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| GW English Professor David T. Mitchell |
GW English is already well known for work in Disability Studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry examining the meanings of disability in culture and history, interrogating ideas of normality, and continually imagining what a more accessible world might look like. We were thus very excited to search this year for a senior scholar in Disability Studies. Professor David T. Mitchell, whose groundbreaking work with Sharon L. Snyder includes The Body and Physical Difference, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, and Cultural Locations of Disability, will join us this fall. Professor Mitchell was present this past weekend for the celebration of our undergraduate majors. We asked him a few questions about his work as part of our Introducing New Faculty series.
Tell us about your
research.
Most of
my research has focused on representations of disability in literature, film,
and art. I understand this domain as
important because most of us interact with the greatest range of disabled
people in imaginative realms such as fantasy, romance, horror, suspense, and
memoir. While the disability rights
movement has focused on the critical question of social barrier removal in
order to achieve more integrated public space, my research has sought to
intervene in the more ephemeral arena of belief, attitude, and stigma. Essentially my work has tried to discover
ways of countering the historical sequestration of people with disabilities; the
cultural denial of the prevalence of disability as human variation rather than
deviance; the inaccurate assumption that our own historical moment
has thought more deeply and effectively about the place of disabled people in our
midst; and, most importantly, the ways in which knowledge of disabled peoples’
points of view have the potential to play a critical role in improving the
world in which we live.
This last point is pivotal to my current research. I have a new book manuscript under
development titled, The Bio-Politics of
Disability. The work focuses on
contemporary subjectivities of disability developing within late liberalism (neoliberalism). What happens to our understanding of
disability when those living in late capitalist cultures experience
transformations as subjects of embodied vulnerability? Our bodies are increasingly segmented between
good parts and bad parts and an increasingly commodified medical/pharmaceutical
industry promises to shore up the problem zones through various forms of
supplementation -- the democratization of prosthetics, medications, and products
sold to soothe beleaguered late capitalist bodies. We increasingly experience ourselves as
embodied beings through encounters with deficiencies we didn’t even know we had,
or with respect to disorders surely on the horizon. How does this more diffused sense of
vulnerability for all impact people with disabilities in particular?
My
research asks questions about what happens to those bodies interpreted as
outside norms of health, capacity, functionality, and appearance. What does disability have to do with
neoliberal regimes of intensified body maintenance? If the eugenics period approached disability
as deviance in need of radical segregation, what differs under neoliberalism
when disabled bodies are increasingly treated as data into which medical,
rehabilitation, pharmaceutical, charity and public relations industries can
tap? Is this an opportunity for a
resuscitation of disability’s marginalized social status or paths to further
levels of degradation even when compared with the radical institutionalization
campaigns of early 20th century eugenics?
We notice you're
teaching Disability Studies in the Fall. Although there have been courses
in Disability Studies in the department before, this is the first time this new
slot (English 3910) has been used. What do you plan to do with this new
course?
One of
the qualities that most attracted me to the GW English department was the
already-established history of Disability Studies scholarship and course
offerings. When I visited as a candidate
in March 2013, graduate students told me of their exciting research projects
related to Disability Studies (DS). I
was excited by the ways in which departmental courses in the Early Modern
period and Queer Studies, for example, were already making disability integral
to their materials. I’ve served in
several administrative roles regarding the development of Disability Studies programs
in the past and my belief is that students primarily generate the future research
agendas of departments. Thus, I look
forward to how students will help me identify the materials and questions
they’d like to study following my arrival at GW. This is an important aspect of further
deepening DS’s relationship to historical and theoretical movements already
richly-positioned in the department and the university at large.
For next fall, I plan to offer a course that focuses on
the movement in DS from a rights-based advocacy movement (i.e. social model and
identity-based approaches) to one increasingly interested in questions of
materiality and subjectivity (what Tom Shakespeare calls “embodied ontology,” Robert
McRuer refers to as “the turn to the body,” and Tobin Siebers identifies as
“complex embodiement”). The course will
focus on interpreting cultural products created by disabled people in a variety
of global locales. We will discuss how
disabled people living in various parts of the world depict their lives, needs,
desires, and alternative social worlds.
Often these ways of living are markedly different from those pursued in
normative contexts. DS has richly
portrayed the ways in which disabled people (of all socio-economic backgrounds)
experience radical exclusion, architectural/attitudinal barriers, and
historically-layered stigma regarding acceptable bodies. However, what is only recently developing is
a way of imagining how disability subjectivity – the queer modes of experience
developed by disabled people surviving alongside other marginalized communities
– further nuance interdependent options for living with others.
