Between the valley and the field

Prose Studies

Volumn 27, Issue 1-2, 2005, Pages 108-119

  Dolmage, Jay ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

Author keywords

Body; Disability; Disability studies; Memoir; Metaphor; Retarded; Rhetoric

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149168842     PISSN: 17439426     EISSN: 01440357     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01440350500068973     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence (New York: Horizon, 1995), 213
2. Campbell McGrath, "Prose Poem," in Campbell McGrath, Road Atlas: Prose and Other Poems (New York: Ecco Press, 2001)
3. Catherine Frazee, "Body Politics," Saturday Night, 2 September 2000, 18
4. Aristotle, Rhetoric ed. John Edwin Sandys (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 89
5. As Nancy Leys Stepan writes, interaction allows two concepts to create similarities and trade features between one another; "other features previously associated with only one subject in the metaphor are brought to bear on the other" see 'Race and Gender: the role of analogy in science' in Evelyn fox Keller and Helen Longino, eds, Feminism Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 129
6. An example of this can be found in the essay 'Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag, see Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Picador, USA, 2001). In her examination of the metaphors of illness, Sontag writes that equating cancer treatment with war has led both cancer treatment to be viewed as more like war and for war to be viewed as more like cancer. War is about excising tumors (like Saddam Hussein), making "surgical" strikes. On the other hand, the treatment of cancer is about aggressive therapy, battle with the disease. As a result of interaction, we can hardly think of war without reference to surgical procedure, and vice versa
7. To conceptualize love as being like a flower entails beauty, sensory stimulation, and a sense of both divinity and nature while hiding the fact that love can also sometimes be difficult. If we want to highlight this difficulty with a phrase, we use other metaphors, saying that love is like a game of chess, or, in the words of the singer Pat Benatar: "Love is a Battlefield." See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). In either case, the metaphor is created to entail a certain set of meanings while hiding others
8. Alison Denham suggests that "in some sense . . . figurative language succeeds in representing aspects of experience which resist characterization in literal terms." See Alison Denham, Metaphor and Moral Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
9. Denham is not alone in linking metaphorical language specifically with the explanation of abstract concepts. D. Schon suggests that metaphorical language is "central to the task of accounting for our perspectives of the world" see "Generative Metaphor: A Perspective on Problem Setting in Social Policy', Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137-163. In his view "metaphorisation" is how we account for that which is not easily explained
10. See Thomas Kuhn, "Metaphor in Science," in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 533-542
11. George Lakoff, "The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor," in Metaphor and Thought, 214
12. Richard Gwyn, "Captain of My Own Ship: Metaphor and the Discourse of Chronic Illness," in Researching and Applying Metaphor, ed. Lynne Cameron and Graham Low (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 219
13. Kuhn, "Metaphor in Science," 539
14. Donna Haraway, Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 39
15. Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London: Verso, 1995)
16. Rosemarie Garland Thomson has written in Extraordinary Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) that, in American literature, the figure of the "disabled" has been represented by non-"disabled" writers as the "ultimate not-me figure"
17. (see Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies [41]). This fictional figure "absorbs disavowed elements" of society and "assures the citizenry of who they are not" (41). Writers use "disabled" representations to erect a fence between themselves and the other. Of course, this then makes the "disabled" character a metaphor in literature - the "disabled" individual is simply a vehicle for the fears and "disavowed elements" of the writer's own psyche
18. James Trent, Inventing The Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 5
19. Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 157
20. Susan Leigh Star, "The Politics of Formal Representations," in Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology, ed. Susan Leigh Star (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 52
21. Lakoff, "The Contemporary Theory," 224
22. Of course, these tests have never been truly reliable. Shockingly, little mention was made of their arbitrariness until a recent move in the US to stay the executions of death row inmates deemed to be "retarded." In a recent New York Times Magazine article on this topic, Margaret Talbot writes that attention to inmates' scores "remind you that the elements that make up a diagnosis of mental retardation are fungible . . . the reasons for that are perfectly legitimate, but when the diagnosis matters in the way it does here, it becomes a little bit scary." See Margaret Talbot, "The Executioner's LQ Test," New York Times Magazine, 29 June 2003, 59. What is scary to her, it seems, is that guilty men might not be killed for their crimes. The matter is not scary, but rather "perfectly legitimate," Talbot suggests, when innocent men and women are being imprisoned in mental institutions, separate schools, and a life of violence and poverty, as they have been for centuries, thanks to just such a fungible diagnosis of "mental retardation."
23. Nancy Mairs, Waist-High In The World: A Life Among The Non-Disabled (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997), 49
24. Raymond Gibbs, "Researching Metaphor," in Researching and Applying Metaphor, ed. Lynne Cameron and Graham Low (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46
25. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 205
26. One other way to look at this might be to use Judith Butler's definition of a "partial" social construction of the body, from her introduction to her book Bodies That Matter (New York : Routledge, 1993): "to claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which is concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body" (5). Any reference to a body is also a formation of that body. In this way, every formation is a further metaphor - these metaphors, in referencing the "pure body" may fortify it, while new metaphors might reform it
27. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 19
28. Mairs, Waist-High In The World, 57
29. Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (New York: Routledge, 1995), 145
30. Haraway, Feminism and Technoscience, 45
31. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 206
32. David Roche, "My Face Does Not Belong To Me," www.davidroche.com/face accessed April 8, 2005