Interactions: Disability, Trauma, and the Autobiography

ABSTRACT

This article responds to several calls to consider the ways disability studies and trauma studies might work synergistically with each other. Using a reading of Kenny Fries's 1997 memoir Body, Remember, I identify the socio-political tendency to devalue a disabled life when it is associated with trauma, pain, and loss as a main obstacle to connecting the two fields, and argue for the importance of studying stories in which disability, trauma, pain, and loss are present in order to locate models that counteract such a bias. The genre of life writing gives authors significant control over the construction of their images and is therefore a particularly potent venue for integrating the alternate constructions of trauma survivorship and disability into a single identity. Fries's memoir insists upon the interrelationship of the seemingly fraught alignments of disability and trauma so that they co-exist, even intertwine, as composites of his narrative and identity. In asserting their interconnectedness, Fries challenges assumptions about the devaluation of disabled lives that involve trauma, pain, and loss. His memoir suggests the necessity and benefits of the intersection of disability studies and trauma theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• trauma
• Kenny Fries
• intersectionality

Acknowledgments

I would like to recognise and thank Dr. Karen L. Jorgensen who provided wise council and excellent feedback that were central to the development of this article. I would also like to thank Antonia DeGregorio and the Interlibrary Loan staff at the SUNY College at Old Westbury library for their support with locating research sources.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Body, Remember can therefore be situated at the crossroads of several theories, including studies in disability, trauma, queerness, gender, and ethnicity and participates in the recent critical turn to consider intersections both of a writer's cultural identities and the theoretical lenses through which to view them. To date, there have been a growing number of projects that call for a merger between disability studies and gender, queer, and race studies. For an overview of some of them, see Alice Hall's Literature and Disability (38–52).

2. Fries supports the social model in his Introduction to Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, an anthology which he edited and published in the same year as Body, Remember: ‘it is clear that it is the barriers, both physical [related to environmental accessibility] and attitudinal, that need to be changed, not the impairments or the bodies with which we live. I have asked many disabled persons what causes them more difficulty, the disability itself or the discriminatory barriers put in their way. The answer is overwhelmingly the latter’ (7–8).

3. One of the most exuberant examples of such a project is Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's essay, ‘Shape Structures Story: Fresh and Feisty Stories about Disability'. She asserts that (from her perspective a little less than 10 years ago), a proliferation of ‘fresh, feisty stories about disabled shapes and acts’ have emerged in the culture that begin to recast traditional stories about disability. Whereas the ‘stereotypical disability narrative’ is one of ‘suffering, catastrophe, isolation, overcoming, or pity', the representations she welcomes to the scene are about ‘disability as an occasion for exuberant flourishing', and specifically link disability to sexuality (countering pejorative associations of disability with asexuality, inability to experience pleasure, and disgust) and vibrant community ties (challenging the image of disability as an isolated and ostracised state) (114–5). Connecting disability to sexuality, community, and lives that are ‘flourishing’ and to other positive life attributes asserts an intrinsic value in disabled lives.

4. Tom Shakespeare and Siebers have also recommended alternatives to the social model of disability that would include the acknowledgement of bodily contingencies such as pain that a change in environment or attitude would not completely eliminate (Shakespeare 62–5; Siebers Theory 53–69).

5. Pain studies can be associated with trauma studies as Smith and Watson place it (220) or with disability studies; for example, Mintz in Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body draws from her specialisation in disability studies to provide a nuanced and detailed study of the ways a variety of stories of pain are scripted.

6. Here it is important to make another distinction: Any possible negative associations from the social construction of homosexuality are not a factor in this mix. Fries is comfortable with being gay, a fact he says is envied by several gay men he speaks with in Israel who experience sexual oppression due to the cultural pressure to have a heterosexual marriage which would produce children. I therefore don't read Fries's sexuality as Ralph Savarese does, who writes that Fries considers the possibility ‘that his homosexuality might be the pathological by-product of his disability and/or the abuse’ (94). Fries records that his father wonders whether Fries's disability will make him ‘turn to men’ (44) but Fries does not consider his homosexuality as an outcome of his disability. Fries does briefly remark on the significant number of gay men who have experienced sexual abuse (90), but he does not attach a cause-effect relationship to the correlation and leaves room to consider political and social causes of the connection.

7. Fries doesn't provide a specific age for when the sexual abuse began or ended, so this is an estimation based on a presumably young Fries focusing on a visit to the toy store as he dissociates himself from his brother's abuse (50) and on the memory of being a teenager and possibly having an encounter with Jeffrey (191).

8. In addition to this personally experienced trauma, Fries intersperses throughout his narrative an overall awareness of the past ‘generational’ trauma of the Holocaust and the persecution of three groups to which he belongs as a Jewish, gay, disabled man. The Holocaust contributes to a sense of exile for Fries, both in terms of the horrific devaluing and extermination of lives, but also because memorials for gay and especially for disabled Holocaust victims are often absent from Holocaust exhibits and memorials; this drives home for Fries the continued marginalisation of some of his identities.

9. In doing so, Fries moves the representation of his legs to a level of metaphor. Disability studies theorists are suspicious of narratives which only present disability as a metaphor because the presentation of disability in symbolic terms denies the lived experiences of disability (see, for example, Berger's discussion of the pros and cons of the metaphor in disability studies in The Disarticulate [147–52]). However, I would argue that the exploration of metaphor is essential if one of the main projects of disability studies is to locate representations of disability, interrogating damaging portrayals and analysing positive depictions of disability. Fries's metaphor reflects the act of disability life writing and is therefore grouped into the latter. In addition, Fries does not just present his legs as metaphor; the image of his legs as a text occurs alongside frank and open descriptions of his body and his life as a disabled man, reducing the tendency to view his disability in a purely symbolic way.

10. For example, Body, Remember is briefly mentioned in The Encyclopedia of Disability as further reading for the concept of ‘Impairment’ (Henderson 922) and ‘Queer’ (McRuer 1329) and as an example of an autobiography which deals with ‘overmedicalisation’ and perhaps ‘asexualisation’ in the entry for ‘Narrative’ in Key Words for Disability Studies (Mitchell and Synder 128).