The Praxis of Silence: Teresa de Cartagena and Grove of the Infirm

"Who could hear with the ears of his soul such healthy advice if his physical ears were filled with the noise of human voices?"

Teresa de Cartagena

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Deafness is traditionally defined as a disability but medieval and modern deaf writers have long made the case for the concept of “deaf-gain.” As part of our embodiment narrative exercises, we have been pushing beyond the intellectual assent to disability theory and into the praxis of enacting life and ideas together. Towards that end, each of you will practice the habit of Teresa de Cartagena by engaging silence physically, intellectually, and socially.

By intentionally experiencing silence in a loud, busy, stimulating modern world, you will engage to the writing of Teresa de Cartagena in a way that makes the theory into an embodied lesson and consider the challenges as well as the benefits of silence.

The Praxis of Silence will begin at the usual class-time (5:30 PM) on Monday. After this time, you have 24 hours to find an 1 hour 15 min of silence. The first critically important and integral task is to find somewhere as perfectly silent as possible to sit or stand for an hour and fifteen minutes. This may be a museum, a library, a park (be safe), or even your own empty room. Please do not use music or other audio to cover over the ambient noise. Note: what you will experience is NOT the same as what deaf people necessarily experience. Rather, you will be learning in your own way and with your own embodiment what it means to live in and with silence.

While you sit in silence, you are to limit your activities and distractions. You may walk around, think, and do some light reading from the book of Teresa de Cartagena OR from read the lyrics to some form of music (e.g. as Teresa does the Psalms). However, reading should only consist of less than half (30 min max.).

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Questions

Before 24 hours is up, you must write a four paragraph post that uses two quotes from Teresa de Cartagena’ in order to help you narrative your embodied experience of silence. How does the theory inform your praxis? How did the physical experience inform your theory? Consider attached questions.

How did the experience of silence affect your body and mind?

• Consider whether or not you moved, fidgeted, sat motionless, etc.
• Consider what emotions and sensations came and went
• Consider how your mind and thoughts changed over the hour.

How did the experience of silence make passages of the Grove of Infirm clearer?

• Consider how certain sentences are different to read than to experience
• Consider how words often are short-hand for complex physical events
• Consider how reading changes in quiet versus among noise

How did reading the Grove of the Infirm affect how you experienced silence?

• Consider what things you focused on because of the book
• Consider how you felt about the experience because of the book
• Consider how the book made the experience an intellectual one

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Additional Pedagogical Resources

Additional Disability Studies

Additional Medieval History

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Monsters: Disability and Narratives of Embodiment

“Here’s what I think: the only reason I’m not ordinary 

is that no one else sees me that way.”

Wonder
RJ. Palacio

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Course Description and Outcomes

Why are monsters so ubiquitous in literature and art? How do they, and other literary villains and anti-heroes, reinforce cultural values and anxieties? Who or what are the monsters of our own cultural moment? In this seminar, we will explore the history and representation of monsters in western culture. Using J.J. Cohen's Monster Theory, as well as other texts from disability and post-colonial studies, we will examine monsters not merely as otherworldly creatures, but as figures that stand in for a wide range of "undesirables" and "others." Readings and films for this class will be drawn from the distant medieval past up to modern horror and fantasy films, and will feature the monsters said to live on the edge of the known world, mystical visionaries, sideshow freaks, hallucinatory apparitions, witches, and even a few vampires and werewolves.

In particular, this seminar will focus on the constructions of disability from the medieval period until the current day through narratives of embodiment. Within the genre of monster stories, disability is conceptualized as a material state and social state. Over time, these states are supposed to derive from God, nature, individual or community acts of will. Utilizing crip and monster theory which understands each as "cultural bodies," these premises and their subjects will be examined to determine (1) how the narratives use tropes, frames, and signs to establish certain assumptions about embodied difference, (2) what ethical problems exist within this use of cultural power, and (3) how these narratives might be resisted or changed to more ethically empower those marked as the monsters and the disabled.


