peoples with whom the Pope can seek advise. By the end of Mandeville's second pilgrimage, perhaps as soon as the conclusion of chapter thirteen, diversity has turned from a marginal quality to escape into a point of authority. Mandeville's vision of authority is a council with the diverse nations, from the various peoples and places of the world. Does this include representatives from the Island of Amazons and Hermaphrodites? The monsters of the world move from the margins to the center of knowledge and Mandeville's hope is that this world council will authorize that his book embodies that diversity.

The need for this authorization is that no one body or pilgrimage can embody the whole diversity of the world, "for as moche as many man troweth noght but that they se with her owen / eye other that they may conseyve with her kyndely witte" (2838-2839). The "kindly wit" means the power of generosity to perceive others and it also means the limits of a mind to comprehend difference only in terms to what it knows and is, of what is of like "kind" to it. The movement towards the other, the anti-loca sancta, is an encounter with a difference that challenges and breaks down traditional forms of knowledge, yet the return to the center acknowledges that this difference will be framed and distorted by the kinds texts and contexts that pre-exists its the same limited archive. The radical "troweth" of the other becomes limited by the "eye" and "witte" of the self. Indeed, despite the diverse peoples present to consul the Pope and authorize Mandeville's second anti-loca pilgrimage, the final word on his narrative is premised on a pre-existing text in Rome that prefigures (and predetermines) all he says. 

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Cycles of Change

In Rome, after Mandeville presents his challenging account of the world, the central authorities offer him a book of their own, "a Latin book containing all this and much more, according to which the book Mappa mundi is made, a copy of which book he showed to me" (124). Even the vernacular English (as well as other languages) used to describe the new content must be translated and confirmed in the authoritative Latin. Only after this pre-text confirms the new that veracity is known, "[t]herefore the Holy Father the Pope has ratified and confirmed my book in all topics" (Bale 124). For the medieval mind, it was not the new and innovative that was trusted but the old, traditional, and familiar.  The center (Jerusalem, Rome, God) functions like a quilting point, returning back only to extend out again among new and unheard of peoples and places. Put another way, Rome functions like the Latin Book to which all authorities must reference: the Bible. As far as Christian authorities travel to include more and more into its world, just as Augustine in response to the existence of Hermaphrodites, in the end the Christian world must find room for it in the pre-existing text at the center of the Faith. In returning to the Book and the City at the center of it all, it changes each time the pilgrim returns to it from some Anti-Loca Sancta with new eyes and new wits. In the end, pilgrimage is cyclical in reflection of Christianity's phases of life, death, and resurrection that are played every year through the liturgical seasons. Christmas gives way to Lent and in turn to Easter. In a temporal mode, the passing of time functions like the circular movements of the pilgrim. On each turn and return, the pilgrim sees the center and the margins in new ways.

Containing people, books, and maps of all the diversity of the world, Rome demonstrates that the center contains the margins. It is literally and figuratively a world power, Rome, that takes the place of God to be the universal translator of all difference. All things come from God and return back to God. In the Cotton version, Mandeville ties his second pilgrimage, to the anti-loca sancta, back into the final Christian authority, the divine map of the world, "who is three in one, without beginning and without end, without good quality, without great quantity, present in all places, and containing all things and whom no good can improve nor no evil harm" (185). Without this description of God as the great unifier across difference and place, the Defective version nonetheless concludes with a prayer to Divine authority as well as a nod to the Worldly authority of the Church in Rome. Yet with this prayer, Mandeville confirms that his vision of the worlds diversity is not only present in the diverse peoples and texts of Rome's earthly authorities but in the divine mind itself. Mandeville (and the Pope) possesses a limited knowledge that will always alter the truth of difference to fit into pre-existing categories, languages, and maps. The eternity of God then is represented in the pilgrimage not only as a singular central point, a Primium Mobile from which God never turns, but as a kind of infinite loop. God is constantly flowing out into the world, towards the margins, and back into itself as in a pilgrimage. This image of God then need not make all things the same in its oneness. The divine map knows "all places" differently and "all things" in their diversity. Unlike the "kindly wit" of humanity, Mandeville's image sees God in present everywhere and in all things in their particularity, as C.S. Lewis writes, "He can think of all, and all different" (Perelandra).

