Introduction: Disability and Emotion: "There's No Crying in Disability Studies!"
- Introduction: Disability and Emotion"There's No Crying in Disability Studies!"
Yes, we admit it: we were the crying panelists. We were on the same disability studies panel at the 2000 Modern Language Association conference, each previously unknown to one another, giving papers with roughly the same mission: to jigger the theoretical trajectory of Disability Studies' paradigms—honed by those working on areas of physical impairment—to accommodate mental disability, our interest. To this end, Catherine began her paper by drawing distinctions between the representational preoccupations of Disability Studies and the predicament of people with schizophrenia who, as Peter Wyden has observed, have no poster child; of the disabled, they are the most reviled. Elizabeth's paper voiced similar concerns about the ableist thinking that structures the concept of selfhood in political theory and the exclusion of people with schizophrenia from that discourse. The trouble was, as so often happens in Disability Studies research, we had based some of our key examples on those near and dear, recalling situations from which we had more than an intellectual investment, and each one of us cried. As in baseball, there is no crying at MLA, and, since the publication of Joseph Shapiro's No Pity in 1993, there is definitely no crying in Disability Studies, whether at MLA or anywhere else. Accordingly, the first question Catherine was asked at the end of the presentations was, "Why did you cry at that point?"
"That point" had been when Catherine recounted that her loved one, "Barbara," was on medications that seemed to allow her, albeit still schizophrenic, to pursue a Ph.D. in recombinant DNA technology, instead of being homeless, hospitalized, imprisoned, or in any other position that would render her at high risk of being the victim of (yet another) rape. Had Catherine offered—and worse, validated with a pathetic display of tears—a narrative of "overcoming" and a sanction of medical intervention as the audience member's question intimated? [End Page 129] What were the emotional investments of the audience member who asked the question, at "that" point, in that setting? Should our debate about these matters settle on the question of whether the narrative championed overcoming disability, or should it go further, to query what forms of emotion are allowed in our "intellectual" work on disability?
We clearly want to push the analysis of the emotional in Disability Studies further here. We would argue that, ironically, Disability Studies, forged as it has been with physical impairment as its primary terrain, has inherited damaging ableist assumptions of "mind" that discourage a more robust consideration of emotion. However, in the context of cognitive and psychiatric disability, the focus of several of the articles in this special issue, emotion is unavoidably a complex subject. In psychiatry and in culture at large, emotion is monitored, measured, and regulated. In some cases emotion is elicited; in others, suppressed. The lack of emotion is pathologized: the "flattened affect" of people diagnosed with schizophrenia is treated as a disabling symptom by psychiatrists. And the presence of emotion is pathologized: sustained feelings of sadness prompt consumers to seek medical and pharmaceutical interventions, while sustained feelings of elation might lead consumers to shun them.1
Emotion and the expression of emotion are also gendered in significant ways. Tears are feminine, and hence trivialized. Crying during a conference presentation is in one respect a failure to regulate the emotions. It signifies a moment of vulnerability that threatens to undermine the authority of the speaker and, further, in this particular case, it appears to resuscitate the pity narrative that undermines disability rights. On the other hand, crying at a conference presentation is a transgression that foregrounds issues central to both feminism and Disability Studies in potentially productive ways. Our bodies, and our minds, do not always conform to prescribed norms and regulations. Crying when one wishes not to cry is both a bodily refusal and an inability to contain or to be contained by these rules.
There is a certain power in transgression; abject bodies and abject emotions can reveal the fault lines of foundational concepts of what the body should be or should...