Course Objectives (Reflecting SAGES Learning Outcomes)

By the end of the course you will be able to T.E.A.C.H. on a range of ethical, historical, and aesthetic subjects:

• THINK critically on the rhetorical and ethical value of cultural narratives 
• ENGAGE respectfully across perspectives alongside and opposing your own 
• ARGUE dialectically with thesis driven claims that actively engage existing debates 
• COMPOSE collaboratively using evidenced-based research and peer-review 
• HONOR differences with nuance, complexity, and sympathy

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Selections from the Reading List

Monsters and Disability is structured around J.J. Cohen's "Monster Theses" and divided into two main parts: medieval and modern narratives. The first half of the seminar will focus on disability and monstrosity as cultural bodies, beginning with "medieval monster narratives" (Mandeville's Travels, The Knight of the Cart, and Bisclavret) augmented by critical disability and transgender studies, then ending with "medieval embodiment narratives" (de Cartagena, Kempe, and Hoccleve) as informed by Arthur Frank's Wounded Storyteller. The second half of the seminar will address the ways in which culture desires disability and monstrosity even as it uses them to marginalize difference. This sections begins with "modern monster narratives" (Animal's People) and films (Beloved, New Moon, Split) that associate disability with dangerous mental illness and animality. This section and the seminar ends with "modern embodiment narratives" (Exile and Pride, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, Wonder, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) focused the movement from isolation towards liberation by youths with disabilities.

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Part 1: How to Make a Monster

“The Monster’s Body is a Cultural Body”

Medieval Monster Narratives

(The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference)

J.J. Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

J. Mandeville, The Travels
R. Garland-Thompson, How We Look

C. de Troyes, The Knight of the Cart
A. Solomon, Far From the Tree, “Dwarf”

M. de France, Lais, “Bisclavret”
S. Stryker, GLQ, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”

Medieval Embodiment Narratives

(The Monster is a Harbinger of Category Crisis)

A. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 

•  “Illness as a Call for Stories” 
• “The Restitution Narrative” 
• “Chaos Narrative”
• “Quest Narrative”

T. de Cartagena, Grove of the Infirm
T. de Cartagena, Wonder at the Works of God
M. Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe

T. Hoccleve, Complaint

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Part 2: How to Love a Monster

“Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire”

Modern Monster Narratives

(The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible)

Indra Sinha, Animal’s People
J. Demme (dir.), Beloved (1998)
S. Myer, Twilight: New Moon (2009)
M. Night Shyamalan, Split (2017)

Modern Embodiment Narratives

(The Monster Always Escapes)

E. Clare, Exile and Pride
M. Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night
R.J. Palacio, Wonder
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

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Pedagogies of Survival: Teaching Trauma in Traumatizing Times

“Here begynnyth a schort tretys and a comfortabyl 

for synful wrecchys, wherin

thei may have gret solas and comfort”

The Book of Margery Kempe

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Compassion and Comfort

I ask only that we feel together for a time. I cannot tell you to imitate my method. I cannot tell you to imitate my feelings. I cannot fix this, these traumas new and old. I ask only that you listen for a time to my feelings and you feel your feelings alongside mine. If something I feel resonates with you, perhaps the sympathies will better us and strengthen us. I blush to say that our compassions, our feeling-together, may comfort us. By comfort I mean that fortification that being-together can give to those it connects. Comfort embiggens us so that we might together face the traumas which might crush us alone. Somehow, the comfort of feeling-together makes us a one that is more than two, yet bigger than one alone. I seek comfort that I might offer comfort, something I do not have on my own. I ask that we feel together because the feelings come without my asking, because I cannot ignore or avoid the feelings and so they must be faced. The seminar must go on, students and teachers must go on. Yet, how do we do this, yet remember as Edutopia does, "When Students Are Traumatized, Teachers Are Too." Many of us need more than a "pedagogy of trauma" but also "a pedagogy of survival" that will not only instruct our students but assist in a collective reclamation of life, power, and self.

