Minor Bodies: Dominant Discourses and Other Normative Stigmas in the Social Space

When someone asks me to write an article about disability, I am always torn between two feelings. On the one hand, there is what I would call my responsibility to speak: I must speak about disability because I have the theoretical tools to do it; I must bear witness to disabled existence and wedge it into the field of the possible, of ordinary life. On the other hand, I have a reaction of defiance mixed with lassitude, thinking: “here we go again! I have to speak about disability. I have to reduce my voice to it, whereas I could speak about a lot of other things.” I am divided between the necessity of showing an element of social space that is usually invisible, and the feeling that I am reproducing an attitude imposed by the dominant standpoint, which wants me to speak about myself, about my disability, reducing me to my difference. The dominant standpoint (the norm) never speaks about itself; it hides behind stories imposed on different people. Normality is only defined by the differences. The dominant ableist standpoint often asks me to speak about myself, but it already knows what it wants to hear. It wants me to play a role, the role that is already given to me, the same way that women have to play the role of the perfect housewife and the sweet mother. It does not want to see me as myself. It wants to see me only as a case of disability. Therefore, I am invisible when I am shown; I am inaudible when I am asked to speak about myself. The static around disability is drowning out my voice.

However, I still want to speak about myself, about my experience. Maybe staying silent would confirm that my existence is unworthy of being told. I want to assert that I have a legitimacy to talk, that I belong with others, that I belong in the world. I just have to find other ways of speaking about disability. I have to invent other ways of constructing a language about myself as a disabled person. I do not want to reduce myself, nor reduce disability in general, to an insular object that is not subject to the same dynamics as any other stigmatized social element. For instance, I am convinced that there are many similarities between femininity and disability. After all, every woman has a body, every disabled person has a body: a sensitive body that endures an ensemble of discourse — including the medical discourses, which helps legitimize systems of social domination.

In this article, I am going to draw a parallel between the status of female bodies and the status of disabled bodies, as well as how they are respectively situated in social space. This comparison allows me to highlight the relation between the elaboration of the medical discourse surrounding these bodies and their exclusion from public space.

Let me first tell you a story. Recently, on a visit to my parents, I told my mother that I wanted to get my file back from Dr. A. She answered that she was afraid that it would be painful for me to read what he had written about me back then.

Dr. A. is the pediatrician who tactlessly announced to my parents that I, their daughter, was disabled and was going to vegetate in a bed all my life. I don’t know why I wanted to get my file back. Maybe I did not want to leave an important part of my life in the hands of this ‘dear’ doctor. Maybe I wanted to escape once and for all from his stranglehold, by seeing whatever he could have written about me and my body. I knew the words that I’d see in my file were not going to be painful to read. My present life would protect me from the word of the past. My parents were not protected and, as such, the doctor’s words frightened them. But when you knew the end of the story, the beginning would seem less frightening. Perhaps.

Facing my parents, Dr. A. spoke about my body, a body that he believed to understand through a medical vocabulary and scientific typologies. He condemned my existence at the very moment it began. His dangerous words seemed to make the whole progression of my life synonymous with immobility: “no improvement is possible, no change is thinkable.” “This child shall never learn syntax and language,” he said. “This child shall never walk,” he said. “This child shall never draw a circle,” he said. When did I learn to read and write, walk, and draw a circle, he said “This child is developing very abnormally.”

His words, like all medical discourse, were dangerous because they claim to be authoritative, capable of defining a body, an existence, a child’s future. The medical discourse draws a boundary between normal bodies and pathological bodies. It sets up a hierarchy between the bodies that matter and all the others. It also reinforces a symbolic system of social order weighing over bodies that do not tally with the norm. Bodies are marked, categorized.

My body produces spastic and dystonic movements because of an excessive muscular tension. But “spasticity” and “dystonia” are only words, which ultimately say very little about me. My body is naked, silent about itself and its existence. Discourses and representations dress it with significations, values, and social status. I have to correspond with a certain image, a certain destiny: my disabled body should impose the conditions of my existence.