Consequently,
the fall course will give students some grounding in social model approaches to
disability, identity theory, and the forwarding of media representations to
effect social transformations in public attitudes. To accomplish this goal we will look at a
variety of disability cultural productions including: novels (Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
and Richard Powers’s The Echo-Maker),
films (John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy
and Jenny Livingston’s Paris is Burning),
art (the figural portrayals of Riva Lehrer), and internet spaces (cybernetic
communities seeking ways of directing medicine toward interventions and
supports more sustaining to themselves). How does life in alternative (i.e. normatively-rejected bodies) result in creative ways of navigating the world? In what ways does a more developed
understanding of disability enhance our knowledge of the fiction of normative
practices and beliefs about bodies in general?
How do early 20th-century modernist exchanges about ways to
exclude disabled people impact the making of contemporary global disability
arts and culture movements on a geopolitical scale at the outset of the 21st
century?
You've been in a
number of innovative, interdisciplinary locations over the years; what made you
want to join the GW English Department?
The one
unfortunate thing that I’ve learned over the course of my career in
“interdisciplinary departments” is that they are not, by-and-large,
interdisciplinary. There’s a significant
amount of rhetoric at universities regarding the importance of
interdisciplinary work – teaching, scholarship, cross-disciplinary
collaboration – but the reality of implementation is much different. At GW there is already a substantial amount
of interdisciplinary work underway. The English
department is full of amazingly diverse, cross-disciplinary faculty; the
graduate students openly address their research within interdisciplinary
contexts; even the Disability Support Services Office imagines its role as much larger
than integration and accommodation of students with disabilities and diverse
learning styles. This is a rich tapestry
in which to bring my own work and one that I believe will continue to feed my
future interests. When I applied to GW I was looking for a location that valued Disability Studies as something other
than an addition to existing diversity initiatives. The disability historian, Catherine Kudlick,
puts the question most succinctly, “why do we need another other?”
This is an incredibly important question in my decision
to come to GW. I don’t think we need
another other, and, even if we do disability should not be it. These concepts of neoliberal diversity tend
to water down the more substantive contributions of meaningful integration. Instead, what I would like to help bring to
the department is an investment in making disability integral rather than merely integrated into human social orders. This entails a parallel project that has been
underway in Queer Studies wherein scholars have asked what use is an LGBTQ
movement without particular discussions of acts constituting queer lifestyles? I take this question to mean, what if we gain
a degree of acceptance of LGBTQ people but change nothing about the culture
based on their alternative ways of being/living/surviving? How do we bring a more peaceful concept of
co-existence with others into existence if we’re not going to forward the
content of artful, creative ways of being that queer lives (including
disability) entail?
So the opportunity at GW appears rich in possibility to
me at this stage of my career and will prove as significant to the development
of my future thinking as it will serve as a new home into which to bring my own
ideas. I have many colleagues already in
the department and new faculty entering alongside me who promise to make the
intellectual, social, and working atmosphere stimulating for a teacher/scholar
such as myself.
What are you most
looking forward to about moving to Washington, DC? What are your thoughts
on disability culture and/in DC?
The
Metro -- the luxury of having access to the most accessible public transportation system in the country, plain and simple. I lived in Chicago for eight years and the
brown line train stop on my block did not become accessible to those in
wheelchairs until the day I moved to Philadelphia! What a terrific, terrible irony. In Philadelphia the trains were technically
accessible but you had to ask a conductor to get a ramp out to board and then
make a 90 degree turn through a narrow doorway to enter the passenger car (only
the front row of course). Two years
later Septa (the Regional Railroad) began purchasing new passenger cars – based
on years of activism by the disability rights movement – that had double
sliding doors and an onboard ramp that could be operated from inside the
train. However, within a month of
purchasing these more accessible train cars the SEPTA administration sent out a
notice disallowing the use of the internal ramps because “someone drove off the
edge of the ramp while disembarking.”
Thus, years of waiting for accessible replacement train cars went for
naught within a month and the system went back to providing grudging assistance
by making conductors get out of the train to set up the manual ramps for egress
and egress. So the Metro in DC will
prove very liberating; it’s as if one has to move to a city with systemic
access built-in already in order to effectively pursue one’s career, lifestyle,
and ability to interact with others outside one’s home.
My partner, Sharon Snyder, and I are enthusiastic museum-goers
and we plan to take full advantage of the amazing art and history on display in
the city and surrounds. I told my 17-year-old daughter (who also has a disability and uses a wheelchair) that living
in DC is like turning everyday into a field trip, rather than looking forward
to the one day in your junior year when you get to load into a bus and drive to
DC with your classmates. I hope that
vision of the city will prove meaningful for all of us.
