After a decade of working in disability studies, I still find myself surprised by the presence of disability in narratives I had never considered to be “about” disability—in animated films from Dumbo to Finding Nemo; in literary texts from Huckleberry Finn to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays; and, most curiously, even in the world of science fiction and superheroes, a world that turns out to be populated by blind Daredevils, mutant supercrips, and posthuman cyborgs of all kinds. Indeed, I now consider it plausible that the genre of science fiction is as obsessed with disability as it is with space travel and alien contact. Sometimes disability is simply underrecognized in familiar sci-fi narratives: ask Philip K. Dick fans about the importance of disability in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and you'll probably get blank stares. But the Voigt-Kampff empathy test by which the authorities distinguish humans from androids was, Dick tells us, actually developed after World War Terminus to identify “specials,” people neurologically damaged by radioactive fallout, so that the state could prevent them from reproducing. That aspect of the novel's complication of the human-android distinction is lost in the film Blade Runner, but the film does give us an engineer with a disability that involves premature aging, which links him intimately to the androids who have life spans of only four years.

I believe, as did one of the greatest Rhe-torical scholars of the twentieth century (or probably any century), Kenneth Burke, that “[t]he human animal, as we know it, emerges into personality by first mastering whatever tribal speech happens to be its particular symbolic environment” (1346). Applying Burke's idea, I am interested in mapping the emergent personality of deaf women writers as they master the tribal speech (and sign too) of their particular region, nation, or era as well as the tribal speech of gender overlaid with the tribal speech of deafness, disability, “normalcy,” and difference.

I have been part of several congregations whose practice of receiving Eucharist includes filing to the front of the sanctuary and kneeling at the communion rail. Often, because I am either in a wheelchair or using crutches, an usher informs me that I need not go forward for the Eucharist. Instead, I am offered the sacrament at my seat after everyone else has been served.

In “seeing the disabled: visual rhetorics of disability in Popular Photography,” Rose-marie Garland-Thomson argues that representations of disability in photography, over more than a century, have generally fallen into four broad categories: the wondrous, which places the disabled subject on high and elicits awe from viewers because of the supposedly amazing achievement represented; the sentimental, which places the disabled subject in a diminished, childlike, or custodial position, evoking pity; the exotic, which makes disability strange and distant—a freakish or perhaps transgressive spectacle; and the realistic, which brings disability close, potentially minimizing the difference between viewer and viewed. In the essay, which first appeared in print in the important disability studies anthology The New Disability History, Garland-Thomson reiterates some of the central disability studies insights that have transformed scholarship in the humanities over the past decade. Simultaneously, she takes disability studies in new directions, providing a critical taxonomy that those of us in the field can use as a foundation for countless other projects.

One of the consistent problems i find in the work I do—which is focused on women and the cultural representations of illness—is classification. There was not really a category of “disability studies” when I started this work in the 1980s, and I would have resisted that label even if there had been. Since embracing the field of disability studies, I have wondered about my early resistance to it. At first, I attributed it to my own ableism (and I don't think I am necessarily wrong about this), but as I have continued to work on the issues, I am coming to see it more as a result of a disciplinary divide between the medical humanities and disability studies. My first job teaching literature was in a medical school, and I was early on immersed in the idea of the medical humanities, an idea I am beginning to think is antithetical to disability studies (though not to disability itself). My talk today discusses the source of that divide, the problems I see with it, and suggestions for what we can do about it. I want to examine the two interdisciplinary fields in terms of their disciplinarity, and in the interest of time, I'll use a shortcut to do this; I will compare two relatively recent MLA publications, Teaching Literature and Medicine (2000) and Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (2002).

As a former trainer in a teaching program and an educational psychologist special-izing in disabilities, I have viewed learning from two perspectives: that of the teacher and that of the learner. My more recent role in administration has caused me to consider these perspectives in a more unified manner, concentrating specifically on the link between teaching and learning in higher education. Here at Emory, my responsibility is to view the total academic experience of students with disabilities and to work with faculty members to develop policies and procedures that will allow our students full access to educational opportunities. I am asked to build bridges between teaching and learning at an institution that has until recently taken for granted that everyone is equally endowed for learning and learns similarly. The unwritten understanding has been that if one passes the threshold of admission into this community, one does not have needs that might be considered “special.”