By the end of the book, Mandeville has wandered so far and wondered so much that the narrative has almost forgotten its initial orientation towards Jerusalem. After several chapters in which dozens of diverse lands and peoples are viewed very quickly almost as though Mandeville is speeding up in his travels and narration in an orgy of difference, trying to jam as much in as possible, reveling in multiplicity.  An image of this center, as an able-bodied white Christian male, Mandeville is nonetheless drawn across boundaries, longing to contain difference that will always escape him, suggesting the cyclical nature of the pilgrim himself as at once one and multiple, like and unlike, here and there, center and margin. Without explicitly identifying with all his different places and peoples, Mandeville nonetheless rejects static boundaries for the self or his world. He may not be "transgender" but he may be "gender fluid," rejecting a definitive place, orientation, physical state or national State for his body. In this sense, he is "trans." Instead of an orthodox English or Christian nationalism, he exhibits trans-nationalism, a cross identification with peoples of other nations. In the process Mandeville's narrative imagines him as a man of crossed, straddled, and blurred boundaries. He shows himself on the road as pilgrim working towards becoming-diverse, becoming-crip, becoming-Amazon, becoming-hermaphrodite. Even if he never arrives at absolute difference and dissidence to the central forms of authority, Mandeville suggests an allegiance to orthodox centrality yet remains ever in tension with a heterodox marginality that keeps its story open at its ends. 

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Loca Sancta: 

Becoming Foreign in Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives

Anti-Loca Sancta: 

John Mandeville's Second Pilgrimage

Becoming Crip, Becoming Hermaphrodite 

in Mandeville's Travels

The Island of the Amazons: 

the Place of Transgender in Medieval Pilgrimage

The Island of Hermaphrodites: 

Bending the Map of Intersex and Disability

Children of Hermaphroditus: 
Intersex in Medieval Pilgrimage

The Sites of Hermaphrodites: 
Intersex in the Greco-Roman World

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"Cultural Territories of Disability" with Simi Linton

"What passes for disability representation in the arts 
is instead mostly fantasy about us."

Simi Linton

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Disability and Democracy

On December 3rd, 2015, Simi Linton spoke to a collection of several classes, as well as faculty and students in GWU's Crip/Queer Studies contingent. Her remarks, which she entitled, "Cultural Territories of Disability," took on the form of a seminar style dialog with the audience. Over the hour and a half, she examined the history and current contexts of disability in the public, the role of disability arts in democracy, and engaged students with a screening of some of her films that illustrate the lived affects art has on people with a diversity of embodiments. Professor David Mitchell introduced Linton and explained that her work has already been an influential part of his course which was now in its final weeks. Indeed, the event was a special treat for students who were able to receive a clarification and continuation of thoughts they had been stewing on all semester.

Throughout her talk, Linton expanded on what she meant by "bringing disability activism into the democracy through the arts." Turning back to the audience, she opened up the questions to the audience, "what is democracy?" and, "how does art influence disabling systems of power?" Various responses were offered, ranging from the formal center of government, major corporations, the media, and the micro-encounters of daily life. Democracy as an idea is then more than a mode of ruling a nation but a way of looking at society as made up of micro-communities of power that are constantly in flux. In such a view, it is not enough to simply pass legislation or elect representatives, but transform needs to occur along massively distributed and systematic channels. It is along these channels that power flows, in contrast to other theories of social interaction that put a greater emphasis on centers or organs of authority. As much as disability justice needs to penetrate these bastions of rulership in order to effect change, it also needs to effect the network of ideas, emotions, and daily acts that are not localizable to one place or person. Power exists between people, not merely in them.

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The Cultural Authority of Disability

At the start of her talk, Linton explained how her first book came out of a dinner at a restaurant with the desire to portray disability as an active mode of embodying the self and society rather than a passive state. As a discerning period, Linton decided that working in the academy would put too many limitations on her time, work, and conversations. In the end, she decided to leave the ivory tower of teaching, "to bring disability into the public" and use the arts to reorient societal orientations, "the cultural authority of disability." Disability justice requires mass participation in order to transform the physical and societal environments that disable those with non-normative embodiments. As Linton brought the audience into the conversation on disability culture, she spurred competition between classes in order to get a diversity of vantage points and to push the attending classes to see crip cultural authority as a good worth fighting to develop. 