This past week has been a representative embodiment of much of the work I struggle with this semester and other times in my work as a scholar, mother, and activist. This past week I have been tasked to teach trauma in a traumatic time to traumatized students. I take one this task as someone who has also struggled with trauma. How do I teach a seminar, "Beyond Male and Female: Histories of Transgender and Non-Binary Gender," discussing how bodies are stolen, imprisoned in mental hospitals, subjected to abusive conversion therapy, and pressed towards suicide in Dylan Scholinski's memoir, The Last Time I Wore a Dress? Can you possibly engage pain that students in the class not only understand but have experienced, and still feel? How do I teach my seminar, "Racism and Human Diversity: Medieval Narratives of Blackness," discussing how the trauma of slavery meets the horror of sexism in the stealing of bodies in Beloved by subjugation, rape, and torture? If each lesson plan has an arc, a beginning, middle, and end, where is it that I can bring my students? Certainly we do not live in a world without the ghosts and illness of white supremacy, racism, sexism, and their thieveries. And the text does not offer any such wholesale escape or escapism. There is liberation, there is hope, there is exorcism, but the scars and pain remains. I cannot tell the students how to fix trauma, where they might run to flee racism, how they might undo the knots of sexism and rape. I can offer them what teachers (including Dylan Scholinski and Toni Morrison) have taught me: how to survive, how to leave, and how to reclaim what has been taken, broken, killed. Yet this requires us to feel where and when we are, to feel where we and others have been, to feel together and find some strength which we might call comfort.

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Trigger Warnings

My students are tired, so tired, and the trauma we must discuss and share is triggering of wounds that have not scabbed. The rape, suicide, torture, death, and abuse of racism, gender, and disability that our texts ask us to feel-with is so heavy and our students are already carrying so much. The hope is that, even if the texts cannot lighten our loads, at least they can give strength through a shared affect and struggle. Yet these connects are hard and demand what Morrison calls a thick sort of love. These are connections that happen at the point of wounds and scars. When students ask to leave the room, I commend their self-preservation and self-care. When they return, I am grateful for their compassion. These are the skills that students have learned to survive trauma. These are good skills. These are lessons we need to share and on which we are trying to build. Comfort may help us survive but it is no guarantee. Some of us may break under the strain. These are the stakes of our learning about trauma and survival, these are the costs, and these are our hopes. Some view "trigger warnings" as extraneous to teaching, even antithetical to teaching because it seems to offer our students an "out" from dealing with difficult learning. I don't see warnings that way. I see the warning a part of the lesson. I see the warning as part of thinking about trauma. I see the warning as part of survival. I see the lesson as part of this survival. This is the lesson Denver learns in Beloved: if one can leave, sometimes one must leave. Students do not leave class because they are experiencing the lesson on trauma any less but because they are experiencing the trauma and the lesson that much more.

A dilemma in teaching about trauma is that trauma rarely exists within a discreet period of time or along a linear temporal frame. Trauma is less like a line than an organic vine with recursive bends back toward the points of unresolved hurt, away from points of pain, and run all through with a twisting anxiety. As instructors, we teach our students to be ever conscious about context, and so we must also be. This is another way that "trigger warnings" may serve as more than a deterrent or excuse. Trigger warnings is a way of acknowledging that traumas we have experienced may not be over simply because we have been able to show up to class. This week, as we discuss the KKK, slavery, the persistence of racism and its damage, white supremacists are once again marching. This week, as we discuss transphobia, the systematic isolation and exclusion of transgender, and the despair unto death felt by trans and other non-binary persons, the federal government works to take away job protections for non-cisgender persons. This week, as we discuss rape and the abuse of women, the same federal government makes it harder for such women (all women) to reclaim agency over their bodies and sexualities. This week, as we discuss violence and the hate that will not die, a mass shooting kills several dozens and harms countless. Do we offer our students escape and refuge? Or do we offer them a place to rally and resist? What if some students desperately need the former and other students are eager for the latter? What if we, the instructors, are feeling crushed under the weight our times? Our times can be poignant reminders of the lingering significance of texts and histories that may be decades or centuries old. Our times can also leave us speechless, unable to think or argue because we feel so much. Some lessons are meant to transport us somewhere, lead us to some conclusion. Some lessons are meant to help us sit exactly where we are, when we are, and help us to exist and survive together. Sometimes, a lesson is successful not because of what students walked away with but because students (and ourselves) were able to walk away.

