Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature
So while prodigious or "monstrous" bodies have always been a focus of human interest, the normal/abnormal dichotomy of the modern mind limits the explanation of differences to pathology. Although the idea of abnormality as an interpretive frame for physical disability displaced such rationales as divine punishment or moral corruption, the dichotomy of normal/abnormal nevertheless devalues disability rather than defining it on its own terms. Like "powerful woman," the term "disabled person" is oxymoronic because "disabled" nullifies the dominant version of personhood expressed in, for example, the Emersonian self-possessed individual.
Yikes. RGT's said a mouthful. But breathe, Shmoopers. We can do this.
Basically, what RGT is saying here is that the centuries-old impulse to "explain" disabled bodies based on whatever ideals and values one's culture holds dear is still in effect in our modern world. But instead of explaining disabled bodies in terms of God's judgment or of moral values (in other words, explaining the disabled body as a punishment for sin or bad behavior) our modern world always explains disability in terms of disease, of pathology.
But here's the problem: even though our modern medicalized culture seems to explain disability through the "objective" lens of science, the reality is that the scientific viewpoint is often just as biased as the older, more moralistic one.
This is because, according to RGT, we continue to base everything on the normal/abnormal opposition. And, in this framework, "normal" is defined in the way that Ralph Waldo Emerson and others like him defined it—an idea based, as we've already seen, on Enlightenment idea of the autonomous, rational subject.
And, if you don't fall within an acceptable margin of this idea of the "normal," then you're not only "abnormal" but you're also no longer a "person" in the Enlightenment or Emersonian sense. Instead, you're just an abnormality. You're a pathology.
Then, when the sense of one's personhood is erased, everything that is unique, identifiable, and individualistic about that person is erased as well. This is why RGT argues that disability nullifies the idea of one's personhood, because once one is labelled "disabled," that is all one is.
In short, you're either normal or you're abnormal. You're either a "person" or you're a "pathology."
Need more chocolate, please. We're depressed.
Quote :Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body
As scientific explanation eclipsed religious mystery to become the authoritative cultural narrative of modernity, the exceptional body began increasingly to be represented in clinical terms as pathology, and the monstrous body moved from the freak show stage into the medical theater. Thus, even though the discourses of the anomalous body comprise a series of successive reframings within a variety of registers over time, the uneasy human impulse to textualize, to contain, to explain our most unexpected corporeal manifestations to ourselves has remained constant […]
Although extraordinary bodily forms have always been acknowledged as atypical, the cultural resonances accorded them arise from the historical and intellectual moments in which these bodies are embedded. Because such bodies are rare, unique, material, and confounding of cultural categories, they function as magnets to which culture secures its anxieties, questions, and needs at any given moment […]
Thus, singular bodies become politicized when culture maps its concerns upon them as meditations on individual as well as national values, identity, and direction.
Eeek. Who here has a migraine? We do! We do! But as menacing as the quote above may seem, Shmoopers, these are ideas, though expressed in the fancy-schmancy language of the academy, which we're actually already BFFs with.
Basically, RGT is telling us here that, as we know, our modern medical culture has transformed our understanding of non-normative bodies. Instead of thinking of them as signs of God's anger or of his wonder—as was done in the symbolic era—we now think of these bodies in terms of the medical/scientific language of pathology: of disease, deformity, or injury.
But here's an added little wrinkle—which we already know about. We think of non-normative bodies in this way not necessarily because that's the "right" way to understand them but because our modern culture tells us and requires us to think of this as the "right way" to view these bodies.
The Enlightenment-based emphasis on "objective" (and by now we should all be gagging at the term, since, as we've seen, "objective" ain't nothing but a story, not a real thing) observation and rationalism that characterizes our modern world, though, is just another narrative, another way we organize, understand, and try to control our world, just as in the symbolic era, civilizations used stories of wonder, of curses, and of grace to explain and understand the world.
The non-normative body, in other words, becomes the paper on which our cultural stories are written. Because extraordinary bodies make waves, because they don't conform to standards or expectations, they require us to explain them. If we don't, then they scare the living daylights out of us… because they make us question everything we think we know about our world and ourselves.
After all, if a body can come into this world or can become something that is so much the opposite of what we expect bodies to look, be, and act like, then what does that mean for the rest of our worldview? What else do we think we know that is actually wrong?
In order to preserve our sense of stability and identity as a culture and as individuals, RGT tells us, we have to find a way to cope with these disruptive bodies and, like everything else, we do so by building a narrative that supports what we already believe about ourselves and our world.
And so, in our modern medical culture, in which everything is explained through science, we immediately jump to the story of pathology to explain and tame the extraordinary body and, in the process, to restore our faith in ourselves and our world as predictable and knowable.
Because there's nothing like uncertainty to eat acid-induced holes in your stomach, are we right?