At another stopping point, Linton and Mitchell discussed disability justice as working to move beyond the compulsory struggle "to be like the able-bodied" and to move instead into offering distinct vantages and goods as different kinds of crip bodies. This form of disability studies effectively is about a change of perspective, turning from exterior social view of disability to seeing the self and society from the disabled vantage. This "vantage," Linton stresses, combines a better understanding of crip knowledge (i.e. vantage points, the places and modes of how people perceive) and of crip power (i.e. advantage, the areas in which crip embodiments are better attuned to the world; perhaps suggestion a new way of conceiving of the "dis-advantage" of "dis-ability"). An implicit part of this shift in crip culture and justice is the movement of disability from being an object of study for those in the center of cultural authority to placing disability in the center of things then reviewing and reorienting from that vantage.

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Architecture of Exclusion 

Over the years disability representation and accommodations have increased under the banner of "multiculturalism," admits Linton, but observes that people often mistake and undermine what it means. In regards to the current state of multiculturalism in arts and the democracy, especially as it relates to disability, Linton notes, "more people know what multiculturalism is against rather than what it is for." As with feminism being portrayed as mere antagonism to men and masculinity, people (especially people of privilege) see multiculturalism as a demanding force (much like a whining child) to which they must continually make concessions. By this view, diversity is that ever present nag that invades the media and communities of straight, white ablebodied cisgender men and takes away things from them bit by bit. They frustratedly ask, "when is it enough for you people?" Yet this attitude shows that despite the little accommodations made, those people in power have not changed their sense of values. Disability and diversity (whether its women, people of color, queers, or trans people) remain groups of "others" who are less and have less than them. This vantage refuses to see diversity itself as a strength or the gifts that diverse peoples possess. But this concession of ideology would require the admission that for all their power, people of privilege are actually less able, less knowing, less rich than those over which they lord their whiteness or normativity. Once the admission is made, "their difference from me has value, authority, and power," suddenly disability and diversity becomes something to be desired and welcomed, not merely accommodated.

The need for the transformation of democracy is evident then not only in the big injustice of government but in the "micro-aggressions" that occur in every day life. Working with a term that has received some use and misunderstanding, Linton defines and nuances meaning of micro-aggressions as the daily acts of ableism that occur despite major social victories. Often, in fact, the "backlash" after concessions are finally made (however small) to disability justice can drastically increase in number and forms after a few major concessions. One example that Linton called on to illustrate this is what she calls, "the Architecture of Exclusion." She defines this as architecture that reflects a dismissal, devaluing, or even frustration with disability as a result of unwillingly making the concessions to design, such as ramps or automatic doors. In one case, documented in one of her films, the ramp of an art center was so hidden that it not only took her away and out of sight from the public (as if she in her wheelchair was a problem for the building's aesthetic) but was covered and narrow so that she felt isolated and confined. The ramp did not allow for her to travel alongside friends and thus cut off her ability to converse with others who used the ramp with her. Evidently, the ramp was not built for the pleasure of people in wheel chairs and indeed wanted them out of the way as much as possible. The cumulative effect was that she felt alienated and marginalized by the building's unwelcoming layout at the same moments concessions are being made.

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Other Crip/Queer Events at GWU

"Why I am Bioconservative" 

with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

"Disability Comes of Age 

at the George Washington University"

"Crip/Queer Studies 

at the George Washington University"

"Composing Disability Conference 2014"

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As a writer, consultant and public speaker, Simi Linton is one of America’s foremost experts on disability and the arts. She works with a diverse range of cultural organizations – theatre companies, film and television producers, museums, non-profit arts companies, universities, and other groups across the country – to improve and increase the way disability is represented and depicted in all art forms.

www.SimiLinton.com

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"An Anthropology of Psychosocial Disability" with Karen Nakamura

“The related concepts of 
“giving up hope” and “a life in decline” 
were the most difficult for me to grasp. 
I still struggle to view them positively."

