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BADD: School Stories
May. 1st, 2011 01:06 pmOn Thursday I was presenting my results of an exercise in primary source research to a class of mine. Now, I'd done this particular project on marriage rights for people with disabilities in the early twentieth century, and my results were fairly surprising: long story short - in my time period and in the cases I was able to find, the conservative nature of jurisprudence often led judges to uphold the rights of people with disabilities to marry if they had already succeeded in doing so - a very limited sort of upholding, I am the first to admit, but more than I had expected. I went into this bracing myself and wound up cheering rather a lot. My results, however, are not really the point of this story.
I'd chosen to introduce the paper that went with the exercise by means of a narrative treatment of the case that sent me off down this particular line of thought. This particular case had a great deal of information about the young woman at the center of it, and covered a great deal of what her life was like before she married her husband. I felt it illustrated the issues at stake and the power of judicial reliance on common law precedent pretty well. I read this introduction out in class, stopping when I came to my thesis statement. I'm a good writer, and I had excellent material, so it's probably unsurprising that most of the questions I found myself fielding centered on the people in the story I recounted, rather than on the broad historical context (a few did center on the latter, of course, but not most). People respond to stories.
But there was one question I didn't handle too well.
Classmate: What was her disability? I mean, I know back then they'd class the littlest thing as a disability, so...
Now, there are several ways I could have responded to this. What I actually said was, "My source isn't very specific. She probably had cognitive disabilities and maybe some learning disabilities, but it's all very vague, and I'm not going to try to diagnose someone I've never even met."
At which my prof chuckled and said, "Fair enough."
(I didn't get a chance to add that I wouldn't try to diagnose someone else anyway even if I had met them, seeing as how I will never be their doctor.)
What I wanted to say, what I wanted to explain, what I had neglected to prepare as an answer was that it didn't matter. The historiography of eugenics is littered with work that obsesses over who was "really" disabled and in the process strongly suggests that the true problem of eugenics is not that it advocates the coercion and disenfrancisment or outright destruction of people with disabilities but that it casts its conceptual net too broadly. Even Stephen Jay Gould (not a historian, not technically part of the historiography, but a very important scholarly voice in the dismantling of reified notions of intelligence) slips up and does this in The Mismeasure of Man. To his credit it was only glaring once in a several hundred page book, and I suspect what he was attempting to do was to emphasize the ways in which people classified as so disabled as to be worthless usually turn out to be, um, people after all, but the slip still emphasizes the power of the narrative expectation that it's "normal" people who are important.
I think there is value in tracing historical patterns of diagnosis, and in attempting to follow the history of understandings and treatments of various disabilities. I think these things are important. But I have no interest in policing the disability status of the dead.
I only thought of how to say what I wanted to say after my turn to present had passed, and class ended shortly thereafter: I was too flustered to come up with a coherent and concise statement about the basic assumptions I'd conducted this research under. My assumption is that disability is not, when you come down to it, about something wrong in a person's brain or body. It is about the structure of society, about who can go where and who the world is built for. Come right down to it, if you're being targeted under laws directed at the control/coercion of people with disabilities, you're disabled enough for me to include you in my study of what those laws meant for people with disabilities.
I'd chosen to introduce the paper that went with the exercise by means of a narrative treatment of the case that sent me off down this particular line of thought. This particular case had a great deal of information about the young woman at the center of it, and covered a great deal of what her life was like before she married her husband. I felt it illustrated the issues at stake and the power of judicial reliance on common law precedent pretty well. I read this introduction out in class, stopping when I came to my thesis statement. I'm a good writer, and I had excellent material, so it's probably unsurprising that most of the questions I found myself fielding centered on the people in the story I recounted, rather than on the broad historical context (a few did center on the latter, of course, but not most). People respond to stories.
But there was one question I didn't handle too well.
Classmate: What was her disability? I mean, I know back then they'd class the littlest thing as a disability, so...
Now, there are several ways I could have responded to this. What I actually said was, "My source isn't very specific. She probably had cognitive disabilities and maybe some learning disabilities, but it's all very vague, and I'm not going to try to diagnose someone I've never even met."
At which my prof chuckled and said, "Fair enough."
(I didn't get a chance to add that I wouldn't try to diagnose someone else anyway even if I had met them, seeing as how I will never be their doctor.)
What I wanted to say, what I wanted to explain, what I had neglected to prepare as an answer was that it didn't matter. The historiography of eugenics is littered with work that obsesses over who was "really" disabled and in the process strongly suggests that the true problem of eugenics is not that it advocates the coercion and disenfrancisment or outright destruction of people with disabilities but that it casts its conceptual net too broadly. Even Stephen Jay Gould (not a historian, not technically part of the historiography, but a very important scholarly voice in the dismantling of reified notions of intelligence) slips up and does this in The Mismeasure of Man. To his credit it was only glaring once in a several hundred page book, and I suspect what he was attempting to do was to emphasize the ways in which people classified as so disabled as to be worthless usually turn out to be, um, people after all, but the slip still emphasizes the power of the narrative expectation that it's "normal" people who are important.
I think there is value in tracing historical patterns of diagnosis, and in attempting to follow the history of understandings and treatments of various disabilities. I think these things are important. But I have no interest in policing the disability status of the dead.
I only thought of how to say what I wanted to say after my turn to present had passed, and class ended shortly thereafter: I was too flustered to come up with a coherent and concise statement about the basic assumptions I'd conducted this research under. My assumption is that disability is not, when you come down to it, about something wrong in a person's brain or body. It is about the structure of society, about who can go where and who the world is built for. Come right down to it, if you're being targeted under laws directed at the control/coercion of people with disabilities, you're disabled enough for me to include you in my study of what those laws meant for people with disabilities.