These social dynamics recall feminist issues: masculinity and femininity are reinforced by bodies — our physical, morphological elements. If we put it in an outrageously binary manner, a girl has a vagina and a boy has a penis. But why should a girl have to play with a doll and become a mother? Why should her crotch say anything about herself and her future? A female body should not determine an individual’s existence, desires, and aspirations.

After all, between one doctor’s words — “it’s a boy / it’s a girl” — and another doctor’s words — “this child is disabled” — what’s the difference? As Teresa de Lauretis concedes, “while we thought that we were marking the F on the form, in fact the F was marking itself on us. […] For since the very first time we put a check mark on the little square next to the F on the form” (Technologies of Gender, 1987). Since the very first time we are declared disabled — “we have officially entered the sex-gender system, the social relations of gender, and have become en-gendered as women” — the abled-disabled system, the social relations of disability, and become dis-abled. “Not only do other people consider us females” — consider us disabled — “but from that moment on we have been representing ourselves as women” — I have been representing myself as a disabled person. According to de Lauretis, the F sticks to us “like a wet silk dress.” I see disability as a trompe-l’oeil so convincing it gets mistaken for reality, sometimes even by me.

Therefore, disability, like femininity, concerns bodies, but also — and above all — representations and social relations, especially relations of domination. The male gaze produces social images about female bodies, incorporating them into a complex system of domination; the power of medicine, in the hands of men, helps develop this system and establish the masculine stranglehold over the female body. Elsa Dorlin, in The Matrix of Race (2006), shows that before the 19th century, doctors reinforced the stranglehold over women’s bodies by medicalizing delivery: the female body is made to appear weak and pathological. Then, throughout the 19th century, the female body is sexualized, especially through the figure of the “hysterical woman.” We can note a parallel movement as well: during the 19th century, women were more and more excluded from public space. There was a progressive erasure of women from political places and other spaces marked by power, but also from the streets in general, creating a gendered division of the city. For instance, new urban organizations, like Haussmann’s transformations of Paris, were driven by the principle of controlling crowds — in particular the working classes, and in particular women. We can wonder if the current intolerance for the naked breast in the public sphere isn’t just a continuation of this logic. It shows how urban organizations reveal and/or influence collective mental structures and the perception of bodies. We can also wonder if the medical language pathologizing feminine bodies does not just legitimize and reinforce the exclusion of women: if these bodies are sick, they have to be protected from the outside world. And the sane bodies — that is to say, the male bodies — have to be protected from such sicknesses.

Is it the same process in the case of disability? Like the male gaze constructs the idea of the feminine body, the ableist gaze constructs the signification of the disabled body. This hegemony produces the image of disability — mendicant, sub-human, sick, shut-away, socially lifeless. Perhaps the organization of urban space is both dictated by these social images and complicit in reproducing them at the same time. People think it is normal that the disabled are absent from the public sphere. I cannot lead my wheelchair down some streets, because they are cobbled. I cannot have a drink in some cafés or buy my cigarettes in some shops, because there are stairs. I cannot enter some theatres, because the doors are too narrow. I cannot dance in some nightclubs because the space is too small. These streets, these cafés, these nightclubs, these shops, these theatres, these restaurants all reinforce this social standard: disabled people are supposed to stay inside, while abled people can go wherever they like. The city is made without me in mind, and because of this, the environment disables me more than my body does. This is the relationship between the way urban spaces are structured and how the collective imaginary is formed. Urbanism produces the social representation of bodies.

In discourses, in our representations of things, in the organization of cities, the dominant standpoint imposes its own images onto certain bodies and assigns a place to them in the social environment. These images say more about the dominant standpoint than about what they intend to define. They tell me that I am the Other, I am another weak, sick body. But as when Judith Butler is told “you are a woman,” when I am told “you are disabled,” I hear not a mere description, but a social order telling me what I must be and do. This injunction does not reveal anything about me: it is only the dominant standpoint revealing itself.