Karen Nakamura

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Beyond IRBs: Anthropology & Disability Studies

On October 22nd, 2015, Karen Nakamura spoke on "Cultural Madness: Notes on an Anthropology of Psychosocial Disability" at the Center of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University. The event was co-sponsored by the English Department's Crip/Queer Studies programming and Disability Student Services. David Mitchell introduced Nakamura, noting her recent work, Disability of the Soul, and her upcoming project on Transgender in Japanese Culture. In front of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty, Nakamura opened with a call for more disability studies within the field of Anthropology, especially projects focused outside the United States. The speaker subsequently discussed her work with Bathel, an intentional Christian community in Japan that supports a wide variety of peoples with psychosocial embodiments, including schizophrenia and depression. While Nakamura ended up writing a book on her research, she first approached the group as a documentarian, living with the subjects of the film for an extended period of time in order to get to know them as distinct persons as she filmed and edited the work.

The choice of film-making came as a creative response to problems with restrictive ethics board guidelines. Such International Review Boards were developed for the medical sciences to police practices of human experimentation, including electro-therapy and the administration of experimental drugs. Since then, IRBs have been expanded in the social sciences, setting tight restrictions on the methodologies for interviewing human subjects. In addition to making data collection more difficult, IRBs have been criticized for protecting research institutions and universities from lawsuits rather than assuring the safety of interview subjects. As a result, vulnerable populations are often less willing to agree to interviews because they fear signing away their rights in perfunctory consent forms. In answer to these problems, Nakamura turned to the creative arts and humanities to further her work with and on disability communities. While sociological articles require IRB regulations a film does not but it is regarded as art not research, notes Nakamura. The speaker defended the use of such loopholes because it recognizes a critical difference between sociological research and the work of the Humanities: research looks at data in order to generalize the information into universal principles while the humanities and arts tend to focus on the particularity of texts and persons.

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The Bethel Community

The subject of Nakamura's documentary, "Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan," was a group of neuro-divergent and neuro-queer persons living in a small town attached to a hospital and university. For years the hospital treated patients with a variety of psychosocial disabilities, offering institutionalization for many who lived in the facility as well as out patient assistance for those living nearby. It was from this population of outpatients that the Bethel intentional community arouse to promote mutual support and dialog. As the name suggests, Bethel was sponsored and founded by a Church group who wanted to affirm non-privatized, non-medical alternative forms of care in order to compliment and contrast the medical practices of the hospital. Modeled on programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Bethel members would meet, share stories, offer assistance and accountability, and consider their relations to society and the wider world. Indeed, outreach and advocacy became a corner stone of the program. Bethel members were eager to show their faces and stories with Nakamura as part of a mutual desire to deepen and spread a more complex understanding and visibility of lives with diverse psychosocial disabilities.

For the film, Nakamura chose to live with the Bethel community and attend meetings. She shared her own personal stories, particularly her experiences of depression. The decision to participate, she explains, came from a desire to witness Bethel from the bottom up (cultural) view rather than from a top down (administrative) perspective. To aid in this commitment, Nakamura did not research psychosocial disorders in any medical archives beyond a basic level of comprehension. She did not want to consciously or unconsciously diagnose any of the community members. Instead, she allowed the individual persons of Bethel to express and define themselves to her through community encounters. Nakamura recounted that at first members of Bethel kept her at arm's distance, habituated to the coming and going of outsider observers. Over time, however, sincere friendships formed as Nakamura made herself vulnerable and dwelled together in the collective life of Bethel.

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Critiques and Benefits

While many academics might be suspicious of non-medical, Christian programs working with disabled communities, Nakamura found numerous positive alternatives that the socio-religious model offers over the privatized medical model. Part of what makes Bethel so beneficial for its members and what allows Bethel to function is that the Japanese government offers people with mental disabilities a living income, housing, and free healthcare. This is unthinkable and hard to duplicate in the United States where social welfare and universal healthcare are hardly comparable, admits Nakamura. Yet other aspects of Bethel are transferable. Rather than drug away the power of those with psychosocial illnesses or incarcerating (or otherwise institutionalizing) them in ways that isolate them and limit their agency (as is prominent in the United States), Bethel stresses social and cultural methods that reaffirm relationships. After persons with psychosocial traits become alienated from friends and family either by symptoms or by medical and legal agencies, Bethel works with the person to help bring them back into community, reestablish social bonds, and creating a sense of family.

