Whose Field Is It, Anyway? Disability Studies in the Academy

These are heady times for disability studies. From a grassroots movement that didn’t appear on the curricular radar as recently as 10 years ago, a burgeoning constituency has sprung up, along with a journal, several high-profile books, and the kind of academic attention that shows that a field is achieving legitimacy. But disability studies is deliberately following a well-traveled route to recognition, and many of its members seem to be paying scant attention to the dangers encountered by those who have been down that road before.

Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that focuses not only on disability, but also on how disability illuminates society and culture. Last summer, my involvement in the field led me to San Francisco to give a presentation at the annual conference of the Society for Disability Studies. After the members of my panel had all spoken, an audience member lobbed a question at us from the back of the room. “I noticed,” she said, “that none of you addressed your own disability status. Would you speak to that?” The question really meant, “Are you disabled?” Certainly that was how everyone in the room interpreted it. We answered in turn. One panelist, a professor from the Northwest who had given a paper on advocacy movements among the mentally retarded, deflected the question with humor. He hoped, he said, that his audience could see that he wasn’t retarded. (Privately, he told me that many scholars in disability studies resist including the mentally disabled in the field.) Another speaker, who had talked about disability rights, was obviously embarrassed by the question. She wasn’t disabled, she said, but she was gay. Amazing, I thought to myself. The woman has just been outed by her audience.

When the microphone was passed to me, I didn’t answer the question directly. Instead, I spoke of the distinction between the professional and the personal, and how important that distinction is to me. The question disturbed me, but it really shouldn’t have surprised me. Throughout the conference, I had repeatedly met with discussions about “disability status.” In one session on teaching, for example, the moderators had focused explicitly on the role that one’s own disability status should play in the classroom. I listened to teachers describe classroom encounters of such intimacy that I wondered how they could grade students afterwards. And I heard much passionate argument that only disabled people should teach disability studies.

What place does the issue of one’s disability, or lack thereof, have in the field of disability studies? The question is actually an old one phrased in a new way. Disability-studies scholars are nearly unanimous on the point that the field should be seen as the newest variation on the model established by racial and ethnic studies, a model that derives its focus from looking at the history and culture of a minority group. Scholars such as the psychologist Simi Linton and the literary critic Rosemarie Garland Thomson have written persuasively on the similarities between disability studies and those fields, and have offered valuable insights into the American experience refracted through the perspective of disabled persons.

Disability studies does resemble African-American studies in crucial ways. Like its older counterpart, for example, it houses an uneasy union between activists and scholars. Another similarity lies in the vexed quest for acceptance: Like African-American studies in its early days, disability studies seeks institutional recognition by establishing new academic programs.

But consider the historical problem faced by black studies, recently noted by Nellie McKay, a professor of American and Afro-American studies, in the Modern Language Association’s flagship publication, PMLA. The field long ago became a kind of ghetto for the small number of African-American Ph.D.'s granted each year in the United States, McKay argued, and the blackness of most of its practitioners, coupled with the whiteness of the rest of academe, stigmatizes the field even today. While McKay would let white people into African-American studies, she still demands that African Americans have a role in insuring that all those involved receive the proper “training and learning” -- because “black people ‘know’ white people,” but white people don’t “know” black people. No wonder African-American studies remains a color-sensitive minefield.

Now, some scholars in disability studies advocate labeling contributors to their field: Linton, for example, argued in a recent book that all writers on disability ought to identify themselves as disabled or non-disabled, to call attention “to the absent voice of disabled people in scholarship.” She believes that doing so would disrupt the reader’s assumption that most writers are not disabled. Labeling would also “situate” the writer, for, as modern critical theory emphasizes, everyone is coming from somewhere.

The danger of mandating self-identification centers on authority and credentials. When intellectual gatekeepers ask, “Are you disabled?’' they are often asking, “Where is your authority to talk about disability?” The implication is that disability studies belongs to disabled people. But we should examine the whole idea of belonging.

