Stirring up the sediment: the corporeal pedagogies of disabilities

Abstract

The centrality of Cartesian dualism to practices of university pedagogy obscures the role that bodily being-in-the-world plays in learning and teaching. This article uses Merleau-Ponty's account of embodiment to explore the pedagogical capacity of disability, specifically in relation to two university courses. I argue that the disabled other offers such radical difference that it intervenes, as Lévinas puts it, anachronistically, in the synchronicity of sedimentary styles of being-in-the-world. I consider the role that syncretic sociability – intercorporeality – plays in producing an incarnatory context within the classroom which challenges the ‘common sense'ness of the ableism which so thoroughly shapes institutions, customs, power, sociality, and dominant styles of being-in-the-world.

Keywords:

• embodiment
• Merleau-Ponty
• disability
• education
• Lévinas
• being-in-the-world
• intercorporeality
• ethics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the contributions of two anonymous reviewers and Dr Anna Hickey-Moody for her encouragement and collegiality. I would also like to thank Associate Professor Nikki Sullivan for her support and encouragement of my teaching practice on the two courses under discussion, and for offering a rare collegial space within which to discuss and develop a critical, self-reflexive pedagogical practice, which informs much of this paper.

Notes

1. I would like to emphasise, at this point, that this established position within critical disability studies does not reduce or dismiss the difficult experiences that are often, in the current cultural context, associated with disability. Rather, it understands this connection between disability and difficulty as contingent, rather than natural, and as a key dynamic in sustaining the privilege associated with being (temporarily) able-bodied. Such a position seeks to bring into focus how disability comes to be constituted as a problem, thus neither naturalising disability as problematic, nor denying those experiences of it as problematic.

2. I use [sic] to mark the use of the masculine pronoun as the generic. As, for example, Elizabeth Grosz (1994, p. 108) has noted, there are problems with Merleau-Ponty's presumption of the masculine body as the generic, which this use of the masculine pronoun represents. It is not within the purview of this paper to discuss in detail the unmarked gendering of Merleau-Ponty's account of embodiment. However, given that the argument here is about corporeal difference (of which sexual difference could be understood as one subset), it is important to mark the apparently unremarkable: the masculine, able body through which his account is offered. Numerous feminist theorists have reworked Merleau-Ponty's account with a focus on women's bodies. See for example Young (1990), Weiss (1998) and Grosz (1994). Other scholars have considered Merleau-Ponty's account in relation to disability: for example, see Edwards (1998), Turner (2001), Iwakuma (2006), Toombs (1995), and Hughes and Paterson (1997). These accounts help to draw attention to the inadequacies of Merleau-Ponty's presumption of an able-bodied, European male as the model for all forms of embodiment, and I seek to attest to both his exclusions and the work of other scholars in addressing such inadequacies. It is also worth noting on this point that the majority of Merleau-Ponty's account of embodiment in Phenomenology of Perception depends upon the contrast between ‘ability’ and ‘disability’ as it occurs by juxtaposing ‘normal’ bodily being-in-the-world with the aphasias, agnosias and other perceptual ‘disabilities’ of Schneider, Goldstein's patient and case study (see Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 90, n. 2 for these details).

3. The term ‘incarnatory context’ is my own, coined to elaborate both the local corporeal contexts – families, groups of friends, schools – and the much larger contexts such as nations, or even global concerns, which contribute to the shaping of specific styles of embodiment.

4. For a more detailed analysis of these ‘bodily tolerances’, see Cadwallader (forthcoming).

5. For more details on these ‘lifelines’, see Sara Ahmed's discussion (2006, pp. 153–156).