Nakamura offered critiques as well. As a "total institution," the Bethel community creates a kind of dependency on its programming. There are few options to take some but not all of the assistance the institution offers. You are either all in or all out. Furthermore, following a kind of "Christianized Buddhism" (of the non-Hindu inflected variety), Bethel promoted a world-view of suffering oriented towards a release into oblivion. Affirming "giving up hope" and an acceptance of a "life of decline," where no matter who bad things are today, they will inevitably get worse, Bethel's more nihilistic philosophy was difficult for Nakamura to embrace positively. Furthermore, the Bethel community remains fairly conservative in its view of gender and sexual politics, limiting the forms of relation and embodiment of its members. Finally, Nakamura explained, the Bethel model is difficult to duplicate due to its ready made population drawn from the hospital's outpatients and inpatients.

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Other Crip/Queer Events at GWU

"Why I am Bioconservative" with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

"Disability Comes of Age at the George Washington University"

"Crip/Queer Studies at the George Washington University"

"Composing Disability Conference 2014"

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Proffessor Karen Nakamura is an American academic, author, filmmaker, photographer and Associate Professor 

of Anthropology and East Asian Studies at Yale University

DeafLibrary.org

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"Why I am Bioconservative" with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

“Who gives dignity? 
Humans or God?"

Rosemarie Garland Thomson

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Pro-Life Disability Politics

On September 17th, 2015, Rosemarie Garland Thomson spoke on "Why I am a Bioconservative" to a packed lecture hall at the George Washington University. The event was coordinated by the GWU English Department as part of its Crip/Queer Studies programing. David Mitchell introduced the speaker, praising her as a foundational figure in Disability Studies, authoring such influential texts as Freakery, Staring: How We Look, and Extraordinary Bodies. In an hour and a half, Thomson spoke on the important but often unspoken alliance between religious conservatism and non-religious disability activists around "Pro-Life" issues, specifically the abortion of fetuses to be born with physical or mental impairments, euthanasia, and the assisted suicide of the disabled.

Historicizing the systematic elimination of disabled bodies, Thomson traced many recent and current practices to the eugenics of the early 20th century, citing proto-holocaust programs in Germany where gas chamber technologies were pioneered through the mass incarceration and killing of peoples with disabilities. While eugenics has since changed names and strategies, the bio-technologies that eliminate or impair socially undesirable lives continue to multiply. Such medical mechanisms target the youngest and oldest groups but cluster around those lives marked as impaired or chronically ill. Critical to the continuation of eugenic ideology are the cultural assumptions and values that encourage society to believe that persons are "better off dead than disabled." 

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Unexpected Allies

By opposing not only the use but the cultural indoctrination of eugenics, disability activists find themselves joining forces with religious conservatives. Thomson contends that while religious and non-religious "bioconservatives" may disagree in first principles, these groups join together in their conclusions. For instance, "dignity" is a key issue within bioconservatives of either ilk. In this context, dignity designates a life worth living and deserving of "moral personhood" (rights and duties) as well as a "quality of life" (well being in medical care, politics, and employment). Religious and non-religious groups may disagree in the source and authority that bestows dignity: humanity or God. Nonetheless,  persons of different belief systems can come together to preserve the dignity of those marked as undesirable: those who are "too expensive" in relation to their social worth.

