Having a career in disability studies without even becoming disabled! The strains of the disabled teaching body

Abstract

Does it matter who teaches disability studies, whether that teacher has a disability or not? Maybe this might strike the reader as a peculiar question – to focus on the teacher’s body or knowledge standpoint. There are certain theoretical and ontological implications in asking such questions. This article is an attempt to theorise about the way the bodies of teachers with disabilities are transmuted within the arena of teaching critical disability studies at colleges and universities. In particular, it explores the ways disabled teachers’ bodies can contribute to experiencing alterity outside of the frame of ‘other’ and the ways that the disabled teaching body can displace the objectification of disability through pedagogical enactments of the lived experiences of disablement. In this way, this article refutes the assertion made by McWilliam and Taylor in 1998 that the pedagogical inspiration of bodies should not be celebrated. Instead, the focus is on working through points of difference between the way normative teacher’s bodies and the disabled teaching body is mediated in the processes of subjectification, identifying points of convergence that can benefit dialogue across varied sites of scholarship.

Keywords:

• disabled bodies
• knowledge standpoint
• disability embodiment
• power and subjectivity

Notes

1. A word about terminology. Where deemed relevant, I have used person‐first language, i.e. person with disability. However, as this is a theoretical piece written within a post‐structuralist genre, I often refer to the disabled body in a similar way to the common usage of the raced and sexed body. Usually in these in these instances I am not referring to a person with disability per se, but a more abstracted ontological notion of difference.

2. Although the piece might seem dated, the debate in many countries has not really moved forward; rather, sensitivities about ‘dealing’ with the issues had pushed it somewhat underground.

3. These hierarchies of suffering have been detrimental and can result in the othering of Othered disabled people – people who appear to have ‘made it’ in the system are not like those other ‘real’ disabled people who are excluded.