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The Lessons that Don't Happen

This sum of trauma may be that the best lesson plan is sometimes the lesson that does not happen. There is power is being able to consider the people in the room, consider the time and context of the room, to consider the instructor in the room, and then change the lesson. What are some of these changes? What lessons emerge when we let go of the classes that won't happen? (Lesson 1) Students have more power than they may know. I have had classes where I've worked to help my students understand trauma in a text. Other times students understand this trauma uneasily well and the lesson becomes learning with them how to survive. Showing our students that we can change, change our directions, change our locations, change our plans, is a way of teaching them the lesson that things don't have to be this way. We have the power to adapt, evolve, respond to our environments. By listening to the students in the room, we teach (or remind) them about their own power. (Lesson 2) Remind students its okay to think with their feelings. At the start of my seminars, I tell my students that nearly all my classes teach the same three lessons but in importantly distinct forms, embodiments, and contexts: how to perceive power dynamics, how to affect/effect power, and how to wrestle with the ethics of power. Understanding that emotions are key to how social power functions and is manipulated, and affective well being is essential to ethical considerations, is a lesson students do not get enough. By acknowledging the struggle of working through pain and fear as well as the ethical role of compassion and comfort, we place our student's experiences in the center of a class, not somehow outside them at an impossible objective and amoral distance. (Lesson 3) The classroom is not the only place where learning and growth can happen. Again, sometimes the best lesson is the lesson not given, when we teach our students about the power to turn a class day into a mental health day: to get sleep, to take a long lunch, to lighten a crushing work load, to find comfort in their own way. As Edutopia succinctly writes, "Brains in Pain Cannot Learn." This may feel like giving up, giving students the day off, but in our humility we are reminding students of their own power to survive, enact self-care, and learn. 

In the end, a pedagogy of survival is not a lesson plan I can set in advance or summarize for those looking to imitate it. Trauma is like a cancer, a form of life that grows and changes. Likewise, survival requires adaptability and transformation in response to classroom environments and the lives that populate them. The lesson is to be able to let go of our lesson plans when our students and circumstances change. This does not mean that there are no ways forward. There are many ways forward. Which ways is best for you and your students greatly depends on who you are, where you are, when you are teaching, and what we all bring to the classroom. On each of my seminars, I ended the last class of the week by compiling lists of ways in which we can reclaim our power, our lives, and survive. We drew from their experiences and the text's offerings. Among the list was the comfort of writing, the comfort of reading, the comfort of sharing one's feelings with another. In its own way, this is a function or hope of www.ThingsTransform.com. This is a corner of the internet where we may share a corner of our minds and hearts. For that, I thank you. Thank you for feeling-together with me for a time. I do not know what it is you felt but knowing you are there gives me some comfort. Sitting alongside my self, I am not sure what lesson I walk away with, but I am grateful that tonight I can walk away from my work, leave it here, and go engage with the things that transform me.

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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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Disability's Digital Pharmacy: On Accessible Writing

"The leaves of writing act as a pharmakon

to push or attract out of the city
the one who never wanted to get out"

Plato's Pharmacy
Jacques Derrida

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Digital Accessibility

It is the goal of many writers and the challenge of many academic writers to be accessible. Yet it is an open secret that the ivory tower policies of university work and scholarly publications set up many levels of gatekeeping. Thus, even when our prose approaches wide-spread readability, able to be comprehended by those in and outside out specialties, those who are able to access our books and articles are relatively exclusive due to copyrights, high prices, and library subscription limitations. Add on to this the compounded divisions of audiences by language proficiency, the availability of translators, and geographic region and it may be surprising that anyone is able to read our work. Indeed, the echo-chamber of academic writing is a significant factor in what drives many, like myself, into the digital humanities and public scholarship. Through websites, such as www.ThingsTransform.com, I am able to share educational resources, works in progress, and lesson plans on transgender, disability, and medieval studies with a wider audience. While currently such digital platforms rarely count for hiring or tenure considerations, such digital humanists feel that we are extending our work in the academy into the realm of public intellectualism, getting information to those who need it, want it, or can challenge it, beyond the circumscription of the ivory tower.