Despite a history of shared political agendas, the cooperation of religious and disability activism is an uncomfortable and often controversial topic in the University setting. "Using the word 'God' tends to tick off liberal academics," Thomson admits after carefully defining the diversity of those who might be considered bioconservative. In the light of increasingly partisan politics and rhetoric, many liberal scholars overtly or indirectly oppose suggestions that any part of the Pro-Life agenda might be worthy of consideration by non-religious fields - as academia is often imagined. A shift towards less reactivity at words such as "God" or "conservative" as well as a willingness to see reasonable middle grounds or overlaps in Pro-Life and Pro-Choice movements is necessary to critical, thoughtful engagement in the preservation and improvement of disabled lives. Indeed, Thomson admits, the goal of "preserving" rather than "eliminating" lives implicit in disability activism suggests within it a kind of "conservatism" - even as it may be distinguished from religious extremism.

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Rituals of Care

Besides legal and medical initiatives, Thomson stressed the important cultural work of bioconservatism that promote a culture of life. In particular, ritual practices such as the washing of bodies are acts of care common among religious and non-religious communities. Washing in hospitals, elderly care facilities, families by caregivers, as well as the sacramental blessing of children, the sick, and the dead are all examples of rituals that recognize the dignity of the bodies they encounter. Such rituals recognize the dignity of embodied experiences, Thomson argued. Through repetition, rituals directly create the conditions for a quality of life while affirming moral personhood. If washing (including toileting) were more openly a communal practice where the reception of care is a sign of dignity rather than shame, fewer people would be instilled with the belief that they would rather be dead than unable to clean themselves. Fewer people with disabilities, including the elderly, would be associated with wallowing in filth if indeed fewer would be left to wallow. Ritual practices would bond care givers and care receivers, instilling a culture of life in the community.

In her conclusion, Thomson fielded some questions about other fields that share similar values as the disability activists who may have reason to rethink the old opposition to bioconservative politics. One example offered was the case of HIV+ gay men, lesbian, and transgender persons. During the AIDs outbreak of the late 20th century, there developed a similar culture of death where the death of LGBTI communities by the disease were seen as excusable even laudable by those who saw non-normative gender and sexualities as abominations against God or Nature. In this time, images of caregivers washing the sick and dead bodies of AIDs victims became politically charged. Such acts gave dignity of those dying and stated that despite the high cost of care, LGBTI lives were worth preserving. Thomson affirmed that many peoples, especially the subjugated, have reason to reexamine their positions on bioconservativism and work towards creating a culture of life.

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Other Crip/Queer Events at GWU

"An Anthropology of Psychosocial Disability with Karen Nakamura"

"Disability Comes of Age at
the George Washington University"

"Crip/Queer Studies at
the George Washington University"

"Composing Disability Conference 2014"

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Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English and Bioethics at Emory University, where her fields of study are disability studies, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities, broadly understood, to bring forward disability access, inclusion and identity to communities inside and outside of the academy. She is the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books. Her current book project is Habitable Worlds: Disability, Technology, and Eugenics.

RosemarieGarlandThomson.com

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The Island of Hermaphrodites: On Mapping Intersex & Disability

“First-world feminist discourse locates 
[intersex politics] not only ‘elsewhere’ 
...but also 'elsewhen' in time"

Hermaphrodites with Attitude
Cheryl Chase

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Dis-Orienting the Place of Hermaphrodites

Crip theory asserts that the location of disability is in the environment, not in the body. Disability is how biopolitics limits, manages, and marginalizes the diversity of embodiments. It determines who has access to where - what bodies may move through space and what bodies are relegated to specific out of the way places. To illustrate how this works, I begin with a recent story from my life. I am standing in a private room after being pulled aside by airport security in Washington DC - the USA's political epicenter, a national loca sancta. Two TSA agents are staring blankly at me. They share coded messages between the two of them before explaining to me that the body-scanner on which their usual screenings depend was unable to read me. I learned that these scanners have two settings: male and female. The machine effectively reads you, produces an essentially naked image of your body (much like the images of heremaphrodites and amazons found in medieval exempla and maps). The machine then compares it to standard body maps looking for anomalies. It turns out that I failed to pass either scan on both the male and female setting. I was unreadable to the TSA's biopolitical machine. As a result, the TSA would have to "more intensively" search my body by hand. For a while they just stood there, waiting for me to submit to a further policing of my gender. The TSA stared blankly at me. The machine stared blankly (unknowingly) at me. I was unmappable to them, off the pioneered and civilized world of gender, and here there be monsters.

