1.connect spoken word, written text, and visuals in interesting ways.Types of artifacts(plz choosing a short and easy to understanding artifacts)
Objects (white cane, hearing aid, medication)
News article
Found artistic work (poem, story, painting, song, cartoon, photograph)
2.explain your artifact and your interest in it
3.connect your artifact with ideas about disability discussed myth in class (I will upload latter)
Types of artifacts(plz choosing a short and easy to understanding artifacts)
Objects (white cane, hearing aid, medication)
News article
Found artistic work (poem, story, painting, song, cartoon, photograph)
Video or online document (website, blog post)
talk about how your artifact represents or tells a story of disability.
• In ter c h a pter
An Archive and Anatomy
of Disability Myths
As Ro sema r i e Ga r l a n d-Th omso n writes, “Seeing disability as a representational
system engages several premises of current critical theory:
that representation structures reality, that the margins constitute the center,
that human identity is multiple and unstable, and that all analysis
and evaluation has political implications” (1997b, 19). With this in mind,
I will pause here to create a quick overview of some of the myths of disability
that are ubiquitous across cultures and eras and that condition our
understanding of disability (and thus of all identity and all bodies). This
investigation of disability myths is an extension of my interrogation of the
logics of normativity. Each of these myths works to mark and construct
disability as surplus, improper, lesser, or otherwise other—and none of
them actually directly defi nes what “normal” is, except via an excessive
exnomination. In this way, these myths reach into all bodies, yet they also
very particularly structure roles for people with disabilities.
I call these myths, but I also situate them also as stereotypes and
tropes. These may not be fully “mythological,” in the rich rhetorical sense
of myth I will try to put forward throughout this book. But these are myths
in the manner of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: meanings are attached to
these images, and they become routinized and easily consumed (1972, 92).
Each one of these myths is also a misplacement of meaning. These are stereotypes
because they are often narrow and infl exible and render simple
understandings. They are tropes because they shape stories and emplot.
They are rhetorical because they provide material for a wide range of
expressions, whether through compressed analogies or longer narratives.
32 • Disa bi l i t y Rh e t or ic
Regardless, these fi gures shape both stories and lives. As Joseph Shapiro
has shown, “Disabled people have become sensitized to depictions of disability
in popular culture, religion, and history. There they fi nd constant
descriptions of a disabled person’s proper role as either an object of pity
or a source of inspiration. These images are internalized by disabled and
nondisabled people alike and build social stereotypes, create artifi cial
limitations, and contribute to discrimination” (1993, 30).
I borrow for my taxonomy from several sources, including Shapiro.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson looks carefully and systematically at disability
in literature, and Ato Quayson (2007) similarly offers a “typology”
of representations.1 Michael Norden, Paul Longmore, and Leonard Kriegel
also look at disability stereotypes in fi lm, television, and literature.2
The chart is greatly indebted to Mitchell and Snyder’s “Body Genres,”
which maps out an “anatomy” of the common characteristics found in
disability portrayals across genres of fi lm (2006, 188).3 Disability studies
scholar G. Thomas Couser describes the “preferred plots and rhetorical
schemes” of disability in nonfi ction or memoir (2001, 79). These rhetorical
schemes or myths tell familiar stories about disability from an ableist
perspective. The use of all of these myths in discourse, then, both borrows
from and shapes cultural beliefs about disability in the everyday.4
Of course, this book will mainly focus on the ways disability can
be positively and expansively represented and not on simple, negative
dismissals. Yet sometimes these two polarities need to engage with one
1. In addition to her literary analyses, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2002) also suggests
that there are four dominant visual rhetorics of disability: the wondrous, the sentimental,
the exotic, and the ordinary or realistic.
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