Finally, I’ve worked with many government and
non-governmental organizations in DC for many years – DRC (Disability Rights Council),
NiDRR (The National Institute for Rehabilitation and Research), DOE (Department
of Education), OPSE (Office for Post-Secondary Education), TASH (the national
association for assistive technology), and AHEAD (the national association of
higher education for people with disabilities).
Living and working in DC will allow me to more easily continue work with
these important policy groups into the future.
Some of your films
have been shown at GW in the past -- are you and Sharon Snyder still making
films? Are there any that are in process right now?
My
research and filmmaking partner, Sharon Snyder, has included me in some of the
most important work about disability; namely, our co-creation of four
documentary films about the culture, art, and history of people with
disabilities. Despite our collaborative
work on books, book series, edited collections, journal publications, etc., it
has been our films that have made the greatest impact on the dissemination of
thinking about disability in higher education.
So this is a media we will continue to use as a primary means to perform
our work as public translators of academic ideas into opportunities for public
engagement.
Right now we are working on two documentary films: the
first, begun in 2007 with our friend and artist, Riva Lehrer, details the
history of a school built for physically disabled children on the outskirts of
Cincinnati, Ohio. Condon School was funded by philanthropists in 1921 to
provide a centralized educational experience for children with chronic
conditions otherwise restricted to living in hospitals. In addition to providing k-6 schooling,
Condon also provided medical, rehabilitation, and dental services. Ironically the school had to add grades 7, 8,
and 9 when their students “outgrew” the elementary school offerings. I guess they were supposed to die before reaching
their high school years. Over the years,
as the school was threatened with funding cuts, administrators expanded the
school’s mission to include children with intellectual disabilities and,
ultimately, autism, “retardation,” and severe behavioral disabilities. By the 1990s neighborhood demographics had shifted
dramatically and the surrounding community became increasingly African American
and Latino. Residents argued that having
a school for disabled children in their neighborhoods further stigmatized those
who lived on the margins of Cincinnati society in predominantly lower class
neighborhoods. The school was torn down
in 2007. The documentary will chart this
ambivalent history of disability-based segregated education and racialization
in the U.S.
The
second film involves our personal history of medically and socially managing
esophageal atresia (EA) with our daughter, Emma. EA results in an esophageal anomaly that
involves a complex surgical intervention for successful repair. Over the past 17 years we have met many
parents/caretakers of children with EA; nearly all have come from medical
contexts that botched the repair surgery because, currently, there is only one
surgical solution for a viable correction of the problem but few pediatric
surgeons trained in the appropriate technique.
This film will discuss the ways in which medical cultures fail to
disseminate lifesaving information about surgical interventions on behalf of
patients due to corporate healthcare profiteering and lack of medical training
about the disorder. The film will also focus on the lack of discussion about
how to manage one’s social life with a severe, highly medicalized, digestive condition.
What do you hope your
first class for graduate students might be?
I like to tie
graduate seminars into current research topics just beginning to be investigated.
If I get the opportunity to teach a graduate seminar in Spring 2014, for
instance, the course will cover a series of themes on the intersections of Disability, Cross-Species
Identification, and Environment. The seminar
materials will open up an examination of the shared interests of disability with
environmental movements. Both activist
agendas require direct redress of the widespread destruction of the planet by
global capitalism. In undertaking
questions of materialism and disability I hope seminar participants can begin
to re-think ways in which marginalized communities (such as migrant workers and
lower income communities) and disabled people’s everyday lives involve significant
levels of exposure to toxic environments -- lives of “slow death” (Lauren
Berlant’s key phrase for the toxic experiences of under-privileged communities
under neoliberalism). The seminar will
also address questions of environmental toxicity with recent theories on the
porosity of bodies wherein animate and inanimate particulate matter inevitably
cross the semi-permeable encasements within which humans and animals exist. In short, we are the environments we inhabit.
Some important theoretical
works I'm thinking of using as reading for the class include excerpts from: Donna
Haraway's Primate Visions: Gender, Race,
and Nature in the World of Modern Science; Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation; Stacy
Alaimo's Bodily Natures: Science,
Environment, and the Material Self; Mel Chen's Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect; Martha
Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice:
Disability, Nationality, Species Membership; Elizabeth Povinelli's Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging
and Endurance in Late Liberalism; Tobin Siebers's Disability Aesthetics; Alison Kafer's Feminist, Queer, Crip; and Michel Foucault’s The History of Madness.
Likely the seminar will include a novel serving as centerpiece such as
Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and/or a memoir such as Dawn
Prince-Hughes’s Gorilla Nation: My
Journey Through Autism. We will also
view select international disability films including: "Sang Froid" (Cold
Blood) [France], "Outcasts" [Australia], "Berocca" [United
Kingdom], and "Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer" [U.S.].
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