In “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism,” Cheryl Chase asks, “Why… have most first-world feminists met intersexuals with a blank stare?” [i] To answer this question of tacit uncomprehending exclusion, Chase examines the spatial logic that has literally and metaphorically marginalized and provincialized intersex biopolitics, locating it in foreign places, out of the way of the globalized, mobile, western community. While the compulsory surgical reconstruction of intersex children ebbed in the 1990s, afterwards seeing a decline in intersex visibility and activism, at the same time the publication on such practices still occurring in colonial and post-colonial places such as in Africa were pervasive. “First-world feminist discourse locates [intersex politics] not only ‘elsewhere…’ but also “elsewhen” in time,” notes Chase. As a result of the western public slowly erasing intersex in the shared global space, it is being re-imagined as a provincial problem of another time and another place. In the next few minutes I will chase after Chases’s “hermaphrodites with attitude” supposed to be located in the past, in another place, to argue that modern marginalizing structures of power have roots in the genealogy of pilgrimage as a narrative and social practice. As a genre, pilgrimage features crip and gender non-binary bodies coming from the margins of the geopolitical world towards centers of authority, the “loca sancta,” to pay deference to material and symbolic powers. In return pilgrims were promised healing and betterment, to become more whole, more like people of privilege.[iii] I consider these motions of social erasure alongside alternative modes of pilgrimage as narrated in John Mandeville’s "Travels," where central bodies who find themselves in positions of power (i.e. able-bodied cis-gender men) travel to the margins and on the way become more crip and intersexual, and returning to the center to bend maps of space, power & embodiment.[v] 

The concept of “places” itself as a relatively stable categories of locating persons, has historically worked to confine crip and intersex bodies on the margins by taking them out of the shared “space” of gender conforming persons and placing them in special sites. Eli Clare considers this in Exile and Pride, where he proposes “the Mountain” as the loca sancta par excellence, a metaphorical place that by its centrality, places difference on the margins.[ii] "The mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people. How many of us have struggled up the mountain, measured ourselves against it, failed up there, lived its shadow?” asks Clare. A metaphor for our various “loca sancta,” the Mountain functions as an over-determined orientation point, structuring the flow of power from the margins to the center & associating centrality with normate embodiment. For medieval Christian pilgrims, the Mountains of Jerusalem functioned as the center point in the circular map of the Christian Mappa Mundi that positioned all other places, including the island of the hermaphrodites, as monsters on its margins.[iv]  In comparison to centralized movements of the body, crip and intersex lives create crises of category that are combatted by the making of places of exception (freak shows, islands, prisons, medical theaters) where they are contained. “The history of freakdom extends far back into western civilization,” Clare recounts on the practices of showing lives and their places of exclusion as points of interest on the margins of the normate world. Over time the motions of marginalization are copied over and again, and the crip & intersex internalize a place in the world as monsters and freak-shows on the margins of society. “To myself, I was a freak, incapable of loving or being loved, filled with shame about my status as a hermaphrodite and about my sexual dysfunction,” writes Chase on the de-globalization of herself as a self-exile from her body; a provincializing, a freakening.

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Two Pilgrimages: On the Anti-Loca Sancta

Thus  while pilgrim narrators often work as “showmen,” exhibiting social mobility to maintain distance & difference from the limits of place set on the shown, the monstrous crip & intersex bodies, pilgrimages reveal that these boundaries aren't stable enough to maintain this difference, leading to lives existing, interacting and shaping one another in what Michel de Certeau calls the dynamism of shared space. [vii] Moved from a circumscribed “place” in the margins into the shared space, crip and intersex pilgrim narratives bend the map of geopolitics, opening lines of flight & biopower around the world (197). “We seek to create an environment in which many parents of intersex children will have already heard about the intersex movement when their child is born,” writes Chase. “Such informed parents we hope will be better able… to find their way to a peer support group and counseling rather than to a surgical theater” (203).  In the history of pilgrimage in marginalizing disability and intersex, Mandeville’s travels both follows and undermines the structures of movement and place. This dual effect is evident in the text’s two half, representing two pilgrimages. The centralizing structure of Jerusalem’s as loca santca can be seen in the first half of his pilgrimage text, on his journey from England to Jerusalem. Yet numerous scholars have noted, in the second half of his pilgrimage and world mapping, Mandeville swerves. Instead of going back to England, Mandeville starts a new pilgrimage, from the center of Christianity to the margins and back. In the process, his body is transformed, his privileged mobility is infected, and he brings the effects of the margins back to the center. Mandeville starts with a model of place that puts crip and non-gender binary bodies on the margins of his world map yet after visiting the place of hermaphrodites, his sense of his body and map break down, overwhelmed by experiences of interconnected difference.

