No doubt about it. Couser is awesome. In his book, Vulnerable Subjects, he cautions us against buying too readily into all those feel-good stories that are becoming so popular nowadays.
You know the ones: brave quadriplegic overcomes adversity to win gold in the Paralympics; former drug addict beats disease and becomes a neuroscientist; noble mother nurses her disabled son through his last illness.
Couser argues that these stories, while important, threaten to perpetuate the very stereotypes they would seem to refute. In other words, these stories are just the same old clichés—especially the story of the "Supercrip" (like angelic Tiny Tim) and the martyrs who love them—masquerading as a more enlightened form.
Couser warns us that life writing when it comes to disability can be just as exploitative and just as stereotyping as any of the older narratives. In other words, these stories are not always what the disabled want to tell—they're what they have to tell; they're what society requires them to tell in order to be thought of as a "good" and "triumphant" supercrip.
Not only that, Couser argues, but these stories are so pervasive and yet so subtle that we all buy into them, disabled and non-disabled alike, and so we almost instinctively, without thinking, fall into these same narrative patterns over and over again. This is why, Couser tells us, so many stories follow either a triumphant or a tragic model—because no one knows how to think or speak about disability in any other way.
And these patterns persist, he says, into the way that science and medicine understand, react to, and speak of illness. For this reason, we are now seeing DNA as the "life script" of the individual and gene testing as the way to determine if that script will be one of triumph or of tragedy.
But, if we've learned anything from stories like Brave New World, it's that we don't want our lives—or our stories—written for us. So Couser asks us to think about how we might tell stories of disability differently. What would disability narratives look like without this triumph/tragedy model? And if we could break free of this, then how would our understanding of disability change?
The fact that stories and voices can so easily be appropriated and exploited is also incredibly important, and Couser asks us to think about what it means to "speak for" others? How can we tell someone else's story? And what gives us the right to do so?