Go figure! Public pedagogies, invisible impairments and the performative paradoxes of visibility as veracity

Abstract

This article asks how public pedagogical texts mobilise particular meanings about whose bodies/minds matter or figure? How do they articulate particular affective investments, desires, and values related to our everyday understanding of invisible and visible impairments, and the ways in which discourses of ‘normalcy’ are taught? The author examines three examples of public pedagogy or media campaigns to educate the public about particular invisible impairments experienced predominantly by women. It theorises how women with invisible impairments are seen to lack veracity in Western visual cultures that both equate and privilege the visible with truthfulness and authenticity. The paper considers, after Agamben, the ‘zones of exception’ created by the in/visible hierarchy for disability rights claims and human rights struggles for women with invisible impairments.

Keywords:

• invisible impairment
• public pedagogy
• media campaigns
• invisible impairments

Acknowledgement

I would like thank the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for the support of my research (Grant number 410‐2005‐0933) in the area of eugenics and the rights of people with disabilities. Gracious thanks also go to Roger Slee and anonymous reviewers for careful comments on this article. My thanks as well go to my graduate students of EDST 565 – ‘The Medicalization of Education: Citizens of The Unruly Salon Act Up’, a disability arts, culture and scholarship graduate course and for allies along the way, among them: Fiona A. Kumari Campell, Alex Lubet, André Mazowi, Lynn Manning, Tom Sork, Stephen Petrina, Tom Patch, Dennis Sumara, Dawna Rumball, Ruth Warick, and Geoff McMurchy.

Notes

1. The mere fact that Western societies distinguish between those who ‘pass’ as ‘normal’ and those who may not directs attention to the social workings of a distinction between socially readable, marked bodies as impaired and those whose impairments are invisible or hidden from easy ‘detection’ to the everyday reading as such. However, not all closets or forms of passing are witting ones. Some are unselfconscious, ‘undiagnosed’, and transparent ones (that is, transparent to others but not necessarily realised by the self). In any case, this realisation of unwitting closets makes the issue of disclosure even more problematic since non‐disclosure or ‘passing’ may not be a conscious effort to fail to disclose or to lie or give false information or impressions. Too much has depended on the idea of conscious, rationale, linear subjects who choose their identities or choose to conceal them. For a majority of people with invisible impairments such an assumption about the process or experience may be questionable.

2. I thank Stephen Petrina who drew my attention to this point.

3. See also the US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s article summarising the contentious and problematic definitions embodied in the 1994 medical conceptions of CFS, which was published as Reeves et al. and the International Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Study Group (2003).

4. I am indebted to feminist sociologist Dorothy E. Smith for the origination of this phrase; personal communication, January 2006.