Gerard Goggin, Linda Steele, Jessica Robyn Cadwallader, eds. Normality and Disability: Intersections among Norms, Law, and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2017. x + 163 pp. $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-138-30248-8.
Reviewed by Lisa Beckmann (Justus-Liebig-Universitaet Giessen)
Published on H-Disability (April, 2019)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)
The essay collection Normality and Disability: Intersections among Norms, Law, and Culture probes the relationship between normality and disability as a power dynamic that responds to and constitutes ableist processes of marginalization. Thirteen contributions, previously published in a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (2017), cover a wide array of topics and issues all related to the historical specificity and the political nature of disability and law as categories of analysis. Throughout the collection, the historical, legal, and cultural depictions of disability that are discussed all have one thing in common: they manifest themselves through the law—in the language and the history of law, in court sentences, and in judicial opinions. The law, as it becomes apparent, is more than “complicit in both the representations of normality and abnormality as deviant, dangerous and disordered” (p. 3). As Normality and Disability makes clear, law is a lens through which ideas of normality and abnormality are channeled and transported from the legal into the cultural and historical discourse. Law is a narrative in and of itself, one that imagines the disabled body and mind as normative or deviant, dangerous or innocuous, and plants that image firmly into the societal and cultural imagination.
Moreover, the essays all revolve around a similar set of questions. Who is seen as disabled and who is seen as equal before the law? How do legal and cultural definitions of disability and the law shape and influence one another? How do notions of vulnerability, dependency, and otherness factor into the way disability is represented in a specific legal context? How does the law position itself with regard to the systematic discrimination of disabled people in the legal system? And, most important, how can one respond to these issues to argue for the rights of disabled people and make self-advocacy an integral part of the law? In an attempt to find answers, the chapters in Normality and Disability fall into three different categories, which I shall define as follows: first, disability history and the law; second, current debates about constructions of disability and normalcy in the law; and finally, disability advocacy approaches toward the law.
The first group historicizes the role law has played in legalizing and institutionalizing the systematic discrimination, mistreatment, and oppression of disabled individuals. What makes this group interesting is that apart from considering specific laws, the chapters also take into account the different narratives that have grown out of disability discrimination. The main focus of this category lies on the US eugenics movement, specifically the construction of the “normal body” (Elizabeth Stephens and Peter Cryle) and the interaction of eugenic ideology with two major legal reforms, the 1891 Immigration Act and anti-mendicancy laws, better known as the “ugly laws” (Stephanie K. Wheeler). What sets these two chapters apart from the broad area of scholarship on the US eugenics movement is that even though their methodological approaches differ from one another—Stephens and Cryle conduct visual analyses of images of the “normal body” in eugenic legal and cultural discourse while Wheeler employs a semiotic approach toward eugenic law—their analyses combined make a compelling case for the multimodality of law and the visual, cultural, and legal narratives of disability discrimination that are part of the US eugenics movement.
As a category of analysis, disability is historically and legally specific. The “cultural pathways” need to be considered, as Stephens and Cryle argue, to understand “the public perception and institutional treatment of people now understood to be disabled” (p. 29). With the authors tracing the historical and ideological foundations of the eugenics movement, it becomes clear that, instead of offering a broad overview of the movement as a whole, they are concerned with the concept of normality and the way normality and ways of being “normal” are interpreted—and abused—in eugenic thinking. The connection made between composite portraiture, a photography technique developed by the British “father of eugenics” Francis Galton, and the racialization of normality through the idealized image of the white, US, and able-bodied “composite athlete, 30 Strongest Men of Harvard” zooms in on the visual construction of a specific type of gendered and racialized able-bodiedness as the hegemonic representation of normality (p. 35). While the notion of disability is briefly touched on in a paragraph about intelligence testing and the way the Binet-Simon test helped to carve out categories of “abnormality” in children, the focus of this essay is on normality and the forms of able-bodiedness that this concept generates. For that, Stephens and Cryle offer a striking insight into eugenic thinking and its visual and ideological manifestation through composite photography.
Wheeler, on the other hand, focuses on legal rule as the foundation of eugenic ideology. Her two case studies, the 1891 immigration act and anti-mendicancy laws, demonstrate that these laws became particularly powerful at the end of the nineteenth century because they spoke to specific fears in US society at that point in time: “who is ... or is capable of becoming ... a citizen and ... who is a person” (p. 48). The attention to the rhetorics of each law and the formation of ableist, anti-disability sentiment that resulted as a consequence makes her close readings compelling and leads the reader back to Stephens and Cryle. When Wheeler addresses eugenic anxieties about the “idealized body of the nation” and the “ideal American citizen,” the image of the “composite athlete” springs to mind as a visual manifestation of the subject that lies behind the nationalist and ableist concept of the “ideal citizen" (p. 44). However, no such connection is made, which is something that could have been made clearer since there is a significant thematic overlap between both analyses.
Furthermore, as Wheeler considers such case studies as Susan Schweik’s The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2009) and such theoretical works as Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell’s Cultural Locations of Disability (2006), her analysis is rooted in disability history and disability theory, which allows her to make a complex argument about eugenic laws as a system that “pathologize[s] human difference” (p. 42). On the other hand, however, references to paradigmatic texts about legal semiotics, such as Jack M. Balkin’s “The Promise of Legal Semiotics,” are missing, which constitutes, as I see it, a slight weakness of the chapter.[1] Referring to legal semiotics as a theory would have provided a counterweight to the chapter’s heavy drawing on disability theory/history, and it would have made her argument for ableist and nationalist legal rule as a semiotic system even more convincing.
