Introduction: Disability, In/Visibility, and Risk

Visibility is strategic. Visibility is insistent. Visibility is an argument—for disabled people, an argument for recognition and rights, a demand to be part of the public and participants in public discourse, a call to be addressed in education and employment policies, seen in accessible spaces, and equitably represented in cultures that have discriminated against disabled people for millennia. Visibility is imperative.

So imperative, in fact, that it is easy to overlook the risks of visibility for minoritized populations. Visibility is fraught. Visibility is not always voluntary. Visibility brings with it risk, always demanding a calculation of the potential value of revealing oneself. Visibility offers its inverse, invisibility, as a rhetorical strategy, as well as nuanced gradations of rhetorically strategic disclosure. Understood within a complex network of social, cultural, economic, and political inequity, visibility and invisibility have radically different effects, and, depending on the situation, they can empower as well as disempower.

In this special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, we feature six short-form essays in which rhetoricians from different subdisciplines of rhetorical studies highlight connections among disability, visibility, risk—and resistance. Using a wide variety of historical and contemporary case studies, the authors in this special issue use intersections of disability, visibility, and risk as starting points for examining a number of issues central to rhetorical studies: agency, identity, publicity, activism, circulation, belonging, space, and even the very meaning of rhetoric and disability.

To be sure, this special issue is not the first rhetorical investigation of the intersections between disability and visibility. For example, the disclosure of disability has been a fruitful topic of research for a number of rhetoricians in recent years (e.g., Johnson; Kennedy; Kerschbaum; Kerschbaum et al.; Moe; Uthappa). In what follows we hope to expand the conversation even further to account for the variety of forms that visibility and invisibility can take with regard to disability. Some essays concern cultural visibility: disability as represented and circulated in media or other public discourse. Others are concerned with epistemological visibility: disability that is known or unknown. Others focus on political visibility: disability or disabled people as subjects or objects of political action. And others examine sensory visibility: physical or mental disability that is perceived via the senses.

Many of our authors rely on intersections among disability studies, rhetorical studies, and the history of social movements. Visibility long has been celebrated in social movements, in large part because increasing visibility is often seen as a way—and a sign—of increasing political power (Phelan, 6). In the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ rights, for example, cultural visibility—positive images of queer people in mass media and popular culture—has been described as “preparing the ground” on which the fight for civil rights was fought (Hennessy, 31–32). Sometimes visibility takes a more concrete form. In recent years, for example, undocumented migrants have begun speaking or writing publicly under their own names, or taking to the streets to demand political recognition, visibility actions often described as “stepping out of the shadows” (Galindo; for a critique of this metaphor, see Chávez, Queer Migration Politics 88–93). On March 31 each year, people around the world acknowledge the Trans Day of Visibility, another cultural effort that connects visibility and political agency, a day that celebrates the accomplishments of trans and gender nonconforming people while also marking the discrimination and violence they continue to face. Each of these actions are examples of visibility politics, which assumes “that ‘being seen’ and ‘being heard’ are beneficial and often crucial for individuals or a group to gain greater social, political, cultural or economic legitimacy, power, authority, or access to resources” (Brouwer 118). In visibility politics, visibility, rhetorical agency, and political action are understood as tightly interlinked.

Like other social movements, disability advocacy and activism has highlighted visibility as central to the effort to secure rights and achieve justice and equity for disabled people. As Simi Linton memorably writes in her landmark book, Claiming Disability, “We have come out, not with those brown wool lap robes over our withered legs, or dark glasses over our pale eyes, but in shorts and sandals, in overalls or business suits, dressed for play or work—straightforward, unmasked, and unapologetic” (3). In Linton’s account, “coming out” functions not just as an analogy to the queer closet, but also as a reminder of a time and place in which disabled people were deliberately kept from public view: children warehoused in institutions, bodily differences hidden or camouflaged, and mental differences kept silent as shameful secrets. It bears noting that, for many, this past is not yet past. However, 20 years after Linton’s book was published, disabled people are more visible than ever before—for some, shorts and sandals now even function to show off bespoke, glittering prostheses that are designed to draw attention, not deflect it (e.g., Pullin). Drawing an analogy to queer identity, individuals with both visible and nonvisible disabilities speak of “coming out” as disabled (Brueggemann; Thomson xvii; for a critique of this idea, see Samuels; Thomsen), and many communities celebrate disability with annual Disability Pride events.