Furthermore, such online databases and writing platforms allow us to continue an ongoing project of increasing the accessibility of education to those physically or socially disabled. The utopian dream of such digital humanists of disability is that the internet might offer a virtual answer to the long sought but elusive goal of a "universal design." We see universities taking up the flag to encourage us to promote, engage, and share classes, lectures, and conference experiences with those who cannot make it to the physical space. Blackboard, blogs, streaming video, skype, live-tweeted conferences, and Massive Open Online Courses urge on the desire that no matter your mobility, geographic isolation, time limits, or sensory modes that we might all be brought together in the digital classroom. Within this tantalizing technological revolution lays the fantasy that perhaps at last the digital pharmacy might offer a virtual cure to disability's limitations.

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The Pharmakon of DH

At the suggestion of virtual transcendence of physical embodiments, a disability studies advocate, or perhaps any practicing humanist, should start back and pause. For those of us who have read our Derrida know to mistrust any promise of technological cure for difference, seeing every cure as also a poison. For however Disability's digital pharmacy presents itself, as an accessible writing platform or a virtual classroom, the age old dialectic is at work. After all, what is online scholarship except an extension of the same technology that Socrates considered to be a deathly cure for matter and meaning; that is, writing itself. "Knowing he can always leave his thoughts outside or check them with an external agency, with the physical, spatial, superficial marks that one lays flat on a tablet, he who has the techne of writing on it will come to rely on it," writes Derrida. "He will know that he himself can leave without his tupoi going away, that he can forget all about them without them leaving his service. They will represent him even if he forgets them" (437-438). And here we begin to see the double movement of digital writing for disability. The "ghost" of disability serves the argument for the Digital Humanities, even as the presumption of accessibility leads to the forgetting of those to whom access is supposed to serve. 

In other words, the grander the accessible digital classroom becomes, the less we concern ourselves with making the physical classroom accessible. Online interfaces that are supposed to give another way for people to get access to the academic community becomes the only way for some to enter the conversation. When we praise the technology that allows the boy in a wheel-chair who can follow along from home, or the deaf girl to read the transcript, we give room for the suggestion that the historical struggle to bring more people into the physical space of the classroom is not longer necessary. In a sense, we give them a virtual presence at the expense of their physical presence. Digital Access reveals itself to be a Pharmakon, where "the leaves of writing... push or attract out of the city the one who never wanted to get out" (429-430). The dream of the digital pharmacy reveals itself an ableist dream, where physical embodiment and difference is transcended. Disabled bodies are eschewed from public space, forgotten. Only the sign of disability remains.

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Digital Disability

In light of the dream and nightmare, cure and poison, of virtual accessibility, what might we as disability advocates in the digital humanities do to make sure that more persons are not excluded from coming into the academic community while we bring our work out to the online public? We remember the ethical and social lessons of the humanities as we venture into the digital realm at the same time that the teaching of the humanities takes on a more digital form. Even if there are those who want us to surrender "the humanities" part of "digital humanities," we will never accomplish, as C.S. Lewis writes, An Abolition of Man. For the techne of digital writing is not totally other and external to humanity, but merely an enactment of age long operations of power. "Each new power won by man is a power over man as well," writes Lewis. "Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger... [Technology] can be withheld from some men by other men — by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production, or those who make the goods." The digital portal then is not an escape from the problems and promises of our world but an extension of it; full of old problems we've face in the humanities presenting in new ways.

If we in the humanities believe that something special happens when people come together in a room and share their thoughts, then writing technology, analog or digital, cannot replace the challenging and uncomfortable task of making an accessible community space. What our digital tools can do is remind us of the diversity of ways that we teach and learn, read and communicate, so that we can adapt the classroom environment to better serve those who show up - rather than predetermining who can show up by how we build our environment. As one blind student once told me: there are plenty of problems with technology that is supposed to be accessible. Screen readers have trouble with blackboard and PDF articles scan only as images without text. Yet technology will always have problems. We will always need the human factor because people can adapt; adapt our technologies, adapt our practices, and adapt our many intersecting worlds.

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