My interest in the disability movement was generated by our class discussions on the meanings and constructions of disability. Along with Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies, I am currently taking a class at Haverford called Social Movement Theory, where we have discussed how and why movements emerge under certain conditions. Throughout the course of my research on the disability movement, I found that three phenomena were pivotal in accounting for its emergence, expansion, and relative success: organizers managed to build broad and diverse coalitions, garner the support of influential political elites, and spark vast changes in consciousness.

Scholars vary in their estimations of the time period during which the disability movement emerged. The first legislation relating specifically to the disabled was passed after World War I in order to accommodate wounded soldiers returning from Europe. However, a flurry of legislation and organizing activity did not surface until the 1970s alongside other social movements in the United States. The first significant piece of legislation was the 1973 Vocational Rehabilitation Act. Section 504 of the bill read,

“No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States, shall solely be reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

In thinking about a topic for this paper, I was utterly confused.  I have never actually written a promptless paper before, and the idea of doing so ramped up my anxiety to the point of crippling any productive thought.  Then, I encountered Margaret Price and her writings on the intersection of mental disability (an umbrella term for mental and neurological illness) and academic discourse.  I am drawn to Price’s analysis of how academia excludes those who have mental disabilities for several reasons.  The first is that  I have, as some would say, a dog in the race of disabilities studies as the interact with academia, since I have a variety of common mental ailments, including several learning disabilities and what therapists are now thinking might be P.T.S.D.  Additionally, my peer mentor at my previous school is a schizophrenic who actually uses the rigors of college to cope with the hallucinations and delusions which plague him.  However, beyond the initial attraction of seeing something of myself reflected in a non-cure oriented text, I was driven to interest in some of the issues which Price examines through our classroom discussion on the topic. 

Finding “Home”: The Gay Evangelical Body
At some point or another in our lives, we generally come to realize that we are unique beings; furthermore, we also discern that  much of our individual essence is encoded in our physical bodies. From height and weight to race, gender, crooked teeth, bum leg, or speech impediment; it is in the body that we may find so many of our defining attributes: our general appearance, our physical strengths and limitations, even our illnesses and diseases. It is the body that Eli Clare conceptualizes as “home” in Exile and Pride, that is tied in so strongly with our notions of self and identity.  In light of this assertion, one might question whether the gay Evangelical is able to come “home” to his body. How is it that religion and sexuality are reconciled somatically? Is it even a possibility?  

Initially, one might be tempted to immediately say that “yes”, of course the gay evangelical is at home in his body. If his body is that of a white cisgendered man, then what is there not to like? What resentment could there be, and what other form besides white cisgendered man could be desired? But it is not so simple as that, because being at “home” in one's body is not merely an issue of liking and accepting oone's body, nor is it fair to objectify the white, cisgendered, male body as ideal, despite its normalization and acceptance as such in Western culture. The question is one that deserves more thought and consideration.

Medical Authority in the Discourses of Disability and Transsexuality

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation is an impossibly far-ranging book. Its author Eli Clare covers many topics that are entangled within his own life: tensions of class, sexuality, gender, abuse, disability, environmentalism and exile. Here I want to use his discussion of the medicalization of disability as a springboard to approach Rachel Ann Heath’s description of the pathologization of transsexuality in The Praeger Handbook of Transsexuality: Changing Gender to Match Mindset. Medicalization and pathologization are not precisely equivalent terms, but to me both represent a process of delegitimizing their subjects and placing this lost authority into the hands of medical professionals. Both produce negative or limiting effects that are not widely acknowledged. In addition, both are oriented towards “curing” or “normalizing” difference.

Exile and Pride: disability history

http://aybala50.glogster.com/a-dream-within-a-dream-/

          As Eli Clare describes in Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation, queer identity has been treated as madness, and queer people have been pathogized and condescended to for centuries:

“[q]ueer identity has been pathologized and medicalized. Until 1973, homosexuality wasconsidered a psychiatric disorder. Today transsexuality and transgenderism, under the names of gender dysphoria and gender identity disorder, are classified as psychiatric conditions. Queerness is all too frequently intertwined with shame, silence, and isolation…[q]ueer people deal with gawking all the time: when we hold hands in public, defy gender boundaries and norms, insist on recognition for our relationships and families…Queer people have been told for centuries by church, state, and science that our bodies are abnormal” (Clare 2009:112-113).