VariAbilities III 2017: Keynote speaker, Miriam L. Wallace
Post date: Dec 17, 2016 10:18:14 PM
The Spector of the Singular Body in Frankenstein (1818):
Difference and Constructed Community
Bodily impairment reminds us constantly that we are at heart, embodied—not merely a mind imprisoned in a body, but a subject constructed not only in language, but in flesh. Social activist and political approaches to minimizing the impact of impairment on the real lives of persons have been widely successful in ameliorating for instance, encounters with the built landscape and institutional access. But what gets left behind in these approaches? Sometimes the upbeat call to understand disability only in terms of inhospitable physical structures or technological or prosthetic mediation evades the ways that the body itself and impairment too ebb and flow, treating disability as so “constructed” that we can simply construct our way out of it. As effective as it has been, the very useful unifying term “disability community” or even “crip community” has a way of eliding the precise specificity and the loneliness of one’s individual embodied experience and interface with the material and social world.