By Chelsea A. Jack
Disability
scholars aim to socially deconstruct naturalized, or seemingly
inevitable and fundamental, understandings of what it means to be able-bodied
or disabled. As is the case with much postmodern writing, disability
scholars forward their ideas with a general suspicion toward claims of
knowledge fortified by dichotomous relationships, e.g. male/female,
nature/culture, disabled/abled. However, this is not to say that actual
differences do not exist among different groups of people. It is only to say
that the barriers between “us” and “them” are never quite as solid as they
appear, and that questioning those barriers allows for reimagined relations
among community members.
Here,
with disability scholarship as my primary example, I draw on the writings of
three feminist scholars across different academic disciplines to show how a
self-reflexive style can show the vulnerable relationship between the self and
other. Such stylistic choices in favor of self-reflexivity betray the academic
mantle of omniscience, or objectivity, that characterize arguments removed from
the first person. Further, these choices can encourage reimagined relations
with those we might understand as other.
When
philosopher Eva Kittay has written against ideal theory in bioethics, she has
made a strategically feminist move in her criticism of such theory and its
proponents, specifically philosophers Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan: she
self-reveals. For example, when she criticized Singer’s and McMahan’s theories
concerning necessary cognitive and psychological criteria for the status of
moral personhood, Kittay reveals that her own daughter, Sesha, was diagnosed as
severely to profoundly retarded. Kittay shares that her own daughter might be
counted among those whom McMahan has stipulated as undeserving of justice or
life. Kittay purposes the developmental experiences of her own daughter as
counterpoints to Singer and McMahan’s arguments that deny severely disabled and
congenitally severely mentally retarded (CSMR) persons the status of moral
personhood.
In her
own reflections on feminist ethnography, anthropologist Ruth Behar has
contemplated the implications of acknowledging the place of “I” in the representations
of others. In The Vulnerable Observer, Behar suggests that it makes
scholars nervous to “forsake the mantle of omniscience” in favor of revealing
personal stories into what we have been taught to think of as the analysis of
impersonal social facts (1996:12). Both Behar and Kittay approach their own
feminist scholarship with an appreciation for humility. Humility, for Kittay,
requires both resisting the impulse to impose your own values on others and
acknowledging what you do not know (2009:229). As Kittay writes about her own
daughter Sesha, she admits, “What cognitive capacities Sesha possesses I simply
do not know, nor do others. And it is hubris to presume” (2009:229). By
utilizing a narrative from her own life, Kittay not only values humility as a
maxim of ethical theorizing but her argument here is feminist for its ability
to respond to the theme of vulnerability and marginality underlying
subject-object formation.
When
Kittay revealed her own relationship to disability, she created a space for
conversation about “the tenuous nature of selfhood,” to borrow phrasing from
feminist scholar Karen O’Connell (2005:219). In O’Connell’s analysis of the
Romany term for the Holocaust – a term that translates to “the devouring” – she
argues that attempts to expel unwanted people (i.e. the disabled, women, Jews)
are never successful, since total expulsion is a myth. The existence of the
self requires attempts to expel unclean and improper elements (218). In this
sense, the constitution of threats to the self represents an exigency for the
latter. The self, then, is a very fragile thing. This realization then becomes
critical in the analysis of violence toward otherness, whether manifested
against disabled people, people of color, or women.
How might
self-revealing break down entrenched notions of “we” versus “them”? In what way
do hypothetical analogies in ideal theory – such as Singer’s between
cognitively impaired people and chimpanzees – reinforce epistemic structures
of hierarchy and domination, where moral knowledge rests on obscuring the
situated-ness of the author herself – situation meaning the circumstances that
formulate our identity, i.e. race, class, gender – and the disturbing absence
of disabled people in this theorizing? I personally admire those, such as Behar
and Kittay, who betray the academic mantle of omniscience in order to advocate
humility and recognize the vulnerability of the self.
Works
Cited
Behar,
Ruth. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer:
Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press.
Kittay, Eva. 2009. “Ideal theory
bioethics and the exclusion of people with severe cognitive disabilities.” In Naturalized Bioethics:
Toward Responsible Knowing and Practice, edited by H. Lindemann, 218 – 37. Cambridge.
O’Connell, Karen. 2005. “The
devouring: Genetics, abjection, and the limits of Law.” In Ethics of the Body:
Postconventional Challenges,
edited by Margrit Shildrick and Roxanne Mykitiuk, 217 – 34. MIT.
Chelsea is a
Research Assistant at The Hastings Center. She graduated with highest distinction from the
University of Virginia, where she received a B.A. in political and social
thought and anthropology with a minor in bioethics. Her research interests
include medical and legal anthropology, political and social theory, bioethics,
and contemporary feminist thought.