Disability is an inescapable element of human existence and experience. Although it is rarely acknowledged as such, it is also a fundamental aspect of human diversity. It is so, first, in the sense that, worldwide, an enormous number of people are disabled. The proportion of disabled people in different national populations varies significantly with factors such as economic development, quality and availability of health care, and the age distribution of the population. (In the United States, people with disabilities make up the population's largest minority: Census 2000 found nearly twenty percent of the population over five years of age to be affected by some sort of disability [United States, Census Bureau].) Furthermore, because of the way this minority is constituted, it is arguably more diverse than those of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Disabilities may affect one's senses or one's mobility; they may be static or progressive, congenital or acquired, formal (affecting the shape of the body) or functional, visible or invisible.

The standard charge activists and scholars make against disability autobiographies is that they reinforce cultural stereotypes and hinder social change. These texts, such critics argue, perpetuate the notion that disability is a personal tragedy that happens to an individual rather than a set of cultural structures and practices that affect many individuals. As a writer and reader of disability autobiography, I believe it is possible to use one's personal experiences to comment on the culture one inhabits. I do not intend here, however, to defend or condemn specific authors or works or to debate the value of these texts as a facet of a social-change movement. I offer instead an impressionistic account of a course on disability autobiography that I taught at Berkeley recently. What stands out in my memory of the course has to do less with students' responses to particular texts and more with interactions among the students or between the students and me that often seemed peripheral to the topic at hand. This is, then, an autobiographical essay, a series of vignettes and portraits, rendered in all the randomness of lived experience. But it will, I hope, raise issues that are central to disability activism and disability studies.

In its short existence as an academic discipline, disability studies has devoted significant attention to the representation of disabled persons in the visual arts, literature, theater, and public life. Disability scholars have studied the ways that cultural forms depend on a putatively normal body to reinforce regimes of national, racial, and sexual normalcy while using the person with a cognitive or physical impairment as a metaphor for the queer, subaltern, or marginal. A common recent criticism among disability scholars is that metaphoric treatments of impairment seldom confront the material conditions of actual disabled persons, permitting dominant social structures to be written on the body of a person who is politely asked to step offstage once the metaphoric exchange is made. Disabled artists and activists have attempted to reverse this pattern, turning their cameo appearances in such theaters back on the audience, refusing the crippling gaze of an ableist society and reassigning the meanings of disability in their own terms. As Carrie Sandahl says, people with disabilities are “not only staring back, but also talking back, insisting that ‘this body has a mouth‘” (13).

Despite its newness, disability-theater studies is an incredibly rich area of inquiry that is exploding in artistic practice and scholarship. The university is a particularly suitable site for a meeting of disability and the theater; after all, we theater scholars think of our classrooms and productions as laboratories not only for showcasing knowledge but for producing, rehearsing, and revising it. As the theater scholar Jill Dolan points out, live performance, especially in the liberal arts setting, has the unique power to test, on bodies willing to try them, academic theories that are otherwise purely theoretical. The feedback loop that oscillates between theory and practice in theater studies is necessarily changed by the inclusion of disability perspectives in the classroom, research programs, and performance offerings. Interestingly, an underlying theme of disability perspectives is that the lived experience of disability is always already performative; indeed, many of us with disabilities understand our disabilities as performance, not exclusively in an aesthetic or theoretical sense, but as an actual mode of living in the world. Consider what the playwright and wheelchair user John Belluso told me in a recent interview: “Any time I get on a public bus, I feel like it's a moment of theater. I'm lifted, the stage is moving up, and I enter, and people are along the lines, and they're turning and looking, and I make my entrance. It's theater, and I have to perform. And I feel like we as disabled people are constantly onstage and we're constantly performing.” The perspective of disability as performance undergirds and permeates disability art and scholarship. Thus, my own development as a disability-theater scholar and artist frames my perception of how disability challenges both the practical and the theoretical aspects of theater studies and points to the role universities play in fostering further development of the field.

While disability studies has opened up new discursive spaces for revising cultural attitudes and beliefs about disability, its increasing legitimation in the contemporary academy comes with conflicts. The university as a research location cannot merely divorce itself from the ethical and restrictive practices that have characterized the past two centuries. In fact, it does so only at its own risk and, even more important, at the risk of further entrenching disabled people in its institutional grounding. The institutionalization of disability studies is just that—a formal cultural ingestion process that churns out knowledge about disability while resisting reflexive inquiries about whether or not more detail is inherently better. More knowledge is inherently better for the institution because it keeps the research mill active, but here we want to contemplate the degree to which generating more professionally based data about disability threatens to reproduce some of the problems that have characterized the study of disability to this point in history.