Disabled people have done most of the important work so far in creating disability studies, but that doesn’t mean it should “belong” to them. To behave as though it does effectively turns the field into patrolled ground, a swath of intellectual private property with “posted” signs allowing exploration only at the owners’ discretion. No area of intellectual inquiry can afford to practice that sort of proprietary scrutiny, but an academic field that is so clearly following in the footsteps of racial and ethnic studies risks becoming a ghetto if such practices become institutionalized. Instead of a private estate, an emerging academic field would be better thought of as a newly endowed public park.

Disabled people have been silenced for too long. They continue to experience real difficulty getting hired in (and also outside) the academy. The slogan of the disability-rights movement, “Nothing about us without us,” is therefore most appropriate. But the culture of disabled people should not be synonymous with the intellectual field of disability studies. An area of inquiry must bring together diverse perspectives to be challenging and productive. While some work in any field is bound to be bad, the freedom for all to range about and make mistakes is also what produces contributions that make a difference. The scholars who tried to limit access to the Dead Sea Scrolls learned that you can’t bar the door forever: Unauthorized researchers got to the documents anyway and have energized scholarship.

If one’s “disability status” affects the way that one’s ideas are judged, then we should separate people in the field into two groups. Does that mean that referees reviewing scholarly manuscripts should receive a special notification of a writer’s disability status? Should the writer be entitled to know the status of the reviewer? I can’t believe that such steps would do any good -- but they are the logical outcome of labeling.

Disability studies shows clearly how dubious that practice is. For one thing, distinctions within the broad area of disability are far from clear. There are so many disabilities (both hidden and visible) that having one hardly entitles a person to speak from personal experience about all other disabled persons.

The borders surrounding disability are similarly blurry. For example, children of deaf adults straddle the worlds of the disabled and the able-bodied, and as the literary critic Lennard J. Davis has shown in his work, they essentially inhabit both worlds, living bicultural lives. Indeed, some scholars of disability, such as the literary critic David T. Mitchell, have recognized that permeability defines the disabled identity generally: Such scholars oppose requiring the “disability I.D. card,” because disability is not a fixed identity. As Annette Kolodny, a literary critic and former dean at the University of Arizona, observes, we’re all destined for disability as we age, unless we die first. She is one of many who have offered the term “temporarily abled” to describe those who have no impairments. If the disabled are a minority group that most people can expect to join, why should disability studies communicate to the majority that “we don’t want you yet”?

To be sure, the able-bodied are hardly in need of passionate defense in the world. Majority indignation at minority privilege has become a tiresome commonplace in the ‘90s. My argument has a different goal: to examine the dangerous consequences of proprietorship in the academic world. There’s nothing wrong with subdividing the scholarly world by fields. Disciplinarity makes it easier to get things done, and interdisciplinarity helps to generate new ideas and new fields while also calling attention to, and often criticizing, disciplinary boundaries. But those boundaries are meant to facilitate inquiry, not to impede it.

If boundaries become restrictions, the whole scheme undermines what the word “university” describes: a community of scholars working across the range of knowledge for the good of the whole. In light of current attacks on academe as elitist, it’s important to add that “the whole” for which professors work refers to all of society. Indeed, academe “belongs” to society; here the idea of belonging is appropriate, since society pays the tab for the academic enterprise. When we restrict access to fields, we fuel a resentment that often seems motivated by a feeling of exclusion. That is a failure of accountability with vast implications.

We need to replace proprietary models with a different way of thinking, one recognizing that broad participation accompanies the success of any academic field -- or democratic polity. In Colonial New England, the Puritans tried to convert Indians to their religion and way of life, but were unwilling to let them fully participate in society. Today’s intellectual communities cannot afford to be closed in that way.

Disability studies needs to choose openness as the way to legitimacy. As with all intellectual inquiry -- and the university itself -- this exciting new field belongs to all of us. So am I disabled? I don’t think anyone should have to answer that question.

Leonard Cassuto is an associate professor of English at Fordham University. He is the author of The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (Columbia University Press, 1997).

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