Revealing Rather Than Concealing Disability: The Rhetoric of Parkinson's Advocate Michael J. Fox

Abstract

Given societal prescriptions to conceal disability, when Michael J. Fox, seeking increased funding for Parkinson's research, addressed members of Congress in 1999 without having taken his own Parkinson's medication beforehand, his display of disability was, in his own words, “startling.” Through revealing his disability, Fox constructs a complex ethos bound up in the intersection of the body, text, and social practices. As a result, through risking the reinscription of traditional and limiting responses to disability, Fox confounds such responses, demanding that both audiences and rhetoricians rethink the relationship between disability and rhetorical practice.

Notes

¹ I thank RR readers Jay Dolmage and Julie Jung for their generative feedback, as well as Jessica Enoch for her formative comments on early drafts of this essay.

² As I was sending this piece to Rhetoric Review, Nicole Quackenbush published her very fine article “Speaking of––and as––Stigma: Performativity and Parkinson's in the Rhetoric of Michael J. Fox” in Disability Studies Quarterly. Quackenbush, to my knowledge, is the first and only other scholar to examine Fox's rhetoric, and she “seek[s] to restore history, complexity, and agency to Fox's work through a thorough exploration of his rhetoric as it moves through … two key and interconnected stages––first, a rhetoric of passing and second, a rhetoric of masquerade.” In doing so, Quackenbush claims that the “performative power of visible disability” in Fox's discourse resonates given that “in the collective imagination and in our own rhetorical histories, physical difference connotes a lack of agency and disability serves as the ‘master trope of disqualification’ from speaking and being heard.” There are parallels between Quackenbush's project and my own. There are also, however, significant differences. Quackenbush gleans her methodology largely from disability studies; I draw on Prelli and classical rhetoric. Quackenbush is primarily concerned with the 2006 exchange between Limbaugh and Fox and its media coverage; I address Fox's first public appearance sans medication (though I do touch lightly on Limbaugh). Quackenbush concludes that Fox's rhetoric “has carved out space” for the disabled rhetor; I put forth that Fox's revealing necessitates a reconsideration of basic principles about the rhetorical body. While we are both examining Fox's rhetoric, we do so through different lenses grounded in different neighborhoods of rhetorical theory with markedly different aims and conclusions. Read together, Quackenbush and I can provide complementary analyses on Fox, and it is my hope that further scholarship on Fox and other disabled rhetors will soon add to this conversation.

³ DeLuca, Nicholson, and Ray have each argued along these lines––that rhetorical display is facilitated through revealing and concealing the body––though they do not use these terms exactly.

⁴ Of the 123 individuals on The Stuttering Foundation's list of “Famous People Who Stutter,” only ten are female. I would like to address the absence of women with disability from the public's eye, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

⁵ I am concerned primarily with the rhetoricity of Fox's unmedicated body, and space here does not permit me to address the important issue of the rhetoricity of the medicated body, as well as the rhetoricity of medication itself; John Schlib offers an insightful consideration of these topics.

⁶ While Fox uses these ableist metaphors to great rhetorical affect, Amy Vidali offers an insightful critique from a disability studies perspective of the cognitive metaphor theory upon which Fox's metaphors and my analysis of them rests (“Seeing What We Know”).