The island and bodies of hermaphrodites inscribe a challenge to the project of mapping space by resisting easy boundaries of gender or embodiment. Around this cast-off place, “beth peple that beth bothe man and womman, and have membres of bothe." The monstrous here is not simply a metaphor but a material and social body. These are at once hybrid bodies with two natures, man and woman, represented by the repetition of the word "beth," as well as whole beings that exist between definable states. While the hermaphrodite remains an object on the margin to be glimpsed at by not identified with, to share a place in his world but not share his space, by traveling to an island on the margins, the farthest possible distance from Jerusalem (in the center), Mandeville suggests that hermaphrodites exist in and as an anti-loca sancta, a center of their own that possesses the power to draw people away from the center on new winding paths. Unlike the “first world feminists” who look at intersex with a blank gaze, Mandeville’s body is redirect and changed by his pilgrimage to the margins. On his return, Mandeville and his text come to embody of the diversity that is erased and marginalized when he travels to Rome to present himself and his text to the Pope as evidence of the worlds diversity, "marvels I had seen in different countries." Referencing a Mappi Mundi in Rome as authorizing his body and account, Mandeville affirms the role of pilgrim narratives in deferring to central loca sancta as governing the geopolitics of those on the margins. In the process, he affirms his own privilege as a sign of that central power, as a cis, Christian male with the mobility to exercise spatial power. Yet this 2nd pilgrimage from the centers of the Christian world to the margins and back, sustains a tension with a heterodox provincialism that keeps its story open at its ends.

Becoming embodying the margins on his pilgrimage, Mandeville brings its monstrosity, its freakishness, back to the loca sancta. By the end of the book, after several chapters in which dozens of diverse lands and peoples are viewed very quickly almost as though Mandeville is speeding up in his travels, his narration becomes an orgy of difference, trying to jam as much in as possible, almost gasping for air: "There are many countries and marvels I have not seen, therefore I can’t describe them correctly." By his travels, Mandeville loses the ability to speak. In the Cotton manuscript, he writes that he has lost the ability to walk because of "arthritic gout." The pilgrim’s ableist attempt to be everywhere and all things proves impossible. Mandeville concludes his travels leaving room for other pilgrim narratives. "I wish to say no more about such marvels as are there, so other people might travel there and find new things to describe." In an alternative there & then, crips and Hermaphrodites look back at the blank stare of white feminism & western patriarchy waiting to break into the shared space of here & now.

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[i] Cheryl Chase. "Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Activism." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 1998. pg 207.
[ii] Eli Clare. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. 199.
[iii] Sabine MacCormack. "Loca Sancta: The Organization of Sacred Topology in Late Antiquity." The Blessings of Pilgrimage. 1990. pg.1.
[iv] Hereford Mappa Mundi. Hereford Cathedral. c1285.
[v] The Book of John Mandeville. c1357.
[vii] Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1980. pg. 71.

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Check out the Medieval Disability 

Glossary on Hermaphrodites

Loca Sancta: 

Becoming Foreign in Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives

Anti-Loca Sancta: 

John Mandeville's Second Pilgrimage

Becoming Crip, Becoming Hermaphrodite 

in Mandeville's Travels

The Island of the Amazons: 

the Place of Transgender in Medieval Pilgrimage

The Island of Hermaphrodites: 

Bending the Map of Intersex and Disability

Children of Hermaphroditus: 
Intersex in Medieval Pilgrimage

The Sites of Hermaphrodites: 
Intersex in the Greco-Roman World

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