The increasing visibility of disabled people extends beyond individuals and communities to institutions. In politics, for example, the election of visibly disabled people challenges the idea that only a normative embodiment is “fit” for public office. In the academy, the growing influence of disability studies challenges fundamental assumptions in a number of fields—including rhetorical studies—where it has opened new lines of inquiry and new methods of finding answers to old questions. In the media, the cultural visibility of disabled people has also grown, as disability themes, disabled characters—and disabled actors playing disabled characters—are featured on both small and large screens. Cultural visibility is not just a question of the quantity of mediated representations, however, but also a question of their quality. Although disabled characters have long been a staple of literature and film, these representations often make disability visible in ways that can be harmful, such as reproducing stereotypes of disabled people as villains, objects of pity, “supercrips,” in which disabled people are used simply as inspirational tropes rather than three-dimensional characters, or as a mode of “narrative prosthesis” to move the plot along (Mitchell and Snyder). Sometimes the representations are less subtle: Donald Trump’s “impression” of journalist Serge Kovalski (often just named in media accounts as “a disabled reporter”) at a campaign rally comes to mind.

Visibility is risky. Sometimes that risk is being misrepresented, such as when disability is made visible by people with little to no knowledge of its “phenomenology,” as Carrie Sandahl puts it, the “unique somatic experience” of moving through the world as a disabled person (18). Sometimes the risk is privileging visible or physical disability over invisible or mental disability (such as the ubiquitous icon of disability that features a person using a wheelchair), or in erasing disability entirely in campaigns that encourage able-bodied audiences to “see the person, not the disability” (Warnke). Sometimes that risk is more direct. To be visible, especially as a person from a marginalized community, is to “summon surveillance and the law” (Phelan, 6). Although invisibility may be the result of oppression (as people in the dominant population choose not to “see” or “show” those who don’t fit the norm), “forced visibility” can also lead to surveillance, doxing, deportation, firing, and even violence or death (Kang 146). Invisibility can be a form of erasure and can be isolating, to be sure, but it can also be a strategy of safety as well as a mark of privilege that allows some individuals to “pass” as members of the dominant community. (Although passing, too, carries risk, and can exact a significant psychological and physical toll.) And much like coming out of the closet (e.g., Chávez; Cisneros and Bracho; Snorton), coming out as disabled often reflects the experience and privilege of white, middle-class, Western people. For many disabled people with multiply marginalized identities, coming out as disabled is much more than simply a matter of having or not having pride in one’s identity.

Sensory visibility also raises an issue too little addressed in many studies of visibility politics: ocularcentrism, or the bias toward sight that has been a persistent feature of Euro-Western culture and thinking. To use the term “visibility” implicitly evokes not only the assumption of a sighted observer, for example, but also reproduces the connections between visuality and knowledge—and blindness and ignorance—that have persisted for millennia (e.g., Warnke). Disability studies encourages us to consider how the term “visibility” is saturated with the value of normative embodiment; rhetorical studies encourages us to consider the effects that such a term has on individual bodies as well as our understanding of the world. We encourage readers to approach visibility as a multisensory engagement, and also as a concept that extends beyond the senses, an understanding in which visibility can foster ignorance, and in which invisibility can also produce new kinds of knowledge.

The issue begins with Vanessa B. Beasley’s essay “The Trouble with Marching.” For many people with disabilities, the march, a form of rhetorical action long associated with political protest, is fraught with challenges that go far beyond the need for accommodations related to access and mobility. From the Ugly Laws created by US city governments in the nineteenth century to the strategies of visibility essential to the success of the nonviolent campaigns of the civil rights movement in the twentieth, Beasley shows how the practices and assumptions used by other social actors and movements are far more rhetorically complex—and come with much greater risks—for people with disabilities, rhetors who are themselves both visible and invisible within the larger context of rhetorical history.

Jenell Johnson also uses the topic of public action in “Breaking Down,” which examines how one synonym for visibility—publicity—might be thought of as a type of capacity. Although publicity has often been considered something that can be granted or denied, Johnson argues that it might also be thought of as an ability created by the meeting of particular bodyminds with particular environments. Using a case study of newspaper accounts of nervous breakdown in the early twentieth century, Johnson considers how “nervous breakdown” names not illness but disability—specifically, the lack of an ability to appear in public. Arguing that publics might function as kairotic spaces (Price), Johnson challenges rhetoricians to rethink the expectation that rhetors need to appear in order to take rhetorical action.

Krista Kennedy examines kairotic spaces from another angle in “‘I Forgot I’m Deaf!,’” analyzing the intentional rhetorical invisibility performed by deaf women who pass by working closely with assistive technologies. Focusing on mid-twentieth-century advertisements from prominent hearing aid manufacturers that encouraged women to obscure markers of deafness in their appearance and speech, she expands Price’s concept to account for strategic uses of technology in ways that sometimes result in the enmeshment of human and machine. In particular, she demonstrates how the technological entanglement that experienced hearing aid wearers rely on in both embodied and cognitive passing results in the rhetorical management of disability disclosure.