As far as pathologizing human difference is concerned, the second category of chapters, current debates about constructions of disability and normalcy in the law, offers an interesting addition to Wheeler’s argument. While Wheeler is concerned with the semiotic content and the ideological intent of legal rule at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century in the US, Frankie Sullivan in “Not Just Language: An Analysis of Discursive Constructions of Disability in Sentencing Remarks” argues that legal language becomes political when it is applied in court, that is, when a judge renders a verdict through a sentencing remark. Rather than focusing on the semiotics of sentencing remarks, Sullivan approaches legal rhetorics from another perspective. Drawing on discourse analysis and critical disability studies, his essay problematizes the way legal rhetorics in sentencing remarks in Australian court cases construct disability as tragedy to legitimize the murder of disabled adults through their parents as mercy killings.
What makes Sullivan’s analysis relevant to current discussions about constructions of disability and normalcy is the role access plays in the exclusion of disability as “abnormal” and as not belonging. He starts his discussion by listing “tangible barriers to participation in the legal system,” such as the lack of accessible information for individuals with cognitive impairments, as well as prejudice on the side of the police, including the fact that, in the majority of cases, police officers do not take disabled individuals seriously when they report a crime or testify to such (p. 76). The attention to the marginalization of disabled individuals and the violence perpetuated by a legal system that is entirely unaware of the needs of disabled people trickles into Sullivan’s analysis of individual court cases. He groups his close readings into three types of legal narratives that reflect the particular legal rhetoric of these cases: “The ‘burden’ of care,” “‘Snap’ narratives,” and “Suffered enough.”
The dynamics between legal and cultural definitions of disability and related issues, such as dependency and normalcy, is what makes Sullivan’s approach particularly fruitful. For instance, a judge’s verdict that centers heavily on issues of toileting to argue that caring for the murdered victim was “burdensome” is placed into a larger discussion about the cultural politics of care to show that there is ableism inherent to the language the judge uses. As Sullivan points out, the continuous infantilization of disabled adults as “children” does not only rely on a specific type of legal language that turns the personal needs of the victim into the central issue in the verdict. Much more so, the legal language of the court case reflects the cultural and societal framing—and shaming—of incontinence as the mark of having a “childlike,” “non-civilized” body, which is linked to the overall societal stigma of caring for a disabled adult (p. 79). The victim in turn, as the author points out, is depicted as someone whose body kept him from becoming a citizen, someone who holds civil and human rights and who is seen as equal before the law.
The only form of critique I can offer here is that, despite the author’s acute awareness of the role language plays when it comes to the marginalization of disabled people, he continues to use the acronym PWD (persons with disabilities). As I argue, PWD is a technical phrase in and of itself, one that removes disability from the person who is affected and from the societal, political, and legal context at large. With the acronym PWD, the person with a disability is reduced to having a disability as if the latter was a static, medical phenomenon that does not change. In light of the author’s analysis, this strikes me as contradictory, especially since the author critiques the technicality and the discriminatory use of legal language in court as a way of pathologizing and medicalizing disability.
With regard to the last category, the disability advocacy approach toward the law, one chapter particularly stands out to me in its attempt to bring disability advocacy and legal discourse together and to problematize the notion of pathologizing human difference once more: Melania Moscoso and R. Lucas Platero’s analysis of contemporary abortion debates in Spain, which reveals an intricate power relation between disability rights, gender, power, agency, and the law. What makes Moscoso and Platero’s discussion of abortion and disability rights striking is that they offer a balanced view of two arguments that are commonly seen as “polarized representations” (p. 134). On the one hand, the argument against prenatal testing and abortions of disabled fetuses is that both are seen as undermining the rights of disabled people. On the other hand, the “pro-choice” counterargument frames prenatal testing and abortion as a manifestation of women’s rights and women regaining control over their own bodies.
Rather than arguing for one or the other, the authors situate both arguments into a wider political and economical context to show that arguing for the rights of disabled people can become a lip service, which runs counter to disability advocacy in the law. As Moscoso and Platero show, the overall argument against prenatal testing and abortion according to the Spanish 2/2010 Abortion Law has become a key part of a strategy that is used by the conservative government to mask cuts to the Spanish health-care sector. Rather than discussing austerity politics in Spain, the government, as the authors show, has used disabled people’s rights without having the actual interests of disabled people in mind. Instead, the argument against abortion is used to aim for the number of abortions to decrease, which, in turn, would benefit austerity politics. In this complex debate, it becomes apparent that the law does not only consist of specific legal rules that are passed in a specific time and place. Current political, societal, and governmental narratives are also part of a legal discourse that generates a specific attitude toward disabled people.
To summarize, the strength of this volume is its broad thematic and international scope, with chapters focusing on US eugenic law, court cases in Australia, and disability rights in Spain. However, this strength may also be its central weakness. The chapters are not grouped according to their approach, thematic scope, or methodology but are listed in the order they were published in Continuum in 2017. Thus it is up to the reader to categorize the contributions. However, apart from that, Normality and Disability provides a detailed and compelling insight into what it means to be disabled in the eyes of the law.
Note
[1]. Jack M. Balkin, “The Promise of Legal Semiotics,” Texas Law Review 69, no. 1831 (1991): 1831–52.
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Citation:
Lisa Beckmann. Review of Goggin, Gerard; Steele, Linda; Cadwallader, Jessica Robyn, eds., Normality and Disability: Intersections among Norms, Law, and Culture.
H-Disability, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53228
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