Disability as masquerade

Literature and Medicine

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 1-22

  Siebers, Tobin ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 4143108316     PISSN: 02789671     EISSN: 10806571     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lm.2004.0010     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. On the rhetoric of coming out as a person with a disability, see Brenda Jo Brueggemann, "'It's So Hard to Believe That You Pass': A Hearing-Impaired Student Writing on the Borders of Language" and "On (Almost) Passing," in Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999), 50-80, 81-99;
2. Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Georgina Kleege, "Gently Down the Stream: Reflections on Mainstreaming," Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003): 174-84;
3. Georgina Kleege, "Disabled Students Come Out: Questions without Answers," in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002), 308-16;
4. Rod Michalko, The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998);
5. and Mitchell Tepper, "Coming Out as a Person with a Disability," Disability Studies Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1999): 105-6.
6. On the limits of coming-out discourse, see Ellen Jean Samuels, "My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming-Out Discourse," GLQ 9, no. 1-2 (2003): 233-55.
7. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.
8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 72. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.
9. Linda Greenhouse, "High Court Limits Who is Protected by Disability Law," New York Times, June 23, 1999, A1, A16.
10. See Janet E. Halley, Don't: A Reader's Guide to the Military's Anti-Gay Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
11. Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 213-36. Williams theorizes staring, playing on the difference between being visible and being recognized. She notes that as a black woman she is highly marked and socially invisible at the same time. In fact, it is the heightened visibility of her blackness that produces her social invisibility.
12. See also Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Newton provides a counterexample, explaining that drag queens represent the shame of the gay world because they most visibly embody the stigma (3). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.
13. Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory," in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 37-49.
14. The essays in María Carla Sánchez and Linda Schlossberg, eds., Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2001) discuss passing as a method of establishing alternative narratives. Judith Butler is also important to the theory of passing.
15. For consideration of her work in the context of disability studies, see Ellen Jean Samuels, "Critical Divides: Judith Butler's Body Theory and the Question of Disability," NWSA Journal 14, no. 3 (2002): 58-76;
16. Tobin Siebers, "Disability in Theory: From Social Construction to the New Realism of the Body," American Literary History 13, no. 4 (2001): 737-54;
17. and Siebers, "Disability and the Future of Identity Politics," in Redefining Identity Politics, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff, Satya Mohanty, and Paula Moya (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, forthcoming).
18. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999)
19. and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).
20. Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade," in The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers: 1920-1958, ed. Athol Hughes (London: Karnac Books, 1991), 90-101,
21. originally published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1929): 303-13. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.
22. A good introduction to the complexities of racial passing is Adrian Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black," Transition 58 (1992): 4-32, 18.
23. For other important treatments of racial passing, see Deborah E. McDowell, introduction to Quicksand and Passing, by Nella Larson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986);
24. Phillip Brian Harper, "Gender Politics and the 'Passing' Fancy: Black Masculinity as Societal Problem," in Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 103-26;
25. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995);
26. Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
27. Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 44-64;
28. and Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). It is worth mentioning that the idea of achieving "color-blind" or "race-blind" societies needs someday to be interrogated from a disability perspective alert to the metaphor of blindness.
29. A number of theorists have described the masquerade as a strategy that manages stigma by creating effects subversive to male power. See Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23, no. 3-4 (1982): 74-87
30. and its sequel, "Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator," Discourse 11 (1988-9): 42-54;
31. Teresa de Lauretis, "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts," in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 1-19, esp. 17;
32. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986);
33. and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. 10.
34. Joseph Grigely, "Postcards to Sophie Calle," in The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 17-40, 28.
35. See Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," in Women: Sex and Sexuality, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 62-91;
36. and Robert McRuer, "Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence," in Snyder et al., Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, 88-99.
37. Of course, Riviere may be masquerading herself. See Stephen Heath, "Joan Riviere and the Masquerade," in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), 45-61.
38. See Sigmund Freud, "Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work," in The Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 14: 309-33, esp. 315.
39. See Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994);
40. and Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
41. See Tom Shakespeare, "Disability, Identity, Difference," in Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability, ed. Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer (Leeds: Disability Press, 1996), 94-113, esp. 100;
42. Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998);
43. and Robert McRuer, "As Good as It Gets: Queer Theory and Critical Disability," GLQ 9, no. 1-2 (2003): 79-105.
44. On the theoretical value of identity, see Tobin Siebers, Morals and Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), esp. chaps. 2 and 4.
45. On the use of disability identity to illuminate the social construction of reality, see Tobin Siebers, "Disability and the Future of Identity Politics" and "Social Facts: One or Two Things We Know about Disability," paper, "Redefining Identity Politics: Internationalism, Feminism, Multiculturalism," University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, October 18, 2002.
46. Paula M. L. Moya, Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27 (Moya's italics).
47. For an account of the protest events, see Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), 131-41.
48. Megan Jones, "'Gee, You Don't Look Handicapped ...' Why I Use a White Cane to Tell People I'm Deaf," Electric Edge (July/August 1997), http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/archive/look.htm (accessed March 18, 2004).
49. Irving Zola, Missing Pieces: A Chronicle of Living with a Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 205. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.
50. References are to Cal Montgomery, "A Hard Look at Invisible Disability," Ragged Edge Magazine Online 2 (2001), http://www.ragged-edge- mag.com/0301/0301ft1.htm (accessed on March 17, 2004).
51. Kenny Fries, Body, Remember: A Memoir (New York: Blume, 1998), 110.
52. Anne Finger, Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1990), 26. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.
53. Cited by Marilynn J. Phillips, "Damaged Goods: Oral Narratives of the Experience of Disability in American Culture," Social Science and Medicine 30, no. 8 (1990): 849-57, 855 (Phillips's italics).
54. References are to Geoffrey Brewer, "Oh, the Psyches and Personalities He Has Seen," New York Times, April 19, 2000, C10.
55. References are to Ralph Blumenthal, "An Artist's Success at 14, Despite Autism," New York Times, January 16, 2002, E1.
56. Disability drag also invites connections to drag kinging. See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 231-66,
57. and "Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings," GLQ 7, no. 3 (2001): 425-52, esp. 427.
58. Deborah Marks, Disability: Controversial Debates and Psychosocial Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1999), 160, suggests that the real reason for using nondisabled actors for disabled parts is to reassure the audience that disability is not real.
59. Barry D. Adam, The Survival of Domination: Inferiorization and Everyday Life (New York: Elsevier, 1978), 119. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.