Lois Agnew’s investigation of “cancer topoi” demonstrates how disability studies can usefully inform analyses of cancer rhetoric by theorizing the relationship between illness and impairment, a relationship that stands in stark contrast to the topoi of overcoming and strength that pervade so much cancer discourse. In the process, she illuminates the ways that cancer advocates rhetorically positioned the disease and cancer patients throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Through close reading of archival materials, Agnew traces the rhetorical formation of cancer visibility in the United States and the related display of the cheerful, brave cancer patient in order to move the reading public’s response to cancer from “pity, fear, discomfort, and guilt” to a “sense of normalcy.”

In “Disabled and Undocumented,” Christina V. Cedillo traces the intersection of disability and undocumented status, revealing another aspect of the nuanced, tactical gradations of in/visbility for im/migrants. The immigration cases of Rosa Maria Hernandez, a child with disabilities, and Eva Chavez, caregiver to a son with disabilities, received national attention in part because their defense campaigns put disability on public display. Cedillo interrogates the compulsory visibility of disability in contested immigration contexts, arguing that Licona’s concept of rhetorical “non-images,” or broad tropes of criminality and infection that are used to conjure fear of the Other, demand that im/migrants rely on branding in order to provide an affective visual counterargument. Disabled im/migrant bodies are caught within this paradox, forced into making disability visible in order to argue for their essential humanity rather than allow their lives to be adjudicated through nationalist stereotypes alone.

Melanie Yergeau closes this special issue with “Cassandra Isn’t Doing the Robot.” Focusing on disability and tropes of contagion from another angle, Yergeau analyzes claims surrounding Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder (CADD), which is rhetorically constructed as a “relational condition in which an autistic person deprives their nonautistic partner of love and affection.” Nonaustistic partners are portrayed as suffering from invisible abuse caused by living with a neurodivergent partner, never believed in their descriptions of the traumatic stress experienced within outwardly successful romantic relationships, and becoming increasingly more autistic themselves by virtue of constant exposure to their partner. Yergeau examines discourse from experts on autism in adulthood, CADD workbooks, and resource sites, revealing the ways that belief and rhetoricability are constructed in opposition to disability and queerness. Their investigation also raises important ethical questions: in the age of #MeToo and its vital insistence on believing women, how should a feminist rhetorician approach writing that is marketed as feminist but demonizes disability?

Taken together, these essays offer a capacious examination of the riskiness of visibility for disabled rhetors. The issues they raise are particularly germane in the current political and material landscape. Both in the United States and abroad, the discourse surrounding disability has become increasingly fraught and disability rights are being systematically dismantled. The president of the United States has mocked a disabled reporter, as we mentioned previously, and referred to the deaf actress Marlee Matlin as “retarded,” a term that he has also used freely in other contexts (Wagner). US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has rescinded dozens of guidance documents that outlined rights for disabled students as well as discipline guidance documents that shaped the educational experiences of neurodivergent students who are often incorrectly regarded as “troublesome.” Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department rescinded guidance documents that codified the labor rights of people with disabilities, particularly those moving from subminimum wage sheltered workshops into other jobs. The Social Security Administration has proposed deep cuts to Social Security disability benefits that would impact millions of people with disabilities. The Trump administration has proposed an overhaul of the Medicaid system, which supports low-income and disabled people, that would tighten eligibility requirements and impose more frequent eligibility checks that demand increased, involuntary visibility from disabled participants (Armour). The Affordable Care Act, which offers those with preexisting conditions a guaranteed path to health insurance, continues to be under legal threat.

And yet despite the grave nature of the current political moment, disabled people persist and resist. In the summer of 2017, for example, activists from the disability grassroots organization ADAPT fought the Medicaid rollbacks by staging various protests around Washington, DC, which led to many arrests, and significant media coverage. According to ADAPT activist Bruce Darling, “People for the first time on national television saw disabled Americans being dragged away and disappeared, but that for us happens every day. They are taken from their homes and forced into institutions” (qtd. in Gomez). Darling points out here how visibility of protest fights not just for health care but also literally against the oldest threat of invisibility to disabled people—the threat of institutionalization and the thick walls that keep abuses from public knowledge. And yet, for every protester who makes the news, how many others are working against ableism in less-visible ways? Whether by tweeting at public officials, gathering in online communities, sitting on an accommodations committee, or even making their demands known to their personal care attendant or caregiver, disabled people resist in both subtle and spectacular ways. Visibility is essential. Visibility is risky. And as the essays in this special issue show, visibility is also a mode of mêtis, as Jay Dolmage defines it, “the rhetorical art of cunning … characterized by sideways and backward movement,” appearing and disappearing at opportune times, a way of being, performing, and thinking through the complex rhetorical intersections between bodies and worlds (5).